Hitu Kanodia

Kanoda is a village in what is now Patan district, and it produced two brothers who ran Gujarati popular culture for four decades. Mahesh Kanodia composed and sang. Naresh Kanodia acted and sang. Together they were billed as Mahesh Naresh, they were the first Gujarati stage pair to tour Africa and America in the 1980s, and both were given the Padma Shri in 2021, four months after they died of COVID two days apart in October 2020. Naresh's son Hitesh, born 21 February 1970, was put in front of a camera before he could have chosen otherwise.

The results were immediate and officially recorded. Best Child Artist for Meru Mulade in the 1980 to 1981 round, Best Child Artist for Jugal Jodi in 1982 to 1983 shared with Bhavik Vyas, Best Child Artist for Ujali Meraman in 1985 to 1986. Three state prizes before he finished school, which he left after 12th grade. Most film dynasties give a son a launch. This one gave him a decade of work first.

His Wikipedia filmography lists seventeen separate titles under the year 2000 alone. Saajan Tane Mara Sam, which brought him the state Best Actor award, Janmo Janam, Raj Ratan, Govaliyo, Kaydo, Vaagya Preetuna Dhol, and eleven more. Then another eight under 2014. These are films made for single screens in Rajkot and Mehsana and for a video market, on schedules that would look like a joke to anyone working in Hindi cinema.

This is the part of the Gujarati industry that critics decided did not count. It counted commercially, and it kept a full generation of actors employed through the years when the language had stopped selling tickets in Ahmedabad. He was one of the names holding it up.

He contested Kadi for the BJP in the 2012 Gujarat Legislative Assembly election and lost. Five years later he stood from Idar and won, serving until 2022. A man with a 12th grade certificate and a hundred rural films behind him sitting in the state assembly is not an unusual Indian story, but the timing is. He entered the house in December 2017, five years into the urban Gujarati film revival that had made his kind of cinema look obsolete.

He married the actress Mona Thiba in Ahmedabad on 14 August 2014, and their son Rajveer was born in 2015. The whole of his political term ran alongside the rise of a Gujarati industry that had no obvious use for him.

Vash opened on 17 February 2023. Krishnadev Yagnik wrote and directed it, Janki Bodiwala played the daughter, Niilam Paanchal the mother, Hiten Kumar the stranger who takes the family apart, and Hitu Kanodia played Atharva, the father who has to watch it happen and cannot stop it. At the 71st National Film Awards it won Best Gujarati Feature Film. Two and a half years after leaving the assembly he was in the most decorated Gujarati film of the decade.

Then Bollywood bought it. Shaitaan released on 8 March 2024, directed by Vikas Bahl, and the five principal parts were reassigned as follows: the father to Ajay Devgn, the stranger to R. Madhavan, the mother to Jyothika, the son to Anngad Raaj, and the daughter to Janki Bodiwala, who was the only person kept. The Hindi film took a reported Rs 211 crore worldwide. It is the cleanest professional review an actor can get and the most brutal: your work was good enough to be worth remaking, and you were not the reason it worked.

The post Vash diary is busier than the pre politics one. Raado in 2022, then Hu, Shubh Yatra and 3 Ekka in 2023, then Prem No Padkar, Kamthaan, Jagat and Nasoor in 2024, then Chhutachheda, Taaro Thayo, Faati Ne?, Shubhchintak and Vash Level 2 in 2025, with Jai Kanhaiyalall Ki announced for 2026. In Kamthaan he is Police Inspector Satrunjaysinh R. Rathod in an ensemble of roughly fifty actors that the Times of India rated 4 out of 5. In Faati Ne? he is Param Lal, in a horror comedy that ran roughly 23 weeks.

Look at what that list is made of. 3 Ekka is the second highest grossing Gujarati film ever made. Vash Level 2 is a franchise sequel that went to Netflix. Faati Ne? is a Melbourne shot genre film. None of it resembles the cinema he grew up inside, and he is on all of it. The child artist from Meru Mulade is now a working multiplex actor, which is a transition nobody else from his generation of Gujarati cinema has managed.