Savarkar: When filmmakers play fast and loose with history

“Gandhi wasn’t a bad man,” goes one of the opening lines of the new trailer of a Hindi biopic on Veer Savarkar. “But,” it continues, “if he hadn’t stuck to his insistence on non-violence, India would have got freedom 35 years earlier.” That is, in 1912.But Gandhi was in South Africa at that time and was yet to bring his ideas to India; he returned to India only in 1915. Savarkar himself was in the Andamans, serving out his 50-year prison sentence from 1911 onwards. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, then India’s tallest leader, was in Mandalay prison in Burma, and the national spirit was down because of a massive crackdown by the British Raj from 1907 onwards and a series of repressive laws such as the Seditious Meetings Act and the Press Act. There was no mass uprising, and those who could bring about such an uprising — ‘Lokmanya’ Tilak more than anyone else — were shut away in jail. So how would India have got Independence “35 years” before 1947?The trailer’s other claims that Savarkar inspired Khudiram Bose and Subhas Chandra Bose also call for a fact-check. Though London-based revolutionaries like Savarkar did send explosive material and manuals clandestinely to India, which helped the Bengali revolutionaries, he did not directly inspire Khudiram. ShowBlurbsBengal had its own revolutionaries like Aurobindo Ghose to spur him on. As for Bose leaving India to lead a revolution from abroad because Savarkar asked him to do so at a meeting at his residence in 1940, that’s wrong too. Bose didn’t leave India on Savarkar’s suggestion. He did indeed meet Savarkar at the latter’s Shivaji Park home in 1940, but after the meeting, Bose criticised Savarkar and said he was, like Jinnah, unable to understand the international situation. There’s no way Bose would have made that statement if Savarkar had given him the idea of going abroad.Yet, if the film turns out to be merely an extension of what we’ve seen so far, it would hardly be the first. Most Indian filmmakers, regardless of language, are not dependable when it comes to portraying history and biography. They trot out creative licence as argument, but there’s a line that divides that licence from falsification. Our filmmakers cross that line effortlessly and proudly so that suspension of disbelief turns into suspension of inherent logic, destroying credibility.The latest case is unfortunate because Savarkar, as one of the most fascinating figures in modern Indian history, deserves a good biopic. A man of extremes who evoked extreme reactions, his life is so filled with drama and controversy — his five tumultuous years in London culminating in the assassination of a British official, his decade of ‘kaala paani’, his social reform initiatives at the risk of alienating conservative Hindus and his later arraignment in the Gandhi assassination case — that a filmmaker has no need for embellishment. mediumRajkumar Santoshi’s 2002 biopic of Bhagat Singh was an example of how the drama inherent in a man’s life can be brought out and the context of his actions illuminated. Recently, a biopic on Udham Singh won accolades for its slow-burn treatment. India’s freedom movement is, in fact, packed with compelling film-worthy material, if only filmmakers were to eschew dubious sensationalism for candid storytelling. In Savarkar’s case alone, it’s notable that he inspired the likes of Madan Lal Dhingra, VVS Aiyar, Anant Kanhere and was a hero to a generation of revolutionaries, including those from Bengal like Ullaskar Dutta and the Ghadarites from Punjab, and that the ‘Gandhian’ Aruna Asaf Ali, who unfurled the Tricolour to launch the Quit India movement, joined the freedom stir after reading Savarkar’s writings on 1857.Why does Savarkar have to be drawn into the Gandhi-Nehru-Bose orbit when his story throws light on how India’s fight for political liberation had multiple, fascinating strands? At the same time, are filmmakers alone to blame when India’s dialogue on politics and history is so messed up? Look at the outburst by those who will deny Savarkar’s contribution to the cause of India’s freedom only because he advocated, in the second phase of his political career, the ideology of Hindutva. Bose’s daughter Anita Bose-Pfaff says the only thing in common between Bose and Savarkar was their religion. Really? Despite their varying political ideologies, Bose had enormous respect for Savarkar as a revolutionary and when Savarkar was released from internment in 1937, Bose said there would hardly be any Indian who would not be happy to know that Savarkar, who had sacrificed so much, was finally a free man. Others like Ambedkar and Jinnah also saw him as a political equal. Savarkar was a central figure in India’s freedom struggle, whether Anita Bose-Pfaff likes it or not.Nuance is thus not lost on filmmakers only. India’s ideological divide is ugly; it thrives on intellectual dishonesty; and the likes of Savarkar, Bose and Bhagat Singh are caught in the middle.The blinkered far right will embrace nothing but Savarkar’s Hindutva (without its resistance to ritualism and orthodoxy), and sham liberals and an intolerant Left will seek to willfully negate his sacrifice. At least in that perverse sense, movies act as a mirror to Indian society.