Regional Reign

Before conquering Bollywood, Sridevi ruled the south film industry with her unparalleled acting prowess

- Lakshmi Subramanian

Silence greets you as you enter Meenampatti, which is just 4.5km from Sivakasi, the cracker capital of Tamil Nadu. Two printouts of Sridevi’s photographs, with a few rose petals strewn around them, rest on a small stone platform in the village square. Meenampatti is mourning the loss of its beloved daughter who went on to become a Bollywood star, leaving behind its bylanes for the Mumbai skyline. “Fifty four is no age to die. Though it has been decades since the village had seen her, it is an irreparable loss for us,” says T. Srinivasan, a distant relative of the actor. “I don’t remember her as a child. They were here for a few years till she was six and then the family moved to Chennai.” The two photos, one of baby Sridevi and another with her parents as a little girl, remained on the platform till she was cremated in Mumbai.

Sridevi’s lawyer father, Ayappan Naidu, hailed from a family of landlords. Her mother, Rajeswari, was from Andhra Pradesh. The house that the family had lived in was in a dilapidated condition for long and was renovated only recently. Srinivasan, who worked for Naidu then, says the family last came to the village in 1989 when the father unsuccessfully contested the assembly elections on a Congress ticket. Another villager Dhanalakshmi recalls how Sridevi had campaigned for her father during the polls. “She is still the village girl ‘Mayil’ for us,” says villager Radha Kumaresan. “I was just 12 when I watched her in Bharathiraja’s 16 Vayathinile (1977). She was so pretty that I always wanted to dress up like her.”