CHENNAI — By Wednesday afternoon, the narrow street outside Bharathiraja’s Chennai home had become a receiving line for half a century of Tamil cinema. Kamal Haasan came. Ilaiyaraaja came. Rajinikanth stood outside the house of the man who once told him, to his face, “I like you but I don’t like your acting,” and called him a friend of fifty years.
The director, who died at his home on Wednesday morning at 84, will be accorded state honours, the Tamil Nadu government announced within hours, recognition for the filmmaker who moved the industry’s camera from studio floors to village soil, India Today reported. Film and television shoots across the Tamil industry are being suspended in mourning, and at least one star, Raghava Lawrence, postponed a long-planned announcement rather than share the day.
The shape of the mourning told its own story about what the industry believes it lost. The tributes did not come from one generation or one language. They came from the men he made, the men he rejected, and the industries next door that copied him.
Rajinikanth’s farewell, delivered to reporters and carried by news agency IANS, was the least guarded of them. Everybody knows the talent and the achievements, he said; what he wanted to talk about was the man who “introduced several actors, actresses, technicians to the film industry,” who could walk into anyone’s home unannounced, and whose name “will continue to remain in the hearts of the Tamil people forever.” The actor’s recollection of the director’s blunt verdict on his acting, offered with evident affection, landed as the day’s most honest eulogy: Bharathiraja said exactly what he thought, to superstars and strangers alike.
Ilaiyaraaja, whose scores are inseparable from the director’s films across dozens of collaborations, arrived at the residence and struggled to manage more than a sentence, telling reporters simply that they had lost the man. Telugu cinema’s Chiranjeevi called him one of Indian cinema’s greatest storytellers, a reminder that the rural realism Bharathiraja built in Tamil traveled across every southern industry.
The honours themselves place the filmmaker in rare company. State funerals in Tamil Nadu have historically been the province of chief ministers and a handful of artists whose work crossed into public identity, Sivaji Ganesan and M. S. Subbulakshmi among them. That a director, not a star, joins that company says something precise about what “16 Vayathinile” and what followed meant: he is being buried not as an entertainer but as an author of how Tamil Nadu sees itself.
He was, by Wednesday’s accounting, also a Padma Shri recipient, a National Award winner several times over, and the teacher of record for a generation of directors who came out of his unit. The honorific the industry gave him decades ago, Iyakkunar Imayam, the Himalaya of directors, was repeated in nearly every statement, less as flattery than as taxonomy.
He is survived by his wife Chandraleela and daughter Janani, a family already carrying the loss of his son, the actor Manoj Bharathiraja, whose death from cardiac arrest at 48 those close to the director described as the blow he never absorbed. The grief that began then ended Wednesday morning in the same house.
What remains unsettled is the practical calendar of farewell. The timing of the funeral and the venue for public homage had not been formally announced by Wednesday evening, the cause of death has still not been stated beyond his long decline, and there is no word yet on whether “Pulavar,” his completed final film, will be released as the industry’s goodbye or held by a family with other things to think about.
The shoots stop for a day, and then an industry that runs on schedules will start again. What will not restart is the particular authority of the voice that opened his films, addressing his beloved Tamil people before the story began. On Wednesday the people he addressed for fifty years lined a Chennai street to answer him back.
