India’s Sweetheart

IN HER LATEST FILM, SIKANDAR, she takes a shrapnel hit to save her husband Salman Khan. In Chhaava, every time the demon­ic enemy inflicts yet another blow on her valor­ous husband, a shudder goes through her slender body, and she prays a little harder. In Pushpa 2, she is the only one who can make her strongman hus­band drop everything, including his clothes, to be with her. And in Animal, her violent and obsessive husband Ranvijay, when he is not mowing down the villains, handles her like a baby doll, undressing her and marvelling at her supple body even after becoming a mother.

SaiSri, Maharani Yesubai, Srivalli, Geetanjali. Says Rashmika Mandanna, the actor playing all four parts: “When you have experienced enough in life, in terms of heartbreaks and happiness, when you play these characters onscreen which are strong yet vulnerable and conflicted, it is you being human. All humans are very layered, they have grey shades, black and white, In my 28 years, I’ve seen so much, been through so much that I approach my characters like that. I imagine myself having lived the life of Srivalli or Geetanjali and I just play with it.”

An object of lust, a source of comfort, goddess of the home, whose kitchen is as much the scene of cooking as it is of lovemaking, the centre of the universe. All these parts have made Rashmika one of the country’s most success­ful women, with Chhaava, Pushpa 2, and Animal making ₹590 crore in India, ₹1,742 crore worldwide, and ₹915 crore worldwide, respectively. Sikandar’s opening weekend num­bers look all set to make it enter the ₹100 crore club.

All this has earned her titles such as the National Crush, Crushmika, India’s Sweetheart, Golden Girl, and Pan India No 1 Heroine, with another Kannadiga heroine Deepika Padukone, 39. Entering a new phase of her career post motherhood, the 28-year-old Rashmika seems all set to race to the top, being far more accessible than her contemporaries Sara Ali Khan, Janhvi Kapoor or even Ananya Panday. In many ways she is the new Rani Mukerji, who was always the understat­ed No 1 to Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. For filmmakers in the south and those in Mumbai planning pan-India films, she is quickly becoming, as her elbow tattoo says, irreplaceable.

In fact, if Rashmika did not exist, she would have to be in­vented for the era we are living in. She is the perfect consort for the hypermasculine Alpha Males currently striding across our silver screens and hiding in plain sight in the manosphere. She is modestly modern and timelessly traditional. She is a male fantasy come alive. In Animal, she is on her way to Princeton University and engaged to be married to a man who teaches there. She gives it all up for a life with Ranvijay, who compliments her for “having a big pelvis and accommodating healthy babies” and giving her a life which is admittedly more exciting, with private planes and personal chefs. In Pushpa, she is a hardworking cowgirl happy to trade a kiss as a side hustle if it makes her money, and until the hero saves her, she is demurely preparing to sleep with the villain who covets her virginity, by washing herself with the Lux soap and dressing in the sari he sends. In Sikandar, she acknowledges wistfully to her assistant that her husband, though much older, has given her everything, except his time.

“Being an actor is a very surprising, adventurous and surreal thing for me,”’ says Rashmika. “I don’t want to break the trust of those who believed in me. I do pause and wonder sometimes about how I am here. But I treat it like a nine-to-five job. I don’t let go of my personality, I don’t let it consume me. I know it’s not everything or forever.”

Much of her appeal lies there. She is accessible, dateable, relat­able. In a manosphere full of aggrieved egos, she is an approach­able woman, happy to mould herself to the moods of her consort. For Sandeep Reddy Vanga, the director of Animal, Rashmika is a “true feminist”. Says he: “The most important thing is she is not a pseudo-feminist. She embodies the true spirit of feminism. The result of the pre-climax scene [where she slaps Ranbir Kapoor’s character after he reveals he has been unfaithful] is outstand­ing because of her deep understanding. She is sincere, with zero pretension, and her willingness to go deep into the subject matter are the qualities that I could sense in the first meeting.”

Sushma R Rao, associate professor, Vijaya College Bengaluru, puts it another way. As she says: “Rashmika has achieved significant commercial success by strategically aligning herself with popular cinema across multiple languages, often within narratives that adhere to similar hypermasculine frameworks. Her ability to capitalise on these trends has cemented her status as a bankable star. The second aspect is her recurring portrayal of the ‘accommo­dative typical female protagonist’. Her rise signals a regression to an era dominated by hegemonic masculinity, one that is further exacerbated by elements of ‘protest masculinity’—a reactionary assertion of male dominance in contemporary cinema.” This dy­namic, she notes, leaves little space for the heroine to develop as an autonomous character, reducing her instead to a narrative device that serves to reaffirm the male protagonist’s power and status.

AS THE COUNTRY and world steps into a period of economic uncertainty and backlash against wokeism, Rashmika articulates the suppressed desire of going back in time to a simpler Stepford Wives age when the home and the world were clearly divided between the wife and the husband, where the former took care of the parents and children while the big man went about executing his agenda, avenging some psychic wound from childhood, and making someone, anyone, pay for it.

Rashmika’s rise through several cinema industries has been steady since she broke out in the 2016 Kannada film Kirik Party, where she played a shy girl making her way through college, not unlike her own journey through MS Ramaiah College of Arts, Science & Commerce in Bengaluru. Co-starring Rakshit Shetty, the film came to her after she was selected as Clean & Clear ‘Times Fresh Face’ in 2014. Shetty and she were to get mar­ried in her hometown of Virajpet, but it was cancelled. Rashmika broke through Telugu cinema with Anjani Putra in 2017.

That led to a series of roles which fit in well with the strong hero-centric movies in the industry. She was in Geetha Govindam with Vijay Deverakonda, her rumoured beau, in 2018, in Sarileru Neekevvaru (2020) with Mahesh Babu and Bheeshma (2020) with Nithiin. Looking back, she says, “If my first film hadn’t worked out, I wouldn’t have got my second film. My parents let me come into the industry because like me they didn’t know much about it, and I wanted to experience it at least once. My dad owns a wedding hall in Kodava and we are into catering. I would have gone back to handle that project. I am very grateful my career was kick-started because there are no second chances for people like me.”

A Harsha, who directed her in Anjani Putra, her second film, says she stands out for her simplicity and positivity: “I never tire of telling people this story. There was a problem with the visas of her team for our London and Scotland shoot. She came on her own without her team because she didn’t want us to suffer. I will never forget it. You don’t get so far so successfully by accident. It takes a lot of hard work and kindness,” he says.

Srivalli’s character in Pushpa: The Rise (2021) was the turning point, sparking both curiosity and interest in this slight, seeming­ly demure young woman whose smile bewitched the soon-to-be sandalwood czar. She says she didn’t quite understand the world she was entering in Pushpa, which was written on the go, but in the sequel she understood the cultural phenomenon it had be­come. In Animal, two years later, with Geetanjali’s docile sensual­ity, the combination of what one insider calls “hot and sweet”, she caught the imagination of the Hindi-speaking audience whom she had tried to woo earlier in Goodbye (2022), where she played grieving patriarch Amitabh Bachchan’s work-obsessed rebel­lious daughter, and as the blind Pakistani Sidharth Malhotra’s spy marries in Mission Majnu (2023).

She has tried to play outside her self-imposed sandbox with mov­ies such as Sita Ramam where she is an angry Pakistani student out to seek the truth about her grandfather, but she is also smart enough to know it is a male-dominated industry and even a minor role in Thalapathy Vijay’s Varisu (2023) means greater visibility if not artis­tic satisfaction. Her friend and director of her forthcoming film ‘The Girlfriend’, Rahul Ravindran says he admires her commitment, drive, deep desire and the ability to build agency by acting in com­mercial cinema, and to then build enough power to balance art and commerce and hit the sweet spot in between.

Rashmika speaks of a childhood of deprivation when the family was struggling financially. “My entire childhood was in a boarding school (Coorg Public School in Gonikoppal) because my parents had to move around a lot as they were not financially stable. From coffee planters, they became builders and then went into hotel management, so they did a lot of jobs. Everyone in our family is very ambitious, in our own ways, but there were times I would be walking with my grandmother and I would want a doll of ₹150. I could see it in her face that we didn’t have the money for it and I would tell her it’s all right, I don’t really need it,” she adds.

She has always been aware that having no money means hav­ing a difficult life, struggle and sacrifice. “Even now, when I make good money I know I cannot be lavish in my spending. So I am not a very big spender, I am a very economical person, I like saving, investing it well. Even if my friends around me spend, I try and talk them out of it. I know how hard it is to make money. Earning money is difficult, but having no money is even more difficult. So when you have money, you have to be smart about it so that later in life you are taken care of by the money you make today.” She is yet to own a house of her own, she says, and prefers to rent. “But there is my parents’ home in Coorg and in Mysore, where they live now. My mother always told me to take care of my finances, and above all provide for myself, given the way life is, especially as a woman,” she says. “Money is my bread and butter but that is not the only thing that drives me. It’s the love I get. But I don’t like being taken for granted,” she adds.

This middle-class ethos is part of her charm. “I believe she is able to portray the girl next door which makes her stand out from other actors. She has the potential to become a brand leader in endorsements,” says business and brand strategist Harish Bijoor. Indeed, she endorses 11 brands, from 7UP to ITC Fiama. She has 35 million followers on Instagram on which she is playful and interactive, answering questions that range from how she keeps her hair so lustrous to whom she is dating.

Next up for her is ‘The Girlfriend’ which is focused entirely on her, as well as ‘Thama’, part of the Maddock horror franchise, with Ayushmann Khurrana. In terms of business, she has invested in cosmetics brand Plum. It is super ambitious and super fun, she says. “I have a business mind. I come from a family of business minds. I share their conversations. Right now I have invested my time in acting but when the time comes I will move into business. I am always looking at the best possible investments.” There is also something else she is starting up, TTT (Terribly Tiny Tales, a storytelling social media platform) and Rashmika and Ru. “We want it to blow up,” she laughs.

Rashmika Mandanna is just getting started.

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