It took a 13-year-long legal battle for Prabhavati Amma to get justice for her son Udayakumar who died in police custody in 2005. In July last year, a CBI special court in Thiruvananthapuram found two cops guilty and, in a first, sentenced both the serving policemen to death.
Actor-writer-filmmaker Ananth Narayan Mahadevan says he happened to read a newspaper editorial on the historic judgment. “It underscored the judge’s statement that it shouldn’t [just] take a mother’s tears to highlight the inhumanity that is happening in society and legal matters,” says Mahadevan, who then decided to make Mai Ghat: Crime No. 103/2005 on the war that an underprivileged and unlettered woman waged against all odds, to bring the social inequities, atrocities and human rights violation to light, and to eventually find justice, closure and a reconciliation of sorts. The film is competing in the ongoing Singapore South Asian International Film Festival and had its Asia premiere yesterday.
Mahadevan interviewed Prabhavati Amma and bought the rights to the story from her. He says he didn’t want to be a typical Mumbai shark and exploit her story. “I wanted to give her a tribute,” he says.
He has stuck to the broader arc of her protracted legal struggle, bringing in some changes by shifting the locale from lush Kerala to harsh, rural Maharashtra, Sangli to be specific. Mai Ghat is an actual place by the Krishna river in Sangli. In the film, the protagonist Prabha Mai is a washerwoman who cleans clothes, including police uniforms, at Mai Ghat.
Played by Usha Jadhav, who portrays the role with a lot of emotional heft, Prabha Mai is a single mother, like Prabhavati Amma. As in real life, in the film too, the police arrest her son along with his friend on the suspicion that they are thieves.
“I found her [Prabhavati Amma] a very strong woman, a woman who wouldn’t break down,” Mahadevan says. That gave him the idea of not making Jadhav cry on screen as well, to keep the grief internalised. “Let it be a volcano waiting to explode, to spew the lava,” he says. There was always the temptation to go overboard with emotions. “It had melodrama written in capitals all over it but the correctness and honesty of the portrayal was what eventually mattered.”
Right and wrong
It’s not Prabha Mai alone who is affected by the violent death of her only son Nitin. It’s about how one heinous act hits many individuals, relationships and families. There are larger issues of personal conscience and moral dilemmas that play out in the parallel tracks of motherhood and familial love. “That’s the irony. Even being right in life you can go wrong,” says Mahadevan. So, even as Prabha Mai continues her quest for justice, there’s Nitin’s friend Suresh, who is constantly on the run and not able to meet his own mother.
One of the cops is a caring father to his daughter. “How can a man, who so tenderly picks up his daughter, be so ruthless with another youngster? What is it that controls our minds and makes us who we are? Can we be monsters and kind-hearted family men at the same time? It’s this dichotomy that I have tried to explore in the characters,” says Mahadevan.
Usha Jadhav as Prabha Mai in ‘Mai Ghat: Crime No. 103/2005’.
Some caste realities are touched upon — the cops can’t lay a finger on those from the upper castes and end up exploiting those from their own caste. The film also makes you acutely aware of how slowly time moves for Prabha Mai. “Nothing has changed even though the pages in the calendar have turned. Hers is a long wait,” says Mahadevan.
Apart from Jadhav, veterans like Suhasini Mulay, as the lawyer who fights Prabha Mai’s case, and Girish Oak, as the CBI lawyer, add weight to the film. The actors were given details of the situations in the film and told to internalise them and react. “Most of the takes were okayed the first time itself. I wanted to do it with the fumbles and blunders, just the way we talk in life, the way we repeat something, or pause in the middle of a sentence,” says Mahadevan.
Usha Jadhav as Prabha Mai in ‘Mai Ghat: Crime No. 103/2005’.
From Red Alert (2009) to Mee Sindhutai Sapkal (2010) to Gour Hari Dastaan (2015) and Doctor Rakhmabai (2016), Mahadevan says he has been trying to change and evolve his approach towards cinema. “I have wondered if, with my previous films, things had been too overstated or dramatic.”
Doctor Rakhmabai, on India’s first practising woman doctor, was epic in scale. With Mai Ghat , he has gone calculatedly small and quiet. “ Doctor Rakhmabai was my biggest production but this is my best and most accomplished film to date.” He likes to compare Mai Ghat to Shaji N. Karun’s classic Piravi (1989) . “That father waiting for his son to come back. Seasons change and you are still there. I subconsciously followed it as a doctrine for this film,” he says.
Mahadevan is now waiting to take Mai Ghat to film festivals across the globe. And dedicate every victory that comes its way to Prabhavati Amma and her indomitable spirit.
