Brand Inquilab

"The food on which the tender plant of liberty thrives is the blood of the martyr"

Bela Malik Delhi

Rang De Basanti rocked. Fast-paced, technically superb, with catchy music, drama, romance, sacrifice, family, university, poetry, history, politics, media, multi-culturalism, what can stop this Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra winner? 

It had a message: the assembly line of beer-guzzling, weed-inhaling, grunge-dressed pouring out of metropolitan campuses is not a write-off. This message flitted through a very acceptable media: the person of young Flt Lt Ajay Rathore (R.Madhavan), young British Sue (Alice Patten) and her jailor grandfather (Old Mckinsey), the gods, and history.

But the party-poopers differ. The message, they insist, is that law can be taken unto our own hands. They nitpick. The university canteen shown is not Delhi University but the India Habitat Centre. There is no such guest room as the one Sue stayed in on campus. How can DJ (Aamir Khan), whose mother is a dhaba owner, afford his lifestyle? There are surely less-token ways of showing tolerance than having most of the cast troop off from Muslim home to Sikh gurudwara, topping it all up with paying homage at the martyr's flame at India Gate. Indian defence ministers do not go on casual unescorted morning walks for novices to take lethal pot shots at them.

The crux, this reviewer thought, is elsewhere. A film that took five years to research still got its history on its head. While both history and politics are available to everyone to be used liberally as it suits their artistic and commercial sensibilities, the point is to carry it off. If not, the positive message of the film about the young having potential, falls on its face.

The film is not able to engage innovatively with the "problem of this desh". It comes to the standard netas-are-corrupt but is unable to deal with politics. Political parties are only about misleading their cadre and activists. In this otherwise multi-hued film, this comes across in stark black-and-white.

The voice of the past, coming through the persons of the actors-in-the-film (DJ-Chandrashekha Azad, Aslam-Ashfak, Karan-Bhagat Singh and Sukhi-Rajguru, Laxman Pandey-Bismil) is shorn of the historical context of the vibrant 1920s-30s. A broad brush is applied over Jallianwalla Bagh, Simon Commission, the Kakori train robbery, the Lahore incident, the assembly bombing, Lala Lajpat Rai's martyrdom and lathi charge-arbitrary killings.

There is no sense of the evolving ideology of the individuals in the group of the revolutionaries in the sepia-toned section of the film. Chandrasekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Ram Prasad Bismil, and Ashfaqullah Khan are only connected by the Kakori train robbery and JP Sander's assassination it would appear. That they were socialists, and the name of their political party was the Hindustan Socialist Republic of India (HRSA), passes us by. It was on Bhagat Singh's insistence that the word "Socialist" was added. Their intense differences with Lala Lajpat Rai and Mahatma Gandhi are not even hinted at. The debates over anarchism, atheism, communism, imperialism, the role of the vanguard party of workers and peasants in the revolution are all omitted so that not even a sepia hint remains. Edited out is the red-scarf entry of the sepia-toned protagonists into the trial room of the Lahore conspiracy case shouting the slogans "Long Live Socialist Revolution", "Long Live the Communist International", "Long Live the People", "Lenin's Name will never Die", and "Down with Imperialism". What remains is a long advertisement for an Inquilab with its substance and colour carefully removed and Azad and his martyred comrades reduced to pop icons of nationalism.