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?

The three films in the past which did make it to the top five also couldn’t have been set anywhere else. Lagaan too had the Raj (for good measure, Ashutosh Gowarikar gave us good Brits and bad Brits, and a pretty lass who falls in love with the rustic, ‘dhoti’-wearing hero), and a horse-whip wielding Englishman. It also had dirt-poor villagers, famine, and starvation, and cricket: for those who do not play the game, it is infinitely exotic.

So was 1989’s Salaam Bombay, Mira Nair’s paean to the street-child. Her hero Chaipau, the little boy thus called because he carried cups of tea to his customers all day long, was a uniquely Indian creation, at home with the cast teeming with pimps and prostitutes. And the first one which made it to the last mile, and didn’t win, was Mehboob’s Mother India. Nominated in 1958, its all-encompassing mother figure, the good son-bad son combo, and its theme may have been universal, but the style and the treatment was just so us.

The Oscar gatekeepers are looking for material which is, clearly, foreign. And which cannot be transplanted to any other part of the globe. The year Lagaan lost, the best foreign film Oscar went to No Man’s Land, a wonderfully moving film about two warring soldiers, a Serb and a Bosnian, connecting as they face certain death: that movie couldn’t have come out of Africa, or China, just as Lagaan had to be set in a tiny hamlet in Madhya Bharat.

But Lagaan is an exception to the rule: we do not generally send our best movies to compete at the Oscars. Our last entry was Paheli: even for Indian audiences, it was a confused mess of genres and acting styles. It is one thing for scholars of Indian cinema to debate over the marriage of middle-of-the-roader Amol Palekar, and mainstream badshah Shah Rukh Khan; it is quite another for it to make sense to viewers in the West.

There’s long been the contention that the West still doesn’t understand the way we make our movies, and that the song-and-dance which is so integral to the form is looked upon with either befuddlement or distaste. Yes, there is that barrier. Our movies make money in NRI boroughs; they do not routinely play on main street theatres. Even those who ought to know better (the people who short-list movies for awards all over the world are supposed to be cinema-literate) turn away from our films just because they either can’t or won’t find a way into them.

All the talk of ‘cross-over cinema’ is still just that, talk. We still don’t have, in our roster, a Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon which makes the kind of money that makes global studio giants salivate. And creates the kind of buzz which makes director Ang Lee a power-luncher in Hollywood board-rooms. He won the Oscar with Brokeback Mountain, didn’t he?

Till we make that elusive film, the Oscars will continue to elude us.