How big is RRR's Golden Globe? Wait for Oscars

“Holy hell, RRR. Has any movie ever packed more movie into a movie? What a ride. Still thinking about it a couple days later.” By the time Jon Spaihts, the Oscar-nominated screenplay writer of Dune tweeted these words last July, SS Rajamouli’s RRR (Telugu) was already a pan-India blockbuster and had been drawing an incrementally rising wave of audience interest in the United States. The wave rose to a tsunami as US film critics began to take note of it, and reached gargantuan proportions yesterday when RRR picked up a Best Song trophy at the Golden Globes in the US. The recognition bodes well for the film’s prospects when the Oscar nominations are announced later this month. Since its release in early 2022, RRR’s effectiveness in melting cross-cultural boundaries has been akin to a wax candle in a blazing furnace. Videos shared on Twitter of viewers dancing in US theatres have mirrored screaming fans in India. Reviews on US news platforms speaking of the film’s “rampaging energy” (NPR) and “glorious excess” (New York Times), have echoed the praise showered on it by a majority of Indian critics. For an India accustomed to over-the-top musicals for decades, Rajamouli had delivered bigger and better. RRR and a stream of other southern Indian works have also benefited from viewer fatigue with the unimaginative fare churned out by Hindi filmmakers through much of the pandemic, a time when confinement during lockdowns caused sizable sections of the Indian audience to explore cinema beyond their mother tongues on streaming platforms. In the US, RRR has worked as enchanting, exhilarating exotica on a scale as gigantic as the superhero universe but with the eccentricities and audacity quadrupled. In the midst of the celebrations, the very few voices raised against the film’s factual distortions and insensitivity towards caste politics have gone largely ignored in India and abroad. RRR, as Rajamouli has informed the press, is the story of a fictional encounter between two historical personalities, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem. Alluri, who was upper caste, allied with Adivasis to fight British oppression. Komaram was a revolutionary from the Gond tribes who battled exploitation by the Nizams of Hyderabad. The two never met. In RRR’s imagined intersection of Alluri and Komaram’s paths, the tone of subservience slipped into the writing of Komaram’s character has drawn little comment in India or abroad. Indicators of Alluri’s superior caste position dot the film. medium nocaption96918138 When the two leads team up against the British, Alluri/Rama is fashioned into a Lord Ram-esque being, styled to mimic the Hindu deity’s most widely known representations, vanquishing the enemy with his arsenal of arrows. On the other hand, Komaram’s actions and utterances portray him as a Hanuman-like devotee moving mountains to unite Ram and Sita (Alluri’s official name in RRR is A Rama Raju, his fiancee is Sita). Later, RRR reduces an Adivasi icon to a self-flagellating disciple-like figure. An admiring Komaram is shown describing himself as a tribal with a narrow vision while the mighty Alluri/Rama was working for a greater cause. In the end, Alluri/Rama in full divine regalia asks Komaram, “What can I do for you?” in the manner of god granting a boon to the faithful, to which Komaram raises his hands in supplication and says: “Be my teacher.” Alluri/Rama then writes “Jal, Jangal, Zameen” (Water, Forests, Land) in blood on a flag that the two are shown raising together. The appropriation is astounding. In reality, this slogan is credited to Komaram Bheem and even today is emblematic of Adivasi land rights movements in the country. A deeper socio-political analysis of RRR, however, has been side-lined so far in the festivities surrounding its phenomenal success. The question in focus in the Indian public discourse is whether this success will have a spill-over effect on Indian cinema as a whole. In that area, a clue perhaps lies in the second category in which RRR was nominated at the Globes – Best Non-English Language Picture, that it did not win. The victor, the Argentinian film Argentina, 1985, is based on real events involving the prosecution of the leaders of a dictatorship that country suffered. In a sense then, RRR has been acknowledged at the Globes precisely as it has been feted by US critics: as a song-dance-and-CGI extravaganza, in keeping with conventional expectations of Indian cinema in the West beyond the festival arena. India is the world’s biggest producer of films, but the diversity in Indian cinema is yet to be represented at mainstream awards. India’s middle-of-the-road and independent films are increasingly being honoured at European and North American festivals in the way parallel cinema once was, but not at popular awards. For now therefore, the positive response to RRR among non-NRI audiences and at the Globes remains a breakthrough for this particular film. To gauge whether this heralds increasing awareness about Indian cinema’s heterogeneity, it would be wise to wait for the Oscar nominations. The writer is a journalist, film analyst and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic