Indian studio Applause Entertainment‘s upcoming big-budget series “Gandhi” aims to humanize the Mahatma.
The first season covers the formative years of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s life as a law student in London and later as lawyer and civil rights activist in South Africa, during which he conceived the ideas that ultimately led India to independence from British rule. Gandhi became known as Mahatma, or great soul, for his leading part in the independence movement.
The series sees the reunion of Applause, director Hansal Mehta and actor Pratik Gandhi (no relation to the Mahatma) who plays Gandhi, after hit SonyLIV series “Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story” (2020).
The benchmark for on-screen depictions of Gandhi remains Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi” (1982), which won eight Oscars.
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“It’ll be complementary in that sense, because Attenborough had some three hours to tell the story, which is a big story and a big life,” Applause CEO Sameer Nair told Variety. “Our approach always from the start has been that we’re telling the larger definitive story, we’ve got a lot more time. So you get more chance to explore characters, meet so many more people, which the Attenborough story never did, and get into the detail of the early years, which has not really been done.”
The series is based on historian Ramchandra Guha’s books “Gandhi Before India” and “Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948.” The first season, which consists of eight 60-minute episodes, covers the first 45 years of Gandhi’s life. The second and third seasons will cover the rest of his life.
Other notable films on Gandhi include Shyam Benegal’s “The Making of the Mahatma” (1996) that covers the Mahatma’s South Africa years; Mark Robson’s “Nine Hours to Rama” (1963) and Kamal Haasan’s “Hey Ram” (2000) that look at Gandhi’s assassination by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse in 1948; and Feroz Abbas Khan’s “Gandhi, My Father” (2007) that examines Gandhi’s troubled relationship with his son Harilal.
“We’re not trying to deify Gandhi, we see his story as a human story,” Mehta told Variety. He adds that from the time Attenborough made his film, there has been a shift in the approach to telling real-life stories, citing the films of Oliver Stone, “Elvis,” “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “The Crown.” “The biggest learning from all that is, however great the man is, you treat him like a human being first. And look at the person with his flaws… and you build that character. Shooting in the long form allows you to explore that person with almost 360 degrees. And from that, as an audience, you derive something that is connected to your own life. We treat him as a character, not as God, nor as a demon. Either you make him into a deity or make him a demon, we’re not doing that,” Mehta said.
Gandhi, for whom playing Harshad Mehta, a stockbroker who gamed the Indian trading system in “Scam 1992” was his breakthrough role, had been preparing for the Gandhi role, albeit unwittingly, for a long time. The first time he portrayed Gandhi was in a school fancy dress competition. He started acting in the fourth grade and is rooted in the world of theater. In 2016, the actor began performing a monologue on Gandhi, titled “Mohan Ka Masala.” Besides studying about Gandhi in school, he had also read a lot of books about him.
“Unknowingly, I was prepping for this series, I had no clue that I’d ever get a chance to perform this for a long format like this,” Gandhi told Variety. “And whatever that we had read and studied in school, was very limited about Gandhi’s life, because mostly we were taught about the Mahatma’s life, not him as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the young boy or man.”
Gandhi had performed “Mohan Ka Masala” around the world, including in the U.S. and Middle East. “He’s worshipped like God,” Gandhi said. “Whenever I performed in front of international audiences, the kinds of reactions that I received, actually made me think that this is not a normal character. That kind of responsibility and pressure is all always there, associated with the character’s persona and the larger-than-life life that he had.”
Gandhi stresses that the effort is to make the character human. “My approach has always been to touch the psyche of the character, because the story around him is known to the whole world,” Gandhi said. “But what must be happening inside his mind is not known to anybody, not to his mother, not to his wife, nobody knows it. That’s something that I want to explore. I don’t have to mimic or have to remember anything, as far as physicality or reactions are concerned. If I touch upon those psyches, those thought processes, it helps me create those nuances.”
Gandhi is married to fellow actor Bhamini Oza, who plays the Mahatma’s wife Kasturba in the series. The pair have acted together numerous times and critique each other’s performances. “If that comfort is already there with a with co-actor, it helps me create those emotions in a much layered way,” Gandhi said.
Season 1 of “Gandhi” completes shooting in July and will be ready to stream by early 2025, Nair said. The platform has yet to be decided but Nair said that there have already been several useful sales meetings. “The one good thing was that whoever we spoke to – everyone knows the name. The name recognition on a project like this is incredible. You don’t have to really explain what it is about,” Nair said.