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Gumnaami teaser: Srijit Mukherji’s film with Prosenjit Chatterji delves deeper into disappearance of Subhash Chandra Bose

The teaser of acclaimed Filmmaker Srijit Mukherji’s latest outing, Gumnaami, was released earlier today on 15 August. The film is based on a legend, ‘Gumnami Baba’, an ascetic spotted in Uttar Pradesh in the 1970s who many believed was freedom fighter Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose in disguise. The film stars veteran Bengali actor Prosenjit Chatterjee in the titular role.

The teaser opens with a voiceover proclaiming that history taught us Bose died in an airplane crash near Taiwan in 1945. However, there were many speculations that he was captured by Russia where he was tortured to death.

The teaser also shows a glimpse of Mahatma Gandhi, who sent a telegram to Bose’s family requesting them to stop Bose’s funeral ceremony, further instigating that maybe Bose is alive. Towards the end, the voiceover explains that many also theorised Bose did return to India but started living as a monk. The combination of these two incidents inspires Mukherji’s film into a present-day courtroom drama as they as try to decode the legend of Gumnami Baba.

The director, who received acclaim for his National Award-winning Bengali outing Ek Je Chilo Raja, told Press Trust of India that he had been toying with the idea ever since he read a newspaper article on the ascetic in 2016.

The Indian government constituted as many as three probe commissions to ferret out the truth behind Netaji’s disappearance. In 1999, the Mukherjee Commission, led by retired Supreme Court judge MK Mukherjee, initiated an exhaustive six-year-long probe into the “alleged disappearance”. Though Mukherjee, in the report, nixed the air crash theory, he did not conclude that the ‘sanyasi’ was Bose due to the “absence” of any clinching evidence.

According to News18, The Narendra Modi-led Central government has also made public a series of files revealing many sensational facts about the revolutionary. In June 2016, the Uttar Pradesh government set up a judicial commission to probe the identity of Gumnami Baba, reigniting the debate on whether the ascetic who lived till 1985 was Netaji.