The Roshans: The Same Old Story

SHASHI RANJAN'S The Roshans comes in the long line of documentaries that reduce filmmakers to a footnote. The presence of directors is as incidental in these films as is writing about them. The reason is simple: these are uncritical observations about famous people (Angry Young Men, The Romantics) where the nonfiction form is used as a smokescreen to wax eloquence about them. Craft here is little to nothing, comprising assembling footage, generously provided by those benefiting from the exercise, and bringing together more famous people willingly sitting before the camera to do the needful.

In The Roshans, there are many. You name it and they are there. Actors like Shah Rukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Madhuri Dixit, musicians and singers like Sonu Nigam, Alka Yagnik, Asha Bhosle, Salim Sulaiman, to name a few. They all sit against a similar background (JW Marriott is credited for location) and speak highly of the Roshans like they have all been hostage.

Spread across four episodes, the docu-series follows a neat outline. The first episode is dedicated to the one who started it all – Roshan Lal Nagrath. He was a music director who broke into the system and introduced a way of melody that wasn’t there before. The second episode halts at his successor, Rajesh Roshan who has given memorable music for five decades. Post that, Rakesh Roshan takes the stage, lamenting about his fledgling career as an actor and producer and final resurgence as the director. Soon it is Hrithik Roshan’s turn and the name pattern is repeated. The euphoria of Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai (2000; his debut film) is revisited, his childhood friends like Farhan Akhtar and Abhishek Bachchan chime in about Hrithik’s audacious choices as Ameesha Patel, wearing a pendant with her name on it, preens that she knew it all along that superstardom was awaiting for the actor.

Recollections of the Roshans are frequently accompanied by commentaries by their colleagues. Each is as respectful as the other, each as generous as the other, each as nice as the other. But the sheer blatancy of it begs the question: what’s the point of it? I get the appeal on a surface level. In a world which is fast losing touch with the past, an archive such as this reiterates the faces of those who built the base of what we see it. There are the occasional, “Oh, he made that?” “Oh, he did that?” Like did you know Roshan Lal Nagrath had furnished the music for 'Rahen Na Rahen Hum' or that Rajesh Roshan scored for the path-breaking Julie (1975)?

In my mind, this distils the limited appeal of such documentaries. Probe a little deeper and they all come across as self-serving vanity vehicles that do a disservice to everyone – the people compelled to sit before the camera and say nice things (Javed Akhtar has been sitting on the same couch since Angry Young Men) and to the form of nonfiction itself which has become all kinds of audacious and clutter-breaking in India.

There is also the issue of selective pandering. The Roshans preoccupies itself with hyping up only the men in the family, erasing the contributions of the women with certainty. They are reduced to talking heads, filling space to broadcast the achievements of the men. At some point, we see Hrehaan and Hridhaan and they are introduced as Hrithik’s sons as if he bore them.

There is no pleasure really in watching the series except for the ironic presence of Hrithik who performs like his life depends on it. The actor keeps scraping his life to tell one sob story after another (he was painfully shy, had a stutter) and then looks deep into the camera as if waiting for one of us to go and hug him. He enunciates each word, conjures emotions which were not required and comes up with thoughts looking so impressed like he is hearing his voice for the first time.

Clearly, The Roshans is not the first in what will become a recurring genre. There is not much to do about it and in a not-so-distant past, there will be multiverses of such docu-series, featuring only couches. For, those sitting on them would be busy chasing the rest to appear in documentaries on them.

The Roshans is currently streaming on Netflix.