Why the song and dance over Naatu Naatu’s Oscar win?

A still from RRR’s song ‘Naatu Naatu’.

It is interesting to note that up until the late 80s and early 90s, Telugu cinema functioned only from Madras (as it was called then) and both Tamil and Telugu studios ran on remakes and bilinguals which would do well in both languages and states. Kannada and Malayalam also rose to their separate leagues from the Madras of yore, till Bangalore (Bengaluru), Hyderabad and Trivandrum (and now Cochin) developed into independent filmmaking cities as key producers, directors and actors shifted their base from Madras to the respective capital cities.

Telugu cinema grew its own talent bank and their music and dance quotient went up by several notches as compared to Tamil or Hindi. The Telugu film industry is also known to treat its technicians and artistes better than any other film industry and the producers who remain relevant till date (like Allu Aravind, for example) are those with a genuine passion for taking a movie to its ultimate peak point of publicity and recognition. The Telugu film industry would leave no stone unturned to take their movies to its zenith and that’s exactly what Rajamouli did with RRR. He took it to the world’s biggest film platform and ensured it won a recognition like no other Indian film has ever before. With this level of committed backing from an ethos of filmmaking that pushes a film all the way to the top, its no surprise that we have a Telugu song (and not a song from Hindi or any other language) being performed on the Oscar stage. RRR is not a win for one director, one film or one song – it is a collective win of an entire industry and of the long-standing Indian format of “mass story-telling”.

Rajamouli and MM Keeravaani represent every Telugu filmmaker and music director before them, who have pushed frontiers and boundaries that went on to establish a separate film base in Hyderabad, which is now a thriving industry, second to Hindi purely (and only) in terms of the percentage of populace which speak Telugu as a language. And just for the record, films from the south have always been ahead of the business and box office curve for the longest time. This is something which the social media generation has discovered post Covid, as South Indian cinema shattered all forms of glass ceiling and made “pan-india movie” a fashionable term. But within the south film industries, there has always been films which did well across South markets irrespective of the original language in which the film was made. One key reason for this kind of universal success belongs to the song and dance methodology (if one can call it that) that our films handle with much dexterity.

RRR director SS Rajamouli with stars Ram Charan and Jr NTR.

While Malayalam cinema opted for the realistic approach till the 60s (Prem Nazir was the ruling superstar then), the 80s (with the entry of Priyadarshan and Mohanlal movies) gave way to music to enhance their story-telling as well. Kannada cinema had a singing superstar in Dr Rajkumar who became the beacon for the industry to shift from Madras later. The song and the resultant choreographed visuals has been the staple for Indian cinema which was not called “art house” but the irony is that, music and dance are key art forms, which late Telugu filmmaker K Vishwanath used as tools of expression in every film of his, and these art forms are seen as infra-dig sometimes. There was (and I hope it is in the past tense) a certain amount of disdain on Naatu Naatu winning Best Song across the main award podiums. This is the above mentioned irony playing out I guess! There was also a lot of debate on how Jai Ho or Naatu Naatu weren’t the best works of A R Rahman and M M Keeravani. At the risk of alienating the “critics”, these were the best songs in the movies that featured them and the movies got nominated and the songs got into the final list as well. How difficult is that to comprehend?

For the first time, the Indian “masala” or the Indian staple diet of entertainment got recognized by the who’s who of entertainment world and it wasn’t a Hindi film that did this. In RRR, the modest (read silent and rather shy) south film industry had spoken. The south unlike Hindi/Bengali cinema, is a place where heroes are worshipped akin to gods (the long queues outside NTR’s Chennai home was not a myth – people lined up to see their “Lord Rama and Lord Krishna/Srinivasa” in flesh and blood as much as they’d queue up in Tirupathi. NTR was famous for roles in mythologies and even won his elections thus). It is an industry where songs and dances were not mere reflections of their regional music but were a lot more musically profound (almost all leading music composers of India are from the south) colorful and splendor-filled (take even the recent Chiranjeevi film Walter Veeraiyah and see the song picturisation). This splendor is what Rajamouli captures in his films and this primary requisite of a successful Indian film is what his RRR showcases. The disdain is unwarranted as the song and its composer have won as a collective.

During the Oscars, I couldn’t help but notice that team RRR were seated in the last row, apart from the nominees who were seated in the middle. One day soon, this seating line-up will change and a lot more film talents from India and more so from the south of India, will take the Centre (and the stage). Being last means we have more to conquer. Thanks to RRR and Naatu Naatu we can now move to the middle and then all the way to the front row soon. And we will do it with a song and a dance to boot.