Swades, Ashutosh Gowariker's 2004 Film About a NASA Project Manager Who Builds a Power Plant for an Indian Village, Won Two National Film Awards and a Filmfare Best Actor Award for Shah Rukh Khan

Swades won two National Film Awards for 2004: best male playback singer for Udit Narayan and best cinematography for Mahesh Aney. The Directorate of Film Festivals’ catalogue for that year says Aney received his award for a lens “that captures the rural Indian landscape with reality and harshness.” The film has a NASA project manager at its centre, and the work he takes on in a village is building a power plant.

Ashutosh Gowariker produced and directed it, and Rotten Tomatoes gives the theatrical release date as 17 December 2004. The Directorate’s catalogue lists a Hindi film of 195 minutes, with Shah Rukh Khan, Gayatri Joshi, Daya Shankar Pandey, Kishori Ballal and Master Smit Seth in the cast and music by A. R. Rahman. Rahman had also scored Gowariker’s Lagaan, and Khan’s wider career is in tuput’s profile of Shah Rukh Khan.

A NASA project manager in a village called Charanpur

The catalogue’s synopsis describes Mohan Bhargava as a young scientist and project manager at NASA. He returns to India to find Kaveriamma, the woman who looked after him as a child, and to take her back to America. She lives in Charanpur, a village where he is drawn into questions of progress and development. Gita, played by Joshi, teaches at the village primary school and has chosen to stay there despite casteism, prejudice and a lack of basic amenities.

Richard Delacy, writing in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin in 2009, says the film culminates in Mohan designing and building a small hydroelectric plant to give the village continuous electricity. Delacy notes that the title, which means homeland, is rendered in English as “We, the People”.

The Bilgaon project behind the electricity plot

Bilgaon is a village of 12 hamlets, called padas, in Nandurbar district of Maharashtra. Frontline reported in October 2003 that its people began work in mid-2002 with activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the Save the Narmada movement) and with the People’s School of Energy in Kerala. Six months and 13.5 km of wiring later, in January 2003, Maharashtra’s rural development minister, R. R. Patil, inaugurated the micro-hydel project.

Frontline gives the engineering in figures. Water flows at 400 litres a second from a height of 8 metres to turn a turbine, and the 15 kW it produces reaches all 12 hamlets within 4 km. A check dam two metres high holds the water. When the river Uday is in full flow the village has power round the clock, and in drier months it has four hours after sundown. Villagers paid Rs 10 a month for a tubelight and Rs 30 for a television.

The labour was voluntary, which Ravi Kuchimanchi, an activist and volunteer with the Association for India’s Development, told Frontline saved Rs 2.5 lakh over eight months. Dilip D’Souza wrote in Scroll in 2017 that Kuchimanchi and his wife Aravinda Pillalamarri, Indian-Americans, moved to India in 1998 to work on projects run by that association, and that Gowariker heard the Bilgaon story and used it in Swades. Shoma Chatterji wrote in The Citizen in 2019 that Rajni Bakshi’s book Bapu Kuti told the couple’s story and the Bilgaon project’s, and that “lighting a village” became the trigger for the script.

The film is inspired by the couple, not a record of them. Delacy points to significant changes from their lives, beginning with Mohan, who returns to India with no intention of contributing to development. The Hindu reported on 11 August 2006 that the Narmada Bachao Andolan said the Bilgaon project had been washed away by the backwater effect of the Sardar Sarovar dam.

Shot near Wai, scored by Rahman

Chatterji writes that the film was largely shot in Wai, about 100 km from Pune. Joshi told Bollywood Hungama in December 2019 that most of her scenes were filmed in villages around Wai, where she stayed for about three months. The interview names Rahman as composer and Javed Akhtar as lyricist.

Dequina called Rahman’s music “beguiling, infectiously eclectic” and singled out the climactic song, “Yeh Jo Des Hai Tera”, as showing Rahman’s and Akhtar’s skill and Gowariker’s as a director. Rahman’s earlier work, from Roja to the Oscars, is covered in tuput’s article on A. R. Rahman.

Two National Film Awards and a Filmfare for Khan

IndiaFM, now part of Bollywood Hungama, reported on 13 July 2005 that the National Film Awards had been announced that day and that Swades won two. The catalogue prints both citations. Narayan’s award is for the song “Ye Tara Wo Tara”, and the jury cited his soulful rendition of the melody. Aney’s award, with a Rajat Kamal (silver lotus) and Rs 10,000, was shared with the film’s processing laboratory, Adlab of Mumbai, which received the same prize.

At the 50th Filmfare Awards on 26 February 2005, the Daily Star reported, Khan won best actor for Swades. The same report names Yash Chopra’s Veer-Zaara as best film.

What critics wrote, and the box office

Dequina wrote that Gowariker “gets his nationalistic message across with powerful understatement” and that Khan holds back his usual histrionics as Mohan. Adrian Martin, in a December 2004 review, found the film moving in its many poignant situations but less satisfying as socially conscious drama, and said the central village is less blighted than the rest of the land Mohan travels through.

Bollywood Hungama’s table lists India nett earnings of Rs 16.31 crore and a worldwide gross of Rs 33.98 crore, and gives the verdict Flop. Delacy, who treats the film as one that did not succeed commercially, argues that a hit at the box office says very little about what it means to consume a film. Box-office figures differ between outlets, and these are that one outlet’s.

Why it comes up when people talk about returning

Delacy places Swades among the Hindi films made since the early 1990s that feature Indians living abroad. Suvadip Sinha, in a 2012 article in South Asian Popular Culture, reads Mohan’s return as a departure from the usual Bollywood assumption of an original bond between diaspora and homeland. Sinha argues that the return is grounded in everyday, material circumstances.

Joshi told Bollywood Hungama that she still meets people who saw the film and moved back to India, and she quotes them as saying “that’s when we decided that we have to move back to India”. That is her account of what viewers have said to her, and the sources cited here give no count of how many returned. The couple who inspired the story had moved in 1998, six years before the film opened.

Village electrification, 2004 and 2018

The Ministry of Power’s annual report for January 2003 to March 2004 records 494,587 villages electrified in total as of 31 March 2004, of which 4,589 inhabited villages were added in 2003-04. It gives 82,976 electrified (provisional) out of 107,045 tribal villages. The report defines an electrified village as one with a distribution transformer and lines in the inhabited area and any Dalit hamlet, power in public places such as schools, panchayat offices and health centres, and at least 10 per cent of households connected.

A Prime Minister’s Office release carried by the Press Information Bureau on 19 July 2018 says about 18,000 villages that had no electricity were electrified in the previous four years, the last being Leisang in Manipur on 28 April 2018. The Ministry of Power told the Lok Sabha on 21 November 2019 that, as reported by the States, all inhabited census villages stood electrified as on 28 April 2018, and that 5,251 un-electrified inhabited census villages were electrified under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana in 2017-18 and 2018-19 up to 28 April 2018.

The next stage is the household. The same reply says seven States reported 19,09,679 households that had earlier declined a connection and later asked for one, and that those were being electrified. The Ministry said on 16 March 2023 that 2.86 crore households had been electrified under the Saubhagya scheme, which was launched in October 2017 and closed on 31 March 2022.