Chandrayaan-3: Space, Hindi Cinema & The Landing Of An Unlikely Dream

Aakash bahut ooncha hai / Aur door bahut hain tare / Phirte huye saikadon Sooraj
Brahmand ke ye banjare...

This folksy interpretation of space hasn’t been picked out of a sonnet. These are lines from the title song of Brahmand, an educational TV series that aired on Doordarshan in the early ‘90s. Space is a scientific subject by design, delineated by mystery and discovery… one of those unknowns that life’s detectives can neither fully define nor fully resist defining. For every generation that has walked the earth, space has represented a field that perpetuates a sense of illusion. We believe what we see, and then we see what we want to believe. To Indians, believers of Astrology and by extension planetary influence, space has been as sacred as it has been seductive. We have imagined it, interrogated it, worshipped it and with Chandrayaan-3 landing on the moon, put ourselves in its midst. Cinema, curiously, has imitated this journey from blunt curiosity, the seduction of illuminating the darkness of the vast sky, to the substantiated step of actually walking out there and flicking on a cosmic switch.

Our fascination with space, its celestial configurations, has dictated our lives for centuries. The scientific curiosity to actually map and study beyond that solipsistic world view, was probably born with Nehru’s planetariums. Brahmand’s first episode, in fact, is about a school trip some curious kids take to the Mumbai planetarium. In DD’s Space City Sigma, an inter-galactic show inspired by the likes of Star Trek, humans make one last stand against an aggressively alien species. In Captain Vyom, Milind Soman travels across the universe trying to catch its most notorious criminals. Indian cinema wouldn’t produce much in the way of space fiction for a while but with Rakesh Roshan’s Koi Mil Gaya, it recast the hostile alien as a benevolent ally to our romantic conquests. The ‘om’ signal used in the film eventually became the stuff of memes, but back then it alluded to the sacrosanct nature of all that we believe is unreachable, for a reason. Divinity resides in the unexplained after all.

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In Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades, Shah Rukh Khan plays a scientist working at NASA. He returns to India as a sort of homecoming to rescue a mother figure. He decides to stay, to build her a dam — an indigenous spoke on which the fledgling, uncertain future of a forgotten Indian village could be built. Not all starry moments occur at the doorstep of an unknown galaxy. They can also happen at the meeting point of man’s will and the celestial nature of the challenge he undertakes. Khan’s character — Mohan Bhargav — represented every curious, hungry Indian who had to look offshore to feed an appetite for knowledge and exploration. His return home might be romantic, but to his galactic conquest it spells a firm end. An end that feeds the colonial narrative that a poor country ought to first clean up the homestead, to be able to dream or recklessly still, pursue it. But we have been dreamers ever since we wrote the sky into our life’s personal calendar. Ever since we fell asleep on unremarkable pavements. It was a matter of time before we’d reach out to catch an actual glimpse.

Of late, stories around space exploration and space travel have started to crop up in our imagination. With Netflix’s Cargo, space becomes that apparatus to conduct an analysis of the human condition. With Rocketry:The Nambi Effect, we have witnessed how political imposition has and will continue to colour the outcome of strictly scientific pursuits. In Mission Mangal, we’ve been treated to the eccentric methods that have allowed us to punch well above our historic weight. With the exceptional Rocket Boys, we have been asked to consider the storied but flawed men who pillared India’s scientific realm. The same realm that is now beginning to flourish and sparkle with outcomes that even the most pious, and the most cynical would have to consider. It’s not virtuous to merely land on the moon, but it is to do it from where we’ve come. Some marathons are won through the contextualisation of their journey, as opposed to the measure of the podium. Even by the podium’s standards, though, we are fairly early.

The Chandrayaan mission will obviously one day get its film, series, documentary etc as it should. It’s an epochal achievement, one that finally assuages the seduction of decades, with the substance of a grainy, dotted black and white image that is the stuff of astronomical history — an assured, cheery, moonshot of our own. To each of us who watched that landing, staring as those numbers were counted down, only the applause applied a sense of finality. It wasn’t detectable to the naked eye, but a historic first step had been taken. Only the extraordinary is of consequence in the mythical. It’s precisely what makes space so bewitching and untranslatable. So much has been travelled, named, occupied and colonised and yet much of it remains beyond reach. At least now, Mohan Bhargav need not abandon his intellectual dream to fulfil an emotional one. “Main space main jaana chahta hun,” a boy, declares bluntly, in Brahmand after he is urged by his teacher to fashion a question about the night sky. He just might, as we once wishfully thought we could. Because now we have.