http://www.chowk.com/bin/showa.cgi?apatel_nov3001
Movie Review: Veer Savarkar
by Anil Saari Arora
Veer Savarkar, 1883-1966, has been one of the most charismatic heroes of the Indian Right. For his admirers he was the greater man compared to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The greater social reformer too, despite the fact that on the political scene of India, post-1948, Savarkar could never hold center stage.
Nevertheless, he has remained a highly revered Hindutva hero, considered to be one of the founding fathers of the religious-political ideology whose leadership is now with the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the BJP. Savarkar’s own organization, the Hindu Mahasabha, of which he first became the president in 1937, receded into the political backwaters after his death.
Savarkar had refused an invitation to join the Congress Party as far back as the nineteen- thirties; becoming instead one of its most trenchant and persistent critics, specially on the issue of the sub-continent’s partition, the Congress Party’s attitude of ‘appeasement’ to the country’s Muslim minority, and of its ‘neglect’ of the Hindu majority’s interests.
Consequently, during the five decades of Congress raj over Indian politics, little was heard of Savarkar outside his own constituency, except that he was a firebrand revolutionary who had suffered extremely brutal punishments while incarcerated in the cellular jail at Andaman and Nicobar, from 1910 to 1921.
Savarkar was, of course, not the only revolutionary fighting against the British Raj who was publicly marginalised - according to admirers, not given due recognition on the national scene - during the five decades of Congress Party hegemony.
Subhash Chandra Bose is perhaps even more prominently mentioned in this regard. Similar accusations were made till very recent times regarding Bhagat Singh. Chandrashekhar Azad, worshipped as devoutly in the smaller geographical region of Allahabad-Kanpur as Savarkar is among his followers, has been similarly neglected. Not to mention the innumerable revolutionaries from Bengal, many of them Leftists, whose name remains but a footnote in the history known to the intelligentsia outside the state.
Indeed, there is a school of thought among some, should we say non-conformist, Indian historians who are extremely dissatisfied with the mainstream framework constructed as a façade for the history of India’s freedom movement. They believe that it eschews not only the major non-mainstream heroes of the struggle for independence but also the contribution of the little people in innumerable small towns and regional capitals.
Unfortunately, as far back as one can remember, the sub-continent’s rulers (and the intellectuals they patronize) do not take kindly to the validity of the uncomfortable facts of history. It is a malady to be found to this day in the leadership of all our political parties. The independent historian seems to have no place of relevance in the sub-continent’s intellectual establishment.
Indeed, it is thanks to the flux of political instability in India since 1975 that many aspects and personalities of the freedom movement, whose memory had been swept under the carpet, are now being gradually resurrected on the national scene.
Indian cinema seems to be making an important contribution in this regard, in particular. Perhaps we are finally coming to terms with the less comfortable realities of 20th century Indian politics. The lid has been taken off the Pandora Box of modern Indian history. There have been a handful of films on the partition in recent years, as well as bio-pics on personalities hitherto ignored by the mainstream media.
Now, this 30th November, a three-hour long feature film on Veer Savarkar is to be released at several metropolises and regional capitals in India. It has taken its producer, Sudhir Phadke, nearly 15 years to complete the project, but not because the funds were not there.
As the film’s writer-director, Ved Rahi, puts it, it was not a subject one could script or film easily. Perhaps because of the extreme allegiances and antagonisms that enwrap the complex persona of Veer Savarkar. It took Rahi himself seven years of involvement with the project to finally see it through this November.
Ved Rahi’s film on Veer Savarkar is best defined as a political biography that focuses on the gist of Savarkar’s most active and effective period as a revolutionary activist and thinker.
As a bio-pic, the film starts slowly in terms of dramatization. It confines itself to simply recording, as it were, the sequence of events that finally led to Savarkar’s arrest and incarceration in 1910.
What comes through in this first section of the film is that Savarkar was a fiery revolutionary who had the ability to inspire other young men to stake their life for the cause of freedom. Also that he was an extremely versatile talent. A believer in the armed struggle for independence, he was also a poet, an effective pamphleteer and an inspiring ideologue.
Friends in Maharashtra who have been lifelong admirers of Veer Savarkar tell me that there is no doubting the authenticity of the film’s content, on either side of the mandatory interval. However, the first half of the film could have been more dramatically filmed, I believe, so that it could have served as a better, more dramatic, film introduction to the charisma of Veer Savarkar to those unfamiliar with his personality. Probably the one moment in this part of the film which conforms to popular requirements of the cinema is the sequence on Savarkar’s famous attempt to escape from a ship, off the French coast, in which he was being brought from London to stand trial in India.
However, shortly after, Savarkar (played by newcomer Shailendra Gaur) is sent to the cellular jail at Port Blair, in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, far out in the Bay of Bengal, and is subjected to the exacting and torturous impositions of the Irish jailer Barrie (played by Tom Alter), the film’s tempo picks up dramatically.
As a film producer friend remarked, Veer Savarkar was subjected to perhaps the most cruel of physical punishments during India’s freedom struggle.The scenes shot on the actual location of the cramped cells in which Savarkar was subjected to varied punishments by the jailer Barrie, are quite nerve-wracking to imagine. Then, the prolonged cycle of being yoked to the huge grindstones of an oil mill, otherwise pulled by animals in the sub-continent, finally establishes the charisma of Savarkar that is intended by the filmmakers.
Through this section of the film one has to admire Savarkar’s indomitable spirit and his ability to lead fellow men in the most adverse circumstances. At this point one is also introduced to his belief that the Hindu nation should be shaped not just in against British colonialism but also in the context of the Hindu struggles against Muslim sultanates and empires.
The second half of the film takes off from this point. Savarkar was released in 1921 from the cellular jail. His sentence of 50 years reduced to 11 because of his failing health and the physical abuse showered upon him by his jailer. His sentence was converted into one that initially confined him to the jails at Ratnagiri and Yerawad; then released but interned at Ratnagiri up to June 1937.
The young actor Shailendra Gaur and director Ved Rahi portray the older, physically shrunken, person of Savarkar with great deftness. The striking portrait they sketch out fits in perfectly with the intense drama of political activity in which Savarkar involved himself after 1937.
One of Savarkar’s earliest political movements after his release in 1937 was to persuade upper caste Hindus to allow Mahar shudras into the local mandir. It was an attempt that was rather brusquely thwarted and Savarkar decided to establish his own Patit Pawan mandir. He realized that the caste system was pushing the so-called shudra Hindus to convert to Islam and he was bent upon re-converting these peoples back to the Hindu fold.
Three political meetings Savarkar had in the pre-independence era stand out as the moments of high drama in the film.
Firstly, the Savarkar-Gandhi confrontation when Gandhi visited him at Ratnagiri in 1927. What the film shows is the crux of their ideological difference. Savarkar insisting that a person should think of himself first as an Indian and then as a member of a caste; and Gandhi saying that he believed that one was first the member of a caste and then an Indian.
Secondly, Savarkar’s meeting with Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS, suggests that Savarkar was to greatly influence the RSS’s views on Hindutva ideology and on making a concerted effort to re-convert those who had left the Hindu fold for other religious affiliations.
The meeting with Subhash Chandra Bose is even more suggestive. According to writer-director Ved Rahi’s screenplay, it was Savarkar who first suggested to Netaji that Indians should be encouraged, during the second world war, to join the British Indian Army. So that they could acquire military skills which, in time to come, may be turned around and used against the British colonialists.
These dramatic moments in the film are finally climaxed by an evocation of Savarkar’s development of his ideology of ‘Hindu nationalism’. Ved Rahi’s is essentially a portrait of the political Savarkar, and he probably felt that there was no reason to follow the cliched biographical routine of tracing the man’s life up to the moment of his passing away. For this is a production dedicated to Veer Savarkar by those who admire him deeply; presented by the Savarkar Darshan Pratishthan.
Critically, however, I for one was disappointed that Ved Rahi’s film does not touch upon the social and political history that led to the emergence of Veer Savarkar’s charismatic Hindutva personality.
The roots of his political persona go back a few hundred years - to the Maharashtrian struggle against the Mughal empire, Aurangzeb onwards. Thereafter, to the emergence of the Maratha Confederacy and the Peshwai empire. And finally to the almost caste-like division during India’s freedom movement - between the Marathas who joined the Congress Party and the Maharashtrian Brahmins who were affiliated to the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS.
Savarkar’s efforts to end casteist untouchabilities seem so obviously to be descended from Maharashtra’s great tradition epitomised by the devotional poets, such as the sants Namdeo, Dyaneswar and Tukaran. This, too, I personally feel, could have been touched upon.
Certainly, I for one find it incomprehensible that the very communities devoted to the political beliefs of Veer Savarkar should so obdurately oppose their ideologue’s views on caste and untouchability. Much like the Gandhites who have tried to make everyone forget that Gandhi’s first principle was to speak the truth!