[Reader-list] Farzana On Gandhi & Gujrat reminds me of Hey Ram

[rehan ansari]

Shuddha's comments and Farzana's writing remind me of
conversations I have had about Hey Ram, one in
particular with Shuddha. Since he has never written on
Kamal Hasan's film you will all have to suffer what I
once wrote about my confusions in general and some in
particular surrounding the reception of the film.

A rumour: when Kamal Haasan visited Nehru Memorial
Library for a talk before historians and other Delhi
types, shortly after the release of his partition
epic, he was expecting compliments. Instead, he came
in for haranguing. One attack was for showing the
Muslim community as helpless in the scenes of violence
in Delhi until the manly Hindu with the fancy gun
decides to save them.

This no rumour: at the Center for the Study of
Developing Societies in Delhi, last year, I heard a
paper on the film delivered by Ravi Vasudevan, a film
theorist, and was astounded by his unenthusiastic
tone. He found Hey Ram disturbing, but not in a good
way. 

When Saket Ram goes down the fundamentalist path, a
journey he begins after Partition violates his world,
it is an erotic journey. He dreams/fantasises about
being a gleamingly muscled warrior in ceremonial garb
wielding a big golden sword and swinging away at the
whirlwind. Ravi seemed troubled by the attractive
images of Saket Ram' s imagination - golden sword,
gleaming muscles - and told me afterwards that it was
not clear to him where the filmmaker stood in relation
to his images. The fundamentalist imagination should
be clearly condemned by Kamal Haasan, Ravi seemed to
be saying. 

Fundamentalism attracts so, it must be sexy. Showing a
character seduced, the seduction shown from the
character' s perspective, I find to be a fantastic
subject for a film. Looking to fight the inner storm
that partition engendered, one can imagine inventing a
persona that wears a brahmin thread and wields a big
sword and sets out to fight the storm.  

In 1991, a year before Ayodhya and the Bombay riots, I
managed a cup of tea in Lahore with Malkani, then a
BJP vice-president, now in the Rajya Sabha, who was
attending a seminar organised by The Frontier Post. I
remember him avuncular and enthusiastic for meeting
young people, taking a break as it were from verbal
duelling with the hawks of Islamabad, but I also
remember another moment. I asked about and he recalled
Hyderabad, Sind, the city of his birth, and boyhood
and I' ll always remember how the room went cold. I
was in the presence of a great anger. 

Kamal Haasan does a brilliant job of letting the
viewer remain within Saket Ram' s subjectivity.
Partition violence, political events, political
personalities are represented from Saket's disturbed
perceptions. 

II thought it wonderful that the direction given to
the actor playing Gandhi presents Gandhi as an  idea,
a perception. The director is not interested in
creating the fiction that the Gandhi we see in the
film is Gandhi-as-he-really-was,  say as the Gandhi of
Attenborough. An example of the staging of Gandhi:
there is the scene in which Saket Ram revisits the
streets of his violent, vengeful acts. He then wanders
the street, and becomes one of a gathering crowd that
watches a tableau in a window - Gandhi is with
Suhrawardy 
addressing the audience and exonerating Suhrawardy for
the Calcutta riots.

In the eye of the would-be assassin of Gandhi, Saket
Ram, this then is Gandhi partial to the Muslim and
hence the great betrayer of the Hindu.

More fabulous work by Kamal Haasan is Saket Ram' s
relationship with the two women in his life. In
pre-partition Calcutta, Saket Ram is in a relationship
with an equal, the Mukherjee character. She is a
teacher, has a life independent of him, his parents
don' t know about her and so on. They are two moderns
living in a city in this fabulous empire apartment. 

Comes the violence: an attempted rape of Saket Ram,
her murder, the loss of his world.

Post-partition he is lost, going through the motions
of his life. His second relationship is a marriage
chosen by his parents. She is beholden to him as a
young bride. From being some idea of modern he enters
some idea of traditional mode. It is in this part of
his life that he is attracted to a fundamentalism, and
in a feverish dream fantasy his virgin wife becomes a
gun (an animation sequence). She is a wife to him like
an appendage, and now that he desired a gun, she
became a different appendage: in his dream her body
morphs into a gun. 

To become an assassin he becomes a brahmacharya,
forsaking the wife, family, livelihood to live a life
of austerity, celibacy, and - violence. It is the
realisation of his fantasy of becoming a brahmin
warrior.

A brahmin who is a warrior, a brahmacharya who focuses
on violence, the journey that Saket Ram takes is a
provocative reading of Gandhi' s autobiography, The
Story of My Experiments with Truth. Gandhi and Saket
Ram' s paths of self-discipline sometimes seem eerry
and similar.

Where else in cinema or in fiction have we recently
found as complex and rewarding-to-analysis exploration
of the fundamentalist imagination? Not in Hanif
Kureishi' s unsympathetic writings of Bradford types,
certainly not in Deepa Mehta' s Earth or Pankaj
Butalia' s forgettable film. 



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