Hey Ram (2000) on Netflix
Saket Ram, an archaeologist in Mohenjo-daro, returns to Calcutta as the Direct Action Day riots break out. After his wife is killed, he joins a militant Hindu faction that blames Gandhi.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In 1946, Saket Ram works as an archaeologist at Mohenjo-daro beside his closest friend, the Pathan Muslim Amjad Ali Khan. Both men oppose the coming Partition, and Amjad resolves to remain in India. When the dig closes amid rising communal tension, Ram goes back to Aparna, his wife, in Calcutta, arriving in the middle of the Direct Action Day riots. Rioters take him hostage and kill Aparna. Shriram Abhyankar, who leads a militant Hindu faction, recruits the grieving Ram with banned literature that names Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as the traitor behind the slaughter of Hindus. Pressed by his family, Ram marries Mythili in Thanjavur and finds that she and her family are devoted followers of Gandhi.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hey Ram (2000)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Kamal Haasan first hired L. Subramaniam to compose Hey Ram and completed shooting the whole film with song sequences set to his music, but when Subramaniam asked ₹1 crore for the final sound mix — more than they had agreed — Haasan turned to Ilaiyaraaja to solve it.
- Kamal Haasan considered casting Ben Kingsley, who played Gandhi in a 1982 film, as Gandhi again but dropped the idea, feeling it would be clichéd and dishonest; he then chose Naseeruddin Shah, who had played Gandhi in the 1998 play Mahatma vs Gandhi and had failed an audition for the 1982 film.
- The Marathi actor Mohan Gokhale was cast as Shriram Abhyankar and had started working on the film in Madras when he died suddenly of a heart attack; Kamal Haasan then chose another Marathi actor, Atul Kulkarni, for the role.
- Kamal Haasan cast Shah Rukh Khan as the Pathan Amjad Ali Khan partly because Khan's father was a Pathan from Peshawar; Khan dubbed his own lines in his Tamil cinema debut and took no fee, considering it an honour to work with one of his mentors.
- Because the real Mohenjo-daro lay in Pakistan and the crew thought it impossible to shoot there for political reasons, the filmmakers recreated it on a set at a village near Chennai, and Sabu Cyril rebuilt the Birla Mandir at Ooty.
- To recreate the ambience of a late evening in winter for the scene where Gandhi is assassinated, Thiru rigged the whole area with special lights and scaffolding and brought in an amber look to manage a sunlight-peeping-through-the-trees effect.
- Ilaiyaraaja wrote new tunes to fit footage already shot to L. Subramaniam's music, and the score and songs were recorded with Hungary's Budapest Symphony Orchestra; Hey Ram became the first Tamil film and the second Indian film re-recorded with a foreign symphony orchestra.
- The then Shankaracharya of Kanchi shot an interview scene for Hey Ram but later asked that his portions be removed from the film to avoid controversy.
