Gandhi: the film and the man
Sir Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi is the first film to have been made about the father of the Indian nation. It has taken 35 years since his death for this simple tribute to have been paid. The emphasizes the decline of Gandhi’s influence, for these years were marked by the heyday and decline of film, and the heyday (and the now foreseeable decline) of TV as it has been known – though cable TV, satellite TV and all the other marvels promised us by Mammon may not be entirely reprehensible.
These years were also marked by the cold war, détente, and the now renewed threat of nuclear war. Perhaps this is an appropriate time for the rediscovery of Gandhi which Attenborough’s film portends. Though some 400 books have been published on Gandhi, very few of them were published in the West after it became clear that India would indeed become independent. And the few books that were published, rarely received much attention in the press or patronage by the public – with the single exception of Louis Fischer’s classic biography.
So far as the ordinary person is concerned, Gandhi’s very name faded into obscurity. There is the musing story, told me by a senior academic at the School of Oriental & African Studies, which perfectly illustrates this point. Around the time of the film’s release, the gentlemen’s uncle said to him, “This chap Gandee ... he was against us, wasn’t he … a bit?”
Well, there’s no excuse for that sort of ignorance any more. The person ironing clothes at home can no longer complain that nothing has been done to try to tell him or her at least something about India’s non-violent struggle for independence: Gandhi is probably the world’s most expensive lesson in modern Indian history. Not only has the film attracted rave reviews and long queues, but it has also led to the first popular paperback issue of Gandhi’s Autobiography in the West (Penguin 1982), and a spate of other books
1. Associated with the film is an educational pack which is being used by Columbia pictures to promote the film in schools and educational circles.
Criticism of the film
The film has not gone entirely uncensored, but it is worth distinguishing between two sorts of remarks: those directed against the film and those directed against Gandhi’s ideas.
Some of the criticism of the film has merely niggled, for example at the sanitary neatness and cleanliness of the clothes worn by the protest marchers in the hot Indian plains, even after they were struck down by police lathis (bamboo staves used in India instead of batons). More considerable criticism has been artistic, for example Attenborough’s direction has been attacked as generally poor. Indeed, his critics claim that he did not direct Indian actors at all, leaving them to get on with it as they thought best.
Offering some defence of the film on such points is not entirely impossible, but we need to get on to the more substantial criticisms, which relate to the film’s portrayal of Gandhi. Does it offer us a believable Gandhi? Even more important, was Gandhi really as he is shown in the film?
There is the lunatic fringe, of course, that would like Gandhi to be shown by a sort of moving light, or perhaps by his feet alone. For such people Gandhi is not a man, he is a symbol of the ineffable, and the Indian cultural tradition is particularly prone to the ineffable. Reality can be so repellant that we turn our faces away, to the forests and mountains, or inward to the silence of Indian fable and religion. Where reality is repellant, there are better ways of trying to deal with it. In Gandhi’s case, the man is more attractive than the myth, and it is the attractiveness of the man that comes through most clearly in the film: his humour, his eccentricities, his charisma, his shrewdness. We are invited to admire Gandhi both for his principles and for his unflinching application of them, especially when it was most costly – that is when applied to himself.
But this is where the film’s apparently unthinking admiration for everything about Gandhi becomes a problem. Ought we to look up to his individual notions of naturopathy, and emulate his peculiar disciplines regarding sexuality? We do not know what Attenborough and his scriptwriter think. Because these matters are vague rather than in focus, little time can be spent on showing how these seeming eccentricities fit into any overall framework of thought and action. Why bring such matters in at all, then? Simply because of their box-office potential?
Anyone who invests 22 million dollars needs to have an eye on the returns of course, but this does lead to several other imbalances in the film, for example the inordinate space given to westerners. Candice Berman is a very attractive woman, but does the character she acts (Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White) deserve more screen time than Gandhi’s political mentors and fellow-leaders? Again the story of Madeleine Slade, who shocked her parents, Admiral Sir Edmund Slade and Lade Slade, by forsaking London society for poverty, chastity and the struggle for India’s independence under the tutelage of a naked fakir – this is stirring, romantic stuff. But the impact of it is lost in the film because we can see neither what she has given up, nor the reaction of her friends and family, only the ambivalent place she occupied, so far as westerners were concerned, in Gandhi’s ashram.
Neither of these instances constitutes the major, central imbalance of the film. Gandhi’s spiritual quest, which was at the centre of everything he attempted as a man and a politician, is entirely and completely missing from the film. Were it not for the fact that Gandhi was shot at one of his famous prayer meetings, we would have had no inkling of his spiritual interests at all. This is because Atttenborough himself cannot appreciate or perhaps even see this core of Gandhi’s personality. Neither, for that matter, can Ben Kingsley, who does a superb job of impersonating Gandhi, though he does not at all resemble Gandhi except in wishful eyes such as Attenborough’s, or in unobservant eyes to whom all Indians might look the same.
Both Attenborough and Kingsley have publicly admitted their inability to sympathise with Gandhi’s spirituality, but it would have been clear enough even if they had not done so: the British ignore what they do not understand or like, in contrast to some other cultures.
However, the ignoring of Gandhi’s spirituality may also have had something to do with Attenborough’s perception of how interesting it would be to the public and to his peers: religion of certain sorts is popular today (charismatic and evangelical Christianity, for instance, or revivalist Brahminism, of fundamentalist Islam), but there is a distinction between what is popular and what is fashionable. Gandhi’s religious ideas will probably never be either fashionable or popular.
We might have got nearer those ideas if the film had begun with Gandhi’s childhood, instead of beginning as it does with his first direct experience of racial discrimination in South Africa, which turned him into an activist. All the activity stemmed from roots going back to his childhood, where very diverse influence shaped him: his mother’s devotion to Vaishnavism, his father’s uncompromising truthfulness which cost him many a lucrative position, the theosophists and vegetarians whom he met in London and who introduced him to the New Testament, as well as to the Gita and the life oh the Buddha in the poeticism of Sir Edwin Arnold’s then popular books The Song Celestial and The Light of Asia. Besides, there were Quakers and Muslims, and no doubt the special place that eccentrics hold in England2. All these contributed to making Gandhi a unique, contradictory and many-layered man.
Admittedly, Attenborough had an impossible job. But if he had attempted, at least, to do justice to the man, one’s criticism would have been muted somewhat. What he has attempted to do is best discussed in terms of Attenborough’s understanding of Gandhi. This is succinctly expressed in the advertisements or the film, which said:
“His goal was freedom
His strategy was peace
His weapon was his humanity.”
Though they may be slickly phrased, two of these statements are, quite simply, wrong. Gandhi’s goal was not freedom, it was swaraj (‘self-rule’). The English word is usually used in two senses implying on the one hand freedom from something, and on the other hand freedom for something – that is, freedom for the purpose of being able to accomplish something. Swaraj has sometimes been understood (as in the case of the film) to mean the second use of ‘freedom’ – that is, freedom from foreign domination so as to be able to rule our country ourselves politically.
For Gandhi, however, what happened in the world of politics was a reflection and an outworking of what was happening spiritually or internally. In his view, it was not so important to drive out the British as to understand how it was that they came to dominate us in the first place; for if we did not understand that, someone else could easily come and dominate us again in the future! The British (and the foreign Mughals, before them) had come to rule India because we Indians had grown morally and spiritually soft, with the political and economic decay that inevitably follow. Gandhi´s prescription was that we Indians must recover moral, economic and political strength; and, if we did so, no power on earth could dominate us.
How was this to be done? By self-rule (swaraj) at the level of the individual, by the elimination of caste and religious discrimination which had divided our people, and by the introduction of sanitary and productive measures which would restore dignity and a human standard of living to us. British rule was, in principle, only an anachronism and a hindrance to those ideals – though, in practice, it was of course much more than that, as well as a convenient cause to which to rally everyone, including those who did not share Gandhi’s utopian vision.
And Gandhi did not set about dislodging the British by the ‘strategy of peace’. He himself gave his strategy the name of satyagraha which has often been ineptly translated as ‘soul-force’. Satya is ‘truth’, but agraha is more difficult to render: perhaps ‘persuasion’ comes as close as anything in English. But agraha is persuasion of a particular sort: satyagraha is best translated as the persistent attempt to persuade someone of the truth by displaying its winsomeness. Satyagraha was meant to be offered, then, so far as Gandhi was concerned, not merely to the British but to all who were blind to the Truth, including fellow-Indians.
The idea of winning people over to your position by showing them its attractiveness is materially connected with another Gandhian notion that is often confusing to westerners, that of ahimsa or non-violence, it is true, but perhaps through an implicit threat of violence. Gandhi believed that it was wrong to direct violence against the opponent; if there was to be violence, it was better for satyagrahis to bear it themselves, and so cause it to be overcome. In practice, however, Gandhi often won his battles because he knew that a non-violent struggle was best designed to penetrate the proto-Christian conscience of Britain (he admitted that it probably would not work against the Nazis, for example). Another factor responsible for Gandhi’s success was the possibility of his dying from one of his fasts, the consequences of which terrified the administration! He valued ahimsa, then, as an instrument, not as a fundamental principle to which he would cling in all circumstances. By clinging to it, Gandhi won not merely India’s freedom but the respect of all who fight for justice.
Cultural Revolution
What did Gandhi achieve in India itself? The quick answer is that he set afoot a whole cultural revolution, curiously parallel to Mao’s, and decades before it. For this reason, the Marxist dismissal of Gandhi as a reactionary has always been puzzling.
There are at least four major strands to Gandhi’s cultural revolution, which interpenetrate rather than merely entwine. The first and possibly most important strand is that Gandhi took a gentleman’s debating club (which is what the Indian congress was at that time) and developed it into India’s second genuinely mass movement.3 Con-comitantly, the national movement drew in women as equal partners – something which had been alien to Indian tradition for at least ten centuries, and probably more.4
Second, Gandhi altered our attitude to work. In my own life, my traditional attitude to work began to be changed from the time when my school encouraged us to participate in the Gandhian practice of Shramdaan (the donation of one’s labour) to prepare the ground for a vegetable patch in the school. It is self-evident that if communities do not work, they cannot eat; and it requires no great powers of observation to notice that in traditional Indian society physical work is despised by the upper castes and is something done only by the lower classes. These in turn naturally try to get away with as little as possible, especially when much of the fruit of it is going into the pockets of the upper caste anyway. Gandhi insisted that all volunteers who joined him had to do physical work and take their turn at cleaning the latrines – the sort of work which was usually reserved only for the lowest classes, whose condition and status Gandhi tried to improve, for example by drawing attention to the crucial importance of what they did, and calling them harijan (God’s own folk).
Though they did suffer the most, harijans were not the only groups who suffered from discrimination on grounds of caste in matters of food, drink and marriage, and even in ordinary everyday conversation. To this day, and in spite of Gandhi’s achievements, one can see the idiocy of traditional attitudes in the newspaper advertisements which seek suitable (arranged marriage) partners from the same sub-sub-caste! In encouraging people to eat and drink and work together, and even marry people from other castes, Gandhi defied tradition, and began to move into action a moribund and finely divided mass of people.