It’s quite a mind-blaster. In fact, at the end of the exhaustive and at spots, exhausting six-hour-plus docu series, a renegade devotee of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh - Ma Sheela Anand - darts the widest smile imaginable to the technical crew. “You could all do with a drink,” she chortles.
To be honest you want to down a double scotch yourself. Cheers!
The Netflix docuseries assembled by brothers Chapman and Maclain Way, calls for a stiff one to calm your jangled nerves. Comprising a series of interviews, a vaultful of archival footage, animated artworks and on occasion, you suspect recreated vignettes, Wild Wild Country, demands to be seen, heard and mulled over.
The marathon reportage is unusually neutral in its approach on the brazen takeover and the inevitable disintegration of the godman’s sprawling ranch in the snoozy township of Antelope in Oregon, USA. It’s up to the viewers, then, to draw their own conclusions. About the directors’ only intrusive element is the buzzy, often hectoring background music score.
So there you are: you can either empathise with the swelling hordes of the godman’s devotees or pitch in with the Oregonians, who all things considered do have a valid point to make about the disruption of their everyday placid lives.
Circa 1981, the provincials were compelled to safeguard their orthodox beliefs in Christianity, their home quaint homes and the sanctity of their local governance. No trespassing – or inclusiveness – permitted. Alluding to the orange and pomegranate robes of the Rajneeshees, an Oregon protest slogan threatened, “Better Dead than Red.”
The ascent and downfall of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh - born Chandra Mohan Jain the eldest of 11 children of a cloth trader in Madhya Pradesh - are touched upon in passing. Relentlessly, the focus is on the audacious colonisation of the 64,000 - acre stretch of “heaven on earth” in the Pacific north west backwoods of the US west coast.
Kicking off with shadowy visuals, worthy of a an edgy Coen Brothers thriller, the docu series grabs you by the collar. And – what do you know? - the unravelling of the woolly yarn, springs a surprise.
Nope, the Bhagawan doesn’t turn out to be the spiritual hero, the acqusitive villain or even the centrepiece.
His personal secretary, the aforecited Ma Sheela Anand does, striking you as a woman who has a classic love-and-hate story to narrate from her sombrely-lit home in Switzerland. Says she, dreamily, “The whole energy was like a fist for me, a fist of colours.”
‘Colours’, like it or not, could be construed as despotic control. Initially anointed the confidante and Lady Jeeves of the godman, she’s a scarier-than-thou exemplar of hell hath no fury like a besotted believer scorned.
“I didn’t ever have s.. with her,” her subject of adulation huffs through his flowing beard in a vintage camera interface, not quite completing the word sex. That his insanely possessive secretary-turned-foe steadily transformed herself into an avatar of Cruella Da Vil, is asserted by the mounting allegations ranging from an attempt to assassinate the godman’s doctor as well as the city council’s top legal officer to the earliest detected case in the US of mass wire-tapping, bio-terror and the poisoning of salad bars and coffee shops.
In the shuffling madness of garnering votes to rig the elections to the Antelope council, an unchecked immigration of homeless people to the Bhagwan’s ranch was orchestrated with such cunning by Ma Sheela, that you’re flabbergasted beyond belief. Even as her clout balloons, the Bhagwan defects, selecting an uppercrust Hollywood woman as his arm-candy bar.
The rejected secretary, today enveloped in a shawl, is the voice of of the series, occupying yards of footage.
Sufficient space is also allocated to the articulate attorney-turned-mayor of the ashram as well as a now-sedate ex-sanyaasin of the commune. The sanyaasin is especially effective in drumming up the emotional quotient, informing the viewer how she had ignored her son and had to leap through legal hoops and criminal charges galore, to visit the son, now grown up and suffering from a terminal brain tumour.
The free love aspect of the Bhagwan’s commune is referred to but on a low-key with rapidly-edited visuals of an orgy in progress and an Oregonian’s remark that the township’s restful life was thwarted by such sightings as a pair of Rajneeshees making love in broad daylight on a bridge.
Undoubtedly, the first three episodes are the most engrossing ones. The plot thickens dizzyingly as the details of the FBI investigations take over from the human melodrama. Follow accounts of the excommunication of Ma Sheela Anand, with a clutch of her supporters, the incarceration in an American prison of Bhagwan Rajneesh who renamed himself as Osho, and the realisation of the go-back-to India campaign. His passing away, at his homeland, is commemorated with the epitaph Osho/Never Born/Never Died/Only Visited this Planet Earth between December 11, 1931-January 19, 1990.
Fortuitously practically every fraction of the time on Planet Earth appears to have been videographed; without the stored footage the docu series wouldn’t have been feasible at all. Images of the godman’s fleet of Rolls Royces, private jet planes, a basement packed with lethal weapons to equip an army, candid shots of Osho drinking champagne and red wine, or fretting in a cell about the prison uniform, all stay with you.
Despite such camera captures, the marathon interview of Ma Sheela Anand, endowed with an unerasable 20th century-foxy smile, is the slayer.
If she poses in the nude for a German magazine, so be it. Sensationalism in the media has its pay-off. Born in Baroda, she had moved to the US for higher studies at a college in New Jersey, and returned to India to become the regent-in-serving for the Bhagwan. Today at the age of 68, she heals the mentally-disabled in a Swiss hospital.
Was she power drunk? Was she a cog in a wheel of megalomania? Or was she pure evil? Directors Chapman and Maclain Way leave such questions dangling in the air.
Indeed, as Ma Sheela Anand’s last line inquires, with that smile intact, “You could all do with a drink.”
(The writer is a film critic, filmmaker, theatre director and a weekend painter.)
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