R Madhavan’s masterpiece gives Nambi Narayanan’s trauma the closure it deserves

Looking at Shah Rukh Khan playing Shah Rukh Khan the Star interviewing Nambi Narayanan the rocket scientist who one fine day found his world falling apart, I felt Shah Rukh has never looked so charismatic in any of his films before.

It’s the company you keep. R. Madhavan , one of the finest contemporary Indian actors, has something to say in Rocketry :The Nambi Effect. Something very disturbing and relevant about what we do to some of our greatest minds when we set our hearts into a concerted witch-hunting.

What happened to Nambi Naryanan can happen to any Indian. We still don’t know why he was declared a spy who had sold Indian space secrets to Pakistan inexchange for sex with a woman he had never met. We will never know who were the brains behind this simple godfearing nation-loving genius’s humiliation and hounding .

But at the end when the real Shah Rukh Khan bends down before the real Nambi Narayanan (and here Madhavan slips out of the picture with seamless self-effacement) the wizened wizard says, true forgiveness is only possible if those responsible for implicating him are brought to book. Until then, Nambi Narayanan’s restoration into grace is justice only half-served.

Which is not to say that Rocketry: The Nambi Effect is an incomplete film.On the contrary it is a befitting homage to a man who never asked what the country can do for him even the country treated him with savage cruelty. Madhavan who plays Nambi Narayanan not only looks uncannily similar to the real Narayanan, he makes us feel every moment of Naryanan’s humiliation, trauma and persecution. It is like being plunged into murky waters .

The biopic, a welcome relief from other biopics on gangsters and hoochsellers creates a sense of inescapable degradation of a nobe man with a brilliant mind that no amount of official apology can make up for.

As a director Madhavan gives the story of aero-scientist Nambi Narayanan the space (pun intended) it and he deserve. What we see in the film is not just one man but an entire family being crushed and destroyed under the wheels of a Kafkaesque chariot of ire.

Madhavan shoots Nambi Narayanan’s interrogation sequence in 35 mm. The screen literally shrinks in horror as the claustrophobia of the moment shrouds us in a climate of collective crime .

I remember Smita Patil in Sagar Sarhadi ’s Bazar looking straight at the audience and trapping us in the net of guilt for a crime committed against mankind. Nambi Narayanan’s brutal torture has the same effect on us. We all are to blame for what we do to the innocent when we weaponize the powerful irrationally. It is not only the scientist’s suffering that this film records. His family especially wife (Simran, excellent) suffers beyond any human justification of irrational persecution.

There is a sequence in the pouring rain, shot without break in one lengthy take, where Narayanan and his wife are literally thrown out of a moving autorickshaw as the camera pans upwards to a curled-up flag.

I spoke to the real Nambi Narayan minutes after watching this film. And he said that his suffering shown in the film was much less than what he had actually gone through. Pain and ignominy have no quantifying fidelity. Beyond a point, the suffering becomes redundant. Not in this case.

In Rocketry: The Nambi Effect Madhavan tells us why it is not okay to let suffering slide under the carpet. Nambi Nambiar’s story must be heard. This is a film that every Indian must watch. Its relevance goes way beyond the immediate.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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