A music-and-dance-filled melodrama set in beautiful Kashmir, Roja shattered box office records all over India, mostly with a re-dubbed Hindi version, but was also dogged by controversy due to its politically sensitive subject matter and imagery. Rishi, a Madras-based computer scientist, and Roja, his feisty rural bride, celebrate their arranged marriage in the sylvan surroundings of his native Tamil village. But Rishi, called away on assignment to Kashmir, is abducted by freedom fighters determined to establish a separate state, and who seek the release of their leader, Wasim Khan. Roja, alone and unable to communicate in a land where nobody speaks her language, nevertheless rushes madly from police to army to Khan himself, seeking her husband's liberation. In its story and images, the film evokes the rhetoric of nationalism-Tamil, Hindu, and Kashmiri-yet finds the humanism propelling all these causes.