In a play on Godse, lessons on the dangers of extremism

In the 154th year of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth, the story of his assassin, Nathuram Godse, is drawing in the crowds at London’s prestigious National Theatre. Anupama Chandrasekhar’s play The Father and the Assassin, directed by Indhu Rubasingham, is being staged here till October 14, with Hiran Abeysekera as Godse and Paul Bazely as Gandhi. The play’s opening, with three bullets being pumped into Gandhi’s chest, is not just a reckoning with an epoch-making moment of world history, but also with the ideals that founded a new nation. In the death of Gandhi was the birth of Godse in India’s history and public imagination – one that is now revived on the London stage.

The play is an imaginary biography of Godse based on known facts of his life, such as his being raised as a girl child by superstitious parents who feared the curse of death that befell their elder male children, and his encounter with Hindu nationalist ideologue VD Savarkar in the 1920s. In the 39 years of Godse’s life is traced the parallel history of the birth of India and Pakistan. Through a clever interweaving of history and fiction, Chandrasekhar creates the complex, neurotic energy of a tortured psyche projected on a...

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