“I am not happy,” Gour Hari Das says. “There is unfairness all around. What this country needs is a social and cultural revolution.”
The octogenarian has taken part in two major struggles in his lifetime. First, it was the call of nationalism, when, as a teenager, he participated in the Freedom Struggle, along with his “Vanar Sena”, a group of boys his age, by distributing pamphlets and hoisting the Indian flag against British orders, which ultimately landed him in jail for two months.
The second struggle made him sad — to prove his identity as a freedom fighter. He “made his way through a long battle of silent war that lasted for 32 years, against his own government to prove his patriotic association towards the nation”.
Perseverance paysGour Hari Dastaan, a film directed by Anant Mahadevan, depicts how with determination and perseverance, he won the long battle without the frustration, anger and scepticism that usually comes to cloud such experiences. “I had a problem and I had to solve it, that’s it. There is no bitterness,” he says in a matter-of-fact manner. It was his quiet resolve that caught Mahadevan’s attention, who wanted to adapt Das’s struggle into a film to bring to light the faults in the system.
Music launchThe music launch of the film was held here recently. L. Subramaniam is the composer. The film will be released on August 14.
“At that time, everyone was taken by the freedom movement. We didn’t think about anything else like how I am making my country proud or anything. We just did it,” Mr. Das said. What he did not realise then was that decades later, he would be fighting that very system that came into existence because of freedom fighters like him.
“How will you make a film about my life? I don’t have any masala; only one file,” Mr. Das asked Mahadevan when he was approached with the idea. Though a file of his documents and correspondence with the state formed the backbone of the screenplay, Mahadevan needed more. “He asked me think about my experience and put down in writing whatever I remembered. He even gave me a recorder for the purpose. That’s when I thought, yes, these people are serious about it and I have to help them,” he recounts.
Gour Hari Dastaan has Vinay Pathak playing the title character and Konkona Sen Sharma his wife. Ranvir Shorey, Rajit Kapoor and Saurabh Shukla are in the cast. “It is sad and ironic that people like Das gave us a country to live in as free citizens — or so we think — and in that very country, people are subjugated by certain powers. So are we really free or are we just replicating what we went through under foreign rule?” is a question that Mahadevan hopes to explore through this film.
