National recognition is reported to have been won by Tamil thespian Sivaji Ganesan along with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for 1996. How correct is this claim? Not much, if what is meant is the recognition of more than a mere name (with a puzzlingly misspelt first name, for north Indians). Which raises questions. What is the recognition he deserves? And why has he been denied it? The answers are of interest and relevance beyond the State that has been his stage.

The first question first. The recognition Sivaji deserves is for the major trend he represents, and not in Tamil cinema alone. It is one he deserves for his contribution to cinematic history, and the term is used advisedly and not in adulatory tribute. His celluloid advent and advance symbolised a larger evolutionary leap of the mass medium elsewhere as well, and imparted the process a push of perhaps underestimated importance.

The variation that made it a more evolved medium was very Indian. From the silent films the way here did not lead straight to talkies. It was songs that followed the silence on the screen. It was the singer-actor who set the tone for the Indian cinema. The song retains its importance to this day, even if the singer does not. He was replaced by the playback, who did not enjoy the same predominance. The heir to the hero of lyrics was the one of lines.

After the beginning, the word needed its wizards too. And the word was God in Tamil cinema after Sivaji. He, thus, deserves recognition as a representative as well as a reinforcer of the transition.

Records of screen dialogues came to replace those of film songs in Tamil Nadu, even if only for a short while, in the fifties. That was two decades before Sholay. But the declamatory deliveries of Sivaji that held crowds spellbound could not have been more different from Amjad Khan's "Arrey oh Samba". The angry young man's articulation of inordinately long passages of purple prose was nothing like the bragging and cursing of the bandit.

What the audience lapped up in the latter's case was not just a show of lung power. It was a language being rediscovered. Sivaji's rich voice, with its range and reach, made something like mass poetry out of unpromising material. It won't be hype to rate him higher than a Shakespearean actor similarly dependent on lines, considering that none of his scriptwriters bore even a coincidental resemblance to the Bard.

Like M. Karunanidhi. Frequently recalled is Sivaji's dramatic screen advent in Parasakthi with a fierily theatrical delivery of the DMK leader's alliterative agitprop. His career marched forward with more convoluted rhetorics of the same authorship and the same stentorian reproduction in Manohara. But Sivaji's voice was too versatile to remain an instrument solely of party propaganda of a particularly stilted variety. It was the voice that appealed more than the words, and lent them an enchantment of its own.

Somewhat in the manner of Amitabh Bachchan's vocal magic. As allegedly uncommercial a director as Sayajit Ray recognised the mass appeal of Bachchan's voice and used it for the opening lines of Shatranj ke Khiladi. It had no acting role for Bachchan, who remained an angry young man on screen much longer than the Tamil superstar. The dimensions of Sivaji's voice were discovered early and the result was a greater diversity of roles than the star system and its stereotypes generally allow.

Among these dimensions were the popular Sivaji deliveries in Tamil dialects. Analogous to Amitabh-speak again (remember the Ganga kinarewala with his Banaraswala paan in Don?) was his adoption of the Kongu peasant speech of Coimbatore. An irony of this `Dravidian' career was that the Brahmin dialect, earlier only a butt of ridicule, became one of the forms of spoken Tamil to find sympathetic articulation through Sivaji.

The answer to the second question raised in the beginning, however, lies in a paradox. It is precisely because Sivaji represented a larger cinematic trend so well that he has been denied more than a regional recognition in real terms. The voice of any culture demands a cultivated ear, and can only be lost on an unattuned listener. The Sivaji talkie could not talk to the non-Tamil India as the technocreative Kamalahasan cinema can today.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.