Harvard Showing of Netaji: The Last Hero

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Event Details for An Evening with Shyam Benegal: Netaji-The Last

Hero Buy Online

Presented By Harvard Film Archive

Description An Evening with Shyam Benegal

in Person

Screening on February 11 (Friday) 7 pm

 

Netaji: The Last Hero

(aka Bose: The Forgotten Hero)

Directed by Shyam Benegal

India, 2004, color, 222 min.

With Sachin Khedekar, Rajit Kapur, Udo Schenk

 

Accomplished director Shyam Benegal emerged over the past thirty

years as the heir to the filmmaking legacy of Satyajit Ray, both of

whom were noted for their use of literary adaptations in realist

contexts. Benegal recently completed a biopic of the great Indian

freedom fighter, Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose created controversy when

he renounced Gandhi's non-violent teachings in favor of more direct

warfare with the British Empire. The film follows his struggles at

home as well as his unlikely encounters abroad with Adolf Hitler and

the Japanese Army.

 

This screening is co-presented by the South Asia Initiative at

Harvard University.

 

 

Date/Time Friday, February 11, 2005 at 7:00 PM Tickets Available

Now

Show Length 2 hrs 10 minutes

Type of Event film

Intermission? NO

Wheelchair Access? YES

Type of seating GENERAL ADMISSION

Ticket Prices Regular - $12.00 / Student & Senior - $10.00 / Outings

and Innings - $9.00

Location Harvard Film Archive

Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy Street

Harvard University

Cambridge

Directions Directions to Harvard Square |

 

Parking

 

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Hitler, Bose and a Common Enemy

 

 

 

Director Shyam Benegal (far right) with actors during the shooting

of "Netaji: The Last Hero" in Germany.

 

 

 

Subhas Chandra Bose, who raised an army in exile to fight the

British, is revered as a freedom-fighter and patriotic icon in

India. So why was Indian director Shyam Benegal shooting a film on

Bose's life in Germany?

 

The residents of Marquardt, a sleepy town near Potsdam west of the

German capital, were rubbing their eyes in disbelief last week.

 

An Indian film crew had taken over the sprawling verdant grounds of

their picturesque neo-baroque castle located on the banks of a lake.

Vans full of technical equipment and costumes were parked in the

driveway as technicians, actors and extra hands -- both German and

Indian -- hurried around barking instructions and calling out to

each other in German, English and a handful of Indian languages.

 

The fuss wasn't about the latest glitzy song-and-dance movie churned

out by India's mainstream multibillion dollar Bombay-based film

industry known as Bollywood. Rather it was the shooting of a weighty

historical epic tracing the last five years in the life of Subhas

Chandra Bose or Netaji (the leader), who set up the Indian National

Army in exile to fight against British colonial rule during World

War II.

 

Titled "Netaji: The Last Hero," the film directed by 70-year-old

Indian cinema legend Shyam Benegal, throws light on a little-known,

almost strange, chapter of Indo-German history. The shooting stint

in Germany focuses on Bose's two-year stay in Berlin in the early

1940s and his single meeting with Hitler when he requested the

Führer's help in the Indian independence struggle against the

British Empire.

 

"It's the story of a great adventure, of a flamboyant person who was

obviously a romantic as well as a strategist, because who would

think of leaving the country and trying to raise an army to fight

for Indian independence from outside of India?" director Benegal,

who is considered the pioneer of new wave Indian cinema, told

Deutsche Welle.

 

The enemy of my enemy

 

 

 

 

Bose (photo), a revolutionary lawyer and leader of the Congress

Party in India who stood in direct confrontation with Gandhi's

passive and nonviolent resistance methods against the British,

escaped from India in 1941 following British imprisonment and made

his way to Berlin, after failing to get himself smuggled to the

Soviet Union.

 

Bose's plan was to get Hitler's help to stage a revolution in India

that would distract British forces from the war against Germany

under the motto "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." He calculated

that in the process, Britain would lose the war against the

militarily superior Germany and as a consequence, lose India as

well.

 

"However things didn't quite turn out that way," Benegal said.

Though the Germans provided financial support for Bose to broadcast

radio propaganda messages to India, it wasn't until more than a year

later that Hitler, allegedly impressed with Bose's cause, agreed to

hear him out.

 

But the much-awaited meeting on May 27, 1942, ended in

disappointment for the Indian revolutionary. "In that meeting, he

[bose] asked Hitler to cut out passages in "Mein Kampf" dealing with

Asians and [Hitler said] that it was better for India to remain

under British domination. Hitler refused to help him," Benegal

explained.

 

German history professor Johannes Voigt, who authored a book on

India during World War II, said it wasn't just Hitler's strong

theories of race that stopped him from helping Bose, whom he

considered racially-inferior. "He was convinced that colonial rule

needed to be upheld if Europe's dominance was to continue. Besides

India was too far away."

 

Indian POWS and a submarine escape

 

Benegal's three-hour, four-million-euro epic also dwells on what is

considered Bose's biggest accomplishment in Germany – the raising of

a 3,000-strong Indian Legion force, made up of Indian POWS captured

by the Germans in the course of fighting in North Africa. The Indian

community in Berlin was pressed into service to play the role of the

troops.

 

Bose envisioned the force spearheading an attack on the British

while the Germans swung through the Soviet Union and the Middle East

to India. But that plan fell apart, too, when the Germans were

defeated at Stalingrad in early 1943. "Bose soon realized it was

pointless for him to remain [in Germany] much longer," said Benegal.

 

The Germans, however, provided Bose with the means to get out of

Germany to Japan, where he believed he stood a better chance of

organizing a large-scale Indian army. In February 1943, the Indian

exile leader boarded the submarine U180 at the Kiel harbor on the

Baltic coast, and traveled to the coast of Mozambique, from where he

transferred to a Japanese submarine.

 

 

 

 

In the movie, the escape from Germany and the spectacular journey

are filmed on site in Kiel's harbor (photo).

 

After Bose's departure, the Indian Legion Force in Germany came to a

sad end. "Their fate remains largely unknown. They were absorbed

into the regular German army and sent to fight in Normandy," said

Professor Voigt. "After the war, some came back through southern

Germany, many perished and some were sent back to India after the

war."

 

A gravestone inscription, "five unknown dead, 4.5.1945" in

Immenstadt in Swabia, southern Germany, is believed to be one of the

last remaining traces of the Indian Legion in Germany today.

 

Bose himself finally raised an army in Burma and led the soldiers

into India to fight the British, but he died in a plane crash in

1945 and never lived to see Indian independence.

 

A touch of romance

 

The memory of Subhas Chandra Bose's mission in Germany isn't just

consigned to history books and archives. Bose married Austrian

Emilie Schenkl in the 1930s during his first visit to Germany. The

couple moved to Berlin where they had a daughter, Anita. Today

Bose's daughter, Anita Pfaff, is an economics professor at Augsburg

University in southern Germany.

Benegal's shooting at the Marquardt castle involves

romantic scenes with Bose and his wife (played by German actress

Anna Prüstel) strolling through the picturesque grounds, a

mellifluous Hindi song playing in the background. Berlin actress

Prüstel said it was amazing how few people in Germany were aware of

Bose's visit to Germany. "This whole cooperation with Hitler, Bose's

go-it-alone attitude is simply so unbelievable. I find it hard to

understand how nobody ever used this material and got it out in the

public," she said.

 

Scheduled to release in January next year, both in Hindi and

English, Benegal's action-packed film is expected to raise awareness

of the revolutionary and his cause. The veteran director (photo,

below), who has also made a film on Gandhi's life, said he

wants "Netaji: The Last Hero" to set the record straight on one of

the most controversial political figures in pre-independent India.

 

 

 

 

"Among all the anti-colonial leaders in Asia, he [bose] is the only

one the British continue to claim was a traitor," he said. "But

Bose's idealism was free of any kind of cynicism. In that sense he

had a simple, straightforward goal – to free India. That makes him a

hero figure to me."