It also determined Gumnami Baba to be different from Subhas Bose in light of a DNA profiling test. The Mukherjee Commission submitted its report to on 8 November 2005 after 3 extensions and it was tabled in the Indian Parliament on 17 May 2006. The Indian Government rejected the findings of. Tandon went on to write a book called Gumnami Subhash in 1986. At the same time another magazine 'Northern India Patrika' started publishing a series on Bhagwanji or Gumnami baba relating him with Netaji. As there were no claimants on Gumnami baba's belongings, district administration decided to auction the items.
| Gumnaami | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Srijit Mukherji |
| Produced by | Mahendra Soni Shrikant Mohta Pranay Ranjan |
| Screenplay by | Srijit Mukherji and Manish Patra |
| Story by | Srijit Mukherji and Manish Patra |
| Based on | Mukherjee Commission hearings |
| Starring | Prosenjit Chatterjee Anirban Bhattacharya Tanusree Chakraborty |
| Music by | Music and score Indraadip Dasgupta Soundtrack: I.N.A. and D. L. Roy |
| Cinematography | Soumik Haldar and Manish Patra |
| Edited by | Pronoy Dasgupta and Manish Patra |
Production companies | |
Release date | (Bengali) |
Running time | 137 minutes[1] |
| Country | India |
| Language | Bengali Hindi |
Gumnaami is an Indian Bengali-language mystery film directed by Srijit Mukherji,[2] which deals with Netaji's Death Mystery, based on the Mukherjee Commission Hearings. It has been produced by Shrikant Mohta, Pranay Ranjan and Mahendra Soni under the banner of Shree Venkatesh Films.[3] Actor Prosenjit Chatterjee plays the roles of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Gumnaami Baba.[4]
The principal photography began in May 2019 in Asansol, West Bengal.[5] The film was released theatrically on 2 October 2019.[1]
Plot[edit]
The film is based on the Mukherjee Commission Hearings and shows a dramatized version of the works of Anuj Dhar, Chandrachur Ghose and the Mission Netaji. The film shows the three theories trying to explain the death or disappearance of Subhas Chandra Bose.The film starts with Subhash Chandra Bose at the Congress Conference. A courageous Subhash disagrees to follow the nonviolent methods of Gandhi and resigns from INC. He then travels the world disguised himself to make allies while confronting the British Army.In 2003, journalist Chandrachur Dhar(Anirban Bhattacharya) is given an assignment for sending reports on Subhash Chandra Bose Death mystery. He takes up the assignment and spends months to gather evidence and knowledge about Bose. His neglecting attitude towards his wife(Tanusree Chakraborty) compelled her to divorce him. Mentally frustrated Dhar quits his job and forms a group entirely dedicated to the purpose for solving the mystery.
At the 2005 Mukherjee Commission he addresses the jury in a bold manner dedicated to bring the truth to the world. According to him, there was no plane crash at all in 1945. Bose had preplanned to fake his death to the world and asked his most trustworthy soldier of INA Habibur Rehman to be with him and not to disclose his fake death to anyone. To support his statement he showed numerous evidence like why he went to a six seater fighter plane when there was already 12-seater plane at that time, like there was no recorded plane crash that year, there was no news of death of the Japanese soldiers. After the judge was convinced that there was no plane crash on the stipulated date but asked where could he have possibly gone. Then he propagated the Siberia journey which was not the case. He lived as an ascetic in Uttar Pradesh without revealing his identity or face, the masses who visited him just used to hear his voice. A few people recognised him as soon as they heard his voice. However, they never revealed it to any third person. Even his close colleague and revolutionary, Leela Roy, and her husband recognised him when they visited him and sent letters. It revealed that the family members knew quite well about the fact that he was there alive. Numerous pieces of evidence were lying with them. Local P.D soon came to know but they could not track him. Gumnaami Baba lived long and died on 1985 one morning. Their disciples regretted as they felt that there should have been more than 13 lakh people should present at the funeral of a national hero, but only 13 disciples were present.
The next day, the commission concluded that there was no plane crash and Bose did not die in 1945. However, in 2006, the Government refused to accept the verdict and discarded the report. Angry and frustrated Dhar burns all his work and contemplates the purpose of his hard work of 3 years. His former wife encourages him to fight as Bose did for the country for 30 years. They vowed to keep on fighting till justice is served. This teaches that fighting is more important than victory, and so the fight to do justice to Netaji- by pressuring the government and authorities to bring an end to the mystery -will also go on.
In a flashback, Subhas Chandra Bose is seen singing Subh Sukh Chain, the National Anthem of the Provisional Government of Free India, along with the Indian National Army.
Cast[edit]
- Prosenjit Chatterjee as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Gumnaami Baba
- Anirban Bhattacharya as Chandrachur Dhar
- Tanusree Chakraborty as Ronita Dhar
- Biplab Dasgupta as Mr. Paul
- Shyamal Chakraborty
- Surendra Rajan as Mahatma Gandhi
- Sanjay Gurbaxani as Jawaharlal Nehru
- Akshay Kapoor (Kolkata) as Srikant Sharma Kanha
- Satyam Bhattacharya as Habibur Rehman, INA Soldier
- Prantik Banerjee
- Pallavi Chatterjee in Lolita Bose (cameo)
Marketing[edit]
| External video | |
|---|---|
| Gumnaami trailer(in Bengali) | |
| Gumnaami trailer(in Hindi) |
Bengali Books On Gumnami Baba Fareed
The teaser of the film was released on 15 August 2019 by Shree Venkatesh Films.[6] Later, the trailer of the film was released on 8 September 2019 also by Shree Venkatesh Films in Bengali[7] and Hindi.[8]
Release and reception[edit]
The film released on 2 October 2019. The Times of India rated the above-mentioned movie 3 out of 5 stars.[9]
Soundtrack[edit]
The soundtrack of the film is composed by I.N.A. and D. L. Roy, whereas background music and score is done by Indraadip Dasgupta. The lyrics are by D. L. Roy and Capt. Abid Ali Mumtaz Hussain.
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|
Controversy[edit]
The director of the film Srijit Mukherji courted a controversy in February 2019, after Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's grand nephew Chandra Kumar Bose criticized him over portrayal of Gumnami Baba as Netaji in his upcoming film.[10][11]
References[edit]
- ^ abc'Gumnaami'. The Times of India. 16 August 2019. Retrieved 18 August 2019.
- ^Sarkar, Roushni. 'Filmmaker Srijit Mukherji announces film on 'Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose' with Prosenjit Chatterjee'. Cinestaan. Retrieved 14 May 2019.
- ^'Srijit's next is on Gumnami Baba? ?'. The Times of India. Retrieved 11 September 2019.
- ^'সৃজিতের ছবিতে 'গুমনামী বাবা' হচ্ছেন প্রসেনজিৎ চট্টোপাধ্যায়?'. Zee24Ghanta.com (in Bengali). 21 August 2018.
- ^'Gumnaami: Shoot for Film Based on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Begins in Bengal'. News18. Retrieved 11 September 2019.
- ^'Gumnaami (गुमनामी) - Teaser (Hindi) - Prosenjit Chatterjee - Anirban Bhattacharya - SVF'. YouTube. SVF. 15 August 2019.
- ^'Gumnaami (গুমনামী) - Trailer - Bengali - Prosenjit Chatterjee - Srijit Mukherji - Anirban - SVF'. YouTube. SVF. 8 September 2019.
- ^'Gumnaami (गुमनामी) - Trailer - Hindi - Prosenjit Chatterjee - Srijit Mukherji - Anirban - SVF'. YouTube. SVF. 8 September 2019.
- ^'Gumnaami Movie Review'. Retrieved 3 October 2019.
- ^'Srijit Mukherji on Netaji film Gumnaami: Put me in jail, will write more scripts'. India Today. Retrieved 11 September 2019.
- ^'Srijit Mukherji on Netaji film Gumnaami: Put me in jail, will write more scripts'. India Today. 22 February 2019. Retrieved 18 August 2019.
External links[edit]
- Gumnaami on IMDb
Among the many conspiracy theories surrounding Subhas Chandra Bose’s death, the most prominent one has been that he returned to India and lived as a reclusive priest in Uttar Pradesh. Gumnami Baba died in 1985, but has since been the subject of much investigation.
Scrutinising one handwritten note, Adheer Som in his book Gumnami Baba: A Case History, sets off on an investigation of his own into the life of the mysterious godman.
Excerpts:.
THIS EXTRAORDINARY LITTLE note, with jottings in Bengali and English, is listed at no. 1741 in the case inventory:
Bengali Books On Gumnami Baba Shah
A piece of paper with the following written in red pencil, apparently in the saint’s own hand:
2.9.45—Japs surrendered/Annamite Govt. became ‘Govt. of Vietnam’ under Ho Chi Minh/Hanoi/‘Liu Po Cheng’
Oct 1945: South China, General’s Guest/Contact with Annamite Govt./One American Intelligence agent—Alfred Wagg—found out, told his Govt.
It was obvious from the contents of the note that the author could not have been a small-town small-time standard-issue godman. The somewhat sinister wartime references to places, events and people in post-WW2 South-East Asia seemed like a written recollection of distant, connected memories. If Gumnami Baba wrote them from his own memory, it followed that he had had another life, had been another person. The question was—who?—and the note’s claims and keywords were the clue.
Japan’s formal surrender—after the August atomic bombings and Netaji’s “death” in Taiwan—had indeed coincided with Ho Chi Minh’s proclamation of independence from France on 2 September 1945. Prior to this, Ho’s Japan-backed, Communist-led “Annamite” Government—so called after Vietnam’s archaic name “Annam”—had been the provisional regime in Hanoi.
Liu Po Cheng a.k.a. “One-eyed Dragon” was among Red China’s greatest military Commanders, instrumental in the raising of the People’s Republic alongside Deng Xiaoping and Mao himself.
Oddly, Liu looked a bit like Bose. A book titled Liu Po Cheng or Netaji? by one Sheo Prasad Nag, published in 1956, even posits the absurdly false hypothesis that the two were the same person. A copy of this book was found in Gumnami Baba’s belongings, as were letters from Nag dating from the 1970s. A letter to Nag was also recovered, in which the nameless saint wrote the following haunting words:
Forget the person whom you knew... That man has been killed off... He has become a ghost after death. Don’t try to know this ghost by the yardstick of the man you used to know long, long ago. You will fail. You will misunderstand...
***
ALFRED WAGG—THE OTHER name on the saint’s note—has long been part of the oral tradition of the Bose mystery, but it was only recently that I was able to procure his own accounts thereof. Alfred “Sonny” Wagg, the 3rd—who Gumnami Baba identifies as an American agent—was the son of an ex-senator and worked for the US State Department before becoming a war correspondent in the early 1940s....
Alfred Wagg’s true claim to fame, however, is that he was the first journalist to publicly challenge the claim of Netaji’s alleged death, and that he did it to the face of none other than the claim’s greatest proponent, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
At a press conference in Delhi on 29 August 1945, as Nehru made a “plea for clemency” for the deceased Bose (presumably from being designated a war criminal) Wagg hotly countered him, asserting that Bose was indeed a war criminal and also very much “alive and seen four days ago in Saigon”.
It is not known what, if anything, Pandit Ji did beyond expressing surprise, upon receiving this news of Netaji from a top newsman. That the newsman persisted with his views is clear from three of his subsequent articles. The first of these—a profile of Netaji that he wrote for New Republic—also reaffirms that Wagg was no fan of the man he was profiling:
During the early months of 1945, I joined the 19th Indian Division, which scaled a mountain range to capture the Burmese hill resort at Maymo, where Bose’s Burmese Headquarters were located. Among the documents found in the safe of the Azad Hind government were receipts for perfume purchased for Bose’s private use, and other items showing the vanity of the man.
One could easily counter-argue, of course, that the receipts only showed Bose’s meticulous account-keeping and that the perfume only proved he liked to smell good, but the American’s petty personal spin on the findings in Burma is not what made them interesting. They were interesting because receipts and accounts of pristine penmanship, along with a highly incongruous stock of the finest toiletries, bathing soaps, colognes and perfumes was also found at Faizabad, in the effects of Gumnami Baba....
The crucial part comes last, where the American recounts a revelation made in Calcutta by Netaji’s dearest elder brother and closest political comrade, Sarat Bose:
He told me he had refused to accept the condolences sent to the family. ‘There are many ways to tell that my brother is alive,’ he said. ‘I know he is not dead.’ He had received a delayed Christmas gift; it was his ‘dead’ brother’s gold watch. Inside the watch was a note in Subhas Bose’s own handwriting, dated November 26—three months after his supposed death....
The longest of Wagg’s statements on the Netaji mystery was dug up by an aptly mysterious fellow Netaji researcher who goes by the nom de guerre “Vandana Garhwal”. Though there was no masthead in the scanned image of the article she shared, I was able to locate a true copy of it thanks to the National Library of Singapore. The piece—headlined “American Correspondent says Netaji is Alive”—appeared in the Indian Daily Mail dated 25 September 1946 and relates Wagg’s hitherto undisclosed reasons for denying Bose’s death:
I first doubted the story of Netaji Bose’s death when in French Indo-China just after the war I was told that ten days after the supposed crash in Taihoku Formosa, Bose attended a meeting in Saigon. By the sight of pictures I accepted this evidence as fact....
***
EVIDENCE OF NETAJI’S link with the “Annamites” finally came via a footnote in the book Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution by Prof. Christopher E. Goscha.... Though detailed indeed as its precursor footnote had stated, it turned out to contain just three lines of text on Bose, but the context in which the lines appeared—a secret six-nation Committee helping Vietnam from the shadows—was far from anti-climactic...
As for what the lines said, not only did it fit with the “Oct 1945 contact with Annamites” part of Gumnami Baba’s note, it also fit, to a T, the long-standing claims of Russian and Chinese roles in the larger Bose mystery:
Chandra Bose was reported present at the end of November (1945) at a conference in Hanoi where the six nations were represented.
Chandra Bose would thereafter have left via Yunnan (Province in South China).
The Russian government would have taken his charge at their frontier.
***
CLOAK AND DAGGER, smoke and mirrors, rumour, conspiracy, myth and truth... That the smallest of notes scribbled by an unnamed saint had foreshadowed such clandestine information about Bose was quite something, to say the least. Though far from adequate to declare the two identical on that score, my findings were quite enough to make me want to find out more.
Gumnami Baba: A Case History
By Adheer Som
Bengali Books On Gumnami Baba Aarti
Published by Eastern Book Company
Bengali Books On Gumnami Baba Nanak
Price Rs 595; pages 292