The Vijay Sena

In a small but crowded room bathed in harsh white light and the strong whiff of oodhuvathi (incense stick), a short man stands tall. His name is KV Damodaran, South Chennai’s district general secretary of Tamil Nadu’s latest political party, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), one that was floated last year by his hero, the actor-turned-politician Vijay, arguably the biggest superstar in a state that takes its superstar adulation most seriously. Everyone among these 13 TVK party workers, seated on colourful plastic stools and pressed cheek by jowl against the three walls as well as the aluminium door on a Sunday night, is a devoted fan of Vijay. But Damodaran, or Damu, as he likes to refer to himself, is a super fan of the superstar, whose fandom has seen him go from an autorickshaw driver when he first met his idol for an autograph to having his face plastered alongside Vijay’s on party posters found all over the southern section of this city, including, of course, Thiruvanmiyur, where, on the shoulder of the main road, sits this district’s party office.

While addressing this late-evening meet, Damu leans the small of his back against a broad table, which occupies a vast chunk of the room’s cramped real estate. Standing, the small man towers over the captivated audience and talks with frequent motions of his hands. On the forearm of his right hand is a tattoo of Vijay, holding a giant TVK flag, with the name of the party studded below Vijay’s shirt in Tamil script. Below his left elbow is a scribble that is inked permanently, which he later tells me is Vijay’s signature. At this late and humid hour, Damu is holding court with the heads of several wings—youth, culture, sanitation, advocates—in his city district about canvassing for a state election that is little under a year away.

“… let’s begin early, elections will come when it has to come. We shall begin our work before others. Tell your people to knock on all doors, rich or poor. You also do so personally. When they open, tell them about what Thalapathy stands for, the good work that he is doing. Okay aa?” says Damu and all 13, 12 men and a solitary woman, nod back. “Dairiyama sollunga [Speak without fear]. Be brave when you talk about our party, our leader Thalapathy. Don’t beg for votes, we don’t bow in front of anyone. But don’t forget to tell them the most important thing, which is that we will not get into an alliance with anyone to win the election. Not with the Opposition party in this state; not with the ruling party in the Centre of this country.”

The speech spurs one of the workers seated directly below the lifesize wall-frame of Damu and Vijay holding a bouquet of flowers, to raise his hand. Damu tilts a head towards him and now he, Prasanth, with fresh vibhuti (ash) smeared over his forehead, momentarily has the floor. “I would like to add that we should not miss this chance. We have one shot only. They, makkal [the people], are ready to give us votes. It is up to us party workers to ensure we collect it. If we miss this shot, who knows what will happen next.”

Satisfied with the response, Damu shifts the topic to the more pressing agenda of the upcoming maanadu, or political rally, in Madurai, slated for August 25. TVK’s first maanadu, helmed by the president of the party, “Thalapathy” Vijay, on October 27 last year in the town of Vikravandi, some 150km southwest of Chennai, was attended by 14 lakh people. This time, Damu tells his audience, he wants more. “Each of you will be given buses to fill. Fill them. I don’t want any empty seats. But most importantly, don’t offer anyone any money to attend. Not even Re 1. Thalapathy will not stand for it. We will take care of their tea, tiffin and other such essentials for the trip, but do not bribe them with cash,” Damu says, before turning his attention to the woman in the room. “Amma, you too will be given a bus for the ladies. Make sure they come in vast numbers.”

The woman hesitates. “Can I be given charge of a mini bus to begin with?”

“No,” Damu says politely, shaking his head vigorously. “You will be given a full-sized bus. Have faith. It will fill.”

When the meeting ends, it does so with suddenness, folded hands all around as the crowd drains out of the local party office. And when they do, I notice the overwhelming presence of the actor in the tiny room—on the walls in the form of frames, on the table as a bronze bust, the statue wearing sunglasses and a solitary index finger shushing his lips, placed between other bronze statues of Lord Venkateshwara and BR Ambedkar. Vijay’s face is also found under the heavy glass of the table in the form of movie posters and party fliers. But as Damu slides on to the leather swivel chair behind his desk and sees me taking stock of all the Vijays around, he tells me that the real Vijay is found mostly in people’s hearts.

To prove his point, he unbuttons the top of his crisp white shirt, pushes aside the strap of his vest and exposes his chest. On the left chest plate, directly over his heart, is yet another tattoo of Vijay. It is of his face, large, moustachioed and smiling. “To me, he is like a God,” says Damu. “Imagine being lucky enough to be known on a first-name basis by your God. All of this happened because I started a rasigar mandram, a fan club. That’s all I did.”

VIJAY IS NOT the first Tamil superstar to have an extensive and state-wide network of rasigar mandrams. These star-worshipping fan clubs date back to the ’60s and ’70s, when MG Ramachandran and Sivaji Ganesan ruled the silver screen in Tamil Nadu, followed by the phantasmal rise of Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan in the ’80s and the ’90s. Neither is Vijay’s phenomenal popularity due to being the lone superstar of today’s generation, for he shares the love of the Tamil-speaking masses with Ajith Kumar, his contemporary in age and acceptance. While there may be little new to the existence of fan clubs such as Vijay’s, what’s certainly novel is his and their readiness to be mobilised into a political movement—a first since MGR, who, on the back of his fan following, founded All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), a party that ensured his transition from a matinee actor to Tamil Nadu’s chief minister.

“Like with MGR back in the day, Vijay’s fan following is mainly among the youth, especially girls. And as we know, the young are always ready to create radical changes in society,” says Rajshankar, the driver of my Uber ride to the Thiruvanmiyur party office. All this talk of Vijay has inspired Rajshankar to watch a song of his. So, on the video monitor mounted on the dashboard of his taxi, the driver switches off navigation and turns on a dance number from Coimbatore Mappillai (1996), where young Vijay, with a shock of curly hair and a thick moustache, shakes a leg with the heroine on a meadow. Over the music, Rajshankar shouts: “Vijay has my vote already. He was born to lead just the way he was born to act.”

Before all of that, in 1974, he was born Joseph Vijay Chandrashekhar to a family entrenched in the movies. His father, SA Chandrashekhar, already a popular director, helped the boy first learn the craft as a child actor in a clutch of his films, before launching an 18-year-old Vijay as the lead in Naalaiya Theerpu (1992), whose story and screenplay was written by the hero’s mother, Shoba Chandrashekhar. When his name appeared in the title card, it did so with the prefix “Illaya Thalapathy”, which roughly translates to “Young Commander”. As Vijay entered his twenties in the movies, they dropped “Illaya” and retained “Thalapathy”.

By the late ’90s, the commander’s acclaim, largely as a lover boy, saw the first sproutings of these rasigar mandrams, such as the one Damu started. “I was a big fan of Vijay even during those early days, you know, there was a spark I felt in his movies. So, when word spread that he was shooting for a film called Love Today on Besantnagar beach back in 1997, I drove my autorickshaw to Elliott’s and stood among the crowd to watch,” says Damu. “After the scene was shot, he came to us and signed autographs, talking to all of us without any airs, like a common man. That day I decided that I would start a fan club for him.”

What would these clubs do, I ask. “In those days, it was simply to promote his movies. We would stick posters all around the city, put up cut-outs outside theatres, cause awareness with banners and flags that a Vijay movie was releasing. That’s when he started noticing me, asking me not to work so hard, or to go home because it was very late because I was still putting up banners at 3AM,” he says. “Then we would show up for the celebrations, too, to make the movie a success, and oftentimes, Thalapathy would be there.”

Soon, by the early 2000s, mainly because of Vijay’s penchant for social work, his rasigar mandrams—about 85,000 of them spread all across Tamil Nadu—found reason to pivot too. The fact that these clubs could easily communicate with one another in the age of the internet, they would be deployed to organise large-scale blood-donation camps in the star’s name one day, then assemble in hordes for flood-relief the next. Now, they weren’t your everyday fan clubs, but fan clubs with a philanthropic cause, and they would continue to mushroom even as Vijay’s movies began flopping in the box office by the second-half of the noughties, the actor’s roughest spell in the movies. But it didn’t matter to the fans on the street, for their star had metamorphosed from a reel-to-real life hero.

In 2009, very much during the lows of his acting life, Vijay gave his cause a name; all his rasigar mandrams were rebranded as Makkal Iyakkam, or People’s Movement, with an office headquarters to manage their affairs in Panaiyur, the posh-end of Chennai’s East Coast Road. The actor roped in Bussy Anand, a sitting MLA from Puducherry, to oversee the new organisation as the general secretary (Anand is now the second-in-command at TVK too). The Vijay Makkal Iyakkams flourished, drawing in even college kids as members in vast figures. One such youth who was drawn to enrol with the Velachery unit of the Makkal Iyakkam was G Vasanth, when he was all of 15 years old.

“In 2012, Thalapathy released a movie called Thuppakki. The message in that movie was so strong that I went straight from the movie hall to join his fan club; all this to do social work. Beach cleaning, food donation, free lunch provision in schools, writing letters to the corporation, you name it, and the Velachery Makkal Iyakkam has done and is doing,” says Vasanth. Now 28, he holds an MBA degree from Loyola College and works in the accounts department of a high-end hotel in the city. But the title Vasanth is most proud of is being the joint secretary of TVK’s youth wing in the district of South Chennai.

“Since I was a child, I wanted to do good for the people, like Thalapathy, with Thalapathy. In fact, my brother Ravi promised me that if I score 1000/1200 in my 12th standard commerce exam, he would take me to meet Vijay Sir. I scored 983, so he didn’t take me,” says Vasanth, with a shrug. Then he smiles and says: “Today, I have met him on my own steam, as a social worker in his movement. That means so much more. At a free lunch drive, he put an arm around me and said that I was doing good work, and that if I needed any financial help, I should ask him.”

How did he react, I ask. “I was shivering like anything,” he says, laughing. “My hero from the screen had held me, spoken directly to me.”

But does the fact that his hero won’t be on the screen much longer upset him? “Yes. But everyone in Tamil Nadu understands that Thalapathy doesn’t need politics. But politics needs Thalapathy.”

JUST A FEW days after founding his political party TVK on February 2, 2024 (the number plate of Damu’s car is 2224 in tribute), Vijay announced that Jana Nayagan (2026) will be his 69th and final movie, as he intends to retire from cinema to focus on his political life. This made little sense to even the actor’s well-wishers, as his onscreen career had scaled heights seldom seen by anyone in the Tamil film industry beyond Rajinikanth. Since he turned around his box-office showing in the early 2010s with Thuppakki, everything Vijay touched turned to literal gold. In the list of the highest-grossing Tamil films of all time, there are seven Vijay films in the top-20, all of them released after 2018—Sarkar (2018), Bigil (2019), Master (2021), Beast (2022), Varisu (2023), Leo (2023), G.O.A.T. (2024). Back to back to back, without a dud in between.

Leo, in fact, ranks third on the list after raking in Rs 595 crore, while his latest release, G.O.A.T., rings in at sixth place with Rs 440 crore. All of this madness made Vijay one of the highest-earning actors across the country and his bankability made theatre owners very happy. In order to find out how his retirement affects those who run the multiplexes of Chennai, I travel to Koyambedu in the north of the city, where Rohini Theatre resides. Rohini is very much a part of the Vijay-movie-watching-experience, almost akin to a cultural phenomenon. “See, to catch the first-day-first-show of a big actor’s movie is part of the social fabric in Chennai, or all across Tamil Nadu. But the fact that the release of a trailer to a Vijay movie draws in crowds of many thousands is something that has to be witnessed to be believed,” says Rhevanth Charan, owner of Rohini.

“We have an open-air area for the screenings of movie trailers. When we received the trailer of Varisu ahead of the movie’s release, I announced on my Twitter handle of its launch in my premises. You won’t believe it, it was very much a working day and I sent the tweet out at 3:30PM, announcing that the trailer will be aired at 5:30PM,” says Rhevanth. “By 5 that evening, there were at least 10,000 people in the theatre’s parking lot. Luckily, I got police permission in advance and there was bandobast, otherwise it would have been even more chaos. Such star power simply does not exist beyond Vijay and Rajini Sir. I mean, it was a trailer that one could watch on their phones on YouTube. Yet, the masses arrived in those numbers.”

A LAWYER BY profession with a degree from London’s Queen Mary University, Rhevanth returned to the city of his birth to practice, before being roped into the family’s theatre-running business. It was then that he truly realised what Vijay meant for his line-of-work, and the state’s movie industry. “We have an inventory of 2100 seats across our six screens in Rohini. When Vijay’s latest film G.O.A.T. was announced, the pre-bookings for those seats were close to 40,000,” he says, which explains why Rohini has shows at the oddest hours of the night. “Think about it, in the year 2023, Leo generated close to 30 per cent of Tamil cinema’s overall revenue. That is the love that the people of this state have for that man.”

How will his retirement affect him on a personal level, I ask. Rhevanth breaks into a smile. “Cinema will always need Vijay, but our people need Vijay the leader more,” he says. “The move is inspirational enough for all of us to be a part of his movement.” So much so that 30-year-old Rhevanth, with thriving businesses in theatre as well as real estate to juggle between and keep his hands full, now holds a full-time post with TVK: he is the coordinator of the party’s various advocate wings. “I never thought politics was for me. But if Vijay, who earned over Rs 250 crore for each of his last two movies, could give up his peak stardom and peak remuneration to join politics, then others in the capacity to chip in can do so.”

Rhevanth knows the road ahead for Tamil Nadu’s most beloved actor is going to be fraught with hardships. But in his interactions with the actor, he has seen not a superstar but a grounded individual, deeply rooted to his cause. “Money, fame, happiness, he has it all in abundance,” says Rhevanth. “Vijay even has all the love in the world, yet he has chosen a field where he will be openly criticised, and hated. But this is what it takes to cause a revolution, I suppose. For now, his fanbase is surely with him. And here in Tamil Nadu, us Thalapathy fans are many.”

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