Every now and then, a film arrives that does not just perform well at the box office but fundamentally rewrites what is expected of its lead. In Telugu cinema, that film was Khaidi. Released on October 28, 1983, it was not the most expensive production of its year, it did not have the biggest name behind the camera, and Chiranjeevi himself was paid just Rs. 1.75 lakh for his work in it. What it gave him in return was everything.

Before Khaidi, Chiranjeevi had been building a career steadily and quietly. He had appeared in supporting roles, worked his way into lead parts, and earned critical recognition for films like Subhalekha, directed by K. Viswanath, which tackled the dowry system. He was, by any measure, a capable and respected actor. But capability and stardom are two very different things, and Khaidi was the film that collapsed the wall between them.

The story behind the film began when producer M. Tirupathi Reddy had seen the American film First Blood, released in 1982, and asked the Paruchuri Brothers to develop a story inspired by it. Director Kodandarami Reddy later noted that while the lead character’s physical appearance drew from First Blood, the story itself was entirely different.

The story that emerged was one of injustice compounded until it became unbearable. Sooryam, played by Chiranjeevi, is a college student who falls in love with Madhulatha, the daughter of the feudal lord Veerabhadraiah, played by Rao Gopal Rao. Veerabhadraiah devises a plan to end the relationship, murdering Sooryam’s father and harassing his sister until she takes her own life. He then accuses Sooryam of the murder, has him arrested, and sets in motion a chase that the film sustains with remarkable energy across its nearly two and a half hour runtime. It was a story built on class, power, and the limits of what a man can endure before the system that is supposed to protect him becomes the very thing hunting him down.

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One of Khaidi’s most enduring images was conceived by Chiranjeevi himself. His now-famous black trouser and sleeveless T-shirt costume was entirely his own design. The team had originally planned to dress him ordinarily, but Chiranjeevi wanted something different. At the last minute, he pulled a black trouser and black T-shirt from the house, cut off the sleeves of the shirt, and wore the belt over the T-shirt rather than through it.

Khaidi went on to gross around Rs. 8 crore at the box office. More importantly, it became the first Chiranjeevi film to cross the Rs 1 crore mark. Crossing the Rs 1 crore mark meant you were no longer just a working actor. It meant people were choosing to come to the theatre specifically for you.

What makes Khaidi exceptional in the full arc of Chiranjeevi’s career is not just what it did for him in 1983 but what it continued to mean to him across the decades that followed. The title carried such good fortune that Chiranjeevi chose to reuse it twice more, for Khaidi No. 786 in 1988 and Khaidi No. 150 in 2017, forming what became known as his Khaidi trilogy, though all three films were entirely separate stories with no narrative connection.

Khaidi No. 786, released as his 100th film, was a deliberate celebration of a career milestone. However, Khaidi No. 150 was something else entirely. By the time it arrived in January 2017, Chiranjeevi had been away from cinema for nearly a decade, not because his career had faltered but because he had walked away from it voluntarily to enter politics. For a man who had spent the better part of three decades as one of Telugu cinema’s most dominant forces, it was a departure, and the industry he returned to in 2017 was markedly different from the one he had left.

Khaidi No. 150 was the remake of the 2014 Tamil film Kaththi, directed by A.R. Murugadoss, dealing with issues of farmer suicides and water scarcity. The film was produced by his son Ram Charan and directed by V.V. Vinayak, who had previously directed Chiranjeevi. The choice of title was not accidental, it was a signal to audiences that the man returning to them was the same one who had stood in that black sleeveless T-shirt forty years earlier and refused to be broken.

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The three Khaidi films, separated by decades, different stories, different directors, and different versions of their lead actor, form an accidental autobiography of sorts. The first announced the arrival of a star. The second marked the achievement of a century. The third proved that stardom, when it is genuine, does not have an expiry date. What connects them is not a plot or a character but a title that came to stand for something specific about Chiranjeevi: a man who is wronged, who fights back, and who does not ask permission to do so.

That is a fantasy that Telugu cinema has always loved, but Chiranjeevi made it feel personal in a way that few actors before or since have managed. In 1983, he did it with a pair of cut-off sleeves and a story borrowed from an American action film. The fact that he was still doing it in 2017, to a theatre full of people who had waited a decade for him to come back, tells you everything about what Khaidi actually built.

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