By Ayesha Khan 
Chennai, May 29: Some news arrives and you just sit with it for a moment before you start typing. Ajith Kumar‘s mother passed away this morning. Mohini. Eighty-four years old. Gone.
She had been unwell for a while, age catching up the way it does, slowly and then all at once. She was being treated at a private hospital in Chennai. The family knew things were not good. Still. Knowing does not really do much when the moment comes.
Ajith was in Dubai. He is coming back. The funeral will wait for him.
Ajith Kumar Mother Passes Away – Two Years After Losing His Father
His father P. Subramaniam died in March 2023. Eighty-five years old, battled paralysis for years, went in his sleep. Ajith was in Europe at the time, on holiday with his wife Shalini and their children. He flew back immediately. Those who were around him said he was devastated, though you would not have seen it written on his face in any photograph because there were no photographs. He kept that grief to himself, the way he keeps most things.
Now this.
Both parents gone within roughly two years of each other. There is no framework for that, not really. You just carry it. And if you are Ajith Kumar, you carry it without making anyone watch you do it.
The Woman Behind Ajith Kumar: Mother Mohini’s Life in Chennai
Mohini was Sindhi. Born and raised in Kolkata, far from the world of Tamil cinema, far from the heat and noise of Chennai, far from anything that would eventually become her son’s entire universe. She came south after marrying P. Subramaniam, a Tamil man from a Palakkad Iyer family with roots in Kerala. Different languages, different communities, different cities of origin. They made it work. They made a home. They had three sons.
The middle one became Ajith Kumar.
She did not push him there. There was no film background in this family, no industry connections, no uncle who knew a producer. Ajith dropped out of school after Class 10. He did odd jobs, tried modelling, wandered into films half by accident and half by stubbornness. There were years when it was not clear any of this would amount to anything. Mohini watched all of that. The uncertainty. The early failures. The slow climb.
She also watched him receive the Padma Bhushan last April. The Government of India’s third-highest civilian honour, for contributions to cinema. Whatever she felt in that moment, sitting somewhere in Chennai knowing her son had just been recognised at that level, you have to imagine it was something close to complete.
Why Ajith Kumar Named His Foundation After His Mother
People reveal things about themselves in small choices. Ajith Kumar chose to name his charitable foundation the Mohini Mani Foundation. Not after himself. Not after any of his characters, not after his production house or his racing team. After his mother.
In an industry built largely on self-promotion, that is a striking thing to do. It is not the kind of gesture you make for optics. It is the kind you make when someone has been genuinely central to who you are.
She was 84. She had a full life. She outlived her husband, saw her son honoured by the country, and left behind people who clearly loved her. By any measure, that is not a tragedy in the conventional sense. But grief is not really about measures, is it. It just is what it is.
After Ajith’s Mother Passes Away, Chennai Responds
The news spread through the morning the way these things do now, first in industry circles, then on social media, then everywhere at once. Actors, directors, people who have known Ajith for years, people who have simply grown up watching him, all finding their way to the same moment of pause.
The condolences have been genuine. That is worth saying. Ajith Kumar is not someone who has cultivated public sympathy over the years. He does not have personal social media accounts. He has asked fans repeatedly not to form clubs in his name. He withdrew from fan meetings, from public appearances beyond what his work requires, from the whole machinery of celebrity maintenance that most stars in his position lean into heavily. He stepped away from all of it and turned toward his family, his racing, and his films.
The result of that is that when something like this happens, nobody is performing grief. The people expressing condolences today actually mean it.
The Man His Mother Raised: Ajith Kumar Beyond the Films
More than 63 films across three decades. Awards that fill a room. A racing career he takes seriously, not as a rich man’s hobby but as a genuine athletic pursuit, with an FIA Bronze licence and his own team, Ajith Kumar Racing. A Padma Bhushan on a shelf somewhere. One of the most photographed faces in South India, recognised on streets from Chennai to Colombo to wherever Tamil communities have settled around the world.
And underneath all of that, a son. Who named his foundation after his mother. Who flew back immediately when his father died. Who is, as this is being written, somewhere over the Arabian Sea trying to get home.
His brothers Anup Kumar and Anil Kumar are in Chennai already, with the family. The last rites will be arranged once Ajith arrives. It will be private. There will be no open invitation, no public gathering. The family has never done it any other way, and they will not start now.
Ajith Flies Home After Mother Mohini Passes Away
Mohini raised three sons in a city that was not the city she was born in. She watched one of them become famous in a way that most people cannot fully comprehend, and she apparently never let it change how she saw him or how he saw her. The foundation named after her will keep doing whatever work it does. The films will eventually come back, the racing events will continue, the public life will resume.
But today a man is on a plane flying back to Chennai to say goodbye to his mother. That is the whole story, really. Everything else is context.
Some things are just personal. This is one of them.
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