Sure, George Washington was a good war strategist, but could he pick up a motorcycle by one wheel and swing it around in battle? Or how about if Martin Luther King Jr. had busted Malcolm X out of prison by carrying him on his shoulders and dodging gunfire while hopping across rooftops, and together they took out J. Edgar Hoover? These events could not, and never did happen, but would be pretty cool to see in a big-budget historical fantasy action flick.
RRR, however, does exactly these types of things with two of India’s national heroes. What? You haven’t seen RRR yet? It’s only one of the top-grossing Indian films in the world. This Telugu language musical action film set in 1920 is a fantastical account of a fictional friendship between two real-life Indian revolutionaries, Alluri Sitarama Raju from the present-day state of Andhra Pradesh, and Komaram Bheem from the present-day state of Telangana, both of whom separately took up arms to fight the British Raj.
The film, directed by S.S. Rajamouli, plays with the question, what if these two revolutionaries had met, became best bros, and worked together? In the refreshingly unpredictable plot, Bheem (played by N.T. Rama Rao Jr.) is a Gond tribesman who sets out to rescue Malli (Twinkle Sharma), a young village girl who is kidnapped in the film’s opening scene by the evil British Governor Buxton (Ray Stevenson) as a gift for his coldhearted wife Catherine (Alison Doody) because of the child’s beautiful singing voice.1
On his journey from the wilds of the Indian city, Hyderabad, to the British Indian capital of New Delhi to rescue Malli, Bheem meets an unexpected obstacle in Raju (Ram Charan), a dedicated Indian officer serving in the British army. Catherine hand picks Raju to track down Bheem and prevent him from rescuing Malli.
Our two impassioned action heroes “meet cute” by joining forces to rescue a small boy from a fiery death after a train derailment, neither badass having a clue of the other badass’s true identity. Their friendship forms the film’s main plot.
But the film’s real enemy is the British Raj, from the antagonist Governor Buxton all the way down to British soldiers patrolling the streets of Delhi. I’ve never seen this many white people in an Indian film, and all but one of them (Olivia Morris as Bheem’s love interest Jennifer) is portrayed as 100% evil. They’re like Nazis in an Indiana Jones movie.
This blockbuster’s title started as a placeholder while the project was in development and is short for Rajamouli, Rama and Ram (the director and two stars). When it was finally released, the producers kept things simple and stuck with the three-letter title because it had become so widely known.2 RRR began streaming on Netflix in May, where it instantly shot to the top as the number one non-English film worldwide.3 It held that position for nine weeks and was in Netflix’s top ten simultaneously in 62 countries.4 These are astronomical numbers for an Indian film. So, what explains its enormous popularity?
As a white-presenting but part Native American man from the West, I have come to expect that, understandably, many Indian readers will look upon my observations with a jaundiced eye, probably thinking, What are white people doing to fetishize us now? It’s a justifiable position.
Come what may, I’ve written quite a lot about India over the years, having visited there many times, as well as married into, and divorced out of, a conservative Hindu family in the U.S. I continue to practice my Hindu faith and explore Indian cultures along with my son. I’m actively involved in my local Bengali community, where I remain as easy to spot as I was while I lived in Kolkata as a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar three years ago.5
After my first viewing of RRR, my jaw was on the floor. I was aghast. I was apoplectic, but happily apoplectic. Is there a word for that? My 11-year-old son coined one for me: hapoplectic. I’ve been using it ever since. The reasons are simple. I’ve seen plenty of lower budget films made within India, for Indian audiences, about Indian freedom fighters, but we Westerners mostly know about India’s Independence Movement through Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Mahatma Gandhi, a figure synonymous with nonviolent resistance and peaceful protest. Or, Western audiences are fed, and easily buy, the Victorian-era propaganda that the British Empire was a force of democratic goodness that built India’s famous railway network for a grateful native population. We just cannot imagine Indians as violent revolutionaries.
Despite its TV-MA Netflix rating, I wanted my son to watch it with me for my second viewing. Along the way, I paused and regularly dropped in a few footnotes. When an angry group of protestors attack a police station just outside of Delhi demanding the release of a captured freedom fighter, the worried police superintendent is on the phone calling for military backup. I told my son about the Trivandrum (in the present-day state of Kerala) police station attack of 1908, in which these exact events had happened.6
I pointed out that the angry protestors are depicted as a cross-section of Indian civilians, including Hindus and Muslims, united in their anger against the British. This messaging recurs throughout the film, thumbing its nose at the Hindu nationalist Hindutva wave sweeping Indian entertainment these days, in which the bad guys are all evil Muslims.7
When Raju and Bheem meet for the first time on the bridge, I pointed out to my son that the marching protesters in the background were chanting “Vande Mataram,” a resistance practice that started in Calcutta.8 Later in the film, Bheem is publicly flogged. I stopped to discuss the real-life roots of that punishment under British Indian law, and that in Calcutta the British had even legalized public floggings of minors.9
My favorite moment in the film is when Bheem sings for inspiration during a pause in his brutal beating, and in this moment is overcome with the realization that Indians already have a powerful weapon at their disposal: they can sing! This might seem laughable when fighting against the then-strongest military force on Earth, but I paused the movie to tell my son about all the banned songs written by Calcutta dramatists in plays that mythologized great warriors of the past, just as RRR does, and that those songs indeed served as a way of unifying the masses while terrifying the Raj.10
That scene made me, well, you know, hapoplectic; not because I hate the British or want my son to hate the British. I was happy that this important part of India’s Independence Movement, the other side of the Gandhi coin, finally made its way into pop culture outside of India. It’s a history that needs to be known about by non-Indians, regardless of whether they approve of armed insurrectionists fighting the British Empire (and if you’re a U.S. citizen, I urge you to refresh your memory about our own history).
I see a parallel to India’s independence struggle with the U.S. civil rights movement during the 1960s. Washington could either endorse the unforgiving social change proposed by a Muslim like Malcolm X and the Marxist-Leninist Black Panthers who were patrolling the streets with guns, or the Christian pacifist Martin Luther King who called for brotherhood and racial harmony. Washington ultimately went running into the open arms of MLK. Don’t take my word for it, listen to Tupac.11
In the Indian context, with no armed insurgents nipping at the Raj’s heels, there would have been no Gandhi as the Indian personality of choice for the British government to embrace. The idea that Gandhi brought the British Empire to its knees without firing a single shot is a myth. Plenty of shots were being fired, just not by Gandhi and his supporters. The British position was: we only negotiate with activists who promise not to lay a finger on white people. We’re the violent ones and we’re calling the shots here, so all other Indians we will hunt down and kill, which is exactly what they did in real life with the two freedom fighters depicted in RRR.
What makes the film so refreshing is its unsparing critique of white colonialism. Its unflinching depiction of the British Raj and its terror is long overdue in Western pop culture and forces viewers, especially white audiences, to think and talk about the real history of colonial violence in India, as told by the colonized after years of being stereotyped in Western pop culture.
As the final credits rolled, I was struck with the pressing questions of how the hell did Netflix decide to take a chance on this anti-imperialist movie, and why is it being so well-received around the world? I believe the larger answer lies in the worldwide impact of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement after the police killing of George Floyd. BLM’s sentiments spoke to sympathetic masses in many nations, including India.12 Sadly, the BLM protests had very little legislative impact around the world but the global cultural influence is undeniable.13 Is it a coincidence that RRR’s producers retrofitted the three-letter title to mean Rise, Roar, Revolt for the English-speaking world?14
In a harsh review of the film, a thin-skinned British history professor, Robert Tombs, wrote he was troubled that the film depicted scenes in which “hapless Indians are brutally tortured by assorted Brits. To portray British officials and soldiers roaming the country casually committing crimes is a sign of absolute ignorance or of deliberate dishonesty.” He goes on to say that Britain shouldn’t “start apologizing for things that did not happen,” and opines that the only way India can have national heroes of its own is to make them up.15 Spare some pity for Tombs as he must have experienced being stereotyped for the first time and made uncomfortable by the actions of British history.
Tombs doesn’t seem to realize that he is behaving like the arrogant, condescending Brits stereotyped in the film. He could slip right in there as Governor Buxton’s top aide. How about apologizing for the crimes that did happen, about which Tombs seems blissfully ignorant? He mistakenly describes the 1919 Amritsar Massacre as the only black mark on the Raj’s record, which makes his emeritus affiliation with the University of Cambridge tremendously embarrassing for the institution. I’m going to hazard a guess that he’s one of those aforementioned Westerners who only know about India from watching the movie Gandhi, but this guy’s a history professor so he should know better.16
The Hindutva bells didn’t alarm me until the film’s final song, when images of Indian leaders appear behind the cast while they sing and dance. These images include, in order, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Vallabhbhai Patel, Queen Kittur Chennamma, Subramania Bharati, Bhagat Singh, Tanguturi Prakasam, Pazhassi Raja, and Chhatrapati Shivaji. Aside from Bhagat Singh, who was born a Sikh but became an atheist and radical socialist, they are all Hindu warriors, politicians, and poets. Most of them are remembered as unifiers who worked against the caste system, supported Hindu-Muslim unity, and fought for women’s rights. All of them, in one way or another, valiantly fought against the British.
That’s all well and good, but sadly there are no Muslims revered here, when Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, Siraj ud-Daulah, and Leakat Hussain, all of whom resisted the British in their own ways, easily came to my mind. This was to me the most disappointing aspect of the film’s parting shot boasting of modern India’s strength. It’s a Hindu strength wherein India’s Muslims need to stand down and passively trust Hindu leaders to take care of them.
Nonetheless, RRR is for me a cry for racial justice, and for an historically oppressed people’s rightful place in world history after decades of belittlement by British scholars like Mr. Tombs, even if it’s a historical fantasy designed primarily to entertain us. As just one fan of RRR, I remain happily stunned, even hapoplectic, by the worldwide success of this movie.
- Gond is a word whose roots mean “hill people,” referring loosely to various aboriginal groups located throughout the country but primarily concentrated in central India.
- Nicolas Ayala, “What Does RRR Stand For? Movie Title Meaning Explained,” Screen Rant, June 13, 2022.
- Caroline Miller, “RRR Breaks Streaming Records on Netflix,” MovieWeb, June 2, 2022.
- Jake Coyle, “Global Success of ‘RRR’ Signals Breakthrough for Tollywood,” Associated Press, July 20, 2022. Author’s note: The term Tollywood originally referred, and still refers, to Bengali cinema, most of the studios for which were originally located in Kolkata’s Tollygunge neighborhood. Today, the term also refers to Telegu cinema.
- I was there researching late 19th and early 20th century Bengali film and theater and their impact on India’s nascent Independence Movement. Why Kolkata? Because Calcutta, as it was then dubbed by whites, was the capital of British India for most of its reign. The British touted the city as “the London of the East.” Much of what happened in Calcutta set the tone for the rest of the country, including Bengalis’ growing calls for resistance to British rule. In 1905, India’s viceroy, Lord Curzon, responded to independence agitation by dissecting Bengal into two parts, largely along Hindu-Muslim lines, in attempt to quash Bengali activists’ organizing power. Curzon’s attempt at silencing dissent backfired spectacularly, and only cemented Bengalis’ resolve to see the British removed from power.
- “Indian Riot: Police Station Looted,” The Irish Times, June 9, 1908, 5.
- Hindutva is an ideology that views Hinduism as India’s only valid religion, strictly defines who, ethnically, can be called a Hindu, and seeks to turn the country into a Hindu theocratic state. I liken the movement to those far right Christians in the US who would love to see Christianity made our official religion and the US remade as a Christian theocracy. In India, some pop stars and Bollywood actors and directors are marching in lockstep with the Hindutva movement, which, at its most extreme, encourages violence against non-Hindus in India, including most often, but not exclusively, Muslims.
- The slogan of choice during protest marches was “Vande Mataram,” meaning “Mother, I salute you,” in this case meaning Mother India. The chant is said to have struck fear into the hearts of many a British passerby on the streets. The chant is taken from a poem featured in Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s 1882 novel Anandamath.
- The final straw came in 1908, when Calcutta Chief Magistrate Douglas Kingsford approved the public flogging of Indian minors. Public floggings of Indian dissidents wasn’t unheard of, but going after high school-aged students was the last straw. A few months later, two young revolutionaries, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki, disguised appropriately as students, attempted to kill Kingsford as his carriage left the whites-only European Club. They mistakenly struck Judge Pringle Kennedy’s carriage instead, only he wasn’t in it. The blast killed Kennedy’s wife and daughter. To their supporters, Bose and Chaki’s attack was still a victory, for they had carried out the threat to shed British Raj blood on Indian soil. Their act inspired a nationwide wave of assassinations and attempted assassinations of everyone from the Viceroy down to British beat cops. This violent resistance continued for decades.
- Bengali playwrights, not wanting to be shut down by openly criticizing the British Raj, began writing and performing historical dramas about Indian warriors from their ancient, pre-British past. On the surface, these biographical, mythologized history plays couldn’t possibly be about the British. However, they were about Indian heroes who had stood up to an invader, making their thematic message clear: it was time for ordinary Indians to rise, roar, and revolt.The slam dunk of these plays in terms of popular impact was, collectively, their songs. Mainly they were innocent-seeming tunes which opined about the natural beauty of India and her glorious past. But sing such a song at a protest rally and you’ve got yourself a heartfelt nationalist cry for self-rule. Not surprisingly, the British quickly banned the songs. Even being caught in possession of the printed lyrics could land an Indian in court.
- “No Malcolm X in my history text, why’s that?/’Cause he tried to educate and liberate all Blacks/Why is Martin Luther King in my book each week?/He told Blacks if they get smacked turn the other cheek.” From the 1991 Tupac Shakur song “Words of Wisdom.”
- Lauren Frayer, “India Sees a Changed Sparked by Black Lives Matter Movement,” National Public Radio, June 29, 2020.
- Ivana Saric, “The global impact of Black Lives Matter,” Axios, May 21, 2021.
- Natalia Keogan, “The RRR Acronym Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means,” SlashFilm, June 23, 2022.
- Robert Tombs, “What Netflix’s RRR gets wrong about the British Raj,” The Spectator, July 19, 2022.
- By 1919, cries for India’s independence had grown in popularity, and not all of them were peaceful. When the British rounded up and arrested several freedom fighters in the city of Amritsar and held them without trial, riots, deadly attacks on British citizens, and lootings of government buildings ensued. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer and his troops were sent to restore order and to enforce the Rowlatt Act, aka, the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, which allowed for indefinite imprisonment, without trial, of Indians as part of the Raj’s effort to quash the growing threat from armed insurgents. Dyer banned all public gatherings of Indians and warned that violators would be stopped with force if necessary. When thousands of defiant Indians gathered for a peaceful protest in what amounts to a back alley with a single entrance, Dyer ordered his men to block the entrance and open fire continuously for almost 15 minutes, killing a thousand and wounding some 1500 children, women and men. Dyer refused to allow medical workers to aid the survivors, intending that the horror serve as a lesson for other unhappy Indians. If you would like to learn more, and read about my own visit to the site of the massacre with my son, please see https://www.brain-on-fire.com/jefeshouse/2017/01/20/never-forget/
