The Tiger’s Roar: The Crossover Success of S. S. Rajamouli’s RRR (Preview)
by Darragh O’Donoghue

One of the most gratifying outcomes of the past year in film has been the crossover success of S. S. Rajamouli’s South Indian action fantasy RRR. Commercial Indian films have long been popular outside India, featuring in weekly national top ten charts across Asia, Europe, North America, and Australasia in particular. This popularity, however, is almost entirely limited to the large Indian diaspora in these regions. Self-proclaimed cinephiles in the West tend not to watch commercial Indian films. They are not reviewed in cinephile publications like the magazine you are now holding. They do not appear in end-of-year ten-best lists. They are not screened in art-house cinemas, except as part of specialist “Indian” or “South Asian” festivals aimed at particular ethnic communities. Academic interest in commercial Indian cinema is stronger but focuses on the films as anthropological artifacts rather than as cultural products or, heaven forbid, instances of auteurial expression. Despite occasional break-through successes, such as the Oscar nominations for Mother India (1957) and Lagaan (2001); despite the engaged enthusiasm of filmmakers such as Baz Luhrmann; despite the appearance of superstar Shah Rukh Khan on David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction program; despite all this, Western cinephiles have remained largely indifferent to popular Indian cinema.

This may be because their conception of this cinema—one generated by several distinctive state film industries within the massive Indian subcontinent, from the Punjab in the North to Tamil Nadu in the South—is formed by a caricature of the dominant Hindi-language cinema made in Mumbai, popularly known as “Bollywood.” This caricature derives not from an actual experience of watching Bollywood films, but from pastiches and parodies of a few elements (collective bhangra dancing, saris, bindis, and cornfields) used in sports ceremonies, advertising, sketch shows, and television idents. Westerners prefer to see India through a white Western lens through films by white British directors—Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) or Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), winners of eight Oscars each—or through works about the British Raj, the direct rule of India by the British Crown 1857–1947, centering on British protagonists, such as David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984) and of the internationally popular TV series The Jewel in the Crown (1984).

RRR seems to have changed all that. Whether its crossover success is a freak phenomenon or will serve as a “gateway drug” to other popular Indian films as argued by Variance Films distributor Dylan Marchetti, remains to be seen. It is not RRR’s impressive statistics that count—entering the U.S. and U.K. top ten releases in its first week of release; earning $140 million worldwide; racking up countless downloads on Netflix. The same could be said of many Indian films that have been ignored by fans of European art films. More indicative of cultural crossover are the positive reviews in influential publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker; their ranking in end-of-year lists in influential journals like Sight and Sound (which hadn’t even bothered to review the film on its original release); the recognition granted by bodies such as the National Board of Review and the Golden Globes; the screenings in art-house venues such as the BFI Southbank in London or the American Cinematheque in LA. True cinephilic acceptance of Indian commercial cinema will be confirmed when its directors and stars are regularly given the same space in magazines like Cahiers du cinéma, Sight and Sound, or Cinema Scope granted filmmakers from, say, South Korea, France, or Hollywood and when home entertainment labels like The Criterion Collection and Masters of Cinema release well-sourced and well-researched editions of classic and contemporary commercial Indian films. Other iterations of popular Asian cinema have been well-served in recent years—think of the deluxe Blu-ray treatment lavished on Hong Kong martial arts and Japanese samurai films—so this should not be an impossible dream…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2