Celluloid uprising

His film on the Chittagong armoury raids released yesterday. Ashutosh Gowariker speaks to Vanita Kohli-Khandekar about his ideas of filmmaking

Ashutosh Gowariker, 46, was an actor in the 1980s when he decided that directing suited his temperament better. As luck would have it, he had acted with Aamir Khan (Holi), Shah Rukh Khan (Circus and Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na) and they appreciated his need to direct by agreeing to star in his films, Lagaan, Swades and others. This week saw the release of Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey (KHJJS), Gowariker’s latest film based on Do and Die, Manini Chatterjee’s book about the 1930 Chittagong uprising.

You are acquiring the reputation of someone who is better at historic, patriotic themes (Lagaan, Jodha Akbar and now KHJJS) than at contemporary ones (Baazi, Pehla Nasha, What’s your Rashee).
I love the immersion of patriotism and nationalism (as in Swades). For me a period film is not about the props. If I have a scene where, say, a Porsche drives into a mansion, my production team has to source both the things, whether for a contemporary or a period film. The difficult part is the burden of responsibility towards history, of presenting the times and the decisions people made at that time in the right context.

Having said that, I would like to attempt something different, may be a murder mystery, horror or a war film. The right subject has to come up.

You are accused of being a self-indulgent filmmaker
The stories I choose, Jodha Akbar or Lagaan, needed a lot of screen time to depict. You can’t make Jodha Akbar without palace intrigue. I don’t dwell over things but the films remain true to the spirit, ethos and feel of those times. You could call me self-indulgent if people were fast forwarding my movie, they aren’t.

From Pehla Nasha to KHJJS what are the big things you have learnt?
Most of my films needed me to do a lot of research; I have had to pore over several books. For instance we all know that Abul Fazl wrote the Akbarnama, but I had to read it before making Jodha Akbar. I had to read about Babar, about all the Mughals before Akbar came to power. For Swades I read Bapu Kutti (by Rajni Bakshi). For KHJJS, you can’t start reading from 1930, you have to start in 1857. I do a huge amount of research before starting work, so each of my films take one to two years to make.

As a result my awareness of many things, social, cultural and political, has improved. So has my sense of cinema, each film has enriched my craft as a filmmaker.

Your challenges as a filmmaker...
Sometimes wish I was more literary conscious. I am a chemistry student. I never read Premchand or Kalidas. I did read a lot of Marathi literature in my student years, but I did not read Ibsen or Greek mythology. I wish I knew more; these films are enriching because their subjects made me read.

I was shocked when I read this book (Do and Die, on which KHJJS is based) because I didn’t know about this revolution. There was an urgency in me. I wanted to share this with Indians worldwide. This film is important because it is saluting those people after 80 years.

As a filmmaker what are the pros and cons of corporatisation, does it stifle creativity?
There are no cons. When a painter paints all he needs is a canvas, the colours and brush and his mind. Filmmaking is a very scattered process. There are too many heads of department, it needs cohesiveness and time to build everyone’s vision for the movie. A corporate structure helps build that system without interference. In fact, most of the new emerging genres you see are the result of corporatisation. In the ‘80s, if you wanted to make a book-based film, it would have been an art house film not a mainstream one like KHJJS.

Is there something you wish you could change about any of your big hits, Lagaan, Jodha Akbar...
Nothing. Once created it is posterity, you shouldn’t tamper with it.

 

The Chittagong tracts

Manini Chatterjee, whose book Do or Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930-34 (Penguin, 2000) was the source for Ashutosh Gowariker’s Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, is a refreshing change from authors who’re always complaining that the film version does not do justice to their book or that it deviates wildly from it.

The 46-year-old Delhi-based veteran political journalist, who is national affairs editor of Kolkata-based daily The Telegraph, is simply happy that the Bollywood film will take her book and its subject — the Chittagong armory raids in the 1830s — to an audience much larger than her book, much-acclaimed though it was, could ever hope to reach. “So few people in the rest of India know about what happened. Even in Bengal, they know about Masterda, Kalpana Dutt and Pritilata, but not many know of the battle in the Jalalabad hills,” she says. Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey has already resulted in the publication of a second edition of her book with a new preface by Ramchandra Guha, a Hindi translation and another in Malayalam.

Chatterjee is also happy with Gowariker’s handling of her book, and the regard he showed her, inviting her to the mahurat, showing her the rushes and giving her the opening credits. “He had read the book in 2001, and we’d exchanged mails. But he was working on Swades and Jodha Akbar. But the book was on his mind and he got in touch with me again in 2005.” Chatterjee, however, did not have any role in writing the script.

Does the film deviate from the book? “There are some departures, of course, especially in the timeline, but Gowariker does not violate the spirit of the book, he doesn’t sensationalise,” says Chatterjee.

She’s even happy that Deepika Padukone has played Kalpana Dutta in the film. The Bangalore girl, among the current crop of actresses, most resembles Dutta, she feels. Incidentally, Dutta was Chatterjee’s mother-in-law. “Ma was quite a stunner in her day, with a long face and quite tall for a Bengali girl,” Chatterjee says. “I have a picture of her with her sons on her lap, in which you can see a resemblance with Deepika.”

Gargi Gupta