Eighteen of us from my local temple group went to see Hanuman Ansh last night. There has been considerable hype around the film, but for once I thought the hype was largely justified.
The film is an elegant rendering of the early life of Neem Karoli Baba, one of the most unusual Indian saints of the twentieth century.
I had known about Neem Karoli Baba for more than ten years, mainly through two of his Western devotees: Richard Alpert, better known as Ram Dass, and the musician Krishna Das. Through them I became interested in this rather enigmatic figure who attracted an extraordinary following while apparently making very little effort to acquire one.
My wife has a much more direct devotional connection. She is a staunch devotee of Hanuman and has long been fond of Neem Karoli Baba. His image is the wallpaper on her laptop. So for her, the film was not simply an introduction to an interesting spiritual figure. It was about someone who was already part of her devotional world.
That was part of what appealed to me about Neem Karoli Baba as well.
He did not seem interested in constructing a philosophy, establishing an intellectual system, or becoming a public spiritual teacher. He did not preach in the conventional sense. He shunned publicity. And yet people who encountered him repeatedly described the same quality: an extraordinary capacity for love.
That presents an obvious problem for a filmmaker.
How do you make a film about someone whose significance lies not primarily in what he taught, but in what people experienced in his presence? How do you portray a saint without turning him into either a philosopher delivering sermons or a supernatural superhero performing miracles?
This is where I thought Hanuman Ansh succeeded.
It is remarkably well made for what appears to be a relatively modest-budget film. The music is outstanding. But what impressed me more was the restraint of the filmmaking. There is very little exaggerated emotional drama and surprisingly little dependence on action or spectacle. Many scenes are understated.
And yet the director manages to convey tenderness, affection and love.
The film seemed to touch many people in our group. That interested me because we were not watching it as detached filmgoers. We came from a spiritual community in which Hanuman, devotion and the idea of the guru were already familiar. Yet the film still seemed to reach people at an emotional level without resorting to the usual devices of melodrama.
Perhaps that is appropriate for a film about Neem Karoli Baba. His message, insofar as one can call it a message, seems to have been communicated less through doctrine than through presence, behaviour and love.
The film also introduces the viewer to something that lies close to the heart of the Indian devotional tradition: single-pointed devotion.
In the modern world, we tend to approach spirituality almost as consumers. We read different teachers, compare philosophies, sample meditation techniques and move from one practice to another. We assemble our own spiritual package from Vedanta, Buddhism, yoga, mindfulness, neuroscience and whatever else attracts us at the time.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with this. But the devotional traditions of India point towards a radically different possibility: to give oneself wholeheartedly to a single form of the Divine.
In Neem Karoli Baba’s case, that devotion was centred on Hanuman.
Hanuman is not merely a deity to be worshipped. In the Ramayana tradition he represents complete devotion: strength without arrogance, extraordinary ability without concern for personal recognition, and action entirely dedicated to something beyond himself. Rama occupies the centre of his consciousness.
There is something psychologically powerful about this idea. Single-pointed devotion simplifies life. Instead of continually asking, What do I want? What do I believe? What should I become?, the centre of gravity shifts away from oneself.
For someone like Neem Karoli Baba, devotion to Hanuman seems not to have been one religious practice among many. It was the organising principle of his life.
Perhaps this is one reason the film works best when it does not try too hard to explain him.
The sacred does not always announce itself with thunder. Sometimes it appears quietly—in affection, humour, music, an unexpected act of kindness, or in the presence of someone who seems to have become less preoccupied with himself and more capable of loving others.
There was another, rather unexpected, thought I carried away from the film.
Its success restored some of my faith in India.
Contemporary India can sometimes appear so consumed by economic ambition, technology, celebrity, political argument and the pursuit of material success that one wonders what has happened to the civilisation’s extraordinary spiritual inheritance. Yet here was a relatively quiet film about an unconventional saint, devotion and love attracting large audiences and generating considerable enthusiasm.
Perhaps that inheritance has not disappeared after all.
There is still a place in India for spirituality—not merely as ritual, inherited custom or nostalgia, but as something capable of moving people.
That, more than anything else, stayed with me after watching Hanuman Ansh.
It is not a loud film. It does not need to be.
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