Playing a Mahatma is not new for Pratik Gandhi. The actor’s much-awaited web series on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, being helmed by Hansal Mehta, is still in the works. Before it comes out, Pratik will be seen playing the fierce critical thinker and rationalist social reformer Mahatma Jyotiba Phule in Ananth Mahadevan’s Phule. Born over forty years before Gandhi, Phule’s strong criticism of Brahmanical patriarchy and rigorous on-ground praxis to negate the stringent rules of the caste system caused a major stir in the late 18th century. The film’s trailer shows how Jyotiba and his wife Savitribai Phule (played by Patralekhaa) coined the term ‘Dalit’ to refer to the oppressed castes. Later, Gandhi referred to them as ‘Harijans’. In that way, Gandhi and Phule stood in contrast with one another. Pratik, however, feels that the two shared similar ideas. “Phule believed that the most powerful weapon against both social injustice and colonial rule is not violence but education. Gandhi’s ideas of ahimsa are the same,” says Pratik.For him, playing the two historical figures goes beyond ideological battles. He is more interested in imbibing the psychological aspects of their personality. It wasn’t a problem for him that there wasn’t much visual material available on Phule. The actor referred to a lot of written documents in order to shape his performance. “I wanted to make people feel that they are watching Jyotiba Phule and not me. For that, I had to understand his mannerisms beyond what is written in the script,” he says. To do this, the actor went into the background of Phule through various anecdotes that opened up the revolutionary for him. “My job is to digest everything and put it into my walk, the way I look, the way I talk, the way I use my hands and how I react to situations,” he says. While internalising these qualities in his performance, Pratik was conscious not to approach the historical figure with too much reverence. “Whenever I play such characters, I don’t think of them as heroes. If I do that, it is a huge weight that I am putting on the character and then everything will become unidimensional,” says the actor. Ananth feels the same. The director has earlier helmed Marathi biopics like Mee Sindhutai Sapkal (2010) and Doctor Rakhmabai (2016) along with the 2016 Hindi film Gour Hari Dastaan – The Freedom File. “I do not make demigods out of my subjects,” he says. “I look at them as humans with flaws, facing the same difficulties that normal people do.”Jyotiba and Savitribai have a strong presence in Marathi folk traditions, with their ideas being made part of cultural songs and performances. Ananth wanted to tell their story in Hindi in order to reach a larger audience; he doesn’t feel the language change will impact their legacy in any way. “If we can accept Richard Attenborough making Gandhi in English and all our farmers talking in English, then this is nothing,” he smiles. Ananth feels that Jyotiba and Savitribai are not celebrated as much as they should be. “When you try to change society from the inside out, there are forces that do not want to propagate it as it doesn’t suit their political agenda,” he says, adding that he wanted to make the film to show their struggle to the young people of today. “Their (Jyotiba and Savitribai) fight, is one of the bravest wars ever waged in the social history of India.” Ananth was clear in his vision for the film. He wanted it to look and feel like the time it was set in without indulging in over-stylisation. “I tried to keep it as credible as possible because these are real people and their reality was completely different,” he says, criticizing other historical films that resort to slow-motion and other stylised aesthetic choices that end up doing a disservice to the subject. “These are not historical biographies; these are fantasies without authenticity,” he reasons. On the other hand, Ananth wanted to portray the life and ideas of the ‘Phule couple’, as he calls them, exactly how it transpired, whether it was their dismissal of caste or the strict gender roles. “We are not interpreting history to our advantage and making an agenda out of it. We are just representing it honestly,” he says.In doing so, the film seems to spark an open conversation on caste discrimination when mainstream Bollywood has diffused the portrayal of caste by either rendering it invisible or bracketing it under the broad category of class. Pratik feels that it is due to the sensitive times we live in. “We don’t even know what will hurt anyone’s sentiments. And a piece of art is the easiest target because it has mass appeal. But one needs to find creative ways to talk about issues without directly pointing at someone,” he opines. Ananth puts it more strongly and calls Hindi films ‘formulaic’. “They want to keep everything safe and play to the gallery by making it palatable for an audience. That is something I don’t believe in,” he concludes.
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