When it comes to taboo-busting, Anupama Chandrasekhar has form. She refashioned Ibsen’s Ghosts into a reflection on the sexual violence in India. Now she finds a paradigm for Hindu nationalism in the man who in 1948 assassinated Gandhi. It’s exhilarating to see such big, bold political history commanding the National Theatre’s largest stage.
Nathuram Godse was born in Maharashtra to parents so traumatised by the deaths of three baby sons that they raised him as a girl to propitiate the goddess who might otherwise take him too. This early emasculation, Chandrasekhar suggests, sent him on a quest for identity and purpose that led him first to Gandhi’s unifying movement of peaceful resistance and then to the divisive politics of Vinayak Savarkar, who built the foundations of Hindu nationalism as a prisoner of the British raj.
