Understanding Telugu Cinema’s Guide to Life With Mukesh Manjunath

When Mukesh Manjunath was in the seventh grade, his English teacher announced that the students who wrote the best essay/short story would be awarded the chance to read them in front of the whole class. Mukesh spent every week hoping it’d be his turn to claim the stage. Yet, even as most of his peers got the chance, Mukesh didn’t. “That moment really stuck with me. But somewhere it also created a fire in me to fight and write.”

Years later, like a Telugu hero eventually winning a fight against a villain, Mukesh won the inaugural HarperCollins-MAMI contest for “writing on cinema” in 2019, as the kid in him danced with joy.

That gave birth to his debut book The Age of Heroes. Mukesh uses his personal experiences – the memories he shared with his grandmother, school friend, teacher and father – to weave together a world of Telugu cinema that he watched growing up. There are several moments, a few nostalgic and a few embarrassing, that Mukesh reveals as he writes about the culture and politics of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Yet his “sad seventh-grade story” didn’t find its way into the book. “The teacher was very kind. So unlike the usual Telugu film world, this story didn’t have a villain and I didn’t know what to do with a story without a villain.” 

Telugu films are, in many ways, representative of its geography. “I don’t know if you’ll get an accurate representation of America if you watch only Hollywood movies for a year, but if you watch Telugu heroes (in films), you’ll probably rightly understand the people they represent. The last 30-40 years is the period I talk about in the book, somewhere until Baahubali. If you think about it, Telugu heroes are excellent metrics for understanding what the place is like, who the people are and also who they are not. And what they are avoiding – be it caste, class or women.”

Starting with late actor Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao’s (NTR) Pathala Bhairavi (1951), thought to be the first Telugu blockbuster, Mukesh explores the influence of mythology in Telugu cinema, and its ideas are still rehashed and celebrated in today’s cinema, not before writing about Chiranjeevi, Pawan Kalyan and others. Along with cultural insights, he also offers insider views of the industry on aspects like the Vijay Deverakonda’s fandom, the slow disappearance of mainstream Red/Erra cinema (films with protagonists from historically oppressed castes), and more.

He lets his personal memories connect the threads of these different aspects of Telugu cinema. If he was introduced to Pathala Bhairavi and NTR through his grandmother, he discovered actor R Narayana Murthy and Erra Sainyam (1994), a film about Naxalites, on a sneaky trip to the movies with his school friend. “It’s strange that at one point, Telugu cinema overtly covered the question of caste. The Erra cinema purely cared about the message. But now, there’s a need to hush up the topic a little bit. In a way, it was also because of the disappearance of the Left from Telugu politics. We have films like Rangasthalam but it’s actually an exception. We used to have an entire genre that was dedicated to this cause, featuring mainstream actors.” 

While Mukesh has been thorough with his research, he admits there’s a lot more he didn’t cover. “For instance, the book doesn’t include Ram Gopal Varma and his major influences on Telugu cinema. It’s because I was not trying to tell the whole story, I was trying to tell what I saw and what my story was. I wasn’t trying to be comprehensive, I was trying to be honest.”

In his story, his grandmother baptised him into the world of cinema. “My grandmother needed some company and she took me to films. But later, I wasn’t shown any Telugu movies in my boarding school. When I used to come back home, I would catch up for the entire year in just four months. Everybody said watching Telugu cinema was a bad habit but ironically, Telugu cinema was all that they talked about.”

So like a Telugu hero, the bad habit became an act of rebellion for Mukesh. “I think people often say Telugu cinema is crowd-pleasing, but ultimately it’s placing the audience on the top. They might fail, the film could be bad or cringe, but Telugu cinema is committed to entertaining everybody who comes to a theatre. There are a lot of times you may not agree with the way they entertain, because there is bad politics. Yet, I think it’s a good thing that the number one priority is the audience and it explains why Telugu cinema is where it is today.”

For a book that takes us through the history, culture, and politics of an entire society through its heroes, a chapter dedicated to Vijayashanti was inevitable. In his book, Mukesh writes about her films, the folklore that inspired her character in films like Pratighatana (1985), the time she wore the Khaki uniform, and how a hero like her can’t always be the angry young woman. “This was the first chapter I had mailed HarperCollins for the contest. It was the litmus test of the book because it’s such a niche. It’s far removed from the experiences of anybody on the panel or anybody who could be sitting in Bombay and reading it. So, it felt nice when I got selected.”

The influence of mythology is something his book addresses a lot — be it when it describes Telugu literature or details the performances of NTR and Vijayashanti. So being a Telugu cinema aficionado, it’s only in his blood to be drawn towards folklore while thinking of a title for his debut book. “There’s a book by William Dalrymple called The Age of Kali (1998), which talks about how the Kali Yuga was a dominant force at the time. And I was reading another book called Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (2010) by Shehan Karunatilaka, the Sri Lankan author who won the Booker Prize last year. He uses cricket to understand Sri Lanka, especially during the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. And to me, it felt like I was trying to speak about a place and time through the lens of cinema. So, somewhere between William Dalrymple and Shehan Karunatilaka, I found the title The Age of Heroes.”

Mukesh ends his book with an imaginary court scene, detailing an argument between a hero and a lawyer where the former is accused of many crimes – copyright of folktales, caste issues, crushing the women around them, bad influence on youth, and so on. “The Telugu cinema principle is that a film will be excellent, even if the first half is bad, given the second half is good and the last 15 minutes makes absolute sense. I had given a different feel to each of the chapters and if someone has reached the last few pages, the climax is quite important. I don’t want them to have the feeling of “Oh, the lights are switched on in the theatre and now I have to just go.” I wanted to give them something better and what’s more entertaining than our usual court scene where the hero defends everything?”