9 minutes reading time
So in Tamil Nadu, fans of two actors will physically fight each other. I mean actual fights. Not "twitter is mean" fights. Not passive-aggressive comment section fights. Actual fistfights, sometimes with weapons, over Rajinikanth versus Kamal Haasan, then Rajini versus Ajith for years, then Vijay versus Ajith once Ajith more or less retreated from that whole thing.
And what is weird to me — I've been thinking about this — is that in the west you have fan wars too, but they're about ideas, sort of. Marvel versus DC, Windows versus Linux, whatever. The thing people are fighting over is a thing, at least. A product. An IP. A brand maybe, but still an abstraction. Here it's two specific humans. Just two men. Their fans fight like those two men are personally insulted by the other's fans breathing.
That's strange, right? It is strange.
There's probably a structural explanation for why Tamil Nadu got like this specifically. The Dravidian movement ran cinema and politics through the same pipe for decades. Dialogues in movies carried political messaging. The hero was always "our man" — the common Tamil man, humiliated by elites, ultimately triumphant. The villain was some landlord or some upper-caste bastard or some corrupt official. And it worked so well that MGR actually became Chief Minister in 1977 and governed till he died in 1987. So fandom was not separate from politics here. It was politics. The screen hero and the political representative were literally the same person.
Once that happened, fandom got attached to something deeper than entertainment. It became identity. And you don't let someone insult your identity without responding.
The Tamil mass hero format makes this worse. These characters aren't written as humans with flaws who sometimes win. They're morally supreme. They beat everyone. They protect women, humiliate elites, deliver justice, deliver the punch dialogue. They're written as basically correct about everything, all the time. Malayalam cinema has historically allowed protagonists to be ordinary, fallible, sometimes wrong. Tamil mass cinema puts the hero on a pedestal and keeps him there for three hours. So when you've spent twenty years watching that man be unambiguously right about everything, an insult against him is not just rude — it's factually incorrect, cosmically unjust, and requires a response.
The fan club is also, I think, a thing for young men with nowhere else to put their energy. No campus union, no political organization to join, no real civic structure to participate in. So you join the fan club. You get belonging. You get hierarchy. You get a group identity and territorial pride and something to defend. And when someone from the other fan club says something about your star, it becomes a proxy for every other status fight you can't have anywhere else.
But the thing I actually wanted to write about is Vijay. TVK launched last month, February 2nd.
I like Vijay. I should say that clearly. Not in a parasocial I-would-die-for-him way, but I genuinely enjoy watching him. He's charming, he's funny, he's got this quality where his characters feel recognizable — not some elevated fantasy, just someone you could plausibly have met. In Kutty, in Poove Unakkaaga, even Gilli if you're in the right mood. These characters exist in the same gravity as normal life. He looks a bit like my uncle Mahesh mama, actually, which probably helps.
I've watched his worst movies too. Beast was bad. Varisu was genuinely difficult to sit through — some Telugu director came in and put the most cringe dialogue in his mouth and made him deliver it with a straight face, and it was painful in a specific way you only feel when someone you like is being wasted. Kuvari was dumb but fun-dumb, which is different. The point is I've watched all of them because he's become so familiar that even the bad ones you just show up for.
That familiarity is exactly what worries me.
There's a question I keep circling: can a person become so familiar, so warm, so present in every household for twenty-five years, that voters stop actually evaluating him?
MGR did this. He didn't speak against caste seriously. He didn't take real positions on structural injustice. He just did whatever gave him mass love — schemes, charity optics, movies where he's always right, always noble, always wins. He diluted the actual ideological core of the Dravidian movement into pure populism. And people loved him for it.
Vijay hasn't taken real positions either. He has this enormous amount of cultural power, and he has been very careful not to use it for anything that would make anyone specifically unhappy. He never speaks against obvious injustice. He never takes a side when a side needs to be taken. He wants everyone to love him. And I understand why — that's also just survival in an industry where your movie has to work for the Brahmin family in Mylapore and the Dalit kid in Madurai at the same time. But it's not the same as political leadership.
The problem is the core fans — I'll call them what they are, the chinna koothiyans or sillarais, the guys who pour milk on cutouts and burst crackers at 6am and will absolutely force their entire family to vote for him without any argument beyond "he is Vijay" — those people will not be asking questions. They will be at the booth. And then there are the softer fans, people like their spouses and parents who don't follow any of this closely but feel warm about him, and those people might just go along.
I genuinely don't know if he becomes CM in the next cycle. I think it's possible. I don't want it to be possible because I haven't seen him demonstrate that he understands governance, and I haven't seen him take a position that cost him anything. That's a bad combination.
I know Kerala well enough to compare. I lived there from 2012 to 2013 — two full years. Had classmates in my Tamil Nadu college who were from Kerala too, so that exposure continued even after I came back. And before all that, I was in SFI from around 2008, which meant I was interacting with Kerala students through those networks for years before I even set foot there.
The difference in political culture is not subtle. It hits you almost immediately. Students there argue. Not online-argue, argue-with-actual-knowledge argue. They understand coalition arithmetic, what factionalism does to a vote, what it means when two left parties split a constituency. They've been pamphlet-reading, campaign-running, marching since they joined college. Some of them were insufferable about it, honestly. The ideological rigidity could be exhausting. But they knew things. They had frameworks. They had opinions that were attached to actual policy positions rather than just vibes about which leader seems trustworthy.
Our college had none of that — I was there from 2008 to 2012 and I can tell you there was nothing. Tamil Nadu colleges mostly have none of that.
And it's not just neglect, and it wasn't always like this. The Dravidian movement was originally genuinely political — rationalism, anti-caste discourse, federalism, linguistic rights. There was real intellectual content. The anti-Hindi agitations in the 1960s got mass student participation; people were in the streets, some died. That was civic engagement. Then over decades: party institutionalisation, concentration of power, welfare populism replacing ideology, campus politics actively suppressed because the government decided politically active students were a problem to be managed. Elections got banned from most colleges. The culture dried up. And here we are, kids with nothing to channel into except movies and cricket and memes.
This matters because it means the depoliticisation was a regression, not a default. We had it. It got taken.
I went to IIM Trichy later, 2017 to 2019. I should probably say something about that experience sometime — I spent most of it working for the placement committee, running around trying to get companies to come recruit us, basically doing free labour for the institute under the delusion that it would look good on my resume, graduated with a 20 lakh education loan, and then spent the next several years paying it off. That's a different rant. The point is: even IIM Trichy had elections. They technically existed. But it was nothing. Nothing like what you see in Kerala colleges. No real stakes, no ideological contestation, just some students doing something that looks like democracy from a distance.
That wasn't an accident and it's not just neglect. The Dravidian parties made a specific choice to depoliticise campuses because a politically literate population is harder to keep delivering votes. A population that watches TV debates and feels warm about their chief minister's face — that's easier to manage.
So you remove real participation, and what fills the vacuum is cinema. Fan culture does the work that civic culture should be doing. And then Vijay becomes not just a star but a genuine political hope for people who have no other framework for engaging with politics at all.
Here's the thing that actually makes me laugh though. In Master — the 2021 film — Vijay plays a professor who gets sent to a college where students are being exploited and there's this whole thing about campus elections and student politics and standing up against corrupt power structures. It's a good movie. I liked it. And nobody in the audience found it strange that Tamil Nadu students on screen are politically engaged when Tamil Nadu students in reality have had their campus elections stripped away for decades.
That's the whole trick, isn't it. You give them the fantasy on screen. You take the real thing away outside.
I don't know how you fix this. I'm not going to pretend I have an answer. I just know that when I think about an election where the decisive factor is whether someone's Vijay fan husband convinces her to vote TVK, my head starts hurting in a way that isn't about headache.
Citizens became an audience. Somewhere in the last fifty years. And nobody really voted on that.