Opinion: Baahubali Director Rajamouli Deserves to be in Hollywood

Rajamouli is perhaps the only Indian filmmaker who deserves to cross over to Hollywood.

One of the probing elements of S. S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali is the waterfall, the infinite marvel that ignites curiosity and makes us wonder about the life beyond the clouds, just how it does to Shivudu, the hero of the film. His superhuman abilities take us to the realm of beyond and we are introduced to the grander vision of a world where power, passion and betrayal work in tandem, really fast, really really furious.

Truth to be told, this wonderful universe has also been sacrificed to certain conventions. From black-faced enemies to white item girls, from occasional bouts of melodrama to jeopardising songs, they are a few spots of bother. Certain scenes also bear the unfortunate sign of poor CGI, like the avalanche of snow. Or consider the incorporation of the Wuxia genre and Peter Jackson’s monumental The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the grain of it. But if we manage to look beyond it, it’s a sight to behold. For in this maze and flurry of things, in this heat and rush of observation and imagination, it’s crystal clear coherence of visualisation that serves us a motion picture with all the bulk and solidity.

The fact that this magnificent film has been created with a fraction of what a Hollywood biggie costs, is proof that it is born not out of a mammoth budget, but unbridled scope of a dream. From the conception of the war strategy to erecting a giant statue, or the relentless fight sequences, everything is created with an immense attention to detail, sometimes observed, sometimes invented or imagined but always enlarged with a magical halo.

The world fashioned in the film is entirely the product of Rajamouli’s fertile mind, a partly real, partly implausible land, where the lights, the shades, the proportions, and the physical laws are slightly different from those of our world. This is more dream-stuff than life-stuff. But honestly, what can be better than dreams?

Hindi cinema, for long, quite wrongly has been hailed as the sole representative of Indian cinema. And here, geniuses are too frequently crowned. As a matter of fact, there is not so much cleverness in our cinema, and a vast deal of reasonable presentation is achieved by an almost decent display of talent. But Rajamouli’s work is different. He belongs to the Telugu film industry, not the holy grail of Mumbai galaxy. His previous work, Eega (2012), was an exceptional piece of filmmaking in which a fly takes revenge on a human being. It was wildly inventive and uncompromisingly entertaining. What started with Magadheera (2009) is blooming with full fury in Baahubali. Even from clichéd tropes, he can wring out emotions to play to the gallery, the hallmark of mainstream entertainment that can manage to live in popular consciousness in the long run. Even if he derives from our mythological heresy, his films always have the choice, by their nature, their aims, and their capacities, of being a warrior of vital ingenuity or nothing. And by that yardstick, he is perhaps the only Indian filmmaker who deserves to cross over to Hollywood, make those summer tent-poles, and be the successful stranger in a familiar land.

When it comes to thinking and dreaming in a larger-than-life scale, our filmmakers more or less meet the fate of Icarus. The success of Baahubali, in originality and execution, is proof of the fact that Rajamouli’s wings are made of unrelenting imagination and no mortal caution can stop his flight of fancy.

(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. His Twitter handle is: @RanjibMazumder)