Boy to girl, devout follower to assassin: the Nathuram Godse story
Illustration, The Father and the Assassin: National Theatre
Daniel Nelson
So, Mahatma Gandhi was murdered because his assassin was brought up as a girl to appease the Gods and was symbolically killing the father who had metaphorically castrated him?
No, Anupama Chandrasekhar’s drama at the National Theatre, The Father and the Assassin, is not that simplistic.
But you could be forgiven for nursing such thoughts as you watch her play about the killer, Nathuram Godse, which blends fact and fiction as it weaves its way through decades of Indian history.
“I did not want the play to be a history lesson,” she has said. “I have skipped over several watershed moments in Indian and Gandhian history to stay true to the overarching story of Godse.”
He opens the epic (“What are you staring at? Have you never seen a murderer up close before?”) and closes it with a hate-spewing speech in which he urges the audience to distrust and smash those who are not like themselves. For Godse, that means India’s Muslims.
The woman next to me was shocked: “Why did it end on such a horrible note, urging destruction?” she said.
But as Godse made clear at the start: “This is my story and I’ll tell it my way … for I, too, am etched in India’s history.”
His way is time-shifting, energetic, fast-paced, bumptious but insecure, and funny.
Yes, funny, because Chandrasekhar’s play is hugely enjoyable, an entertainingly told tragedy. Ok, she takes liberties with historic events and characters (“If you are expecting a history lesson that is completely factual, this is not it”), fills gaps in the record with her imagination and dramatist’s instincts (suggesting it was Gandhi who resurrected Godse’s maleness), occasionally labours over exposition, especially in the second half. But having worked on it for five years, she has found an inventive way to tell this extraordinary tale, from girl to boy, from devout follower of “the father of the nation” to his killer.
Given that there are knowing asides to “that fawning Attenborough film [Gandhi, 1982]” and to parallels with xenophobia’s role in Brexit, the absence of a reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu drift today is surprising - though Vinayak Savarkar, a key leader of the Hindutva movement in the 1920s and ‘30s, gets a key role in re-directing Godse’s trajectory, and Shubham Saraf, who performed in an earlier production of the play, pointed out at the time that “We use these gaps in our history to almost illuminate what’s going on now.”
And the girl child part of the story? Chandrasekhar says in her programme notes that Godse was born to an orthodox Brahmin couple whose three boys had died young. A girl survived, causing them to believe that their male line was cursed. So when another boy arrived they brought him up as a girl, whose youthful prophecies were considered to be a human channel for the Goddess Yogeshwari.
From such stuff, dreams are made on.
* The Father and the Assassin, Anupama Chandrasekhar’s exploration of the life of Nathuram Godse, the murderer of Mahatma Gandhi, India’s champion of non-violence, £10-£89, National Theatre, Southbank, SE1 until 14 October. Info: National