“It seems we were better off under the British rule. At least, we knew who the enemy was.” These are no words uttered by some friendly neighbourhood anglophile. Those came from a freedom fighter who found that fighting against the British was far easier compared to tackling the Indian bureaucracy. Gaur Hari Das spent the first few years of his life for the freedom movement, and a major part of his adult life to get the government to recognise those initial years of struggle.
Now, his story has been brought on screen by Ananth Mahadevan through the film Gaur Hari Dastaan: The freedom files , which was screened at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) on Wednesday. Written by journalist C.P. Surendran, it chronicles Das’s struggles with the red tape interspersed with his fight for freedom.
Das (Vinay Pathak) was the member of a group of young boys who specialised in delivering messages for leaders of the freedom struggle. He was accused of hoisting the national flag at a public place when the government had banned it in 1945, at the age of 14, and spent 90 days in jail.
Most of it never came on record as he was an under-trial.
Resilient pursuit
He did not care about being recognised officially until it was time for his son to join college. His identity questioned, Das embarked on a resilient pursuit that stretched for more than three decades. Aiding him in this was journalist Rajeev Singhal (Ranvir Shorey), who follows the story even when his boss persuades him to write about more attractive topics.
It becomes a single-minded obsession as we see him cutting out every other activity other than drafting letters and visiting officials. In later years, as everyone around him, including his caring wife (Konkona Sen Sharma) asks him to abandon the dream of ever being recognised by the government and as his memory also starts fading, we see him typing out a letter to the then President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, ending with the words ‘before I forget the meaning of freedom, please grant me my tamrapatra.’
At a time when biopics are made based on how marketable the person is, Gaur Hari Dastaan brings to the viewer an untold but important story that highlights one of the many forgotten men who gave up everything for the country.
