Saturday, July 20, 2013

Bhaag Milkha Bhaag: Milkha flies high and how!



If not for anything else, Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra’s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag should score full marks for the hard work put in by Farhan Akhtar to impersonate Mikha Singh, the Flying Sikh as the sportsperson was famously known as. Farhan speaks with his sinews, which he has amply developed to look like Milkha, an army personnel and dedicated athlete. But more importantly, he has effectively brought to Milkha Singh multiple shades, bringing to life an enigmatic character whose public image of the Flying Sikh hides behind it a vulnerable private life of loss, betrayal and trauma.  


            Bhaag Milkha Bhaag could have ended up being another sentimental bildungsroman of an underdog’s journey from the margins to the centre. But, it has brilliantly averted such a predicament. The public and the private are curiously mingled in this biopic told in painstaking detail, where personal experiences of a historical calamity connect the life of an individual to the people of a certain geographical area carrying in their collective unconscious the agony of that calamity. This is where Bhaag Milkha Bhaag transcends the narrow boundaries of an individual’s life to relate the story of ‘a people’. The symbolism in the title is not hard to decode: it is not only Milkha who is running away from a traumatic memory of the past; the people on both sides of the border that divides India and Pakistan are also trying to flee the prison of such a memory, the memory of the holocaust of the Partition. That one historical event which has left such deadly scars in the hearts of the people that even after sixty-five years they have not ceased to bleed. In this sense, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag doesn’t really turn the clock to an earlier decade; but addresses the contemporary times, when communal violence, mass slaughter, state-controlled pogroms, segregation based on race, and militant nationalism are on the rise. Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra and Prasoon Joshi’s Milkha Singh is therefore more of a metaphor than a character, on whose predicament the tragic consequences of the Partition are mapped out. The flashbacks and the black-and-white album images of the Partition which have been used in several other films as well act as constant reminder of a past which is impossible to erase. 


            Yet, despite itself, the film almost helplessly promotes territorial nationalism, where the ongoing Indo-Pakistan rivalry is addressed with a certain degree of unpretentious condescension for the warring neighbour. The film might be adhering to a historical truth, but, nonetheless, the Otherness of the people across the border is quite well established by the end. But ironically, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag had actually set out to question this strife which is actually mindless. I would not, however, take the filmmaker to task for this; for, this is also an aftereffect of the Partition: the prejudice is so deep-seated that it raises its head even at the slightest opportunity. 


            On another level Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, just like Chak De! India, is a story of will-power, perseverance and untiring enterprise. The film’s celebration of Milkha’s hard work, abstinence and discipline might help it land in the syllabus of the MBA course! However, the film might be attacked for stereotyping the woman: she is either the loving mother or the wayward seductress who distracts men from reaching their goal. Another drawback is its length: at 187 minutes the film seems to drag. The editor could have been a little more merciless!   
 
Image Courtesy:santabanta.com

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