How to make a saintly modern Indian biopic
Hemalkasa
Image by Hemalkasa
It’s hard to make a biopic about our contemporary saints unless they are involved in political affairs.
Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi lived out their lives in a maelstrom of dramatic events, so a film has plenty of drama and conflict on which to draw. But how to show a life of quiet good works?
Where’s the drama in such a film? Wouldn’t it be gushingly obsequious or boring, or both?
Hemalkasa looks as though it will fall into that trap. The opening scene has Dr. Prakash Baba Amte wading ashore, god-like and self-satisfied, and displaying his spiritual affinity with wild animals to a pair of adulatory journalists who gasp with astonishment at his every touch. It’s cringingly awful, at least to this Westerner’s eye.
Fortunately, the rest of the film is far, far better.
It tells the real-life story of how Amte and his equally committed doctor wife, Mandakini, set up a health centre amidst mistrustful forest “tribals” (what outside India are generally known as indigenous peoples), slowly win their trust, build up facilities and finally win a Magsaysay Award, given for activists with integrity and pragmatic idealism.
There’s a comic scene when an Indian bigwig with his eye on more important matters than ordinary people’s health is told of the award and scrambles his civil servants to find out what on earth this project is and where on earth Hemalkasa is located. As so often happens, it takes outside recognition to bring official attention to unsung heroes.
Officials come out of the film badly, pompous, hierarchical and, in the case of the police, prejudiced and casually brutal. The tribals are seen as in thrall to mumbo-jumbo “witch doctors” and wondering how people can be small enough to get inside radios – no Western liberal hang-ups about “respecting alternative cultures” here. The health centre staff don’t get much of a look-in, apart from an understated understanding that they are making sacrifices to work for little money in a place with few amenities. And the Amtes themselves? Mandakini is a rock and she finally gets full recognition in Prakash’s award-acceptance speech. But it’s really the Prakash Baba Amte show, and apart from a few warts (why did it take so long for him to bother to learn the tribals’ language, which surely should be his starting point) you do feel he is totally committed to the job he has set himself and is an inspiring example.
And no, it’s not boring or obsequious. There’s humour, pathos and drama: a sharply observed scene in which Baba Amte tries to soften police treatment of a villager suspected of helping Maoist rebels in the area; a do-or-die effort to save a patient whose imminent death could jeopardise the villagers’ trust; his anguish at having to literally cut an emerging baby into pieces to save the mother; Mandakini’s tug-of-war tussle over keeping a villager’s baby she has looked after for a year. Interestingly, the only time Baba Amte’s rational, judicious approach breaks down in a similar way is over the snakebite death of a favourite leopard in his menagerie.
The publicity says, “Incredibly moving, the film will leave you with a tear in your eye, a fond smile on your lips and an immediate desire to improve the world that we live in.” That’s a wonderful achievement for any film.
· Hemalkasa is showing at Cineworld Haymarket at 6pm on 17 July as part of the http://www.londonindianfilmfestival.co.uk/programme.htm L:ondon Indian Film Festival + Q&A
+ Also showing at the Festival:
Bravura Bangladesh independence war adventure
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