NATHURAM Godse killed Gandhiji at a prayer meeting in Delhi on Jan 30, 1948, and was hanged for the crime, which he told the court was an act of high patriotism. At another level, Godse has defeated Gandhi again and again, notably in Delhi in 1984, in Ayodhya in 1992, in Gujarat in 2002, and injuriously in Delhi in 2014. Other battles — in Nellie, Muzaffarnagar, Kandhamal, Hashimpura, the list never ends — also saw Gandhi being assassinated repeatedly. But Gandhi is also invincible, and keeps coming back to continue the fight despite being defeated or being killed. Asghar Wajahat wrote a play 10 years ago in which Gandhi survives Godse’s bullets and lives to defeat him finally, through dialogue.
In the play Godse@Gandhi.Com, Gandhi recovers from his bullet injuries and Godse goes to jail. Gandhi becomes a fighter against terrible atrocities that helpless people continue to face in independent India. For this, he is sentenced to prison, and he opts to be lodged in the same cell as Godse. Their dialogue makes up the essence of Wajahat’s play. It was adapted recently as a movie.
The director, Rajkumar Santoshi wrote the screenplay with Wajahat and called it Gandhi-Godse: Ek Yudh, which translates as a battle between Godse and Gandhi. The battle was one of ideas, of course. The actors were all unfamiliar faces though some were seasoned stage veterans. Chinmay Mandlekar made a powerful Godse, which would make Pathan or Tiger characters look like robots. Mandlekar went to the National School of Drama, the institution where seasoned actors like Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah received their training. It shows. Mandlekar’s lines are sharp and rooted in driven nationalism. Godse’s strong character is possibly what some of Wajahat’s intellectual friends disapproved of. The movie has striven to move away from the tradition of labelling villains and heroes in black and white, something Hollywood war films would do with German soldiers. Then, Steven Spielberg made a hero of a Soviet spy in Bridge of Spies, not ignoring the reality that human beings can be flawed.
That apart, the dialogues given to Deepak Antani playing a superlative Gandhi are winners, each one of them. His diminutive form makes a perfect foil for the muscular Godse. For example, in the prison cell, Godse has drawn a map of his idea of Akhand Bharat, Hindutva’s undivided India. The Hindu rashtra stretches from Afghanistan to Myanmar via Tibet. While Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan have become part of the great Indian nation, the Hindu rashtra. Gandhi asks Godse a crisp question to which, for once, Godse is seen groping for an answer. “Do you even know the people who live in these countries?” Godse’s growing admiration for his rival takes a dramatic turn when he protects Gandhi from another Hindutva gunman’s attempt on him.
In the terrifying real world today, Godse has grown in stature, as a cult figure for Hindu nationalists.
Between surviving the assassin’s bullet and his imprisonment in free India, Gandhi’s characterisation as a free-spirited do-gooder, on occasions resembling Maoist guerrillas fighting for tribal rights, throws light on many things that ail the impoverished masses in India today.
Wajahat is a former Hindi professor from Jamia Millia Islamia, and has been a member of the Communist Party’s literary club for years. His progressive views have seldom if ever abandoned his creative writing. One of his plays was staged in Pakistan and was very popular with audiences in India. ‘Who hasn’t seen Lahore has not lived’ would be a loose translation of the critically acclaimed Urdu play with the partition as backdrop. In a sense, the Godse play is also rooted in partition.
Godse’s transformation was only in the movie though. In the terrifying real world today, he has grown in stature, as a cult figure for Hindu nationalists. See the election of Godse-worshipping Sadhvi Pragya, for example, accused in terror attacks targeting Muslims. Sadhvi was controversially given bail on health grounds, while paralysed prisoners have struggled to get a sipping straw from the warders. The bail enabled Pragya to win the Lok Sabha election in 2019 from Bhopal. Another example of Godse’s victory: a key accused in the Gandhi murder trial was V.D. Savarkar, charged as a plotter but freed for want of clinching evidence. Demands are growing to posthumously confer on the founder of the Hindutva worldview, the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award.
The Godse-Gandhi movie has come under intense fire from some of Wajahat’s friends who claim it gives the communal killer needless legitimacy. I didn’t get that sense at all, and wondered why many of these friends saw no problem with Attenborough’s Gandhi in which Dalit icon Ambedkar didn’t get a walk-on role. There are graphic scenes of partition violence at the start of the movie, which could be called terrifying. Tamas, another soul-searching movie on partition, had more gory violence, which rightly didn’t invoke intellectual ire.
Wajahat is an old friend but that’s hardly a reason for my liking the movie. As for Rajkumar Santoshi, one has admired him for making Lajja (Shame), an unusual feminist protest. Lajja featured a female team of Rekha, Madhuri Dixit and Manisha Koirala, each with powerful feminist roles. Santoshi has been accused of holding reactionary views bordering on the communal. Lajja questioned that.
Dixit, a theatre actor in the movie, plays Sita, and her fiancé plays Ram. When the man doubts the child she was carrying was his, Dixit moves away from the script in the test-by-fire scene. She exhorts Ram to take the chastity test with her as both were away from each other. Did she not spurn Ravana and reduce him to a dead man by her rejection? Ram valiantly fought a half-dead man. As for Lakshman, he too inflicted his wrath on a woman. These are not regressive dialogues. They are rare and badly needed lines today, not any less than the Gandhi-Godse dialogue, creatively scripted by Asghar Wajahat to illustrate the signs of the times for Indian democracy.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent based in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, March 21st, 2023
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