So, there’s indeed a political continuum in the last three Rajni movies and it’s not concealed at all although the superstar’s charm, style, entertainment quotient and the director’s skill effectively prevent it from screaming in your face. The politics couldn’t have gotten more evident than this. Interestingly, in one scene, his lynch-mob friends turn against him and accuse him of peddling beef.
#Petta rajinikanth movie
So, every situation could have been discussed threadbare and Rajinikanth would indeed have approved as to why the critical setting of the movie is in Uttar Pradesh, why the politics of the antagonists looked the way it did, and why Jithu, the political-thug indulged in what he did.
![petta rajinikanth petta rajinikanth](https://c.tenor.com/pPEJ2XEFuTIAAAAC/petta-rajinikanth.gif)
The movie was not written and made overnight, but over a few years. A guy who does such macabre things – almost entirely as a political thug – cannot be a good fellow and doesn’t deserve sympathy. At one stage, as a matter of strategy, Rajini projects one of the antagonists as a victim, but clarifies in the end that he indeed is a bad man. Rajini’s closest friend is named Malik and his son, who the villains want to kill, is Anwar. Why should Singaaram, who had a past rivalry with Rajinikanth (or Petta Velan, his character) in the movie, run away to Uttar Pradesh of all the places? Why should the political pastime of the villains be the kind of vigilantism that we hear from states such as Uttar Pradesh. In one of the scenes his backdrop is an elaborate arati.Īnd guess what, this Tamil move is set in Uttar Pradesh of all the places. His party has saffron flags and associated signs and sounds. Jithu is the sidekick of the main antagonist Singaaram, or Singaar Singh, who is a criminal politician and he too sports the same signifiers as that of Jithu. Vijay Sethupathi’s Jithu is a gorakshak, a moral vigilante and even a mass murderer who burns people alive. His activities, with the help of a thuggish mob in similar attire, are depicted in considerable detail which clearly recreates the cow-protection, lynching and moral-policing episodes that have been reported from states such as Uttar Pradesh. He sports a saffron tikka on his forehead, has a saffron cloth around his neck all the time and walks around with a danda. He is a gorakshak, a moral vigilante and even a mass murderer who burns people alive. In terms of screen space and time, the villain that gets more prominence is Jithu, the character played by Vijay Sethupathi, a top-billing Tamil actor.
![petta rajinikanth petta rajinikanth](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qcv1L5_-Y4U/maxresdefault.jpg)
And the way they are set up – both the people and their politics – is not subtle – but very explicit and carefully detailed. Beneath the entertaining surface, Petta’s storyline too is intensely political and here too, besides their villainy, the antagonists embody majoritarian politics. Interestingly, the underlying leitmotif is no different in Petta as well, although the storyline, the presentation and the director are different. In Kaala, Rajinikanth, his life and the people around him were soaked in Ambedkarism and symbols of Dalit-politics, and his antagonist was a cleanliness-obsessed corporate-backed non-Tamil right-winger.
![petta rajinikanth petta rajinikanth](https://hogslat.com/Content/images/uploaded/InfoPages/Tube_Heaters/Big-Foot-radiant-tube-heater(Web60).jpg)
![petta rajinikanth petta rajinikanth](https://english.cdn.zeenews.com/sites/default/files/styles/zm_700x400/public/2019/01/10/750934-750391-rajinikanth-petta.jpg)
If Kabali was just a teaser in which the subaltern-Tamil Dalit political identity asserts itself against hegemonic power, in Kaala, it was clearly Tamil-Dalit Vs Corporate-right wing. The movie indeed is a super-stylish thrilling entertainer, but not without very strong political undertones that are quite similar to his last outing Kaala, in which the antagonists are associated with or represent the majoritarian rightwing ideology. If you look even reasonably close, the answer is NO!