'Rang De Basanti': Rewatching the revolution that still resonates

The film inspired many young people in the early 2000s, but rewatching it now seems to only inspire nostalgia

The 2006 Hindi film, ‘Rang De Basanti’ (RDB), directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, opens with a carefully placed factoid. When the film’s narrator, Sue McKinley (Alice Patten), a young London-based filmmaker, meets her producers to discuss a potential film on Indian anti-colonial revolutionaries, such as Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Sukhdev, Rajguru, and others, they tell her that they have no budget for it. They inform an increasingly frustrated Sue that they could probably find some money if her film were on M K Gandhi: “Gandhi sells!” one of them says. Gandhi has indeed proven to be cinematic gold, evidenced by his 1982 Oscar-winning biopic, directed by Richard Attenborough.

 

 

However, Singh, hanged by the British at the age of 23 years on 23 March 1931, also continues to be popular, both in the public discourse and cinema. It is, in fact, Singh’s popularity and repeated on-screen representation that allowed RDB to repackage him for a receptive contemporary audience. Historian Kama Maclean, in her book ‘A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text’ (2015), writes that despite the paucity of academic research into the revolutionary activities of Singh, Azad, and their comrades of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA), they enjoyed “extraordinary popularity in popular culture.”

 

In “colonial India, this was most evident in proscribed literature and posters, and in contemporary India, in film, posters, comics and bazaar histories,” writes Mclean, recalling a visit to Amritsar in Punjab in 2007, soon after the release of RDB, and “noticing pictures of Bhagat Singh everywhere in the town’s bazaars.” Historian Chris Moffat, in his book ‘India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh’ (2018), writes: “Bhagat Singh is frequently invoked across contradictory ideological projects… from the Hindu right to the Maoist left, Sikh separatists in Punjab to secular rationalists in Tamil Nadu, the army in India to pacifists in Pakistan.”

 

The Hindi film industry has played a significant role in making the myth popular. Since India’s independence in 1947, Singh has been the subject of several biopics, which have repeatedly staged key events from his life and the activities of the HSRA revolutionaries. A central event in these filmic narratives is the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar on 13 April 1919, where “more than 1,500 unarmed children, women, men and the elderly were shot dead and more than 600 injured” under the orders of General R.E.H Dyer. The British establishment has staunchly refused to issue a formal apology for the massacre, with even far-right politician Nigel Farage recently referring to it. As several historians have noted, the massacre turned many Indian youths in the 1920s towards armed revolution.

 

The other incidents are the train robbery near the town of Kakori in Uttar Pradesh in 1925, the protests against the Simon Commission in 1927, and assault and murder of independence movement leader Lala Lajpat Rai by colonial police officers during the protests, the assassination of police officer John P. Saunders by Singh, Azad and others on 17 December 1928, and the unique protest staged by Singh and his comrade Batukeshwar Dutt, who threw non-lethal smoke bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi on 8 April 1929. Singh and Dutt intended to get arrested and use their trial to spread awareness about their movement. On 13 December 2023, two men — Manoranjan D and Sagar Sharma — staged a similar protest by throwing smoke bombs in the Lok Sabha to highlight problems such as inflation, the situation in Manipur, and joblessness, demonstrating, yet again, the continued emotional appeal of Singh and his comrades.

 

The other narrative signifiers of Singh’s cinematic afterlives include the torture of the revolutionaries in British prisons, the hunger strike by Singh and his comrades, resulting in the death from starvation of 24-year-old Jatin Das on 13 September 1929, and the final martyrdom by hanging of Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru, often accompanied by the song “Mera rang de basanti chola…”, attributed to another revolutionary, Ram Prasad Bismil. It is, in fact, the repeated and ritualistic representation of these historical and mythical events on screen that allows RDB to repackage them, using stylized cinematography and electronic background music, for its own ideological purposes. As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues in a 2019 essay, Hindi cinema, like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, works through repetition, and with recognition of plot markers being a key aspect of film-watching pleasure.

 

RBD follows Sue, who arrives in India to make her film on Singh. Her Indian colleague, Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) introduces her to a group of Delhi University students — DJ (Aamir Khan), Karan (Siddharth), Sukhi (Sharman Joshi), and Aslam (Kunal Kapoor), as well as her boyfriend, Ajay Singh (R. Madhavan), who is an air force officer. Sonia’s friends are disillusioned with the lack of opportunities and endemic corruption in India, and they spend their days and nights partying and having fun. Sue convinces them to act in her film, with DJ playing Azad, Karan playing Singh, Sukhi playing Rajguru, Aslam playing Ashfaqulla Khan, and Sonia playing Duwgawati Devi. A right-wing student politician, Lakshman (Atul Kulkarni), plays the role of Bismil. As the shooting progresses, the group learns more about the revolutionaries, and their attitude towards society starts to change.

 

Ajay and Sonia are engaged, but before they can get married, he dies when his fighter jet crashes. It is revealed that the reason for the crash is corruption in the acquisition of parts for fighter jets; however, the defence minister V.K. Shastri (Mohan Agashe) refuses to take any responsibility. When Ajay’s mother, Aishwarya (Waheeda Rehman), and his friends organise a protest, they are violently removed by the police on the instructions of the defence minister. With no other option, DJ, Karan, and Lakshman assassinate Shastri. Then, they take over a radio station and start broadcasting their views. The security forces storm the radio station, and all of them are killed, but they inspire young people all over the country.

 

Even beyond the diegetic space, the film did prove inspirational for many young people. I was an undergraduate student when RDB released, and I remember how many of my peers were enthused by it. Computer engineer and political activist Ankit Lal, who worked for several years with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), writes in a 2016 article how RDB inspired him to join the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement in 2011. The IAC was formed by activists against purported corruption in former prime minister Manmohan Singh’s government and eventually led to the formation of the AAP.

 

Though RDB faced some initial challenges with censorship, the Indian government eventually selected it as its official entry to the 79th Academy Awards in 2007. An article published last year claimed: “We are never going to see another ‘Rang De Basant’”, arguing that the conditions of filmmaking and reception had changed significantly over the past two decades. What remains unchanged, however, is the endemic corruption in India, highlighted in recent weeks by the leak of Neet examination papers. Rewatching the film now perhaps evokes only nostalgia about a lost moment of political enthusiasm.   

 

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Uttaran Das Gupta is an Indian writer and journalist