A.R. Rahman is our best bet yet for an Indian win at the Oscars (other than the honorary Oscar conferred on Satyajit Ray for Lifetime Achievement in 1992). And there is no reason why the same qualities that fetched him the Golden Globe should not find him holding the statuette at the 81st Academy Awards. But as the heave to get him there gathers momentum, it may be worth a pause to remind ourselves that the Oscars are not to Indian cinema what they are to Hollywood.
An Oscar nomination and win belong arguably to the best that Hollywood has to offer in terms of artistic merit. But shift location to India, and a rash of mismatches surfaces. It takes a quick-fix acculturation into a high brow Anglo Saxon way of seeing for an Indian film to make Oscar sense to the invited voting group of the Academy. The operative barrier is `sensibility.' Bollywood and Kollywood are replete with instances of Oscar aspirants raring, and failing, to make it over and across the sensibility threshold. There is nothing obvious about the Oscar needing to be the holy-grail quest, or test, of Indian cinema. It really speaks to another context and culture and idiom and ethos. True, the top end of the Indian box office has, for long now, coveted this as the ultimate prize. And the urge got worse with a process of globalisation that somehow neatly slips into Americanisation. As filmic themes and concerns moved metro-ward and into the multiplex cinema mould, the traditional `B' and `C' circuits of distribution were destroyed and along with them the target specificity of the semi-urban and rural viewer. What is left has often been called NRI cinema, which strives to share a seamless appetite with British or American audiences, yet remains an ethnically separate category from their perspective. Of course, we are discussing the mainstream and the popular here, not the profound or the experimental, which would take us to Cannes or Berlin or Venice or Locarno or Pusan. Even these festivals of the best of world cinema have recently been co-opted by the Hollywood brand. They have become more de rigueur than alternative, as the presence of Aishwarya Rai as jury member at Cannes in 2003 reminded us. The makeover to meet the Hollywoodian sensibility entails a strange retrofit of the Indian stereotype. The song picturisation, our unique and surreal contribution to the celluloid form, has to be dropped. The dialogue has to be couched in a language they would understand, not necessarily as we would speak it. The cultural markers and references must be instantly communicable or neutralised, so that they don't hinder the narrative. In short, a lot we would consider `the given' in our cumulative cinematic experience needs to be reinvented and explained across the divide. And it doesn't help to notice that no such eagerness to be easily understood comes our way from there. We are expected to, and do, take the extra effort to crack the language and the codes, although even after several decades of a Hollywood diet this writer must admit to finding it difficult to follow all of the dialogues in a typical American film. But that seems to be the price to pay as the world's biggest, and most varied, cinema goes chasing after the world's richest, and more or less homogenised, cinema. It hit us monumentally way back in 1983 with Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. The film no doubt deserved each of the major eight Oscars it bagged that year (including for best picture, director, and actor), limiting competition of the stature of Steven Spielberg's `ET' to just four wins in the sound and visual department. But all that India had to do with this achievement was provide the eponymous subject of the biopic and money as co-producer. A western crew and westernised cast and mindset took care of the rest. It could not be otherwise, seemed the accepted assumption, if the film was to be in the reckoning for the Academy awards. But there was an uneasy sense that, in the process, something was being cannibalised somewhere. Six years later, not so charitable cine buffs were talking about how Mira Nair had `attenboroughed' Kamatipura, Mumbai's red light district and her setting for her cast of real life street children in Salaam Bombay. That film, which sought out the city's underbelly but didn't look like it belonged there, comes closest to being the precursor of Slumdog Millionaire. It made it as far as nomination to both the Golden Globe and the Oscars of 1989 in the Foreign Language category. Slumdog Millionaire has its awkward share of conflict of sensibility moments. But in its hybrid wantonness, its unapologetic overture to formulaic Bollywood, its volatile mix of childlike and aborted innocence, it seems more homegrown. Simon Beaufoy (screenplay) deftly herds disparate elements forward together as his "moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on," perhaps just a shade too fast. Anthony Dod Mantle's supple camera follows, but even in the fleeting time he is allowed to dwell on his material, invests it with mood and meaning. The vibrant faces of slum children as they rummage through their lives with gusto rather than self-pity stay etched in the mind, vivid and stark, long after the plot has moved on. Excellent casting by Loveleen Tandon gets selective play as some characters are less fleshed out than others; and the difference tells, as with the police officer, played by Irfan Khan, who seems to get left behind somewhere along the way. But British actor Dev Patel's understated and heart-warming performance as the protagonist Jamal in the `Kaun Banega Crorepathi' hot seat sets aside any quibble about whether someone from India couldn't have handled the role instead. His delicate, at-a-loss look is a clinching counterfoil to the steely determination of one who knows what he knows, and wants. Anil Kapoor breezes through his role as the savvy TV show host with panache. But they are all ultimately, and efficiently, the handiwork of the director, Danny Boyle, who adds a bit here and removes a bit there as he churns his cast and plot in the melting pot. The one strong independent element that, in separate but equal measure, adds to the feisty tone and tenor of the film is A.R. Rahman's musical score. We have known Rahman long enough to know not to expect him to repeat himself. Not only does he not, there is no obvious chunk of music in the main body of the film we can put to a typical Rahman test. As the background musical track segues into atonal musical effect and back into strains of a tune, it provides, alternatingly, lilt and gravitas to the visual mood and action. One stretch alone lingers long enough to foot tap to a leisurely rap accompanying the young siblings on the train taking them away from their tormentors into the magical world of the Taj in Agra. It is a score that elevates the film without drawing attention to itself. And if you are missing the Rahman you want in all this, it comes like an assertive coda at the end of the film with the catchy `Jai ho.' Even if the credit titles rolling on that robust song and mass dance sequence is a bit distracting, it is a fitting Bollywoodian finale for the film which might just make the cross-over breakthrough. As for Rahman, an Oscar for his score in Slumdog Millionaire will certainly add to his lustre. But so much he has composed is already on par and some, as in Jodha Akbar, even better that without it he would not be any less sparkling. For the little maestro, the Oscars may be a defining moment, but not a definitive reckoning of his musical genius. http://www.hindu.com/2009/01/21/stories/2009012155571100.htm
