After watching Aligarh, it’s hard to believe that Rajkummar Rao’s character Deepu Sebastian, the journalist, never met Professor Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras (brilliantly portrayed by Manoj Bajpayee) in real life. Based on the true story of the suspension of Prof Siras from the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) on the grounds that he was gay, a large part of Aligarh’s source material came from the former Indian Express journalist, Sebastian’s conversations with the Professor.
In February 2010, Sebastian was a young 21-year-old cub reporter in Delhi covering Higher Education in the city (and additionally Aligarh), when he was pulled up by his editor for having missed the news of Prof Siras’ suspension from AMU. The brief given to Sebastian was to file a story with an interview of the professor on how it is to be gay in AMU.
Since then Sebastian had a series of conversations with Prof Siras, till the final one, which he had with him before he died in April 2010. It’s the one conversation that the journalist keeps going back to find out if Siras gave out any clue which would point out to the cause of his mysterious death. While the police initially speculated on suicide, a case of murder was registered after traces of poison was found in the Professor’s body.
“He was talking about the future,” Sebastian tells me, while recalling the last time he spoke to Siras. “He was thinking of going to America, about meeting me, looking forward to returning to the University (his suspension had just been reversed by the Allahabad High Court) and moving towards a retired life,” adds Sebastian.
About his sexuality, Prof Siras was totally comfortable being who he was, says Sebastian. He was gay and he didn’t feel like he had to explain it to anybody else. He felt it was something intensely private, he didn’t want to stand up and give a speech about it.
But it may not have always been that way. “He was not comfortable giving himself a tag or being pigeon-holed into something. And remember he was someone who was married in the past, which he discussed in detail with me. I am sure there was a time when he was not ready to come out about it, got into marriage, so there must have been a time when he could not come to terms with it in the past.”
Sebastian feels Manoj Bajpayee has captured the idea of being Siras brilliantly in Aligarh. Rajkummar Rao, who plays Sebastian himself, also gets a thumbs up though his Malayali accented Hindi is slightly inconsistent.
Surprisingly, Sebastian wasn’t extremely thrilled when he was told that his character would be a part of the film. “As a journalist, you are trained and told that you are not the story. Even when you are beaten up, the story should not be about you. So when something like this comes up, there is a slight awkwardness to be involved in a film, a little guilt like – I should not being doing this,” he admits. “But I keep telling myself that this is not about me, they are using my interviews, my work and me just as a character to take the story forward.”
As someone who doesn’t watch many Hindi films, today Sebastian is just happy that the one film that he happens to be a part of, is one of the few very good films to have come out of Bollywood. And we totally second that.
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