HYDERABAD, India — When Indian screenwriter Vijayendra Prasad set out five years ago to write an action film, he wanted to tell a fictional story but pay homage to the “real warriors” of India’s freedom struggle. The result was “RRR,” a three-hour visual effects spectacle that was released in the spring and immediately broke records at the Indian box office. At the film’s climax, a muscular protagonist retrieves a bow from a shrine to the Hindu god Ram and cuts down hapless British soldiers with a hail of arrows. He then arms the Indian villagers with weapons to fight their colonial oppressors before launching into a rich song and dance number praising a list of real-life revolutionaries from Indian history. Missing from the names? Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian pacifist who has been celebrated by many—including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.—as an inspiration and symbol of nonviolent resistance. “It’s time to let Indians know the truth, the real warriors who need to be honored,” Prasad said recently at his office in Hyderabad, a center of South India’s fast-growing film industry. “The real reason we got independence was not because of Mr Gandhi. This is the fact.” As India celebrates 75 years of independence on Monday, the legacy of the “father of the nation” who championed non-violence and secularism is being debated, downplayed and mocked like never before. Instead, Indians embrace a pantheon of other 20th-century heroes, particularly leaders who favored armed struggle or openly defended Hindus, as a reflection of the nation’s mood and changing politics. Today, at rallies of Hindu nationalist hardliners, Gandhi is routinely accused of being weak in his tactics against the British and too accommodating to India’s Muslims, who broke away and created their own state, Pakistan, on August 14, 1947. The media and online forums, exaggerations and lies abound about Gandhi’s supposed betrayal of Hindus. In both popular films and the political mainstream, Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru—the first prime minister—are sidelined, while nationalists who advocated the power of arms are exalted. India is essentially rethinking whether Gandhi could have freed colonialism without the specter of bloodshed – which so clearly contributed to Britain’s loss of appetite for empire – and whether his ideals should be the country’s founding principles. “The current government is trying to project itself as a government that is macho, defiant, strong and won’t take nonsense from anyone,” said Tushar A. Gandhi, an author and great-grandson of the independence leader. “There is an ongoing campaign to eliminate Gandhi from the psyche of the Indian people, or at least to diminish his qualities to the point of insignificance and insignificance.” Personifying the cultural shift is Narendra Modi, the popular prime minister portrayed by his allies as the living antithesis of Gandhi and Nehru: tough on Islamist separatists, steeped in Hindu nationalism, formidable on the world stage and — if his campaign speeches campaign is to be taken literally — physically imposing, with a 56-inch chest. Since 2018, Modi has announced new statues of two freedom fighters: Subhash Chandra Bose, an Indian nationalist who broke with Gandhi, formed an army against the British and sought help from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. and Vallabhbhai Patel, a former home minister who effectively consolidated Indian territory through the use of military force and raised concerns about the faith of Indian Muslims. While both men are revered by Indians across the political spectrum, they have been particularly embraced by the right. When the Culture Ministry released a video this month to encourage citizens to attend the independence anniversary, it featured cameos by Bollywood stars and showed statues of Bose and Patel. Gandhi and Nehru didn’t make the cut. They didn’t appear on “RRR” either. Prasad wrapped up his summer blockbuster with tributes to Bose, Patel and Bhagat Singh, a folk hero who shot a British policeman and bombed the parliament building in Delhi before hanging himself in 1931. They were the kind of heroes who forced the British to go home. their. Prasad explained. “You cannot preach non-violence when you are dealing with brutes and murderers,” said the author, who was nominated by Modi to the upper house of parliament in June for his contribution to culture. “Sir. Gandhi was not a bad man, but the praise built around him over the decades? Today’s younger generation is questioning it, because so much historical evidence is coming out.” Since his death, Gandhi’s achievements and failures have been hotly debated by Indian historians and writers. Many argue that Gandhi was overused – and the contributions of militant leaders ignored – in the decades after 1947, when his party, the Indian National Congress, dominated politics and shaped the mythmaking of the nation. More recently, scholars have criticized Gandhi’s views on race and gender, adding wrinkles to his legacy. But the tide of revisionism has accelerated and grown into the mainstream in recent decades, especially with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the decline of the Congress. The BJP has roots in the Hindu nationalist movement that opposed Gandhi’s secular ideology during his lifetime and favored a vision of India as a Hindu state. Nathuram Godse, the man who shot Gandhi three times in the chest in 1948, was a member of the Rashtriya Swayam Sangh (RSS), an influential Hindu nationalist organization that Modi would join in 1978 as a young cadet. “Criticism of Gandhi is not new, but what is interesting is that it is taking root once again now that you have a new nationalist ideology of the BJP trying to assert its hegemony,” said Srinath Raghavan, a historian at Ashoka University . Because organizations like the RSS stayed away from the Gandhi-led independence movement, Raghavan added, “their search for historical legitimacy required a search for alternative nationalist icons.” Brutal killing in India sparks fears of escalating sectarian violence To be sure, Modi, 71, has consistently paid homage to Gandhi at public functions and in speeches. When fellow BJP legislators praised Godse as a patriot, Modi reprimanded them. In 2011, when Modi, then serving as the chief minister of Gujarat state, banned a biography by an American journalist that said Gandhi had a homosexual relationship and racist views, Modi said the book defamed an “icon not only in India but also to the whole world.” But he has also remained silent over the past year as the Hindu far-right gathered for a series of religious rallies at which speakers called for violence against Muslims – and hatred of Gandhi became a central theme. At a December rally, a Hindu cleric hailed Godse and argued that India would be stronger than America today if Patel, not Nehru, had been its first prime minister. One of the high-profile activists at the rallies, Pooja Shakun Pandey, said she believed Modi privately shared the far-right’s disdain for Gandhi. “He is bound by the circumstances of his secular chair, but I believe in his heart, he has the same feelings,” Pandey said. “He was brought up in the RSS and the RSS teaches in its ranks, ‘Who is the real hero, God or Gandhi?’ On Gandhi’s death anniversary in 2019, Pandey made headlines when she took an airsoft gun and fired three shots at an effigy of him, which spurted fake blood. What India needed, he said, was national strength, more militarization, more training for India’s young men to fight against what he called the threat of Islamic jihad. “You have to get mentally and physically strong,” he said. In 1998, the government under BJP Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee banned a Mumbai theater production that featured Gandhi’s assassin as the lead. But since the 2000s, more films have emerged to explore the lives of lesser-known nationalists, radicals and opponents of Gandhi. In 2004, acclaimed director Shyam Benegal released a biopic on Bose, the militant nationalist, subtitled “The Forgotten Hero”. Today, more mass-market films are being made that “predict” the country’s shift to the right, said Srinivas SV, a professor at Azim Premji University who studies Indian cinema. “We’re seeing a preference for a more muscular nationalism and a rewriting of the kind of nationalist we should respect,” he said. However, he warned, some popular narratives come “from online retellings of the story, which are not based on evidence”. Mahesh Manjrekar, a director and actor who starred in the 2008 British drama “Slumdog Millionaire,” plans to release a picture this year about Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a progenitor of Hindu nationalist thought accused of being a conspirator in Gandhi’s assassination. Manjrekar also has an upcoming project on Godse, which he Instagrammed as “a story no one dared to tell before!” How bulldozers in India became a symbol of Hindu nationalism Prasad, the author of ‘RRR’, says he too has undergone a transformation in recent years. Born into a wealthy Telugu-speaking family in southern India in 1941, Prasad had a long and successful writing career before “RRR” and often collaborated with his son, director SS Rajamouli. The plots he devised often became hits. They included “Baahubali,” an action epic set in ancient India, and “Bajrangi Bhaijaan,” a drama about a devout Hindu (played by superstar Salman Khan) who befriends a mute Pakistani Muslim woman. Five years ago, Prasad said, his friends sent him online posts about Gandhi and the history of independence, which overturned the orthodoxy he learned in school. Prasad started digging into the internet…
