Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T04:24:46.985Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter Six - Rang De Basanti: The Solvent Brown and Other Imperial Colors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2012

Manisha Basu
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
Get access

Summary

A little less than half-way into Rakesh Om Prakash Mehra's Rang de Basanti (Paint it Saffron, 2006), four young men – DJ (Daljit), Karan, Sukhi, and Aslam – are almost accidentally plucked out of their urbane, metropolitan, indeed remarkably privileged Delhi university environment to play the roles of the illustrious revolutionary quartet of Bhagat Singh (1907–1931), Chandrasekhar Azad (1906–1931), Hari Sivaram Rajguru (1908–1931) and Ashfaqullah Khan (1900–1927). As the young students begin to prepare for what is to be an amateur documentary on the lives of these martyrs to the cause of national autonomy, the visual diagram of their own contemporary lives comes into contact with the ‘quaint’ lives and times of Singh, Azad, Khan and Rajguru – boys who were themselves no more than twenty-three or twenty-four when their paths intersected in the most volatile of fashions through the manner in which they chose to die. While Karan, DJ, Sukhi, and Aslam awkwardly grapple with the effort to approximate the roles of men who seem remote from them, in their lives, in their deaths and in their passions, what we view on screen in the first half of Rang de Basanti is the hesitant and stuttering encounter between two distinct visual worlds, estranged from one another by what appears to be an insurmountable chasm.

Type
Chapter
Information
Bollywood and Globalization
Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora
, pp. 93 - 110
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×