Buxom Bollywood babes going South and
striking gold is an old story.Not so well-known is the case of that other
important player of Hindi cinema - the villain - who's also got lucky there.For
two decades now,Bollywood has been exporting its baddies to southern shores,a
lucrative business by any stretch.
An early export was theatre-film
actor Salim Ghouse whose baritone and curly mane are now part of Tamil film
folklore.Ghouse says it was Malayalam actor-director Pratap Pothen who saw one
of his plays in Chennai and suggested that he play Carlos in Vetri Vizha,his
Tamil remake of The Bourne Identity,where Kamal Haasan was Jason Bourne."Vetri
Vizha was a runaway hit," says Ghouse,who from then on was on the Mumbai-Madras
express ever so often.
Mani Ratnam,who believes that the film baddie
has to have many dimensions so that the invariably straight-laced hero doesn't
come up smelling of roses at least till the climax,was one of the earliest
directors to look to Bollywood.He gave Ghouse an interesting role to play in his
black comedy Thiruda Thiruda (1993),signed on Amrish Puri for his post-modern
Mahabharata,Dalapathy (1991),and Pankaj Kapur for Roja (1993).(Of course Kapur
wasn't strictly a South performer,since he essayed the role of an Urdu-speaking
Kashmiri terrorist.)
While the hardcore Punjabi Puri and Kapur made
their South Indian sojourn an exception rather than the rule,Ghouse,who has a
flair for languages,found himself a huge fan following in Tamil,Telugu and
Malayalam films."I learnt Tamil by listening to Tamil songs," says the actor who
was very clear that if he didn't speak a tongue,he wouldn't attempt a film in
it."I didn't do Kannada films only for this reason," he says."If an actor
doesn't know the language he is doing a film in,he becomes a caricature."
Of course,Ghouse is in a minority of one.Once the idea of the
Bollywood villain caught on,Southern filmmakers started importing them by the
truckload,whether or not they understood the southern languages even remotely.In
these 20 years,countless villains and even henchmen from Mumbai have found their
way to the studios of South India,and,as filmmaker R Madesh puts it,while some
fell by the wayside after an inconsequential film or two,at least a dozen have
made it to the top.The latest additions to Telugu cinema,Murali Sharma and Sonu
Sood,have even picked up Best Villain awards for Atithi and Arundhati
respectively.
Although they come at a fairly prohibitive price tag of
anything between Rs 15 lakh and Rs 50 lakh,the Czars of South cinema have no
budget constraints when it comes to importing their villains.One producer says
that Atul Kulkarni asked for Rs 25 lakh,two-first class tickets to the foreign
shooting locale,five-star accommodation and two staffers."I refused,but some
other producer readily agreed," he says.
Asked why the Bombay baddie
is so attractive to southern filmmakers,a hotshot director says,"There are five
reasons.One,the South (especially Tamil/Telugu cinema) still makes a lot of
regular potboilers where the typical hero-villain confrontation is the
core.Two,there is a dearth of imposing villains down South.Three,the Bombay
baddie is usually blessed with a six-foot frame (Mukesh Rishi,Pradeep Rawat and
Rahul Dev being cases in point).Four,he doesn't mind getting beaten to pulp by
the South Indian hero,who is often puny and dark.And five,promising villains
like Rajnikant,Chiranjeevi,Sarath Kumar and Dhanush have now become
superheroes."
Director Selvan says there is also a superstition
doing the rounds - that if a villain from North India is brought in,the film
invariably has a jubilee run.Strangely,the South Indian audience,which
idol-worships its darkcomplexioned heroes,likes contrasting them with fair
heroines and wheatish villains.Marathi actor Sayaji Shinde,currently the rage in
Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu,says he can well believe the superstition because
he has been made to do the same role in two language versions of the Tamil film
Dhool."After it became a hit in Tamil,I was asked to do the same role in Telugu
and Kannada," he says.Shinde adds mischievously that it hardly matters to him
that he gets pummelled in every climax because "through the film I'm the one
calling the shots and terrifying the heroine;the hero only gets her in the end!"
Admitting that he has made a small fortune by spending around 200
days each year down South,Shinde,who has completed nearly 80 South Indian
films,is unwilling to view this as a North-South migration issue."An actor is an
actor is an actor," he says."According to me,when a filmmaker is writing a
role,a certain actor comes to his mind.Now whether that actor resides in Mumbai
or in the Malabar is hardly of any consequence." Agrees Ghouse,"That's the
beauty of globalisation.Actors from across the seven seas are making it here and
vice-versa.So to view us as Bollywood exports is wrong."
SOUTHSIDE
STORY
Salim Ghouse:
Vetri Vizha (Tamil); Thazhvaram (Malayalam); Antham (Telugu)
Ashish
Vidyarthi:
Ghilli (Tamil); Aa Dinagalu (Kannada); Pokiri (Telugu)
Pradeep
Rawat:
Sye (Telugu) Ghajini (Tamil)
Mukesh
Rishi:
Shambo Shiva Shambo,Indra (Telugu)
Mukesh
Tiwari:
Kanthaswamy (Tamil)
Sayaji
Shinde:
Vettaikaran (Tamil); Dhool (Tamil,Telugu,Kannada)
Atul
Kulkarni:
Run (Tamil)
Sonu
Sood:
Arundhati,Athadu (Telugu)
Murali
Sharma:
Atithi (Telugu)
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