The politics of 'Hey! Ram'

Protagonist Saket connotes two very Hindu truths - the current personal tug of war being experienced by at least some believing Hindus in the face of the militant upsurge within its ranks and the masculinisation of Ram. KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH reviews the film and the controversies behind it.

THE exclamation mark in Kamal Haasan's "Hey! Ram", coupled with his history of having penned "Dear Mohan" to the man whose dying words first brought "Hai Ram" to attention, definitely portends confusion. And confusion there is aplenty in the film - with names and identities, with form and content and with the conclusion.

One function of the exclamation mark in the title is indicating that a certain Ram is being hailed. The suspicion that this is not the Ram who Gandhi immortalised with his death cry, is confirmed when the blind Muslim girl child asks Saket Ram, the film's Hindu protagonist, "Hey, Rama, Do you want to know how I died?" This scene clearly shifts the focus from Gandhi's Ram, gentle and just, sovereign over an idealised secular state, to the traumatised and vengeful Saket Ram, willing the sovereignty of a Hindu Nation. It also very, very, subtly underscores the film's unstated bias in favour of the Hindu. As if every Muslim the Hindu murders awakens in him the feeling of having killed a tragically blind child.

"Hey! Ram" tells the story of how Saket Ram, an archaeologist, is pushed to the edge, caught unawares by the Calcutta riots prior to Partition, during which his wife is murdered after being gang raped and he himself nearly sodomised. Here he meets Abhayankar (who seems loosely based on Vir Savarkar) and is persuaded by the force of his eloquent logic that it is a "civil war" they are fighting, in which they themselves are the Law, with Gandhi and the Muslims on one side and Hindus on the other. Saket eventually joins the movement and is chosen to kill Gandhi. Towards the end of the film, he rejects the notion of securing (Hindu) rights through violence, rejects also the idea that Gandhi should die. Saket regains his former humanity as he passes through the tragic epiphany of his (Muslim) friend Amjad's death. Into this basic story are woven numerous other details.

Saket Ram is only one of many Rams in "Hey! Ram." It would not be stretching the obvious to say that the film's entire range of meanings is played out in the court of these Rams.

For the audience, probably the first Ram that springs to mind is the Mahathma's Ram. The second would be the Ram of the "Ramayana" - this suggested in part by fan club banners showing Kamal Haasan in the saffron garb of the mythical Ram, bow in one hand and arrow in the other. As the film unrolls, there appears (Saket) Ram, at home as much in the baths and granaries of Mohenjo Daro, as in the Archaeologists' Club of Karachi and equally in Calcutta with his Bengali wife. Yet another Ram is Shriram Abhayankar, who is Saket's guide in the realm of extremist Hindu aspirations. The last Ram, whose name we hear only once, and that, whispered by a policeman, is, of course, "Nathuram" Godse.

What do all the Rams in "Hey! Ram" mean?

Saket Ram is clearly meant to be the most important of them.

The first step to understanding this chimerical character is the name. Saket is a word that came or returned to the popular imagination around the time that the Babri Masjid was torn down, Saket being a synonym for Ayodhya. Considering that Saket is a highly unlikely name for a Tamil Brahmin, particularly of those times, the choice of this name seems to suggests a deliberate invoking of the complex reformulation of identities that occurred around Ram Janmabhoomi - Babri Masjid. The effect is compounded by naming Saket Ram's second wife "Mythili" (one of the names of Sita). And by having Saket die on December 6 - the anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition, Kamal Haasan clearly implies a historical parallel.

There is about this Saket Ram-Mythili-December 6 constellation, a certain attitude of making hay while the sun shines, as well as an unseemly desperation to cram in as much of the beastly as possible (for Kamal himself speaks of how in the process of making "Hey! Ram" he encountered the beast in himself). However there seems more of the beast than is warranted.

It becomes increasingly clear that Saket is meant to connote two very Hindu truths - one is the truth of the current personal tug of war being experienced by at least some believing Hindus in the face of the militant upsurge within its ranks, which Saket Ram's response represents. The second truth is that this response is meant to lead us back to the Ram Janmabhoomi masculinisation of Ram, which not only changed the traditional, time honoured greeting of "Jai Siya Ram" to "Jai Shri Ram", but also began to depict Ram without Sita, in the threatening attitude of a warrior. For both Rams are identical in this aspect - that a certain masculinisation is seen as essential in the fight against the enemy.

Saket's masculinisation comes through and with a break from the past. The "manly" Saket is not the urbane Saket of pre-Calcutta riot days - there is noticeably none of the equilibrium of his first marriage in the second. He is dictatorial, whimsical and negligent of his adoring second wife, Mythili.

Significantly, Saket is able to consummate his marriage only after having drunk the contents from a silver glass offered by Abhayankar, with the gloss, "idhu soma panam". The erotically charged "tamasha" (which the women view hidden away while the men are lolling on cushions), evokes the ancient link between a man's manliness and the indulgence in "soma", "nritya" and "yudha". Sure enough the "man" in Saket - seen here with a twirling moustache - is aroused. He drags and carries his wife upstairs and couples with her. Or "takes her" would perhaps be more appropriate in keeping with the "manly" attitude!

More revelations follow. In the passionate prelude to the actual coupling, Saket's wife appears to him as a sinister-looking gun, stretching the length of the bed as would an average human body. He neither recoils nor draws back, but caresses it with increased ardour, slithering over it languorously. During this scene not only does the scantily clad couple fly through the air and land on the bed, but the intervening space between is filled with a surreal sequence showing "swastikas" of varied shades, and a metallic lotus. Taken together, the wife(in her avatar as a weapon of destruction), the "swastikas" and the lotus may imply that this new Saket Ram has the same "manly" attitude to his marriage as to his mission of shooting Gandhi.

It is in subtleties, albeit crudely overstated, such as the relationship of Saket with his dead mother, and his later acceptance of the terrifying Durga as the mother, identified with the country as mother, that the film rises above the level of mere platitudes and of sentimental meanderings. Saket has earlier returned to Calcutta, through the bylanes of his guilt and sorrow, laying them finally to rest and coming away with his dead wife, Aparna's picture of Durga. Here he once again meets Shriram Abhayankar, who regards the Durga with a pointedly meaningful look. The mother motif is interesting and runs in a clear line from the pre-militant days in Calcutta where Durga was a pleasant experience of his wife's Bengali identity, to the internalisation of Durga as the only suitable mother for a patriot of his kind. This is emphasised in the scene during which Saket Ram, waiting for the directive to proceed to Delhi to kill Gandhi, stands before a portrait of his dead mother. He runs a hand gently over her picture, and as if of its own volition, the hand passes to the adjoining map of India, with the heading "Gandhi's itinerary". Then he turns to look at his luggage packed and belted, ready to keep his rendezvous.

In all this, Saket Ram is being imbued with the same overtly "militant," rather than the "righteous", identity given to the Ram of the "Ramayana", by adherents of Ram Janmabhoomi. The killing of Sambuka by Ram in the "Ramayana", who dared to indulge in tapas, was often depicted during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement to suggest that through such acts, Ram was maintaining a predestined order. Saket Ram is apparently doing the same in attempting to kill Gandhi. So all the Rams are one, except for Gandhi's Ram. And the Ram of the "Ramayana", who can be made to seem militant, but whose abiding love for his brother is a benediction and it is this love which is being invoked in the relationship of Saket with Amjad, who in a moment of danger from Hindu attack, Saket actually calls "Bharath"!

Saket's trauma cuts him off from the past, to float unanchored through the unknown territory of his new exclusively "Hindu" identity. Contrast this with Amjad, who has not forgotten the past though he too has suffered during Partition. He has passed through all this with the conviction that he belongs here, in India.

Significantly, in "Hey! Ram", Muslim suffering is shown sketchily. Amjad is described by one of his own relatives as someone who does not know himself, and, at one point when he and Saket are running through the dangerous streets of curfew-time Delhi, Amjad says that he did not go to Pakistan because India is his country. "Idhu yen naadu," he says, and a bullet whizzes overhead, forcing him to duck right back into his hiding place.

Do all these images in "Hey! Ram" add up to a picture of an Indian Muslim, like Amjad as someone who does not know himself and who therefore proclaims his patriotism from dark hidden depths? The film leaves this an open question. Is some saving grace provided by making Amjad the gentle, loving, courageously pacific person that he is, whose relationship with his wife is one of love and equality? By making him not only an admirer of Gandhi, but one who works with him?

In conclusion, let's turn to the ending of the film. Saket Ram is dead. His grandson, named Saket, a writer of absorbing stories, is showing Tushar Gandhi, the real life grandson of Gandhi, around Saket Ram's room. Grandson Saket gives grandson Tushar a little rectangular box in which are Gandhi's glasses, his sandals and grandfather Saket's gun, with the words "I have a remarkable story to tell you."

After the story, Tushar tells Saket that his grandfather was a remarkable man. Saket returns the compliment. Tushar asks for and is given the box. There is some silent conversation, the credits appear on screen to the sound of Gandhi's favourite bhajan, "Vaishnava jana to te ne kahiye". The day is December 6.

Gandhi is being laid to rest along with Saket Ram for all along he has only been a footnote to Saket's dilemmas, a convenient reference point to all Saket's criss-crossing in the shadowlands of personal faith. Saket's personal apprehension of history is given public marking by the figure of Gandhi. And it is this history that is now being validated by the presence of Tushar.

The appearance of "Vaishnava jana to te ne kahiye" (which Gandhi loved for its call to embrace suffering humanity, its call to know and love fellow Indians), during the final credits seems to suggest that Gandhian idealism, with its stress on personal adherence to truth, seems to hint at the possibility of unity in strife ridden India.

This writer can be reached at Kala-i@yahoo. com.

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