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A few years ago, Feroz Abbas Khan created a stir in theater circles with his critically acclaimed play, Gandhi Virudh Gandhi. Focused on the largely unknown, tense relationship between the Mahatma and his eldest son, Harilal Gandhi, the play will now make its cinematic debut on August 3, 2007 as Gandhi, My Father.

Produced by Anil Kapoor, the film stars Akshaye Khanna as Harilal Gandhi, the black sheep of the Gandhi family who drank himself to an early grave, Shefali Shah as Kasturba Gandhi and Darshan Jariwala as the Mahatma. And if you put any value in pre-release hype then this is going to be one heck of a movie.

The subject of Gandhi has been done to death - negatively, positively, patriotically, hypocritically, critically… just think of an adjective. Chances are, it’d apply well to the topic. But Gandhi, My Father actually manages to bring something new to the table: here is a movie that not only brings up a facet of the Mahatma’s life that very few know or have thought about, but also enters that long neglected realm of Indian filmmaking: the biography.

In the usual scenario, when one thinks about how difficult it must have been to live with a person of unbending principles, whatever they might be, one automatically thinks of the immediate family. But the tag "Gandhi" has been so thoroughly taken over by the Nehru-Gandhis that when one thinks of that name, the Mahatma’s own family plays a distant second fiddle. At the most, we might think of Kasturba Gandhi, a woman who (arguably) chose to live and die by her husband’s principles, but what of his children?

Harilal, the eldest, is the most interesting of the lot. Some amongst you will remember the crop of movies that sprung up one year on the life of Bhagat Singh. There is a poignant scene in one them (they all tend to bleed together in my mind, which doesn’t speak well of any of them, I guess) in which the young Bhagat Singh, who left school to show his solidarity with Gandhi’s Non Cooperation Movement, is shattered to find that Gandhi’s reaction to the incident at Chauri Chaura means that he, like so many of his young contemporaries, has been left up a creek without a paddle.

Watching that movie, I remember wondering about Gandhi’s own children. If Bhagat Singh, growing up far from Gandhi direct sphere of influence, could feel such anguish and dismay, what would have been the reaction of Gandhi’s own family?

Well, Harilal, who wanted to become a barrister like his father before him, bore the full brunt of his father’s idealism. No son of Gandhi would learn the Englishman’s law. As ‘Bapu’ decreed, so Harilal obeyed. Instead, he became an alcoholic, estranged from his family. Eventually he turned to Islam for solace but religion was apparently not the answer to his troubles. He died shortly after his father, his life lacking the kind of neat resolution we love to give fictional characters.

These are the kind of details that a lot of people would either like to forget about the Mahatma or would like to obsess over, depending upon their feelings for the man. A group of Gandhians in Bihar, for instance, have already petitioned the government to stop the release of the film.

Razi Ahmad, 70, a Gandhian, has written to the president, PM and the information and broadcasting minister, seeking their intervention to stop the film’s release.

He said the Gandhians are against the release of the film as it portrays Mahatma Gandhi in bad light.

"The name of Mahatma Gandhi or that of any other national leader should not be used for commercial purposes. It is against the law of the land," Ahmad, who is also the secretary of Patna’s Gandhi Sangrahalay, said here Monday.

With all due respect to Mr. Ahmad and his brethren, they’re missing the point rather spectacularly. These "controversial" details are the kind of things that humanize the Mahatma. A lot of people forget that Gandhi was a living, breathing human being the same as any one of us. That’s what’s so great about him. That’s why biographies are so fascinating to read: they remind us that we all come from the same human stock, faults and all. What matters is what we do with it.

There is also the issue of control. Why do we feel the need to whitewash those whom we admire? The Mahatma was the first to give us a glimpse into all his faults. Why do people forget that when they come upon new information?

A number of people, like Ramachandra Guha, have written about the woeful lack of biographies in India, Gandhi (and to a much lesser extent, Jawaharlal Nehru) being the sole exception. One of the reasons behind this paucity is the fear of giving offense. In India, it has become steadily more acceptable (in deeds if not in words) to use violent means of protests. People don’t think twice before destroying public property, historical records or whatever else their hot little paws can reach.

This kind of persecution might fix the problem in the short term but in the long term all it serves to accomplish is to hide pertinent facts from the public, which might enable them to make up their own minds. I don’t expect Gandhians to go on a rampage for obvious reasons but dragging the government into this is merely another aspect of the same problem. I remember the first time I heard of Harilal Gandhi was from an anti-Gandhi poster on another forum who brought his name out as "proof" that Gandhi was a failure even in his private life. A little reading soon showed the complexities of the case that that poster had either ignored or was ignorant of - but that was just one instance. By protesting the release of a film that, by all accounts, is pretty sensitive to the father-son dynamic, the Gandhians could well be stoking the fire in ways they did not intend.

Then there is the film itself. Somehow this intense preoccupation with the Mahatma in print has not translated to the big screen. Part of the reason might be the shadow cast by Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. It’s not exactly my favorite film but I can imagine the hesitancy in the heart of a filmmaker who knows his work will inevitably be compared to a mammoth movie that will forever carry upon its brow the stardust of an Oscar win.

Britain’s The Independent quotes the director:

"Gandhi has always been compelling, complex and strangely contemporary. Sir Richard Attenborough introduced Mahatma to the West. I grew up understanding Gandhi through others till I discovered a deep wound he carried in his heart," [Khan] said in one recent interview. "Somewhere in the shadows of the great man lived his son, roaming the streets of India like a beggar. He converted to Islam and became Abdullah Gandhi as a rebellion, then reconverted to Hinduism as a penance, finally drinking himself to death. Mahatma Gandhi could transform the soul of a nation but couldn’t save the soul of his own son."

Another factor might well be that any Indian who tackles the subject of the Mahatma does so with the full weight of his nation’s history on his shoulders. It’s a huge task. But according to all reports so far, Khan is a director who’s up for the challenge.

Could this be the movie to watch out for in an otherwise lackluster year?