Rang De Basanti


“ courageous, untroubled, mocking, violent- that is what wisdom wants us to be”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Courageous, untroubled, mocking & violent-adjectives for the ways in which dissent among youth burst upon the Indian celluloid in the form of Rang de Basanti. Directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, this story involving a bunch of young college students, impervious to any and everything happening outside their immediate worlds, was a major success and one of the few movies to achieve a cult following among the youth of a nation where dissent is equated with indiscipline and indiscipline is criminal. The notion of dissent being criminal is reflected in constant and unquestioned state policing and suppression of “rebellions”. Whenever the state denies accountability to the people, a section of the population questions it and the authority does what its known best to do: silence it.

Rang de Basanti is a story of five friends who are disillusioned with the state India is in but nonetheless are too happy in their own world to either realize or do something to address this disillusionment. The movie addresses this disillusionment of the youth by historicizing and juxtaposing it with the lives and events occurring within them of DJ (Aamir Khan), Aslam (Kunal Kapoor), Sukhi (Sharman Joshi), Karan (Siddharth), Laxman (Atul Kulkarni) and Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) with those of revolutionaries Chandrashekhar Azad, Ashfaqullah Khan, Sukhdev, Bhagat Singh, Ram Prasad Bismil and Durga respectively. This juxtaposition is manifested in and through a documentary being filmed by Sue (Alice Patten) who plays the granddaughter of a British Police officer who was in charge of the jail-terms and executions of the revolutionaries. DJ, Aslam, Sukhi, Karan, Sonia are all college students who’s philosophy in life is “live for the moment”. This seemingly hedonistic but naïve philosophy comes across as an escape route if one looks closer, for all of them, in their own ways are unhappy with the “system”. Conversations among them repeatedly bring out the hopelessness they perceive and the futility of everything that India has to offer, even independence. There is a strong irony in this disillusionment with independence. While the “heroes” that they are being compared with fought and died for India’s independence, it’s this independence, its perceived ineffectiveness, futility and a quest for its reclamation that drives the friends to rebellion. The realization of this, of course, is triggered off by a personal loss, the death of Ajay (Madhavan), a pilot with the Indian Air Force and a close friend of the five. This sets in motion a series of events that leads to friends’ decision to kill the Defence Minister Shastri (Mohan Agashe) who is shown to be responsible for an arms deal that causes Ajay’s death due to a MiG air crash. They however witness an unexpected bouleversement of their action, as the DM is decorated as a martyr and a hero. It is at this point that they decide to do what the film symbolically equates with Bhagat Singh’s action of dropping a bomb in the assembly chamber of the British Parliament; they decide to assume the responsibility of the DM’s murder on AIR. The message conveyed through both acts is the same: “it takes a loud noise to make the deaf listen”, a statement originally attributed to Valliant, a French anarchist martyr, but made immortally famous by Bhagat Singh and revolutionarizingly relived in Rang de Basanti. At this point, the state intoxicated with power and forever ill-equipped to address dissent resorts to what its best known for, suppression through violence. The students are immediately declared terrorists, even as the truth about the DM spreads around India, creating a huge wave of support for the students. Unarmed students are cornered and executed by the use of heavy firing and dissent is silenced.

The film, however, remains “unclimaxed” with various questions thrown at the viewer. Is violence the only means of expressing dissent? Is violence necessarily wrong, even when it is resorted to by the oppressed and targeted towards the oppressor? Who is the enemy; does it have to be a foreign power? Can it not be the state itself, the independent, democratic government of the day? Why is dissent so unsettling? Why is change so dreaded? What is the truth and more importantly how it is to be told to who it is to be told? These and various other questions float in the unsettling numbness and the vacuum that the film creates. The film, in its course, celebrates the spirit of rebellion as inherent in the ideas of Bhagat Singh and his comrades. It celebrates the romance of youth and the varicolored expressions of its nature to question, to rebel, to change what is unsettling to it. The idea is to bring about the need for dissent, the need to question the order, the authority, the need to realize and reclaim freedom in all its spirit, in all its rawness, in all its undiluted, intoxicating glory.

These ideas are voiced with screaming conviction through the movie’s electrifying soundtrack (A.R.Rahman). Words, lyrics, poetry have always been faithful comrades of revolutionaries all over the world, as rightly portrayed in the movie through the observation of Chris Patten (the officer in charge) “ I think it was their poetry that kept them alive”. Every revolution in the world has had some sort of a “soundtrack”. Prasoon Joshi’s simmering lyrics set on fire by Rahman’s electrifying tunes provide the lyrical fuel for the movie’s revolutionary ideas. The songs all celebrate rebellion and the existential chaos experienced by the youth. Whether it be the screaming “Loose Control” or “be a rebel” or pathshaala or the liberating assertion of chaos in “Khalbali’, forcefully brought out by lyrics like “ hum lapakte saaye hain, hum sulagte aaye hain, ghar bata ke aaye hain……hai khalbali!!” Also brought is the need for blood that the revolution demands in “ khoon chalaa” and of course the famous pronunciamento of the realization of the fire within, in “roobaroo”.

Rang de Basanti is thus a film that is unapologetic about the ends it’s characters achieve and at the same time wonders whether the means employed towards that end are justified. The revolutionary overtones of the movie set up debates on violence and rebellion and the role of state.

Mahim Pratap Singh
M.A.
JNU