HEY RAM
("O God!"), 2000. 190 minutes. Color, Hindi (also available in Tamil)
Directed by Kamal Haasan
Screenplay: Kamal Haasan
Starring Kamal Haasan, Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mookerji, Girish Karnad, Hema Malini,
Naseeruddin Shah.
It's December 6, 1999, and in a Chennai racked by communal violence on the
7 anniversary of the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya (a Muslim site claimed
by Hindu fundamentalists as the "birthplace" of the epic hero-god Ram) a retired
archeologist named Saket Ram lies dying of heart disease.
Keeping vigil at his bedside, his grandson, a Hindi novelist, narrates part of the old man's
life story to the attending physician —a true story that he implies to be stranger than any
fiction. It begins 53 years before, with Ram (Haasan) and a Muslim colleague, Amjad
(Shahrukh Khan) working under the direction of British archeologist Mortimer Wheeler in
the excavation of a grave in the 4,000 year old Indus Valley city of Mohenjo Daro (the
"mound of the dead"). But their painstaking work to uncover the mysterious first urban
civilization of South Asia is abruptly cut short by the announcement of the imminent
division of the Subcontinent into two nations. Mohenjo Daro will now be in Pakistan, and
Ram must return to his home in CalcuttaSo begins famed Tamil and Hindi actor Kamal Haasan's daring and controversial
meditation on the violence of Partition and its lingering traumas — a subject virtually taboo
in commercial cinema for half a century. While retaining the look and sound of the
Bollywood blockbuster (complete with digital special effects and a modest number of
songs), Haasan’s cinematic epic ventures deep into the terrain of communal conflict,
examining the process by which human beings create and destroy their intimate “others.”Most of the film unfolds in flashback within the brief span between August 16, 1946, when
the future "Father of Pakistan" Muhammad Ali Jinnah's declaration of a day of "Direct
Action" by Muslims sparked communal carnage in Calcutta, and January 30" 1948, when
a Hindu fanatic's bullet felled the "Father of India," Mohandas K. Gandhi at a prayer
meeting in the garden of New Delhi's Birla House. These watershed events shape Saket
Ram's personal trajectory and drive him, at times, to the brink of madness. The film offers
an unprecedented portrait of a traumatized survivor of events that others seek to forget,
and reopens some of India's most painful wounds — though ultimately pointing toward a
barely-imaginable redemption.
HEY RAM opened in February, 2000 to a lukewarm response in all but the deep South
(where Haasan enjoys superstar fame). The film's poor reception—or rather, near
invisibility—in India partly reflected the reaction of angry politicians and bewildered critics
(India Today praised its "technical wizardry" and acting, but called it "hard to categorize").
Many distributors (always jittery about cinematic subjects that are “too controversial” or
‘too smart” for the audience) pulled it from their areas within days of its release. The right-
wing BJP party tried to have it banned as an “anti-Hindutva’ film, while some Congress
Party leaders denounced it as “anti-Gandhi’—the BJP's reading appears, to me at least, to
have been the more astute and certainly more in line with the director’s stated intent.
Some leftist intellectuals, however, complained that the film's refusal to demonize Hindu
communalists and its “seductive” use of their imagery entirely subverted any progressiveideological agenda. If nothing else, such glaringly bi-polar interpretations at least suggest
the intentional complexity of this courageous and groundbreaking film about individual and
collective madness. As a meditation on Gandhi (albeit one in which he seldom appears on
screen), the film offers us a humanized Bapu who is cranky, humorous, and not always
sure of himself—a portrayal that I, for one, much prefer to the flat and pontificating
Mahatmas of Richard Attenborough (Gandhi 1982) and Shyam Benegal (The Making of
the Mahatma, 1996)—whose every utterance appeared ready to be set in granite.
‘
In the great tradition of Indian epic storytellers (and modern Indian magical-realist
novelists), Haasan constructs his tale with multiple layers and ironies, involving three
principal narratives, two of which are explicit and one implied. The frame narrative of the
dying archeologist Saket Ram—a man who made his living digging through layers of the
past—anchors the tale in the present (of the film’s release), at the turn of the 21st century.
It also invokes (through the symbolic date of December 6th) the rise of Hindu nationalism
during the 1990s as a potent force in Indian politics and the attendant increase in
communal riots and massacres: events that led many Indians to a re-examination of long-
repressed memories of the Partition violence in which their nation was born. As Saket Ram
struggles for his life’s breath (muttering, "My nightmares are coming back to me...") the film
hints at a nation struggling with its memories in the poisoned atmosphere of religious
identity politics that have bred renewed hatred, fear, and violence. Since “Saket” is one of
the ancient names of Ayodhya and also the name, among Ram worshipers, of the
heavenly and eternal “city of Ram” to which they aspire after death, the hero of the film is
also “Ram of Ayodhya,” and his own physical passing (in Hindi devotional euphemism, his
“setting out for Saket’) is destined to fall on the anniversary of the day on which the earthly
Ayodhya witnessed an act of desecration that would reverberate throughout the Indian
body politic.The second explicit narrative is the flashback that comprises most of the film: a
recapitulation of roughly a year and a half of some of the most turbulent and momentous
events of 20th century South Asia: Partition and its aftermath, Independence, and the
murder of Gandhi, This part of the film is exhaustively researched and fastidiously
recreated, and most of the characters depicted (with the exception of the hero) are based
on real persons. They are also, of course, archetypes of roles taken by (or forced upon)
many Indians during this period:the brahman intellectual Sti Ram Abhyankar who preaches Hindutva (the ideology of India
as a “Hindu nation’) and presses on Saket Ram a banned book that is probably Veer
Savarkar's influential tome of this title, the Bible of early Hindu militants; the discontented
and formally deposed central Indian Maharaja whose palace contains a goddess temple-
cum-arsenal (suggestive of the secret shrine in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya's famous
proto-nationalist novelAnanda Math, but including, here, a portrait of Savarkar and another
of Adolf Hitler, for whose agenda of “ethnic cleansing” Hindu nationalists have regularly
expressed admiration) and who supplies weapons to Gandhi's would-be assassins (as the
Maharaja of Gwalior allegedly equipped Nathuram Godse); and the once-prosperous
Sindhi businessman Lalwani, who has lost everything in the Partition violence and seen his
wife brutally slain — and who is a stand-in for the many traumatized Sindhis (including L.
K. Advani) who have played a prominent role in the political rise of the Hindu Right. Such
realistic strands of identity, within the fabric of Haasan’s fiction, give special meaning to the
director's own ironic subtitle for the film (echoing that of Gandhi's 1925 autobiography
experiment with truth.” Other strands include a graphic meditation on the relationship
between communal violence and male fears of impotence, coded as “loss of honor”
through failure to protect women: fears that are horribly addressed through the violation
and (often) mutilation of women of the “Other” community. Godse's famous defense during
his trial — that he and his co-conspirators “wanted to show that there were still men left
among the Hindus’— is suggested by the lovemaking that follows Saket Ram’s initiation
into the plot to kill the Mahatma, culminating in a drug induced hallucination in which he
fantasizes his wife's body turning into an enormous gun. Another hallucination poses the
hero himself in a graphic (and according to some viewers, far too seductive) rendition of
the latter-day Ayodhya agitators’ favored propaganda poster of an “angry Rama,” muscular
and armed, gazing determinedly into a gathering storma?) .
indeed, the third and subtlest level of narrative here is the Ramayana saga itself, both in its
‘own basic structure and in its myriad reinterpretations, especially as a socio-political
allegory. The film's Ram, like the epic’s, is traumatized by the loss of his wife and sets out
on a quest for revenge that eventually carries him across the length and breadth of India.
In the film, this journey includes a second marriage, albeit half-heartedly contracted, with a
spirited girl named Mythili (“the girl from Mithila,” a favorite epithet of the epic’s heroine
Sita), who, like her namesake, unsuccessfully urges her husband to abstain from violence.
Instead, Saket Ram makes his fateful decision to join the plot against the Mahatma during
a folk drama in which an effigy of the demon Ravana is burned: hence during the autumn
festival of Dusshera which climaxes the annual Ram-lila pageant and commemorates the
demon-king’s death (and which was also the date chosen for the founding of the R.S.S. in
1925, the extremist organization whose rabidly anti-Muslim ideology nurtured Godse and
his cohorts). And like the epic Ram, the film's hero battles “demons” throughout much of
the story: those of his own madness and grief; the innocent (and guilty) Muslims he kills in
revenge for his first wife's death; and Gandhi, on whom he eventually focuses as the
Ravana or arch-demon, the “poison tree” (in Abhyankar's words) behind the whole “Muslim
problem.” At last, he turns against the demons of hatred and violence within himself,
reunites with a brother named "Bharat," reverently accepts a pair of sandals, and achieves,
through suffering, a kind of personal “Ramraj" that Gandhi himself would have endorsed:
the dream of a multi-religious, harmonious IndiaDespite the Chennai riots of December 6th (chillingly prophesied by the film ), that tore
apart a city that had rarely known communal violence , Saket’s dream is shown to survive
his death, to be reaffirmed as Amjad Khan's widow joins the aged Mythili in mourning her
husband, and as Tushar Gandhi (the Mahatma’s actual great-grandson, though admittedly
not much of an actor) joins Saket Ram’s fictional grandson in the deceased archeologist's
study: a museum-cum-shrine to his obsession with and devotion to the man he once
wanted to kill. The film's final image of these younger men opening shuttered windows to
let in the daylight suggests its director's own obsessive labor to illuminate and examine
with lights and camera, several of modern India's repressed pasts. This sequence is
accompanied by the most memorable of the film's five songs (all of which are sensitively
inserted into the storyline, and reflect the versatility of famed south Indian composer
llayaraja) — an anthem strongly critical of communalism (alas, the available DVD offers no
subtitles;click here to hear the song, which begins with the film's final lines of dialogue—in
which Nehru and Mountbatten discuss breaking the news of Gandhi's death)
(chorus) Ram
Ram, he
he Ram
Ram,
Ram Ram
asalaam
Ram RamWhere
there is
no longer
poverty,
there will
be
nonviolence.
Where
there is
happiness,
there a
myriad
lights will
shine.
Darkness
will not
go, light
will not
come, it
will not
bring
morning
(just
saying) Ram
Ram, he
he Ram
Ram,
Ram Ram
asalaam
Ram Ram
Who
knows
when
Judgment
Day may
come?
Who
knows
when you
and | may
lose our
way?
All that is
in your
powerhere is to
act,
And the
consequences
of actions
no one
can avoid.
O Friends,
let our
religion be
humanity!
Friends,
Letit be
humanity!
Leam
from what
is past,
but think
of the
present
and
future.
Those
who are
gone are
truly
gone, not
even their
shadows
remain
Today, O
People,
light the
lamp of
love, O
People,
light the
lamp of
love!
Ram
Ram, he
he Ram
Ram,
Ram Ramasalaam
Ram Ram
Ultimately, one’s response to HEY RAM will depend on a perception of the plausibility of
Saket Ram's eleventh hour conversion from Gandhi-hater to Gandhian, which in turn
hangs on a momentous surprise reunion with Amjad in the twilit lanes of Old Delhi
Despite Shah Rukh’s inevitable hamming (and clearly, he is trying his damndest to give a
subdued and serious performance), this dramatic scene—which struck some as contrived
and unconvincing—worked for me, and Amjad’s wounding by a Hindu mob caused me to
viscerally relive, with Saket Ram, his own wife's suffering, thus erasing the boundary
between One’s-own and the hated and feared Other. From that moment, | was entirely in
the thrall of the film's gut-wrenching vision, and indeed wept throughout its last quarter
hour. Movies seldom do this to me, and so | take my hat off to the courageous and cocky
Kamal Haasan.
The film boasts gorgeous cinematography and splendid sets that meticulously recreate the
period, including scores of antique automobiles, and a recreation of Mohenjo Daro dug into
the Tamil earth outside Chennai. The assassination scene in the garden of Birla House,
though actually shot in the South Indian hill station of Ootacamund, was so exhaustively
researched and convincingly recreated that the actress playing Amjad’s mother—who, in
fact, had been an eyewitness to Gandhi's slaying as a girl of twelve—was reportedly
overcome with emotion, necessitating a halt in shooting. Superb performances by an all-star cast include cameos by veterans Girish Karnad and Hema Malini, and a heavily-
made-up Naseeruddin Shah, who looks surprisingly convincing as the aged Mahatma.
HEY RAM is an important and must-see film, a visceral and visionary experiment in
mainstream Hindi cinema.