Maybe it’s Gandhi, not Ganga, that RSS needs to be concerned about

Then there is this enlightening discourse between Madhumati, the “head-madam” of the House of Widows, and the man who supplies her with ganja, Hariharan, where he asks her: “Did you know, didi, that Gandhi is going to sink India?” Of course, she doesn’t, whereupon Hariharan says: “You know what? Gandhi cleans his own latrines…”, to which Madhumati replies: “Disgusting! It’s fools like Gandhi who are going to destroy our great Indian culture. And what a culture it is.”

At another point, Narayan mocks his friend Rabindra’s father, Seth Bhupindernath, when he hears that he loves to sleep with widows: “You could get him to join Gandhi’s movement. Can you see the headlines? `Seth Bhupindernath and Mahatma Gandhi, Hand in Hand, Liberate the Widows of India from their Sad Plight’.”

More, Narayan asks his mother Bhagwati whether she’s ever thought of spinning khadi. She replies: “As if I don’t have enough work that you want me to spin thread. And don’t you sit with a spinning wheel like that Gandhi — what’ll they say?”

In other exchanges with his mother, Narayan also assures her that Gandhi is “not some crooked pandu” and that he’s a “great teacher”. Of course, like Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram, Mehta also tempers her critique of Gandhi with a stirring end where the Father of the Nation, after an emotional speech about religion, whisks the child widow, Chuyia, from a fate worse than death. But not before she’s been raped by a dirty old man.

Apart from the fact that it’s difficult to imagine Akshay Kumar as the Sanskrit-spouting romantic, Narayan, what’s really alarming is the sound and fury over the alleged resemblance to Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Those Days, which is set in a different period, and to which it bears only a fleeting similarity. The source of this inspiration, it now turns out, was publicised by Mehta’s friend, theatre director Neelam Mansingh Chaudhury, in an interview she gave to the Hindi newspaper, Amar Ujala, on February 10, where she said it was she who gave the book to the Toronto-based director.

But one imagines it will be a while before the BJP’s cultural wing, Sanskar Bharati, will publish a pamphlet to protect the good name of Gandhi — as it has done with the “Water controversy” where it has taken Mehta to task for her “deliberate distortion of Hindu religion and its social customs”.