20 Years Of Swades & The Search For A Self

THE TEST of art's profundity is the shelf of time. Lesser the dirt accumulated greater the relevance. Because truly seminal art returns to you not as a flashback of collective experience but as an intimate chapter not too dissimilar from your memory. Few stories or films accrue that sort of value over generations. Fewer still do it from the vantage point of bureaucratic failure. Twenty years ago, when Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades was released, it petered out of theatres as this odd, unglamorous portrayal of a country trying to look the other way. Globalisation had erected a new middle class, the tech boom had opened doors to the world and within it, Shah Rukh Khan had installed himself as the canopy for diaspora culture, ambition and nationalism. From Pardes seven years ago, Swades felt like a flattening of the curve of ambition. Two decades on, not only is the film famed or distinguished as one of Khan’s finest, but it may have only grown in relevance.

What can be said of Gowariker’s Swades that isn’t already a truism? It features one of AR Rahman’s best albums, some of the most memorable supporting characters ever written, at least a dozen scenes that can be iconised and an unadulterated Shah Rukh Khan like he never was, like has rarely been since. But though Swades is primed as the story of the diaspora’s return, of the lofty accomplishments of new India turning around to look at the nation it had left behind, the nation that hasn’t caught up to the worldly Indian, it is in essence, the story of migrant’s guilt. Of the uprooting effects of ambition, of the distant view of home, of the devastating inability to return and the sense of the heart pulling away from the mind, for every day spent as a stranger trying to belong to a strange land.

I obviously watched Swades as a kid in school, unaffected by its provocations, intrigued but rarely moved by its grim images of an India I had already experienced. For someone like me who had grown up in rural India in villages where caste, poverty and class consciousness anchor the social compass, nothing from Gowariker’s film came as a shock or a rude awakening. It wasn’t until I put 1800 kilometres between myself and the place I grew up in that the film acquired fresh meaning.

For most of India that grows up in small towns or villages, the route to financial literacy and liberation goes through the cities. You either stand in line and scramble for the half-decent government jobs on offer, or you tie your bow to the wind and go do whatever the city demands. The only ambition really is to find work, to not become a burden on your elders, and more importantly, to escape the slow minutiae of a place where survival isn’t impossible, it’s just invisible. For a lot of us, the city offered visibility, not necessarily in the eye of common people but in the mirror that told us ‘we had done something’. Mohan Bhargava’s aspirations aren’t deconstructed in Swades but his motivation has clearly taken him across oceans. For a lot of us, even the land between two bus stations has felt like an eternity the first time we rode it. It’s the depth of the severance rather than the distance I understood.

I re-watched Swades, alone, as a corporate employee trying to conquer a distant city. This time, I bellowed, wept and felt crushed by it like a fish that has lost memory of the sea. I had a home, a job, a vague supply of love, support and merriment, but I simply did not belong. Like most people who arrive in the city, I sought this sense of belonging in cubicles, bowling alleys, upscale cafes, gaudy multiplexes and listless shopping arcades. To which point I often wondered why Kaveri Amma, the memorable mother figure in Mohan’s life, sent him on this aimless quest to witness the abyss that is India’s underprivileged. The India we know, have heard of but spend our lives trying to run away from. Because home, its sensibilities can’t be outlined by the escape routes we spend our lifetimes building. It’s the Big Bang that all delusion, disenchantment and desperation is the consequence of. Every step away from it, only makes the knot, the density of its shadow tighter. To pretend to not live under it, must be ignorance.

I never had the Bhargava-like epiphany to go back to the village and right historical wrongs. Nor did I ever summon the courage to fully return, reinstall myself in the milieu that I had evidently grown out of. But what Swades did, at that moment, was to prevent me from travelling further, from committing to work I couldn’t pour my heart into, from hanging onto relationships that were thoroughly mapped but hardly rooted. Because Bhargava’s biggest challenge in Swades isn’t the return, nor is it the desi apparatus he uses to power an unlit village. It’s the letting go of his ambition, the burden of NRI prestige, the cloak of privilege and the journey from hard-earned riches to pervasive rags.

There is plenty that can be said about Swades’ texture, its grammar of subtlety, its exquisite use of silences and foremost its moral positioning as a story trying to draft nationalism from the inside as opposed to the outside. But certain films transcend the status of their application. At the time of its release, it felt like a rebuttal of roughly a decade of overachievement, of post-globalisation summits, and of course the emergence of a new kind of nationalism. Today, it can be viewed as a near-perfect study of dislocation, the impermanence of socioeconomic ladders, and the idea that home isn’t just the place you leave, but also the person you’d rather be. The person most of us spend lives estranged from; the self that never recovers from being washed away by the world’s schemes. A chosen few, like Bhargava, claim it. Because of geography, the distances are mere cosmetic features. You can spend a lifetime living away from yourself, by staying in one place.

Watch Swades here.