Padmaja Challakere
T
elugu movies– Sukumar’s Pushpa (2021), and S.S Rajamouli’s RRR (2022)- and one Kannada movie, KGF2 (still playing in theaters and on a record-breaking spree for crossing the Rs. 400 crore mark since its release on April 14, 2022) are Bollywood’s biggest box-office sensations of 2022, far ahead of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s HeroPanti2 and Ajay Devgn’s Runway 34. These 3 “movies from the South” are top-grossers in the Hindi-belt of India.
It would be one thing if these movies were dubbed only in Hindi for Bollywood, or if these movies were rehashed from South-Indian movies with Bollywood actors, but these Telugu movies were dubbed in multiple languages, not just in Hindi. Pushpa released on Dec 17th, 2021, in Telugu (and, later dubbed in Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, and Hindi) cost Rs. 150 crore to make and grossed Rs 350.1 crore in Week 10 of its box-office collection. Rajamouli’s RRR grossed Rs. 604.93 crore at the box-office on its 40th day. Prashant Neel’s KGF 2 grossed Rs. 50 crores on its opening day.
This unprecedented turn of events has put Bollywood on high alert. The runaway success of these “South-Indian movies” has shattered the collective illusion that ‘the lights will always turn green’ for Bollywood producers!
Some are shocked, some feel snubbed, some cannot conceal their contempt, but some are unsurprised. For Nawazuddin Siddiqui, “it is just a “phase.” For Manoj Vajpayee, the cinematic language of these films is a “lesson for Mumbai industry mainstream filmmakers on how to make mainstream cinema.” For Anil Kapoor, the spectacular success of South-Indian movies is well-deserved, and proof that the “South has always been making exceptional films, and has always been at the forefront of changing the dynamics of Indian cinema.”
Karan Johar, the Owner of Dharma Productions (the top Production House in Bollywood) can be seen nervously smiling and making appreciative speeches at the promotion events for Pushpa, RRR, and KGF 2, hoping, no doubt, to be part of the show, and hoping, no doubt, for a win-win solution! For the movie audience across India, the success of these big-screen entertainers from South India has redrawn the regional divide of North and South, but on the Bollywood Film-Producers, this has had a shattering effect.
The stupendous box-office success of Sukumar’s Pushpa (2021) Rajamouli’s RRR (2022), and now Prashant Neel’s KGF: Chapter 2 (2022) a Kannada film- is not a craze; nor just a “phase,” as Nawazuddin Siddiqui, speaking indirectly to Bollywood producers, puts it.
“It is rather the voice of the masses saying: “Do not patronize us. We do not just want another fanciful plot; we want a layered, complex story that assumes our intelligence.”
The Bollywood Star-System routine of overly slick entertainment, stock-lines, formulaic story, and its recent market-algorithm of rehashing South-Indian movies has been unraveling for a while now.
Bollywood movies have been feeling “packaged” for a long time.
“A new genre is hardening,” to borrow a phrase from James Wood: a kind of magic-realism of cinema with a blend of the quixotic and the fanatical (as in absolutism of values), with a resurgence of the heroic. A new genre that has been “pushed into velocity” by Tollywood, offering us a hero with a real woundedness but also with a self-overcoming asceticism, discipline, and a sense of responsibility. Not a messianic hero, but one ordained to dignity.
It all started with the stupendous success of Rajamouli’s Bahubali (2015) which channelled the 3-D animation and animism of Avatar to tell an 8th century mythological story about “what discipline and asceticism it takes to become a rightful heir.”
Sukumar’s Pushpa (2021) and Rajamouli’s latest film RRR (2022) are both massively funded, both showcase magnificent performances by talented actors. But what dominates is the layered cinematic language and the attentiveness to the subtext. Another signature of these movies is the cinematography, the extraordinary cinematic sequences that reject realism, and make you feel that you have jumped into a painting by Goya or Dali.
Manoj Vajpayee, speaking of Pushpa and RRR is accurate when he points to the incredible diligence and visionary talent that the composition of shots reveal:
They are unapologetic, they are passionate, and every shot they take is as if they are taking the best shot in the world…They shoot a film as they have envisioned it, they don’t dumb it down for the audience because they hold their audience in the highest regard and their passion is supreme. If you see Pushpa or RRR or KGF, the making of it – it is immaculate. Each and every frame is actually shot in a manner as if it were a life and death situation. This is what we lack. We started thinking about mainstream films only in terms of money and box office. We can’t criticise ourselves. So we differentiate them by calling them ‘alag’ (different). But it’s a lesson. This is a lesson for Mumbai industry mainstream filmmakers on how to make mainstream cinema.
Pushpa, RRR, and KGF speak to an audience that is by now well-versed in the idea of a “problematic hero” but the heroic in these movies is not just about defiance or anger or revenge. The obvious thing to say, and the reviews have said it repeatedly, is the hyper-masculinity of the hero, and all agree that the market success of these movies will possibly “bring back sexism and “toxic-masculinity.”
Rather, what these movies show, instead, is a vulnerability, that galvanizes an audacious, hysterical fallout in an encounter with the sadistic violence of the powerful. The hero, his love-interest, his family, and friends are all pitted against the destructiveness of exploitation and violence whether it is smugglers of sandalwood in Pushpa or the British colonialists in RRR. The hero’s position, in such a context, is masochistic in so much as what the hero controls or can control and determine is his pain. These movies ask: “What does responsibility or irresponsibility look like in such a context of a post-modern feudalism?”
While performance of strength, and yes, muscle, is significant in this battle, these movies show a preoccupation with woundedness, with a masochistic heroism, and a warrior-style self-overcoming.
The woundedness of the hero comes from poisoned circumstances, from unspeakable realities, and both the wounding and the self-overcoming of the hero speaks to the audience, and performs, in a movie like Rajamouli’s RRR, a sort of Hindu-cultural re-education. But even a triumphant movie like RRR exposes the long shadow of abuse and violence. Charges of “toxic-masculinity” are too easy, too lazy an accusation to fling at them. I wonder if these movies have been watched, or how they have been watched.
The working-class hero is able only to direct or control his torment which creates a masochistic subjectivity that the audience identifies with. The endurance or pleasure of this masochistic subjectivity outlasts the exhaustion of sadistic violence of the villains and rulers. But the suffering or the grime and torment or the cost of this heroism is not slick and leaves a residue the audience is not be able to wash off.
In Pushpa: The Rise, Pushpa (fire, not flower) is the illegitimate son of a Brahmin who is cast out and deprived of his father’s name. By the end of the film, Pushpa seizes power, moving up from coolie who transports red sandalwood for smugglers to becoming the head of the sandalwood smuggling syndicate in the Rayalaseema district of Andhra Pradesh.
Pushpa is played by Allu Arjun–a handsome and talented actor, known for his magnetism and dancing talent, but in this film, we see him in a disguise.Allu Arjun not only sports a limp by way of an Oedipal handicap, but also a drooping shoulder. This “disguise” is not about darker-flesh make-up or what the reviews have called a “rustic” and “rugged” look. Allu Arjun’s look is not a disguise; it is rather the portrait of an injury. The disfigurement of the hero in Pushpa was intelligible to millions of fans of this movie.
Pushpa’s dragging walk accounts for the extraordinary appeal of the Srivalli song sung by Sid Sriram “Choope Bangaram Aayane Srivalli” because even in the song-sequences, the hero’s wound, his limp, is not escaped away. While the lyrics express the joyful themes of love, the hero is seen limping sideways clumsily. The effect is eerie. Pushpa’s limping, dragging walk spoke to the imagination of millions of fans across India, and is now trending as a new dance-move!
The imagined audience for these movies is not the metropolitan middle-class, even less the NRI Indian. Nor is Sukumar’s Pushpa a rousing example of a people-film or an issue film that teaches something. It is mega- entertainer, but it is responsive to its audience, one we would invoke as “the masses”- people on the other side of class-apartheid. The movie is timely, ambitious and shows faith in the imagination of the audience to press against the dissonance and the irony in the film. The audience is not made comfortable in this film, and that is its achievement. Pushpa does not patronize its audience.
If the success of Rajamouli’s RRR resembles that of a gladiatorial sport, and feels like a Spielberg mega-movie, Pushpa: The Rise is a different kind of Telugu movie, more complex.
Pushpa tells a story of love in conflict, of the kind that Telugu cinema does with originality, and operatic intensity. Pushpa dares to tell an archetypal story without distorting the complexity out of it. The movie makes us ask: What happens to human nature when forces of corruption, greed, and violence become unnaturally ruthless? Can the violent who hold legitimate power be made to suffer correction? Can revenge be a revolutionary process? And what is the cost of revenge? And, what happens to love? Mainly, what counts as love? These are some questions the film raises at a symbolic level.
The camera, wielded by Polish cameraman Miroslaw Kuba Brozek, frames the town, and the people, in a way that shows us a world there. Even the red sandalwood trees logged and smuggled to Japan become a cinematic image, like a sunset, something transformed, destroyed by human beings.
The crisp expressive dialogue and the Chittoor dialect and the voice-over narration are part of the rich cinematic language of this film, which engages active audience attention by splitting the unity between soundtrack and image (in a Godardian fashion), a divergence that is put to great effect in the song-sequences.
The cinematic possibilities of beauty are explored even in the scenes of violence, as when the sandalwood logs are thrown into the river in a detonation of red, just seconds before the police arrive, and the gates of the 500-year-old “Rayal Cheruvu” reservoir is opened and two truckloads of sandalwood worth Rs 200 crore are dumped into it.
Pushpa: The Rise fuses two different strands together: a story of reckoning and a love story. The revenge thriller is contained in a forbidden love story that is shown to us rather than just told as a background story. The first love story we see is that of Pushpa’s mother for Molleti Venkatraman, a married Brahmin man, a love which runs into difficulties right away, and into even greater difficulties when Venkataraman dies.
Typically, when Indian cinema does a love-story, the passion of love is happily imagined- there is no guilt, no ambivalence, no shame, no regret, no layer of irony. But in this film, the love-story too is made uncomfortable—Pushpa must pay for Srivalli’s smile, for the first kiss, (which, as it turns out, he does not get), and it is all a misunderstanding, but it is still astonishing. While the film is not cynical about love, we are being made comfortable with something uncomfortable: a purchased smile and a kiss. Something is being communicated about a sense of depression that characterizes our age.
Sukumar’s Pushpa questions or intervenes in its own language and makes the audience into active viewers. A look, a dialogue, a gesture, invites different interpretations, as does the film’s use of a voice-over narrator manipulates our response to the scene. The movie’s intervention of its own cinematic language is not done with a smug comic irony, but in a tragi-comic way, as if gesturing to the brokenness of language.
Rashmika Mandanna, who plays Srivalli, has a role beyond being Pushpa’s love interest.
At one point in the film, Srivalli, is put in an impossible position where her only options are either to allow her father to be killed (because he was forced to become a police-informer) or, be raped by Jalli Reddy, the son of the boss of the smuggling syndicate. She considers her options carefully; we see her thinking while she is dressing. Next, we see her convincing Pushpa that she loves him, makes her love for him manifest, and asks if it is possible that he can reciprocate her love before she must go to Jalli Reddy. Soon, Jalli Reddy is ambushed by Pushpa and Srivalli, and has every bone in his body broken, and becomes another antagonist that Pushpa will later need to deal with.
The violence in Pushpa is more about the inescapability of violence when all that matters is the caste-system, the rule of money and power, and the criminality needed to maximize both.
Rajamouli’s RRR (2022) with its unforgettable performances by Ram Charan and N.T Rama Rao Jr and inspired by Attenborough’s Gandhi and by Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave tells the story of British colonialism in India as one of masochistic bondage of the colonized and the sadism of the imperialist British rule, one in which compassion or kindness plays no part. It might be said that RRR is full of inhuman stories about male masochism in early 20th century British India. To achieve his quest for independence that Ram has promised his father (played by Ajay Devgan), Ram has to play the Imperialist Man, the pitiless British police-officer. It is an exceptionally bold and violent story not only of British colonialism but of a friendship in conflict.
RRR focuses specifically the violence of British colonialism in India and presents the sufferings of colonialism in an exaggerated, theatrical way. RRR tells the story of how the army of the British government supressed the tribal uprising against British atrocities in the Visakhapatnam region in 1922, with extreme brutality. In telling this story of colonial sadistic violence, RRR tells the story of the courage of the Rampa rebellion, also known as the Manyam rebellion, led by the Telugu freedom-fighter Alluri Seetharam Raju. In telling us the story of what civilized masculinity looks like in the context of brutal colonial violence, RRR seeks to insert itself in the tradition of patriotic movies like Kranti, Lagaan, Mangal Pandey.
RRR remixes or cites scenes familiar to us and recodes them. For instance, RRR melds and collages the famous bridge scene in Attenborough’s Gandhi in which Ram and Bheem- friends from the opposite sides of the colonial divide–come together briefly to rescue a young boy from a fire. Jr. NTR, (N.T Rama Rao’s grandson plays) Bheem, the Gond tribal who will take the fight to the British, and Ram Charan plays the fearsome police-officer whose goal is to capture Bheem and hand him over to the British administration. They come together in the bridge-scene that opens the movie when they must hold each other from either ends of a rope from across the bridge to pull out a burning child from the river.
However, RRR does a Tarantino-like take on violence in its representation of British brutality without letting historical accuracy get in the way. No doubt, violence was an essential feature of the British rule in India but the British brutality in RRR includes the British soldiers bashing the skulls of Indians because bullets are too expensive to be used on them, summary executions, being blown up by canons, and also an extended lynching scene which take us to into all the scenes of violence and pillage and flogging during slave-trade in Leopold’s Congo and scenes of slavery in the American South, even though historical evidence would indicate that in India, flogging was banned by Lord William Bentwick in 1835.
The most savage scene in RRR is the 7-minute sadomasochistic flogging scene where Bheem’s muscular masochism becomes a mode of resistance. Bheem is at the gallows; his hands tied tight to the scaffold while a rawhide whip is brought down on his back again and again as the welts rise and blood flows. The one holding the whip is his friend in Police-Officer uniform: Ram. The goal is to bring Bheem to his knees, and the whip comes down harder and harder on Bheem until so much blood that it runs down his thighs into rivulets into the ground towards the crowd watching passively. But Bheem refuses to bring his knees to the ground.
The relish with which Ram whips his brother-friend must be a tragic display of the conflicted emotions of his service to colonial ideology. But for the demonic woman-the Governor’s wife- around whose wishes the whipping scene is organized –there is “hardly enough blood”.. She needs to see “more blood” and throws a nail-studded ox-whip with the power to rip wood into shreds. The wife of the British Governor is played by the Irish actress, Alison Doody, of the James Bond fame.
Conquering and dividing myself, I watched this scene squirming. But squirming was not the only reaction to this scene. Twitter is rife with accounts of “being pumped” by this scene in “jaw-dropping” RRR where Bheem does not get down on his knees and defeats British Colonialism.”RRR wants us to see both Ram and Bheem as neo-ascetics, as acrobats of a new asceticism that can re-train us. In the final 20 minutes, Ram and Bheem do, indeed, turn into mythological Rama and Bheema, whose divine energy destroys the armoury of the British tyrants to the sound of verses from the Bhagavad Gita.
In contrast, in Pushpa: The Rise, the humanity of the characters, even that of the villains, is important, and the audience is not browbeaten into any lesson: historical or mythological. However, in the second half of the movie, Pushpa hardens into Pushparaj. When his half-brother’s insult scuttles his marriage to Srivalli, Pushpa’s defiance hardens and he turns violently energetic, now the hero of a different movie.
In the final scene, the hero gets to marry the girl of his dreams, and everything has been made ready for him. The wedding guests have arrived, but the bridegroom is missing. Pushpa is seen in confrontation with a psychotic police-Inspector, who is played by Fahadh Faasil. Refusing the police-inspector’s equation between “brand-value” and status, Pushpa says that his honour is the blood that runs in his veins, and that alone is his “brand.” Then, he strips the police-inspector of his uniform, so that he too can learn by his own logic that in a context of no mutual respect, we are all equally nobodies, when stripped of our status.
But Pushpa, in his rage, is doubling up on his own wounds. Pushpa shows up at his wedding, stumbling, like a drunk. His right hand is bloody and bandaged. Pushpa is now a changed man, in a state of narcotic slumber. When his bride asks him if his fights are finally finished, Pushpa responds: “No, they’ve just begun!” Perhaps, that is why “Thaggede Le” — “I will not back down” — is the motto of this film.
The complexity of form and subtext in both Pushpa and RRR is an important marker in the rise of cinema from the South. It is not just about the box-office success of Tollywood or the tons of money they have made. It is about how they have changed the image bank of what a blockbuster can achieve, for millions upon millions of people, a vast audience.
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Padma Challakere teaches high-school English in St.Paul, MN. She has taught literature and writing in liberal arts colleges in Minnesota for two decades. In the last few years, she has published essays in Counter Punch, The Hindu, The Deccan Herald, and The Wire on topics such as the Afghanistan war novel, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Kishori Amonkar, V.S Naipaul, and Bret Easton Ellis.
More by Padma Challakere in The Beacon
What a compelling review! I don’t feel I qualify to make a comment about this expert opinion. The intricacies of the narratives, the cinematic techniques, the play of the voice- over narration, acting, dialogues, nothing has escaped your sharp observation. Incredible ma’am!