The Music, the Melodrama, and the Mythology of RRR

Where RRR is coming from, why its song sequences are crucial to its emotional machinery, and how mythology is woven into its DNA.

Ramaraju makes a spectacular, mythological entrance. Courtesy: Netflix

“There are so many questions in there—whether I want to make a small-budget film, a big-budget film, a patriotic film…what I want to make is an emotional film.”

-SS Rajamouli, responding to a journalist.

“But if you could see the ‘artist’s intentions’ you’d probably wish you couldn’t anyway.”

-Pauline Kael, Trash, Art, and The Movies.

RRR, like every other Rajamouli film, is an escapist realm bound by a magic circle. The realm bound by this circle is one of mythical melodrama and awe—the laws governing this realm are emotional, not logical. The logical loophole in Bheem instigating a riot by singing a Telangana song to a crowd in Delhi does not matter for instance. The emotional truth in the people responding to his suffering does. At its most triumphant moments, RRR lets its melodramatic spectacle gleefully tear any pretence of realism apart while defiantly staring you in the eye. This is why Ramaraju fights off hundreds of protestors alone; this is also why two Indian men can defeat racism and steal the English girl through a dance-off.

Its song sequences are crucial to its emotional machinery, helping it land some of the most outlandish narrative beats by situating them in a purely emotional dimension— this is how musicals have always worked, by suspending reality. During the golden age of Broadway musical theatre in the '40s and ’50s, the oft-repeated maxim was this —that the story must burst into song only when the emotions on display are too overwhelming for spoken words. Like many successful Indian musicals, RRR abides by this. 

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Komaram Bheemudo, Naatu Naatu, Dosti, and the song as a vehicle of melodramatic catharsis.

Komaram Bheemudu, a song clearly inspired by, and paying homage to protest songs of the Telangana revolution. Courtesy: Netflix

Consider the way Komaram Bheemudo begins: Bheem sings it to himself at the dramatic apex of a scene in which he’s being tortured and subjected to the ultimate betrayal by his closest friend. The song itself acts as a fulcrum by which the plot turns—it instigates a riot, triggering a change of heart in Ramaraju. The emotional intensity of the song and the visceral, physical intensity of the visuals is a genealogical descendant of the mythological melodrama of the sort old Telugu and Kannada cinema and theatre specialized in —take for instance this famous Telugu song from Sita Rama Kalyanam which features NTR playing Ravana, who approaches Shiva for a boon and resorts to gutting himself and playing music with his intestines, and another, from Bhookailas in which NTR (playing Ravana again) beheads himself while singing an apology for his sins.

Then there is the way Komma Uyala is sung back to Malli by Bheem, who breaks into the song when she begs him to rescue her, this time, with the lyrics telling her that she can find home only if she closes her eyes.

This is also true of Naatu Naatu, which features a long sequence building up to it where Bheem is subjected to racism by a smug, white Britisher, and the film explodes into song-and-dance precisely when the white man reaches the heights of obnoxiousness. (Incidentally, this is exactly how dharmic violence erupts in every Rajamouli film—after the antagonist has displayed ridiculous levels of cruelty. There is a phrase in Telugu renditions of Hindu mythology—Paapam pandadam, or the idea that divine justice shows its hand when the sins of the sinful “ripen”. This is something Rajamouli films use to build up conflict, and to justify the brutal violence exacted by the protagonist on the antagonist.)  Naatu Naatu also clearly owes something to “Kattu Kuyilu” from Mani Ratnam’s Thalapathi, another song celebrating friendship and native immanence from another Indian masala multi-starrer that leverages Hindu mythology.

Top: Yeh Dosti, from Sholay (1975). Bottom: Dosti, from RRR (2022) Courtesy: Shemaroo and T-Series.

Dosti, a clear hat-tip to Sholay’s iconic Yeh Dosti, begins when the two protagonists meet for the first time after saving the boy, a scene riding so high on the emotions of earnestly celebrating friendship and brotherhood that it begins with the leads running towards each other and clasping hands underwater, while a train burns in the background (again, underwater). 

Hitchcock famously explained how suspense works on screen—show the audience the bomb under the table, then have the characters talk over it.  RRR’s first half is built on melodramatic bombs-under-the-table. We know Ramaraju is a police officer, but Bheem doesn’t. We know Bheem is not Akhtar, and is the man Ramaraju is looking for, but Ramaraju doesn’t. We know Bheem is friendly with Jenny to get access to the mansion where Malli is being kept, but Jenny doesn’t. The late Sirivennela’s lyrics for Dosti verbalize this tension—the second line goes thala ki urithaadu ki dosti, the head and the hangman’s rope have befriended each other.

The bombs go off as the characters discover each other's true identities in the pre-interval sequence in a glorious, unabashed revelatory explosion of sound, fury, fire, and water.

The lyrics in these songs touch on diverse cultural synapses of Telugu culture: Naatu Naatu, Chandrabose’s celebration of earthy Teluguness is rooted in the flavor and texture of Telugu and Telangana food and rural festivals.  Linguistically, it is on the other side of the continent from the late Sirivennela’s signature lofty, Sanskritized Telugu in Dosti (note how many lines end in -am syllables), whereas Komaram Bheemudo by Suddala Ashok Teja, is written in the tradition of the Telangana folk protest songs which were an integral part of the many anti-establishment protests in the region over the years. (Notably, Suddala Ashok Teja’s father, Suddala Hanumanthu, was one of Telangana’s iconic poets, and a key figure of the Telangana Peasant Rebellion, which was largely inspired by the real Komaram Bheem.)

The emotions in RRR and its songs are large, and very Indian, laden with Sooraj Barjatiyaesque close-ups and push-ins to actors reacting to events with awe and grief (a device now ubiquitous in TV serials). If emotions are partially socially constructed and every culture experiences and expresses emotions differently, it makes sense that RRR’s emotions, like the typical masala film, are larger and louder than the typical Hollywood Blockbuster, whose embarrassment over naked display of emotion is visible in the jokes the MCU uses to undercut its dramatic moments.

Raamam Raghavam, Etthara Jenda, and the masculine nationalism of RRR. 

Ramaraju picks up a rifle. Courtesy: Netflix

Where Dosti and Naatu Naatu for the most part celebrate the two leads equally, the most contentious scene of RRR seems to be the ending, when Ramaraju is dressed up in saffron robes, adorns long hair, and wields a bow, evoking Lord Ram. As someone from the Telugu states, I was fully expecting this—this is, after all, how Alluri Sita Ramaraju, the real revolutionary, is supposed to have dressed up. The Telugu states have multiple statues depicting him as such at prominent locations, and the famous film Alluri Seetharama Raju (1974) starring and produced by Krishna (Mahesh Babu’s father) also depicts him this way. When I heard of filmgoers shouting religious slogans in the theater at the appearance of Ramaraju in Alluri’s costume, I thought this was a result of the lack of cultural context—that people outside the Telugu states did not know this is how Alluri dressed. However, it could very well be intentional on the part of the filmmakers: there is, ultimately, more Lord Ram in RRR’s Ramaraju than the real, historical Alluri Sitarama Raju. (This is not to say that this connection is entirely manufactured in the film: the real Alluri was often compared and mythologized as Lord Ram in folk ballads.)

A photo of the deceased Alluri Sitarama Raju, aged 27, released by the British after they apprehended and executed him, perhaps to serve a very similar function as the one of Che Guevara released by the Bolivian army, on which John Berger famously wrote.

The song Raamam Raghavam is explicitly written as a stotra in praise of Lord Ram, his lineage, and his bow, not Alluri. RRR's Ramaraju and the Ramayana's Ram both spend years in exile because of a promise they've made to their fathers. The moon-shaped locket broken in two and shared between Ramaraju and Sita is a reference to a line in the Ramayana where Ram rues that he and Sita are looking at the same moon in the sky while separated by many miles. In the pre-interval sequence, Ramaraju rides into the fight on a chariot driven by white horses which is ablaze—a reference to the similarly depicted Sun god, Surya, who is considered to be an ancestor of Ram. He is carried on Bheem’s shoulders much like Ram was on Hanuman’s. The story, especially in the second half, begins to turn into an adaptation of the Ramayana with parallels that range from the subtle to the explicit. 

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The problem is that the Ramayana, unlike the Mahabharata, has a single, all-powerful hero. When RRR in its third act essentially turns into the Ramayana, it subordinates Bheem to Ramaraju—inevitable, when he is required to become a Hanuman to Ramaraju’s Ram.

When the film treats him with this undercurrent of inferiority due to him being an Adivasi—he sits on the floor in Ramaraju’s study, marvels at Ramaraju’s collection of books, says he is an adivi manishi— it is doing so not just because this is a callback to the old NTR starrer Raamudu Bheemudu (remade in Hindi as Ram aur Shyam, starring Dilip Kumar), in which NTR plays both an urbane Raamudu and the boorish Bheemudu, but because it implicitly assumes a difference between the two, based on their birth. This is also why the song can't quite find a way to eulogise Bheem as it does Ram—is Bheem Hanuman? Is Bheem, Mahabharata's Bheem? It can only make vague allusions to him being of the "Komaram clan".

When the film has Bheem imply that he is unintelligent compared to Ramaraju (“adivi manishini thalli”, I’m only a man of the forest), the dialogue contradicts what the plot is telling us—Bheem has managed to keep his identity secret for much longer than Ramaraju, and has infiltrated guarded British complexes twice. This is why the film’s emotional logic begins to falter in the second half  when Bheem is more apologetic to Ramaraju for not acting on information he didn’t have (he had no way of knowing Ramaraju’s real motivations) than Ramaraju ever is for ostensibly killing and torturing dozens of freedom fighters.  The portrayal also does injustice to the real Komaram Bheem, who by all accounts was a self-educated, well-traveled revolutionary with a concrete ideology for tribal emancipation from exploitation. 

While RRR celebrates Hindu-Muslim unity in a manner very similar to 70’s Bollywood ala Zanjeer or Amar Akbar Anthony, it discards the two political figures most commonly associated with the mass popularisation of that school of secularism— Gandhi and Nehru—from Etthara Jenda, the song that plays over its end credits. (The 1974 film based on Alluri does, notably, include them in a tribute at the end).  It does, however, include Sardar Vallabhai Patel.

Etthara Jenda. Courtesy: Netflix

In an interview, V Vijayendra Prasad, the film’s screenwriter, when questioned about this choice, explains that the song intends to celebrate violent revolutionaries, which Gandhi and Nehru were not. When questioned about the inclusion of Patel, he replies that he “has a grudge against Mr. Gandhi” for his intervention in choosing Nehru over Patel to be the first Prime Minister of India. “If he (Patel) were there, Kashmir wouldn’t be burning today”, he goes on to say. His version of events has been disputed by scholars and historians. (What makes a political analysis of this interesting is that Rajanna, the Vijayendra Prasad-directed film about the Telangana Peasant rebellion starring Nagarjuna, seems deeply appreciative of Nehru.)

Telugu cinema has, perhaps more than any other film industry, been deeply wedded to Hindu mythology. But rarely has this been communal. Its two most iconic mythological hits certainly aren’t— Mayabazaar is a comedy of manners set during the events in the Mahabharata that celebrates an elopement, and Dana Veera Soora Karna with its rationalist strain, questions the caste system through the story of Karna. RRR is a departure from the standard Telugu depictions of Ram as a compassionate and kind figure, like the one portrayed in NTR's Lava Kusa.  Despite the complication that Alluri was something of a warrior-saint who was mythologized as Lord Ram, the film’s ending is a celebration of the warrior Ram—a depiction that has primarily existed in the Hindi heartland and been fueled for political purposes.

(Another antagonism is more subtly embedded in RRR: When Bheem first enters the Scott Mansion with Jenny, he’s intimidated by large Roman-looking statues. At the pre-intermission scene, the Indian goes on to destroy the very symbols of Western Civilisation he was intimidated by.)

However, unlike the current wave of nationalist epics from the Hindi Film Industry, RRR does not villainize any Indian community. Before its release, I feared that the fact that real Komaram Bheem fought the feudal Nizamate would make it an easy vessel for the kind of Islamophobia found in other films that released this year (Despite the fact that the real rebellion targeted upper-caste landlords who forced underprivileged castes into bonded labour as much as it did the Nizam monarchy)

Instead, the film shows Indians with different religious markers uniting to oppose the British.  Do the times colour our perception of benign religious iconography? Is Etthara Jenda’s evocation of masculine nationalism in the vein of generic Telugu film masala? Is its celebration of violent revolution and its exclusion of Gandhi Tarantino-style revisionism, or does it derive from Savarkar’s rejection of Gandhi and Buddha’s ahimsa and his calls for the militarization of religion?

In my opinion, it is instructive to look at RRR’s design from the ground up. Rajamouli had to appeal to two Telugu states—Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, split from one state into two following a popular movement in 2014. For this, the filmmakers chose one revolutionary belonging to each state. But the film also had to appeal to a North Indian audience—for this, Ajay Devgan and Alia Bhatt were roped in. It is possible that the filmmakers decided that the North Indian lack of familiarity with Alluri and Bheem could be compensated by appealing to Hindu sentiments. Every target demographic had to be told that the filmmakers were on their side, or at the very least, that the film wasn’t offensive to their worldview—Gandhi and Nehru were excluded from its tributes and Komaram Bheem’s association with communist organisations invisiblized to appease the saffron nationalists and their sympathisers; but Hindu-Muslim unity was included to distance itself from the politics of hate and to appeal to a larger audience. (It is also significant that the film that was making waves in theatres before the release of RRR was The Kashmir Files. )

But the choices mean that the film ends up validating only a violent, masculine form of nationalism to the exclusion of the kind pioneered by Gandhi, despite (and perhaps, owing to) him being a towering Indian figure of the 20th Century. Ultimately, commercial cinema might be trying to cater to the proponents of a New India by furnishing a past where violence and masculine nationalism won the day. The danger, of course, is that if you believe violence has successfully shaped your past, the cultural temptation to use it to shape the future is irresistible. 

Ram and Bheem explode into combat. (Courtesy: Disney+ Hotstar)

There is a tension between the dharmic violence that wins the war between good and evil in the Hindu epics, and the long non-violent rebellion that is generally accepted to have won India its independence. When RRR needs its heroes to triumph against overwhelming odds, it transports us to another realm: when the two fighters take down entire regiments of the British in Delhi with melee combat, a spear, and a bow, they triumph only because the emotional arc of the story has transcended history and entered mythology—we are firmly in the centre of the magic circle. Logic is being stripped away, torn apart, and sucked to the outside—questions like why the officers are given a nonsensical order to not shoot the heroes unless they’re at point blank range are vaporised at the spectacle of Ramaraju firing arrows with grenades attached to them.

When the lights went up after my third viewing of RRR, I found myself thinking of the scene in Baahubali : The Beginning when Kattappa gets on his knees, takes Baahubali’s foot, and places it on his head. I remembered the gasps in the theatre— clearly, a nerve in the collective Indian cultural substratum, one that responds to the primordial emotions of submission and worship, had been touched.  But does that scene—that shot— work without the characters being situated on different rungs of the caste hierarchy? As always, with Rajamouli, it’s about the emotions. The question then is what part of us these emotions come from.