On Rang De Basanti**

Rang De Basanti (Rakeysh Mehra, 2006) was not just a very successful film in terms of box office returns, but was also able to aquire cult status, when it was released. A film can do both at the same time only when it is able to put ideas out there which its audience is able to identify with. And this is exactly what RDB did. It packaged two important ideas in its story - one, that the glory and fervour of patriotism that was prevalent at the time of the Independence struggle is something that is simply not accessible to the youth of today, and two, that there is a chasm between the State and the youth which results in deep-seated alienation in the minds of the young people of this country.

But the skill of the film-maker did not stop there. RDB has a parallel narrative structure, which not only assimilates the two ideas, but is also able to convey the thought that in spite of the alienation positive action is possible. In this blog, I want to concentrate on this parallel narrative and what it is able to do for the film.

On the one hand, we have the story of Bhagat Singh and his comarades, who fought and died for the independence of this country. Let us take a step back in time to the year 2002 when five films on the very same story were made. None of the films were successful. One of the reasons for this is obvioulsy that if there are five films made on the same subject available to the audience, the individual impact of each is bound to get diluted. But also, that the ideals shown in all five films are something that most of today's audience (60-odd years after Independence) will simply not be able to identify with. This thought struck me, in fact, when I was watching a much older version of the same story, Shaheed (S. Ram Sharma, 1965). I can appreciate the film as a history lesson and a good film, but the rhetoric and the driven behaviour of the characters, I cannot relate to. This is also the same reason why films like Wake Up Sid and Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na do well. These are young people we actually may know in our real lives too.

So, making a film only on the Bhagat Singh story is not enough. One remixes it with a contemporary track, and there in you have a hit formula. In order to so this, you take characters who resemble the contemporary scenario and have them play Bhagat Singh and the rest of the freedom fighters. By doing this two things are possible - the young people in the film are able to imbibe their ideas, live their emotions through role play, and get the feeling that the people are different, but perhaps the problems are still the same, and in spite of living in a democracy, we are perhaps not completely free. Not only do the actors on the screen play the dual roles, but we as the audience do too. So DJ and his group act as a binder between the audience and the Bhagat Singh story.

Another message the film is able to pass on through this kind of inter-mixing of the two stories is that even if ours is a free country, complacency and indifference is not acceptable. We still need to make a noise against what is wrong and at least attempt to fix it.

When the film released, a common criticism of its ideology was that it promotes violent, sporadic action against injustice in our country. Simply put, it promotes murder -- an eye for an eye -- in a country force-fed the passive values of Gandhigiri. My response to this is no, the film does not do that. The shooting of the Defence Minister in the film is a symbolic action. It replicates the shooting of Saunders in the alter-ego narrative of the film, and that's about it. If the film truly promoted murder then the last radio station scene of the film would not have been included at all, in which the characters explain that what they did was only a means of revenge for their friend's death, and by no means a war cry.

In fact, if one watches the last scene of the film when DJ and the others are killed by the police, the police actually come off as far more violent and blood-thirsty than the young people -- a scene reminiscent of the Jalianwala Baug massacre depicted earlier in the film.

Compare this to another film, where maybe the solution depicted is more practical and usable -- a film like Yuva (Mani Ratnam, 2004) -- which advocates an entry into politics as a mode of bringing about change. Yet, even in that film violence and arm-twisting is something that cannot be completely left out. Compare this to yet another classic like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (Kundan Shah, 1983), where the end shows that the common man is ultimately silent and powerless in face of the behemoths of policits and money. Contextually, this solution may work, but in the larger picture, silence may also imply acceptance. And this is exactly what a film like RDB does not want to preach.

RDB is by no means a flawless film, but it is also a film one need not take literally. Everything in the film has been positioned so as to pass on a message. In the end, a film like this needs to be made and watched because it says some important things about our country and makes us think, and then maybe, act.

** I owe the germ of the ideas in this blog to a discussion in my M. Phil. class and also to an essay called 'Outside the Whale' by Salman Rushdie, available in the collection Imaginary Homelands.