Gandhi, My Father

Great men often have fraught personal relationships, particularly with their sons.

Ambition, however noble, doesn't usually sit too well with family life. Mahatma Gandhi was no exception.

His passionate pursuit of peace and harmony, and his desperate attempt to stop the Hindu-Muslim Partition of India, left him little time for his family, and especially for his eldest son Harilal.

Five months after his father's assassination, Harilal died destitute and unknown in a Bombay hospital.

This is the story told by Feroz Abbas Khan's film and it is one worth telling. Darshan Jariwala plays Gandhi and Akshaye Khanna is Harilal. Shefali Shah, another well-known Indian actor, is Kasturba, Gandhi's patient and loving wife denied the marriage bed owing to her husband's vow of chastity

The story, if largely true, is not exactly original - we have seen a good few films in which a son tries to get out from under the shadow of a famous father and seek an identity of his own.

Harilal's aspirations to study law in England and to help his father were discouraged, his best efforts to support himself as a businessman failed and his conversion to Islam didn't make him any happier. He roamed the streets like a beggar and finally drank himself to death.

Gandhi My Father, which includes newsreel footage of the time, is very decently acted but ponderous in places as if the retelling of such a piece of history has placed a certain caution on the writer-director. At least it avoids most of the clichés of Bollywood