The argument that the nation’s history cannot be thought apart from aurality entails a reconceptualization of history itself. By adding sound and musical elements to the mix, I argue that RDB points to and partially fills this flagrant gap in the historical record.īut RDB does more than just correct the historical narrative. While film music and its affiliated industries and technologies have played an important role in public debates over national identity, they are typically ignored in histories of both cinema and the nation. All of these industries, the connections between them, and the technologies that sustain them are highlighted in RDB. The deejay has historically operated at the interstices of at least four media industries in India: music, radio, film, and television. It does so, I argue, via its focus on the figure of the deejay. RDB teaches us that the nation’s past is incomprehensible without film sound, song, and music in India. To ignore the soundtrack is to miss this film’s primary means of engaging with the concept of history. While I share many of these concerns, I submit that what is left out of most commentaries on RDB is the work that cinematic sound and music perform. Some critics also cautioned against the film’s regressive ideology as evidenced in its sidelining of female characters and its elite point of view, which is blind to the existence of lower classes and assumes that corruption is the most pressing problem facing the nation. “caricaturised minister, the naive politics, the misplaced cause, the violent turn of events, the pat comparisons with the historical figures, the far-fetched and confused finale.” This enthusiastic journalistic and public response notwithstanding, there were those who criticized the film for the For a brief while, candlelight vigils and protests of the kind depicted in the film became de rigeur. The Indian blogosphere teemed with discussions of RDB and calls for civic participation. More remarkable was the social and political impact of the film in India, what came to be dubbed the “ RDB effect.” The film spurred middle class urbanites-youth in particular-into political debate and action in a way that few Hindi films previously had. Rahman), and best lyrics (Prasoon Joshi). It garnered a slew of accolades including nominations and awards for best film, best director, best music and best background score (both composed by A. It recovered the $5.5 million spent in production costs within a week and went on to break records for overseas collection. Released worldwide on January 26, 2006, the day India celebrates as Republic Day, RDB was an immediate box-office hit. One film that stood out in this flurry of “historicals” is Rang De Basanti/Color My Spring (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, 2006, henceforth RDB). The 50th anniversary of independence in 1997 and aggressive attempts by right-wing political parties to frame India as an exclusively “Hindu” country, both in public discourse and in educational curricula, inspired animated debates about the nation’s identity and history. While the phenomenal success of Lagaan/Land Tax (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha/Mutiny: A Love Story (Anil Sharma, 2001)-two very different period films with disparate target audiences and politics-in the summer of 2001 may have bolstered this cinematic obsession with the past, this trend was also linked to a broader interest in history in the Indian public sphere at the time. Films about Gandhi such as Hey Ram! (Kamal Haasan, 2000) and Gandhi, My Father (Feroz Abbas Khan, 2007) jostled for the public’s attention alongside those attempting to recuperate other figures instrumental in the freedom struggle including The Legend of Bhagat Singh (Rajkumar Santoshi, 2002), Bose: the Forgotten Hero (Shyam Benegal, 2004), and Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005). Big-budget epics like Asoka (Santosh Sivan, 2001) and Jodhaa Akbar (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2008) conjured enchanted visions of the past, while more somber dramas like Pinjar/Cage (Chandraprakash Dwivedi, 2003) probed the wounds of Partition. Even as India rushed headlong into the future, so to speak, powered by neo-liberal economic reforms initiated in the early 1990s, the mainstream Hindi film industry produced numerous films dealing with history. Of radio, remix, and Rang De Basanti: rethinking history through film soundĪ curious aspect of Bollywood cinema in the first decade of the twenty-first century was its obsession with the past. 2014, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
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