I finally watched Randeep Hooda’s Swatantryaveer Savarkar. I never believed such a movie would come to life this way, on the big screen, with no expense spared, and everything looking amazing and historically accurate. When I started writing India House in 2020 (whew, it’s been a while hasn’t it? We’ll get to that in a bit), such a movie on the big screen was unimaginable. It felt like I was sneaking up on some hidden history. Now, well, it’s mainstream AF!
Which is a very very happy place to be in. It’s always been hard to sell novels, but it now feels like the movie will do the marketing for me. While Mr. Hooda has expressed disappointment at how the movie has been received, I’m pretty sure more people have watched the movie than will read a book about the same topic, so I’m glad my audience is already primed for me.
Plus… everyone has got to know this story, so they’d appreciate any attention to detail I put in. Essentially, we need a landscape of media relating to Indian history and allied topics, so we can go deeper and people can become connoisseurs. No one ever said, “There’s enough books about Rome and World War 2, let’s stop now”.
The level of depth that Mr. Hooda and his team have gone into to understand the story as well as the character of Savarkar is quite something else. I have read all the research that is to be read in English and Hindi so far, and I can see some bits from every source made it to the movie. The worry with historical biopics is always them having to invent a villain, or throw in an angle of romance that wasn’t real, or putting in a song that wasn’t a thing for commercial value. Udham Singh, for instance, was presented in his biopic as a sad, deep guy with broken English, but in real life he was a well-dressed, fun-loving guy who had lived in the US for several years and married to a Mexican woman. The Savarkar movie doesn’t make him out to be a sad, angry person like everyone does to freedom fighters. He’s a young man with a lot of friends in the first half of the movie, and always full of life and buzzing around doing things. That’s the impression of him I got too, and I’m glad to see that out there.
Now that we’re clear I appreciate the movie, let’s get into some critique that can only come from someone who’s tried to do the same thing as these guys and struggled alone with it.
It’s Hard To Do A Savarkar Biopic
When you start reading about Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, you start off thinking he’s just another ideologue, just another face in the Indian freedom struggle. He organized the prisoners in Kalapani, and was prominent enough among the great people imprisoned there that the Port Blair airport is named after him.
Then you realize he’s a lot more than that. He wrote several historical books. Then you hear about all the songs and poems he wrote that were banned from being sung on All India Radio. So he’s a poet too.
Then you come across his escapades in London and Paris where he wrote a book that got banned before it was even published, then he smuggled copies illegally into India and they spread like wildfire. As if that’s not enough, he facilitated bomb technology to be brought into India. He convinced someone to go shoot the secretary of state for India in a public event in London, and the man succeeded! And then he has this wild escape attempt where he jumps off a ship and tries to escape into France. Phew.
Then you come across his novels! And then you find out that his political party, the Hindu Mahasabha, was in power in several provinces.
And if all this wasn’t enough, he was charged for Gandhi’s murder.
But wait, there’s more. You haven’t heard of his social justice work yet. He dealt with casteism in a way that was different from others in his milieu. He focused on giving the underprivileged the same privileges as the rest, and his work yielded a lot.
Anyone who did just one of these things would be a hero. How do you make room for ALL of this?
Perhaps writing this while parenting my toddler gave me insight into his personality. My daughter is never still for one minute. Her favorite phrase is “I have an idea”, and all those ideas get executed very well because she manages to convince everyone around her to take part in her schemes. And why is she so convincing? Because she is so full of passion for everything she chooses to do, it feels wrong to say no, and it feels like the funner choice is to say yes.
That’s the energy I took in while characterizing Savarkar. Someone naturally high-energy, highly sensitive and reactive to his environment, and full of inner reserves of strength and determination.
But even with that, the challenge is to fold all these disparate narratives and successes into one story without making it seem like you’re writing a Mary Sue character.
It’s hard to write fiction based on historical events
When I took up India House, it felt a lot easier than any other project I’d taken up - the story was already there, and the events were documented well enough. The challenge seemed like I’d need research to reconstruct the narrative, but since I was writing it as fiction, I could just invent details and keep going.
Little did I realize every time I did a little more research than I did, I came across fact that was way more exciting and mindblowing compared to any fiction I could dream up. It could be that my imagination isn’t that great, but who on earth would imagine a group of Indians just hung around Russian anarchists in Paris of all places and got them drunk enough to give them a manual to make bombs? And would you even believe one of them shacked up with a Russian medical student for a year while she translated the manual into English, fell in love with her, and promised they’d be together in the next life because this birth was for Revolution? It would be too far-fetched if I made that up, but it is actually documented in multiple sources.
Given we haven’t been raised on stories of how the Revolutionaries got us our independence, every single fact is mind-blowing, and the narrative that emerges feels like a far-fetched secret. You want to make art about it just to blow other people’s minds and explode their perceptions of what history looked like.
Growing up, there were always movies like Kamal Haasan’s Indian where you’d see glimmers of how armed revolution brought us our independence, but it was only your grandpa’s kooky friend who would say things like “Gandhi did nothing, it was Bose who gave us our freedom”. Your grandfather would laugh and talk to you later to ensure you don’t repeat this in school and upset your teachers because he’d have to discard his stroll to the bank to come to school and pacify your principal.
In that light, when you go in to the story of the revolutionaries, you see the connections clearly of how Abhinav Bharat of Maharashtra was connected to the Anushilan Samiti of Bengal, and how Aurobindo Ghosh, who you only knew as a saint and someone a series of schools were named after, was a bomb-making revolutionary. It didn’t end there, your grandpa’s beloved Kappalotiya Thamizhan, VOC Pillai, was also a member of Abhinav Bharat, and Savarkar likely corresponded with Mahakavi Subramaya Bharati.
So when you have this giant web of connections in front of you, how on earth do you do justice to all of this while not making it an annoying series of unconnected events?
A Series Of Unconnected Events
I’ve written multiple drafts of the novel by now. Each time, my struggle was the same - how do I make this into a coherent narrative instead of a series of loosely connected scenes?
Like, you want to provide the backdrop of how the Bombay Plague of 1897 triggered the Chapekars, had Madame Cama leave her marriage to go live in Europe, and made Shyamji Krishna Varma establish India House because he didn’t want to end up in Mandalay like Tilak, and made Savarkar into who he was thanks to his father’s untimely death, But… how do you keep things NOT like a documentary?
The first hour of the movie is the plot of India House, much abridged. At every point, I noticed it had the same issues I didn’t know how to fix in my novel.
Like, sure, you want to show the plague. But you then see a random woman getting shot at, and you’re not sure how it all fits in. You think after Annarao Savarkar’s death, there would be something showing how Vinayak becomes who he is, but then there isn’t. There’s also an unrelated shot of Bhagat Singh talking. Sure, I understand why it’s there, but it’s too many disparate things coming together.
It probably merits a whole new post that talks about the historical inaccuracies in the movie, and I’d write that just so the interested can get more excited, not because I think the movie has to be extremely accurate in every way. But the India House portion of the book, which I consider myself well enough versed in, dwelt too much on the wrong things and telegraphed through what would have been more interesting.
I was most annoyed with how Aiyar was portrayed, as a short tubby man who wanted to be westernized. He’s my favorite character in all of this, and he’s this tall bear of a man who translates ancient texts into English, never traveled without his Kamba Ramayanam, and was always quick with a gun. Lala Hardayal is not a cute child, he was a genius whose reputation lived long after he had passed, and Khushwant Singh, who went to the same school as he did 30+ years later was aware of his legend. And Acharya is a composite of Acharya and Kirtikar, the spy, but the thing was Kirtikar was planted as a spy in the aftermath of the Alipore Bomb Case, and Acharya, while a planted double agent, was always loyal to Savarkar.
Sure, these annoyances are okay in the light of making a 3 hr long movie, but the most amazing movie-ish part of the whole thing is not there in the movie. Savarkar was betrayed by Chaturbhuj Amin, who was the chef at India House, and his deposition was a big part of why he was sentenced to 50 years in Kalapani. Chaturbhuj had actually transported guns, including the gun used to kill Magistrate Jackson, so it was clinching evidence. I haven’t managed to figure out WHY Amin would turn approver, or what happened to him after. There are publicly available statements of others who turned approver, after a lot of torture and intimidation, but I can’t seem to find anything about Amin. That kind of betrayal would have set a good tone to the movie, so I’m a touch annoyed it wasn’t in there.
The thing I struggled the most with was also what I squirmed the most at in the movie - Madame Cama is shown waving the first Indian flag. That could have been an epic scene that has shades of RRR if they had shown Savarkar waving it. But they don’t, and you don’t understand why or where Madame Cama is waving it. That scene felt like a big miss. I’m likely going to cut it out of my novel, haha, it just comes out of nowhere and it doesn’t fit in with the narrative somehow.
I loved how they characterized Dhingra though. A bon-vivant raconteur who is a foil to Savarkar. That is hard to get right because there are lots of conflicting narratives on Dhingra. A good-for-nothing lothario who assassinated Curzon-Wyllie out of depression is one narrative the British tried to perpetuate. But reading biographies of him, he was someone who tried to make his own path in life despite everyone in his family being a successful bureaucrat for the British Raj. In doing so, he worked in factories, on ships, and in other places where it was quite clear there was nothing to be gained from kowtowing to the Europeans, and it led him to despair about the status of Indians in a world run by Europeans until he met Savarkar. But that level of complexity is too much for just an hour, and this is a better picture.
But, the issue I bring up is quite clear here - each scene doesn’t naturally lead to the next. It has a staccato feel, where the broad picture is there, but you don’t know what exactly we’re focusing on in each scene and if it will matter later.
This was also what earlier drafts of mine struggled with. It was unclear unless I wrote down dates regarding when something was happening - was it happening immediately after the previous scene, or a month later, or a year after? It was hard to keep track of time, sequence, and characters. The same is true for the movie. (And, maybe the same is just true for life).
Other things I didn’t like about the movie
Everyone other than Randeep Hooda/Savarkar had a very stageplay kind of quality to them, as did a lot of scenes, sequences, and choice of shots.
There’s this scene where Gandhi gives a speech to a crowd of Indians in London on Vijaya Dasami, talking about how nonviolence is the core of Ram Rajya, and then it is immediately followed by a speech of Savarkar, where he says that to establish Ram Rajya, Rama had to kill Ravana. It’s a very very powerful moment that shows the divergence between these two main characters.
What does the movie do? It takes away the crowd of young men who are confused about right and wrong in the aftermath of the assassination. They feel chastised by Gandhi, and then, Savarkar manages to reassure them that yes, their instincts are right to sympathize with Dhingra, and this non-violence schtick isn’t going to go anywhere. Instead, it’s like one of those professional stageplays where there are two characters on opposite ends of the stage where the spotlight is on one as they monologue, and then the other. It would totally kill for a stageplay, but this is a movie.
To add, Gandhi, who’s kind of the main antagonist, is played by someone who seems like a very skilled stage actor…. but unfortunately, the medium is film, not stage play. His repetitive dialogues, his oily manner of speaking, and his overall smarmy attitude are great for a stageplay, but a movie requires way more gravitas in addition to that portrayal. On that note, all the big names who aren’t Savarkar end up being played cartoonishly.
The movie goes from highlight to highlight. You constantly need onscreen text to explain what’s going on or what happens to the characters, because there’s just a lot of stuff to explain. And there are typos in the text overlay.
But there’s one underlying problem, which, if solved, will take away all of these issues.
Inner Story / Emotional Journey
I was watching this Harlan Coben murder mystery series on Netflix called Fool Me Once. It’s riveting enough to make me watch it all in one night, forgoing sleep. Once I got to the end and we found out who the killer was, I realized none of it added up, and it was just badly plotted. But I didn’t care! I had had a great time watching it at the edge of my seat and I wasn’t going to try to piece together how it didn’t make sense.
Why?
Because I cared about the protagonist’s journey. She just buried her husband, and suddenly finds evidence he could be alive. How is she dealing with this problem? How is she feeling about it? Who can she trust?
The book Story Genius by Lisa Cron is one I’ve talked about a lot here and there, but this is the thesis of the book. People care about stories because there’s something in the story that tells them how to lead their lives better. How to watch better for threats. How to make sense of the world.
Central to being able to do this is to be able to connect with the protagonist’s emotions and place in life, and be interested in the problems they are facing, and how they plan to solve them. And what helps you follow how it goes for the protagonist is a SILSILA - one scene leads to the next, not just plot-wise, but also emotionally.
So you start with trying to understand who your protagonist is, what their needs are, and what lesson you hope for them to learn at the end of the story. Then using that need and the lesson, you build a series of scenes where at the end of every scene, the emotional journey of the protagonist advances as well as the plot journey.
This way, as the plot advances, the protagonist’s emotions make sense of the plot for you, and you feel connected to the plot. You have a reason to care.
Okay, but how does this help the Savarkar movie?
The thing that annoyed me the most about the movie was how big, impactful scenes got lost in the melee. I hope I’m wrong in saying this, but there weren’t shots or clips that were meme-worthy. I don’t know how many of us have watched Shaurya, but everyone knows Kay Kay Menon’s speech in it. There’s endless potential for such iconic clips or screenshots, but when everything is iconic, nothing is iconic.
What I realized is important is to PICK ONLY A FEW THINGS, AND DO THEM WELL.
And to maximize their impact, it works if they fit in with the protagonist’s emotional journey.
With the wealth of material, there could have been one or two strong lines the movie could have taken. These are present in the movie, but they aren’t played up.
One is to have made it a Gandhi vs Savarkar movie, with them realizing they both have been had by the British again, in the form of Nehru. This would have involved playing up their contrast. That would mean a stronger actor playing Gandhi. And more time devoted to how Gandhi thought and what his influences were. I would have, for instance, liked their last scene together to have mirrored their first scene together.
Another thing that bolsters this movie is that Nehru and Savarkar were both in London at the same time. Jawaharlal Nehru went by ‘Joe’, and he firmly refused to set foot in India House, preferring instead to ingratiate himself with the British. Throw that in, and then Nehru isn’t coming out of nowhere near the end.
It could have helped also to have the betrayal line I’d suggested earlier - Chaturbhuj Amin betrays Savarkar in the beginning, but then Nehru betrays Gandhi in the end, both collaborators going on to have a good life.
Or, downplaying all of that, you just focus on the protagonist who tries all his life to drive the British out of India, only to find out they’ve won in the end anyway, by appointing a kala angrez in their stead. That could have worked too.
The challenge though, is when you’re the first to write such a book or make such a movie, there’s so much pressure to contain the whole world within your work. You want the story to contain multitudes, and all of the mindblowing bits of trivia you’ve painstakingly gathered.
This is very very hard to get over.
For one, the mindblowing stuff is what gets you interested in the first place, and probably the lowest-hanging fruit for your audience to get interested in too. For another, it feels hard to convey the full extent of who Savarkar was without all of the interesting anecdotes around him and all the difficult things he did.
What I suggested would involve playing down the India House shenanigans in the first hour down to the barebones, tightening up the Kalapani scenes, and redoing the entire last hour to focus more on Gandhi’s emotional journey too, and having Nehru play a larger role. That would mean a lot of the cool stuff would be out, but what’s remaining would be iconic… and I’m trying to do that with my book, but god, it’s so difficult to cut out things that feel so important.
So, while what I’ve said about the movie might come off as harsh, that’s not how I mean it. I know this stuff is hard, and with all the challenges that Mr. Hooda has been through to get this movie released, just finishing is a great achievement, one I haven’t yet managed to do. (Sidenote: it feels like anything you touch related to Veer Savarkar will tend to be a long-running Tapasya that puts your whole life in perspective).
And Mr. Hooda has made the movie so incredibly amazing, so beautifully picturized, and getting right into the energy and persona that was Savarkar. I watched the movie with people who didn’t have much context on India or the freedom movement, and they enjoyed it immensely and came away understanding the nature of the freedom struggle as well as what part the Congress plays in India today. When I shared my raw thoughts with others with as much interest in this story as I have, they pushed back hard against me and said I was being too nitpicky and they just loved the movie and the conversations it sparked.
What we need next
There needs to be a Savarkar documentary series. There are so many interesting sidetracks and so many facts that don’t easily fit into a narrative. There needs to be room for that. Bring in Vikram Sampath, Sanjeev Sanyal, the top leadership of the RSS, and members of the Savarkar family, and get Randeep Hooda as the face of the series to travel to London, Paris, Marseilles, Nasik, Ratnagiri, and Port Blair. And make a whole soundtrack for it with songs written by Savarkar himself. Make it a whole thing that is a one-stop peek into his history and legacy.
Once we have something like that, the template gets established for other chapters of Indian history and other important characters. Once there’s a baseline awareness of facts, writers and filmmakers can make more content that doesn’t have to contain the whole world, and just focus on specific parts of our history, like Dunkirk or The Imitation Game.
And my novel too
Yeah, I’m now loath to promise anything, given every few months, something about my life goes upside down making it hard to make time to focus and write. But I’m working on editing, and I have a good grip on the Inner Story now. The Inner Story is the evolution of a leader of boys to a leader of men, and I’m trying to figure out where to put all the interesting sidetracks. Watching this movie gave me one vision of what I could do with all the research I’ve done, and based on my feelings around it, I could make different choices.
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Haven't seen it but sounds from your review that it should be an OTT series.
Hey! Good write up. I watched the movie two days after it came out and since then, believe me or not, I have been stalking your twitter page to read your thoughts on the movie. I'm happy that you finally wrote a long post on it!
I would mostly agree with you in your criticism of the movie. For one, it was too long. A bit of tight editing would have really helped in making it more impactful. The ending was heartbreaking but maybe it could have been executed better to make a bigger impact. I also noticed that the subtitles and in-movie text had typos which took me out of the movie momentarily. I too found the movie a bit jarring since it kept jumping from one incident to other in Savarkar's long life which made it look like a video collage than a movie. The most charitable way of describing this is that the movie felt like an Amar Chitra Katha comic book on screen.
My SO also complained that parts of the movie looked like stageplay but to me, it seemed like a deliberate choice that did not work. So, in that case, I didn't have too much of a problem because I appreciate the risk Hooda took with those choices.
Althought, when it comes to plot points, I agree with your fellow movie-goers that you are being nitpicky. :P I mean, I understand why you are being nitpicky... You've spent years researching India house and Savarkar. Of course you will have a so much more insight into the whole thing and a certain story beat in your head. So, you have a much better idea on how things could be better. I, on the other hand, had heard stories of Savarkar since childhood (thanks to RSS and my family's affiliation with RSS) but didn't know much about India House or other revolutionaries. So, I didn't have much criticism with plot points. In fact, thanks to you, I know much more about Savarkar and India house from your book excerpts, tweet threads, etc. and could appreciate the movie better because of this. There were times during the movie when I was just awestruck that a Bollywood movie went into such minute details about the man.
As you have written, just the fact that a movie on Savarkar was made is a big deal. I highly appreciate Randeep Hooda for having the guts to make this movie against all odds. When his own movie industry refuses to acknowledge the movie to the extent of not even reviewing it, making this movie would have been HARD. We don't even know much about all the drama behind the screen when Mahesh Manjrekar stepped down from the director chair and the producer too dropped out of the project. To then take over both those major roles to make sure the movie got made is pure passion! And it showed. This movie was a passion project. Like you said about your daughter, when you see the passion in someone's eyes, you don't think much about logic. That way, it was very Savarkaresqe of Hooda to get this project made.
The lack of top quality film making showed in the movie but I don't fault it too much. When there is so much opposition to these kinds of movies (Kashmir Files, Kerala Story, Vaccine war, etc.) from the movie fraternity , the director does not get access to the best of the top talent because the fact that they were making this movie makes them a pariah. So, although I know that a different cast and crew could have made this movie way better, I also know that it would never happen! It blew my mind that Hooda himself had to sit down to create subtitles of the movie during post production when he was also busy promoting the movie. So, I had to temper few of my criticisms of this movie just because of the fact that this movie went against the movie industry to be made.
In any case, loved your review of the movie and loved reading more facts about the story. Good luck with the book and yeah, your fans are waiting for the book. :)