Marching on alone: This nontraditional docudrama showcases Gandhi’s ideological spectrum

Rachana Ramesh

One after another, women in colorful kurtis and men in their formal shirts, rushed into the Bengaluru International Center auditorium to catch a glimpse of the screening of Ekla Chalo – a short film by Nachiket Patwardhan.

Ekla Chalo (Walk Alone) has chosen an offbeat road to go on an adventure using a traditional documentary format to explore the impact of Gandhi’s life and message on young Kalyani, who comes to Pune, to complete her doctoral thesis on ‘Gandhiji and Contemporary Pune’. Through her journey of completing her thesis, she faces emotional turmoil as she confronts opinions of her family and friends that reveal deep negative undercurrents, under layers of friendliness and familiarity.

Kalyani’s story has been designed to highlight all the critical issues that we face today – may it be climate change, abuse of development objectives, morality, religion and spirituality that had been raised and answered by Gandhiji in a variety of situations many decades ago. In a profound and practical manner, all this comes alive in the 90-minute film through music, humour and flashbacks that are built into a storyline.

Over the years, Gandhi has become a conflicted figure. The title ‘Mahatma’ has been challenged from his writings and ambiguities regarding his own conception of sensitive issues. While Gandhi worked for the upliftment of the lower caste and denounced ‘untouchability’, he did not condemn the varna system for the most of his life. While some of his ideas were advanced in the gendered realm that women occupied in a Hindu society, many are found to be regressive and patriarchal. While Gandhi has become a global emblem freedom and non-violence, and any deviation of the perceived image becomes a topic of discussion.

In one scene, there is a conversation among Kalyani and her fellows about the much famous – Gandhi vs Ambedkar debate. On several occasions and in several of his texts, Ambedkar has exposed his innate casteism that presented the dilemma of the ‘Mahatma’. Gandhi held the idea that – “The callings of a Brahmin—spiritual teacher—and a scavenger are equal, and their due performance carries equal merit before God, and at one time seems to have carried identical reward before man. Both were entitled to their livelihood and no more. Indeed one traces even now in the villages the faint lines of this healthy operation of the law.”

Amedkar challenged this thought of ‘ancestral calling’ as a reason to follow the hierarchy that results from one’s hereditary lineage. “If the Mahatma believes, as he does, in everyone following his or her ancestral calling, then most certainly he is advocating the caste system, and in calling it the varna system, he is not only guilty of terminological inexactitude, but he is causing confusion worse confounded,” he wrote.

Rabindranath Tagore’s famous poem Ekla Chalo is seen by many as a tribute to the Mahatma and this song helps awaken Kalyani’s spiritual instinct. She realises that the greatest challenge today is an environmental disaster and we assume that somebody else is going to solve the problem for us. She discovers and works out her own ways of self-discipline and takes a closer look at rural life, in spite of a heavy bias in favour of urbanisation as the sole means of economic well-being.

“She no longer sees her scholarship and academic career as the most important part of her life and sees that there are greater issues and commitments that she must pursue in order to achieve higher goals in life,” says Abhinav Bhargav, an eager audience who travelled an hour on the metro to watch the film.

Ekla Chalo reveals a transition of the Mahatma to Bapu, through fiction as well as the nostalgia of romantic archival clips that can help convey his message of tolerance, peace and compassion to a new generation of Indians.

Ekla Chalo aims to showcase the study of contrasts between emotional upheaval and the timeless endurance of Gandhi’s thinking that brings about a fascinating transformation of a college student who represents the collective future.