2 - Locating the Political

Summary

Introduction

In 1984 the Tamil movie star and politician, M. G. Ramachandram, was paralysed by a stroke. For three years he lived on in a Brooklyn hospital room, his followers celebrating the miracle of the ‘thrice-born’ leader's survival. Finally in 1987 the end came. M. S. S. Pandian uses what followed to introduce his short monograph on MGR:

Perhaps the best way to begin the incomparable success story of Marudur Gopalamenon Ramachandram (popularly known as MGR) and his politics, is to begin with his funeral … No less than two million people, including several who had travelled long distances from remote villages, formed MGR's rather long funeral procession. In other places, people who could not attend the actual funeral organized mock ‘funerals’ in which images of MGR were taken out in procession and buried with full ritual. Countless young men tonsured their heads, a Hindu ritual usually performed when someone of the family dies. Thirty-one of his desolate followers, unable to contain their grief, committed suicide.

(Pandian 1992: 17)

Two million mourners, thirty-one suicides: MGR's life has been mapped out in such apparently surreal statistics: in 1967, when a fellow actor shot him, 50,000 fans gathered at the hospital where he was treated. When he suffered his stroke in 1984, ‘At least twenty-two people immolated themselves, or cut off their limbs, fingers or toes as offerings to various deities, praying for the ailing leader's life.’ During this last illness, 27,000 new roadside shrines were constructed in Tamil Nadu (Pandian 1992: 18).