Rajinikanth the Indian Superstar

Meenaatchi Saverimuttu is a Lecturer at Cardiff University, UK. She has expertise in film studies, stardom and fan studies, gender and queer theory and postcolonial theory. Her work on race and gender politics in Tamil cinema has been featured in the edited collection Tamil Cinema in the 21st Century: Politics, Genre and Technology (2021) edited by Selvaraj Velayutham and Vijay Devadas and Bioscope: South Asian Cinema Studies. Her forthcoming book Rajinikanth, Self Reflexivity and the Tamil Star as Paratext (Bloomsbury, 2025) combines contemporary stardom, fandom and film studies to conceptualise Tamil stars as cumulative paratexts, separate from both the offscreen star and their onscreen character. These paratexts exist across the stars career and are easily uncoupled from individual films to be referenced by fans and film texts alike.

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionPart 1: Introduction: Nativity, Self-Reflexivity and the Masala GenreChapter 1: Key Tropes and ProcessChapter 2: Rajini, Masala and Native identity: Annamalai (1992) and Padayappa (1999)Chapter 3: Adapting Rajini in the Works of S. Shankar: Sivaji (2007) and the Enthiran Duology (2010, 2018)Part 2: Introduction: Nostalgia, Paratext and PoliticsChapter 4: Reintroducing Rajinikanth: Kabali (2016) and Kaala (2018)Chapter 5: Revisiting Rajinikanth: Petta (2019)Chapter 6: Competing Paratexts and Rajinikanth Proxies in Darbar (2020)Postscript: The Future of the Star ParatextBibliographyIndex

'A theoretically innovative study, attentive to both aesthetic form and affective resonance, shows how the enduring star power of Tamil film icon Rajinikanth emerges through self-reflexivity, citationality, and the embodied energies of collective diasporic spectatorship, making a distinctive contribution to Tamil cinema scholarship.'