E-Paper
Swades merits unstinted ovation
It is a tale of an individual's search for his roots, says Saibal Chatterjee.
Ashutosh Gowariker has a way of confounding film reviewers. When he made Lagaan, they thought it was a film about patriotism. It clearly wasn't. Lagaan was a good old underdog-versus-oppressor story told in mint-fresh style. That one set of characters was Indian and the other British was only incidental.
Three years on, Gowariker has fooled the self-styled pundits into believing that Swades is a something akin to an overlong documentary. Lengthy it sure is but it certainly isn't as drab and dreary as documentaries are usually perceived as in a film-crazy but cinema-illiterate country.
Swades is a captivating and universal tale of one individual's search for his roots narrated in a manner that blends languor and precision. No Bollywood film in recent memory has delved into the mind of a returning NRI with quite the same sense of logical progression and compassion.
Give me Swades any day. I have really had my fill of the likes of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Pardes and Aa Ab Laut Chalen. They were entertaining all right, but they were manipulative, even myopic in the depiction of the East-West cultural divide. Swades, refreshingly, does not blame the US of A for India's ills.
Gowariker proves that docudrama-style realism can go hand in hand with a reigning Bollywood megastar. He does a truly fabulous job of a seemingly difficult task. If only he had contained the temptation to replicate the length of Lagaan, Swades would have been a bit of a masterpiece of contemporary Indian cinema. But, for most parts, it doesn't fall short by much.
For sure, Swades lacks the high drama of Lagaan. But that is not really a lacuna. It's a necessity. It is the subject, not the predilections of the film-going masses, that determines the pitch of Gowariker's film. The storyline is peopled with believable men and women caught in real situations. The narrative style steers clear of the pitfalls that usually plague a Mumbai film featuring a megastar - no concessions are made to his screen image. And the acting is of a consistently high quality.
In short, Swades takes Bollywood out of the rut of silly NRI romances and mindless action flicks that it is currently trapped in. The film's eventual box office fate will make no difference to this assessment of its worth. If it fails, it would be more a comment on the quality of the audience.
Swades proves that the director of the super-successful Lagaan hasn't let the accolades cloud his judgment and feed his greed. It is the first mainstream Hindi film in eons that dares to travel into the heart of the darkness of rural India and comes up with a simple and unflinchingly truthful, if somewhat lethargic, narrative of rare incandescence. It meanders just a touch as if to approximate the protagonist's confused state of mind.
Swades touches upon much that is wrong with an India seeking its place on the global stage even as it sets the deep-rooted problems against the affluence of a NASA project manager, a lovably nerdy Mohan Bhargava (Shahrukh Khan). He heads back to a small north Indian village to look up an old nanny, Kaveriamma (Kishori Ballal), whom he hasn't been in touch with for over a decade.
The protagonist stumbles upon a world that is full of surprises and contradictions. The nanny's selfless love is placed as a counterpoint to the social prejudices that blind the upper caste villagers, while the thoughts and deeds of an independent-minded, convent-educated young village school teacher, Geeta (Gayatri Joshi), are contrasted with the though processes of rural folk who use tradition as a weapon of oppression.
This is Shahrukh Khan's most authentic screen performance ever. The superstar is completely shorn of his mannerisms and he makes the most of the opportunity. Even the mother figure, played with great skill by Ballal, is free from clichés.
Indeed, barring its inordinate length and occasionally preachy passages, there is nothing in Swades that is Bollywood. In a filmmaking climate dominated by profit-seeking weavers of fluffy dreams, Gowariker's new film is a welcome respite: When did we last see the real face of rural poverty in a Mumbai film?
Swades is not about nationalism at all. It has nothing to do with an NRI's guilt-laden conscience either. If Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Pardes and Aa Ab Laut Chalen extolled Bharatiya sanskriti and ran down everything western, Swades is only a genuine voyage of discovery for its hero, who careens through the heart of India only to realize that the nation's enemy lies within - within all of us. It lies in our minds and in our beliefs. It lies in our outdated social structures.
But Swades isn't a typical cows-casteism-and-chaos drama either. There is soul in Swades if not as much flair as in Lagaan. It is an uplifting film. When a crowded train pulls up at a nondescript railway station, Mohan encounters a poor boy selling drinking water ay 25 paise per earthen glass. Since his arrival in India, he hasn't touched anything but mineral water but he buys a glass from the boy and drinks it. The water of his land, like the nanny of his childhood, is his link with his roots and he renews the connection without any undue song and dance.
In an earlier but longer sequence, Mohan, at the behest of Kaveriamma, treks across the countryside in order to recover some pending dues from a middle-aged man who tills a land owned by Geeta. He and his family are on the verge of starvation. His plight embarrasses Mohan and before he leaves, he hands over some money to the weaver-turned farmer.
The emotions that Swades maps are raw, tangible, and delectably free of mass- appeal manipulation. The film eschews theatrics except when Mohan, in a Lagaan-like situation, helps the villagers generate their own electricity and light a bulb that illuminates another of the many authentic faces that Gowariker puts on screen - a half-blind woman whose furrowed visage stretches into a smile as the darkness is dispelled.
But Swades is different from Lagaan and it doesn't end at this point. The climax has to play out in Mohan Bhargava's mind. It does so with utmost subtlety.
Even the sequences shot inside a NASA flight centre are not presented as grand moments - that would hardly have fitted into the film's overall scheme. The sets designed by Nitin Desai are basic and functional and the low-key technical attributes prevent any dilution of focus. Gowariker puts the people bang in the middle of the action and carves out a tale that would have made Bimal Roy proud. Cinema isn't dead in Bollywood.
