‘I’ll always remain grateful I was chosen to play Gandhi’
Very few actors have been able to pull off playing Mahatma Gandhi on the big screen, and one of them is veteran Annu Kapoor. He played the role in the Ketan Mehtafilm Sardar (1993), starring Paresh Rawal as freedom fighter Sardar Patel.
As we celebrate 150 years of Gandhi today, we get in touch with Annu, who tells us this role was his “most memorable experience after Kabir”. “Ketan selected me, someone who was considered a smalltime comedian by many who could still not recognise my gravity and potential as an artist. I will always remain grateful to him, Anil Chaudhary and Gajendra Singh who valued my talent and offered me out-of-the-box stuff. I never disappointed them,” says the 63-year old.
Sharing a memory he has of the shoot, he says, “I shot at Rashtrapati Bhawan, did my makeup in Nalanda Suite, which I was told was the one where Prince Charles and Princess Diana had stayed. I rested my head on the same pillow that Bapu used. We shot with 10 cameras, with at least 10,000 people.”
And the prep wasn’t easy to begin with. Annu had to imbibe the way Gandhi spoke. He says, “I concentrated on his postures, gestures and walk, but above all, his speech, language and diction, with the Gujarati accent. His pronunciation of ‘sa’ as ‘sha’ would have looked caricaturish, thus I worked very hard to produce the sound in between ‘sha’ and ‘sa’. During the English dubbing, I used the same pattern, although the director’s wife thought otherwise! They wanted Gandhi to speak proper English so I dubbed two samples. Finally, they were convinced and allowed me to dub in the English Gandhi used to speak, without sounding odd.”
Actors such as Darshan Zariwala, Sir Ben Kingsley and Naseeruddin Shah have also played Gandhi in their respective projects, but Ben’s portrayal in Gandhi (1982) remains the reference point for actors playing the role. Did Annu consciously make his portrayal different from how other actors have played it over the years?
“I have never seen any actor playing the role of Gandhi... which did not leave scope for me to create some thing new,” he adds.