Hansal Mehta: It’s a swadeshi version of Gandhi

Hansal: You admire certain films, but you don't emulate them. You get inspired by them. But then you learn to discern between admiration and execution and interpretation because you have your own voice. I don’t know if Pratik was even born then but I remember Attenborough’s Gandhi sweeping the Oscars. Every Indian knew Ben Kingsley as the man who looked like Gandhi. But I think the world has changed. We have been used to far more layered world of long-form storytelling. It has reinvented the way you look at characters. So, rather than see it as an onerous task, I think it became a challenge. It was exciting to explore this character beyond the two and a half hour feature film format; the human tale of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; to see him journey from Mohan to Mahatma, to look at that story with a human angle, to look at Mohan as an Everyman. Every young adult would go through Mohan's journey. The joy was to discover a Mohan that you did not know. The Mohan that Attenborough's film was limited in not telling you about. What his film achieved in the first 20 minutes, we have travelled that journey in the entire first season. So, it's an interpretation, which is entirely our own. I always, very proudly, say it is a swadeshi version of Gandhi. Besides the international cast, and a sprinkling of international crew, it's made by Indians; made by India, for India and for the world.

Sameer: We've been doing long-form streaming for some time now and it's a really nice format to tell stories. You get that really premium drama, 6-7 hours to tell a story. It's much better than feature and it's not daily soap television.

In 2019, I had gone to meet Ram Guha in Bangalore. I thought that, the two books, Gandhi Before India and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, could make for a really nice three-season, sweeping, epic drama series about Gandhi and the Indian independence movement. We had good chat and he sent me back to read the books, get prepared and come back again. Then I met him again, we got into contractual discussions as well, but then nothing could come of it. Then COVID happened, and then, when I contacted him again, we got moving on it.

I remember Attenborough’s Gandhi. My father was in NFDC (National Film Development Corporation) at the time. It was produced by NFDC, so I have seen it as a trial show in the Nehru Centre in Mumbai.

Films are limited by the format. There's only so much story you can tell, only so much you can do. Gandhi is a highly documented figure. There’s no new discovery there. I suppose the discovery comes in finding that person in the material. I think, between Hansal and the entire writing team, and everybody working on it, we found our Gandhi. That's the Gandhi you're going to see. That's the Gandhi you're going to see Pratik play.

Hansal: We discovered Gandhi through the events in his life. We've tried to explore, excavate, and find the soul of a conflicted young man. Every young man is conflicted between career, ideals, marriage, children, family, finances. Those inner conflicts exist even today. How do you extrapolate Gandhi to our times? Each of us is still as conflicted, and is still dealing with the same problems in the real world. In the true sense of the word it is about discovering the Gandhi within.

Pratik: It’s the role of a lifetime for any actor, and that too in this longer format where we are showing the whole life of Gandhi. I still have the memory from my childhood when I saw Gandhi for the first time. We kept watching that film every year, on 15th August and 26th January on DD (Doordarshan), with three intervals in between. The film would go on for almost the whole day.

I’ve been playing Gandhi on stage for the last ten years. My first memory of Gandhi is when I became Gandhi in one of the fancy dress competitions in school. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Mohan as in Krishna—every kid must have become these two characters in a fancy dress competition. And then, since 2015, I'm actually performing this monologue on Gandhi.

The most comforting thing for me was that the idea of telling the story was absolutely clear. We all wanted to explore the human side of Gandhi. I always wanted to explore Gandhi from that angle, never wanted to see Gandhi as the father of the nation, or the Mahatma. He was just Mohanya for his friends and family. He had dreams that nobody knew about.  Whatever we know about Gandhi is what he wrote himself—all his flaws, all his mistakes, everything he has already written about. But between the lines is where I started interpreting and reinterpreting. That is a unique experience that only this longer format can give you. People know that he was thrown out of the train. But what exactly was he thinking when this happened? Nobody knows that. What must have happened is what we reimagined.

Hansal: Whether it's a true-life story or fictional you're ultimately dramatizing. The experience has to be engaging, cinematic, dramatic. I have to look for the elements of storytelling within the character's life, and those elements include conflict, they include internal and external world. They include likes and dislikes. You build an entire character and a journey in whatever story you tell. So I try to approach it that way. You cannot be overawed by the person you're trying to represent on screen. That, for me, is the cardinal mistake. You cannot be in love with your character beyond his existence as the character.

Sameer: I am a passionate reader, I read a lot, I read all kinds of things. We bought Sucheta Dalal's book, and then we did Scam. I remember the entire post-production happened during COVID first wave. We were all locked up in our homes and completing the show. Before we could release it there were a lot of legal discussions and conversations.

The one thing that really struck me about why we do this, and why all of these things happen, is because books are written. Books are almost like the theatre of the mind. So it's written, and then you have to imagine. And then when it gets into performance and direction and acting and all of that, what happens is that we are literally putting simple things like words and actions into the lives of people.

In Gandhi there's a little scene that happens between him and his brothers talking to each other. This is a line in Guha's book, that he had two brothers. But when you breathe life into that, you have that nuance, the language, the acting, and the performance, and the nervousness, and uncertainty, I think that really is exciting, because books then become real.

There is a real treasure trove of material to mine. But the mining process and the creation process is what makes these characters come alive. I really enjoy that, I think Hansal enjoys that, I think Pratik enjoys that. We are bringing these people alive, straight into your living rooms, and very close to you. You can feel for these people.

Hansal: I just want to illustrate our point, that when he was thrown out of the train, it’s almost like a passing note, that this was the transformative event in his life. He spent nearly 16 to 18 years after that in South Africa, before he came back to India. But, in a film, it becomes this event, then there’s some work that happens in South Africa, you set up a farm, and then you come back to India. And then you change, you fight for India's freedom, you drive the British out. I'm getting to look at what it did to his mind. How it affected him, and gradually, he discovered nonviolence as a weapon against oppression. It's so much more universal, the injustice and the reaction to injustice, than just being limited to the Indian freedom struggle.

Sameer: We are telling a young adult drama. This is an 18-year-old boy who leaves from Rajkot in Gujarat in 1888 and goes to London to study law. Funnily enough, in a happy coincidence, my daughter was born on October 2nd and we sent her to school last year in London. So I made her watch it.

I think it applies to every generation. All of us are 18 year old in one part of our life. All of us are insecure and unsure about things. We're all getting out of the home, trying to do things. It’s everyone's story.

Currently for the younger generation, in India especially, and anywhere in the world, Gandhi is the picture on the currency note. He's the father of the nation. But I think it's important to know that he's, like Hansal says, everyman. All of us are the same person, with the same flaws and insecurities and ambitions and vulnerabilities.

Hansal: You have to explore his greatness as much as his flaws. You have to build a character from that, from his flaws, from his greatness, from his journey. All the things that he wrote in hindsight, he interpreted his own journey, in his own words. It was his own understanding of his journey. We are also following that journey, and trying to make the world understand his journey.

Pratik: As far as creating a character is concerned, I don’t sympathize with the character. I try to just empathize with him. I don't put the character on a pedestal before I start performing, because then you will see a coloured version. It will be a very single-tone character, because I have already made him Mahatma in my mind. So, every line will be delivered in a certain way. Every move, every turn, every facial expression, every hand gesture, everything will be a little primed already. So, to avoid that, you put the character in a way where you are also exploring his or her life. But, after playing him for so many years, there are certain qualities that I've loved, that I actually want to imbibe in my personal life, and one of them is simplicity. In the whole chaos all around, it is very difficult to achieve simplicity in anything that you do, whether it's your simple and plain communication, through WhatsApp or email or just talking to somebody about what you feel. Everything is so complex, and we're trying to make everything even more complex.

One of the lines from Gandhi which I've loved personally is, “My truth will change every day with my experience of life.” Now, if I just decode this whole line in the whole performance, in the whole character, it gives me another layer altogether which may not be written anywhere, which may not discussed anywhere but in each and every scene, in each and every line, in each and every emotion that I create, this helps to elevate it further.

Sameer: I think our association really got cemented in Scam. I think it really came alive, and, in many ways, this is a continuation of that same thing. I think we understand each other and have a finer sort of understanding of what we think we have set out to achieve. So, like Hansal said, with Gandhi the main thing was to not be overawed or get overwhelmed by what we are doing, but really just to proceed and try and discover. Keep it simple.

Hansal: Also, one big trap, when you're telling a great story, is the quest for greatness yourself. It’s something that I like to avoid and I'm helped in doing that because I've made many bad films. You're always grounded. I'm not going to seek greatness, I'm going to give it my best. I'm going to improve with this experience. It's a very simple way of approaching stories. I don't like to complicate it. I'm going to discover it the way the world is going to discover it. I'm going to explore the way the world is going to explore. Only thing is that my exploration began much before the people who are going to watch the series. We had a blast making Scam. We had a blast celebrating Scam. The celebration hasn't stopped.

Pratik: When we got together for Gandhi, it was the same as the way we started Scam.

Sameer: We had a celebration for joining Gandhi at the Scam party. A lot of the key people of the team have been repeated .

Hansal: I think one of the big things that he had said is, “My life is my message”. All of us human beings are inconsistent. We are not expected to be consistent. The fact that I can change, my truth can change. I think it is important to recognize that your truth will change. You're going to learn new lessons. Gandhi's journey is such a lesson of learning. You're not born a Gandhi, you're not born with the message of non-violence, of peace. You're born with the same anger that each of us feel. Slowly you learn to overcome that. It's in many ways such a spiritually rich journey. How many spiritual leaders, how many political leaders do you know whose flaws are so well documented?

Pratik: That too by themselves, not by others.

Sameer: Growing up, studying in school, the one thing that you always come across is all the Gandhi quotes. And, in the process of making this story you suddenly come in contact with this young man who got around to saying all these cool things later in life.

Something he had that featured in a Michael Jackson song, 'Man in the Mirror'. So the Jackson line would say, I'm talking to the man in the mirror, I'm asking him to change his ways. The original Gandhi line was, be the change you want to see.

Both those lines are deeply important. It all starts with you. It's very easy to say, but very hard to do. So that's what makes it something to try and live by.

Pratik: I think, not only for India, but the whole world needs Gandhi, more than ever before. The kind of wars, the kind of behaviour that we see all around us, I think the Gandhian approach, or that thought process for the overall humanity is what we are missing.

Hansal: It’s very unfortunate that while we discuss the relevance of Gandhi, how many people have really tried to explore his journey, or to understand it? There's an entire generation that does not really know his story. Over the years, characters are reinterpreted to suit certain narratives. But I think Gandhi is truly a narrative-free character. A man for all times, because he is a man, he's a human being, before being the great influence that he was. I think in his humanity lies the tale of all of us, lies the message for our collective humanity today.

Sameer: His image and his figure looms large on us even today. I don't think we set out to make any kind of political story in that sense. It's a human story. And I think what we set out to do, and I'm really proud of the way it turned out, is that when you see it, you will be surprised. So I think that's the important thing, that this is not about Gandhi the Great, it's not even about Gandhi the Grey. This is just a story of young Mohan turning into something.

I think it's super relevant, because it's relevant as a young adult story. So Gandhi was an angry young man, like every other angry young man that ever is there. I think what's unbelievable about the story is what it ends up becoming. Where it starts off from and where it ends up. He's a hero in the truest sense.

Hansal: It's perhaps my most entertaining piece of work. It's got the scale, very large canvas, epic, yet it's got the lightness of touch.

Pratik: It’s where I have done the maximum action, while playing Gandhi.