Ketan Mehta, who has made films like Sardar, Rang Rasiya, Mangal Pandey: The Rising and Manjhi: The Mountain Man, has been in the news for his upcoming film, a biopic on freedom fighter Usha Mehta, who played a pivotal role in the Quit India Movement of 1942. The biopic became a point of discussion also because it came to light that filmmaker Karan Johar, too, is reportedly planning a film on the same subject. Ketan Mehta spoke to BT exclusively about this and more:

India is a free country, and I can’t deny that my phoiba (aunt) makes for a great subject. I wish Karan all the best. I feel personally responsible that a tribute to her is made and presented as well as possible. It is a family legacy. My father was also a freedom fighter, and this is the only legacy dad and phoiba left us with and I feel this should be passed on to people. I have been out of the ring for a while. The last film I made was Toba Tek Singh and Manjhi: The Mountain Man. I am also not an industry insider to pick up the phone on another filmmaker and talk about things. I prefer to be that way. I am Usha Mehta’s kin and reaching out to me is their decision. If they want to do that, they can. And why would I anyway stop them from making their film? Yes, it’s unfortunate that these things happen all the time in our business. When I was making Rang Rasiya, it so happened that a few more films were in the pipeline on the same subject. I can’t stop others from doing what they want to do.

Usha Mehta was my father’s sister. I’ve grown up under her guidance, and she also spent the last 20 years of her life with us at our home. She has guided me all my life and that inspiration, I felt, should now be shared with the world at large. I made films like Mangal Pandey: The Rising and Sardar because the freedom movement has inspired me in a big way. This film is about the Quit India Movement, our last battle for freedom, which is the most underreported aspect of our freedom struggle. All the prominent leaders like Maulana Azad, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were in prison and the youngsters took over the mantle. They guided the nation in its last battle for independence with very little resources at their disposal. They used the radio to reach out to as many people as possible. That underground radio station was run by my aunt, Usha Mehta, at the age of 22. That entire phase between 1942 and 1947 has barely been recorded. Next year, it will be the 80th anniversary of the Quit India movement, hence the movie.

My grandfather was a judge in the court and he still allowed them, especially my aunt, which only goes on to show that he was an open-minded man, who not only made it a point to educate his daughter, but also support her decisions. Phoiba was studying to become a lawyer at that time. She went on to do her PhD degree, too. My grandfather didn’t know about the underground radio station, but he knew where the sentiments of his children were. I can imagine what that time must have been like...It was a do or die situation, youngsters took charge unprepared and took it to the finish line. Deep down, in all of this is a father-daughter story. I was very close to my aunt and this film is close to my heart.

It’s because our society was, and to a great degree, is patriarchal even today. It has forgotten the contribution made by women in our freedom struggle. Their work has remained unsung and that is the reason we need to look at our history with a different lens now, and revisit chapters to understand our past better while looking towards the future.

At this moment, all I can say is that the screenplay is still being worked upon. It’s very early to say who will be playing the part.

Ketan Mehta, 61, is very obsessive when he is working on a project, very laid-back when he is not. He is very stubborn if he believes in something, very accommodating otherwise. He is a Gandhian, but a rebel and is ambitious to go beyond his means in trying to do new things. The release of Rang Rasiya may have drained him physically, emotionally and financially, but this filmmaker, who holds the distinction of having launched Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri in bollywood, felt compelled to tell the story of Raja Ravi Varma, a man who fought for the creative freedom of expression. Over an hour-long conversation with Bombay Times, he talks about his intelligent and strong-willed wife Deepa Sahi, his childhood rebellion against being a Gandhian and his obsession and passion for telling the story of Raja Ravi Varma. Excerpts:

How did you become a filmmaker?
I was born in Gujarat at my nani's house and then lived in Mumbai till the age of 10 and then moved to Delhi. My father was a professor in Gujarati Literature and taught at the Delhi University. He was a Gandhian and had been a freedom fighter, who had gone to jail with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel for four years, so all those influences were there. His father was a khadi-wearing nationalist and so, patriotism came naturally to him. I had two younger brothers and was the black sheep of the family, who rebelled against the restrictions placed upon me as a Gandhian, like wearing khadi all the time, the frugality of living and food habits. My father was a complete moralist with high standards of ethical behaviour.While we grew up in Delhi, we would go back to Gujarat on our holidays, spending time in mango orchards. Dr BV Karanth, who later became the director of NSD, was my theatre teacher in Sardar Patel school in Delhi. So I grew up in theatre, in a sense, and those experiences in childhood must have shaped the desire to be in this field. I was a merit lister and got selected for Economic Honours at St Stephen's College, but I had no interest in Economics while I was there.

And while all my classmates went onto becoming IAS officers or to Cambridge or MIT to learn or teach, I joined the Film Institute in the film direction course. When I told my parents that I wanted to go to the Film Institute, they were shocked as filmmaking was taboo. They even decided to go on a hunger strike to stop me from going there, but somehow, I persuaded them. Those three years were transformational years in my life. Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Vinod Chopra and Saeed Mirza were all contemporaries. Falling in love with cinema was the best thing in my life. It took possession of my life and I never looked back after that. I then joined the Indian Space Research Organisation in Gujarat, as they were the first to beam directly from satellite and that really excited me, as it was the very beginning of satellite television. I travelled rural villages shooting and also got exposed to a folk Gujarati form called Bhavai. I did a series of programmes on the untouchables and made my first feature film called Bhavni Bhavai with just 3.5 lakhs given to me by NFDC. Making a musical with just that much money is as foolhardy as it gets, but it won several national and international awards. Friends like Naseer, Om and Smita Patil made their debuts and all came together for nothing. They would sleep on a terrace in a haveli in a row, under the sky. That's how it started. I then picked up Aamir Khan, who was a student in one of the colleges and made my next film Holi with him and Ashutosh Gowariker also making his debut. And since, it has been 35 years.

You obviously rebelled against your father.
Yes, I was this rebellious kid, who was feeling choked with my father's Gandhian ways. When I went to the Film Institute, it was a difficult relationship. We were talking, but he did not know where I was going, what I wanted to do, what my future would be. But he was a true Gandhian in the true sense and managed to control his anger. And when they realised that I had made up my mind and would not listen, he supported me. While we had a formal relationship, I loved it when he loved the films I made and his view mattered to me. I was attached to him and he finally was proud of my work, particularly films like Mirch Masala. He died while I was making Rang Rasiya a couple of years back.

Why did Rang Rasiya take so long to release?
It was an ambitious project at that point in time. We borrowed the money, got a partner and made this film. The moment we made it, the market crashed in 2008-09. The sensuality that is so integral to the film got into trouble with the censor board. The screening committee initially refused to give it a certification and so, we had to take it to the revising committee. Fortunately, Sharmila Tagore was the chairperson and a revising committee of really eminent people saw the film and when the film got over, they got up and complimented me and passed the film despite the sensuality and nudity without cuts, as they felt that it was relevant and aesthetically handled. It led to a huge financial crisis for us. Fortunately, the animation studio we started in 2010 has taken off very well and we are now the largest content providers of original animation content produced in India. But it has drained us completely physically, emotionally and financially and I am very proud and honoured that Deepa has withstood all this in this journey. I am not fond of crying, but I came very close to it. It is a passionate love story of a passionate artist in a passionate film.

Who do you love the most in the world?
That has to be Deepa. She is my biggest strength and my strongest critic. We got married in 1988 during the making of Maya Memsaab and for the both of us, this is our second marriage. She is very strong-willed, independent, very intelligent, adventurous and willing to take challenges and risks. Without that kind of support, the kind of films I have made would not have been possible at all. She is a hands-on producer with an international mind, a lot of courage, very sharp wit and a sharp, perceptive mind. She is a gold medalist from Delhi University and clearly, the brighter amongst us. I must be the craziest man she has met in her life, but I suppose she likes my madness, my films and my world view. We are both strong-headed people and she likes my stubbornness towards my work. We are best friends and rarely fight, as we are both consumed by the same passion of making films that we believe in and we share our dreams. I am creatively egoistic, but personally not at all. We have a dynamic equal relationship and that is the basis of our relationship.

What attracted you to Raja Ravi Varma's story?
I was attracted to him even in the film institute times. I felt that somewhere, cinema had derived so much from his paintings. I also admired him for having discovered our culture somewhere for us by painting realistic images from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. I liked his modern spirit, the idea of starting his own coloured printing press and then, distributing his prints. He was a renaissance mind, who played an important part in rediscovering our civilisation for us. And then I read his story by Ranjit Desai and realised that he had faced charges of obscenity for painting beautiful nudes. This was just after finishing making Mangal Pandey. That was also the time that the environment of intolerance was building in India, painters were being hounded, girls being pulled out of pubs and being beaten up. So this film, in a sense, was a reaction to that kind of intolerance and extremism. If an idea fascinates me, it almost compels me into its orbit. At times, I feel that ideas are using me to express themselves. I do believe that a filmmaker is a live participant in a changing society and his purpose is to reflect the society and the mind of the society that he is living in.Creative freedom of expression is a need of the time and I feel the need to react to it. I am very stubborn if I believe in something strong enough, very accommodating otherwise in my personal life. I am obsessed with somethings and very chilled out otherwise. I am not that short-tempered now, but I remember when I would shoot earlier, all these actors including Shah Rukh Khan in Maya Memsaab must have been struck by my matchbox throws at them like missiles.

Have you made friends in the industry?
Sudhir Mishra and Deepti Naval are friends. Sudhir is again a strong personality and does the film he believes in doing, again doesn't accept any rules or regulations and is driven. Deepti is intelligent, a fine artist and a sensitive soul.

You have launched Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan in this industry. Who do you see the potential in within the current generation of actors?
Apart from Randeep Hooda and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who are really world class actors, I find Ranbir Kapoor and Ranveer Singh incredible. For Rang Rasiya, we were looking for an actor who was not bogged down by his stardom. Deepa recommended Randeep after seeing his first gangster film. He is an incredible actor with an electric presence and had done a fine job of portraying Raja Ravi Varma.

How much of a Gandhian are you today?
More now than ever before. His ideas are so relevant now, given the violence and corruption we see all around us. His values are important for the survival of the world as a whole. I earlier found his puritan ical traits constricting where truth is absolute. It choked me while growing up. I had been allowed to wear only khadi till the age of 15 and nothing else with no vices and 100% vegetarian food. That was not acceptable to me at that age. I showed my rebellion by going to the Film Institute, by breaking every rule that was laid out for me and felt liberated. Today, after so many years and having broken all rules, I have come back to eating vegetarian food and to wearing khadi, but this time, by choice.

Sensuality is the spice of life. Sensuality is essential for the survival of the human species, it is essential for all art, culture, civilisation. Sensuality is what makes life worth living. Sensuality is the essence of being human. Indians are highly sensuous people. This is reflected in our spicy food, colourful clothing, our music and dance, rituals and celebrations and even in the explosive growth of population!

From ancient times, we have celebrated sensuality in all its aspects. From erotic paintings and sculptures in the temple art of Ajanta, Ellora, Konark and Khajuraho to erotic poetry in Sanskrit, to the world-famous treatise on sensual pleasure - The Kamasutra, which dares to merge sensuality with spirituality. So, it is strange, almost bizarre, that in India, conservative religious extremists of all kinds are reacting to sensuality with suspicion and venom, vitriol and violence. Art exhibitions are vandalised, art students brutalised, books are burnt, films banned, young girls molested and manhandled for going to pubs. What kind of a free world are we living in?

For centuries, great artists across the world have celebrated sensuality along with the nude human form in all its glory. There is no shame attached to the human form, shame can only be in the way you look at it. Seeing sensuality as sin is foreign, a Victorian, colonial hangover totally against the spirit of our ancient, extremely liberal civilisation and completely out of sync with the times. After winning political freedom, liberalising the economy, now it's time to liberate our minds. Suppression of sensuality leads to perversion, as reflectled in the daily violence against women, turning them into vulgar objects of titillation. It dehumanises both men and women.

Raja Ravi Varma, one of the greatest Indian painters of all times, the man who gave faces to our Gods and Goddesses by painting their realistic portraits for the first time, celebrated sensuality like few others. He too, faced scorn and censorship from the conservative sections of the society and was accused of obscenity and hurting the religious sentiments of the people for painting some nudes of characters from Indian mythology. He fought the legal case and won. More than a hundred years after that, artists face similar problems even today. So, are we progressing or regressing?

Actor Randeep Hooda, who plays the role of Raja Ravi Varma in the film Rang Rasiya, is bare-chested through a major part of the film and no one has any problem with it, but a few shots of bare breasts of the actress Nandana Sen create such a stir! What does it tell us about the kind of double standards we have, the morbid gender discrimination we practise, the hypocrisy we indulge in and the kind of society we have created?

The film Rang Rasiya, which deals with the issue of censorship, too faced some censorship problems when it was submitted to the Central Board of Film Certification as the Censor Board is called now. It was denied censor certificate by the screening committee, who found the theme very controversial, the depiction of sensuality shocking. However, fortunately for us, when we presented the film to the revising committee, it was applauded for its courage in dealing with such a sensitive subject and aesthetic depiction of sensuality. We are now told that today, it would be even more difficult to get the film past the Censor Board. Freedom of expression is a fundamental right. It is essential for any democracy, a minimum requirement for free flow of ideas necessary for the growth of any culture. In the 'Information Age', any attempt to censor ideas or images is not only nearly impossible, it is counter-productive. Let the creative juices surge unhindered, ideas flow freely, let the debates rage, only then can we grow as a civilisation. Censorship is an idea which has long outlived its expiry date.

Rang Rasiya is based on the book 'Raja Ravi Varma', written by the famous Marathi author Ranjit Desai. The film, presented by Jayantilal Gada (PEN), co-produced by Dhaval Jayantilal Gada, Kushal Kantilal Gada and Reshmaa Kadakia and produced by Deepa Sahi and Aanand Mehendroo, releases November 7.