Ananth Mahadevan, unarguably one of the most underrated filmmakers of Hindi cinema, is a bit of a biopic wizard. I have not forgotten his Marathi double whammy, Mee Sindhutai Sapkal and Doctor Rakhmabai, captivating portraits of two women from the past who made a difference to the quality of our lives.
Phule is a more tenderly laid out a tapestry than Mahadevan’s earlier bio-pic, more emotionally rich and handsomely mounted. It brings to resplendent life the tirelessly devoted social reformist Jyotirao Phule and his wife Savitribai Phule, played with such sincerity and passion by Pratik Gandhi and Patralekha. They seem to be born for this job.
Pratik is no stranger to integral performances. He lives every breath of Jyotirao’s impassioned commitment to educate girl children and to eradicate the caste system. In his confrontational moments with Brahminical tyranny, Pratik portrays Jyotirao as a man who never ceases to wonder at the bullying nature of humankind. He is deeply saddened, yes, but also amused.
Patralekha, last seen in a similarly luminous light in Citylights, reminding us at many points of Smita Patil, is a revelation. Her Savitribai begins as a shadowy figure trailing behind her husband’s reformist zeal. Gradually, she emerges as a force in her own right, negotiating her way through societal prejudices and age-old anathema (planting a solid slap on a toxic goon’s face) with a confidence that belies the fragility of her gender in the 19th Century.
Indeed Phule is a sum total of many components. It is, first and foremost, a picturesque, poignant portrait of human compassion at a time when caste defined one’s place in society (it still does). It is also a part-praise, part-condemnation of British designs in Colonial India (the screenplay acknowledges their good work in the field of education but condemns their Christianity conversion plans).
Most of all, this is a beautifully designed love story between two souls fastened in their determination to change what they feel was a worse scourge than colonialism (casteism and female illiteracy).
Miraculously, though leaden with reformist ideals, the storytelling never becomes top-heavy or overburdened with polemics. The emotions are never over-punctuated. Pratik Gandhi and Patralekha convey the team spirit with a heartwarming gusto. They are especially moving towards the end when Jyotirao is dying without the answers to the questions that he had asked for most of his life: are men born unequal, and if they are, who decides the borders of discrimination, gender or otherwise?
Like his other remarkable bio-pics, Ananth Mahadevan’s Phule is shot in authentic locations in rural Maharashtra, rendering easy and fluent the lead players’ struggle to get the externalities right. Sunita Radia’s cinematography captures the warmth of the heartland in captivating shades of green. The film’s panoramic sweep is sometimes felled by its limited funds: where there should be 200 people in a frame; sometimes there are only 20.
But that’s okay. Phule is a film with a big heart and big dreams of a social order based on equality. Just one shot of a gaggle of young girls emerging from a dark building with their school bags filled me with so much hope; it was as though that morning dawn, which Sahir Ludhianvi had dreamt of in the song ‘Woh subah kabhi toh aayegi’, had finally arrived.
