Happy birthday Kamal Haasan: The man who was a pan-India superstar even before the term existed

It was the success of Baahubali: The Beginning that brought the term pan-India into Indian cinema’s lexicon. The Telugu film’s record-breaking performance in the Hindi-speaking belt and much of India had people calling it a pan-India hit. Since then, there have been many debates and theories on which was India’s first pan-India hit or star. Disregarding the quest for the first, there can be no doubts that the biggest pan-India star India has seen has been Kamal Haasan. On his birthday, a deep dive into how Kamal broke language barriers much before anyone dared to, charting the path for others to follow. Also read: Kamal Haasan says ‘pan-India films’ like KGF and RRR are nothing new

Ever since he began as a child artiste over 60 years ago, Kamal Haasan has worked in 232 films. That’s a large body of work. What is even more impressive is that over two dozen of these have been bilingual or multilingual films. These are films shot simultaneously in Tamil and another language, usually either Telugu or Hindi. He identified the potential of marketing and releasing films in multiple languages four decades ago, when SS Rajamouli was in primary school. In that regard alone, he has been a trendsetter.

Those early films of his may not have been called pan-India films but they were, in many ways. Films like Guru and Ullasa Paravaigal (both 1980) truly broke the language barrier in terms of box office collection. But the 80s were spent in Kamal performing in others’ films. His bilingual films were largely Tamil-Telugu with dubbed versions in Hindi and Malayalam. The true pan-India appeal of his films began only in the 90s, as he marketed films accordingly. It began with remakes as Avvai Shanmughi was remade as Chachi 420 but soon transcended to true-blue pan-India cinema.

The first in this experiment was the 1996 blockbuster Indian. The film was released in Hindi as Hindustani. Not only was it marketed as a Hindi film, it cast actors known in the north (Urmila Matondkar and Manisha Koirala) and the Hindi dub had popular Bollywood actors’ voices. His subsequent releases like Hey Ram and Abhay followed the trend, with names like Shah Rukh Khan and Raveena Tandon co-starring.

While other stars from the south–Rajinikanth, Nagarjuna, and Venkatesh–were crossing over to Hindi films, Kamal was bringing his films to the Hindi audience. It had a different pan-India appeal. This made him popular in north India, more than his contemporaries, some of whom (maybe only Rajini) were bigger stars than him down south. This pan-India appeal meant he could get Bollywood stars like Mallika Sherawat, Rahul Bose, and even filmmaker Shekhar Kapur in his projects.

The true testament to the success of this approach is that it was eventually adopted by Rajinikanth as well, but a decade later. Enthiran (2010) was marketed and released in Hindi as Robot and had Aishwarya Rai as the female lead. The sequel cast Akshay Kumar as the villain. Baahubali rewrote the book, of course, as it outdid even Hindi films released at the time. But the fate of Prabhas’ ‘pan-India’ films–Saaho and Radhe Shyam–since then clearly shows he isn’t quite where Kamal Haasan was 25 years ago.

Allu Arjun, Yash, Ram Charan, and Jr NTR have all been dubbed pan-India stars of late. Even Samantha Ruth Prabhu has been called that given her national appeal. I believe they deserve this tag only if their subsequent films can sustain the pan-India appeal, the way Kamal Haasan did, single-handedly, for over a decade. Till then, he and Rajinikanth stand in that pantheon all by themselves, with Kamal on a slightly higher pedestal.