It started with a small incident when Gour Hari Das’s son applied for admission in a polytechnic institute in Matunga, Mumbai. He was told that he could get extra marks if he could produce a certificate indicating that his father was a freedom fighter. He rushed home and told his father. Das, who was part of vanar sena, whose job was to carry secret posts to freedom fighters, saidthat he didn’t participate in the freedom struggle to get a certificate but gave him a release slip of the jail. The principal said even a criminal could get such a document. This changed the life of Das because he was being called a fraud. He took on the State but found it was easier to fight the British than getting his due from his own people. He was told to file the application in Orissa because he went to jail in Balasore. He told the officer that during the freedom struggle he didn’t fight for the freedom of Orissa or Maharashtra; he fought for the freedom of India. Ultimately, Das got his tampatra in 2008 and his struggle inspired Ananth Mahadevan to weave Gour Hari Dastaan - The Freedom File (GHD) , which was premiered at IFFI this past weekend and is one of the two Hindi films which are part of Indian Panorama.
“The general opinion is, and this happened even when I made Mee Sindhutai Sapkal , the biopic on the social worker who lives in Pune, that a film about unsung heroes would veer towards a documentary rather than a feature. The life of Gour Hari Das may be simple and ‘uneventful’ in the conventional and crass commercial sense, but the simmering internal conflict of a man seeking identity and turning a fighter to prove his credentials, is the kind of material that lends itself to cinematic terrain. It is a road-rail-office-home trip of another kind, the kind that would find resonance in every citizen who had to live through the rigmarole of red-tapism in India,” says Mahadevan, whose filmography is a curious mix of crass commercial and sublime. “These are rewarding experiences I don’t mind investing time and money in, with only worldwide acknowledgement as my return. That is where an Xpose comes in handy. As they say, swim with the sharks when the need arises. They provide protection to small fish like me.”
Senior journalist and noted poet and novelist, CP Surendran, who has written the screenplay says it was a story he ran away from. “Who wants to read again about what happened in 1947. It is another millennium, isn’t it? So when Ananth Mahadevan brought up the subject, I said I wasn’t interested. He had read Gour Hari Das’s struggle in a newspaper. And typical of Ananth he had started amassing anything that related to the man, who lives in Dahisar, a western suburb of Mumbai. My writing is more centred around conflicted and rather dark personalities, and I found Gour fairly satisfied with himself. If he bore deep wounds, he didn’t show them. A month or so later, Ananth suggested we pay a visit to him. We did, and it did nothing to me. Then one day I thought, if this man fought for 32 years for his recognition, surely he should be an extraordinarily determined man. And it also struck me that this was a man who fought then two freedom wars, one against the Brits and one against Indians. And so I went at it,” relates Surendran.
On the contemporary relevance of the story, Surendran says the relevance is precisely that the values Das represents are now obsolete. “It is bringing good back to the big bad world. Some one does you great harm, denies you your identity and past? And what do you do? You become a Naxalite? Turn to mass killings? Form a political party? No, Gaur Hari Das goes up and down steps of the great big institutions of the world's largest democracy for 32 years with Gandhian determination and steely stoicism. And he wins at last, and the process doesn’t turn him into a bitter angry man. This is a movie of hope, the saga of a 30 years’ war waged in silence. Good cinema, see?”
Recalling his meetings with Das, Surendran says he took to writing the script only because somewhere his image became associated with his late father, a well known writer in Malayalam, who died of Alzheimer's. “I saw the language he lived by slipping away from him. I introduced some of that into the character.”
On casting Vinay Pathak in the title role, Mahadevan says the titular role challenged him to cast correctly and many eyebrows were raised when he I suggested Vinay Pathak to play Das. “I always knew Vinay as a thinking actor who was much beyond the comic roles he was being confined to on screen. And as the film began and the make-over started along with Vinay sinking his teeth into the character, the lines between Vinay and Das blurred. It was imperative that the rest of the principal characters matched this. Though Konkona plays the part of Das’s wife, a role of shorter length than Das, no actress of lesser calibre could have pulled off the role of the film’s conscience keeper as well as she has done. Ranvir Shorey and Tannishhtha Chatterjee too were on my wish list to play the journalists fighting their own demons and finding their alter ego in Das’s struggle. The film also features names like Rajit Kapur, Vikram Gokhale, Saurabh Shukla Vidya Malavade...some of them willingly playing cameos because they believed in the film and Das’s integrity as a person.”
Surendran has brought his journalistic experience to the table. “Well, one of the main characters performed brilliantly by Ranvir Shorey, is a journalist. He is a failure in the corporate-media world, a rebel and a drunk. The experience I had of the media world came in handy in his portrayal. Also there is a bit of my earlier avatar as a so called misogynist columnist finding its way into the movie.”
And, of course, the habit of meeting the deadline. “I finished the shooting script in three months. Ananth helped, of course but basically the movie making experience was one of making sense of the material I had access to without getting preachy or boring. The subject ran the risk of putting you to sleep. So I did follow a time line and three stage process of set-up, confrontation and resolution. Making sense is hard, as you know, especially in Bollywood where the race is to spend more money so life comes out looking stupider. Stupidity bores me. And it is also dangerous, of course.”
The movie film is being talked about in the film circles for a long time now. Mahadevan says the film’s post production was very crucial. “The film boasts of probably one of the most high profile technical teams ever put together. Emmy award winning cinematographer Alphonse Roy shot GHD on film, probably among the last of movies in India to be shot on film. Sreekar Prasad edited the film giving it a rare pondering quality so scarce in the hit-and-run pace of today’s movies. Dr L Subramaniam returning to composing for Hindi cinema 30 years after Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay preferred to record the score and numbers in Los Angeles and Poland where the studios offered impeccable sound quality. And Resul Pookutty had to be given his breathing space to design the sound for the myriad hues of Mumbai. All of which may have made it appear that the film was delayed, but it needed the finish that it now has. All of which is a blessing in disguise because the current mood of the country is in sync with the film’s optimism.”
