From IBNLIVE.com
It’s arguably the comeback of the millennium. Father of the Nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, is once again taking centrestage in popular culture through the medium of the masses.
In the run-up to his birth anniversary on October 2, CNN-IBN discovers the relevance of Gandhi in our times and understands the reasons behind the phenomenal rediscovery that he has been for Generation Next.
Mumbai: Mainstream cinema experimented with Gandhi for the first time in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi that made for considerable commercial success.
But popularising Gandhi and his principles in the present day and age was made popular by director Rajkumar Hirani who followed Mahatma’s steps and reinvented Gandhism as Gandhigiri in Lage Raho Munnabhai.
Hirani’s “Experiments with Truth” had the winning formula and the director able to pull the icon out of history books with a humourous ease.
The Sanjay Dutt, Arshad Warsi-starrer seems to have captured everyone’s imagination and literature on Mahatma’s life are fast becoming best-sellers.
“We constantly wanted to say that we need to modernise Bapu because the image of Bapu is that of an old man in a dhoti and a stick and people probably laugh at him now. So we wanted to say that he is a great man but wanted to say it in a way so that the youth could connect with it,” says Hirani.
Getting under the skin of the Mahatma is a challenge film directors seem to love.
Add to that his troubled personal relationship with his family and they get a real-life drama tailor-made for cinematic expression, as seen in Feroz Khan-directed Mahatma vs Gandhi.
“Here was a huge conflict. A conflict of principals and Kasturba (Gandhi’s wife) was caught between the two. It was a deep pain that Gandhi carried, here was a Gandhi who carried that pain and the audience could understand that,” Khan says.
While popular culture iconised him in films like Gandhi, it also humanised him in films like Shyam Benegal-directed Making of the Mahatma.
“What was it that made him the Mahatma? What is this lodestone that he carried, that made him the person he was? That is what fascinated me,” says Benegal.
A dramatic life, a most tumultuous political career and complex personal relationships, it’s certainly no real surprise that Gandhi makes for engaging cinema and theatre.
But what does pleasantly surprise is the ease with which he has gone pop.