Awards for two very different Indian entries at the 95th Academy Awards may well be a milestone marking India’s growing soft power in the world. Much like how it discovered the cool violence of Hong Kong-made Chinese movies in the 1990s, and K-pop in the 2010s, the world may be waking up to popular Indian cinema (which is already a global phenomenon, thanks to the great Indian diaspora) as exemplified by RRR. The popularity of its song Naatu Naatu on the global festival circuit has rarely been seen before, especially for an international motion picture. The song is completely Indian in its aesthetic, just like the movie (a mainstream one, not an art-house film), which was made by Indians working for an Indian production house.
MM Keeravaani and Chandrabose, winners of the award for best original song for "Naatu Naatu" from "RRR" pose in the press room at the Oscars on March 12, 2023, (AP)
That makes its award very different from the Oscars won by Indians in the past — for western production houses, in efforts helmed by non-Indians. That is truly a coming-of-age moment — and it’s entirely possible that many Hollywood movies made in the next decade will have a profusion of SS Rajamouli-moments, much like how those many made in the 1990s and 2000s had John Woo-moments.
But India’s talented filmmakers — including those who make documentaries — are about more than just song and dance (although it is never just). And, as if to remind global audiences of this, in one of mainstream Indian cinema’s greatest moments, The Elephant Whisperers, a short documentary made by Kartiki Gonsalves, won the top award in its category. Both The Elephant Whisperers, the poignant 40-minute telling of the lives of a tribal couple tasked by the local forest department to look after an orphaned elephant calf, and All That Breathes, Shaunak Sen’s film on two brothers who run a raptor hospital in Old Delhi, which lost out to Navalny in the Best Documentary Feature category, highlight the depth of talent in the country — and this will further accelerate both the acceptance of Indian films overseas and the internationalisation of the Indian film industry.
To be sure, there have been many false dawns, but the wins at the highest level suggest that this may well be it. Joseph Nye, who came up with the concept of soft power, believes it holds one of the keys to success in world politics. It may be a bit of a stretch to link a song picturised on a hook-step dance and a short on fostering elephants with Mr Nye’s classical definition of the term — but this could well be where it begins.
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