http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=5d9f0dd3c22bf21119af7183eb022cf5
Film Sparks Revolutionary Fever in India
New America Media, News Feature, Sandip Roy, Feb 22, 2006
EDITOR'S NOTE: A new film that recalls the sacrifices and glories
of pre-Independence Indian freedom fighters stirs heated debate
over whether such passion can still exist in the new, modern India.
Sandip Roy is the host of "UpFront," New America Media's radio
program on KALW 91.7-FM in San Francisco.
CALCUTTA--An India awash with Western-style malls and brand names
has some new unlikely heroes. It's not Madonna or even Bill Gates
but freedom fighters from pre-Independence India. The
twenty-somethings who went to their deaths after gunning down
British officials are suddenly sexy again. Or so Bollywood, India's
film industry, would have us believe.
"Rang de Basanti" (or RDB as it's become known) is the latest
big-screen hit sweeping the country, and it raises a question that
has all the media buzzing. Now that we have Maxim and Tommy
Hilfiger is anything worth dying for anymore? It's not an idle
question. By the last frame of RDB almost all its hipster,
college-student protagonists are dead, going down in a hail of
bullets after they take over a radio station at the crack of
dawn.
The film has been such an instant blockbuster that some theaters in
India have had to add a 6 a.m. show. In its opening weekend alone
it raked in a phenomenal $4.79 million.
RDB is about a group of bored, cynical friends who are roped into
acting in a film about freedom fighter Bhagat Singh, who was hanged
in 1931 at the age of 24 for killing a British officer and throwing
a bomb in the Central Assembly in Delhi. When the crew's friend, a
fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force, dies because of shoddy
equipment, these Generation X Bhagat Singhs, electrified by the
histories they are acting out, assassinate the corrupt defense
minister.
Of course, the defense minister is Indian now. For the new RDB
generation, the stand-in for the pith-helmet wearing tyrannical
Brit is now its own government. A survey by India Today across 14
cities in India finds that 68 percent of young people view
corruption as the greatest ill facing India.
But here's the twist. When asked if, given a chance, they would
rather work in India or abroad, 80 percent still chose India. They
are reading Hewitt Associates estimates that salaries in India will
go up by 13.8 percent in 2006. They see a new report projecting
"major power status" for both India and China by 2035. This new
generation wants change not through moving to the United States but
right here in India. They are, writes India Today, "looking ahead
in anger."
They are also looking back to find their heroes. Impatient for
change, they are looking not toward Gandhi and his patient
satyagraha, or philosophy of non-violent resistance, but to
long-dead young men with homemade bombs, breathing life into their
crow-dropping spattered statues, islands lost in traffic and grimy
with exhaust.
Bhagat Singh has already had two other celluloid incarnations, as
have other long-dead heroes like Netaji Subhas Bose, who marched
against the British during World War II, and Mangal Pandey from the
1857 War of Independence.
It's quite astonishing for me to see freedom fighters from the
1920s and 30s as the newly minted heroes for the new Levis-clad
India. When I lived in India 15 years ago, Lenin-reading,
homespun-cotton-wearing revolutionaries with pencil-thin mustaches
and neatly-parted, oil-slick hair were the last people we wanted to
emulate. At that time we drank Coca Cola knock-offs and wore jeans
with labels like Lavis. Now India has all the real brands plus one
more. "Celluloid has made Bhagat Singh the brand of the 21st
century-a brand that blends the ancient with the contemporary,"
says singer Shaan in The Times of India.
Perhaps in this age of Osama and his terrorists, terrorists of
another age, now reincarnated as freedom fighters hold a special
appeal. "These guys are irreverent and want to break the rules,"
Siddharth, one of the stars of RDB, told The Telegraph. He is
talking about the filmmakers of RDB, but he could be describing his
own generation who have had enough of a byzantine bureaucracy with
its armory of rules and endless scandals involving politicians and
kickbacks.
But it's difficult to figure out how real this revolution really
is. Sagarika Ghose, a columnist for the Hindustan Times dismisses
RDB as "the ultimate made-in-media-India film," not "rooted in any
kind of reality." It's hard to tell what the audiences sitting in
plush new multiplexes, sipping their Coke and curry puff combo
really make of the fiery speeches on the screen. Does what India
Today calls the "Me Generation" really have the stomach for
revolution and the sacrifice it calls for? My mother recalls how
soon after Independence passionate movie-goers threw their slippers
at the screen whenever the British-loving inspector appeared. The
audience at RDB limited their rebellion to answering their cell
phones in the middle of the movie.
The person I really wanted to ask about this newfound patriotism
was my great aunt. She had been beaten up by the police on the
streets of British India. But I didn't get to see her. After
decades of public service (always clad in plain white cotton saris)
and now over 90, she has moved to an ashram on the city outskirts.
That was too far away, too difficult to get to (Mapquest has yet to
come to Calcutta), and on the couple of weekends I was in town we
had more pressing things to do -- like going to see "Rang de
Basanti."