Interpreting history

ON Wednesday, December 6, 2006, on the 50th death anniversary of Babasaheb Ambedkar, a biopic on the man who drafted our Constitution finds a commercial re-release. The film, "Ambedkar", made by Jabbar Patel in 2000 is scheduled for an all India release, dubbed in nine languages. The print byte (equivalent of sound byte) in the newspaper advertisement in Pune is succinct: "They were segregated, humiliated, condemned.... Until he changed the rules of the game... the untold truth, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar."

The film is well made. This is primarily due to the terrific narrative drive of the script (by Sooni Taraporevala, Daya Pawar and Arun Sadhu), which takes us from 1915 when Ambedkar was at Columbia University, New York, to October 1956 when he converted to Buddhism, together with hundreds of thousands of his followers. The film is shot on location in the U.S., England and India by possibly one of the finest cinematographers in India, Ashok Mehta. The period setting, the costumes and the performances are top class and one would not hesitate to say that it is the finest historical film made in India by an Indian production unit.

Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" (1982), the only other comparably large production on the same period of history and shot in India, was an essentially foreign film. Interesting, perhaps shocking, is the fact that in Attenborough's "Gandhi", Dr. Ambedkar makes no appearance at all, as if to say that the framer of our constitution had little or nothing to do with Indian independence.

Cinema is not history, fortunately, but it can be a reflection of contemporary interpretation of historical personalities. M.K. Gandhi, on the other hand, finds a place in Jabbar Patel's "Ambedkar", but a very small one. In one scene, Gandhi (Mohan Gokhale) is astonished when he is told of Ambedkar's caste and says: "But I thought he was a Brahmin from Pune!" Mahatma Gandhi spoke much on being a Hindu and so did Dr Ambedkar. Their views did not converge, though they respected one another. In Dr Ambedkar's view: "Mr.Gandhi is not a saint. He is a seasoned politician." The movie is a refreshing antidote to the way we have looked at the great figures of Indian history in the last century.

The celebrated Malayali actor Mammooty, who plays Ambedkar, transforms himself into an uncanny replication of Ambedkar's iconic picture and statue we see and honour so often today — an Indian who makes it a point to dress in Western suit and tie when the typical Congressman of the time was in white Gandhi cap and dhoti. Ambedkar's sartorial choice was deliberate, probably to make the point that he was not accepted by the largely upper caste Indian leadership of the freedom movement. In the few scenes that he shares with first Gandhi and then Nehru, Ambedkar appears uncomfortable and ill at ease.

This was a man who had come back from America and England with an unparalleled academic record that should have taken him, by right, to the very top of Indian society. What Ambedkar found instead was unparalleled discrimination. At his first place of appointment, the peons refused to let him drink water from the common container at the office, lest they be defiled by his caste. When ordered to take files to him, they flung them on his desk rather than place them in his hands. Indeed, this was apartheid on a daily basis and practised by his own countrymen; in a sense more humiliating than M.K. Gandhi's experience of being thrown off a train in South Africa by a white ticket collector. The basics of human existence were denied — Ambedkar found it nearly impossible to find anyone to rent a room from at his first place of employment; this in his own land and amongst those of his own religion.

End and beginning

Indeed, what the film demonstrates is that the Indian freedom movement was just one of many struggles in the continuous striving for human dignity for a vast majority of Indians. Political freedom is not synonymous with social and economic empowerment, as the life and struggle of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar demonstrates. That is why the ending of the film in October 1956, with the mass conversion of Ambedkar and his followers to Buddhism, is so important and moving. It is both an ending and a new beginning. And that is why the significance of Dr. Ambedkar's death anniversary on December 6 this year is so vitally important and symbolic for so many millions of Indians who are technically free, in terms of the constitution framed by Ambedkar, but not as yet fully empowered. It becomes the 50th birth anniversary of a freedom movement that is still evolving and taking shape.

According to director Jabbar Patel, it is important for every Indian to see the film because "we don't often read this chapter of our history. As we can see from events around us today, the social struggle of Dr. Ambedkar is important to know because it helps us better understand the present".

The movie "Ambedkar", in many ways, has a narrative that can explain the chain reaction from cause to consequence that many of us are shocked by, and completely fail to understand, when we watch TV reports and news analysis of events right in front of us today.