Found here http://history.eserver.org/ghandi-nobody-knows.txt a very interesting take on Gandhi.
The Gandhi Nobody Knows
Richard Grenier
[From the magazine, "Commentary," March 1983, published monthly by the American
Jewish Committee, New York, NY.]
I HAD the singular honor of attending an early private screening of Gandhi with
an audience of invited guests from the National Council of Churches. At the end
of the three-hour movie there was hardly, as they say, a dry eye in the house.
When the lights came up I fell into conversation with a young woman who
observed, reverently, that Gandhi's last words were "Oh, God," causing me to
remark regretfully that the real Gandhi had not spoken in English, but had
cried, Hai Rama! ("Oh, Rama"). Well, Rama was just Indian for God, she replied,
at which I felt compelled to explain that, alas, Rama, collectively with his
three half-brothers, represented the seventh reincarnation of Vishnu. The young
woman, who seemed to have been under the impression that Hinduism was
Christianity under another name, sensed somehow that she had fallen on an
uncongenial spirit, and the conversation ended.
At a dinner party shortly afterward, a friend of mine, who had visited India
many times and even gone to the trouble of learning Hindi, objected strenuously
that the picture of Gandhi that emerges in the movie is grossly inaccurate,
omitting, as one of many examples, that when Gandhi's wife lay dying of
pneumonia and British doctors insisted that a shot of penicillin would save her,
Gandhi refused to have this alien medicine injected in her body and simply let
her die. (It must be noted that when Gandhi contracted malaria shortly afterward
he accepted for himself the alien medicine quinine, and that when he had
appendicitis he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien outrage of
an appendectomy.) All of this produced a wistful mooing from an editor of a
major newspaper and a recalcitrant, "But still...." I would prefer to explicate
things more substantial than a wistful mooing, but there is little doubt it
meant the editor in question felt that even if the real Mohandas K. Gandhi had
been different from the Gandhi of the movie it would have been nice if he had
been like the movie-Gandhi, and that presenting him in this admittedly false
manner was beautiful, stirring, and perhaps socially beneficial.
An important step in the canonization of this movie-Gandhi was taken by the New
York Film Critics Circle, which not only awarded the picture its prize as best
film of 1982, but awarded Ben Kingsley, who played Gandhi (a remarkably good
performance), its prize as best actor of the year. But I cannot believe for one
second that these awards were made independently of the film's content--which,
not to put too fine a point on it, is an all-out appeal for pacifism--or in
anything but the most shameful ignorance of the historical Gandhi.
Now it does not bother me that Shakespeare omitted from his 'King John' the
signing of the Magna Charta--by far the most important event in John's reign.
All Shakespeare's "histories" are strewn with errors and inventions. Shifting to
the cinema and to more recent times, it is hard for me to work up much
indignation over the fact that neither Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin' nor
his 'October' recounts historical episodes in anything like the manner in which
they actually occurred (the famous march of the White Guards down the steps at
Odessa--artistically one of the greatest sequences in film history--simply did
not take place). As we draw closer to the present, however, the problem becomes
much more difficult. If the Soviet Union were to make an artistically wondrous
film about the entry of Russian tanks into Prague in 1968 (an event I happened
to witness), and show them being greeted with flowers by a grateful populace,
the Czechs dancing in the streets with joy, I do not guarantee that I would
maintain my serene aloofness. A great deal depends on whether the historical
events represented in a movie are intended to be taken as substantially true,
and also on whether--separated from us by some decades or occurring
yesterday--they are seen as having a direct bearing on courses of action now
open to us.
On my second viewing of 'Gandhi,' this time at a public showing at the end of
the Christmas season, I happened to leave the theater behind three teenage
girls, apparently from one of Manhattan's fashionable private schools. "Gandhi
was pretty much an FDR," one opined, astonishing me almost as much by her breezy
use of initials to invoke a President who died almost a quarter-century before
her birth as by the stupefying nature of the comparison. "But he was a religious
figure, too," corrected one of her friends, adding somewhat smugly, "It's not in
our historical tradition to honor spiritual leaders." Since her schoolteachers
had clearly not led her to consider Jonathan Edwards and Roger Williams as
spiritual leaders, let alone Joseph Smith and William Jennings Bryan, the
intimation seemed to be that we are a society with poorer spiritual values than,
let's say, India. There can be no question, in any event, that the girls felt
they had just been shown the historical Gandhi--an attitude shared by Ralph
Nader, who at last account had seen the film three times. Nader has conceived
the most extraordinary notion that Gandhi's symbolic flouting of the British
salt tax was a "consumer issue" which he later expanded into the wider one of
Indian independence. A modern parallel to Gandhi's program of home-spinning and
home-weaving, another "consumer issue" says Nader, might be the use of solar
energy to free us from the "giant multinational oil corporations."
AS IT happens, the government of India openly admits to having provided
one-third of the financing of 'Gandhi' out of state funds, straight out of the
national treasury--and after close study of the finished product I would not be
a bit surprised to hear that it was 100 percent. If Pandit Nehru is portrayed
flatteringly in the film, one must remember that Nehru himself took part in the
initial story conferences (he originally wanted Gandhi to be played by Alec
Guinness) and that his daughter Indira Gandhi is, after all, Prime Minister of
India (though no relation to Mohandas Gandhi). The screenplay was checked and
rechecked by Indian officials at every stage, often by the Prime Minister
herself, with close consultations on plot and even casting. If the movie
contains a particularly poisonous portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder
of Pakistan, the Indian reply, I suppose, would be that if the Pakistanis want
an attractive portrayal of Jinnah let them pay for their own movie. A friend of
mine, highly sophisticated in political matters but innocent about film-making,
declared that 'Gandhi' should be preceded by the legend: *The following film is
a paid political advertisement by the government of India.*
"Gandhi", then, is a large, pious, historical morality tale centered on a
saintly, sanitized Mahatma Gandhi cleansed of anything too embarrassingly Hindu
(the word "caste" is not mentioned from one end of the film to the other) and,
indeed, of most of the rest of Gandhi's life, much of which would drastically
diminish his saintliness in Western eyes. There is little to indicate that the
India of today has followed Gandhi's precepts in almost nothing. There is
little, in fact, to indicate that India is even India. The spectator realizes
the scene is the Indian subcontinent because there are thousands of extras
dressed in dhotis and saris. The characters go about talking in these quaint
Peter Sellers accents. We have occasional shots of India's holy poverty, holy
hovels, some landscapes, many of them photographed quite beautifully, for those
who like travelogues. We have a character called Lord Mountbatten (India's last
Viceroy); a composite American journalist (assembled >from Vincent Sheehan,
William L. Shirer, Louis Fischer, and straight fiction); a character called
simply "Viceroy" (presumably another composite); an assemblage of Gandhi's
Indian followers under the name of one of them (Patel); and of course Nehru.
I sorely missed the fabulous Annie Besant, that English clergyman's wife, turned
atheist, turned Theosophist, turned Indian nationalist, who actually became
president of the Indian National Congress and had a terrific falling out with
Gandhi, becoming his fierce opponent. And if the producers felt they had to work
in a cameo role for an American star to add to the film's appeal in the United
States, it is positively embarrassing that they should have brought in the
photographer Margaret Bourke-White, a person of no importance whatever in
Gandhi's life and a role Candice Bergen plays with a repellant unctuousness. If
the film-makers had been interested in drama and not hagiography, it is hard to
see how they could have resisted the awesome confrontation between Gandhi and,
yes, Margaret Sanger. For the two did meet. Now *there* was a meeting of East
and West, and *may the better person win!* (She did. Margaret Sanger argued her
views on birth control with such vigor that Gandhi had a nervous breakdown.)
I cannot honestly say I had any reasonable expectation that the film would show
scenes of Gandhi's pretty teenage girl followers fighting "hysterically" (the
word was used) for the honor of sleeping naked with the Mahatma and cuddling the
nude septuagenarian in their arms. (Gandhi was "testing" his vow of chastity in
order to gain moral strength for his mighty struggle with Jinnah.) When told
there was a man named Freud who said that, despite his declared intention,
Gandhi might actually be *enjoying* the caresses of the naked girls, Gandhi
continued, unperturbed. Nor, frankly, did I expect to see Gandhi giving daily
enemas to all the young girls in his ashrams (his daily greeting was, "Have you
had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?"), nor see the girls giving him
*his* daily enema. Although Gandhi seems to have written less about home rule
for India than he did about enemas, and excrement, and latrine cleaning ("The
bathroom is a temple. It should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy
eating there"), I confess such scenes might pose problems for a Western
director.
'Gandhi,' therefore, the film, this paid political advertisement for the
government of India, is organized around three axes: (1) Anti-racism--all men
are equal regardless of race, color, creed, etc.; (2) anti-colonialism, which in
present terms translates as support for the Third World, including, most
eminently, India; (3) nonviolence, presented as an absolutist pacifism. There
are other, secondary precepts and subheadings. Gandhi is portrayed as the
quintessence of tolerance ("I am a Hindu and a Muslim and a Christian and a
Jew"), of basic friendliness to Britain ("The British have been with us for a
long time and when they leave we want them to leave as friends"), of devotion to
his wife and family. His vow of chastity is represented as something selfless
and holy, rather like the celibacy of the Catholic clergy. But, above all,
Gandhi's life and teachings are presented as having great import for us today.
We must learn from Gandhi.
I propose to demonstrate that the film grotesquely distorts both Gandhi's life
and character to the point that it is nothing more than a pious fraud, and a
fraud of the most egregious kind. Hackneyed Indian falsehoods such as that "the
British keep trying to break India up" (as if Britain didn't give India a unity
it had never enjoyed in history), or that the British *created* Indian poverty
(a poverty which had not only existed since time immemorial but had been
considered holy), almost pass unnoticed in the tide of adulation for our
fictional saint. Gandhi, admittedly, being a devout Hindu, was far more
self-contradictory than most public men. Sanskrit scholars tell me that flat
self-contradiction is even considered an element of "Sanskrit rhetoric." Perhaps
it is thought to show profundity.
GANDHI rose early, usually at three-thirty, and before his first bowel movement
(during which he received visitors, although possibly not Margaret Bourke-White)
he spent two hours in meditation, listening to his "inner voice." Now Gandhi was
an extremely vocal individual, and in addition to spending an hour each day in
vigorous walking, another hour spinning at his primitive spinning wheel, another
hour at further prayers, another hour being massaged nude by teenage girls, and
many hours deciding such things as affairs of state, he produced a quite
unconscionable number of articles and speeches and wrote an average of sixty
letters a day. All considered, it is not really surprising that his inner voice
said different things to him at different times. Despising consistency and never
checking his earlier statements, and yet inhumanly obstinate about his position
at any given moment, Gandhi is thought by some Indians today (according to V.S.
Naipaul) to have been so erratic and unpredictable that he may have delayed
Indian independence for twenty-five years.
For Gandhi was an extremely difficult man to work with. He had no partners, only
disciples. For members of his ashrams, he dictated every minute of their days,
and not only every morsel of food they should eat but when they should eat it.
Without ever having heard of a protein or a vitamin, he considered himself an
expert on diet, as on most things, and was constantly experimenting. Once when
he fell ill, he was found to have been living on a diet of ground-nut butter and
lemon juice; British doctors called it malnutrition. And Gandhi had even greater
confidence in his abilities as a "nature doctor," prescribing obligatory cures
for his ashramites, such as dried cow-dung powder and various concoctions
containing cow dung (the cow, of course, being sacred to the Hindu). And to
those he really loved he gave enemas--but again, alas, not to Margaret
Bourke-White. Which is too bad, really. For admiring Candice Bergen's work as I
do, I would have been most interested in seeing how she would have experienced
this beatitude. The scene might have lived in film history.
There are 400 biographies of Gandhi, and his writings run to 80 volumes, and
since he lived to be seventy-nine, and rarely fell silent, there are, as I have
indicated, quite a few inconsistencies. The authors of the present movie even
acknowledge in a little-noticed opening title that they have made a film only
true to Gandhi's spirit. For my part, I do not intend to pick through Gandhi's
writings to make him look like Attila the Hun (although the thought is
tempting), but to give a fair, weighted balance of his views, laying stress
above all on his actions, and on what he told other men to do when the time for
action had come.
Anti-racism: the reader will have noticed that in the present-day community of
nations South Africa is a pariah. So it is an absolutely amazing piece of good
fortune that Gandhi, born the son of the Prime Minister of a tiny Indian
principality and received as an attorney at the bar of the Middle Temple in
London, should have begun his climb to greatness as a member of the small Indian
community in, precisely, South Africa. Natal, then a separate colony, wanted to
limit Indian immigration and, as part of the government program, ordered Indians
to carry identity papers (an action not without similarities to measures under
consideration in the U.S. today to control illegal immigration). The film's
lengthy opening sequences are devoted to Gandhi's leadership in the fight
against Indians carrying their identity papers (burning their registration
cards), with for good measure Gandhi being expelled from the first-class section
of a railway train, and Gandhi being asked by whites to step off the sidewalk.
This inspired young Indian leader calls, in the film, for interracial harmony,
for people to "live together."
Now the time is 1893, and Gandhi is a "caste" Hindu, and from one of the higher
castes. Although, later, he was to call for improving the lot of India's
Untouchables, he was not to have any serious misgivings about the fundamentals
of the caste system for about another thirty years, and even then his doubts, to
my way of thinking, were rather minor. In the India in which Gandhi grew up, and
had only recently left, some castes could enter the courtyards of certain Hindu
temples, while others could not. Some castes were forbidden to use the village
well. Others were compelled to live outside the village, still others to leave
the road at the approach of a person of higher caste and perpetually to call
out, giving warning, so that no one would be polluted by their proximity. The
endless intricacies of Hindu caste by-laws varied somewhat region by region, but
in Madras, where most South African Indians were from, while a Nayar could
pollute a man of higher caste only by touching him, Kammalans polluted at a
distance of 24 feet, toddy drawers at 36 feet, Pulayans and Cherumans at 48
feet, and beef-eating Paraiyans at 64 feet. All castes and the thousands of
sub-castes were forbidden, needless to say, to marry, eat, or engage in social
activity with any but members of their own group. In Gandhi's native Gujarat a
caste Hindu who had been polluted by touch had to perform extensive ritual
ablutions or purify himself by drinking a holy beverage composed of milk, whey,
and (what else?) cow dung.
Low-caste Hindus, in short, suffered humiliations in their native India compared
to which the carrying of identity cards in South Africa was almost trivial In
fact, Gandhi, to his credit, was to campaign strenuously in his later life for
the reduction of caste barriers in India--a campaign almost invisible in the
movie, of course, conveyed in only two glancing references, leaving the audience
with the officially sponsored if historically astonishing notion that racism was
introduced into India by the British. To present the Gandhi of 1893, a
conventional caste Hindu, fresh from caste-ridden India where a Paraiyan could
pollute at 64 feet, as the champion of interracial equalitarianism is one of the
most brazen hypocrisies I have ever encountered in a serious movie.
The film, moreover, does not give the slightest hint as to Gandhi's attitude
toward blacks, and the viewers of 'Gandhi' would naturally suppose that, since
the future Great Soul opposed South African discrimination against Indians, he
would also oppose South African discrimination against black people. But this is
not so. While Gandhi, in South Africa, fought furiously to have Indians
recognized as loyal subjects of the British empire, and to have them enjoy the
full rights of Englishmen, he had no concern for blacks whatever. In fact,
during one of the "Kaffir Wars" he volunteered to organize a brigade of Indians
to put down a Zulu rising, and was decorated himself for valor under fire.
For, yes, Gandhi (Sergeant Major Gandhi) was awarded Victoria's coveted War
Medal. Throughout most of his life Gandhi had the most inordinate admiration for
British soldiers, their sense of duty, their discipline and stoicism in defeat
(a trait he emulated himself). He marveled that they retreated with heads high,
like victors. There was even a time in his life when Gandhi, hardly to be
distinguished >from Kipling's Gunga Din, wanted nothing much as to be a Soldier
of the Queen. Since this is not in keeping with the "spirit" of Gandhi, as
decided by Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi, it is naturally omitted >from he
movie.
Anti-colonialism: as almost always with historical films, even those more honest
than 'Gandhi,' the historical personage on which the movie is based is not only
more complex but more interesting than the character shown on the screen. During
his entire South African period, and for some time after, until he was about
fifty, Gandhi was nothing more or less than an imperial loyalist, claiming for
Indians the rights of Englishmen but unshakably loyal to the crown. He supported
the empire ardently in no fewer than three wars: the Boer War, the "Kaffir War,"
and, with the most extreme zeal, World War I. If Gandhi's mind were of the
modern European sort, this would seam to suggest that his later attitude toward
Britain was the product of unrequited love: he had wanted to be an Englishman;
Britain had rejected him and his people; very well then, they would have their
own country. But this would imply a point of "agonizing reappraisal," a moment
when Gandhi's most fundamental political beliefs were reexamined and, after the
most bitter soul-searching, repudiated. But I have studied the literature and
cannot find this moment of bitter soul-searching. Instead, listening to his
"inner voice" (which in the case of divines of all countries often speaks in the
tones of holy opportunism), Gandhi simply, tranquilly, without announcing any
sharp break, set off in a new direction.
It should be understood that it is unlikely Gandhi ever truly conceived of
"becoming" an Englishman, first, because he was a Hindu to the marrow of his
bones, and also, perhaps, because his democratic instincts were really quite
weak. He was a man of the most extreme, autocratic temperament, tyrannical,
unyielding even regarding things he knew nothing about, totally intolerant of
all opinions but his own. He was, furthermore, in the highest degree
reactionary, permitting in India no change in the relationship between the
feudal lord and his peasants or servants, the rich and the poor. In his 'The
Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi,' the best and least hagiographic of the
full-length studies, Robert Payne, although admiring Gandhi greatly, explains
Gandhi's "new direction" on his return to India from South Africa as follows:
He spoke in generalities, but he was searching for a single cause, a single
hard-edged task to which he would devote the remaining years of his life. He
wanted to repeat his triumph in South Africa on Indian soil. He dreamed of
assembling a small army of dedicated men around him, issuing stern commands
and leading them to some almost unobtainable goal.
Gandhi, in short, was a leader looking for a cause. He found it, of course, in
home rule for India and, ultimately, in independence.
WE ARE therefore presented with the seeming anomaly of a Gandhi who, in Britain
when war broke out in August 1914, instantly contacted the War Office, swore
that he would stand by England in its hour of need, and created the Indian
Volunteer Corps, which he might have commanded if he hadn't fallen ill with
pleurisy. In 1915, back in India, he made a memorable speech in Madras in which
he proclaimed, "I discovered that the British empire had certain ideals with
which I have fallen in love...." In early 1918, as the war in Europe entered its
final crisis, he wrote to the Viceroy of India, "I have an idea that if I become
your recruiting agent-in-chief, I might rain men upon you," and he proclaimed in
a speech in Kheda that the British "love justice; they have shielded men against
oppression." Again, he wrote to the Viceroy, "I would make India offer all her
able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the empire at this critical moment To some of
his pacifist friends, who were horrified, Gandhi replied by appealing to the
'Bhagavad Gita' and to the endless wars recounted in the Hindu epics, the
'Ramayana' and the 'Mahabharata,' adding further to the pacifists' honor by
declaring that Indians "have always been warlike, and the finest hymn composed
by Tulsidas in praise of Rama gives the first place to his ability to strike
down the enemy."
This was in contradiction to the interpretation of sacred Hindu scriptures
Gandhi had offered on earlier occasions (and would offer later), which was that
they did not recount military struggles but spiritual struggles; but, unusual
for him, he strove to find some kind of synthesis. "I do not say, `Let us go and
kill the Germans,'" Gandhi explained. "I say, `Let us go and die for the sake of
India and the empire.'" And yet within two years, the time having come for
swaraj (home rule), Gandhi's inner voice spoke again, and, the leader having
found his cause, Gandhi proclaimed resoundingly: "The British empire today
represents Satanism, and they who love God can afford to have no love for
Satan."
The idea of swaraj, originated by others, crept into Gandhi's mind gradually.
With a fair amount of winding about, Gandhi, roughly, passed through three
phases. First, he was entirely pro-British, and merely wanted for Indians the
rights of Englishmen (as he understood them). Second, he was still pro-British,
but with the belief that, having proved their loyalty to the empire, Indians
would be granted some degree of swaraj. Third, as the home-rule movement
gathered momentum, it was the swaraj, the whole swaraj, and nothing but the
swaraj, and he turned relentlessly against the crown. The movie to the contrary,
he caused the British no end of trouble in their struggles during World War II.
BUT it should not be thought for one second that Gandhi's finally full-blown
desire to detach India from the British empire gave him the slightest sympathy
with other colonial peoples pursuing similar objectives. Throughout his entire
life Gandhi displayed the most spectacular inability to understand or even
really take in people unlike himself--a trait which V.S. Naipaul considers
specifically Hindu, and I am inclined to agree. Just as Gandhi had been totally
unconcerned with the situation of South Africa's blacks (he hardly noticed they
were there until they rebelled), so now he was totally unconcerned with other
Asians or Africans. In fact, he was adamantly *opposed* to certain Arab
movements within the Ottoman empire for reasons of internal Indian politics.
At the close of World War I, the Muslims of India were deeply absorbed in what
they called the "khilafat" movement--"khilafat" being their corruption of
"Caliphate," the Caliph in question being the Ottoman Sultan. In addition to his
temporal powers, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire held the spiritual position of
Caliph, supreme leader of the world's Muslims and successor to the Prophet
Muhammad. At the defeat of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Turkey), the
Sultan was a prisoner in his palace in Constantinople, shorn of his religious as
well as his political authority, and the Muslims of India were incensed. It so
happened that the former subject peoples of the Ottoman empire, principally
Arabs, were perfectly happy to be rid of this Caliph, and even the Turks were
glad to be rid of him, but this made no impression at all on the Muslims of
India, for whom the issue was essentially a club with which to beat the British.
Until this odd historical moment, Indian Muslims had felt little real allegiance
to the Ottoman Sultan either, but now that he had fallen, the British had done
it! The British had taken away their khilafat! And one of the most ardent
supporters of this Indian Muslim movement was the new Hindu leader, Gandhi.
No one questions that the formative period for Gandhi as a political leader was
his time in South Africa. Throughout history Indians, divided into 1,500
language and dialect groups (India today has 15 official languages), had little
sense of themselves as a nation. Muslim Indians and Hindu Indians felt about as
close as Christians and Moors during their 700 years of cohabitation in Spain.
In addition to which, the Hindus were divided into thousands of castes and
sub-castes, and there were also Parsees, Sikhs, Jains. But in South Africa
officials had thrown them all in together, and in the mind of Gandhi (another
one of those examples of nationalism being born in exile) grew the idea of India
as a nation, and Muslim-Hindu friendship became one of the few positions on
which he never really reversed himself. So Gandhi ignoring Arabs and
Turks--became an adamant supporter of the Khilafat movement out of strident
Indian nationalism. He had become a national figure in India for having unified
13,000 Indians of all faiths in South Africa, and now he was determined to reach
new heights by unifying hundreds of millions of Indians of all faiths in India
itself. But this nationalism did not please everyone, particularly Tolstoy, who
in his last years carried on a curious correspondence with the new Indian
leader. For Tolstoy, Gandhi's Indian nationalism "spoils everything."
As for the "anti-colonialism" of the nationalist Indian state since
independence, Indira Gandhi, India's present Prime Minister, hears an inner
voice of her own, it would appear, and this inner voice told her to justify the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as produced by provocative maneuvers on the part
of the U.S. and China, as well as to be the first country outside the Soviet
bloc to recognize the Hanoi puppet regime in Cambodia. So everything plainly
depends on who is colonizing whom, and Mrs. Gandhi's voice perhaps tells her
that the subjection of Afghanistan and Cambodia to foreign rule is "defensive"
colonialism. And the movie's message that Mahatma Gandhi, and by plain
implication India (the country for which he plays the role of Joan of Arc), have
taken a holy, unchanging stance against the colonization of nation by nation is
just another of its hypocrisies. For India, when it comes to colonialism or
anti-colonialism, it has been Realpolitik all the way.
Nonviolence: but the real center and raison d'etre of 'Gandhi' is ahimsa,
nonviolence, which principle when incorporated into vast campaigns of
noncooperation with British rule the Mahatma called by an odd name he made up
himself, satyagraha, which means something like "truth-striving." During the key
part of his life, Gandhi devoted a great deal of time explaining the moral and
philosophical meanings of both ahimsa and satyagraha. But much as the film
sanitizes Gandhi to the point where one would mistake him for a Christian saint,
and sanitizes India to the point where one would take it for Shangri-la, it
quite sweeps away Gandhi's ethical and religious ponderings, his complexities,
his qualifications, and certainly his vacillations, which simplifying process
leaves us with our old European friend: pacifism. It is true that Gandhi was
much impressed by the Sermon on the Mount, his favorite passage in the Bible,
which he read over and over again. But for all the Sermon's inspirational value,
and its service as an ideal in relations among individual human beings, no
Christian state which survived has ever based its policies on the Sermon on the
Mount since Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman
empire. And no modern Western state which survives can ever base its policies on
pacifism. And no Hindu state will ever base its policies on ahimsa. Gandhi
himself--although the film dishonestly conceals this from us--many times
conceded that in dire circumstances "war may have to be resorted to as a
necessary evil."
It is something of an anomaly that Gandhi, held in popular myth to be a pure
pacifist (a myth which governments of India have always been at great pains to
sustain in the belief that it will reflect credit on India itself, and to which
the present movie adheres slavishly), was until fifty not ill-disposed to war at
all. As I have already noted, in three wars, no sooner had the bugles sounded
than Gandhi not only gave his support, but was clamoring for arms. To form new
regiments! To fight! To destroy the enemies of the empire! Regular Indian army
units fought in both the Boer War and World War I, but this was not enough for
Gandhi. He wanted to raise new troops, even, in the case of the Boer and Kaffir
Wars, from the tiny Indian colony in South Africa. British military authorities
thought it not really worth the trouble to train such a small body of Indians as
soldiers, and were even resistant to training them as an auxiliary medical corps
("stretcher bearers"), but finally yielded to Gandhi's relentless importuning.
As first instructed, the Indian Volunteer Corps was not supposed actually to go
into combat, but Gandhi, adamant, led his Indian volunteers into the thick of
battle. When the British commanding officer was mortally wounded during an
engagement in the Kaffir War, Gandhi--though his corps' deputy
commander--carried the officer's stretcher himself from the battlefield and for
miles over the sun-baked veldt. The British empire's War Medal did not have its
name for nothing, and it was generally earned.
ANYONE who wants to wade through Gandhi's endless ruminations about himsa and
ahimsa (violence and nonviolence) is welcome to do so, but it is impossible for
the skeptical reader to avoid the conclusion--let us say in 1920, when swaraj
(home rule) was all the rage and Gandhi's inner voice started telling him that
ahimsa was the thing--that this inner voice knew what it was talking about. By
this I mean that, though Gandhi talked with the tongue of Hindu gods and sacred
scriptures, his inner voice had a strong sense of expediency. Britain, if only
comparatively speaking, was a moral nation, and nonviolent civil disobedience
was plainly the best and most effective way of achieving Indian independence.
Skeptics might also not be surprised to learn that as independence approached,
Gandhi's inner voice began to change its tune. It has been reported that Gandhi
"half-welcomed" the civil war that broke out in the last days. Even a
fratricidal "bloodbath" (Gandhi's word) would be preferable to the British.
And suddenly Gandhi began endorsing violence left, right, and center. During the
fearsome rioting in Calcutta he gave his approval to men "using violence in a
moral cause." How could he tell them that violence was wrong, he asked, "unless
I demonstrate that nonviolence is more effective?" He blessed the Nawab of Maler
Kotla when he gave orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his
state. He sang the praises of Subhas Chandra Bose, who, sponsored by first the
Nazis and then the Japanese, organized in Singapore an Indian National Army with
which he hoped to conquer India with Japanese support, establishing a
totalitarian dictatorship. Meanwhile, after independence in 1947, the armies of
the India that Gandhi had created immediately marched into battle, incorporating
the state of Hyderabad by force and making war in Kashmir on secessionist
Pakistan. When Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist in January 1948 he
was honored by the new state with a vast military funeral--in my view by no
means inapposite.
BUT it is not widely realized (nor will this film tell you) how much violence
was associated with Gandhi's so-called "nonviolent" movement from the very
beginning. India's Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore, had sensed a
strong current of nihilism in Gandhi almost from his first days, and as early as
1920 wrote of Gandhi's "fierce joy of annihilation," which Tagore feared would
lead India into hideous orgies of devastation--which ultimately proved to be the
case. Robert Payne has said that there was unquestionably an "unhealthy
atmosphere" among many of Gandhi's fanatic followers, and that Gandhi's habit of
going to the edge of violence and then suddenly retreating was fraught with
danger. "In matters of conscience I am uncompromising," proclaimed Gandhi
proudly. "Nobody can make me yield." The judgment of Tagore was categorical.
Much as he might revere Gandhi as a holy man, he quite detested him as a
politician and considered that his campaigns were almost always so close to
violence that it was utterly disingenuous to call them nonviolent.
For every satyagraha true believer, moreover, sworn not to harm the adversary or
even to lift a finger in his own defense, there were sometimes thousands of
incensed freebooters and skirmishers bound by no such vow. Gandhi, to be fair,
was aware of this, and nominally deplored it--but with nothing like the
consistency shown in the movie. The film leads the audience to believe that
Gandhi's first "fast unto death," for example, was in protest against an act of
barbarous violence, the slaughter by an Indian crowd of a detachment of police
constables. But in actual fact Gandhi reserved this "ultimate weapon" of his to
interdict a 1931 British proposal to grant Untouchables a "separate electorate"
in the Indian national legislature--in effect a kind of affirmative-action
program for Untouchables. For reasons I have not been able to decrypt, Gandhi
was dead set against the project, but I confess it is another scene I would like
to have seen in the movie: Gandhi almost starving himself to death to block
affirmative action for Untouchables.
From what I have been able to decipher, Gandhi's main preoccupation in this
particular struggle was not even the British. Benefiting from the immense
publicity, he wanted to induce Hindus, overnight, ecstatically, and without any
of these British legalisms, to "open their hearts" to Untouchables. For a whole
week Hindu India was caught up in a joyous delirium. No more would the
Untouchables be scavengers and sweepers! No more would they be banned from Hindu
temples! No more would they pollute at 64 feet! It lasted just a week. Then the
temple doors swung shut again, and all was as before. Meanwhile, on the
passionate subject of swaraj Gandhi was crying, "I would not flinch from
sacrificing a million lives for India's liberty!" The million Indian lives were
indeed sacrificed, and in full. They fell, however, not to the bullets of
British soldiers but to he knives and clubs of their fellow lndians in savage
butcheries when he British finally withdrew.
ALTHOUGH the movie sneers at his reasoning as being the flimsiest of pretexts, I
cannot imagine an impartial person studying the subject without concluding that
concern for Indian religious minorities was one of the principal reasons Britain
stayed in India as long as it did. When it finally withdrew, blood-maddened mobs
surged through the streets from one end of India to the other, the majority
group in each area, Hindu or Muslim, slaughtering the defenseless minority
without mercy in one of the most hideous periods of carnage of modern history.
The Gandhi Nobody Knows
Richard Grenier
[From the magazine, "Commentary," March 1983, published monthly by the American
Jewish Committee, New York, NY.]
I HAD the singular honor of attending an early private screening of Gandhi with
an audience of invited guests from the National Council of Churches. At the end
of the three-hour movie there was hardly, as they say, a dry eye in the house.
When the lights came up I fell into conversation with a young woman who
observed, reverently, that Gandhi's last words were "Oh, God," causing me to
remark regretfully that the real Gandhi had not spoken in English, but had
cried, Hai Rama! ("Oh, Rama"). Well, Rama was just Indian for God, she replied,
at which I felt compelled to explain that, alas, Rama, collectively with his
three half-brothers, represented the seventh reincarnation of Vishnu. The young
woman, who seemed to have been under the impression that Hinduism was
Christianity under another name, sensed somehow that she had fallen on an
uncongenial spirit, and the conversation ended.
At a dinner party shortly afterward, a friend of mine, who had visited India
many times and even gone to the trouble of learning Hindi, objected strenuously
that the picture of Gandhi that emerges in the movie is grossly inaccurate,
omitting, as one of many examples, that when Gandhi's wife lay dying of
pneumonia and British doctors insisted that a shot of penicillin would save her,
Gandhi refused to have this alien medicine injected in her body and simply let
her die. (It must be noted that when Gandhi contracted malaria shortly afterward
he accepted for himself the alien medicine quinine, and that when he had
appendicitis he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien outrage of
an appendectomy.) All of this produced a wistful mooing from an editor of a
major newspaper and a recalcitrant, "But still...." I would prefer to explicate
things more substantial than a wistful mooing, but there is little doubt it
meant the editor in question felt that even if the real Mohandas K. Gandhi had
been different from the Gandhi of the movie it would have been nice if he had
been like the movie-Gandhi, and that presenting him in this admittedly false
manner was beautiful, stirring, and perhaps socially beneficial.
An important step in the canonization of this movie-Gandhi was taken by the New
York Film Critics Circle, which not only awarded the picture its prize as best
film of 1982, but awarded Ben Kingsley, who played Gandhi (a remarkably good
performance), its prize as best actor of the year. But I cannot believe for one
second that these awards were made independently of the film's content--which,
not to put too fine a point on it, is an all-out appeal for pacifism--or in
anything but the most shameful ignorance of the historical Gandhi.
Now it does not bother me that Shakespeare omitted from his 'King John' the
signing of the Magna Charta--by far the most important event in John's reign.
All Shakespeare's "histories" are strewn with errors and inventions. Shifting to
the cinema and to more recent times, it is hard for me to work up much
indignation over the fact that neither Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin' nor
his 'October' recounts historical episodes in anything like the manner in which
they actually occurred (the famous march of the White Guards down the steps at
Odessa--artistically one of the greatest sequences in film history--simply did
not take place). As we draw closer to the present, however, the problem becomes
much more difficult. If the Soviet Union were to make an artistically wondrous
film about the entry of Russian tanks into Prague in 1968 (an event I happened
to witness), and show them being greeted with flowers by a grateful populace,
the Czechs dancing in the streets with joy, I do not guarantee that I would
maintain my serene aloofness. A great deal depends on whether the historical
events represented in a movie are intended to be taken as substantially true,
and also on whether--separated from us by some decades or occurring
yesterday--they are seen as having a direct bearing on courses of action now
open to us.
On my second viewing of 'Gandhi,' this time at a public showing at the end of
the Christmas season, I happened to leave the theater behind three teenage
girls, apparently from one of Manhattan's fashionable private schools. "Gandhi
was pretty much an FDR," one opined, astonishing me almost as much by her breezy
use of initials to invoke a President who died almost a quarter-century before
her birth as by the stupefying nature of the comparison. "But he was a religious
figure, too," corrected one of her friends, adding somewhat smugly, "It's not in
our historical tradition to honor spiritual leaders." Since her schoolteachers
had clearly not led her to consider Jonathan Edwards and Roger Williams as
spiritual leaders, let alone Joseph Smith and William Jennings Bryan, the
intimation seemed to be that we are a society with poorer spiritual values than,
let's say, India. There can be no question, in any event, that the girls felt
they had just been shown the historical Gandhi--an attitude shared by Ralph
Nader, who at last account had seen the film three times. Nader has conceived
the most extraordinary notion that Gandhi's symbolic flouting of the British
salt tax was a "consumer issue" which he later expanded into the wider one of
Indian independence. A modern parallel to Gandhi's program of home-spinning and
home-weaving, another "consumer issue" says Nader, might be the use of solar
energy to free us from the "giant multinational oil corporations."
AS IT happens, the government of India openly admits to having provided
one-third of the financing of 'Gandhi' out of state funds, straight out of the
national treasury--and after close study of the finished product I would not be
a bit surprised to hear that it was 100 percent. If Pandit Nehru is portrayed
flatteringly in the film, one must remember that Nehru himself took part in the
initial story conferences (he originally wanted Gandhi to be played by Alec
Guinness) and that his daughter Indira Gandhi is, after all, Prime Minister of
India (though no relation to Mohandas Gandhi). The screenplay was checked and
rechecked by Indian officials at every stage, often by the Prime Minister
herself, with close consultations on plot and even casting. If the movie
contains a particularly poisonous portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder
of Pakistan, the Indian reply, I suppose, would be that if the Pakistanis want
an attractive portrayal of Jinnah let them pay for their own movie. A friend of
mine, highly sophisticated in political matters but innocent about film-making,
declared that 'Gandhi' should be preceded by the legend: *The following film is
a paid political advertisement by the government of India.*
"Gandhi", then, is a large, pious, historical morality tale centered on a
saintly, sanitized Mahatma Gandhi cleansed of anything too embarrassingly Hindu
(the word "caste" is not mentioned from one end of the film to the other) and,
indeed, of most of the rest of Gandhi's life, much of which would drastically
diminish his saintliness in Western eyes. There is little to indicate that the
India of today has followed Gandhi's precepts in almost nothing. There is
little, in fact, to indicate that India is even India. The spectator realizes
the scene is the Indian subcontinent because there are thousands of extras
dressed in dhotis and saris. The characters go about talking in these quaint
Peter Sellers accents. We have occasional shots of India's holy poverty, holy
hovels, some landscapes, many of them photographed quite beautifully, for those
who like travelogues. We have a character called Lord Mountbatten (India's last
Viceroy); a composite American journalist (assembled >from Vincent Sheehan,
William L. Shirer, Louis Fischer, and straight fiction); a character called
simply "Viceroy" (presumably another composite); an assemblage of Gandhi's
Indian followers under the name of one of them (Patel); and of course Nehru.
I sorely missed the fabulous Annie Besant, that English clergyman's wife, turned
atheist, turned Theosophist, turned Indian nationalist, who actually became
president of the Indian National Congress and had a terrific falling out with
Gandhi, becoming his fierce opponent. And if the producers felt they had to work
in a cameo role for an American star to add to the film's appeal in the United
States, it is positively embarrassing that they should have brought in the
photographer Margaret Bourke-White, a person of no importance whatever in
Gandhi's life and a role Candice Bergen plays with a repellant unctuousness. If
the film-makers had been interested in drama and not hagiography, it is hard to
see how they could have resisted the awesome confrontation between Gandhi and,
yes, Margaret Sanger. For the two did meet. Now *there* was a meeting of East
and West, and *may the better person win!* (She did. Margaret Sanger argued her
views on birth control with such vigor that Gandhi had a nervous breakdown.)
I cannot honestly say I had any reasonable expectation that the film would show
scenes of Gandhi's pretty teenage girl followers fighting "hysterically" (the
word was used) for the honor of sleeping naked with the Mahatma and cuddling the
nude septuagenarian in their arms. (Gandhi was "testing" his vow of chastity in
order to gain moral strength for his mighty struggle with Jinnah.) When told
there was a man named Freud who said that, despite his declared intention,
Gandhi might actually be *enjoying* the caresses of the naked girls, Gandhi
continued, unperturbed. Nor, frankly, did I expect to see Gandhi giving daily
enemas to all the young girls in his ashrams (his daily greeting was, "Have you
had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?"), nor see the girls giving him
*his* daily enema. Although Gandhi seems to have written less about home rule
for India than he did about enemas, and excrement, and latrine cleaning ("The
bathroom is a temple. It should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy
eating there"), I confess such scenes might pose problems for a Western
director.
'Gandhi,' therefore, the film, this paid political advertisement for the
government of India, is organized around three axes: (1) Anti-racism--all men
are equal regardless of race, color, creed, etc.; (2) anti-colonialism, which in
present terms translates as support for the Third World, including, most
eminently, India; (3) nonviolence, presented as an absolutist pacifism. There
are other, secondary precepts and subheadings. Gandhi is portrayed as the
quintessence of tolerance ("I am a Hindu and a Muslim and a Christian and a
Jew"), of basic friendliness to Britain ("The British have been with us for a
long time and when they leave we want them to leave as friends"), of devotion to
his wife and family. His vow of chastity is represented as something selfless
and holy, rather like the celibacy of the Catholic clergy. But, above all,
Gandhi's life and teachings are presented as having great import for us today.
We must learn from Gandhi.
I propose to demonstrate that the film grotesquely distorts both Gandhi's life
and character to the point that it is nothing more than a pious fraud, and a
fraud of the most egregious kind. Hackneyed Indian falsehoods such as that "the
British keep trying to break India up" (as if Britain didn't give India a unity
it had never enjoyed in history), or that the British *created* Indian poverty
(a poverty which had not only existed since time immemorial but had been
considered holy), almost pass unnoticed in the tide of adulation for our
fictional saint. Gandhi, admittedly, being a devout Hindu, was far more
self-contradictory than most public men. Sanskrit scholars tell me that flat
self-contradiction is even considered an element of "Sanskrit rhetoric." Perhaps
it is thought to show profundity.
GANDHI rose early, usually at three-thirty, and before his first bowel movement
(during which he received visitors, although possibly not Margaret Bourke-White)
he spent two hours in meditation, listening to his "inner voice." Now Gandhi was
an extremely vocal individual, and in addition to spending an hour each day in
vigorous walking, another hour spinning at his primitive spinning wheel, another
hour at further prayers, another hour being massaged nude by teenage girls, and
many hours deciding such things as affairs of state, he produced a quite
unconscionable number of articles and speeches and wrote an average of sixty
letters a day. All considered, it is not really surprising that his inner voice
said different things to him at different times. Despising consistency and never
checking his earlier statements, and yet inhumanly obstinate about his position
at any given moment, Gandhi is thought by some Indians today (according to V.S.
Naipaul) to have been so erratic and unpredictable that he may have delayed
Indian independence for twenty-five years.
For Gandhi was an extremely difficult man to work with. He had no partners, only
disciples. For members of his ashrams, he dictated every minute of their days,
and not only every morsel of food they should eat but when they should eat it.
Without ever having heard of a protein or a vitamin, he considered himself an
expert on diet, as on most things, and was constantly experimenting. Once when
he fell ill, he was found to have been living on a diet of ground-nut butter and
lemon juice; British doctors called it malnutrition. And Gandhi had even greater
confidence in his abilities as a "nature doctor," prescribing obligatory cures
for his ashramites, such as dried cow-dung powder and various concoctions
containing cow dung (the cow, of course, being sacred to the Hindu). And to
those he really loved he gave enemas--but again, alas, not to Margaret
Bourke-White. Which is too bad, really. For admiring Candice Bergen's work as I
do, I would have been most interested in seeing how she would have experienced
this beatitude. The scene might have lived in film history.
There are 400 biographies of Gandhi, and his writings run to 80 volumes, and
since he lived to be seventy-nine, and rarely fell silent, there are, as I have
indicated, quite a few inconsistencies. The authors of the present movie even
acknowledge in a little-noticed opening title that they have made a film only
true to Gandhi's spirit. For my part, I do not intend to pick through Gandhi's
writings to make him look like Attila the Hun (although the thought is
tempting), but to give a fair, weighted balance of his views, laying stress
above all on his actions, and on what he told other men to do when the time for
action had come.
Anti-racism: the reader will have noticed that in the present-day community of
nations South Africa is a pariah. So it is an absolutely amazing piece of good
fortune that Gandhi, born the son of the Prime Minister of a tiny Indian
principality and received as an attorney at the bar of the Middle Temple in
London, should have begun his climb to greatness as a member of the small Indian
community in, precisely, South Africa. Natal, then a separate colony, wanted to
limit Indian immigration and, as part of the government program, ordered Indians
to carry identity papers (an action not without similarities to measures under
consideration in the U.S. today to control illegal immigration). The film's
lengthy opening sequences are devoted to Gandhi's leadership in the fight
against Indians carrying their identity papers (burning their registration
cards), with for good measure Gandhi being expelled from the first-class section
of a railway train, and Gandhi being asked by whites to step off the sidewalk.
This inspired young Indian leader calls, in the film, for interracial harmony,
for people to "live together."
Now the time is 1893, and Gandhi is a "caste" Hindu, and from one of the higher
castes. Although, later, he was to call for improving the lot of India's
Untouchables, he was not to have any serious misgivings about the fundamentals
of the caste system for about another thirty years, and even then his doubts, to
my way of thinking, were rather minor. In the India in which Gandhi grew up, and
had only recently left, some castes could enter the courtyards of certain Hindu
temples, while others could not. Some castes were forbidden to use the village
well. Others were compelled to live outside the village, still others to leave
the road at the approach of a person of higher caste and perpetually to call
out, giving warning, so that no one would be polluted by their proximity. The
endless intricacies of Hindu caste by-laws varied somewhat region by region, but
in Madras, where most South African Indians were from, while a Nayar could
pollute a man of higher caste only by touching him, Kammalans polluted at a
distance of 24 feet, toddy drawers at 36 feet, Pulayans and Cherumans at 48
feet, and beef-eating Paraiyans at 64 feet. All castes and the thousands of
sub-castes were forbidden, needless to say, to marry, eat, or engage in social
activity with any but members of their own group. In Gandhi's native Gujarat a
caste Hindu who had been polluted by touch had to perform extensive ritual
ablutions or purify himself by drinking a holy beverage composed of milk, whey,
and (what else?) cow dung.
Low-caste Hindus, in short, suffered humiliations in their native India compared
to which the carrying of identity cards in South Africa was almost trivial In
fact, Gandhi, to his credit, was to campaign strenuously in his later life for
the reduction of caste barriers in India--a campaign almost invisible in the
movie, of course, conveyed in only two glancing references, leaving the audience
with the officially sponsored if historically astonishing notion that racism was
introduced into India by the British. To present the Gandhi of 1893, a
conventional caste Hindu, fresh from caste-ridden India where a Paraiyan could
pollute at 64 feet, as the champion of interracial equalitarianism is one of the
most brazen hypocrisies I have ever encountered in a serious movie.
The film, moreover, does not give the slightest hint as to Gandhi's attitude
toward blacks, and the viewers of 'Gandhi' would naturally suppose that, since
the future Great Soul opposed South African discrimination against Indians, he
would also oppose South African discrimination against black people. But this is
not so. While Gandhi, in South Africa, fought furiously to have Indians
recognized as loyal subjects of the British empire, and to have them enjoy the
full rights of Englishmen, he had no concern for blacks whatever. In fact,
during one of the "Kaffir Wars" he volunteered to organize a brigade of Indians
to put down a Zulu rising, and was decorated himself for valor under fire.
For, yes, Gandhi (Sergeant Major Gandhi) was awarded Victoria's coveted War
Medal. Throughout most of his life Gandhi had the most inordinate admiration for
British soldiers, their sense of duty, their discipline and stoicism in defeat
(a trait he emulated himself). He marveled that they retreated with heads high,
like victors. There was even a time in his life when Gandhi, hardly to be
distinguished >from Kipling's Gunga Din, wanted nothing much as to be a Soldier
of the Queen. Since this is not in keeping with the "spirit" of Gandhi, as
decided by Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi, it is naturally omitted >from he
movie.
Anti-colonialism: as almost always with historical films, even those more honest
than 'Gandhi,' the historical personage on which the movie is based is not only
more complex but more interesting than the character shown on the screen. During
his entire South African period, and for some time after, until he was about
fifty, Gandhi was nothing more or less than an imperial loyalist, claiming for
Indians the rights of Englishmen but unshakably loyal to the crown. He supported
the empire ardently in no fewer than three wars: the Boer War, the "Kaffir War,"
and, with the most extreme zeal, World War I. If Gandhi's mind were of the
modern European sort, this would seam to suggest that his later attitude toward
Britain was the product of unrequited love: he had wanted to be an Englishman;
Britain had rejected him and his people; very well then, they would have their
own country. But this would imply a point of "agonizing reappraisal," a moment
when Gandhi's most fundamental political beliefs were reexamined and, after the
most bitter soul-searching, repudiated. But I have studied the literature and
cannot find this moment of bitter soul-searching. Instead, listening to his
"inner voice" (which in the case of divines of all countries often speaks in the
tones of holy opportunism), Gandhi simply, tranquilly, without announcing any
sharp break, set off in a new direction.
It should be understood that it is unlikely Gandhi ever truly conceived of
"becoming" an Englishman, first, because he was a Hindu to the marrow of his
bones, and also, perhaps, because his democratic instincts were really quite
weak. He was a man of the most extreme, autocratic temperament, tyrannical,
unyielding even regarding things he knew nothing about, totally intolerant of
all opinions but his own. He was, furthermore, in the highest degree
reactionary, permitting in India no change in the relationship between the
feudal lord and his peasants or servants, the rich and the poor. In his 'The
Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi,' the best and least hagiographic of the
full-length studies, Robert Payne, although admiring Gandhi greatly, explains
Gandhi's "new direction" on his return to India from South Africa as follows:
He spoke in generalities, but he was searching for a single cause, a single
hard-edged task to which he would devote the remaining years of his life. He
wanted to repeat his triumph in South Africa on Indian soil. He dreamed of
assembling a small army of dedicated men around him, issuing stern commands
and leading them to some almost unobtainable goal.
Gandhi, in short, was a leader looking for a cause. He found it, of course, in
home rule for India and, ultimately, in independence.
WE ARE therefore presented with the seeming anomaly of a Gandhi who, in Britain
when war broke out in August 1914, instantly contacted the War Office, swore
that he would stand by England in its hour of need, and created the Indian
Volunteer Corps, which he might have commanded if he hadn't fallen ill with
pleurisy. In 1915, back in India, he made a memorable speech in Madras in which
he proclaimed, "I discovered that the British empire had certain ideals with
which I have fallen in love...." In early 1918, as the war in Europe entered its
final crisis, he wrote to the Viceroy of India, "I have an idea that if I become
your recruiting agent-in-chief, I might rain men upon you," and he proclaimed in
a speech in Kheda that the British "love justice; they have shielded men against
oppression." Again, he wrote to the Viceroy, "I would make India offer all her
able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the empire at this critical moment To some of
his pacifist friends, who were horrified, Gandhi replied by appealing to the
'Bhagavad Gita' and to the endless wars recounted in the Hindu epics, the
'Ramayana' and the 'Mahabharata,' adding further to the pacifists' honor by
declaring that Indians "have always been warlike, and the finest hymn composed
by Tulsidas in praise of Rama gives the first place to his ability to strike
down the enemy."
This was in contradiction to the interpretation of sacred Hindu scriptures
Gandhi had offered on earlier occasions (and would offer later), which was that
they did not recount military struggles but spiritual struggles; but, unusual
for him, he strove to find some kind of synthesis. "I do not say, `Let us go and
kill the Germans,'" Gandhi explained. "I say, `Let us go and die for the sake of
India and the empire.'" And yet within two years, the time having come for
swaraj (home rule), Gandhi's inner voice spoke again, and, the leader having
found his cause, Gandhi proclaimed resoundingly: "The British empire today
represents Satanism, and they who love God can afford to have no love for
Satan."
The idea of swaraj, originated by others, crept into Gandhi's mind gradually.
With a fair amount of winding about, Gandhi, roughly, passed through three
phases. First, he was entirely pro-British, and merely wanted for Indians the
rights of Englishmen (as he understood them). Second, he was still pro-British,
but with the belief that, having proved their loyalty to the empire, Indians
would be granted some degree of swaraj. Third, as the home-rule movement
gathered momentum, it was the swaraj, the whole swaraj, and nothing but the
swaraj, and he turned relentlessly against the crown. The movie to the contrary,
he caused the British no end of trouble in their struggles during World War II.
BUT it should not be thought for one second that Gandhi's finally full-blown
desire to detach India from the British empire gave him the slightest sympathy
with other colonial peoples pursuing similar objectives. Throughout his entire
life Gandhi displayed the most spectacular inability to understand or even
really take in people unlike himself--a trait which V.S. Naipaul considers
specifically Hindu, and I am inclined to agree. Just as Gandhi had been totally
unconcerned with the situation of South Africa's blacks (he hardly noticed they
were there until they rebelled), so now he was totally unconcerned with other
Asians or Africans. In fact, he was adamantly *opposed* to certain Arab
movements within the Ottoman empire for reasons of internal Indian politics.
At the close of World War I, the Muslims of India were deeply absorbed in what
they called the "khilafat" movement--"khilafat" being their corruption of
"Caliphate," the Caliph in question being the Ottoman Sultan. In addition to his
temporal powers, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire held the spiritual position of
Caliph, supreme leader of the world's Muslims and successor to the Prophet
Muhammad. At the defeat of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Turkey), the
Sultan was a prisoner in his palace in Constantinople, shorn of his religious as
well as his political authority, and the Muslims of India were incensed. It so
happened that the former subject peoples of the Ottoman empire, principally
Arabs, were perfectly happy to be rid of this Caliph, and even the Turks were
glad to be rid of him, but this made no impression at all on the Muslims of
India, for whom the issue was essentially a club with which to beat the British.
Until this odd historical moment, Indian Muslims had felt little real allegiance
to the Ottoman Sultan either, but now that he had fallen, the British had done
it! The British had taken away their khilafat! And one of the most ardent
supporters of this Indian Muslim movement was the new Hindu leader, Gandhi.
No one questions that the formative period for Gandhi as a political leader was
his time in South Africa. Throughout history Indians, divided into 1,500
language and dialect groups (India today has 15 official languages), had little
sense of themselves as a nation. Muslim Indians and Hindu Indians felt about as
close as Christians and Moors during their 700 years of cohabitation in Spain.
In addition to which, the Hindus were divided into thousands of castes and
sub-castes, and there were also Parsees, Sikhs, Jains. But in South Africa
officials had thrown them all in together, and in the mind of Gandhi (another
one of those examples of nationalism being born in exile) grew the idea of India
as a nation, and Muslim-Hindu friendship became one of the few positions on
which he never really reversed himself. So Gandhi ignoring Arabs and
Turks--became an adamant supporter of the Khilafat movement out of strident
Indian nationalism. He had become a national figure in India for having unified
13,000 Indians of all faiths in South Africa, and now he was determined to reach
new heights by unifying hundreds of millions of Indians of all faiths in India
itself. But this nationalism did not please everyone, particularly Tolstoy, who
in his last years carried on a curious correspondence with the new Indian
leader. For Tolstoy, Gandhi's Indian nationalism "spoils everything."
As for the "anti-colonialism" of the nationalist Indian state since
independence, Indira Gandhi, India's present Prime Minister, hears an inner
voice of her own, it would appear, and this inner voice told her to justify the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as produced by provocative maneuvers on the part
of the U.S. and China, as well as to be the first country outside the Soviet
bloc to recognize the Hanoi puppet regime in Cambodia. So everything plainly
depends on who is colonizing whom, and Mrs. Gandhi's voice perhaps tells her
that the subjection of Afghanistan and Cambodia to foreign rule is "defensive"
colonialism. And the movie's message that Mahatma Gandhi, and by plain
implication India (the country for which he plays the role of Joan of Arc), have
taken a holy, unchanging stance against the colonization of nation by nation is
just another of its hypocrisies. For India, when it comes to colonialism or
anti-colonialism, it has been Realpolitik all the way.
Nonviolence: but the real center and raison d'etre of 'Gandhi' is ahimsa,
nonviolence, which principle when incorporated into vast campaigns of
noncooperation with British rule the Mahatma called by an odd name he made up
himself, satyagraha, which means something like "truth-striving." During the key
part of his life, Gandhi devoted a great deal of time explaining the moral and
philosophical meanings of both ahimsa and satyagraha. But much as the film
sanitizes Gandhi to the point where one would mistake him for a Christian saint,
and sanitizes India to the point where one would take it for Shangri-la, it
quite sweeps away Gandhi's ethical and religious ponderings, his complexities,
his qualifications, and certainly his vacillations, which simplifying process
leaves us with our old European friend: pacifism. It is true that Gandhi was
much impressed by the Sermon on the Mount, his favorite passage in the Bible,
which he read over and over again. But for all the Sermon's inspirational value,
and its service as an ideal in relations among individual human beings, no
Christian state which survived has ever based its policies on the Sermon on the
Mount since Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman
empire. And no modern Western state which survives can ever base its policies on
pacifism. And no Hindu state will ever base its policies on ahimsa. Gandhi
himself--although the film dishonestly conceals this from us--many times
conceded that in dire circumstances "war may have to be resorted to as a
necessary evil."
It is something of an anomaly that Gandhi, held in popular myth to be a pure
pacifist (a myth which governments of India have always been at great pains to
sustain in the belief that it will reflect credit on India itself, and to which
the present movie adheres slavishly), was until fifty not ill-disposed to war at
all. As I have already noted, in three wars, no sooner had the bugles sounded
than Gandhi not only gave his support, but was clamoring for arms. To form new
regiments! To fight! To destroy the enemies of the empire! Regular Indian army
units fought in both the Boer War and World War I, but this was not enough for
Gandhi. He wanted to raise new troops, even, in the case of the Boer and Kaffir
Wars, from the tiny Indian colony in South Africa. British military authorities
thought it not really worth the trouble to train such a small body of Indians as
soldiers, and were even resistant to training them as an auxiliary medical corps
("stretcher bearers"), but finally yielded to Gandhi's relentless importuning.
As first instructed, the Indian Volunteer Corps was not supposed actually to go
into combat, but Gandhi, adamant, led his Indian volunteers into the thick of
battle. When the British commanding officer was mortally wounded during an
engagement in the Kaffir War, Gandhi--though his corps' deputy
commander--carried the officer's stretcher himself from the battlefield and for
miles over the sun-baked veldt. The British empire's War Medal did not have its
name for nothing, and it was generally earned.
ANYONE who wants to wade through Gandhi's endless ruminations about himsa and
ahimsa (violence and nonviolence) is welcome to do so, but it is impossible for
the skeptical reader to avoid the conclusion--let us say in 1920, when swaraj
(home rule) was all the rage and Gandhi's inner voice started telling him that
ahimsa was the thing--that this inner voice knew what it was talking about. By
this I mean that, though Gandhi talked with the tongue of Hindu gods and sacred
scriptures, his inner voice had a strong sense of expediency. Britain, if only
comparatively speaking, was a moral nation, and nonviolent civil disobedience
was plainly the best and most effective way of achieving Indian independence.
Skeptics might also not be surprised to learn that as independence approached,
Gandhi's inner voice began to change its tune. It has been reported that Gandhi
"half-welcomed" the civil war that broke out in the last days. Even a
fratricidal "bloodbath" (Gandhi's word) would be preferable to the British.
And suddenly Gandhi began endorsing violence left, right, and center. During the
fearsome rioting in Calcutta he gave his approval to men "using violence in a
moral cause." How could he tell them that violence was wrong, he asked, "unless
I demonstrate that nonviolence is more effective?" He blessed the Nawab of Maler
Kotla when he gave orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his
state. He sang the praises of Subhas Chandra Bose, who, sponsored by first the
Nazis and then the Japanese, organized in Singapore an Indian National Army with
which he hoped to conquer India with Japanese support, establishing a
totalitarian dictatorship. Meanwhile, after independence in 1947, the armies of
the India that Gandhi had created immediately marched into battle, incorporating
the state of Hyderabad by force and making war in Kashmir on secessionist
Pakistan. When Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist in January 1948 he
was honored by the new state with a vast military funeral--in my view by no
means inapposite.
BUT it is not widely realized (nor will this film tell you) how much violence
was associated with Gandhi's so-called "nonviolent" movement from the very
beginning. India's Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore, had sensed a
strong current of nihilism in Gandhi almost from his first days, and as early as
1920 wrote of Gandhi's "fierce joy of annihilation," which Tagore feared would
lead India into hideous orgies of devastation--which ultimately proved to be the
case. Robert Payne has said that there was unquestionably an "unhealthy
atmosphere" among many of Gandhi's fanatic followers, and that Gandhi's habit of
going to the edge of violence and then suddenly retreating was fraught with
danger. "In matters of conscience I am uncompromising," proclaimed Gandhi
proudly. "Nobody can make me yield." The judgment of Tagore was categorical.
Much as he might revere Gandhi as a holy man, he quite detested him as a
politician and considered that his campaigns were almost always so close to
violence that it was utterly disingenuous to call them nonviolent.
For every satyagraha true believer, moreover, sworn not to harm the adversary or
even to lift a finger in his own defense, there were sometimes thousands of
incensed freebooters and skirmishers bound by no such vow. Gandhi, to be fair,
was aware of this, and nominally deplored it--but with nothing like the
consistency shown in the movie. The film leads the audience to believe that
Gandhi's first "fast unto death," for example, was in protest against an act of
barbarous violence, the slaughter by an Indian crowd of a detachment of police
constables. But in actual fact Gandhi reserved this "ultimate weapon" of his to
interdict a 1931 British proposal to grant Untouchables a "separate electorate"
in the Indian national legislature--in effect a kind of affirmative-action
program for Untouchables. For reasons I have not been able to decrypt, Gandhi
was dead set against the project, but I confess it is another scene I would like
to have seen in the movie: Gandhi almost starving himself to death to block
affirmative action for Untouchables.
From what I have been able to decipher, Gandhi's main preoccupation in this
particular struggle was not even the British. Benefiting from the immense
publicity, he wanted to induce Hindus, overnight, ecstatically, and without any
of these British legalisms, to "open their hearts" to Untouchables. For a whole
week Hindu India was caught up in a joyous delirium. No more would the
Untouchables be scavengers and sweepers! No more would they be banned from Hindu
temples! No more would they pollute at 64 feet! It lasted just a week. Then the
temple doors swung shut again, and all was as before. Meanwhile, on the
passionate subject of swaraj Gandhi was crying, "I would not flinch from
sacrificing a million lives for India's liberty!" The million Indian lives were
indeed sacrificed, and in full. They fell, however, not to the bullets of
British soldiers but to he knives and clubs of their fellow lndians in savage
butcheries when he British finally withdrew.
ALTHOUGH the movie sneers at his reasoning as being the flimsiest of pretexts, I
cannot imagine an impartial person studying the subject without concluding that
concern for Indian religious minorities was one of the principal reasons Britain
stayed in India as long as it did. When it finally withdrew, blood-maddened mobs
surged through the streets from one end of India to the other, the majority
group in each area, Hindu or Muslim, slaughtering the defenseless minority
without mercy in one of the most hideous periods of carnage of modern history.
