Nimmakuru is a village in the Gudivada region of Krishna district in coastal Andhra Pradesh, and it produced a man who dominated two entirely separate spheres of Telugu life. Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, born there on 28 May 1923, was the defining star of Telugu cinema for three decades and then, in a single extraordinary campaign, built a political party from nothing and took power in the state within nine months of founding it. He is known everywhere simply as NTR.

Village beginnings

NTR was born into a farming family in Nimmakuru. He matriculated in 1940 and went on to study at Andhra Christian College in Guntur. He married Basavatarakam in 1942, and after graduation he took the Madras Service Commission examination and was appointed a sub-registrar at Mangalagiri — a secure government post. He held it for about three weeks before resigning to pursue films. It was a decision that appeared reckless at the time and turned out to be one of the most consequential career choices in twentieth-century Indian public life.

The face of Telugu cinema

NTR made his screen debut in Mana Desam in 1949, directed by L. V. Prasad. His breakthrough came in the early 1950s with films including Pathala Bhairavi and Malliswari, and by the middle of that decade he was the leading man of the Telugu industry.

What made him singular was his command of mythological roles. He played Krishna seventeen times, and also Rama, Ravana, Duryodhana, Karna, Bhishma and Shiva. In Mayabazar (1957), still regularly voted the greatest Telugu film ever made, his Krishna became the definitive screen image of the god for a generation of Telugu audiences. His performance as Brihannala in Nartanasala (1963) won him recognition at an international festival.

He also worked extensively in social and folklore cinema, produced films through his own banner, and directed several, including the ambitious Daana Veera Soora Karna (1977), in which he played three principal roles. Across his career he appeared in some three hundred films. He received the Padma Shri in 1968, three National Film Awards, and the first Filmfare Award for Best Actor in Telugu.

The mythological roles had a consequence nobody planned. Telugu audiences, particularly in the villages, had watched him embody divinity and heroic kingship for thirty years. When he entered politics, that accumulated image was available to him in a way it has been to almost no other politician anywhere.

Telugu Desam and the 1983 upheaval

NTR founded the Telugu Desam Party on 29 March 1982. His central argument was that the self-respect of Telugu people had been insulted — that Andhra Pradesh had been treated as a Congress fief in which Chief Ministers were installed and removed at the convenience of Delhi. He campaigned from a converted van he called the Chaitanya Ratham, travelling continuously across the state.

In the elections of January 1983 the party won a landslide, taking over two hundred of the state's assembly seats. It was the first non-Congress government in the history of Andhra Pradesh, and it was achieved by a party that had existed for nine months. NTR was sworn in as Chief Minister on 9 January 1983.

In August 1984, while he was abroad for medical treatment, his government was dismissed and a defector installed in his place. The resulting public agitation, and the mobilisation of his own MLAs, forced a reversal within a month, and he was restored on 16 September 1984. The episode became a landmark case in Indian federalism and in the debate over the misuse of the Governor's office.

Governing

His terms in office produced a set of policies that changed daily life in the state:

Subsidised rice at two rupees a kilogram for the poor, a scheme that reshaped welfare politics across India.
Legislation giving daughters equal rights in ancestral joint family property, ahead of comparable national reform.
Abolition of the hereditary village officer system, which had concentrated local power in a few families for generations.
A restructured three-tier panchayati raj system devolving power to elected local bodies.
Housing site allotments for the poor, with registration in women's names.
Total prohibition of alcohol, introduced during his final term following a mass women's anti-liquor movement.

He also became a major national figure, serving as the driving force behind the National Front coalition formed in 1988 that brought a non-Congress government to power in Delhi the following year.

Fall and legacy

NTR returned as Chief Minister in December 1994 after another sweeping victory, but was removed from office in 1995 in a revolt within his own party led by his son-in-law Chandrababu Naidu. He died in Hyderabad on 18 January 1996, aged seventy-two.

His imprint on the region is permanent. The NTR University of Health Sciences at Vijayawada carries his name, as do numerous institutions, and in 2022 a newly created district of Andhra Pradesh was named NTR district. The Telugu Desam Party he founded remains one of the two major forces in the state.

For Nimmakuru, the arithmetic is simple. A farmer's son from the village walked away from a government job in his twenties, became the face of the gods for millions of people, and then turned that standing into a political movement that ended one-party rule in Andhra Pradesh.