The article which appears below was originally published in Krishna Tiloks's book, Notes Of A Dream. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
Roja has withstood the test of time in the way very few works of art have.
The film is built around the premise of political unrest in Kashmir. It is the tale of a young Tamil couple who go to Kashmir when the husband, Rishi (portrayed by Arvind Swamy), a cryptologist, is sent to the region on a military assignment. Rishi is kidnapped by terrorists, and his newlywed wife, Roja (Madhoobala Raghunath), needs to find a way to get him back in a land where she does not know anyone and she can speak neither Hindi nor Kashmiri.
The movie draws subtly from the most loved stories of Indian mythology (like the Ramayana, and the tale of the lovers Savitri and Satyavan) as well as on Indian patriotic feeling. The result was a heart-wrenching and uplifting tale of love, feminine strength and human goodness that is as touching and relevant now as it was when it was released back in 1992. The themes of the film are both universal and timeless.
Roja—apart from being the name of the female protagonist—is Tamil for ‘rose’. Mani Ratnam felt that the red flower with its thorns was a suitable metaphor for Kashmir, a land that is at once dangerous and beautiful.
Kashmir itself, at the time, was too unsafe for the cast and crew to film in, and so Roja was primarily shot in other mountainous regions of India, most of them in the southern parts of the country. Visually too the film was a masterpiece, with some stunning cinematography by cinematographer Santosh Sivan.
But the thing people remember most about and immediately associate with Roja is its music—and, more specifically, the man who made that music.
A.R. Rahman was genuinely not interested in composing for films before the fact. Playing at recording sessions for other composers, programming for them and creating jingles was plenty lucrative. And his bands and other independent collaborations allowed him to experiment creatively with music. He was happy with what he had.
Towards the end of the 1980s, in fact, AR had stopped playing at recording sessions altogether to focus exclusively on making jingles.
But AR’s sister Raihanah believes that he would have eventually got into composing for films. ‘The movies wouldn’t have let his sort of talent go,’ she says. ‘I’m just thankful it was a director of Mani Ratnam’s standard who got to him first. Roja was a great film and it gave Rahman the platform he deserved. He could easily have ended up composing for some other film-maker for his first movie, not been noticed at all, and been just another music director.’
AR wanted to compose for Roja because he was a Mani Ratnam fan and because he knew that the director respected good music, different music.
Considering all that it would become, the film was made on a modest budget. No one expected a Tamil film, with virtually unknown actors, about the problems in faraway Kashmir would work as it did.
When it came to creating the Roja album, creatively, AR did not have anything to complain about. Mani Ratnam was very clear about what he wanted and pushed his new composer relentlessly, but he was also open to ideas and allowed AR his freedom.
The Roja album itself was compact, with seven songs (five, strictly speaking; two songs were reprises), but each was a sonic novelty. The likes of them were unheard by the Tamil ear when they first came out. And they demonstrated Rahman’s remarkable versatility, musical knowledge and sheer talent.
‘Rukkumani Rukkumani’ was a classily erotic wedding song with a persistent beat and a powerful vocal delivery by SPB and K.S. Chitra. Both of them are among India’s most skilled and experienced singers. Funnily, while AR is extremely strait-laced when it comes to matters of sex in real life, many of his love songs are of a playfully and joyously erotic nature—though that could probably be attributed more to the lyricists he works with than the man himself. Rahman respects and embraces the joyous nature of true, respectful physical love as totally natural and powerful. It is vulgarity that he doesn’t care for.
‘Kadhal Rojave’ as a pining and haunting ballad of separated lovers (again sung by SPB, with Sujatha Mohan).
‘Pudhu Vellai Mazhai’, which was sung by Unni Menon and Sujatha Mohan, was a searing and intense number that perfectly captured Roja’s wonder at seeing snow for the first time.
‘The recording of “Kadhal Rojave” was the first time I worked with him as a composer,’ says SPB. ‘Panchathan was still very minimal at the time.’
SPB asked AR to sing the song and show him, but AR was very, very shy and it took a bit of prodding on SPB’s part to finally get him to do it. He sang the song, with all the nuances. It would, of course, be a while yet before AR started singing on his own records.
‘Rahman never dictates,’ says SPB of the experience of recording a song for AR. ‘He asks. He is not rigid. He jokes, he is approachable and he is genuine. He has no airs. And it’s true humility. You always come out with a smile after meeting him. It’s a combination of personality and talent that makes him great. He’s a very, very good human being.’
Roja’s ‘Tamizha’, meanwhile, was an anthem of Tamil pride that AR and Bharat Bala had worked on much earlier but didn’t end up using. And it found a place of honour in the film. It was particularly memorable because it was used in one of the best-loved moments of the movie. When the extremist militants who’ve kidnapped Rishi attempt to burn the Indian flag in his presence to demonstrate their aggression and hatred, Rishi jumps on the flag and tries to smother the flames, in a symbol of defiance.
But the album’s—and to an extent, the film’s—highlight was without doubt a perky and touchingly innocent reggae-based song about the dreams of a young girl. It was called ‘Chinna Chinna Aasai’, a playful number sung by a relatively unknown singer by the name of Minmini. Some of the ‘little wishes’ of the girl in the song include a desire to touch the moon, to be the centre of the universe for just a little while and to turn into a jasmine flower.
When you consider the song in the context of the movie, it will move you all the more—for it is essentially about the charming naivety of a young woman who will soon have to leave her idyllic home town and face unimaginable difficulties in a distant land.
The concept of ‘charts’ didn’t really exist for Indian music at the time of Roja’s release, but if it had, it’s pretty obvious that ‘Chinna Chinna Aasai’ would have topped them all.
When the song came out, it went through the stratosphere. It was playing everywhere; people were singing along to it everywhere. It might just be one of the most played songs in Tamil movie history. And it wasn’t just in Chennai. Roja—both as an album and as a movie—went national. The north of India rarely watched films from the south then, for their aesthetics and languages and sensibilities were very different, but Roja transcended those barriers seamlessly.
You can tell that AR really put himself into these songs, that he felt just what the characters in the film were feeling—the same wonder, the same mischief, the same pain.
The one thing that makes Mani Ratnam and A.R. Rahman such masters of their respective crafts is perhaps their ability to empathize with the characters in their movies.
Mani Ratnam knows precisely how his characters are feeling, how they should behave. Even his actors (some of whom are the best in the business) don’t see their parts so well. And AR knows just what the people in the movies he’s scoring for are going through. He can feel their sorrow, their happiness, their churning. Or even if he can’t feel it, he sure can imagine it. That’s part of what makes his movie music so powerful—there’s real feel in it. He invests a part of himself in all of his songs. That is why the better the director understands and communicates his script, the better the quality of music AR delivers.
Given all that it became, you’d have thought the making of Roja was a dream, but, in truth, it was sort of a trial for AR, fraught with doubts and frustrations. The man encountered his fair share of hurdles when it came to actually recording the Roja album.
Many of the musicians who had been staples at AR’s recordings till then disappeared at this time, leaving AR alone—and rather dispirited. ‘My core group of musicians whom I’d been working with until then didn’t show up when the time came for me to record the songs for Roja,’ says AR. ‘They all had other commitments, bigger gigs, and they felt that those should prioritized. So no one turned up for me.’
AR’s mother, Kareema Begum, however, told him to get over himself. A tough cookie, a woman who never wasted time feeling sorry for herself, and doesn’t indulge others who are doing so, she said to her son, ‘Listen, you need no one. You can do this on your own. Forget about them and do what you have to do. I got you all these instruments, didn’t I? You can play them, can’t you? You have everything you need. So go ahead and do this.’
AR pulled himself together, did whatever he could himself and got a few other musicians he could pull together on board and finally recorded the song.
That song was ‘Chinna Chinna Aasai’. It was the first song that was recorded for Roja.
Kareema Begum broke into tears when she first heard the song, the whole Roja album. She was so happy and so proud.
‘I knew that “Chinna Chinna Aasai” was going to be a super-duper hit for sure,’ says Raihanah. ‘I was jumping around and dancing all over the house when I heard it.’
The day AR played the Roja soundtrack to Trilok Nair, his old friend was lost for words for a long time. ‘He called Sharada and me over after he’d recorded it,’ remembers Trilok. ‘I think we were the first people to listen to that song. My hair was standing by the end of it and I literally had tears in my eyes.’
Eventually, Trilok turned towards the young Rahman and said, ‘Mark my words, you’re not going to do another jingle for me after this. I’m guaranteeing you that. This is the end of the road for you as far as advertising goes.’
‘What are you saying, man?’ AR laughed. ‘What nonsense. Of course we’re going to work together again.’
‘No, trust me,’ Trilok said. ‘I can give it to you in writing. This is it. It ends here.’
While the prediction was not one hundred per cent accurate, it was pretty nearly there. After Roja, Rahman would only do a handful of jingles. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. He just didn’t have the time any more.
‘He got on to the train that was waiting for him and he went,’ says Trilok. ‘That was it. We all stood on the platform and waved goodbye, and he went. And I’m glad, because he deserved to be on that train.’
