Maann Singh’s WHY I KILLED GANDHI (मैंने गांधी को क्यों मारा) is the picturization of the legal statement that was submitted by Nathuram Godse to the honourable court of law in the Gandhi Murder Trial. With the permission of Justice Atma Charan, the statement was read out by Nathuram Godse before the court. It took almost four and a half hours for the entire statement to be read out and it was later on published as a book titled WHY I KILLED GANDHI which is freely available.
Everybody knows that Gandhi ji was killed by Nathuram Godse but nobody knows what prompted him to take such an extreme step. A perception has been created that Nathuram Godse was a terrorist or a mentally disbalanced Hindu extremist. However when you read his statement you realise that he was a freedom fighter and social activist from Pune and edited a newspaper named AGRANI from there. In 1964 Government of India instituted a one man commission under the jurisdiction of Justice JL Kapoor who was the retired justice of the Supreme Court of India to investigate into the causes that led to the murder of Gandhi ji. Justice JL Kapoor submitted his report in 1970 and the 10 minute commentary in the beginning of the film is the reproduction of the selected passages from the Chapter 12 of that report. The remaining 35 minutes of the film the edited version of the legal statement submitted by Godse to the court of law. Thus every spoken word in the film is the translation of words taken from legal documents. What the film reveals has been systematically suppressed since Nathuram Godse was hanged and it gives a radically alternative perspective to look at the history of 20th Century India. The songs of this film have been penned by Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Hriju Roy is the music director. Starring Amol Kolhe (who played Nathruram Godse) the film is beautifully captured by cinematographer Sanjeev Sood, edited by Bharat Barik and sound is designed by Shiv Das. WHY I KILLED GANDHI is produced by Kalyaani Singh and directed by Ashok Tyagi is releasing on 30th Jan 2022.
