Golden Globes 2023: Is RRR’s ‘Naatu Naatu’ win India's Vishwaguru moment? No, it isn't a great song

The song that has caught on to the global pulse is an out and out entertainer. The song is not a dance sequence, but was conceptualised as a competitive action sequence, and there lies the song's allure. The two men's steps are synchronised beat to beat is praiseworthy at a time when men and women have forgotten how to dance. That hard work has paid off.

They couldn’t shoot in India during the pandemic, so Rajamouli took the crew to Kiev, in Ukraine, where the song was shot. The iconic step, taking the world by storm, is “actually an easy step”, Jr NTR has said in interviews, but Rajamouli took 18 takes of the step, as he peered into the camera monitor, so that the synchronisation between Charan and Jr NTR is on point.

While both actors are good dancers, Rajamouli wanted to keep the steps simple so that people can do it. Like two friends doing it. The fast 6/8 beat is more Indian and African than Western, and more south Indian than north Indian, says the composer in a Variety interview.

For the West, song and dance are synonymous with India and Indian entertainment. That even if you suffer, you must dance and entertain us. We will sit up and listen. RRR's song win may feed into India's geopolitical 'Vishwaguru' hopes but it doesn't. “Every other song in RRR is more emotional than Naatu Naatu,” Keeravani said in an interview.  But he wasn't expecting the tsunami of fans for the song. What one must give to the makers is that the global craze is a never-seen-before phenomena. Something of this scale was not seen even when 'Jai ho' won the Oscars in 2009 from the poverty-porn film 'Slumdog Millionaire' (2008), made by a White director.

There is a wider acceptance, especially among the younger generation and the White world, of anti-colonial narratives. And RRR's fictional world, with two freedom fighters as protagonists bringing the White oppressors (the British) down, in the film and also in the song, Naatu Naatu, is a epoch-defining moment — much like British prime minister Rishi Sunak becoming the premier of the land of his ancestors' oppressors — if there ever was a historical moment in which an RRR would be acceptable, it is now. An irrefutable history has been made. And yet, that argument is only surface level.

In the postcolonial world, the White man's burden is to celebrate the oppressed world but with their limited, simplified understanding of it, there's still a long way to go for them to accept that India is far more complex than a win-and-lose match between the oppressed and oppressor. This isn't a Phoenix rising from its ashes moment. They should watch Indian films at a greater rate, of a varied scale.     

The real win, if at all, is of the music composer, not because the song is great, Naatu Naatu does not hold a candle to MM Keeravani's soulful, ingenious compositions from the 1990s. Reason why, maybe, Naatu Naatu is not in the Grammys. But the fact that, at long last, finally, he and his craft has been recognised and appreciated. And, maybe, this song is now less of a dark horse and more likely to be a frontrunner for the final five slots in Oscars. If it wins, hail be to the lord who created a genius like MM Keeravani, for the body of work that his behind him. 

The 20-year-long team of Telugu director Rajamouli and his music director MM Keeravani has achieved a never-seen-before feat. RRR, starring NT Rama Rao Jr and Ram Charan as real-life freedom fighters Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitaramaraju, respectively, is the first Indian film to be nominated at the awards.

In an interview, Rajamouli attributed the reason for this global thunderous success to RRR's "unapologetic heroism" and its action sequences. If this is
"heroism" what was Lagaan (2001)? If this is heroism, then it is an alpha-male desire to winning: in games or fights.

The said song has seen vociferous cheerleading squads in the US and around the world. Most recently, on Monday, as Chinese Theatre screening witnessed an ecstatic 900-strong American crowd, which sold out the screening in 93 seconds.

TikTok may have been banned in India but the platform actually helped push the Indian film. Homemade clips set to Naatu Naatu propelled the movie’s US domestic box-office success, according to the film’s makers.

Rajamouli attributes his visual approach to a single tenet: treating action and musical sequences with the same understanding. “They have to convey emotion to the audience,” he says in an Indiewire interview. While the visual elements of his dance scenes all work in tandem, the first part of his process is allowing Keeravani to create music that tells an action-driven story, a step that precedes Rajamouli even mentioning his dance numbers to his cinematographer, KK Senthil Kumar, and his choreographer, Prem Rakshith. In the RRR scene that leads into Naatu Naatu, “Bheem is being humiliated, he’s an innocent guy. He’s a great dancer, but he’s in a completely unfamiliar world. So, when Ram comes and helps him, I want the audience to feel their anger. They can’t fight because of the situation that they’re in, but I’m bringing this song which is supposed to give me the satisfaction of a fight. [Keeravani and I] had a lot of discussion on that,” he’d said.

MM Keeravani co-wrote the song with lyricist Chandrabose. So, first came the idea of the action visual, then the beats, then the song. This upends the classical way a song is composed, and leaves little for the composer's imagination.

Coming to the Academy Awards, whose final-five nomination results will be out on January 24, last saw an Indian film song make it to the very end and win the best song Oscar in 2009, when AR Rahman and lyricist Gulzar won the 81st Academy Award for Jai Ho from Danny Boyle-directed Slumdog Millionaire. Maybe, there is no exoticisation of India’s poverty and slums like that film, but rather the West sees an India, made of its freedom fighters, who retaliated the British to win its freedom — this is just ultra-nationalism. This is what we did in Lagaan, with a cricket match, beating the erstwhile colonisers at their game. Now, we are back to fighting, no imagination required there. The  Indian film that has danced its way to claim its space, and piece of the pie, on the global stage, has actually fed into the Western expectation of us — fight, sing, dance, don't think.

Rajamouli's earliest RRR conversations with his cousin-composer Keeravani were simply about not repeating themselves creatively, and avoiding the sounds of their previous project, the bombastic two-film action epic Baahubali (The Beginning, 2015, and The Conclusion, 2017). Baahubali resurrected a forgotten Keeravani, but the songs were now regressive, the focus was more on action than feeling. Keervani had thus transitioned from a love-song composer to an action-song composer, because action has replaced love in India, and so its cinema should reflect that, too.

Rajamouli has been giving Keeravani instructions from the very beginning. And yet, blame it on the times, the genius Keeravani's compositions from that era were far superior, even to the musically ignorant, than the ones we are getting now. In an Indiewire article, “When the duo collaborated on Rajamouli’s debut feature, the college comedy Student No. 1 (starring another frequent collaborator, NTR Jr), Keeravani was given carte blanche, the producer’s trusting his then decade-plus track record in the Telugu film industry. The novice Rajamouli, meanwhile, had no input whatsoever on the sound of his debut musical. That would change after the resounding success of Student No. 1, with Rajamouli being granted full oversight on their follow-up, the mythologically-inspired action drama Simhadri in 2003. One of his earliest edicts? Asking Keeravani to create a riff on a song he really liked: Rednex’s country-inspired ’90s Eurodance track Cotton Eye Joe. Keeravani, who calls the song one of his favourites, was happy to oblige.” Keeravani’s compositions would have plenty of Western influence over the years, and he would go on to be a key part of all 12 of Rajamouli’s films.

MM Keeravani had many aliases in his past life, as the 1990s-2000s' very popular but faceless MM Kreem in the Hindi film industry, MM Keeravani in the Telugu film industry and Maragathamani in Tamil and Malayalam industries. He was pan-Indian decades before the phrase was trending, in the pre-internet era. “The internet was not very popular, so many of us kept resorting to taking the texture of popular songs and adapting them in our own way. But after the advent of the internet and exposure to world music, it begs some criticism. Many of us were doing it. It happens sometimes: if you like something, you want to imitate it,” said Keeravani in one of his interviews.

If Western tunes inspired and propelled Keeravani's early-day compositions, today the tables have turned and life comes a full circle with him taking on the Western world and making it dance to his tune. No matter which side you are on — good, bad, or ugly — Naatu Naatu may not be a musical genius, which is painful to wrap our heads around because its composer is the proven genius, however, it is India's moment in the sun, one nobody can take away from it, and a rarity that will not come around in a long time to come. Unless, others hone the lobbying game. The song is catchy no doubt, it is a party favourite, but it isn't the song we'd reach out to when grappling with our deepest emotions. A great song would have been an icing-on-the-cake moment. Keeravani's lifetime discography deserves an award for a song he has full control on. For now, let's Naatu Naatu, it is a beginning.