Just how raucously the release of a new Tamil film has been celebrated can often be gauged by the size of the puddle of milk at the entrance of a theatre. The bigger that puddle on opening day, the more the milk that has been expended in the ritual shower of the hero’s giant cardboard cut-out, glorification verging on deification.
In the film’s release, the distinctive stamp of the rasigar mandrams—literally, “associations of fans”, a uniquely Tamil phenomenon—is everywhere. The young man pouring the milk is a card-carrying member; so are the young men holding his ladder steady, and those setting off firecrackers, and those filling the theatres for the first few days, dancing and whistling and throwing money at their hero on the screen.
Beneath all that devotion to chaotic merrymaking, though, the rasigar mandrams are surprisingly well-organized marketing strategy bodies (who, after all, simply happens to have a few kilolitres of milk on his person at a film premiere). They volunteer their time to manufacture posters and high expectations; less often, they volunteer their energy to engage in fisticuffs with rival mandrams. And invariably, the large mandrams are entirely male affairs, often fuelled by the very masculine activities of communal drinking and the hero-worship of machismo.
Funded as they are by the actors they deify, mandrams exist for nearly every star; even a first-time actor, an industry insider grumbles, “will have an All India Rasigar Mandram present at the premiere”.
“When I wrote my first song in 1977, four people came up to me and said: ‘Give us Rs25 apiece, and we’ll go to the theatre for your film, spread out, and when your name comes on the screen, we’ll cheer and whistle’,” says Randor Guy, a popular film historian and writer of screenplays. “I had to tell them that I didn’t really want a Randor Guy Rasigar Mandram.”
But the rasigar mandrams are more than just hype machines with a weakness for buying dairy products in bulk. “When mandrams first began coming up in the 1960s, they were a part of the political scenery,” Guy says, mentioning in particular the mandram of M.G. Ramachandran, the dashing film idol who ascended to the chief ministership of Tamil Nadu. “Some mandrams claim to be social welfare units, although how much social welfare they do, I don’t know.”
Today’s mandrams are still political animals by nature, waiting only to hear the word from the star of choice before they leap with a roar into the fray. When “Captain” Vijayakanth launched a political party in 2005, the cadre of the All India Vijayakanth Fans Welfare Association turned into a mouthwateringly captive base of voters. By what seemed like the most natural extension of duties, the association’s general secretary, S. Ramu Vasanthan, became the general secretary of the party.