A hero from the north who charmed Madras

A distance of 1,314 kilometres separates Chennai from Mumbai’s iconic old-world theatre Maratha Mandir, the place Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) turned 30 on Monday (October 20, 2025). While the romantic blockbuster is on a seemingly everlasting run, additionally it is time to take a look at Shah Rukh’s celluloid hyperlinks with the Madras of the previous.

It is a bond additional strengthened just lately as Shah Rukh’s maiden nationwide award for greatest actor was garnered for his function in Jawan, a film directed by Chennai-based Atlee. Back in 1993, Baazigar was fairly the fashion in Madras, and the movie catapulted Shah Rukh in the direction of stardom.

He instantly adopted it up with Darr, and on this too, the actor donned a job with a damaging shade, and film halls erupted with cheers when he appeared on display screen. There have been some theories in regards to the Shah Rukh phenomenon on the Madras field workplace, and inputs have been drawn from the Tamil viewers’s soft-corner for villains-turned-heroes.

In a few of these options again then, references have been made to the evolution of Rajinikanth and even Sathyaraj — actors who began out because the anti-hero after which grew to become the principle star. Seen in that mild, Shah Rukh’s reputation was not a shock. It additionally fitted into the template of Bollywood actors inflicting a churn each decade within the southern metro’s cinema halls.

Shah Rukh’s success was preceded by what Anil Kapoor (Tezaab) and Jackie Shroff (Hero) achieved individually and collectively in Ram Lakhan. Magazine articles delved into the truth that each these stars sported moustaches, in contrast to their different northern counterparts. It was deemed that this attribute discovered a mark within the southern market the place heroes usually had a moustache!

Shah Rukh, although, like Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan, had a clean-shaven look, and it nonetheless labored for him whereas he developed from being a stalker on display screen to somebody oozing love with outstretched arms. Aamir too had a bull run on Mount Road in 1988 when his Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak ran lengthy on the Safire advanced. And because the Shah Rukh fever took over, corporates did bulk bookings for his or her workers. This was on par with what they did with the flicks of Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan.

When DDLJ was launched in Madras, crowds thronged, and Shah Rukh’s look was greeted with the identical delirious pleasure usually reserved for home-grown expertise. In the climax, when Kajol ran in the direction of him, there have been screams of pleasure. It now appears inevitable that in some unspecified time in the future, he needed to do a film titled Chennai Express. And as Chennai strikes on, Shah Rukh continues to tug in an viewers, one which has accepted him in all shades of the appearing spectrum.