Mani Ratnam charts an inter-generational journey, from Velu’s days as a young migrant through his old age. The film is about Velu Naicker’s rise as an underworld figure in Bombay’s Dharavi. So, this is how every film was introduced at home, and this is how Nayakan was also introduced - through a bad print but with a lot of excitement and noise. When you are a kid, you are in charge of taking the VHS, putting it in, cleaning the head with the spray, putting the connections and seeing the volume and things like that and as you are doing it, there are these murmurs that go on around the film, and that is when you catch all the trivia or you understand what this film could be.
I could hear all the conversations when the film was being played. Varadarajan Mudaliar’s Ganesh pandal near the Matunga station was so famous that a strong legend had already built around it and when you are watching Nayakan with Kamal Haasan playing a version of Vardha Bhai, you know what you are getting into. Being from the same neighbourhood, my parents had heard his name from his bootlegging days. Also, by then, Varadarajan Mudaliar, or Vardha Bhai as he was widely known, was a big name in Matunga where I grew up. Since I was young, I couldn’t pigeonhole these films into classical structures. You follow this boy (Kamal Haasan as Velu Naicker) who grows up to become a dreaded gangster from one point of view and a messiah from another. Such a powerful opening that it shakes you up. For Nayakan, his hairstyle was different, he had taken off the moustache and right in the beginning, it’s about this kid who gives away his father and the father gets killed because of that. Kamal Haasan, for the first time, was clean shaven. I could hear murmurs and family chatter from behind complaining that they couldn’t see anything, the camera work being too dark but that didn’t bother me because I hadn’t seen visuals like these before. Starring Kamal Haasan, Saranya and Karthika, Nayakan was a similar experience. My memory of cinema is very bootlegged, in that sense. In my house, a lot of Tamil films were played on VHS, but most of them bootlegged, none of them originals. But on the first viewing itself, I don’t know, but something happened. Not so much a theatrical experience as a VHS one, I watched the Mani Ratnam masterpiece over two-three different Tamil prints which had, as usual, bad sound and bad visuals. On one extreme end was Shekhar Kapur’s Mr India which blew my mind at that age and on the other, Mani Ratnam’s Nayakan.
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(Express archive photo)ġ987 was a watershed year, at least for an eight-year-old me. A thinly-veiled autobiography of Mumbai’s famous don Varadarajan Mudaliar, Kamal Haasan-starrer Nayakan follows the rise and fall of Velu Naicker.
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