Resources for all concerned with culture of authoritarianism in society, banalisation of communalism, (also chauvinism, parochialism and identity politics) rise of the far right in India (and with occasional information on other countries of South Asia and beyond)
Nearly 30 years ago, in 1989, Pradip Dalvi’s Marathi play Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy
opened to a maelstrom of controversy in Maharashtra. The two-act play
told the story of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination from the perspective
of his killer, Nathuram Godse, resulting in an outcry and a ban on its
performance for the next four years. That piece of theatre is making a
comeback, after the appearance of a new play that has also been accused
of glorifying Godse.
The new play, titled Hey Ram...Nathuram, was first staged on October 2, on Gandhi’s birth anniversary. It has much in common with Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy, beginning with actor Sharad Ponkshe, who has played the titular character of Godse in both plays. Ponkshe wrote and directed Hey Ram...Nathuram, following disagreements with the producers of Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy.
Since the first staging of his new play, Ponkshe has been at the receiving end of attacks from two sides.
On
the one hand, Uday Dhurat, the producer of the older Godse play, has
accused Ponkshe of copying the premise of the original – Dhurat now
intends to revive Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy with new actors. On the other hand, in the week running up to Gandhi’s death anniversary on January 30, Ponkshe’s Hey Ram...Nathuram faced angry protests
outside theatres in Sangli, Aurangabad, Thane, Nagpur and Pune, by
local representatives of the Congress, Nationalist Congress Party and
the Sambhaji Brigade, a Maratha vigilante group affiliated with NCP. On
January 24, in Nagpur, some protesters were detained by the police, as a show of Hey Ram...Nathuram was cancelled.
According
to the protesters, the play glorifies Gandhi’s assassin and ought to be
banned. While critics don’t endorse a ban, they do believe that
Ponkshe’s play is an obvious and worrying reiteration of the Hindutva
ideology that led to Gandhi’s death in 1948. Sharad Ponkshe. Credit: YouTube
‘Non-violence not the only way’
Ponkshe has refuted the allegation that his play – which Sambhaji Brigade calls “seditious” – glorifies Godse. Scroll.in was unable to reach Ponkshe, but in an interview with Marathi news channel TV9 in October, the actor-director claimed that his purpose of revisiting and revising the original Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy was to showcase the “truth” of Godse’s character without any glorification.
In
the same interview, however, Ponkshe – the vice president of the Shiv
Sena’s cinema wing – expressed an attraction towards some of Godse’s
thinking. “He [Godse] was trying to say that non-violence is not the
only successful way forward,” Ponkshe had said. “In these 70 years of
being a non-violent country, even a nation like Pakistan has been able
to attack us so many times. But recently when we responded with just one
violent attack, the situation changed almost immediately.”
‘Assassination as vadh’
For
many liberal critics, this line of thinking is not surprising, just as
it wasn’t surprising when Ponkshe essayed the role of Godse in Pradip
Dalvi’s older play for 14 years. “These plays bring out the fact that
the Hindutva of old is no different from Hindutva today, which still
persists in our midst and is in power,” said Anand Patwardhan, a
documentary filmmaker whose 2002 film War and Peace closely looked at the impact of plays like Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy.
Right-wing
Hindutva history, according to theatre critic Shanta Gokhale, has
always seen Godse as a hero and Gandhi as someone who deserved to be
assassinated. “They refer to the assassination as vadh,” said Gokhale. “In our myths, when heroes kill villains, the deed is called vadh.”
Playwright
Ramu Ramanathan believes this glorification of Godse has grown more
intense in the past two decades. “The BJP top leadership pays lip
service to Gandhi and [Bhimrao] Ambedkar,” said Ramanathan. “But if you
pay heed to the ideologues and their founders in the RSS [Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh], the message is clear.”
Godse, a Brahmin from
Maharashtra, was a member of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha that also
spawned the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. As Gokhale points out, Ponkshe
was a member of the RSS until some years ago, when he quit and joined
the Shiv Sena. While the Shiv Sena and the BJP lead a coalition
government in Maharashtra, the Sena has announced a split with the BJP
in the run-up to the Mumbai’s civic corporation polls. This, according
to Gokhale, explains the Shiv Sena’s rousing support for Ponkshe’s play
across Maharashtra.
“Although reconstructing/distorting history is
not one of the Sena’s known objectives, it would be perfectly happy to
go along with Ponkshe’s version of it, since he is now one of them,”
said Gokhale. “Even more significantly, in today’s politics in
Maharashtra, Ponkshe is against the organisation [RSS] that supports the
BJP, which is Sena’s rival.”
A new Godse will rise?
Ponkshe’s
new Godse play is currently touring parts of Maharashtra and is
expected to be staged in Mumbai in the first week of February.
Meanwhile, Uday Dhurat, the producer of the original Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy, is preparing to revive the old play, which hasn’t been staged since 2011.
“After
playing a character for 14 years, it is sad that Ponkshe has chosen to
trample on the work of the original playwright and do another play on
the same subject,” said Dhurat. “But we are auditioning new actors and
directors to bring our play back. A new Nathuram will rise again. We all
love and respect Gandhi, but people need to know the other side of the
story.”
While Patwardhan is convinced that the renewed presence of
the Godse character on stage will be damaging to the social fabric, he
believes the world of secular artistes has not responded adequately to
counter this right-wing narrative of history. “But it is good if all of
these attitudes come out in the open,” he said. “People should know that
right-wing parties even today are in favour of those who killed Gandhi.
Hopefully it will lead to some cultural resistance.”