The surreal life of Nathuram Godse

January 28, 2017 11:31 pm | Updated 11:31 pm IST

twisting history:  Though the cast of  Nine Hours To Rama   is almost entirely from outside India, the foreign actors are the least of the film’s problems.

twisting history: Though the cast of Nine Hours To Rama is almost entirely from outside India, the foreign actors are the least of the film’s problems.

A week ago, while trawling the Net, I discovered a controversial film that I’d been seeking for the longest time – Twentieth Century Fox’s Nine Hours To Rama , based on a novel by academic and Indologist Stanley Wolpert. A fictional account of the nine hours leading up to the horrific assassination of Gandhi at a prayer meeting, the 1963 film was banned by the Indian government.

The reason for the ban was never specified: in an interview decades later, Wolpert hinted that it was because his book (also proscribed) was, “so uncomfortably close to the truth on the criminal neglect of Gandhi’s security” that the Congress government got cold feet. I’d read that interview; also the numerous hyper-rave reviews posted by western viewers, and consequently was expecting some sort of masterpiece.

Great expectations

The thriller began on a gripping note – a teen member of the ‘secret society’ that’s plotted Gandhi’s murder is heading for Delhi in a train even as the police, who’ve got wind of the plan, step up vigilance at the railway station and comb the city for suspects. The teen, clearly based on the real-life Madanlal Pahwa, is arrested and lets on that two men are planning to kill the Mahatma. About 20 minutes into the film, Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte make their entry – and from then on, the film begins to degenerate into a ludicrous farce that calls for more suspension of disbelief than any Bollywood blockbuster you’ve ever seen.

To begin with, director Mark Robson chooses to cast his film almost entirely from outside India, employing only four or five Indian performers in minor roles (the central role, thankfully, is enacted by J.S. Casshyap, the amazing Gandhi lookalike who went on to make a career of portraying the Mahatma). All the other main parts are played by a medley of white actors sporting brownface and a wild range of accents that fail to get even the pronunciation of the Indian names right. It’s disconcerting, to say the least, to watch Horst Buchholz, a German actor in the role of Godse, refer to Apte as ‘Apter’ and valiantly try to inject some verisimilitude into the part of India’s most notorious murderer.

That said, the foreign actors are actually the least of the problems besetting Nine Hours To Rama; the real WTF factor is how history has been blithely turned on its head. Buchholz’s Godse is a chain-smoking, hard-drinking violent-tempered womaniser – a flashback takes us to his past relationship with a married woman (a follower of Gandhi!), who he invites to Nashik to a “charming little inn that serves great Nasik whiskey” (seriously, WTF), where a room is normally reserved for his amorous liaisons. Before the assassination, Godse spends most of his nine hours smoking, guzzling liquor and holing up in a brothel to escape the police – a hilarious display of decadence that flies in the face of the RSS/Chitpavan Brahmin asceticism that was his path in real life. True, there is very little in the public space about his private life, but by all accounts Godse had no minor vices – his fixations were his Hindutvavadi nationalism and his visceral hatred for Gandhi.

Bollywood elements

The give-a-damn-for-authenticity portrayal of the assassin’s private life is of a piece with the rest of this completely surreal movie. Godse in real life was the city-bred son of a postal employee whose reasons for killing Gandhi had nothing to do with personal suffering like the victims of Partition. The film, however, chooses to take a flaming revenge tack to explain his compulsions. Godse’s child bride (another concoction) is raped and killed by Muslims, his father dies in a communal riot, and his mother, in a scene straight out of B-grade Bollywood, grimly urges him to “repay violence with violence”. The father, incidentally, is a village priest who, in an earlier scene, has sternly declared that his son must follow in his priestly footsteps since their surname ‘Godse’ means ‘the chosen ones of God’. (It was at this point that I seriously began to wonder if the film was a spoof.)

Godse’s co-murderers and planners all get the same outlandish treatment. The RSS/Hindu Mahasabha is a gangster mafia that will take you in but never let you leave, peopled by sinister-looking men who come to blows in dark basements (there’s a Savarkar lookalike called Karnik who’s out to get Godse!). Narayan Apte is a shivering nervous wreck constantly trying to wriggle out of the murder he’s been chosen to co-commit (in real life, he was a devil-may-care man who was acknowledged as having more leadership qualities than Godse). An hour before the assassination, Godse is willing to abandon his mission if his lady love, the Gandhian, elopes with him. And at the end comes the biggest WTF moment – after shooting Gandhi, Godse breaks down in a fit of remorse and cries at his feet, convinced he has killed a saint.

Fiction, not history

What was Wolpert, supposedly a historian, thinking? Although the beginning of Nine Hours To Rama carries a disclaimer that the film is a work of historical fiction (using a Gandhi quote on truth, no less, to justify this), none of the definitions of this genre cover something that twists history so outrageously that there’s damn-all left of what really happened. One possibility is that the film, which is supposed to have left out the ‘dry’ political parts of the book, conveys a totally different picture – however, the fact remains that no amount of political background could have changed the caricaturish nature of the main events, which are also from the book.

The film also contradicts Wolpert’s contention in the book that the government criminally neglected Gandhi’s security – it shows the superintendent of police taking every conceivable measure to thwart the assassination plan, which comes to naught because Gandhi himself never allowed police guns or frisking at his prayer meetings. If the film had pursued the security controversy (given that this was the sixth attempt on the Mahatma’s life); had it been a little less luridly imaginative about Nathuram Godse’s last hours and portrayed him for the cold-blooded, ideologically motivated killer that he was, Nine Hours To Rama could have been a passable work of historical fiction. As things stand, all it does is to make a complete mockery of India’s most shocking and tragic assassination.

Karl Marx famously said that history repeats itself twice – first as tragedy and then as farce. That perhaps is the line that comes closest to summing up Nine Hours To Rama .

The columnist is a freelance editor and writer

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.