How much artistic licence can a filmmaker take while narrating the “true” life story of a contemporary individual? There is a lot more room to exercise “artistic creativity” if the persons in question lived in the distant historic past. Our knowledge about them is usually patchy, either because their lives were not properly documented or because the nuances have got lost in the mists of time. A bit of imagination can make them come alive. If the characters are mythological then the filmmaker can go to town! Fantasy films, which the teens are so fond of, have mythical figures mingling with contemporary humans and have fluid time barriers.
But what happens when filmmakers combine facts, fictional history and fantasy when narrating the stories of contemporary people, whom we have known personally or know because they have been in the news. People whose histories have been properly documented by contemporary historians. Sticking too much to boring old facts make the chances of box office success slim. But then, how much masala can such films add? Should the filmmaker sacrifice truth for fantasy?
Take for instance the super hit film RRR, which is having a field day at the box office. In his true style Rajmouli has made a visually spectacular film with all the masala ingredients carefully mixed and placed. The scale of the film is breathtaking and the plot is particularly appealing today when the anti-colonial sentiment is running high. The two heroes are based on two real-life freedom fighters, Komaram Bheem (NT Rama Rao Jr), a Gond tribal and Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan), who was finally shot to death by the British. They never met each other while they lived nor did they fight together. Rajmouli and team have taken the precaution of labelling it pure fiction and so it can be taken as an anti-colonial fable and buddy drama about the imaginary combo of two real-life freedom fighters. It is an imagined story of what would have happened if the two fighters joined forces against the colonial masters. Of course no one really reads the disclaimers at the beginning or end of a film and so that mish mash of fact and fiction and fantasy becomes a reality in the viewer’s mind.
Almost every “fictionalised” or “dramatised” biopic which has come out in the recent past has such huge dollops of masala that the truth is absolutely subsumed. As a journalist, I have met some of the “characters” involved professionally. Like for instance the mathematician Shakuntala Devi. And also Dr Sarabhai, who was my husband’s boss and mentor at Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Abdul Kalam, his close friend. I also know Nambi Narayan, whose biopic “Rocketry’ has made waves.
Shakunthala Devi’s biopic airbrushed the darker side of her life and added some imaginary bubbly episodes to give her a more likeable personality. But this is nothing compared to the way ISRO has been fantasised!
The fictionalisation which floored me completely was “Rocket Boys”, which was a very successful series and won several Filmfare awards. It is now poised to start its second season. While reviewing the first season I wrote, “Some of our most iconic scientists had been turned into Bollywood stereotypes and Nobel Laureate Sir CV Raman into a spineless prop. A Dalit Muslim villain building a cyclotron and taking money from Jinnah had been fabricated. In his column for Business Standard, Shekhar Gupta calls this “identity theft” because the man who built India's first cyclotron in 1950 was an internationally renowned physicist named Meghnad Saha.”
The first series had more fantasy moments than real ones. Right from the start when Vikram and Homi ran athletically up the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) building in Bengaluru to hoist the national flag up to the last scene where they hoisted a big rocket on their shoulders to put it on the launcher. In between there was Homi Bhabha jumping into the tank inside the nuclear reactor and the completely fantastic story of Kalam, who was actually a young anonymous engineer when Bhabha died. He definitely did not meet Nehru along with the fantasy duo.
But the series apparently was a great success and Sarabhai, Bhabha and Kalam are now well on their way to becoming super heroes who might feature next in a Marvel series!
Similarly, the biopic of Nambi Narayan, while it had its core of truth (in that he was falsely accused of spying) it was totally romanticised by actor Madhavan, who directed and played the star role in it. Madhavan is most known for the romantic leads he played in many films. The artistic licence he took in building up the story of Rocketry made it seem as if Nambi Narayan was solely responsible for getting the know-how and building the cryogenic engine. This made all the ISRO engineers who had worked for years on building the engines over several decades so angry that they called a press conference to clarify the real situation.
Dr Muthunayagam, who was Director of the Liquid Propulsion system and under whom Nambi Narayan had worked for 26 years, said contrary to Nambi’s claim that 90% of the film was the truth, “90% of the film was bluff”. The other scientists pointed out a lot of other “bluffs” the film contained, including the fact that Nambi was not even on the team when the work of the cryogenic engine started. Did Nambi Narayan get his Padma Bhushan for his contribution to ISRO? Did the Space Department recommend it? Did Dr Sarabhai pick him up and send him to Princeton? The scientists have debunked all these claims and more.
But how does all this matter? The scientists protesting hardly made any headlines, but the movie was a contender for an Oscar and was screened at Cannes. As for Rocket Boys, all the heroes who are portrayed in it are dead and gone, but they died within our living memory. So, this kind of cartoonish portrayal of them with scant respect for the actual truth, though alarming, will stick in the minds of viewers as the reality.
Fact, fiction or fantasy… Does anyone care? It’s the box office which counts.