10 Years of Bhaag Milkha Bhaag: A sporting tale that echoed a country’s coming of age

In Farhan Akhtar, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag had a nimble actor whose physical transformation felt like the kind of sporting feat we rarely witnessed as a country. (Screen grab)

Bhaag Milkha Bhaag is unique for celebrating, for the most part, an unlikely athlete’s journey, much like the country’s, from ruin to running for glory.
Sporting icons are predominantly remembered for the measure of their greatness – numbers that qualify them for future shortlists of historicity. Brutal as it might sound, there is possibly no place in memory for the also-rans. Athletes consigned to the ruins of data unless relevant for the queerness of a sporting moment – remember Cricket’s Douglas Marillier or Football’s Cuauhtémoc Blanco? Then there are those who become myths, driven by the sheer audacity of their existence. Ten years ago, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra gave us a stirring portrait with Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, of an athlete who perhaps triumphed as much off the field as on it. We had all heard the story, in some sort of abstract version, the facts of which stopped mattering a long time ago. This was instead about a legend that memory wanted to construct, and the heart wanted to believe.

Most retrospectives of sporting stars are cheerful odes to their underdog journeys. Bhaag Milkha Bhaag is no different except it also gleans from the fuzzy edges of a national folk tale, the coming-of-age story of a young country. Sporting biopics usually lean towards decoratively analysing storied careers. For some, however, the myth upstages reality. Singh’s story, its many oral narrations passed on from household to household, would always be the kind of material that fiction would serve, and fact ultimately restrict. Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, thus, can only really be looked at as a rousing, fantasy portrayal of a sporting icon not many witnessed, but almost everyone in this country heard about.

It probably makes sense that some of India’s most popular sporting films have been made around sports that aren’t actually that popular. Other than Lagaan, Chak De! India, Dangal and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, all focus on formats that Indians even in the era of their respective releases, did not consume. It possibly adds to the legend then that not just the athlete but also the sport feels at least as a cultural entity, out of reach. It urges you to glean subtext, drives you to read beyond the plainness of the mainstream that our collective obsession with filmy heroes and cricketing superstars has homogenized to an extent. It’s probably why Mehra’s film is at its most intense and effective when it’s actually not about the running, the gladiatorial physical feat that it wants to capture.

One of the most moving scenes from the film is of Singh running barefoot with blood casually spreading through the bandage on his feet. It’s a sequence worthy of a climax, except climaxes, we’ve been trained, demand victories of merit as opposed to the conquest of human spirit. Singh’s journey from a tortured past, stained with the horrors of Partition to gradually become a person capable of aspiring, and competing is THE story.

Everything that follows is a well-made but clichéd sporting spectacle, designed to garland the foundational work of a searing, at times heart-breaking origin story. Some feats deserve boards and medals while some deserve to be fleshed out as narratives of human persistence alone. Singh’s accomplishments dwarf compared to his compatriots', athletes raised in the culture of winning. And yet to someone who must have felt somewhat defeated by circumstances, the prospect of competing for something other than a livelihood is a victory in itself. It’s what Mehra’s telling us Singh’s storied life aspires to for the most part. This man we’d all heard of wasn’t gifted with speed, but merely the will to run through the wall of an unfair, unflattering life.

A lot of things came together for Bhaag Milkha Bhaag to become the revered artefact it must be deemed. In Farhan Akhtar, it had a nimble actor, whose physical transformation felt like the kind of sporting feat we rarely witnessed as a country. The music of Shankar Ehsaan Loy served as the perfect melancholic backdrop for a sporting tale manufactured from the spindle of suffering and loss. The fact that the love story too echoed a sense of un-fulfillment, carries within it the core of a bittersweet conquest. No one, not even those with the most formidable will and wisdom, wins at everything. Akhtar’s Singh, therefore, felt like the continuation of a myth, as opposed to a post-mortem of the sporting moment that it, at least in the records of history, amounts to. Some men just become bigger than the races they finished, the medals they clinched or didn’t.

A decade on, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag remains an oddity. A half-blooded, sensitized portrayal of a sporting hero whose legacy seems to have built its own little coliseum of patronage. Milkha Singh’s achievements aren’t remarkable in the wider arena of world sport, but they are baffling for a man who started his journey running away from hate and penury. The fact that he doesn’t quite get it all, on or off the field, is also the crowning glory of this cultural unicorn that chose to not sprint towards easy denouement. Instead, it jogged towards a historic survey of the pain we have as a country overcome so we can consider ourselves, worthy of competing.