Gangsters still have a major hold over Kollywood

Gangsters’ lives offer audience a vicarious satisfaction. They live on the edge, elude the law, commit excesses and Kollywood loves the don or so it seems from this slew of forthcoming releases: Kabali and Vikram Veda to name a few.

There is no dearth of stories about the underworld mafia and gangsters when it comes to cities like Chennai and Madurai. Kollywood filmmakers have taken a step further, presenting on celluloid the way they lived and died.

Till Kamal Haasan’s Nayakan hit the screens in 1987, a majority of people across Tamil Nadu and Mumbai did not really know what the Bombay underworld don Varadarajan Mudaliar really looked like. Then came an array of movies, like Thalapathy, Baasha, Arindhum Ariyaamalum, Pudhupettai, Billa and Jigarthanda which raked it in at the box-office. Baasha ran to packed houses for 15 months.

The year 2016 will witness many more such movies, such as Kabali, in which Superstar Rajinikanth will be playing the role of Kabaleeswaran, a local don who went on to help Tamil refugees in Malaysia and Singapore. A source from the film unit says, “Kabaleeswaran was not just a mafia don. He has a huge fan following among Tamil people living in Southeast Asia for the kind of amiable person he was.” With Vishnuvardhan’s Billa in 2007 setting the trend for the new-gen international gangster, Vetrimaaran’s Polladhavan portrayed the life of a present generation gangster in north Chennai. “In my movies, I always try to bring the truth to light. And when it comes to Polladhavan , be it Dhanush or Daniel Balaji’s gangster Ravi’s character, I did a detailed research on the lives of these particular characters before bringing them to the screen.”

Director Ravi Arasu of Eetti fame says that he had to live in north Chennai to study the life of gangsters before writing the screenplay. “Audiences are always curious to know such things. And the onus is upon us to present the content to them with authenticity. Things are really different in north Chennai. I ensured that the lives of those gangsters or the way they talked wasn’t misinterpreted on screen. I lived there for 15 days and also took the help of my friend Andrews who was raised there,” he added.

Traditionally, almost all gangster movies have gone on to become a huge success on screen. There is something about a gangster’s life that intrigues us. Audiences always want to see how they came into that profession or how they emerged as gangsters, and finally, how they got caught or how they perished.