We lost Rang De Basanthi in Lanka

Aravinda HETTIARACHCHI

In the distance, among the weeds beside the runways of an airport, a few young university students creep into this isolated area without permission. They freely clamber unto the runway removing their shirts and waving them. As the plane whizzes by, they try to touch it by leaping and stretching their hands out. Are they jumping from their Indian earth to grasp the Euro-Us sky? Perhaps, then, Rang De Basanthi is a film, which x rays the schism between the narrative of this Jumbudvipa earth and the Euro-US fantasy.

This film invokes much in my mind. Yet the newspaper space alloted and the time given to me to explain this is limited. So I feel helpless, crying sadly within me, to try to sketch something about it so as not to commit the crime of not writing about the important issues this film brings up. It seems as if most of my life experiences indistinguishable metamorphosing with the scenes of this film.

One day, way back in the 90's (ie: a day one doorstep down from the defeats of the 88-89 rebellion), I took the 174 bus from Kottawa, and got down just past the railway track on Cotta road, to walk towards Borella. I ran into a friend (Saliya Induruwithan from Dankotuwa) coming towards me from the junction. He was hiking because he didn't have enough money for a ticket. Just then, another guy from Mathugama (who believes Colombo to be a toxic city) came in to the scene. All of us turned into the avenue to my left, and walked towards this film study course at the "Office Catholique Internationale du Cinema".

Back then we always walked together (even though we now trudge different paths.) At the film class, we met two other close friends, Nishantha Gammuduwatte from Atulkotte and Nevil Uditha Weerasinghe from Palawatte (who now inhabit in totally divergent universes.) The course was conducted by Shelton Payagala. (To me he was a great Guru who recovered for us actual relevance of Marxism to society, at a time when Victor Ivan was spreading the idea that a "Hegal is more advanced than Marx.")

We took this course to become cinema artists in Sri Lanka. That was our dream. There were other friends who had had this same dream, and taken this course before or after us or never took the course. Friends like Madura Ganegoda (where is he?), Nishanatha Dahanayake, Ravi Perera, Vimukthi Jayasundara, K.K. Saman Kumara, Mnubandu Vidyapathin Priyakankara Rrathnayake and etc.

Most of these people were youth or on the edge of adulthood, and like the characters in Rang De Basanthi, searching for an aesthetic and social ideal in life. Most of them acquired their young heroic cinematic ideals through certain types of films in Sri Lanka such as Ahas Gavva, "Valmathvoovo," Vesgaththo and Hansavilak.

Among them were both upper middle-class friends and friends with rebellious bent. Most of them did not come from universities, as in Rang De Basanthi, but were young wandering spirits who thought that the road was their university. So what mouth is it that can utter that the earth these friends and Rang De Basanthi characters were brought up in, totally differ from each other.

If I were to schematize the entire matter, Rang De Basanthi, in a certain way, a cinematic expression of the phase between the late national freedom movement of collective Indian Identity and the present differently scattered national movements- movements thrown up by the colonial period and the neo-colonial strategies of capitalism.

Furthermore, it is a film suspended between the present extremism of Indian nationalisms, and the revolutionary camaraderie built up with Euro-Us people who took stand against imperialism.

Most of all it is a film of youth, within the cultural matrix of India which the '80'-90 generations of Sri Lanka totally missed out in their creative film making life. Who is going to grieve for or salve these lost generations?