Book Excerpt: Sridevi: The South Years by Amborish Roychoudhury

The book titled 'Sridevi: The South Years' was written by, national award-winning writer, biographer and film historian, Amborish Roychoudhury.

The book covers the early career of Sridevi and documents her rise as an actress in South India. Empowered with interviews of four prominent personalities of southern cinema, namely Baradwaj Rangan, Mohan Raman, G. Dhananjayan and Chithra Lakshmanan, this book entails snippets from Sridevi’s illustrious career. It also features photographical inserts from Sridevi’s early roles with actors like Kamal Hasan, Rajinikanth, MGR, NTR and the Ganesans.

This book examines her early career as a child artist and leading lady before she became well-known in North India. This book offers a glimpse into Sridevi's development as India's first female superstar, interspersed with interviews and observations from prominent directors and journalists who have worked with her.

Pages: 195 pages, INR: 395, Available on Amazon, Rupa Publications 

An excerpt from the book: 

Decades before she became a film goddess, Sridevi was playing a god on-screen and the South Indian moviegoing audience was eating out of her hands. I do not use the term ‘South Indian’ loosely like we often tend to do. As is evident from the previous chapter, Sridevi played child gods and demi-gods in a bevy of Tamil, Malayalam as well as Kannada movies. Owing to her sweeping success as Lord Muruga in her Tamil debut, Thunaivan, Sridevi was flooded with offers to play deities in film after film.

She played Muruga in films like Kumara Sambhavam, Aathi Parasakthi and Agathiyar. Kumara Sambhavam was multilingual. It was also shot in Malayalam where she was Subramanian, the same deity who’s referred to as Muruga in Tamil. She also appeared as Krishna in a Tamil film, Agathiyar.

It was like an invisible door had been flung open all of a sudden. Close on the heels of Tamil and Malayalam hits, the Telugu film industry beckoned her too. In those days, even as a child, Sridevi had a quality in her act that would immediately grasp everyone’s attention. Similar to her first performance as Muruga, all her subsequent roles sparkled with a level of authenticity and comfort which demonstrated that even she believed that this is what she was born to do.

Thevar and his brother, Thirumugam, were quite the team. Thevar was the producer, while Thirumugam mounted the director’s chair. For about two decades, they worked in film after film. Most of these were with Tamil cinema’s greatest superstar (before Rajinikanth came along), Maruthur Gopalan Ramachandran or MGR as his devotees call him. Thevar and Thirumugam made some 16 films with MGR as the lead, and some 20 other films with other actors. Thunaivan was one of many such films.

Like most Tamilians who are religiously inclined, Thevar was quite obsessed with the stories of Lord Muruga and his exploits. He was known to donate a huge part of his bounty from the box-office collection of his films to Muruga temples. In the middle of shooting he would start praying, mumbling his entreaties to the deity, asking him to ensure that the shot goes well. He made some four films with Lord Muruga at the centre: Deivam, Thiruvarul, Murugan Adimai and Thunaivan. Legend has it that during a raid of his house by the income tax department, officials ran into countless packets of vibhooti (consecrated ash) from Muruga temples. If on a cloudy day he needed the sun to be out during shootings, Thevar would look skyward and yell, ‘Dei Muruga veyila viduda (Muruga, let the sun out)!’

Muruga is an extremely popular deity in the Tamil pantheon of gods. The deity is akin to how Ganesha is in Maharashtra or Durga/Kali is in West Bengal. Muruga, also known as Kartikeya or Subramanian, is the son of Shiva and Parvati and the sibling of Ganesha. According to legends, it was Muruga who instructed the sage Agathiyar (known as Agastya Rishi in the rest of India) to create the Tamil language.

Like his brother Ganesha, Muruga has been worshipped as a child god. Muruga has been portrayed countless times on-screen, with actors like Master Sridhar and Sridevi playing the roles. Both of them apparently played the role of the deity in a film called Kandhan Karunai (1967). I won’t dwell much on this, as the details are not etched out too well. On multiple online platforms, it is Kandhan Karunai that’s been stated as Sridevi’s movie debut. But if one looks closely, the child actor shown in the song from the movie doesn’t look anything like her. The film is available on YouTube and one can see that the child actor credited for the role is Master Sridhar. My dear friend Rajagopal Prabhakar, scrubbed through the video to look for her and stumbled onto one little blink-and-you-miss-it apparition of hers in the movie. So, for the purpose of this book, I have considered Thunaivan as Sridevi’s bona fide movie debut.

Thunaivan, literally meaning ‘companion’, is the story of a devout Muruga worshipper who undergoes crises that test his faith and how he held steadfast in his belief even then. Valayutham is an orphan boy brought up in a Muruga temple, but is thrown out of the place when he’s accused by the temple trustee of stealing a ruby from the Lord’s spear. By the time the ruby is found, Valayutham is long gone. By a quirk of fate, he ends up as a fruit vendor; and then by dint of honesty and sheer hard work, he amasses a certain amount of wealth. He also marries a woman after his own heart. But to his utter dismay his wife, Maragatham, turns out to be an atheist.