‘Swades’ and the NRI Burden
The 2004 Shah Rukh Khan film broke away from the fantasy of overseas glamour. Instead, it showed us the political responsibility of returning home.
A NASA project manager feels an invisible thread pulling him to India. It isn’t nostalgia for home, but love for the woman who raised him. He returns on a short assignment, to convince her — a woman who has lived in India all her life — to leave with him for America. But along the way, he discovers what he owes his country of birth.
In 2004, this premise wasn’t an obvious one for a Shah Rukh Khan film. That year, Khan dominated the box office with Veer-Zaara and Main Hoon Na. If the former capitalized on his trademark romantic pining, then the latter was perfectly packaged to flaunt his family-friendly avatar. Nor was Swades reflective, in scale or scope, of director Ashutosh Gowariker’s prior film, the Academy Award-nominated cricket drama Lagaan (2001).
And yet, Swades, which focused on the quiet journey of a non-resident Indian’s (NRI) shifting relationship with his homeland, has over time become one of Khan’s most critically be loved movies.