LONG BEFORE C Joseph Vijay asked Tamil Nadu for political power, he had already asked, and got, something more intimate: recognition. For three decades, he had found a space in homes across Tamil Nadu , arriving through first-day-first-show whistles, television reruns, college dance floors, festival releases and YouTube clips. So by the time he launched Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) in February 2024, Vijay could make a political claim that other new entrants would have found impossible to match: “I did not enter homes after launching TVK,” he would tell supporters. “I launched TVK only after entering every home through cinema.” In a state where cinema has been a key medium to represent and reinforce Tamil/Dravidian culture and identity politics, Vijay fits into a familiar pattern — from C N Annadurai and M Karunanidhi, who used theatre and film dialogues to carry Dravidian ideas into popular imagination, to M G Ramachandran and later, Jayalalithaa, who commanded both cinematic and political loyalty.…