SS Rajamouli is right, RRR is not a Bollywood film, although it aspires to be one

SS Rajamouli’s promotion of RRR towards the Oscars took an interesting turn last week when after the screening of RRR for the Directors Guild Of America he told the American media very categorically that RRR is not a Bollywood film.

Rajamouli said, “ _RRR_ is not a Bollywood film, it is a Telugu film from the south of India where I come from, but I use the song to move the story forward rather than stopping the film and giving you a piece of music and dance. I just use those elements to move the story forward."

This is an interesting conversation, ratifying regionalism at a time when pan-Indianization is the catch-sentiment in our cinema. The distinction that Rajamouli draws is the same one that the South often draws when it rejects Hindi as the national language. Rajamouli and his enlightened ilk won’t have their work being lumped with ‘Bollywood’.

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And the GOLDEN GLOBE AWARD FOR BEST ORIGINAL SONG Goes to #NaatuNaatu #GoldenGlobes  #GoldenGlobes2023  #RRRMovie

pic.twitter.com/CGnzbRfEPk

— RRR Movie (@RRRMovie) January 11, 2023

Fair enough. Regional pride is a good thing. But it would have been more gracious to not draw the distinction between Bollywood and regional cinema at a time when the West is celebrating Naatu Naatu as a Bollywood song.

If push comes to shove, RRR is more ‘Bollywood’ than Bollywood itself. The bromance between Ram Charan and NTR Jr is a direct echo of Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra’s Jai and Veru act in Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay. They got rid of Gabbar Singh and gang for the Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar). Bheem and Raju heckle and hector the Britishers out of India. The scale of ambition is inflated. But the essential expulsion of intruders remains unchanged.

When the West looks at all song-and-dance films from India as ‘Bollywood’ it not so much a sign of Western cultural ignorance but our own failure to be culturally specific in our cinema. No one called Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali a Bollywood film, as it was true to its West Bengal flavour from first frame to last.

Films like Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas and Rajamouli’s RRR are miraculously liberated from cultural specificity by their affinity to the song-and-dance tradition, even as they are shackled to the same tradition that India is known for in the West.

It is indeed a matter of pride that the “Bollywood” song-and-dance concept has belatedly caught on in the West. Naatu Naatu’s entry into the global club was facilitated by the Western “Bollywood” gaze. To deep-dive at this time into regionalism is like turning the clock back. When it comes to national pride we must stop looking at narrow interests. There are Bollywood composers giving interviews patting themselves on the back for their past achievements suggesting they have done better songs than Naatu Naatu.

These petty elements must realize this is no time to beat your own drum but to stand up and applaud a moment of glory for the entire country.

It is also petty to puncture the Bollywood balloon at this time when a song and a film are piggy-riding the Bollywood wave in the West. More so, when RRR has prominent Bollywood superstars Ajay Devgn and Alia Bhatt to bolster its equity. You can’t use North Indian spices in your sambhar and then say the final dish belongs only to the South.

Also, before we forget, it was the dubbed HINDI version of RRR on Netflix that got the film its global fame. Then why this nitpicking on where the film belongs?

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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