On the evening of May 8, I stood in the offering hall of a Hindu temple in Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, amid a phalanx of anxious politicians dressed in their customary white shirts and dhotis. ‘‘Lord Perumal, we pray that justice will prevail,’’ a priest intoned. ‘‘Tamil Nadu was on the verge of prosperity, but evil powers have left it stagnant. Let Amma resume her work. Let her opponents be punished. Let the evil that has imprisoned her be banished into hell.’’ While we waited for the ceremony to begin, the politicians showed me their tattoos. The minister of higher education had a woman’s plump face inscribed on his forearm. A district secretary had the words ‘‘Long Live Amma.’’
Amma means ‘‘mother,’’ and in Tamil Nadu, it’s the nickname for an indestructible politician named Jayalalithaa Jayaram, a former actress who is now the general secretary of the state’s ruling party, the A.I.A.D.M.K. Until Sept. 27, when she was sentenced to four years in prison, she was also the state’s chief minister. The charge was ‘‘disproportionate assets’’: the court found that her wealth exceeded her known sources of income by 660 million rupees, or around $10 million. A raid on her house found 10,500 saris, 750 pairs of shoes and 66 pounds of gold. It is a pittance compared with the 10-billion-rupee hauls some North Indian public servants are said to have amassed. Nevertheless, she was the first chief minister in India to be ejected from office for corruption.
Across the state, her followers pelted buses with stones and set them on fire. At Perungalathur junction, on the highway to Chennai, people lay down in the road and tried to persuade bus drivers to turn the buses on them. ‘‘Run us over, run us over!’’ they yelled. ‘‘Why should we live when our Amma is in jail?’’ According to the A.I.A.D.M.K., hundreds of people committed suicide in response to her conviction, dozens by self-immolation.
How to account for this histrionic devotion? You don’t find people begging bus drivers to kill them in Kerala, the state just next door. One explanation is movie mania. Before she went into politics, Jayalalithaa was the most popular Tamil movie actress of her time, the heroine in more than 100 films. She followed the model of her mentor and co-star, an actor-politician named Marudhur Gopalan Ramachandran but more commonly known by his initials M.G.R. He ruled Tamil Nadu for 11 years, and since his death in 1987, Jayalalithaa and her archenemy, a wily 92-year-old screenwriter named Muthuvel Karunanidhi, have taken turns running the state. As the head of the D.M.K. — the party to which M.G.R. belonged until their rivalry forced a split — Karunanidhi has built a cult following on par with Jayalalithaa’s. The two of them rule as if in a melodrama, having each other arrested, dropping snide insults and wild accusations, destroying each other’s pet projects. The D.M.K. and the A.I.A.D.M.K. have almost no policy differences, but no other party can gain a foothold.
Three days before Jayalalithaa’s appeal, A.I.A.D.M.K. loyalists were staging mass prayers in temples, mosques and churches. If she were to win, she would resume her seat as chief minister in time to contest the 2016 elections. If she were to lose, she would remain banished from politics for 10 years. In Madurai, party disciples broke 1,008 coconuts. In Coimbatore, 2,008 marched with urns of milk on their heads. At Chellapillai Rayar temple, 508 women lighted an equal number of oil lamps. The courtyard filled with the smell and haze of incense and the sound of hundreds of tiny brass bells. The politicians posed for photographs with a framed portrait of Jayalalithaa.
Their prayers were fueled by a dual hope: that God would take mercy on Jayalalithaa and that Jayalalithaa would take note of their efforts on her behalf. The best way to get her attention was to put on a performance of their own.
You know you’ve entered Tamil Nadu when you begin to see Jayalalithaa’s face everywhere: a double-chinned Mona Lisa, her long, dark hair pulled back in a demure chignon. In the cities, her party members line the avenues with giant Jayalalithaa billboards to prove their fealty, and her likeness stares out from posters all over the villages, where her biggest vote bank resides. Her face appears on the outside of the free laptops she distributes to students and then again on the desktops. There are Amma pharmacies for subsidized drugs and Amma canteens for 5-rupee meals; soon there will be Amma cinemas for cheap movies. The ubiquity of that face gives the state the feel of a cartoon dictatorship, much to the annoyance of Tamils indifferent to her charms.
Chennai in particular is a city whose self-image is genteel, cultured and intellectual, and some there are prone to deep embarrassment over the excesses of Amma worship. It is also the capital of the Tamil film industry, the southern counterpart to Hindi-language Bollywood in the north. Its blockbusters are just as bombastic, and its fans are even more fervent: at every new release by the Tamil action star Rajinikanth, his admirers bathe posters of him in milk, a treatment typically reserved for idols in temples. But no actor has dominated Tamil culture like M.G.R., who is like a messianic hybrid of Elvis Presley and Ronald Reagan.
In the movies, M.G.R. was a swashbuckler: fencing with the dastardly, rescuing the innocent, dancing, romancing, laughing madly. Jayalalithaa, born in 1948, grew up in his thrall, but wary of the cinema. Her father died when she was 2, and her mother, Sandhya, was a struggling second-rung actress who rarely came home. At 16, Jayalalithaa was confident and voluptuous, a talented dancer with a knowing air. Sandhya’s colleagues found her alluring and offered her parts in movies. Though Jayalalithaa dreamed of becoming a lawyer, her mother pushed her to turn down a college scholarship and accept. One of her first films was ‘‘One in a Thousand,’’ a starring role opposite M.G.R.
When M.G.R. stepped into the studio, everyone was expected to stand in respect. But on the set of ‘‘One in a Thousand,’’ Jayalalithaa sat cross-legged and kept right on reading her book. M.G.R. was intrigued. Despite their three-decade age difference, she turned out to be his perfect on-screen foil: flirty one moment, haughty the next, worldly and earthy and vivacious. Rolling in the grass in a song sequence from the film ‘‘The Sacred Dwelling,’’ he pounces for a kiss, only to end up with a flower in his mouth; she bites the petals from his lips and flings them aside with her teeth. That they were lovers was an open secret, though M.G.R. was married to a former co-star named Janaki. Over the next eight years Jayalalithaa and M.G.R. starred together in 28 films.
By the time they met, M.G.R. was strongly associated with the Dravidian Progress Federation, or D.M.K. The party grew out of a movement against the brutal social order of the era in which lower caste Tamils were denied public resources and often forbidden even to wear shoes or ride bicycles. Dravidian activists protested the dominance of Brahmins in Tamil Nadu and of Hindi-speaking northerners on the national level. Fatefully, the D.M.K. came of age just as the cinema craze took hold in India, and many of its ideologues were screenwriters, M.G.R.’s close friend Karunanidhi among them.
Jayalalithaa in Her Breakout Role
A video clip from “One in a Thousand” (1965), Jayalalithaa’s first film with Marudhur Gopalan Ramachandran, known as M.G.R. The song is titled “Song of My Juvenility.” The film was digitized and rereleased in 2014 by Divya Films.
By Divya Films on Publish Date July 1, 2015.The D.M.K. packaged its propaganda in the form of popular action entertainments, using catchy songs to instill Tamil pride, comedy to mock its enemies and extravagant oratory to attract a following, coding its ideas in allegory to evade the censors of the ruling Congress Party. The D.M.K. made M.G.R. a star: his madcap energy gave their films the wild charisma they needed to carry their message. The party cultivated an image of M.G.R. as ‘‘the savior of the poor,’’ the journalist Sampath Kumar told me. ‘‘And he became intoxicated with that image.’’
M.G.R. became the face of the party, and what a face it was: jowly in a way that was somehow dashing, with a smile that flitted dangerously between mischief and love. It was a stroke of luck, then, when M.R. Radha, a rival actor, unaccountably shot M.G.R. in the neck just before the 1967 elections, and widespread sympathy for his injury helped push the D.M.K. into power. Two years later, M.G.R. used his party clout to propel Karunanidhi to the chief minister’s chair, a prize for having given him his big break in films.
The two looked like co-celebrities in chief, superstar and screenwriter, with a shared uniform of sunglasses and wide smiles. But in power, their friendship soured. In 1972 M.G.R. founded the A.I.A.D.M.K. and took most of the movie magic with him. The rabble-rousing songs he had lip-synced in his films — ‘‘How long will they fool us/in this land of ours?’’ — became his party’s anthems. His fan clubs doubled as party chapters, in a ready-made organization that in 1977 was instrumental in winning him the chief minister’s seat. M.G.R.’s government has been hailed for the success of his Nutritious Meal program, which provides free lunches for school children. His rule was also characterized by police abuse, an intolerance of dissent and economic policies that nearly always favored the wealthy. But the movies, coupled with M.G.R.’s knack for publicizing his personal acts of generosity, convinced his rural devotees that they had an intimate bond with him. They re-elected him until the end of his life.
By then, at M.G.R.’s invitation, Jayalalithaa had joined the A.I.A.D.M.K. She had shown little previous interest in politics, and her entry into a Dravidian party was made especially unlikely by the fact that she was a Brahmin. But she was a natural leader: glamorous and intelligent, with a command of English and Hindi that served her well as a legislator in Delhi. The men in M.G.R.’s inner circle saw her as a threat and tried to shut her out. After M.G.R. died on Dec. 24, 1987, she revealed the depths of her tenacity. While M.G.R.’s body lay in state, Jayalalithaa secured a position just behind his head, where the cameras couldn’t avoid her, making her seem more prominent even than his wife, Janaki. For two full days she kept her post, even as Janaki’s entourage pinched her and stomped on her feet. When his funeral procession departed, Jayalalithaa tried to climb onto the gun carriage bearing his body. On live television, Janaki’s nephew struck her and pushed her to the ground.
For four years she fought her enemies inside and outside the party; each insult only seemed to harden her resolve. In 1991 she began the first of three terms as chief minister.
One evening out on Chennai’s Marina Beach, I met a burly fisherman named Sathiavaan. He greeted me happily when he saw me examining his net and catamaran and spoke with pride of the danger and difficulty of his work. When I asked him, through an interpreter, about Jayalalithaa, he started to cry. ‘‘The only person who helps the fishermen is Amma,’’ he said. ‘‘We felt like orphans when she went to jail. She’s like the sea that gives us our livelihood.’’
All along the beach waved tattered A.I.A.D.M.K. flags on wind-bent sticks. The tsunami of 2004 hit hard here during Jayalalithaa’s second term. In a nearby concrete slum, two fishermen’s wives praised her response. ‘‘Immediately she rushed here and investigated, talked to us, consoled us,’’ one said. On the steps of a small church hidden in a maze of shanties, I asked a woman named Kala about the corruption case that had knocked Jayalalithaa out of office. ‘‘What she did was wrong, but who has not committed mistakes?’’ Kala said. ‘‘We love her because she’s a woman. A lonely woman like us.’’
While M.G.R. built a film persona that he could import almost directly to politics, Jayalalithaa had to make a clean break. ‘‘To live down the image of an actress is very important, because an actress is by definition a public woman, a loose woman,’’ the social historian V. Geetha told me. ‘‘She had to desexualize herself.’’ In her first term, she started wearing body-sheathing capes over her saris and asked voters to call her ‘‘sister.’’ By her second term she had stopped wearing jewelry altogether. That’s when she began to be known as ‘‘Amma’’: a stern and distant yet endlessly generous mother, a screen for all her children to project their hopes onto.
The Star Power of Jayalalithaa
CreditStills Chari
Much of her style of rule comes directly from the M.G.R. playbook: populist, authoritarian, tantalizingly inaccessible. In her first term, a bureaucrat who questioned one of her transactions was disfigured in an acid attack; Jayalalithaa has denied involvement. In recent years, she has silenced her critics with constant defamation cases. Her handpicked replacement after her conviction, a party loyalist named O. Panneerselvam, wept as he was sworn in as chief minister and refused to occupy her office or sit in her chair. He presented the state budget in a briefcase emblazoned with her face. Her party discipline is total. ‘‘It’s a man’s world here,’’ said A. Arulmozhi, the propaganda secretary for another Dravidian party. ‘‘Sometimes I feel that the reason women in Tamil Nadu enjoy Jayalalithaa in power is that they see how she controls men, keeps them at a distance, falling at her feet.’’
You would think that given all this emotional mayhem, Tamil Nadu would be a mess, but in fact it’s one of the best-run states in India. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, in their book ‘‘An Uncertain Glory,’’ an analysis of economic development in India, single out Tamil Nadu as a paragon of administrative innovation among Indian states, ranking it best in the country for the quality of its public services. Under Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi’s governance, Chennai has gained a reputation as the Detroit of India (in the car-manufacturing-hub sense, not in the bankrupt-and-abandoned sense). Her raw instinct for political survival was enough to put her in office. Once there, she revealed a surprising talent for administration. ‘‘She schooled herself, and to that extent one has to salute her,’’ the journalist Sadanand Menon told me. ‘‘She has worked to understand procedures, rules and regulations, policies.’’
But her continuing success among voters perhaps owes less to her management skills than to her genius at branding. In 2006, immediately before an election that seemed sure to go Jayalalithaa’s way, Karunanidhi promised free televisions for all. He won, and a freebie arms race commenced. Since Jayalalithaa resumed office in 2011, she has given away or heavily subsidized laptops, saris, fans, rice, cows, goats, food processors and bicycles, and branded all of it with her face and the name Amma: Amma salt, Amma cement, Amma drinking water. Some of the giveaways, like free neonatal kits for new mothers, are certainly worthwhile. But the practice has become so brazen that politicians discuss it with open cynicism. I suggested to Kanimozhi, Karunanidhi’s daughter and a member of Parliament, that the parties are running out of things to give away. ‘‘Maybe fridges,’’ she said wryly. ‘‘But the only thing is we don’t have enough electricity. Maybe we should do cupboards.’’
In attaching her Amma persona to every welfare program, Jayalalithaa now embodies the state in her role as the mother of all Tamils, and all good things appear to flow from her largess. Even as she stood convicted, few disputed that she was right then at the very pinnacle of her power.
One morning I met Shihan Hussaini, a karate teacher, archer, sculptor, painter and sometime actor, at his studio near Elliot’s Beach in Chennai. ‘‘Tamil Nadu revolves around sensation, revolves around drama, revolves around legends,’’ he said. ‘‘Tamil Nadu people, they lap it up.’’
I first heard of Hussaini after he made a double-size but otherwise perfectly lifelike sculpture of Jayalalithaa’s head out of 11 liters of his own and his students’ coagulated blood. But he was quick to draw a line. ‘‘I’m not one of those fools that set themselves on fire,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m an educated guy. There are millions and millions of men, women and children who love her equally or in fact more than me. But I’m able to express it in the right way.’’
The latest way he chose to express his love for Jayalalithaa was to have himself crucified. He invited the press to his studio to watch his karate students help him hammer six-inch nails though his hands and feet. Then he delivered a speech about the glories of Amma until he passed out. Jayalalithaa wrote him a letter, telling him that she was terribly disturbed and asking him to please never do anything like it again. ‘‘I was touched,’’ Hussaini whispered. ‘‘Touched! I’ve kept that letter very, very safe. I’m going to frame it and put it up somewhere.’’
A month after the crucifixion, he wore adhesive bandages on each side of his hands. I asked how long it had taken before he could use them again. ‘‘Surprisingly, very soon,’’ he said cheerily. Then his face darkened. ‘‘But my feet are giving me a lot of problems. The heels are — it’s very painful.’’
In the A.I.A.D.M.K., political engagement is physical engagement. It begins with the bodies of the politicians themselves: their performances on-screen, whatever physical relationship they had with each other, their athletic struggles in the political arena. The people do the rest. ‘‘There’s something about blood bonds in Tamil Nadu politics,’’ the journalist Sadanand Menon told me. After M.R. Radha shot M.G.R., he said, fans lined up across the state to donate blood. And when M.G.R. came out of the hospital, he started addressing his audiences as ‘‘blood of my blood.’’ When he started his party, he called on his followers to prove their loyalty by being tattooed with his new flag, and thousands complied. When Jayalalithaa set up a tent on Marina Beach and fasted publicly for 80 hours in protest of interstate water policy, thousands joined her. At every letdown, it seemed, A.I.A.D.M.K. supporters tried to set themselves on fire.
Several Jayalalithaa skeptics told me that they doubt her party members care for her at all. They just know that mad acts of political theater are how things get done in Tamil Nadu. ‘‘I don’t think it’s about people liking her or liking Karunanidhi,’’ the playwright Gnani Sankaran said. ‘‘The people have no options. Because Jayalalithaa’s the boss, they totally depend on her.’’ What looks like fervency is perhaps merely a practical result of being trapped in a state with only two viable parties that are indistinguishable except for the personalities of their commanders.
This still doesn’t explain the self-immolations; surely there is no pragmatic angle on those. Yet Sankaran insisted to me that there was. ‘‘Party functionaries organize these things,’’ he said. ‘‘They’re not spontaneous.’’ A suicide, I said, seems like an extreme thing to organize. ‘‘They can organize extreme things,’’ he said. ‘‘Using money. Using emotion.’’ I first dismissed this as conspiracy theory. But as the months after Jayalalithaa’s conviction passed and the suicides continued, the party kept boasting of the tens of millions of rupees in compensation it gave to victims’ families, which surely only encourages more suicides. I often heard party men exaggerate the number of deaths; it’s something they’re clearly proud of. In statements issued from her home in the heart of Chennai, Jayalalithaa is careful to express her shock and dismay whenever her constituents self-destruct in her name.
The day before the verdict was quiet, so I went to the movies. Jayalalithaa made a cameo during the intermission. In a government ad, an old man complained that it never rained anymore, and a woman told him not to worry. Amma has been planting trees all over Tamil Nadu, and soon the rains will return. It sounded like her boldest giveaway yet. The ad closed with an M.G.R. song: ‘‘Tomorrow Is Ours.’’
Early on verdict day, I stopped by A.I.A.D.M.K. headquarters. A small crowd of hopeful fans had gathered, and a newscaster was clustering them together to use as a backdrop. One man in particular caught my eye: He wore a big black cowboy hat and a shiny white robe with the party symbol on it. It was only when I approached him that I saw he was missing three fingers on his left hand. His name was R. Rathanam, and he was the superintendent of police for a city called Salem, until the day in 2004 he chopped off his fingers with a machete and dropped them in the collection box at a local temple. ‘‘For Amma to win,’’ he said. I asked him how she responded to the gesture. ‘‘She suspended me from the force!’’ he said. Then he raved about how she covered the bill for his medical treatment.
Nearby, outside Jayalalithaa’s house, thousands were waiting for the verdict to be announced at 11 a.m. Everyone was performing for the news channels, shouting slogans: ‘‘Long live Amma!’’ ‘‘Revolutionary leader Amma!’’ ‘‘The savior of the people!’’ Often it seemed as if a shoving match was going to break out, as the fans elbowed one another to get in front of the cameras. But as the hour approached, the mood shifted. You couldn’t even call it anticipation: We had moved beyond that now. No news had come, and yet the whole street was swept in a wave of emotion, smiling, trading jokes, laughing.
And when the verdict came, right on time, no one stood up to make an announcement. The good news passed from mouth to ear, and a chain reaction of wild dancing passed through the mob until it became one leaping mass of joy. Amma won, Amma won, Amma was acquitted of all charges.
No one knew the judge’s rationale, but it hardly mattered. For hours, the crowd kept dancing and shouting and setting off firecrackers, their energies fueled by rumors that she would emerge from her house to greet them. She never did. Apparently the day was not auspicious for appearing in public. But the celebration raged on for as long as the cameras were rolling. After a while, it even started to rain.
An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to Jayalalithaa’s popularity as a Tamil movie star. She was the most popular Tamil movie actress of her time, not the most popular Tamil movie star of her time.