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20 December 2004
Swades
Having burned my fingers long ago by watching Shahrukh Khan in Kal Ho Na Ho, I was wary of another Shahrukh Khan movie. Also, I was not excessively fond of Lagaan as others were and there was no special fascination to follow Gowariker's repertoire. What drew me to watching the movie however was the plot -- that of an Indian native living and working in the United States faced with the dilemma of staying back or returning to India. Since college, this has been a tricky hand-grenade lobbed at most of us rather nonchalantly and most often we have had to contend with giving non-committal responses.Swades very articulately captures this dilemma. It gives it broad perspective from both points of view although, and this should not be surprising, generally favouring the argument to return. Hey, the movie is Indian after all. A NASA scientist returns to India to look for and bring home to the United States his mother-like guardian. The guardian is now in a village tending to a strong and principled female protagonist who runs a school. The two sides of the argument now are effortlessly projected onto the male and female lead and a love story follows as an inevitable and rather nice concomitant. The movie does not, as others have done and as Lagaan itself did, pander to sentimentality although this is a minority opinion. Others have wondered why it needed to be so sanctimonious. This is understandable -- the movie as seen by a villager in India or someone who has lived all his life there can hardly be appreciated. It makes points and highlights circumstances that are only too well-acquainted with to that segment of the audience. It takes the idealistic high road and that can be a bit off-putting to those who come to a theatre to be regaled with conjurer's tricks and flights of fancy. It is as the cliché might go a thinking man's movie and people seldom come to the theatre ready to think.
But that is what is so appreciable about Swades. It does not degenerate into the morass of commercial viability. It makes its points very cogently and very persistently. The movie's highlights -- that of the scientist motivating the village to build a hydel power plant harnessing a little stream, his earnest efforts at trying to overcome still lingering caste differences and exhorting villagers to send more children to the school and his genuine and heartfelt commiseration with a weaver-turned-farmer who finds it increasingly hard to make ends meet to feed his family needing to overcome the social ostracisation for having changed professions -- are all based on the harsh realities of rural India. These points need to be made, these tales need to be publicised. This is what the ruling government is referring to as the need for an equitable and socially viable growth agenda. Particularly perceptive was the incident when the scientist confronts the village heads who speak contemptuously of the so-called decadence of American society and lack of values and heritage in the United States. The scientist rightly opines that it is a sham and a sorry state of affairs that we as a nation resort to a facade of cultural values and heritage in order to claim supremacy (of the moral kind at least) amongst nations. There were many such flashpoints where the movie reveals a very gentle Gandhian aura to it and that impressed me a lot. In the end though, one suspects that the scientist's decision to return to his fold was more generally based on purely personal reasons (that is what the movie gives us to understand) than on moral grounds.
The movie does have Shahrukh Khan giving a very understated, restrained performance as a pensive individual who is shaken and emotionally stirred by what he sees around him. It was clearly the best performance I have seen of his since Yes Boss. Gayatri Joshi's essay has been labelled competent by most movie reviews. That is perhaps shorthand for not bad for a newcomer. I could not agree more. Her facial expressions were spot-on but her dialogue delivery left a lot to be desired. The rest of the cast does a splendid job in propping up the two leads, in particular the actor who played the weaver-farmer.
Finally, the movie's colours are astounding especially in regard to the earthy village imagery. I have rarely seen such a brilliant composition of the blue sky, the brown soil and the lush green foliage. The music is an A-plus match and the background score is particularly a treat. This was easily one of the best Hindi movies I have ever seen.
