Nine Hours To Rama : Movie Review

Nine Hours to Rama (1963) was the first foreign film banned in India. It was based on historian and Indophile Stanley Wolpert's novel of the same name and is a fictionalized account about the life of Nathuram Godse - the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. It features a narrative capturing the final hours in the run-up to Gandhi's assassination on Jan 30, 1948, with a few biographical notes about Godse thrown in. This Anglo-American film was directed by Mark Robson who also directed films like Van Ryan's Express and Valley of the Dolls.

The book was banned by the Nehru administration upon its release in 1962 and subsequently the film was banned when it was released an year later. The reason for banning cited by the first Prime Minister of independent India - the liberal socialist Jawaharlal Nehru, was it supposedly portrayed Nathuram Godse in the wrong (better than he deserved) light and that it would have hurt the sentiments of certain sections of the population. That is a credible argument, although banning both the book, which clearly belonged to the fiction category and the movie based on it, was an overkill, especially for a progressive like Nehru. 

The real reason could have been that throughout the 2+ hours the camera was focused intensely on Godse and the Father of India, M.K.Gandhi was just a side character. Adding insult to the injury, for a movie based on an event that was a turning point in India's history, almost every consequential Indian character other than Gandhi was played by white actors.

Valerie Gearon and Horst Buchholz

Godse was played by German actor Horst Buchholz. Buccholz looks very Caucasian with his chiseled face, but can't say he didn't try his best to act his part. The women characters in the movie were also essayed by British/American actors. I appreciate the effort they had put into make them look Indian. The make-up (brown-face?) is excellent, the only thing that gives them away other than the language they speak - English, is their bone structure. The way these ladies carry off their acts in well draped saris and kurtas are some of the best sari-draping I have ever seen on western women. 

The character of Godse is shown as a beer-chugging, hot headed romantic chasing after women, which might have been the farthest from the real life Godse. So it is understandable the conservative Hindu RSS faction, to which Godse belonged, would definitely be incensed by this fictional Godse. Nathuram Godse, the real assassin, was a celibate, religious right wing activist and teetotaler. Here's Godse's letter on - "Why I Killed Gandhi"

J.S. Casshyap as Gandhi, with Robert Morley in white cap

Gandhi in this movie is the best Gandhi I have ever seen on silver screen. The most famous Gandhi on screen, Ben Kingsley's Oscar winning portrayal of the man in 1982 Attenborough film - Gandhi , looked a little too able-bodied, younger and muscular compared to how the real sixty, seventy year old person would have looked. Jamuna Swaroop Kashyap who portrayed Gandhi in Nine Hours To Rama, credited as J. S. Casshyap in the movie, was an excellent choice. He looked and delivered like the real life Mahatma Gandhi. Although one of the reasons Indian PM Jawaharlal Nehru cited on banning the film was that the person who played Mahatma in the film lacked dignity. For about 5 minutes of screen time in the entire movie and a handful of dialogues, I would say,  J.S.Casshyap did an amazing job, delivering the first believable Gandhi I have ever come across on screen. His claim to fame in Bollywood though was as a lyricist, from mid 1930s to 1950s. An English professor turned Hindi lyricist, he wrote the songs for Achhut Kanya (1936), one of the early super hit movies of Bollywood that had established the career of actor Ashok Kumar.

This is the first movie I have ever watched, based in India, much of it shot in location in India but the entire main cast of Indians were played by westerners. Delhi police chief Gopal Das was brought to life by an amazing Jose Ferrer (Cyrano de Bergerac, The Caine Mutiny, Moulin Rouge) Other actors like Valerie Gearon, Robert Morley, Harry Andrews (the Sikh general in the pic, alongside Jose Ferrer) and Diane Baker essayed other Indian characters. It was fascinating to see 50s-early 60s towns and villages of India in color, as there were a lot of outdoor locations in the movie. The only other non-Indian movie which I have watched that showed India of that time period in color is Jean Renoir's The River. A juicy bit of trivia about this movie is among all the inconsequential characters played by Indians or people of Indian descent there was a man named Basdeo Pandey who played a bit part of a laundry man, he went on to become the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago (1995-2001.)

Nine Hours to Rama intriguing movie for a student of history or someone interested in India, Gandhi or Indian independence. The movie opens with the disclaimer that it is historical fiction, but its fidelity in the depiction of India (despite non-Indian actors in all major roles) and the socio-political climate of the times is remarkable.