Sridevi's career spanned over 300 films. She started her journey as a child actor and some of her roles in the beginning of her screen career were those of a deity. This earned her immense popularity among the moviegoing audience in South India and translated into more such roles in the coming time.

When Sridevi first played Lord Murugan

In this book extract from Sridevi: The South Years, published by Rupa, ad world personality and National Award-winning author Amborish Roychoudhury disputes the popular theory on Sridevi's debut film and looks back at her entry into cinema as a child artiste playing Lord Murugan in Sandow Chinnappa Thevar's Tamil devotional movie, Thunaivan, starring AVM Rajan and Sowcar Janaki. Murugan, or Muruga, is an extremely popular deity in the Tamil pantheon of gods. Muruga has been worshipped as a child-god, and Sridevi stepped in to play the role in several movies.

In Thunaivan, Sridevi makes her appearance as Murugan at around the two-hour mark wearing a dhoti and smeared with vibhuti all over.

Sridevi flooded with offers to play deity onscreen

After this, Sridevi played child gods and demi-gods in many Tamil, Malayalam as well as Kannada movies. Owing to her sweeping success as Lord Murugan in her Tamil debut Thunaivan, the kid Sridevi was flooded with offers to play deities in film after film.

She played Murugan in films like Kumara Sambhavam, Aathi Parasakthi and Agathiyar. Kumara Sambhavam was multilingual, shot also in Malayalam where she was Subramanian, the same deity who's referred to as Murugan. She also appeared as Krishna in a Tamil film called Agathiyar.

(With IANS inputs)