What the #Oscar win of #NaatuNaatuSong mean for us.

It is indeed heartening to see a desi song of a regional film industry from Bhāratavarṣa getting global recognition. Congratulations to @ssrajamouli and the @RRRMovie team. But this win has some lessons.

The very appeal of the #NaatuNaatusong was not just desi, but the very ‘in-your-face’ desi attitude which puts the colonized and Anglicized mentality to its place. The setting, lyrics, choreography of the song all set that tune and that is why the song became hit.

People loved the idea of a thoroughly native hero being spurred by a man of the world who knows Bhārata on one hand and the West on the other… spurred to go dance on a genre-defying celebration of nativity and anti-colonialism. This is what made the song a hit.

And it is this confidence which won it an Oscar. Once again, we should never care of these international awards, and yet they will notice us precisely if we don’t care. It is in this regard that we need to be more careful.

The way @tarak9999 and @AlwaysRamCharan affected atrocious American accents and described their nomination as ‘being accepted by Hollywood – the Mecca’, was a sign that they lost sight of the very reason why #NaatuNaatu became a global hit.

This happens to any colonized society again and again. Any sign of nativity makes them get noticed, but the colonizer (the Western cultural paradigm here) then co-opts them and digests them to let no further native indigenous feature rise.

This is what they need to understand. We rise by being us. By defying any and all colonized mentalities, British and medieval. That will make the world notice us. And of course, we should proudly continue to be us, whether or not the world notices us.

(This article has been compiled from the tweet thread posted by @PankajSaxena84 on March 13, 2023)