Filmmaker Om Raut tells Chahak Mittal that he had to dig deep to shoot his first period drama, Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior in order to get the details right
Om Raut grew up around historical stories, coming from books, his grandparents as well as his travels. Somewhere along the way he saw himself as part of this bigger picture and imagined himself a time traveller. “I grew up listening to a lot of stories of rulers like Chhatrapati Shivaji and his great warriors, his soldiers, figures like Maharana Pratap, Chanakya, Tipu Sultan and Haider Ali. I romance history. I like to live in the dream world of that bygone era. There’s some kind of power that I draw from it. It gives a sense of where one came from, a sense of belonging and great sacrifices. Today, there are smartphones which keep us connected, anytime, anywhere. But the sense of history keeps you grounded amid all the luxuries that we can afford today,” he says.
Living in the US for major part of his life and having moved to India only a few years ago, Om happened to watch a film on a Greek warrior with a friend in 2007. “Two weeks before the film released, he was constantly talking about the what-abouts of the war. What would have happened if this war would not have happened? What is the importance of this in the Greek as well as the European history? The film made me raise such questions. And I was completely blown away with its idea,” he says. That’s when he had his epiphany. “I was there standing outside the theatre at the New York’s Times Square. It was around 6 pm but not very dark. I thought that there are so many beautiful stories that I need to tell from my motherland too. I felt the rush to tell the tales about the warriors from my country,” he adds. Well, Tanhaji Malusare was the first person to cross his mind for the idea since as a child, his story had “a huge impact” on his life.
The period drama, starring Ajay Devgn, Kajol and Saif Ali Khan, revolves around the life of Tanhaji, a 17th century Maharashtrian Marathi military leader, who is known for his role in the battle of Sinhagad in 1670 against Mughal army leader Uday Bhan. He says, “I am amazed by the very fact that the Maharashtrian warrior, whose soldier count was just 56, fought against 2,000 people and pulled off an impossible task, emerged victorious! He did astonishing feats like climbing from the back of the fort, which is 4,000 ft high up in the mountains. He actually pulled off what is fondly known as a surgical strike today. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj started the concept of a surgical strike or a war on the military target, which is called Ganimi Kava in Marathi. It looked like the Spanish guerrilla warfare. In this battle, they scaled up and won the fort. And I really wanted to tell that story of courage.”
One has to be “foolish and crazy” while making cinema, feels Om, who spent four years researching the subject. “The research was done at several levels. Right from sketching the story to meeting people and historians, reading books because very little information is available, stitching different data into one narrative and reading between the lines… there were so many things to look at to ensure that the story’s accuracy isn’t questioned. When you have so much of scattered information, you have to build a skeleton or a flowchart around it to join the dots. Finally, you get the story and you start to weave the script. Having said that, I would like to also point out that reading and researching is just the first level. To set up the script, the actual locations need to be visited and experienced live. You understand the scope of it and visualise what it was like,” he says.
The next level, he points out, was taking photographs of the architecture of the fort, which helped him work on special effects and sets. The special visual effects and technology have been used for the first time in any Indian period drama. He says, “We came up with something which was really huge and gigantic in nature — the fort. It was some really ultra-modern technology, which has been used for the first time in Indian cinema. While executing all the plans, I realised that there are three levels of making a film — what to create, where to create, and how to create.”
But aren’t historicals a safe bet for Indian filmmakers? Raut defends it by saying he is only a disseminator of information to a digitally-hooked generation. “Cinema is one of the biggest conversation platforms in a country. It has a strong influence and talks to the youth who are averse to reading. Even if they read, they don’t complete the task. Most of them are half-read. So, personally, as a filmmaker, it’s a very responsible position that I enjoy in order to tell something which is important for people to know. Then why not begin from our rich history and heritage?” he asks.
Well, the makers of period dramas have a pressure of balancing the facts and fiction so as to not make the film boring for the audience. “Yes, that’s very true. But not just this, as a filmmaker, I also have to be very cautious of the censorship and of what I bring to the audience. I have to keep the dramatic element intact, make the character more appealing and at the same time not deviate much from the point of history,” he says. Highlighting his responsibility as a chronicler, he adds, “Cinematic liberty is highly misinterpreted and abused in the film industry today. It is known to be fake. But it actually means the enhancement of the existing situation. You take the genesis and transpose it on to a larger format and tell it in an impactful way for the viewers to enjoy it.”
