Film on ‘Gumnami Baba’ gets legal notice from Netaji fan

A day after the teaser release of acclaimed Filmmaker Srijit Mukherji’s latest venture ‘Gumnaami’, based on the recluse ‘Gumnami Baba’, who many believed was the freedom fighter Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose in disguise, a Netaji fan from Kolkata on Friday sent a legal notice to the producer. The fan, Debabrata Roy, has urged Srijit to “drop the project” as the film would promote manipulation and misrepresentation of facts regarding the hero of India’s freedom struggle.

The one and a half minute long teaser of ‘Gumnami’ was released on August 15. The teaser shows a few characters talking about their hunch that the recluse ‘Gumnami Baba’ was Netaji himself.

“Your proposed anecdote linking him (Netaji) with ‘Gumnami Baba’, is purely imaginative, subjective, hypothetical, hypocritical, absurd and an attempt to damage and demean the great parties,” said the legal notice issued by Debabrata Roy from Kolkata’s Belgachia.

The notice claimed that the Justice Manoj Mukherjee Commission — set up to prove Netaji’s mysterious disappearance in 1945 — in its report confirmed that the identity of ‘Gumnami Baba’ did not match with that of Bose. Also, critical examination of the belongings of the hermit from Uttar Pradesh’s Faizabad, revealed no evidence to even remotely justify his links to Netaji.

The notice also said that it is highly unlikely that a “magnetic public leader like Bose could have really lived like a recluse at any place in India without being identified for such a long time.

“Such distorted propaganda shall leave an indelible and a harmful impression on the mind of the nation’s people and will constitute a crime of cheating and deception,” the notice said.

“Therefore you are requested to refrain from manipulation and misrepresentation of the facts and to give up the project, otherwise law shall take its own voyage against your act of defamation of Netaji,” it added.