Director Shyam Benegal at the premiere of his film in Yangon on August 15.

NETAJI Subhas Chandra Bose – the Forgotten Hero, the second ever foreign film to be shot in Myanmar, premiered in Yangon on August 15 to a theatre full of dignitaries, diplomats and the cream of the Myanmar film industry.

In his opening speech for the screening, Indian ambassador Rajiv Kumar Bhatia said how pleased he was to be premiering the film in Yangon on Indian Independence Day.

The three-and-a-half hour historical epic tells the story of Bose, who came out of Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian Congress but threw aside the movement’s pacifist ideology in favour of armed struggle with Britain at the start of the Second World War.

He fled the British colonial government for Germany, where he sought help from Hitler to raise an army, to fight against the British in India.

His first recruits were prisoners of war in Germany, though he later sought help from the Japanese to raise an army in southeast Asia.

The Indian ambassador added that while the film is titled The Forgotten Hero, it is not entirely true to say that Bose, who raised much of his Indian National Army from Myanmar, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore had been forgotten here.

Filming the epic took legendary director Shyam Benegal, who was in Yangon for the film’s premiere, to Germany, Uzbekistan, Myanmar and Malaysia.

In an interview last week, the director told the Myanmar Times he has been waiting to make this film for nearly five decades.

When he was a young boy, his uncle, who had been one of Bose’s recruits in Myanmar, came to stay with him in Mumbai after the war.

As a young lad Benegal was fascinated by the stories the uncle told of his experiences with Bose in the war.

“When Bose came to Myanmar - or Burma, as it was then called - this uncle of mine, who was only 15 at the time stood up and said he wanted to join Bose’s army. So Bose sent him and 34 other 15-to-17 year-olds to the Japanese military academy in Tokyo to train to be fighter pilots,” Benegal said.

These young men were supposed to form the core of the Indian National Army’s air force, but the war ended and Bose had to disband his army before they saw any action.

Benegal, whose career spans over four decades, said he spent three years researching Bose’s life before even shooting a single reel of film, and the attention to detail in the finished product is striking.

“Doing a film like this is not just about researching the facts,” he said. “It was also very important to collect a lot of personal anecdotes from people who actually knew Bose.”

This helped flesh out the character and give him depth, Benegal, said.
There are still a lot of people living in Myanmar who remember Bose and who had personal experiences with him.

Bose even met with General Aung San on several occasions, but this has been left out of the film. “We decided not to go off on this tangent, because that was not the focus of this film,” Benegal said.

Benegal auditioned 79 actors for the part of Bose. Although the actor who finally won the role bears an incredible resemblance to the independence leader, Benegal said he did not know when he first saw him that he would end up being his Bose.

“He had a moustache so I couldn’t see straight away if he resembled Bose. I was thinking ‘should I ask him to shave it off?’ but then he did it himself and came up to me and asked, ‘now do I look like Bose?’, and I had to agree that he did.”

Turning the actor completely into Bose involved putting a prosthetic chin on him every morning, which took four hours. It is just another example of the lengths Benegal went to so that his film would have authenticity.

Benegal’s daughter, costume designer Pia Benegal and art director, Samir Chanda helped create a visual style for the film that was true to history.

Benegal also did not shy away from sensitive subjects such as Bose’s cooperation with the Nazi’s and the Japanese, and the cruel treatment of Indians by the British.

“Why should I? This is the truth; you can not judge history through the politics of your time. Nobody can say that they can make a decision that is purely virtuous. It’s about balancing so many things. Nothing is that black and white,” Benegal said.

The film was well received at its premiere, with the audience becoming noticeably more audible during the scenes shot in Myanmar as they recognised locations they were familiar with, such as Mount Popa, Bagan and the Chin Hills, which Bose’s army marched through.

“I was very impressed to see for the first time in my life, our locations and our people in national dress, in an international film,” legendary Myanmar actress Swe Zin Htike said, after the screening.

“It was also interesting to see another side to history and another angle on India’s revolution, which we do not know so much about,” she added.

Bose was overlooked for many years by the Indian public for Gandhi, whom Bose himself proclaimed the “father of India”.

Benegal said he was pleased with the reaction of the audience to the screening, but was disappointed that he had not been able to secure wider release for his film, “The only problem I have had is with the length of the film.

Because it is so long it has been hard to get cinemas to take it on. It has to do with economics, I guess,” he said.

Although Bose’s military campaign ultimately failed, two years later the British, shaken by the experience and no longer able to trust their own army, withdrew from India.