Hey Ram | Journey into Ram’s Mind | Video Essay Script

Hi, I’m Kishor and this is MOVING IMAGES. Stories narrated from a character’s perspective is nothing new. Even an unreliable narrator has been done on film many times. But what Hey Ram achieved that many couldn’t, was narrate a story visually through the mind of a protagonist suffering from a mental condition. The story of Hey Ram is actually a journey into Saket Ram’s traumatized mind.

The film is from the perspective of Saket Ram, a retired archeologist on his deathbed, who thinks back to a traumatic event in his life during the partition of India that makes him go on a mission to kill Gandhi. The event makes Ram suffer from PTSD. PTSD or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental condition that some people develop after experiencing a traumatic event. Saket Ram’s traumatic event was the loss of his wife to an angry mob and the subsequent murder spree Ram goes on in the streets of Calcutta. Every action Ram takes after the event and everything that happens to him is the result of Ram suffering from PTSD. The symptoms of PTSD include the person re-experiencing the event, being easily triggered, and feeling guilt and negative thoughts. Today, we are going to see how Hey Ram visualizes PTSD and its symptoms, and how it is a case study on how to make a story interesting visually.

Intrusion of the mind

To see how Ram’s PTSD takes the story of Hey Ram forward, let’s start from after the traumatic event. It has been a few months and Ram remarries and this is where we realize that Ram suffers from PTSD. A common symptom of PTSD are triggers that bring back strong memories of the traumatic event that intrudes the mind. We see Ram’s traumatic memories come flooding back to him following a trigger. He hears Mythili shout from inside a room and relives the event where he lost his first wife, Aparna. Later, Ram goes through a mental breakdown to the horror of his family. This is where the PTSD truly manifests. PTSD causes the intrusion of memories into reality. We see this happen with Ram as he hallucinates Aparna and the people he killed sitting with him in the bathroom. Traumatic memories are usually vivid and readily accessible in the consciousness that it surfaces at simple triggers. They intrude the reality in the most unwanted and uncontrollable way. We later see these triggers and the intrusion of the traumatic memories throughout the story.

The breakdown makes Ram decide to go back to Calcutta to the place where he lived. Throughout this sequence, we see Ram reliving his happy past with Aparna, but also his PTSD resurfacing when he visits the streets where he killed, and surely enough the memories intrude his reality again. A fateful meeting at his weakest moment pushes Ram into giving his suffering a name, Mahatma Gandhi. He blames Gandhi for the riots that took his wife and made him a murderer. Ram also runs into Abiyankar. Abiyankar is an extremist who was part of the riots and the one who initially planted the seeds of hatred towards Gandhi in Ram’s mind. Their second meeting following Ram’s mental breakdown makes him journey deep into the dark world of religious hatred.

Descent into Darkness: Delusions of a Savior

Almost at the mid-way point of the film, and after the meeting with Abiyankar, we see a changed Saket Ram. He has a cool demeanor and is even willing to smile and be happy. It may seem like he has made peace with his past and is finally on the mend. But the guilt creeps up again as he starts to hallucinate, and the inebriated Ram takes the final step towards deciding to assassinate Gandhi. This entire sequence is an excellent way to show Ram’s changing mind and how delusional he gets. At one end he wants to be happy with Mythili but on the other end he could not get over Aparna. The traumatic memories would not let him have a normal life. One of the most unrecognized subtype of PTSD is the presence of psychotic symptoms, such as delusions. The film, though trying to exaggerate the symptoms of PTSD for greater effect, still manages to stay pretty accurate to the real-life symptoms. Ram becomes delusional and thinks of himself as Lord Rama from the epic, Ramayana, and Gandhi and the Muslims he supports as Ravana and his army. This is symbolized by the event taking place during Dusshera and Ram triumphantly twirling his mustache as the effigy of Lord Rama burns down the one of Ravana. Saket Ram’s twisted Ramayana starts here where he starts seeing the people around him as twisted versions of the other characters. Abiyankar becomes his Hanuman and Mythili, turn into a gun which becomes his Sita. The delusions are shown visually by a whole dream sequence where Ram prepares for the battle. The story here on even follows a few beats from Ramayana, with Ram leaving his family to go on his mission, losing his Sita, his gun, to Muslims. He meets his old friend, Amjad. Ram sees Amjad, a Muslim, as part of the enemy first, but is conflicted by the friendship he shared with him. This is where Ram’s Ramayana takes a turn. When Ram finally begins to see Amjad as neither his friend nor enemy, but as his brother, his delusions start to break. Ram fights to save Amjad but fails. But the experience and his subsequent meeting with Gandhi makes him realize that Ram was the real villain here, with his actions both starting a religious shoot-out and also claiming the life of his brother.

What follows next is Ram’s final shot at redemption, where he tries to ask for forgiveness to Gandhi, only to be denied the opportunity. In the present day, Saket has one last hallucination before he dies where he sees his Sita, but this time it is his Mythili.

Hey Ram

Hey Ram, to me, achieved almost two decades ago things that are still unimaginable in today’s tamil cinema. It was one of the first, if not only, historical-fiction in Tamil, especially the one surrounding the partition of India and the assassination of Gandhi. And although many films today deal with a variety of stories involving protagonist suffering from mental conditions, Hey Ram did it way back when and did it in a way that the condition played a key role in moving the story. It also did what only recent movies are doing; showing Ramayana from a different perspective.

This was an entirely new topic for me to explore and along the way I realized that Kamal used his experiences from Hey Ram to make another trippy film. Maybe I’ll analyze that in the near future, Until then, this is Kishor signing off saying…