Some time after Hey Ram released and sank, we heard about it being used as subject material in the University of Iowa. I came across a site titled philip’sfil-ums on the university’s Web-site, maintained by Philip Lutgendorf, with contributions from Cory Creekmur. It’s an amazing site with reviews of Indian movies (mostly Hindi) ranging from Amar Akbar Anthony to Yuva. The syllabus for Popular Hindi Cinema is put up, along with a list of recommended movies and also a fantastic collection of posters.

Here are excerpts from the Hey Ram review, which provides a fantastic perspective on the movie which the Indian audience didn’t quite appreciate. Despite being a foreigner, Lutgendorf displays a deep understanding of Indian history and culture.

Ultimately, one’s response to HEY RAM will depend on a perception of the plausibility of Saket Ram’s eleventh hour conversion from Gandhi-hater to Gandhian, which in turn hangs on a momentous surprise reunion with Amjad in the twilit lanes of Old Delhi.

…Amjad’s wounding by a Hindu mob caused me to viscerally relive, with Saket Ram, his own wife’s suffering, thus erasing the boundary between One’s-own and the hated and feared Other. From that moment, I was entirely in the thrall of the film’s gut-wrenching vision, and indeed wept throughout its last quarter hour. Movies seldom do this to me, and so I take my hat off to the courageous and cocky Kamal Haasan.

HEY RAM is an important and must-see film, a visceral and visionary experiment in mainstream Hindi cinema.

…Kamal Haasan’s daring and controversial meditation on the violence of Partition and its lingering traumas — a subject virtually taboo in commercial cinema for half a century. While retaining the look and sound of the Bollywood blockbuster…Haasan’s cinematic epic ventures deep into the terrain of communal conflict, examining the process by which human beings create and destroy their intimate “others.”

The film offers an unprecedented portrait of a traumatized survivor of events that others seek to forget, and reopens some of India’s most painful wounds — though ultimately pointing toward a barely-imaginable redemption.

The right-wing BJP party tried to have it banned as an “anti-Hindutva” film, while some Congress Party leaders denounced it as “anti-Gandhi”—the BJP’s reading appears, to me at least, to have been the more astute and certainly more in line with the director’s stated intent. Some leftist intellectuals, however, complained that the film’s refusal to demonize Hindu communalists and its “seductive” use of their imagery entirely subverted any progressive ideological agenda. If nothing else, such glaringly bi-polar interpretations at least suggest the intentional complexity of this courageous and groundbreaking film about individual and collective madness.

As a meditation on Gandhi (albeit one in which he seldom appears on screen), the film offers us a humanized Bapu who is cranky, humorous, and not always sure of himself—a portrayal that I, for one, much prefer to the flat and pontificating Mahatmas of Richard Attenborough (Gandhi 1982) and Shyam Benegal (The Making of the Mahatma, 1996)—whose every utterance appeared ready to be set in granite.

Such realistic strands of identity, within the fabric of Haasan’s fiction, give special meaning to the director’s own ironic subtitle for the film…: “an experiment with truth.”

The film’s Ram, like the epic’s, is traumatized by the loss of his wife and sets out on a quest for revenge that eventually carries him across the length and breadth of India. In the film, this journey includes a second marriage, albeit half-heartedly contracted, with a spirited girl named Mythili (“the girl from Mithila,” a favorite epithet of the epic’s heroine Sita), who, like her namesake, unsuccessfully urges her husband to abstain from violence.

This sequence is accompanied by the most memorable of the film’s five songs (all of which are sensitively inserted into the storyline, and reflect the versatility of famed south Indian composer Ilayaraja) — an anthem strongly critical of communalism…

The assassination scene in the garden of Birla House, though actually shot in the South Indian hill station of Ootacamund, was so exhaustively researched and convincingly recreated that the actress playing Amjad’s mother—who, in fact, had been an eyewitness to Gandhi’s slaying as a girl of twelve—was reportedly overcome with emotion, necessitating a halt in shooting.

Check out the review interspersed with meaningful shots from the movie and laced with interesting tidbits.

Image courtesy: Philip Lutgendorf, University of Iowa.