The Other Indian

3 Idiots is a pathbreaking movie, for introducing a mainstream Hindi film hero who’s not from north India.

Aamir Khan’s Ranchordas Chanchad-Rancho, of Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots, is now famous. But Ranchordas is not his real name. He really is Phunsuk Wangdu—as we get to know at the end of the film—a brilliant scientist with 400 patents, who is being pursued by American corporations and the Japanese. His girlfriend Pia’s (Kareena Kapoor) first reaction to this revelation is, “Oh, I don’t like Wangdu… Mein shaadi ke baad surname nahi change karungi.” This sequence, the film’s climax, is not only the icing on the cake of this contemporary Bollywood film, it’s also remarkable for its insertion of the Northeast and the extreme north into our mainstream imaginary.

Since the 1940s, and more so the 1950s, the Hindi film hero has typically been north Indian. In later years, he increasingly became Punjabiised, as the Bombay film industry came to be identified by the likes of Yash Chopra, the Kapoors and the Sippys. Other prototypes, like the Bengali bhadralok, for instance, which had currency with filmmakers like Bimal Roy, disappeared after the mid-1960s. So, the Hindi film’s hero was now the imaging of a nation which projected itself as a Hindi nation.

For this nation, the Northeast is the backwaters and, by and large, the people of these parts became in our mainstream imaginary an ‘other’—ethnically and culturally different and for many, just not as much a part of India as they themselves were. At the same time, these parts, removed as they were from the mainstream, became quaint and touristy—the backdrop of films like Dev Anand’s Jewel Thief (1967). Hence, Hirani and Aamir Khan’s Phunsuk Wangdu makes us sit up and take notice.

We first hear the name Phunsuk Wangdu at the start of the film’s second half, after it is revealed that the man known to his friends as Ranchordas Chanchad is not the real Ranchordas. Of the men who arrive in Shimla from Delhi on Rancho’s trail is one who is also hot on the heels of the scientist Phunsuk Wangdu, who is somewhere in these parts. Wangdu-Rancho is finally located in a children’s school in Ladakh, where tiny local boys make their own little motors and gadgets.

Work and play in this local school is focused on making one’s own thing—tiny inventions that are not part of any course book. They are, so to say, the antithesis of the mainstream educational system, which puts a premium on textbook definitions. It is not entirely coincidental, therefore, that the maverick Ranchordas turns out to be Wangdu. When a character like Wangdu arrives in our midst from the margins, as it were, he ends up debunking many of our received wisdoms, and also telling us that there are ‘other’ ways of being.

When a top Bollywood actor like Aamir Khan plays Wangdu, perhaps we subconsciously imbibe this message of ‘the other’. In the film, Aamir Khan’s entire look—the styling of his hair, or his gait—are calculated to make believable the final Phunsuk Wangdu. Not that there is no playing out of the regular trope of the mainstream, and so Pia balks at the thought of being Pia Wangdu.

However, at the end of the day, Wangdu is the winner, and even has sworn foe Chatur Ramalingam—the mainstream’s product par excellence—grovelling at his feet. More importantly, however, Phunsuk impacts the mainstream. He changes the lives of those around him, and even when he’s not around, his methods are working, always turning the so-called system on its head. That’s vintage Hirani, of course—very Munnabhai in every sense. He tugs at some part of our ideas of mainstream, and therein lies the challenge of this unlikely ‘hero’ of a Bollywood film.

Sharmistha Gooptu is a scholar of Indian cinema and a founding trustee of South Asia Research Foundation

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Sharmistha Gooptu