Indian Epic Focuses on Gandhi's Political Rival

“My method is conversion, not coercion, it is self-suffering, not the suffering of the tyrant,” Gandhi wrote. The story of India’s nonviolent fight for independence is well known. If nothing else, the popularity of the 1982 film Gandhi ensured that, setting both its eponymous hero and his partner, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India’s first Prime Minister, firmly in the American consciousness.

The story of the Indian leaders who opted to fight by more violent means is less familiar to us. Of these, Subhas Chandra Bose—known as “Netaji,” or “leader”—was one of the most influential and most controversial. Shyam Benegal, an accomplished Bombay director and one of the most celebrated figures of contemporary Indian cinema, has taken the last years of Bose’s life as the subject of his newest film, Netaji: The Last Hero.

A powerful figure on the political scene in pre-independence India, Bose served as president of the National Congress until Gandhi, with Nehru’s support, helped oust him on grounds of disagreement over the necessity of violence. Bose was charged with sedition and jailed.

In 1941, having been released to recuperate from an “illness” brought on by hunger strike, he escaped from the house British police were so intently watching, and traveled to Germany via Kabul, where he eventually gained recognition from the Axis Powers and tentative support for his plans against their common enemy.

In 1943, with the help of the other Leader himself, Bose traveled by submarine around the Cape of Good Hope to Japan; there he gathered more than 45,000 Indian POWs and began the offensive that would carry him all the way to the Bay of Bengal before the Japanese withdrawal necessitated their retreat and he himself, in a gesture of terrible bathos, was killed in a plane crash.

Collaborationist or patriot? Even from this grossly abbreviated life story, it is evident that Benegal has chosen a complex protagonist.

“BORDER CROSSINGS”

Benegal spoke last Friday afternoon at an event hosted by the South Asia Initiative, to benefit tsunami victims in South and Southeast Asia, shortly before the world premiere of his newest film at the Harvard Film Archive. That presentation focused less on Netaji itself than on problems of identity and representation Benegal has encountered more generally throughout his career. After an introduction by Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs and the Director of the South Asia Initiative, Benegal discussed a number of issues in contemporary Indian film and culture, grouped loosely under the theme of “border-crossings.”

Professor Bose identified three kinds of films as “border-crossing”: “works of great artistic creativity and sophistication that are nevertheless commercially viable; films about citizenship and identity that trespass across the frontiers of 1947 between India and Pakistan…and films about the overseas, extra-territorial and universalist dimensions of anti-colonial nationalism.”

Referring to the milieu in which he grew up, and in which the Indian film industry has developed, as “a kind of conflictual tapestry,” Benegal attended to the difficulties of representing minorities within India—and representing Muslims in particular. “I attempt to play across rather than to stereotypes,” he explained.

Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English, who also helped moderate the discussion, brought up another category of border-crossing elements: those of Benegal’s “working milieu.” Benegal listed a prodigious number of influences, ranging from American directors like Billy Wilder and John Ford to the French nouvelle vague and Italian Neo-Realists, from the works of Tarkofsky, Eisenstein and other Russian filmmakers—which were easiest to come by in his youth, he explained—to Kurosawa and, perhaps most importantly, Satyajit Ray, the director credited with founding the Indian “Parallel Cinema” of which Benegal is a self-proclaimed practitioner.

THE “CONFLICTUAL TAPESTRY”

After such a role call, Netaji itself feels like a bit of a disappointment. The attempt to retain elements of Bollywood song-and-dance in what otherwise presents itself as a sober—and, at 3 hours and 42 minutes, certainly epic—history produces a somewhat bewildering montage, in the course of which it grows increasingly difficult to distinguish hagiography from farce.

In the first scene, we are greeted by a Gandhi doppelgänger who puts Ben Kingsley to shame, but whose finest rhetoric (“my love is soft as a blossom and hard as a rock”) cannot get his errant pupil back on track.

En route to Kabul, we watch the “Mad Mullah” (as he is affectionately called) give a remarkably gratuitous performance that looks like something out of an Afghan remake of Jesus Christ Superstar.

A perfectly mustachioed Führer awaits in Berlin—where, though he is significantly less plausible than Bruno Ganz in the Academy Award-nominated Downfall (or even the toga-clad Heinz Schubert in the 1978 film Our Hitler), he delivers a spluttering invective against the “low races,” and proceeds to bestow upon Bose a toy model of the boat that will carry the latter around Africa “like Vasco da Gama”—and furnish ample opportunity, in turn, to bond with the spice-starved German crew over dal.

That Benegal has chosen a colorful subject is indisputable. Borders are crossed and re-crossed. There are more varieties of badly-accented English than one could ever imagine. We are shown Bose’s humanity, too—in an inexplicable anecdote in which the sudden presence of a small cat sends him, impervious though he may be to the threats of gunfire all around, into fidgeting and squeals.

However, what is perhaps most unsettling about Netaji is the juxtaposition of graphic violence with such peculiar jokes. It is unsettling to witness the readiness with which one dewy-eyed woman after another hands over food, coins or, in the most dramatic instance, an only son at the prompting of a few words from Bose and a crescendo of woodwinds (the bandshell must be behind the camp).

The film is disturbing because it does not spare us the fate that awaits the son—but also does not fully register its significance, does not make clear the connection between the nationalistic rapture of the mother and the explosions that will kill her last family member. In the end, Netaji does not sufficiently explore or evoke the ethical questions and complications that it should—particularly in a time when questions of violence and the deployment of violence in service of nation-statehood are so salient.

After Benegal’s talk, toward the end of the Question and Answer session, a graduate student posed a question to him about “reality as it really is”—and why he, along with other Indian filmmakers, failed to represent it. This drew a bemused chuckle from Benegal, who answered briefly “allusion, metaphor…all these things are to be used, surely. There has to be a place for imagination.”

As good postmodernists, we know that “reality as it really is” doesn’t really exist. The strength and the weakness of this film may be precisely the extent to which it is seduced by its protagonist’s own rhetoric and rhetorical figures. Benegal doesn’t fail to convey that he has great enthusiasm and passion for the subject he has chosen. But this passion seems, too often, like the zeal of a propagandist and not enough like the reflection of an artist open to the ethical difficulties of the “conflictual tapestry” he has chosen to represent.