INDIA:New epic depicts revered leader as eminently human for the first time, write Emily Waxand Rama Lakshmiin New Delhi
A man with long, shaggy hair and a thick beard, wearing a tattered overcoat, collapses in a rain-soaked alley. Soon after, he is lying on a trolley in a Mumbai hospital, shivering and moaning incoherently as a team of doctors try to find out who he is, asking him repeatedly: "What is your father's name?" "Bapu," he whispers again and again.
Bapu, or father, is the nationally recognised term of endearment for Mohandas Gandhi, the father of India. The medical staff at first take the man for a drunken, blathering vagabond.
That's the opening scene of Gandhi, My Father the latest blockbuster to hit India's cinemas. The rest of the two-hour film flashes back to the indigent man's life. He was, indeed, Mohandas Gandhi's first-born son, Harilal, who spent much of his life in a love-hate struggle with the man who led India to independence in 1947. As a teary Harilal declares in one of the film's many flashbacks, "I am suffocating" - forever unable to escape his father's shadow.
In the decades following his death in 1948, the man known as Mahatma Gandhi has become an icon who inspired civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Many know of Gandhi's courage and determination as a freedom fighter, but few know of his shortcomings as a father. In the film, Harilal views Gandhi as alternately aloof and domineering, stubborn and even selfish, traits that helped estrange his eldest son, even though first-born males are traditionally those favoured in Indian culture.
What makes the film significant is its humanising portrait of one of India's most revered leaders, a depiction that would have sparked outrage even a decade ago. Released on the eve of India's 60th anniversary of independence it shows a far more vulnerable and even flawed figure than the saintly Gandhi portrayed in Richard Attenborough's Oscar-winning film 25 years ago.
"Sixty years after independence, the only Gandhi reference that we have is his political life where Gandhi is a haloed demigod," says Feroz Abbas Khan, the director of the new Gandhi film. "But now with some distance, making Gandhi more human also makes him more relevant and real. I think that is very important in India today as we struggle to live up to and remember his ideals. We are growing economically, but we also have to lift millions out of poverty."
In his later years, Gandhi said his greatest regret in life was his inability to sway two people: Mohammed Ali Jinnah, whose push for a separate homeland for Muslims led to the partition of India and Pakistan soon after independence, and Harilal.
The film portrays Harilal as a bright, devoted son who is handed some bad breaks. First, his father holds him back from a law scholarship in London because he wants Harilal to join the protests against the treatment of Indians in South Africa, where they lived at the time. Initially, Harilal supports Gandhi wholeheartedly in everything he does. He takes pride in being called Junior Gandhi.
But Gandhi criticises his son's marriage, saying he should not worry about family life and focus on working. Harilal weds anyway, and back in India, after several of his businesses fail, he asks his father again to be allowed to go to London; later on, he asks for money. His father says no to both pleas, saying Harilal has to learn to stand on his own.
"Gandhiji was after all a human being," says Radha Bhatt (74) president of Gandhi Peace Foundation in New Delhi, using the term of respect "ji".
"Some things he said or did may be viewed today as being rude or harsh, but his ideology is not wrong," Bhatt says. "Maybe we can say that his children did not understand and share his values and he should not have insisted on them. This shows the extremes that Gandhiji would go to for the sake of the values of hard labour and self-sufficiency."
The film documents the ways in which, as Gandhi rose in national adulation, his son's luck worsened. Harilal's wife dies soon after they are married. He finds that unless he is willing to trade on his father's good name, his job prospects are slim.
While adversity might burnish the character of another man, it only crushes Harilal's spirit. He descends into a life of boozy carousing and gambling.
At one point, he lands a job importing British-made cotton - just as his father, to promote self-sufficiency, calls for a nationwide boycott of foreign goods, especially those from Britain.
"He is the world's greatest father, but I can't bear the burden of being his son," Harilal says during an emotional scene in which he has a breakdown after losing money in another failing business.
Gandhi, My Father is partly based on the book Gandhiji's Lost Jewel: Harilal Gandhi, written by Harilal's granddaughter, Nilam Parikh. Their relationship was stormy from the start, said Parikh, who advised the movie's scriptwriters. Gandhi was only 18 and studying law in London when Harilal was born in South Africa, and he was away for much of his son's early childhood.
"The problem was a universal struggle of father-versus-son epic, which is as old as our oldest stories of myth in any culture," says Parikh (74).
"This story is of every family's dysfunction. But this was happening within the context of Gandhi's struggle for the nation." Often, Harilal turns to his sympathetic mother, Kasturba, whose forgiving nature balances his father's occasional bullheadedness. At one point, Harilal converts to Islam and changes his name to Abdullah, but later returns to his Hindu roots to allay his shocked and grieving mother. He died in 1948 at the age of 61.