In my years as a Delhi-based card carrying film critic, I’ve encountered Rajni in his Bollywood outings. Back when he did a jig with Sridevi in Chaalbaaz, or fought with Amitabh in Hum to trounce the baddies, he was not so big. He was just a very popular South Indian star trying to cross over to the North, like his compatriot, Kamal Haasan.

But unlike Haasan, whom I’ve dutifully tried watching in Tamil, minus subtitles, in Madras, I’ve never had the pleasure of doing Rajni in the original. The Kamal film was Guna, and I was all agog with the whole deal — participating in the popular culture of the place, picking up the vibes from the audience of a Tamil film in the heartland.

It was a disaster. The film was relentlessly dark, Kamal’s role had him act morose, and the dialogues were delivered in rapidfire Tamil.

The only other time I watched a Tamil film minus subtitles was during the 1998 press show for national award winning films. Iruvar, Mani Ratnam’s take on the real-life rivalry between MGR and Karunanidhi, came off as a heavy political allegory, in which the cast spends a lot of time declaiming. There were murmurs from the gathering as soon as it was apparent that there would be no subtitles: most of my fraternity, protesting loudly, upped and left.

I sat through, missed almost everything, and spent the time conjecturing and surmising, and catching Aishwarya in her brief but effective debut. To a largely English/Hindi speaker like me, Iruvar was a lot of sound and fury, signifying very little. But it left a residual regret, of not being able to understand, to only connect.

So when last week, a serious film-goer friend called to ask if I’d go see Sivaji with her, and would ‘my translator’ please come as well, I leapt at it. Getting past the hype to the real thing? Totally.

The Sivaji publicity bandwagon was like nothing else, having begun its drum rolls months before the release. I have preserved an SMS from an industry watcher , which goes like this: “Breaking news from South India... Car parking and cycle stand fee collection for Sivaji found to be more than the box office collection of Jhoom Barabar Jhoom...”

Whatever. But there is no doubt that Sivaji mania has taken over traditional North Indian bastions: theatres which have never run South Indian movies are sweeping aside the Yashraj clunker in favour of the AVM juggernaut, minus subtitles.

I’ve seen Shankar’s films before (Jeans, Hindustani), so I know what to expect. Or so I think. Nothing prepares me for the growing roar from below (we are upstairs, in the sparsely filled balcony, at tony Priya in South Delhi). Rajni Makes An Entry. And the crowd goes berserk.

For the next three hours and twenty minutes, he proves why he is so huge: he smiles, frowns, laughs, cries, sings, dances. Every once in a while he intones, “Cool.” And everytime he does so, there are cheers and whistles and claps.

He wears wigs. He turns, oh yes, fair. He switches back to dark. He romances a lissome lass. And he does that thing — you know, throwing something, and catching it in the mouth with chewing gum, cigarettes being very bad, now. It is all sublime nonsense. No Hindi movie star can hope to scintillate thus.

It’s a story Shankar has told several times, of a good guy fighting a corrupt system, and winning. But he’s never had a bigger hero, or a more baroque canvas. The set-pieces, especially for the song-and-dances, outdo anything that Bollywood has ever dreamt of. They are outré, they are outlandish, they must have cost crores.

The climax has villains flying in the air, Crouching Tiger style, as Sivaji cuts a mighty swathe through them. Who needs Tamil, when it is all about non-verbal pyrotechnics scorching the screen?

Rajni rocks.