Few beyond West Bengal may have heard the name of Nemai Ghosh. Though he is extremely low-profile; his name is synonymous with Satyajit Ray and with his still camera. He was Satyajit Ray’s official photographer beginning in 1969 when actor Robi Ghosh introduced him to Ray on the sets of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. He did not bother to get his collection recorded with the Guinness Book of Records but perhaps across the world, he is the only photographer who has in his collection more than one lakh photograph negatives of Satyajit Ray clicked between 1969 and the time Ray passed away. 

Originally from group theatre, Ghosh chanced upon photography through a strange twist of fate. “One evening, as I was waiting to get to the rehearsals for a play,  munching peanuts, a friend of mine told me that someone had forgotten his camera in a cab. My friend had picked it up and was already offered Rs.600.00 for it by another friend. I don’t know what prompted me to buy the camera off him. “You already owe me Rs.240.00. If you give the camera to me, I shall write off the loan.” He left the camera with me. I turned it around and looked into it, examining it closely. But I could hardly understand how it worked. At the time, a friend of mine who worked as an assistant cameraman in films offered to teach me the ropes. One day, theatre actor Robi Ghosh took me to see the shooting of a Ray film. The rest, as the saying goes, is history, he reminisces.

Delhi Art Gallery has digitized Ghosh’s work of more than one lac negatives, and present around one hundred and seventy archival prints at the Harrington Street Art Centre in Kolkata. Delhi Art Gallery brought out a superbly printed coffee table book of Ghosh’s photographs of Ray caught candidly in a myriad of moods – reading, writing, concentrating, pensive, working, looking through the lens on location, pointing a finger to direct action and so on. Pramod Kumar KG curator of the exhibition said, “Ghosh’s photographs of Ray at home and on the sets suggest a rare intimacy; with the poignancy of these images of the master at work, during and in many cases, enacting roles.”

His photographs on Ray are exhibited at the permanent gallery of St Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and at Nord Pas-de-Calais, France. He has documented the making of films such as Jukti Takko Gappo by Ritwik Ghatak, Interview, Calcutta 71 and Ek Adhuri Kahani by Mrinal Sen, Paar by Gautam Ghosh and Ijjodu by M S Sathyu. Ghosh photographed great masters Jamini Roy, Ramkinker Baij and Benodebehari Mukherjee over the years 1969 and 1970. He went back to his interest in documenting master artists from 2002, photographing more than 30 major Indian painters and sculptors at work, resulting in a massive suite of photographs of the best minds in contemporary Indian art at work. 

Ghosh has occasionally worked with other directors in film assignments. He was the still photographer for several films including Utpalendu Chakravarty’s Chokh (Eyes) (1982), Mrinal Sen’s Interview (1970), Calcutta ’71(1972) and Ek Adhuri Kahani (1972) and M.S. Sathyu’s Kahan Kahan Se Guzar Gaya (1981). “I am choosy about film assignments because I insist on reading the entire script of a film before accepting the work. This seems to puncture the egos of many filmmakers because after all, I am only a still photographer. But I do this because I work hard to sustain the high standards Ray helped me establish. For magazine work too, I look at the magazine myself to examine the processing and printing so that the quality of my original work does not fall because of bad printing” says Ghosh.

Moving beyond Ray, he has photographed the land and the people of Kutch in Gujarat (1995–97), Bastar in Chattisgarh (1998–99), Bonda Hills in Orissa (2007), the Apatani tribals in Ziro in Arunachal Pradesh (2010). “You cannot even begin to imagine what a long struggle it was to capture the lives and habitats of the adivasis of India living in remote places, inaccessible by any form of public and private transport, involving miles and hours of trekking on foot in terrible climatic conditions and all this when I was not exactly young,” reminisces Ghosh who celebrates his 85th birthday on May 8 this year. “The three things that have seen me through my struggles to establish myself are – the tenacity of purpose, discipline and hard work. I learnt discipline from Utpal Dutt when I trained under him as part of his Little Theatre Group. The same applied to Ray.” One of his sons, Satyaki Ghosh, is currently one of the best-known names as a brilliant photographer in B & W of performing artists, cinema, and fashion. 

Following Ray’s demise, Ghosh’s creative energies sought other directions, other subjects, other worlds. One is Kolkata, the city he was born in, grew up and still lives in. Nemai Ghosh’s Kolkata is a brilliant aesthetic and creative tribute to the spirit of this city. The images reproduced in Black-and-White, are complemented with text and captions by Shankarlal Bhattacharya and Ghosh’s own quotes. Published in 2014, the coffee table book is a collector’s item. About this book, he says “I hear a lot about this city. Some call it a city of poverty and despair. Some find it to be one of politics and rallies. And there are many who believe in its deep root in art and culture. Whatever be the case, I find life here and love. What draws me to Kolkata is the human element and its spontaneous expression. Every moment of the city distils a narrative of epic possibilities and I, as a flaneur, have framed all of that. From the alleys to the highways, my lens has been doing its job. It is not a comprehensive, definitive compendium of Kolkata. Neither is it meant to be one. It is my Kolkata, the way I have seen it evolve through time.” 

Every page, every photograph and every paragraph explaining each picture throws up the true spirit of the city of Kolkata such as roadside performers and vendors, the city seen from the rooftops, a historical shot of Jyoti Basu addressing the first United Front Rally at the Maidan, instant portrait painters who have disappeared into anonymity with the advent of globalization and shopping malls, fortune tellers, the person playing monkey tricks to the gathering crowds, huge crowds moving towards Strand Road to begin their pilgrimage to the Ganga Sangar Mela, the then then-debutant actor Ranjit Mullick crossing the street, cabaret dancer Shefali captured in action that can never fade away if the history of the city was to be written in pictures.

This includes a brilliant series on street performers such as fortune tellers and the monkey trick man plying their trade under the Sahid Minar, a moving series on the hand-pulled rickshaws of the city, a historic shot of Jyoti Basu addressing the First United Front rally at the Maidan, instant portrait painters who have since disappeared from Gariahat, massive crowds heading for the Gangasagar Mela from Strand Road and even Irrfan Khan and Tabu walking along the gardens between shots for Mira Nair’s film The Namesake, the weeping figure of a skeletal child sitting under the huge Howrah Bridge, a shot of a very young Ranjit Mullick crossing a street during the shooting of Mrinal Sen’s Interview and a shot of the maidan in the afternoon clicked from the top of the Shahid Minar. One can get a glimpse of Shefali, the cabaret dancer of yesteryear caught in a pose during a performance. There are rare photographs of historical value. One shows Ray and Ghatak sitting together. Another catches Ray unawares in silhouette. A third is a priceless image of Ajoy Mukherjee, his deputy Jyoti Basu and Minister Jatin Chakraborty in a single frame. There is an architectural statement that places the Thacker Spink Mansion, the RBI Building and the UBI Building together. Painter Paresh Maity in second preference is seen looking at a forgotten idol of Kartik, the Warrior God. 

“Today, the word “camera” is an integral part of my name. Wherever a group of people discusses me, the word “‘photograph” comes up almost naturally. The most interesting part of my story is that to be a photographer was never a part of my life-plan.” These are the opening lines of the book Manik-da published in 2000 in Bengali. Written plainly, the author-photographer traces how his passion for the theatre, developed since boyhood, and his interest in lighting, which is an integral part of the theatre, slowly but surely took him on a long and exciting journey with one of the greatest filmmakers the world has ever produced. The book is a slim volume of 96 pages, bound in paperback, and is equal parts text and image (prints of B & W photographs of Ray taken by Ghosh himself). The book is a collector’s item for cinephiles and fans of Ray.

Way back in 1991, a photo biography on Satyajit Ray was published under the title – Satyajit Ray at 70. It documented a collection of B & W photographs of the great master of celluloid taken by his photographer, Nemai Ghosh who, by then, had been Ray’s photographer for 25 years. It was published by the Eiffel Editions of Belgium that went on to institute a travelling exhibition of these photographs with a world premiere on June 20, 1991. 

His motivation for photography is the thought – what is viewed by the natural eye should also be capable of being grasped through the lens of the camera. His ultimate aspiration is to be able to photograph completely in the dark, totally without light.”I am positively allergic to the flash in photography. The flash, in my opinion, cannot capture the drama of life. Only natural light can achieve this perfection. This is why I try to shoot as much as I possibly can, in natural light.”  
 

Photographs are no longer purely a recording instrument documenting faces and events. Photography has journeyed a long way since the invention of the first plate camera in 1851. Ghosh for more than five decades has been documenting history, recording not only Ray but artists, painters and musicians, ordinary people, using his camera and his ingenuity to make strong political statements or satiric comments on the state of things.  The word “photogenic” does not exist in his dictionary because he believes that this is totally in the hands of the photographer. Ghosh’s photographs have greater significance than the written word because of their visual authenticity and archival value.

“The three things that have seen me through my struggles to establish myself are –the tenacity of purpose, discipline and hard work. I learnt discipline from Utpal Dutt when I trained under him as part of his Little Theatre Group. The same applied to Ray and I re-learnt them from him again,” he says, adding, “But my ability to catch the exact mood, the precise moment, the particular posture, the body-movement, the facial expression are all rooted back to my theatre training” he sums up. 

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

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Image Courtesy: Ananda Bazaar

The term “rudaali” literally means a female weeper. Rudaalis are a group of professional mourners who are called upon to shed synthetic tears, cry loudly and beat their chests for money when someone important and affluent dies. It was a new addition to the lexicon of Indian literature, thanks to Mahasweta Devi who introduced this term and its socio-political ramifications within little-known pockets of tribals and other neglected groups in the country. Devi is looked upon as an icon in Indian literature. She persistently worked around the notion of the subaltern³, their “silences” and suffering amplified by caste, and class, in the landscape of Indian society. Rudali is relevant even today for its powerful treatment of the deeply entrenched social and political ramifications of caste-based discrimination. The story speaks of the ghettoisation of women, particularly those belonging to the said Dalit communities, by confining them into an occupation that is exclusively a female domain. These women find themselves trapped in the business of selling tears and its associated paraphernalia – wailing loudly, rolling on the floor, chest-beating, manufacturing tears and so on just to keep body and soul together. 

Kalpana Lajmi’s film, Rudaali is set against the physical and cultural backdrop of rural Rajasthan. It revolves around the life of Shanichari, a woman belonging to the most impoverished lot of the village population. Her father dies soon after her birth and she was abandoned by her mother. She is married to a man who works as a bonded labourer at an upper caste landlord’s house. Her husband is a drunkard with little to spare for the family requirements. She looks after her ailing mother-in-law and her little son. As the story progresses, she loses both her mother-in-law and her husband. Her son runs away after growing up.

Image Courtesy: Medium

Having suffered all her life, Shanichari(Dimple Kapadia) discovers that when she becomes the heir to her mother’s profession for the first time, her tears have dried up and the ‘cry’ just fails to come. She cries, at last, drawing upon her personal tragedy. She learns that the professional mourner from another village Bheekhni(Rakhee), who she had developed a close bonding with, has died of smallpox. Bheekni was the mother who abandoned her when she ran away with another man. When the landlord dies, Shanichari’s pathetic wails pierce the silence of the sky, the horizon, till they bounce off from the high walls of the zamindar’s haveli. These scenes are dotted with the use of black for the long robes the rudaalis wear as they beat their chests and roll on the floors, the air dotted with their loud wailing, manufactured to keep body and soul together. Though paid for in cash and in-kind yet their livelihood remains at the bare subsistence level.

Dr Mahua Bhowmick, in her paper, “Rudali, the Mourner: The “Cry” of the Margin⁴”  writes: 
Rudali, a custom of professional mourning prevalent among the lower caste women of rural Rajasthan for the deceased males of the upper castes, is a culture which can be regarded as a site of contestation where gender, class, caste and economic status are intertwined. This culture of publicly expressing essentially private emotional experiences –  grieving and crying –  is rarely considered as a creative practice. Abject poverty and social oppression drive these women to such a dehumanised state that they become compelled to earn their living by displaying their heart-wrenching sorrow in the service of the wealthy upper castes who can, as it were, purchase their tears.

Rudaali calls forth multiple worlds of debate, discussion, questioning, research and analysis. On the one hand, it explores the concept of the working woman living in desperate poverty, engaged in an occupation that is entirely dependent on the death of an affluent man. On the other hand, it looks at the woman question surrounding a mother and daughter where the daughter has been widowed at an early age. There is also the question of caste because Shanichari, the rudaali, belongs to a low caste in the caste hierarchy and is a social outcast. She survives by selling old clothes at a temporary shed, where she is teased and taunted by the upper caste male shopkeepers for being a low caste, poor and single woman without a man’s support.

Kalpana Lajmi’s film takes the root of the story and then changes it to suit the demand for glamour and glitz of Bollywood cinema with top stars, lavish mounting and high colour. Mahashweta Devi’s Rudali is originally placed in Tahad village of West Bengal where the low caste untouchable tribal people Ganjus and Dushads are compelled to live an afflicted life under the repression and tyranny of the upper-caste Rajputs who enjoy their so-called “inborn privilege” of owning the land of these tribal people by hook or crook. Lajmi shifts the geographical backdrop to a village in Rajasthan that offers the scope for exploiting the colours of Rajasthan and enriched the scope of the film by placing songs the music of which was composed by the late Bhupen Hazarika who generously drew upon his root Assamese melodies to offer a beautiful blend of the music and the visuals representing two different cultures. 

In Mahasweta’s Rudali, echoed in Lajmi’s film, Devi portrayed the Rajputs as debased humans who would rather indulge in hosting extravagant and sumptuous funerals than pay for the treatment of their ailing relatives. They are so insensitive that they do not have any time to mourn the death of their loved ones so they hire rudaalis to make the genuine show of mourning scene. The Rajput wives in the landlord’s home are not permitted to express their grief or even come out of their confined spaces to join the rudaalis as the latter belonging to a lower caste, are treated as untouchables and outcasts. No one even bothers to ask these Rajput wives if they felt like crying to express their grief. 

Lajmi’s directorial works are filled with a lot of pomp and style that does not go well with the raw reality and ugly poverty of Mahasweta Devi’s stories. The original story was stripped completely of melodrama or attempts to garner sympathy for Shanichari and Bheekni’s terrible state. Lajmi is unable to give Rudaali, the film, a distinct identity of its own. Despite choosing ‘women’ as her beat that informs all her feature films, she loses out to the lavish mounting and the musical gimmicks of commercial cinema. Lajmi has structured the film as a dialogue between an ageing Shanichari who is not yet a “rudaali” and her new-found friend Bheekni who has been commissioned by the landlord’s employees from another village to wait for the ritual crying and weeping when the patriarch finally dies. It is Bheekni who keeps telling Shanichari that she will teach her the rudiments of being a rudaali and earn some money.

In a flashback scene, we see a brief romantic liaison between Shanichari and the landlord’s son which pushes the young man to hire her services as his wife’s special maid. This does not exist in the story. In hindsight, one may even call it a blasphemy on the original because Shanichari’s life is so preoccupied with how and where the next meal will come from that romanticism does not exist in the lexicon of her life. The caste-ridden values of the community and the patriarchal attitudes of the affluent represented by the landlord’s young son (Raj Babbar), would never deign to even talk to a low caste woman ever, much less to ask her to raise her head and look into his eyes!  

There are moments in the film that offer us a wee glimpse into the expendable lives of these Dalits. At a village fair, the milk used to bathe the gods is given to the low castes. Many of those who drink the milk, including Shanichari’s husband, die of cholera but there is no investigation. Another scene shows Bheekhni haggling over the price for mourning over the patriarch’s death including “extras,” or separate “rates” for weeping, beating chests, rolling on the floor, and so on. Her matter-of-fact manner of haggling shows the nature and degree of oppression they live within without questioning the inhumanity of the system. 

Image Courtesy: Post5 theatre

Lajmi’s fondness for spectacle tends to diffuse the focus of the film never mind the three National Awards – Dimple Kapadia (Best Actress), Samir Chanda (Best Art Direction) and Dimple Kapadia (Best Costume). Late film scholar and critic Chidananda Dasgupta rightly said, “Spectacle creates distance between the observer and the observed; the understanding of the mind of the human being in a predicament requires closeness between the observer and the observed, asking for the removal of all sights and sounds.”

Lajmi loses out to the lavish mounting and the musical gimmicks of commercial cinema. She ends up denying the film the identity it deserves. Rudaali was a brazen, commercial film spilling over with the commercial ingredients of big stars, wonderful music, hummable songs, excellent production values, picturesque landscape and so on. So, Lajmi did not really need the framework of a famous Mahasweta Devi story to fall back on. As a celluloid representation of a Mahasweta Devi story, Rudali fails. But as an independent film, separated from the Mahasweta link, it is entertaining, educative and tries to inform the Indian audience about the oppression of a people it hardly knows anything about. 

 1. Comment by Samik Bandyopadhyay during the interview with Mahasweta Devi.
 2. Pandey, Rajesh: U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara and Mahasweta Devi’s Rudali: An attempt to voice the Unvoiced, Research Scholar, An International Refereed e-Journal of Literary Explorations, Volume II, August 2014.
 3. The term was adopted by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian social theorist in his Prison Notebooks.
Ranjit Guha in his essay, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of the Colonial India” defines the subaltern “as a name for the general attributes of the subordination in South Asian Society, whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way” (216). Source: www.cacsarchive.org/dataarchive/otherfiles/TA001125/file.
 4. Bhowmick, Mahua, “Rudali, the Mourner: The “Cry” of the Margin”. Episteme: an online interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary & multi-cultural journal, Volume 4, Issue 1, June 2015

Shoma A Chatterji is a National Award winning author, freelance journalist, and a film scholar, based in Kolkata, India.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

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Kumravatara(2011)

A still from Kurmavatara

In Hindu mythology, kurma, which means turtle, is the second avatar of Lord Vishnu(variously represented by ten avatars). Like the other avatars, Kurma is said to appear in times of crisis to restore the equilibrium of the cosmos. His iconography is either that of a tortoise or, more commonly, as half-human-half-tortoise. These figures are found in many Vaishnava temple ceilings or wall reliefs. The story of Kasaravalli’s film Kurmavatara takes seed of this mythological legend and produces it through the lens of a contemporary character and the changes that happen in his life. The film is based on a short story of the same name by Kannada poet and writer, Kum. Veerabhadrappa.

The story revolves around Rao, a government employee, and ageing widower, living with his son, daughter-in-law and grandson, who owing to his strong resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi, is picked up by a television producer to portray Gandhi’s role in a television serial. Rao resists the offer initially because neither had he acted before in his life nor was he a Gandhian; but is forced to accept the assignment by his son and daughter-in-law to help their son get admission in a good school. However, after having reluctantly agreed, he pours himself wholeheartedly into the character. His work in the serial makes him famous instantly. Fans begin crowding his home and the lifestyle of the lower-middle-class family improves drastically as the son and daughter-in-law cash-in on his new-found fame.

However, the most dramatic change occurs in  Rao’s character as he begins reading on Gandhi and his ideology for a role he had never dreamt of performing. The serial turns his life around, as he starts examining his life and philosophy. As the fans keep growing,  the humble Rao has to come to terms with the fact that simply ‘portraying’ Gandhi does not “make” him a modern-day Gandhi. The serial, thus, transforms his life into a journey that enriches him as an individual with a new perspective on life, family, and relationships.

Dr Shikaripura Krishnamurthy who played Rao, an ordinary man, who is asked overnight to step into the mighty feet of Mahatma Gandhi for the small screen, gave an outstanding performance – bereft of glamour or chutzpah, investing the character-within-the-serial with as much sincerity and authenticity as possible. A moving sub-plot explores this man’s warm and humane interaction with Kasturba(played by famous Kannada actor, Jayanthi) within the serial, and off the sets. The sub-plot shows Jayanthi empathising with the predicament of her co-actor who suddenly finds himself famous overnight owing to his portrayal of Gandhi, and endeavours to befriend him not as an actress or even a co-actor, but as a fellow human being.

The film is enriched by Kasaravalli’s signature low-key handling –  no pomp and show, loud colours or music, but extremely realistic and natural performances by the entire cast. Kurmavatara was screened in 17 film festivals and won acclaim at Bangkok, New York and Vancouver. It won the Feature Film Award for the Best Kannada Film at the 59th National Film Awards. The cinematography is low-key and appears as if most of it is shot in natural light. Gandhi does not appear in the film but we discover him through the metamorphosis in Rao who portrays him for a short while but changes forever.

About his statement, Kasaravalli says, “It is a question of whether Gandhian values can lift our present world from degeneration. Today, we are moving in the opposite direction. Gandhi believed in small things. Nowadays, we believe only in big things. Even if you are telling a lie, you only want to sell your product.”

The Salt Stories (Documentary) (2007)

The Salt Stories (2015)

Nearly eight decades after the Dandi March, filmmaker Lalit Vachani made The Salt Stories, an interesting documentary raising questions about the contemporary relevance of the Salt March. Set in modern India, The Salt Stories is an 84-minute documentary, presented as a road movie that follows the trail of Mahatma Gandhi’s salt march of 1930. The film puts the historic Dandi March into perspective by juxtaposing it against the reality of the poor being denied freedom by depriving them of basic needs like food, clothing and shelter. Has Gandhi’s non-violent means to attain a political end for the benefit of the entire country really brought freedom to their descendants, the poor and the oppressed? Or, has the Dandi March been reduced to a token for non-violence to be relegated to history textbooks? – are some questions the film seeks to ask.  

The film introduces the viewers to Mohammed Bhai, standing in, what remains of his bangle factory, where the number of workers has dwindled to a handful after his machines and workshop were destroyed by Hindu fundamentalists during the riots. The team then sets off on a road journey to Dandi passing through rickety roads and small towns, talking to people on the way to find out if they knew who Gandhi was, or about the Dandi March.

One of the people we meet on the journey is, Ketanbhai, Dalit leader of Navagam village, who was forced to resign as upper- caste members refused to let him go on. 102-year-old Gordhanbhai Bakhta, the sole living survivor of the Dandi March, who passed away soon after, is also seen recalling and sharing his experiences.

Explaining his motivation, Vachani says, “In 2002, I was completing The Men in the Tree. It revisits the RSS and Hindu fundamentalism when the Gujarat massacre happened. I was horrified and shocked. How could this happen in Gandhi’s Gujarat? On the other hand, I surmised that this could happen only in Gujarat. This is one state where the ideology of Gandhi has been completely erased. The Men in the Tree explores RSS’ attitude to Gandhi. I tried to show how the RSS denigrates and neutralizes Gandhi and his ideology, yet appropriates him when they feel he is convenient for the Hindu right. This is what motivated me to revisit the Salt March trail and find out how things are.”

Set against the backdrop of Gandhi’s original journey, this road-movie makes caustic comments through its telling visuals and one-to-one interviews, on how the globalization of Gujarat equates Gandhi’s ‘salt’ to a metaphor on poverty, forced migration, joblessness and injustice. Secularism, as the film points out, is conspicuous by its absence. The film meanders through time and space –  juxtaposing the present scenario, shot in colour, with the past, compiled with silent Black-and-White archival footage (courtesy: Gandhi Films Foundation in Mumbai). Such a presentation lends the film a unique stage to place a sense of history, time, place, people and events in perspective, while at the same time pitting old and new values against each other to provide an objective view of how relevant the Salt March is in today’s India.

Gour Hari Dastaan – The Freedom File (2015)

Gour Hari Dastaan – the Freedom File: Movie poster

Among films inspired by or based on the honesty and integrity of Gandhi is, Gour Hari Dastaan – The Freedom File, a biopic on Gour Hari Das, a Gandhian, living in his eighties. Actor-director-scriptwriter Ananth Narayan Mahadevan decided to make this film on the struggles of this Gandhian whom he had met and interacted with and whom he confesses to having been enriched by as a human being. In the film’s title, Gour Hari Dastaan – The Freedom File, the surname has been extended from Das to Dastaan which means “story.”

During his teenage years, Gour Hari Das actively participated in the struggle for independence in Balasore, Orissa where he was growing up. He was enrolled in Gandhi’s vanar sena for younger freedom fighters. His job was to courier messages and letters between freedom fighters by running alongside rushing trains to hand over the letters. When he was 14, he was arrested and imprisoned for three months. “I read about Gour Hari Das in a tabloid. The headline screamed, “It took him 32 years to prove that he is a freedom fighter”. The irony was there for everyone to see. I probed further and tracked him down in a distant suburb of Mumbai…Dahisar,” says Ananth Narayan Mahadevan who directed the film and also co-produced it along with Bindiya and Sachin Khanolkar.

His story became interesting after an episode, around mid-seventies, when one day his son complained that he was refused admission under the freedom fighter’s ward’s quota as he could not produce proof that his father was a freedom fighter. It was then that it dawned on Gour Hari Das that he had not received the Tamra Patra which every freedom fighter is entitled to, as he had not really fought for any award. He was left speechless with shock when his son turned around and asked him, “Were you really a freedom fighter?” At that moment something ticked inside him and his fight for another ‘freedom’ began. He embarks on a journey to find proof that he was indeed, jailed for three months, that he really was a freedom fighter, that he was a genuine member of Gandhiji’s vanar sena and that he was a true Gandhian who did not believe in rewards for fighting for his country’s freedom.

Das wanted to get his own proof. It took 32 long years for him to be finally given the Tamra Patra – now by the Maharashtra CM himself. In his struggle, as the director, informs us, Das knocked on 321 doors, wrote 1043 letters to different officials, climbed 66000 steps, and pleaded 2300 times in Post-Independent India to prove that he was the freedom fighter who was once blessed by Mahatma Gandhi and even jailed for fighting against the British. During this turbulent journey, he visited government offices, influential politicians, ministers, media, jail officials and so on and was called ‘fraud’, ‘thief’, ‘crazy’, ‘eccentric’ by others. The struggle cost him 32 years of his life to get what he feels was justice.  

Vinay Pathak, a gifted and trained Bollywood actor, who was chosen to play the title role says, “In 2008, Gour Hari Das was front page news. The Maharashtra Government had just conferred the freedom fighter certificate to him. I remember reading the article and I was amazed by it and later when Ananth asked me to play him. It was an author-backed role no actor would let go of.”

The film revolves around Gour Hari Das. He is like a solid tree from which the branches of interesting characters emerge to add to his story. There are fictional interpolations to detail the struggle of Gour Hari Das and a fictionalised climax which ends the film. But these factors do not take away from the core message of the film – that the honesty Gandhi upheld endures albeit among a handful of Indians, for whom his teachings mould their entire life.

Babar Naam Gandhiji (2015)

Babar Naam Gandhiji 

In Babar Naam Gandhiji, Gandhi assumes the form of a biological father, – for a street urchin named Kencho (snail) who was discarded in a dustbin by an old alcoholic and grew up in the dredges of Kolkata – after a policeman jokes about Gandhi being his biological father by showing him a currency note with Gandhi’s face printed on it. Kencho takes this seriously and his life changes forever.

“The story is not mine, it is Kencho’s story,” says the voice-over of Pavel (Parambrato Chatterjee) who runs an NGO for street children who attend his classes only because he arranges tiffin for them. Kencho is their leader, who not only uses his intelligence and shrewdness to fool people to part with their money but also teaches clever ways of extortion to other kids. He hardly attends Pavel’s classes but uses this young man as his bank. “I have faith in you,”  this worldly-wise ten-year-old tells him.

Kencho is a friendly chap and enjoys the support of all the fellow beggars in the locality, though a couple of goons bash him up black and blue when he refuses to part with their demand for hafta. Yet even these goons rally behind him when he decides to join the big school in the neighbourhood in response to a teacher who insults him in his father’s (Gandhi) name!

The entire group of beggars take out a procession with their indigenous band, in support of Kenchu as he nervously marches towards the big school for his final interview. In fact,  his first instalment fee is put together by a medley of street men, women and children who have saved from the “weekly” hafta; even the goons surrender their hafta to contribute to the target sum of Rs. 5000. And what does Kencho do? He upturns a sack of small coins in the principal’s cabin with the promise that “more will come when needed” from the same source. The smooth falsification of every single document needed for his admission test from birth certificate to ration card to age proof to the name of his father written in full as “Kenchodas Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi” and many more such small bits and pieces picked up from real life are portrayed on celluloid. These make Babar Naam Gandhi a film worth watching!

The life-changing story of Kencho is based on a string of lies, dishonest and corrupt practices – by individuals and institutions, including the police and high-nosed gentlemen, which are in fact, diametrically opposite to the Gandhian ideal of honesty and integrity. But for Kencho, these lies lead to a decent future and an honest way of life – and perhaps this is where the strength of the film lies.

Shoma A Chatterji is a National Award winning author, freelance journalist, and a film scholar, based in Kolkata, India.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

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