Remembering ANR: The Telugu superstar and my birthday-brother – Firstpost
The son of another famous Telugu star, Jamuna, remembers Akkieni Nageshwara Rao not just for the roles he played but the man he was.
by Vamsee Juluri
I read the news of Akkineni Nageshwara Rao or ANR’s passing on the morning after the Jaipur Literature Festival, where I felt honored and delighted to have had a chance to share stories about south India’s massive and massively-felt film cultures with a vast audience that perhaps can only guess at the extent of what our movies and their gods have meant to us. I passed through scenes of ANR’s funeral on television sets in a blur across living rooms across the country. I saw scenes from Andhra Pradesh’s legislative assembly, convened to pay tribute to him, and the scores of people who sincerely feel his loss. I saw a world passing, and yet, the first thing that struck me about the admiration people had for him is that it was not so much for his roles or image, as for the man himself, a rare accomplishment in an industry of illusions and dreams.
I write this eulogy for Akkineni Nageshwara Rao for the simple reason that despite his towering stature, he never once forgot the bond I had with him from the time I was a child—we shared our birthday. As the son of the famous Telugu filmstar, Jamuna, my earliest childhood memories are filled with the presence of many great luminaries of the film industry. But somehow they cannot help holding an extra sense of affection for the man who made me famous, in his own way, for this peculiar coincidence.
Each year, on ANR’s birthday, bus-loads of fans would come to his house on Road No 1, Banjara Hills (younger Hyderabadis will recognize it as the place across the road from the City Center mall). Some of them would then drop in at our house, to wish me as well. I wonder if it was that adulation which made me a writer about cinema today.
Like all stars, ANR was of course a reflection of who he was seen to be in his movies. He captured the relentless sentimentality that a certain generation of Telugus, and Indians, perhaps, are known for, in his 1950s film Devadasu. In stuttering, weeping, sorrowful, melancholic lugubrious black-and-white, ANR pined away into immortality and failed love. Generations of Telugus have repeated his words, sung by the great Ghantasala, more than any other, in the face of heartbreak, real, and ironic; Jagame Maya! Then, as the young Abhimanyu in Maya Bazar, ANR held his own as a romantic lead across from NTR’s iconic Krishna and SV Ranga Rao’s boisterous and charming Ghatotkacha.
ANR was also the lead actor paired with my mother in two of Telugu culture’s most fondly recalled movies, Missamma (Miss Mary in Hindi, Missiamma in Tamil) and Gundamma Katha. In Missamma, he played a domestic detective determined to unravel the secret of a lost-at-birth mystery, and in Gundamma Katha, the younger son of a zamindar (and NTR’s brother) out to woo, and somewhat “tame,” the rich young daughter of a legendary shrew. The shrew was played by the much-missed actress Suryakantam. My mother played the rich young daughter.
If Telugu cinema has a pantheon from its golden age, it is perhaps from these two movies; NTR-Savitri, ANR-Jamuna. The two big heroes and heroines, and now three are gone.
In the end, what ANR left behind was more than memories of his fine roles and movies, but an entire industry. He nurtured talent, and apart from encouraging his children and grandchildren to take pride in their family’s line of work, made himself available as a mentor and supporter to many people who remember him with gratitude. In his retirement years, he did what elders are revered for doing in our culture (despite being a somewhat non-religious man himself); he passed on something of his world to those who would come after him; an enlightened understanding of life if there was one.
I feel ANR’s absence now especially poignantly as the child of an era of gods and goddesses who are now mostly gone. As time passes, even the greatest of hurts and regrets, slights real and imagined, must be forgotten. In the end, it is the kindnesses we exchanged in our lives that must remain. It is not an easy thing, but it is the only inevitable thing, it seems to me. After a brief bout of media-interview “biting” at each other (inevitable perhaps when journalism demands not insights but exactly those “bites”), a mutual friend told us of ANR’s words for my mother; “lingu-lingu mani manamiddarame unnamu katha, enduku ivanni?” (it’s just the two of us from that era still lingering on, why this testiness?). Nothing really matters in the end, nothing negative that is.
Last September, I called my mother on my birthday and by the coincidence of antipodal time-zones found her at a birthday dinner hosted by ANR. She passed on the phone to him for his blessings, just as he was starting his speech. On a grey morning in California, in my kitchen, I heard him speaking, precisely and quietly powerfully, to his family and admirers, a philosopher of action in his own right. As he concluded, he told everyone that I was on the line, his birthday-brother, and spoke to me with warmth and affection.
In my childhood, and more so in my youth, I used to be awestruck by my mother’s colleagues. Now, I still am, but in a different way. As an adult, I see a man who cared about those around him, and took the trouble to extend courtesy and grace. He was not a larger than life person in the flesh, though he carried himself with awareness of who he was and what he meant. But he was larger than life in his actions, and that is what remains in the end, a world built one relationship at a time.
Vamsee Juluri is a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco and the author of Bollywood Nation
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