When Rang De Basanti opened on 26 January 2006, I was in a theatre in Patna watching a very fidgety, very confused audience reacting as we all did to unfamiliar experiences, with embarrassment and heckling.
The entire film unfolds through the eyes of a young British documentary maker, Sue(Alice Patten) in India to shoot a documentary on the freedom struggle. The film is in two time zones. In the past , with Aamir Khan cast as Chandrashekar Azad, the Tamil star Siddharth as Bhagat Singh, Atul Kulkarni as Ramprasad Bismil, Kunal Kapoor as Ashfaqullah Khan and Sharman Joshi as Rajguru. The same actors were also seen in contemporary times grappling with the grammar of socio-political corruption.
Rang De Basanti’s theme is so excitingly original, the tonal textures are so untried and yet so visually, emotionally and aesthetically energised, you wonder how such a near-flawless merger of history and fiction could be achieved with such editing and directorial cogency.
In every sense of the word, Rang De Basanti is a triumph. Its aesthetics and characterisations fill you with amazement and elation. It’s a gloriously triumphant look at contemporary youth. And yet it audaciously takes a sweeping, arching look at history for answers to the Big Question.
Where has today’s generation gone wrong? Why is the nation so inured to corruption? And why are we so enamoured of the stagnant status quo?
Rang De Basanti dares to point fingers and tells us where we’ve gone wrong. With the deft and diligent editor(P.S Bharathi) tailoring the past to merge fluently into the present, and Binod Pradhan’s camera capturing Delhi and its surroundings as a character rather than cities, Mehra’s job of bringing the past into the same line of vision as contemporary India is rendered inevitable and unforgettable.
Looking back, Rakeysh Mehra says, “Rang De Basanti(RDB) is a younger film. But I didn’t consciously choose a subject that would be more accessible to audiences than my first film, Aks. I knew I had to make this film. Since Aks, my storytelling technique has improved. You learn from your past mistakes and new experiences. This time, I had the luxury of living with my script for four years. So many people joined me on the journey that was Rang De Basanti. It was no longer my film. When it was released, it became the audience’s film.”