India's southern state of Tamil Nadu has a long, peculiar political tradition: here, cinema doesn't merely entertain, it also governs.
From extremely successful political stints of MG Ramachandran - popularly known as MGR - and Jayalalithaa to the more ambivalent experiments of Rajnikanth, Kamal Haasan, Khushbu and Vijayakanth, the state has repeatedly seen cinema icons turn into full-time politicians. MGR and Jayalalithaa even became chief ministers.
Now Tamil superstar C Joseph Vijay, known as "Thalapathy" Vijay (General Vijay), is the latest to join the list.
He launched his political party, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), in 2024 and soon after announced that he would retire from films to pursue politics full-time. His upcoming film this month, Jana Nayagan (The People's Hero), would be his farewell release, he said.
Vijay's reasoning was explicit: politics, he argued, is not something one can dabble in. Tamil Nadu's voters, he said, deserved nothing less than full commitment. And the state's political history supports that calculation.
