The Film Swades by Ashutosh Gowariker Essay -- India Indian Film Movie

Swades After the international success (including an Academy Award nomination) of Lagaan (2001), writer-producer-director Ashutosh Gowariker’s follow-up is at first glance a very different film: whereas Lagaan gave new life to the Hindi â€Å"historical† film by being located entirely in 1893 and in Champaner, an imaginary Indian village, Swades opens with a shot of the globe that zooms down into contemporary Washington DC, where its hero, so unlike the earlier film’s simple villager Bhuvan, is a manager working on NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement project. Whereas Bhuvan, lacking the ability to converse in English, nevertheless has to learn the wily ways of the British colonial rulers in order to literally beat them at their own game, Mohan Bhargava (Shah Rukh Khan), the hero of Swades, is apparently a fully assimilated, literally globalized scientist who skillfully handles a press conference in high-tech, jargon-laden English. And whereas Lagaan begi ns with the imposing voice-over of Amitabh Bachchan’s immaculate Hindi, that language won’t be heard in the â€Å"Hindi† film Swades for almost ten minutes, and then as hybrid â€Å"Hinglish† spoken by Mohan and his colleague Vinod. But Swades soon draws Mohan back to his native India and to Charanpur, another imaginary village, in search of his beloved Kaveriamma (veteran actress Kishori Ballal, most notable in Kannada theatre, film, and television), the humble woman who raised him but who he has shamefully neglected following the death of his parents in a car crash when he was in college. Once the film adds a romance with Gita (Gayatri Joshi in her film debut), a village belle and schoolteacher of the feisty and independent sort, and begins to focus upon a goal (the generation o... ..., auditions, and â€Å"Social Relevance Information.† The latter consists of a summary of India’s caste system â€Å"complied only for the purpose of the film and necessarily does not coincide with any other researched sources.† Truly interested viewers might nevertheless be encouraged to seek out â€Å"other researched sources.† Works Cited Jigna Desai, â€Å"Planet Bollywood: Indian Cinema Abroad† in East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture. Ed. Shilpa Dave, LeLani Nishime, and Tasha G. Oren. New York: NYU Press, 2005. Sunaina Marr Maira, Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. London: Routledge, 2002. Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.