Ace director Shyam Benegal points to a plausible reason for this failing. “Gandhiji was a man of such a complex personality that it’s not possible to feature everything about his life in one single film. It’s logical for filmmakers therefore to focus on only selected aspects of his life in each film,” he says.

Benegal’s The Making of the Mahatma (released in the mid-’90s), set in his early days in South Africa, touched upon Gandhiji’s personal relationships, particularly with his wife Kasturba, to trace his evolution into the ‘Mahatma’. “Gandhiji’s relationships don’t form the central theme of my film. But it’s true that he had a somewhat functional relationship with his children,” adds Benegal.

Indian theatre, too, has seen some stray but significant efforts to ‘demystify’ Gandhiji in the recent past. Sammy, a hugely popular play by Lilette Dubey, shows how ‘Mohan’, an ordinary man with his flaws and weakness, comes to terms with his ideology and emerges as the Mahatma. Mahadevbhai, a play based on Gandhiji’s letters to his long-time secretary Mahadevbhai, and the Marathi play Gandhi Virudh Gandhi,too, deserve mention in this context.

“In the case of Gandhiji, it is very difficult to separate the real person from the historical figure. That’s one of the reasons why most films or plays prefer to deal with his political life,” says Jaimini Pathak, actor-producer of Mahadevbhai.

Recently, Rajmohan Gandhi’s book, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, had its first few pages dedicated to his great grandfather’s “spiritual relationship” with Tagore’s niece Saraladevi. It triggered a series of discussions on unexplored aspects of Bapu’s character.

... contd.