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Literary Review
Life's a stage
IF Rupa Books' Charitavali biographies attempt, as the jacket copy claims, to make the lives of Great Indians come alive for us Little Indians, then the Greats are ill-served by these hagiographic narrations of their triumphs. "A shilling life" is roughly what we get in both the biographies of MGR and Sivaji Ganesan by Roopa Swaminathan. Perhaps her brief was to simplify, narrate film plots, outline the major events in the actors' lives: birth, death, marriage/s, politics, with basic analyses of how these actors changed Tamil cinema. Nothing more ambitious is attempted in these books for the "general" (read stupid) reader.
There are some curious parallels in the lives of these thundering thespians: both were raised by mothers struggling to make ends meet, both started off life in theatre, both wandered towards politics. In some of the many brilliant stills these books have, they even strike similar poses.
With MGR, Swaminathan provides a few glimpses of his authoritarian, vain aspect. But her sympathies lie unambiguously with MGR's archrival: Sivaji, it appears, could do no wrong. She mourns the "North-South divide" that led to Ganesan being misunderstood in the North as melodramatic, and denied the National Award. He was penalised, she says, agreeing with Kamal Hassan, "for being an actor in a state that had different expectations from its heroes". What were these? The nature of the language apparently required that lines be declaimed, not spoken; unlike in the North, Tamil heroes were loved for their flab not their fitness — the more there was of them, the better; and the parallel film movement reached Tamil Nadu late.
From her description it seems tough being a Tamil actor; unsurprisingly, then, Marlon Brando is said to have met Sivaji Ganesan and commented poker-faced, "Sivaji can act like me, but I cannot act like him."
Sivaji Ganesan; M. G. Ramachandran; Rupa, Rs. 150 each, illustrated.
ANURADHA ROY
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