20000320

'Hey Ram' probes motives of Gandhi killers

NEW DELHI: Fifty-two years after Mahatma Gandhi was riddled with bullets on his way to a prayer meeting, a film maker has dared to probe the Hindu fanaticism which killed the father of modern India.

"Hey Ram!" - whose title comes from the invocation of despair Gandhi uttered as he fell, mortally wounded - recounts how the independence leader's embrace of Muslims had convinced Hindu fundamentalists that he was an enemy of his own religion.

Revered for so long that he has virtually joined India's pantheon of gods, Gandhi is depicted in first-time director Kamal Hassan's film as a meek and helpless figure.

Faced with the bloody communal rioting that erupted as the subcontinent was torn into Pakistan and Hindu-dominated India, he lisps: "I can only fast and pray; what else can I do?".

Kamal Hassan, 45, is the latest in a new breed of artists who have sought, on stage or in writing, to separate Gandhi the man from the myth. Naseeruddin Shah, a veteran of Bombay's entertainment scene, played Gandhi in one of those plays and was cast in the same role for "Hey Ram!".

"Gandhi was a great man. But he was certainly not the perfect human being," Hassan says. "I get upset when people try to give him a halo and make him the second Jesus Christ."

CONTEMPORARY SWIPES

But his film also takes a few contemporary swipes at the Hindu nationalist movement whose political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has risen from virtual anonymity to power over the past 20 years.

Critics accuse the BJP of harbouring a bias against minorities, in particular Muslims, and fuelling the communal animosity that erupted with such savagery 52 years ago.

The censors, at once prudish and sensitive to inciting social tensions, have not spared Hassan's movie. Among several cuts, most of which were of sex scenes, there was one which showed a Nazi swastika turning into a lotus, the BJP's symbol.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who came to be known as the Mahatma - the great soul - for his doctrine of non-violence in the pursuit of independence, was shot dead by Nathuram Godse on January 30, 1948.

The following year Godse and co-accused Narayan Apte were sentenced to death.

History records Gandhi's tireless tours on foot to stop the partition bloodshed that caused the deaths of an estimated one million people and the flight of at least 10 million refugees in history's largest mass migration.

"It is our duty to see that not a single Muslim brother is killed," Gandhi declares in one scene of the film where he pleads for unity between Hindus and Muslims.

But his attempts to paper over the communal chasm was perceived as a prejudice towards Muslims by a small Hindu minority who plotted his assassination.

SENSUOUS HUSBAND TURNED LETHAL ASSASSIN

The film tracks the metamorphosis of mild archaeologist Saket Ram, a fictional Hindu character, into a bloodthirsty fanatic, and then back to a believer in Gandhian non-violence.

Ram's calm life, cocooned within a passionate love for his wife, is torn apart when the venom of the Hindu-Muslim riots enters his serene Calcutta flat.

Battered and tied to a piano, over and under which the couple had made love just hours earlier, Ram grimaces helplessly as his old Muslim tailor rapes and then slits his wife's throat.

Ram's rage and grief lead him to a group of Hindu zealots led by a provincial ruler who says: "To save the soul of the Hindu nation, this Great Soul (Gandhi) has to die".

Armed with a Mauser German rifle, Ram stalks Gandhi to Delhi.

But a chance meeting with an old colleague, a Muslim who still clings to Gandhian values even after losing his father in the riots, douses Ram's fury and shows him the futility of hatred.

A remorseful Ram dashes to apologise to Gandhi. But by then Godse has killed the Mahatma.

Zooming to the present, the final scene shows Ram, withered by age, being taken to hospital on a stretcher as communal violence rages again. "Oh God! they still carry on," he sighs before closing his eyes forever.

MISTAKES OF THE PAST, COMMENT ON THE PRESENT

Reaction to the film, which was released in India in mid-February, would have made the Mahatma happy. Family members of both the assassin and his victim have been united in praise.

Tushar Gandhi, the Mahatma's grandson, was impressed enough by its "realistic depiction" to act as himself in the movie, while the 80-year-old brother of Gandhi's killer, Gopal Godse, called it a "bold attempt to present the other side of the story".

"The mood and anger against Gandhi, among the highly intellectual microminority, was not clearly brought out in the past," Gopal Godse told the Times of India in Pune.

The film drew flak in Calcutta as "anti-Gandhi" and in Bombay as "anti-Muslim", but otherwise opened to all round encores. The Times of India called it "sensitive and sensible cinema".

The BJP appeared to take "Hey Ram!" very cooly. Sporadic protests died down very quickly and the party had no official reaction.

By having the protagonist criticise Gandhi in the first part of "Hey Ram!" and in the latter part show remorse and conversion to Gandhian values, Hassan perhaps managed to keep both sides happy.

Hassan says his film is an effort to comment on present flaws by reliving mistakes of the past.

"Communal disharmony continues even today and there's a lot we can learn from our past," he says. "I'm just saying that just because you have the Internet don't throw away the postman."-Reuters