The Brahmin Warrior

When Kamal Haasan visited Nehru Memorial Library for a talk before historians and other Delhi types, shortly after the release of his partition epic, he was expecting compliments. Instead, he came in for haranguing. One attack was for showing the Muslim community as helpless in the scenes of violence in Delhi until the manly Hindu with the fancy gun decides to save them.

At the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, earlier this year, I heard a paper on the film delivered by Ravi Vasudevan, a film theorist, and was astounded by his unenthusiastic tone. He found Hey Ram disturbing, but not in a good way.

When Saket Ram goes down the fundamentalist path, a journey he begins after Partition violates his world, it is an erotic journey. He dreams/fantasises about being a gleamingly muscled warrior in ceremonial garb wielding a big golden sword and swinging away at the whirlwind. Ravi Vasudevan seemed troubled by the attractive images of Saket Ram' s imagination - golden sword, gleaming muscles - and told me afterwards that it was not clear to him where the filmmaker stood in relation to his images. The fundamentalist imagination should be clearly condemned by Kamal Haasan, Ravi seemed to be saying.

Fundamentalism attracts so, it must be sexy and showing a character seduced, the seduction shown from the character' s perspective, I find to be a fantastic subject for a film. Looking to fight the inner storm that partition engendered, one can imagine inventing a persona that wears a brahmin thread and wields a big sword and sets out to fight the storm.

In 1991, a year before Ayodhya and the Bombay riots, I managed a cup of tea in Lahore with Malkani, then a BJP vice-president, now in the Rajya Sabha, who was attending a seminar organised by The Frontier Post. I remember him avuncular and enthusiastic for meeting young people, taking a break as it were from verbal duelling with the hawks of Islamabad, but I also remember another moment. I asked about and he recalled Hyderabad, Sind, the city of his birth, and boyhood and I' ll always remember how the room went cold. I knew I was in the presence of a great anger.

Kamal Haasan does a brilliant job of letting the viewer remain within Saket Ram' s subjectivity. Partition violence, political events, political personalities are represented from Saket Ram's disturbed perceptions.

Naseeruddin Shah is a great actor but its wonderful that the direction given to Naseer presents Gandhi as an someone's idea and perception. The director is not interested in creating the fiction that the Gandhi we see in the film is Gandhi-as-he-really-was, the Gandhi of Attenborough. An example of the staging of Gandhi: there is the scene in which Saket Ram revisits the streets of his violent, vengeful acts. He then wanders the street, and becomes one of a gathering crowd that watches a tableau in a window - Gandhi is with Suhrawardy

addressing the audience and exonerating Suhrawardy for the Calcutta riots.

In the eye of the would-be assassin of Gandhi, Saket Ram, this then is Gandhi partial to the Muslim and hence the great betrayer of the Hindu.

More fabulous work by Kamal Haasan is Saket Ram' s relationship with the two women in his life. In pre-partition Calcutta, Saket Ram is in a relationship with an equal, the Mukherjee character. She is a teacher, has a life independent of him, his parents don' t know about her and so on. They are two

moderns living in a modern city, in this fabulous empire apartment.

Comes the violence: an attempted rape of Saket Ram, her murder, the loss of his world.

Post-partition he is lost, going through the motions of his life. His second relationship is a marriage chosen by his parents. She is beholden to him as a young bride. From being a modern he is now in traditional mode. It is in this part of his life that he is attracted to a fundamentalism, and in a feverish dream fantasy his virgin wife becomes a gun (an animation sequence). She is a wife to him like an appendage, and now that he desired a gun, she became a different appendage: in his dream her body morphs into a gun.

To become an assassin he becomes a brahmachari, forsaking the wife, family, livelihood to live a life of austerity, celibacy, and - violence. It is the realisation of his fantasy of becoming a brahmin warrior.

A brahmin who is a warrior, a brahmachari who focuses on violence, the journey that Saket Ram takes is a provocative reading of Gandhi' s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Gandhi and Saket Ram' s paths of self-discipline sometimes seem eerily similar, but one led to non-violence and

the other to its opposite.

Where else in cinema or in fiction have we recently found as complex and rewarding-to-analysis exploration of the fundamentalist imagination? Not in Hanif Kureishi' s unsympathetic writings of Bradford types, certainly not in Deepa Mehta' s Earth or Pankaj Butalia' s forgettable film.