A victory for the stories of India as seen from within

India arrived at the Oscars with two unique acceptance speeches. First, accepting the award for the Best Documentary Short for The Elephant Whisperers (the first Oscar ever awarded to an Indian production), director Kartiki Gonsalves made a dedication to “my motherland India”.

Not long after, while receiving his award for Best Original Song for Naatu Naatu from the Telugu film RRR (the second Oscar ever awarded to an Indian production), music director MM Keeravani riffed on The Carpenters’ Top of the World, singing, “RRR has to win, pride of every Indian”.

Though the evening began on a disappointing note, with Shaunak Sen’s masterful climate-crisis documentary All That Breathes losing out to Daniel Roher’s Navalny (about the assassination attempt against the titular Russian opposition leader), there was cause for celebration soon enough.

After all, this wasn’t the kind of India moment India had in 2009, when Slumdog Millionaire swept the awards, and AR Rahman and Resul Pookutty won three Oscars between them, for Best Original Song, Best Original Score, and Best Sound Mixing. That was a Jai Ho built around a foreign production helmed by yet another Englishman, Danny Boyle (India’s other big winner, Gandhi, was helmed by Englishman Richard Attenborough, when it won awards all the way back in 1983). Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire were both tales of India as seen by the curious outsider. They were stories of an India trapped in strife that it couldn’t control, full of poverty that manifested as squalor.

This year’s stories were stories of India as seen from within, a land of ancient coexistence with the natural world, and tribes that still worship elephants. The stars of The Elephant Whisperers are a couple from Tamil Nadu’s Kattunayakan tribe. They raise lost elephant calves as their children, resulting in an exceptionally high success rate for baby pachyderm survival.

Despite its 42-minute runtime, this documentary short takes its time letting the viewer immerse themselves in the lives of this unusual family and their lush forest world. In one scene, the tribal woman Bellie says of their first baby elephant, Raghu: “He tugged at my clothes… and I felt his love.” In another, the camera is positioned far enough from Bellie’s husband, Bomman, for the viewer to take in the beauty of the Mudumalai National Park. “Who’s the best elephant?” Bomman mutters to Raghu.

RRR is a celebration of a very different kind. The Telugu blockbuster, made on a massive budget of ₹550 crore, is set during the British Raj and designed to evoke nostalgia and national pride. Critics say Keeravani has composed better music in the past. The truth is, no viral tune was better timed. Naatu Naatu invites the world to celebrate this land as it does, unapologetically, through vibrant dancing men and pulsating rhythms.

As for the timing, this year’s Oscars were a clear nod to new audiences, new demographics.

The Asian-American absurdist comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once, based on the life of a Chinese immigrant couple, featuring inter-dimensional travel, kung-fu and a third eye, swept the Oscars, netting seven awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Asian-American Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) and Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh; the first Asian to win this award).

As the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sends out feelers in a quest to improve dipping ratings, it’s been changing its definitions in much-delayed but still-remarkable ways. This began, of course, with the South Korean film Parasite, the first non-English film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, in 2020. Other major changes have included nominations to feature films produced by streaming platforms (among the most prominent of these, in the early years, was the 2017 Best Picture nomination for Amazon Prime’s Manchester by the Sea).

Meanwhile, as India heads up in the rankings — from second-most-populous country to most-populous; from fifth-largest market for cinema by box-office revenue to third-largest — the India moment can be expected to last. Could Best Director or Best Picture be next? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now, why not just Naatu Naatu.

The writer is a journalist and music critic