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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Ammar Kalia

The celebrated assassin: the play about Gandhi’s killer, still dividing India

Honoured by statues and memorials … Godse, who was hanged for the 1948 assassination.
Honoured by statues and memorials … Godse, who was hanged for the 1948 assassination. Photograph: Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images

‘Sometimes the truth is messy and illogical,” says Anupama Chandrasekhar. “But theatre can display the truth in ways journalism or other nonfiction cannot. It’s not just the facts that people can struggle to understand – it is the enormity of things.”

The playwright, who is based in Chennai, India, has spent the last 15 years examining just such uncomfortable truths, from 2007’s Free Outgoing, exploring the viral consequences of a sex tape, to 2019’s When the Crows Visit, which was partly inspired by the Delhi bus gang-rape of 2012.

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