So Rang de Basanti didn’t make it. Not even to the top nine foreign film contenders, vying for top dog status at the Oscars, up ahead in February. Deepa Mehta’s Water has, but as a Canadian entry, even though the director is Indian, as well as the story and backdrop and the actors. (We’ll know if it makes it to the last five only on January 23, when nominations close).

Should we be hugely surprised? Not really. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s story of the coming-of-age of contemporary, confused Indian youth was a film with a solid storyline and good performances. And it resonated enough with Indian audiences last year to become Bollywood’s first big hit of 2006.

But Paint It Yellow/Saffron (that’s what its English-subtitled version is called, which doesn’t even begin to get near its significance) didn’t travel too far down the road to the Oscars for that exact same reason: confused, contemporary youth exist all over the world. To a foreign viewer, the film is not ‘Indian’ enough, not in the same way as, say, a Water is: it is also, and this is not a well-known fact, very strongly reminiscent of Canadian film Jesus Of Montreal, in which a group of actors’ lives change drastically as they put on a passion play.

Incarcerated widows in a pre-Independence Indian ‘ashram’. Oooh, that’s Indian. Where else would you find little girls and beautiful young women and old crones with tragic backstories and cruelly shaven heads? It’s another matter that even today, Vrindavan’s widows lead lives of quiet desperation. It’s also another matter that major portions of the film had to be shot in Sri Lanka, which masquerades as Varanasi. But Water has the backdrop of the British ‘raj’, the horror of child marriage and ‘sati’, and brutal oppression. Can’t get better, can it?

... contd.