DesiDabba - Boss, Thoda Sa Roomani Ho Jaye

9X was showing Roja today. I came across it while channel-flicking as usual and for a split-second wondered which patriotic event we were commemorating.

Roja, released in 1992 has come to be clubbed in that genre of semi-patriotic movies that grace our television sets every Independence Day/ Republic Day/ Gandhi Jayanti. The other favorites being Karma, Bombay (?), Bhagat Singh (both movies) and the occasional Mother India.

Grave mistake, I believe. A classic case of being successful for all the wrong reasons. Roja wasn’t a patriotic story at all. Well yes, it had some nationalistic flavour, given the setting and situation. But it was the story of a young girl facing difficult circumstances and how she dealt with them.

If there ever was an example of ‘Lost in Translation’ it has to be this movie. I’ve had the good fortune to watch the movie in both languages (Tamizh and Hindi) and be able to discern the differences they caused. The same story told with the same film but in two different languages has caused very different impressions. I’m rather partial to the Tamizh version (the original in my mind since Hindi was the dubbed version) which is think is a far more sensitive and original story.

Roja is a young girl who grows up in a small village in Tamil Nadu and typically knows no language other than her mother tongue and has had no real exposure to the outside world. Quite literally a wide-eyed innocent, a babe in the woods. The movie follows her abrupt uprooting from her safe world ensconced in Southern sun and catapults her into the state of matrimony in New Delhi. Almost immediately she finds herself in Kashmir, towing along with Rishi, husband of a week, whom she has just recently managed to accept. Her link to this strange new world is the handsome young stranger that she is just getting used to thinking as husband.

And then suddenly, Rishi is kidnapped by militants, demanding the release of one of their captured men in return for Rishi’s freedom. Roja, alone in the cold confines of Kashmir, unable to understand what the newspapers say, unable to understand the language or make herself understood to the police and the military that takes over Rishi’s case…what does she do?

A particularly noteworthy scene that brings out the essence of the story in the Tamizh movie is Roja’s meeting with the cops and then the armyman. The Hindi-speaking cops have no idea what the hysterical young woman in a saree is screaming, no clue that she was present on the scene of the kidnapping. All they’re able to offer is advice to go home and wait. Emotions can transcend words and make themselves understood…seem to be Mani Ratnam’s lesson to us all in this scene and ones that follow. Roja’s pain and her steely determination flash through when she declares that she will not leave Kashmir until her husband is found…nor stop hounding them for news.

When she asks for the captured terrorist to be freed to bring back her husband and is told that it is not in the national interest to do so…

If this were a minister’s son or daughter, would you tell them the same thing? Is my husband’s life any less valuable than that of a minister’s son or daughter?

…Roja asks and her point is well-taken.

There is a reason this movie was called Roja and not Kidnapped or Fight against Terrorism. This is a story about Roja, not about Rishi or the Kashmir situation.

The Hindi version sacrifices Roja’s linguistic dilemma and loses the essence of the rose, so to speak. Did you know Roja means ‘rose’ in Tamizh? If you didn’t….remember when Rishi looks out of the window of his locked room in the terrorist hideout….in the distance are the snow-capped mountains and right beneath the sill, a red rose blooms out of the snow. Would you understand the poignancy of that scene? Or understand why it leads into the song Kadal rojaavei (Roja jaaneman)? If you didn’t know, my dear non-Tamizh speaking friends, I’m afraid that the beauty of this movie was totally lost on you.

Arvind Swamy probably never looked as good as he did in this movie. His debut movie Thalapathy received rave reviews but he was still the young (and slightly under-nourished) debutant who shone in the star Rajnikant’s reflected glory. His later movies like Bombay showed a much podgier and definitely-not-eye candy Swamy to the unimpressed Bollywood audience. Which might be why he retired from Hindi cinema soon after to seek his fortunes in the South industry. But Roja was the showcasing of a classic good-looking South Indian man.

Roja was also the movie that made A.R.Rahman a household name in India. His earlier offerings like Duet (Anjali, Anjali, pushpanjali…) were nothing more than a build-up to the grand orchestra presenting his work to the entire nation. Roja of course, was followed by a very successful Bombay and many others thereafter.

Roja was neither Mani Ratnam’s first movie, nor his last. But it appears to have been a memorable milestone since it earmarked his moving from ‘talented Southern director’ to ‘Indian director of acclaim’.

Madhoo, the rose of Roja herself disappeared into oblivion after this movie. Just as well, perhaps since the audience will always remember her as the fresh-faced innocent rose of a movie that was neither her first nor her last…only her most memorable.

Roja then, neither the first nor the last in anyway, remains still, a single cherished rose in the garden of good cinema.