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Saturday, December 12, 2009

Mahatma Gandhi speaks

On 21st June 1961 a voice manifested in the seance room of British medium Leslie Flint, claiming to be that of the late Mahatma Gandhi.
Mahatma Gandhi
The voice said:"Death is something which in your world is taboo! People are afraid to mention the word. They do not like to think about it. They run away from it. It is something they are afraid of because they know deep down in their hearts that it is a reality they must face eventually, and they are afraid of it because they are knowing deep down in themselves they are not fully prepared for it. They know so little about it and they are afraid to find out. Fear dominates the hearts and minds of man. And we know that, unless something is done about this before it is too late, the disastrous consequences are so tremendous that one hardly dares to think about it.
Today your world stands on the bridge as it were of destruction. Anytime that bridge, which is in itself so unreliable that it is doubtful if it will sustain the weight that is placed upon it, because man himself, unconsciously, and in some ways consciously, has brought into being such a condition of confusion, such a condition of hatred and intolerance.

Special Publication From the pages of The Hindu

This is a compilation of articles published in The Hindu during 1997 & 1998.
This book in 530 pages of the last 200 days of Gandhiji's extraordinary life from 15th July 1947 to 30th January 1948 may rekindle interest in his teachings and set off further enquiry, research, and new writing relevant not only to the times that we live in now, but for all time.
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Mahatma Gandhi Residential High School (MGRS)

Project DescriptionIn 1991, the Mahatma Gandhi Residential High School was started to cater to those boys who were at the risk of discontinuing school after their 7th class to go and work in hotels. MGRS is a residential school for students from class 8 to class 10. There are a maximum of 30 students in each class.Project proposal asked about supporting 1/3rd cost of running the school. After discussions, current plan is to support batch of students from class 8th to 10th, so that there is continuous interaction with same group and 1/3rd cost is also covered.After supporting the 8th Standard students for one year, Asha Colorado gained enough confidence on this project to start a 'Support a Child' program for these kids. Donors were encouraged to sponsor the expenses of a kid in the 9th standard for the 2005-06 academic year. This program was a resounding success and we were able to raise about $5000, from 20 unique donors.
Purpose / GoalsThe goal of this project is to make sure that kids who drop out or are at risk of dropping out of high school for financial reasons are brought back into the education system and given the same educational opportunities as kids from more better off families.
Organization DescriptionThe Kisan Sabha, as the name suggests, was started with the motive to empower land tenants through awareness about their rights. This was against the background of an ineffective Land Reforms Act. From organising kisan sabhas at the taluk and district levels, the group took up literacy campaigns as it realised that literacy was the prime reason for the farmers being victimised.
Project Type: Support a Child (description)
Primary Focus: children who are working (description)
Secondary Focus: dropouts
Area: Rural
Number of Children: 84
Student/Teacher Ratio: 17 : 1

Mahatma Gandhi

Date of Death:
30 January 1948
Nationality:
Indian
Quote count:
274
Times favorited:
1286
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi , also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was a major political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement. He was the pioneer of Satyagraha—a philosophy that is largely concerned with truth and 'resistance to evil through active, non-violent resistance'—which led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. Gandhi is commonly known in India and across the world as the Mahatma and as Bapu . In India, he is officially accorded the honour of Father of the Nation. 2 October, his birthday, is commemorated each year as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday. On 15 June

M A H A T M A G A N D H I ~ A Great Soul

WELCOME to theMahatma Gandhi Memorial Statue Web Site. To honor the life and achievements of Mahatma Gandhi, members of the Gandhi Trust and elected officials, community leaders, and citizens of Skokie and the surrounding areas, unveiled a 12ft statue at Heritage Park on the Birthday anniversary ofMahatma Gandhi on October 2, 2004. This site provides information about the memorial as well as the life of Mahatma Gandhi.
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LEARN ABOUT GANDHI'S GRANDSON'S 2006 VISIT, AN EXHIBIT, LECTURES, AND A DISCUSSION REGARDING MAHATMA GANDHI'S LIFE AND NONVIOLENT CHANGE.

Indian Freedom Struggle (1857-1947)

End of the East India Company
Consequent to the failure of the Revolt of 1857 rebellion, one also saw the end of the East India Company's rule in India and many important changes took place in the British Government's policy towards India which sought to strengthen the British rule through winning over the Indian princes, the chiefs and the landlords. Queen Victoria's Proclamation of November 1, 1858 declared that thereafter India would be governed by and in the name of the British Monarch through a Secretary of State.
The Governor General was given title of Viceroy, which meant the representative of the Monarch. Queen Victoria assumed the title of the Empress of India and thus gave the British Government unlimited powers to intervene in the internal affair of the Indian states. In brief, the British paramountcy over India, including the Indian States, was firmly established. The British gave their support to the loyal princes, zamindar and local chiefs but neglected the educated people and the common masses. They also promoted the other interests like those of the British merchants, industrialists, planters and civil servants. The people of India, as such, did not have any say in running the government or formulation of its policies. Consequently, people's disgust with the British rule kept mounting, which gave rise to the birth of Indian National Movement.
The leadership of the freedom movement passed into the hands of reformists like Raja Rammohan Roy, Bankim Chandra and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. During this time, the binding psychological concept of National Unity was also forged in the fire of the struggle against a common foreign oppressor.
Raja Rammohan Roy (1772-1833) founded the Brahmo Samaj in 1828 which aimed at purging the society of all its evil practices. He worked for eradicating evils like sati, child marriage and purdah system, championed widow marriage and women's education and favoured English system of education in India. It was through his effort that sati was declared a legal offence by the British.
Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) the disciple of Ramakrishna Pramhamsa, established the Ramkrishna Mission at Belur in 1897. He championed the supremacy of Vedantic philosophy. His talk at the Chicago (USA) Conference of World Religions in 1893 made the westerners realize the greatness of Hinduism for the first time.
Formation of Indian National Congress (INC)
The foundations of the Indian National Movement were laid by Suredranath Banerjee with the formation of Indian Association at Calcutta in 1876. The aim of the Association was to represent the views of the educated middle class, inspire the Indian community to take the value of united action. The Indian Association was, in a way, the forerunner of the Indian National Congress, which was founded, with the help of A.O. Hume, a retired British official. The birth of Indian National Congress (INC) in 1885 marked the entry of new educated middle-class into politics and transformed the Indian political horizon. The first session of the Indian National Congress was held in Bombay in December 1885 under the president ship of Womesh Chandra Banerjee and was attended among others by and Badr-uddin-Tyabji.
At the turn of the century, the freedom movement reached out to the common unlettered man through the launching of the "Swadeshi Movement" by leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Aurobindo Ghose. The Congress session at Calcutta in 1906, presided by Dadabhai Naoroji, gave a call for attainment of 'Swaraj' a type of self-government elected by the people within the British Dominion, as it prevailed in Canada and Australia, which were also the parts of the British Empire.
Meanwhile, in 1909, the British Government announced certain reforms in the structure of Government in India which are known as Morley-Minto Reforms. But these reforms came as a disappointment as they did not mark any advance towards the establishment of a representative Government. The provision of special representation of the Muslim was seen as a threat to the Hindu-Muslim unity on which the strength of the National Movement rested. So, these reforms were vehemently opposed by all the leaders, including the Muslim leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Subsequently, King George V made two announcements in Delhi: firstly, the partition of Bengal, which had been effected in 1905, was annulled and, secondly, it was announced that the capital of India was to be shifted from Calcutta to Delhi.
The disgust with the reforms announced in 1909 led to the intensification of the struggle for Swaraj. While, on one side, the extremist led by the great leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai and Bipin Chandra Pal waged a virtual war against the British, on the other side, the revolutionaries stepped up their violent activities There was a widespread unrest in the country. To add to the already growing discontent among the people, Rowlatt Act was passed in 1919, which empowered the Government to put people in jail without trial. This caused widespread indignation, led to massive demonstration and hartals, which the Government repressed with brutal measures like the Jaliawalla Bagh massacre, where thousand of unarmed peaceful people were gunned down on the order of General Dyer.
Jallianwala Bagh Massacre
Jalianwala Bagh massacre of April 13, 1919 was one of the most inhuman acts of the British rulers in India. The people of Punjab gathered on the auspicious day of Baisakhi at Jalianwala Bagh, adjacent to Golden Temple (Amritsar), to lodge their protest peacefully against persecution by the British Indian Government. General Dyer appeared suddenly with his armed police force and fired indiscriminately at innocent empty handed people leaving hundreds of people dead, including women and children.
After the First World War (1914-1918), Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi became the undisputed leader of the Congress. During this struggle, Mahatma Gandhi had developed the novel technique of non-violent agitation, which he called 'Satyagraha', loosely translated as 'moral domination'. Gandhi, himself a devout Hindu, also espoused a total moral philosophy of tolerance, brotherhood of all religions, non-violence (ahimsa) and of simple living. With this, new leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose also emerged on the scene and advocated the adoption of complete independence as the goal of the National Movement.

Mahatma Gandhi A Votary for Sustainable Living

Mahatma Gandhi not only gave us freedom but he also gave the world and us a new thought on nonviolence and sustainable living. His teachings and experiments are more valid today then ever especially when we are trying to find solutions to worldwide violence and runaway consumptive life style which is going to put a very heavy burden on the world's resources.Through ages India has occasionally given to the world a new thought. Thus Buddhism, Jainism, Yogic system, Sikhism are part of great spiritual thought given by India from time to time. Gandhiji's message of nonviolence and sustainable living is a continuation of that long tradition. Gandhiji was energy conservator par excellence. He lived in his ashrams without electricity or any modern amenities. His insistence on use of self-human labor for majority of needs was legendary and was usually frowned upon by his closest colleagues who thought it was anti progress and pushing back India to stone ages. Nevertheless his own life was a shining example of how with frugal living and with minimum energy needs he was capable of producing the highest quality of thought. Very few of us can live his exemplary life but Gandhiji showed that mental happiness and simple living could form the basis of sustainability. He believed that with simple living the resources of the planet earth can sustain us comfortably and his famous saying that earth provides us enough for our needs but not for our greed is extremely apt today.Gandhiji was a highly evolved and spiritual human being. Politics came as a byproduct of spirituality and he considered it as his duty to help his countrymen and fellow beings. The spirit of Bhagwadgita's Karma Yoga guided him in this endeavor. There are many instances of people who saw his glowing skin, aura, and felt the presence of his personality whenever they met him. That is only possible for a Yogi of very high order.My father who was involved in the freedom struggle and went to jail with Gandhiji told of a remarkable instance. In early 1940's just before the quit India movement, a mammoth public meeting took place in Allahabad. About 5-10 lakh people were present. Gandhiji was late for the meeting. All the great leaders of independence movement were giving their speeches and trying to calm the crowd, which was quite restless. Then suddenly Gandhiji came, climbed on the dias and put a finger on his lips. A wave of silence swept the grounds starting from dias. My father termed it as a remarkable experience of the power of a small frail man over the masses.Sometimes Gandhiji carried his energy conservation experiments too far. His experiments on conserving his sexual energy proved quite controversial. He was obviously following the age-old tradition of abstinence that yogis practice. Thus when at the age of 70 he had a wet dream he felt that his world had collapsed. He wrote about it and said that he felt ashamed of himself. Recent scientific evidence however has shown that our brains are full of sexual chemicals, which help in memory improvement and general well being. It is therefore possible that the practice of abstinence was done intuitively by yogis to conserve these chemicals to enhance their brain quality, which would help them in practice of yoga. More than the loss of chemicals, Gandhiji felt a lack of Sanyam and a loss of control over his purity of thought and hence his anguish. As a spiritual being and visionary Gandhiji was far ahead of his times. I am sure if he were alive today he would have felt that his dream village (about which he talked often) could have taken shape with the availability of internet connectivity, desktop manufacturing and small renewable energy power packs. His dream of giving employment and decent life to rural population may become possible with the availability of these energy efficient and high tech systems. Hence if we follow his maxim of simple living and high thinking then it is possible to have a decentralized high tech rural society and India can again show the world a new path in sustainable living.

The Gandhi Nobody Knows

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.
A comparison is in order. At the famous Amritsar massacre of 1919, shot in
elaborate and loving detail in the present movie and treated by
post-independence Indian historians as if it were Auschwitz, Ghurka troops under
the command of a British officer, General Dyer, fired into an unarmed crowd of
Indians defying a ban and demonstrating for Indian independence. The crowd
contained women and children; 379 persons died; it was all quite horrible. Dyer
was court-martialed and cashiered, but the incident lay heavily on British
consciences for the next three decades, producing a severe inhibiting effect.
Never again would the British empire commit another Amritsar, anywhere.
As soon as the oppressive British were gone, however, the Indians--gentle,
tolerant people that they are gave themselves over to an orgy of bloodletting.
Trained troops did not pick off targets at a distance with Enfield rifles.
Blood-crazed Hindus, or Muslims, ran through the streets with knives, beheading
babies, stabbing women, old people. Interestingly, our movie shows none of this
on camera (the oldest way of stacking the deck in Hollywood). All we see is the
aged Gandhi, grieving, and of course fasting, at these terrible reports of
riots. And, naturally, the film doesn't whisper a clue as to the total number of
dead, which might spoil the mood somehow. The fact is that we will never know
how many Indians were murdered by other Indians during the country's
Independence Massacres, but almost all serious studies place the figure over a
million, and some, such as Payne's sources, go to 4 million. So, for those who
like round numbers, the British killed some 400 seditious colonials at Amritsar
and the name Amritsar lives in infamy, while Indians may have killed some *4
million* of their own countrymen for no other reason than that they were of a
different religious faith and people think their great leader would make an
inspirational subject for a movie. Ahimsa, as can be seen, then, had an
absolutely tremendous moral effect when used against Britain, but not only would
it not have worked against Nazi Germany (the most obvious reproach, and of
course quite true), but, the crowning irony, it had virtually no effect whatever
when Gandhi tried to bring it into play against violent Indians.
Despite this at best patchy record, the film-makers have gone to great lengths
to imply that this same principle of ahimsa--presented in the movie as the
purest form of pacifism--is universally effective, yesterday, today, here,
there, everywhere. We hear no talk from Gandhi of war sometimes being a
"necessary evil," but only him announcing--and more than once--"An eye for an
eye makes the whole world blind." In a scene very near the end of the movie, we
hear Gandhi say, as if after deep reflection: "Tyrants and murderers can seem
invincible at the time, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always."
During the last scene of the movie, following the assassination, Margaret
Bourke-White is keening over the death of the Great Soul with an English
admiral's daughter named Madeleine Slade, in whose bowel movements Gandhi took
the deepest interest (see their correspondence), and Miss Slade remarks
incredulously that Gandhi felt that he had failed. They are then both
incredulous for a moment, after which Miss Slade observes mournfully, "When we
most needed it [presumably meaning during World War II], he offered the world a
way out of madness. But the world didn't see it." Then we hear once again the
assassin's shots, Gandhi's "Oh, God," and last, in case we missed them the first
time, Gandhi's words (over the shimmering waters of the Ganges?): "Tyrants and
murderers can seem invincible at the time, but in the end they always fall.
Think of it. Always." This is the end of the picture.
NOW, as it happens, I have been thinking about tyrants and murderers for some
time. But the fact that in the end they always fall has never given me much
comfort, partly because, not being a Hindu and not expecting reincarnation after
reincarnation, I am simply not prepared to wait them out. It always occurs to me
that, while I am waiting around for them to fall, they might do something mean
to me, like fling me into a gas oven or send me off to a Gulag. Unlike a Hindu
and not worshipping stasis, I am also given to wondering who is to bring these
murderers and tyrants down, it being all too risky a process to wait for them
and the regimes they establish simply to die of old age. The fact that a few
reincarnations >from now they will all have turned to dust somehow does not seem
to suggest a rational strategy for dealing with the problem.
Since the movie's Madeleine Slade specifically invites us to revere the "way out
of madness" that Gandhi offered the world at the time of World War II, I am
under the embarrassing obligation of recording exactly what courses of action
the Great Soul recommended to the various parties involved in that crisis. For
Gandhi was never stinting in his advice. Indeed, the less he knew about a
subject, the less he stinted.
I am aware that for many not privileged to have visited the former British Raj,
the names Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Deccan are simply words. But other names, such
as Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, somehow have a harder profile. The term
"Jew," also, has a reasonably hard profile, and I feel all Jews sitting
emotionally at the movie 'Gandhi' should be apprised of the advice that the
Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should
commit collective suicide. If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to
offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers' knives and throw themselves
into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public opinion, Gandhi was
convinced, and their moral triumph would be remembered for "ages to come." If
they would only pray for Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they
would leave a "rich heritage to mankind." Although Gandhi had known Jews from
his earliest days in South Africa--where his three staunchest white supporters
were Jews, every one--he disapproved of how rarely they loved their enemies. And
he never repented of his recommendation of collective suicide. Even after the
war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told Louis
Fischer, one of his biographers, that the Jews died anyway, didn't they? They
might as well have died significantly.
Gandhi's views on the European crisis were not entirely consistent. He
vigorously opposed Munich, distrusting Chamberlain. "Europe has sold her soul
for the sake of a seven days' earthly existence," he declared. "The peace that
Europe gained at Munich is a triumph of violence." But when the Germans moved
into the Bohemian heartland, he was back to urging nonviolent resistance,
exhorting the Czechs to go forth, unarmed, against the Wehrmacht, *perishing
gloriously*--collective suicide again. He had Madeleine Slade draw up two
letters to President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia, instructing him on the
proper conduct of Czechoslovak satyagrahi when facing the Nazis.
When Hitler attacked Poland, however, Gandhi suddenly endorsed the Polish army's
military resistance, calling it "almost nonviolent." (If this sounds like
double-talk, I can only urge readers to read Gandhi.) He seemed at this point to
have a rather low opinion of Hitler, but when Germany's panzer divisions turned
west, Allied armies collapsed under the ferocious onslaught, and British ships
were streaming across the Straits of Dover from Dunkirk, he wrote furiously to
the Viceroy of India: "This manslaughter must be stopped. You are losing; if you
persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man...."
Gandhi also wrote an open letter to the British people, passionately urging them
to surrender and accept whatever fate Hitler' had prepared for them. "Let them
take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You
will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds." Since none of this
had the intended effect, Gandhi, the following year, addressed an open letter to
the prince of darkness himself, Adolf Hitler.
THE scene must be pictured. In late December 1941, Hitler stood at the pinnacle
of his might. His armies, undefeated anywhere ruled Europe from the English
Channel to the Volga. Rommel had entered Egypt. The Japanese had reached
Singapore. The U.S. Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. At this
superbly chosen moment, Mahatma Gandhi attempted to convert Adolf Hitler to the
ways of nonviolence. "Dear Friend," the letter begins, and proceeds to a
heartfelt appeal to the Fuhrer to embrace all mankind "irrespective of race,
color, or creed." Every admirer of the film 'Gandhi' should be compelled to read
this letter. Surprisingly, it is not known to have had any deep impact on
Hitler. Gandhi was no doubt disappointed. He moped about, really quite
depressed, but still knew he was right. When the Japanese, having cut their way
through Burma, threatened India, Gandhi's strategy was to let them occupy as
much of India as they liked and then to "make them feel unwanted." His way of
helping his British "friends" was, at one of the worst points of the war, to
launch massive civil-disobedience campaigns against them, paralyzing some of
their efforts to defend India from the Japanese.
Here, then, is your leader, 0 followers of Gandhi: a man who thought Hitler's
heart would be melted by an appeal to forget race, color, and creed, and who was
sure the feelings of the Japanese would be hurt if they sensed themselves
unwanted. As world-class statesmen go, it is not a very good record. Madeleine
Slade was right, I suppose. The world certainly didn't listen to Gandhi. Nor,
for that matter, has the modern government of India listened to Gandhi. Although
all Indian politicians of all political parties claim to be Gandhians, India has
blithely fought three wars against Pakistan, one against China, and even invaded
and seized tiny, helpless Goa, and all without a whisper of a shadow of a
thought of ahimsa. And of course India now has atomic weapons, a satyagraha
technique if ever there was one.
I AM SURE that almost everyone who sees the movie 'Gandhi' is aware that, from a
religious point if view, the Mahatma was something called a "Hindu"--but I do
not think one in a thousand has the dimmest notion of the fundamental beliefs of
the Hindu religion. The simplest example is Gandhi's use of the word "God,"
which, for members of the great Western religions--Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam, all interrelated--means a personal god, a godhead. But when Gandhi said
"God" in speaking English, he was merely translating >from Gujarati or Hindi,
and from the Hindu culture. Gandhi, in fact, simply did not believe in a
personal God, and wrote in so many words, "God is not a person ... but a force;
the undefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything; a living Power that
is Love...." And Gandhi's very favorite definition of God, repeated many
thousands of times, was, "God is Truth," which reduces God to some kind of
abstract principle.
Like all Hindus, Gandhi also believed in the "Great Oneness," according to
which everything is part of God, meaning not just you and me and everyone else,
but every living creature, every dead creature, every plant, the pitcher of
milk, the milk in the pitcher, the tumbler into which the milk is poured....
After all of which, he could suddenly pop up with a declaration that God is "the
Maker, the Law-Giver, a jealous Lord," phrases he had probably picked up in the
Bible and, with Hindu fluidity, felt he could throw in so as to embrace even
more of the Great Oneness. So when Gandhi said, "I am a Hindu and a Muslim and a
Christian and a Jew," it was (from a Western standpoint) Hindu double-talk.
Hindu holy men, some of them reformers like Gandhi, have actually even
"converted" to Islam, then Christianity, or whatever, to worship different
"aspects" of the Great Oneness, before reconverting to Hinduism. Now for
Christians, fastidious in matters of doctrine, a man who converts to Islam is an
apostate (or vice versa), but a Hindu is a Hindu is a Hindu. The better to
experience the Great Oneness, many Hindu holy men feel they should be women as
well as men, and one quite famous one even claimed he could menstruate (I will
spare the reader the details).
IN THIS ecumenical age, it is extremely hard to shake Westerners loose from the
notion that the devout of all religions, after all, worship "the one God." But
Gandhi did not worship the one God. He did not worship the God of mercy. He did
not worship the God of forgiveness. And this for the simple reason that the
concepts of mercy and forgiveness are absent from Hinduism. In Hinduism, men do
not pray to God for forgiveness, and a man's sins are never forgiven--indeed,
there is no one out there to do the forgiving. In your next life you may be born
someone higher up the caste scale, but in this life there is no hope. For
Gandhi, a true Hindu, did not believe in man's immortal soul. He believed with
every ounce of his being in karma, a series, perhaps a long series, of
reincarnations, and at the end, with great good fortune: mukti, liberation from
suffering and the necessity of rebirth, nothingness. Gandhi once wrote to
Tolstoy (of all people) that reincarnation explained "reasonably the many
mysteries of life." So if Hindus today still treat an Untouchable as barely
human, this is thought to be perfectly right and fitting because of his actions
in earlier lives. As can be seen, Hinduism, by its very theology, with its
sacred triad of karma, reincarnation, and caste (with caste an absolutely
indispensable part of the system) offers the most complacent justification of
inhumanity of any of the world's great religious faiths.
Gandhi, needless to say, was a Hindu reformer, one of many. Until well into his
fifties, however, he accepted the caste system in toto as the "natural order of
society," promoting control and discipline and sanctioned by his religion.
Later, in bursts of zeal, he favored moderating it in a number of ways. But he
stuck by the basic varna system (the four main caste groupings plus the
Untouchables) until the end of his days, insisting that a man's position and
occupation should be determined essentially by birth. Gandhi favored milder
treatment of Untouchables, renaming them Harijans, "children of God," but a
Harijan was still a Harijan. Perhaps because his frenzies of compassion were so
extreme (no, no, *he* would clean the *Harijan's* latrine), Hindu reverence for
him as a holy man became immense, but his prescriptions were rarely followed.
Industrialization and modernization have introduced new occupations and sizable
social and political changes in India, but the caste system has dexterously
adapted and remains largely intact today. The Sudras still labor. The sweepers
still sweep. Max Weber, in his 'The Religion of India,' after quoting the last
line of the 'Communist Manifesto,' suggests somewhat sardonically that low-
caste Hindus, too, have "nothing to lose but their chains," that they, too, have
"a world to win"--the only problem being that they have to die first and get
born again, higher, it is to be hoped, in the immutable system of caste.
Hinduism in general, wrote Weber, "is characterized by a dread of the magical
evil of innovation." Its very essence is to guarantee stasis.
In addition to its literally thousands of castes and sub-castes, Hinduism has
countless sects, with discordant rites and beliefs. It has no clear
ecclesiastical organization and no universal body of doctrine. What I have
described above is your standard, no-frills Hindu, of which in many ways Gandhi
was an excellent example. With the reader's permission I will skip over the
Upanishads, Vedanta, Yoga, the Puranas, Tantra, Bhakti, the 'Bhagavad-Gita'
(which contains theistic elements), Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and the terrible Kali
or Durga, to concentrate on those central beliefs that most motivated Gandhi's
behavior as a public figure.
IT SHOULD be plain by now that here is much in the Hindu culture that is
distasteful to the Western mind, and consequently is largely--unknown in the
West--not because Hindus do not go on and on about these subjects, but because a
Western squeamishness usually prevents these preoccupations from reaching print
(not to mention film). When Gandhi attended his first Indian National Congress
he was most distressed at seeing the Hindus--not laborers but high-caste Hindus,
civic leaders--defecating all over the place, as if to pay attention to where
the feces fell was somehow unclean. (For, as V.S. Naipaul puts it, in a twisted
Hindu way it is *unclean to clean*. It is unclean even to notice. "It was the
business of the sweepers to remove excrement, and until the sweepers came,
people were content to live in the midst of their own excrement.") Gandhi
exhorted Indians endlessly on the subject, saying that sanitation was the first
need of India, but he retained an obvious obsession with excreta, gleefully
designing latrines and latrine drills for all hands at the ashram, and, all in
all what with giving and taking enemas, and his public bowel movements, and his
deep concern with everyone else's bowel movements (much correspondence), and
endless dietary experiments *as a function* of bowel movements, he devoted a
rather large share of his life to the matter. Despite his constant campaigning
for sanitation, it is hard to believe that Gandhi was not permanently marked by
what Arthur Koestler terms the Hindu "morbid infatuation with filth," and what
V.S. Naipaul goes as far as to call Indian "deification of filth." (Decades
later, Krishna Menon, a Gandhian and one-time Indian Defence Minister, was still
fortifying sanctity by drinking a daily 1 of urine.)
But even more important, because it is dealt with in the movie directly--if of
course dishonestly--is Gandhi's parallel obsession with brahmacharya, or sexual
chastity. There is a scene late in the film in which Margaret Bourke-White
(again!) asks Gandhi's wife if he has ever broken his vow of chastity, taken, at
that time, about forty years before. Gandhi's wife, by now a sweet old lady,
answers wistfully, with a pathetic little note of hope, "Not yet." What lies
behind this adorable scene is the following: Gandhi held as one of his most
profound beliefs (a fundamental doctrine of Hindu medicine) that a man, as a
matter of the utmost importance, must conserve his bindu, or seminal fluid.
Koestler (in 'The Lotus and the Robot') gives a succinct account of this belief,
widespread among orthodox Hindus: "A man's vital energy is concentrated in his
seminal fluid, and this is stored in a cavity in the skull. It is the most
precious substance in the body ... an elixir of life both in the physical and
mystical sense, distilled from the blood.... A large store of bindu of pure
quality guarantees health, longevity, and supernatural powers.... Conversely,
every loss of it is a physical and spiritual impoverishment." Gandhi himself
said in so many words, "A man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emasculated
and cowardly, while in the chaste man secretions [semen] are sublimated into a
vital force pervading his whole being." And again, still Gandhi: "Ability to
retain and assimilate the vital liquid is a matter of long training. When
properly conserved it is transmuted into matchless energy and strength." Most
male Hindus go ahead and have sexual relations anyway, of course, but the belief
in the value of bindu leaves the whole culture in what many observers have
called a permanent state of "semen anxiety." When Gandhi once had a nocturnal
emission he almost had a nervous breakdown.
Gandhi was a truly fanatical opponent of sex for pleasure, and worked it out
carefully that a married couple should be allowed to have sex three or four
times *in a lifetime*, merely to have children and favored embodying this
restriction in the law of the land. The sexual-gratification wing of the
present-day feminist movement would find little to attract them in Gandhi's
doctrine, since in all his seventy-nine years it never crossed his mind once
that there could be anything enjoyable in sex for women, and he was constantly
enjoining Indian women to deny themselves to men, to refuse to let their
husbands "abuse" them. Gandhi had been married at thirteen, and when he took his
vow of chastity, after twenty-four years of sexual activity, he ordered his two
oldest sons, both young men, to be totally chaste as well.
BUT Gandhi's monstrous behavior to his own family is notorious. He denied his
sons education--to which he was bitterly hostile. His wife remained illiterate.
Once when she was very sick, hemorrhaging badly, and seemed to be dying, he
wrote to her from jail icily: "My struggle is not merely political. It is
religious and therefore quite pure. It does not matter much whether one dies in
it or lives. I hope and expect that you will also think likewise and not be
unhappy." To die, that is. On another occasion he wrote, speaking about her: "I
simply cannot bear to look at Ba's face. The expression is often like that on
the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling, as a cow occasionally does,
that in her own dumb manner she is saying something. I see, too, that there is
selfishness in this suffering of hers ...." And in the end he let her die, as I
have said, rather than allow British doctors to give her a shot of penicillin
(while his inner voice told him that it would be all right for him to take
quinine). He disowned his oldest son, Harilal, for wishing to marry. He banished
his second son for giving his struggling older brother a small sum of money.
Harilal grew quite wild with rage against his father, attacked him in print,
converted to Islam, took to women, drink, and died an alcoholic in 1948. The
Mahatma attacked him right back in his pious way, proclaiming modestly in an
open letter in "Young India," "Men may be good, not necessarily their children."
IF THE reader thinks I have delivered unduly harsh judgments on India and Hindu
civilization, I can refer him to 'An Area of Darkness' and 'India: A Wounded
Civilization,' two quite brilliant books on India by V.S. Naipaul, a Hindu, and
a Brahmin, born in Trinidad. In the second, the more discursive, Naipaul writes
that India "has little to offer the world except its Gandhian concept of holy
poverty and the recurring crooked comedy of its holy men, and ... is now
dependent in every practical way on other, imperfectly understood
civilizations."
Hinduism, Naipaul writes, "has given men no idea of a contract with other men,
no idea of the state. It has enslaved one quarter of the population [the
Untouchables] and always has left the whole fragmented and vulnerable. Its
philosophy of withdrawal has diminished men intellectually and not equipped them
to respond to challenge; it has stifled growth. So that again and again in India
history has repeated itself: vulnerability, defeat, withdrawal." Indians,
Naipaul says, have no historical notion of the past. "Through centuries of
conquest the civilization declined into an apparatus for survival, turning away
from the mind ... and creativity ... stripping itself down, like all decaying
civilizations, to its magical practices and imprisoning social forms." He adds
later, "No government can survive on Gandhian fantasy; and the spirituality, the
solace of a conquered people, which Gandhi turned into a form of national
assertion, has soured more obviously into the nihilism that it always was."
Naipaul condemns India again and again for its "intellectual parasitism," its
"intellectual vacuum," its "emptiness," the "blankness of its decayed
civilization." "Indian poverty is more dehumanizing than any machine; and, more
than in any machine civilization, men in India are units, locked up in the
straitest obedience by their idea of their dharma...
"The blight of caste is not only untouchability and the consequent deification
in India of filth; the blight, in an India that tries to grow, is also the
overall obedience it imposes, ... the diminishing of adventurousness, the
pushing away from men of individuality and the possibility of excellence."
Although Naipaul blames Gandhi as well as India itself for the country's failure
to develop an "ideology" adequate for the modern world, he grants him one or two
magnificent moments--always, it should be noted, when responding to "other
civilizations." For Gandhi, Naipaul remarks pointedly, had matured in alien
societies: Britain and South Africa. With age, back in India, he seemed from his
autobiography to be headed for "lunacy," says Naipaul, and was only rescued by
external events, his reactions to which were determined in part by "*his
experience of the democratic ways of South Africa*" [my emphasis]. For it is one
of the enduring ironies of Gandhi's story that it was in South Africa--*South
Africa*--a country in which he became far more deeply involved than he had been
in Britain, that Gandhi caught a warped glimmer of that strange institution of
which he would never have seen even a reflection within Hindu society:
democracy.
ANOTHER of Gandhi's most powerful obsessions (to which the movie alludes in such
a syrupy and misleading manner that it would be quite impossible for the
audience to understand it) was his visceral hatred of the modern, industrial
world. He even said, more than once, that he actually wouldn't mind if the
British remained in India, to police it, conduct foreign policy, and such
trivia, if it would only take away its factories and railways. And Gandhi hated,
not just factories and railways, but also the telegraph, the telephone, the
radio, the airplane. He happened to be in England when Louis Bleriot, the great
French aviation pioneer, first flew the English Channel--an event which at the
time stirred as much excitement as Lindbergh's later flight across the Atlantic
and Gandhi was in a positive fury that giant crowds were acclaiming such an
insignificant event. He used the telegraph extensively himself, of course, and
later would broadcast daily over All-India Radio during his highly publicized
fasts, but consistency was never Gandhi's strong suit.
Gandhi's view of the good society, about which he wrote ad nauseam, was an
Arcadian vision set far in India's past. It was the pristine Indian village,
where, with all diabolical machinery and technology abolished--and with them all
unhappiness--contented villagers would hand-spin their own yarn, hand-weave
their own cloth, serenely follow their bullocks in the fields, tranquilly
prodding them in the anus in the time-hallowed Hindu way. This was why Gandhi
taught himself to spin, and why all the devout Gandhians, like monkeys, spun
also. This was Gandhi's program. Since he said it several thousand times, we
have no choice but to believe that he sincerely desired the destruction of
modern technology and industry and the return of India to the way of life of an
idyllic (and quite likely nonexistent) past. And yet this same "Mahatma Gandhi
handpicked as the first Prime Minister of an independent India Pandit Nehru, who
was committed to a policy of industrialization and for whom the last word in the
politico-economic organization of the state was (and remained) Beatrice Webb.
WHAT are we to make of this Gandhi? We are dealing with two strangenesses here,
Indians and Gandhi himself. The plain fact is that both Indian leaders and the
Indian people ignored Gandhi's precepts almost as thoroughly as did Hitler. They
ignored him on sexual abstinence. They ignored his modifications of the caste
system. They ignored him on the evils of modern industry, the radio, the
telephone. They ignored him on education. They ignored his appeals for national
union, the former British Raj splitting into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu
India. No one sought a return to the Arcadian Indian village of antiquity. They
ignored him, above all, in ahimsa, nonviolence. There was always a small number
of exalted satyagrahi who, martyrs, would march into the constables' truncheons,
but one of the things that alarmed the British--as Tagore indicated--was the
explosions of violence that accompanied all this alleged nonviolence. Naipaul
writes that with independence India discovered again that it was "cruel and
horribly violent." Jaya Prakash Narayan, the late opposition leader, once
admitted, "We often behave like animals.... We are more likely than not to
become aggressive, wild, violent. We kill and burn and loot....
Why, then, did the Hindu masses so honor this Mahatma, almost all of whose most
cherished beliefs they so pointedly ignored, even during his lifetime? For
Hindus, the question is not really so puzzling. Gandhi, for them, after all, was
a Mahatma, a holy man. He was a symbol of sanctity, not a guide to conduct.
Hinduism has a long history of holy men who, traditionally, do not offer
themselves up to the public as models of general behavior but withdraw from the
world, often into an ashram, to pursue their sanctity in private, a practice
which all Hindus honor, if few emulate. The true oddity is that Gandhi, this
holy man, having drawn from British sources his notions of nationalism and
democracy, also absorbed from the British his model of virtue in public life. He
was a historical original, a Hindu holy man that a British model of public
service and dazzling advances in mass communications thrust out into the world,
to become a great moral leader and the "father of his country."
SOME Indians feel that after the early l930's, Gandhi, although by now
world-famous, was in fact in sharp decline. Did he at least "get British out of
India"? Some say no. India, in the last days of British Raj, was already largely
governed by Indians (a fact one would never suspect from this movie), and it is
a common view that without this irrational, wildly erratic holy man the
transition to full independence might have gone both more smoothly and more
swiftly. There is much evidence that in his last years Gandhi was in a kind of
spiritual retreat and, with all his endless praying and fasting, was no longer
pursuing (the very words seem strange in a Hindu context) "the public good."
What he was pursuing, in a strict reversion to Hindu tradition, was his personal
holiness. In earlier days he had scoffed at the title accorded him, Mahatma
(literally "great soul"). But toward the end, during the hideous paroxysms that
accompanied independence, with some of the most unspeakable massacres taking
place in Calcutta, he declared, "And if the whole of Calcutta swims in blood, it
will not dismay me. For it will be a willing offering of innocent blood." And in
his last days, after there had already been one attempt on his life, he was
heard to say, "*I am a true Mahatma.*"
We can only wonder, furthermore, at a public figure who lectures half his life
about the necessity of abolishing modern industry and returning India to its
ancient primitiveness, and then picks a Fabian socialist, already drawing up
Five-Year Plans, as the country's first Prime Minister. Audacious as it may seem
to contest the views of such heavy thinkers as Margaret Bourke-White, Ralph
Nader, and J.K. Galbraith (who found the film's Gandhi "true to the original"
and endorsed the movie wholeheartedly), we have a right to reservations about
such a figure as a public man.
I should not be surprised if Gandhi's greatest real humanitarian achievement was
an improvement in the treatment of Untouchables--an area where his efforts were
not only assiduous, but actually bore fruit. In this, of course, he ranks well
behind the British, who abolished suttee over ferocious Hindu opposition--in
1829. The ritual immolation by fire of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres,
suttee had the full sanction of the Hindu religion, although it might perhaps be
wrong to overrate its importance. Scholars remind us that it was never
universal, only "usual." And there was, after all, a rather extensive range of
choice. In southern India the widow was flung into her husband's fire-pit. In
the valley of the Ganges she was placed on the pyre when it was already aflame.
In western India, she supported the head of the corpse with her right hand,
while, torch in her left, she was allowed the honor of setting the whole thing
on fire herself. In the north, where perhaps women were more impious, the
widow's body was constrained on the burning pyre by long poles pressed down by
her relatives, just in case, screaming in terror and choking and burning to
death, she might forget her dharma. So, yes, ladies, members of the National
Council of Churches, believers in the one God, mourners for that holy India
before it was despoiled by those brutish British, remember suttee, that
interesting, exotic practice in which Hindus, over the centuries, burned to
death countless millions of helpless women in a spirit of pious devotion, crying
for all I know, Hai Rama! Hai Rama!
I WOULD like to conclude with some observations on two Englishmen, Madeleine
Slade, the daughter of a British admiral, and Sir Richard Attenborough, the
producer, director, and spiritual godfather of the film, 'Gandhi.' Miss Slade
was a jewel in Gandhi's crown--a member of the British ruling class, as she was,
turned fervent disciple of this Indian Mahatma. She is played in the film by
Geraldine James with nobility, dignity, and a beatific manner quite up to the
level of Candice Bergen, and perhaps even the Virgin Mary. I learn from Ved
Mehta's 'Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles,' however, that Miss Slade had another
master before Gandhi. In about 1917, when she was fifteen, she made contact with
the spirit of Beethoven by listening to his sonatas on a player piano. "I threw
myself down on my knees in the seclusion of my room," she wrote in her
autobiography, "and prayed, *really* prayed to God for the first time in my
life: 'Why have I been born over a century too late? Why hast Thou given me
realization of him and yet put all these years in between?'"
After World War I, still seeking how best to serve Beethoven, Miss Slade felt an
"infinite longing" when she visited his birthplace and grave, and, finally, at
the age of thirty-two, caught up with Romain Rolland, who had partly based his
renowned 'Jean Christophe' on the composer. But Rolland had written a new book
now, about a man called Gandhi, "another Christ," and before long Miss Slade was
quite literally falling on her knees before the Mahatma in India, "conscious of
nothing but a sense of light." Although one would never guess this >from the
film, she soon (to quote Mehta's impression) began "to get on Gandhi's nerves,"
and he took every pretext to keep her away >from him, in other ashrams, and
working in schools and villages in other parts of India. She complained to
Gandhi in letters about discrimination against her by orthodox Hindus, who
expected her to live in rags and vile quarters during menstruation, considering
her unclean and virtually untouchable. Gandhi wrote back, agreeing that women
should not be treated like that, but adding that she should accept it all with
grace and cheerfulness, "without thinking that the orthodox party is in any way
unreasonable." (This is as good an example as any of Gandhi's coherence, even in
his prime. Women should not be treated like that, but the people who treated
them that way were in no way unreasonable.)
Some years after Gandhi's death, Miss Slade rediscovered Beethoven, becoming
conscious again "of the realization of my true self. For a while I remained lost
in the world of the spirit...." She soon returned to Europe and serving
Beethoven, her "true calling." When Mehta finally found her in Vienna, she told
him, "Please don't ask me any more about Bapu [Gandhi]. I now belong to van
Beethoven. In matters of the spirit, there is always a call." A polite
description of Madeleine Slade is that she was an extreme eccentric. In the
vernacular, she was slightly cracked.
Sir Richard Attenborough, however, isn't cracked at all. The only puzzle is how
he suddenly got to be a pacifist, a fact which his press releases now proclaim
to the world. Attenborough trained as a pilot in the RAF in World War II, and
was released briefly to the cinema, where he had already begun his career in
Noel Coward's superpatriotic 'In Which We Serve.' He then returned to active
service, flying combat missions with the RAF. Richard Attenborough, in
short--when Gandhi was pleading with the British to surrender to the Nazis,
assuring them that "Hitler is not a bad man"--was fighting for his country. The
Viceroy of India warned Gandhi grimly that "We are engaged in a struggle," and
Attenborough played his part in that great struggle, and proudly, too, as far as
I can tell. To my knowledge he has never had a crise de conscience on the
matter, or announced that he was carried away by the war fever and that Britain
really should have capitulated to the Nazis--which Gandhi would have had it do.
ALTHOUGH the present film is handsomely done in its way, no one has ever accused
Attenborough of being excessively endowed with either acting or directing
talent. In the '50's he was a popular young British entertainer, but his most
singular gift appeared to be his entrepreneurial talent as a businessman, using
his movie fees to launch successful London restaurants (at one time four), and
other business ventures. At the present moment he is Chairman of the Board of
Capital Radio (Britain's most successful commercial station), Goldcrest Films,
the British Film Institute, and Deputy Chairman of the BBC's new Channel 4
television network. Like most members of the nouveaux riches on the rise, he has
also reached out for symbols of respectability and public service, and has
assembled quite a collection. He is a Trustee of the Tate Gallery,
Pro-Chancellor of Sussex University, President of Britain's Muscular Dystrophy
Group, Chairman of the Actors' Charitable Trust and, of course, Chairman of the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. There may be even more, but this is a fair
sampling. In 1976, quite fittingly, he was knighted, by a Labor government, but
his friends say he still insists on being called "Dickie."
It is quite general today for members of the professional classes, even when not
artistic types, to despise commerce and feel that the state, the economy, and
almost everything else would be better and more idealistically run by themselves
rather than these loutish businessmen. Sir Dickie, however, being a highly
successful businessman himself, would hardly entertain such an antipathy. But as
he scrambled his way to the heights perhaps he found himself among high-minded
idealists, utopians, equalitarians, and lovers of the oppressed. Now there are
those who think Sir Dickie converted to pacifism when Indira Gandhi handed him a
check for several million dollars. But I do not believe this. I think Sir Dickie
converted to pacifism out of idealism.
His pacifism, I confess, has been more than usually muddled. In 1968, after
twenty-six years in the profession, he made his directorial debut with 'Oh! What
a Lovely War,' with its superb parody of Britain's jingoistic music-hall songs
of the "Great War," World War I. Since I had the good fortune to see Joan
Littlewood's original London stage production, which gave the work its entire
style, I cannot think that Sir Dickie's contribution was unduly large. Like most
commercially successful parodies--from Sandy Wilson's 'The Boy Friend' to
Broadway's 'Superman,' 'Dracula,' and the 'Crucifier of Blood'--'Oh! What a
Lovely War' depended on the audience's (if not Miss Littlewood's) retaining a
substantial affection for the subject being parodied: in this case, a swaggering
hyperpatriotism, which recalled days when the empire was great. In any event,
since Miss Littlewood identified herself as a Communist and since Communists, as
far as I know, are never pacifists, Sir Dickie's case for the production's
"pacifism" seems stymied from the other angle as well.
Sir Dickie's next blow for pacifism was 'Young Winston' (1973), which, the new
publicity manual says, "explored how Churchill's childhood traumas and lack of
parental affection became the spurs which goaded him to a position of great
power." One would think that a man who once flew combat missions under the
orders of the great war leader--and who seemingly wanted his country to win--
could thank God for childhood traumas and lack of parental affection if such
were needed to provide Churchill in the hour of peril. But on pressed Sir
Dickie, in the year of his knighthood, with 'A Bridge Too Far,' the story of the
futile World War II assault on Arnhem, described by Sir Dickie--now, at
least--as "a further plea for pacifism."
But does Sir Richard Attenborough seriously think that, rather than go through
what we did at Arnhem, we should have given in, let the Nazis be, and even--true
pacifists--them occupy Britain, Canada, the United States, contenting ourselves
only with "making them feel unwanted"? At the level of idiocy to which
discussions of war and peace have sunk in the West, every hare-brained idealist
who discovers that war is not a day at the beach seems to think he has found an
irresistible argument for pacifism. Is Pearl Harbor an argument for pacifism?
Bataan? Dunkirk? Dieppe? The Ardennes? Roland fell at Roncesvalles. Is the 'Song
of Roland' a pacifist epic? If so, why did William the Conqueror have it chanted
to his men as they marched into battle at Hastings? Men prove their valor in
defeat as well as in victory. Even Sergeant Major Gandhi knew that. Up in the
moral never-never land which Sir Dickie now inhabits, perhaps they think the
Alamo led to a great wave of pacifism in Texas.
In a feat of sheer imbecility, Attenborough has dedicated 'Gandhi' to Lord
Mountbatten, who commanded the Southeast Asian Theater during World War II.
Mountbatten, you might object, was hardly a pacifist--but then again he was
murdered by Irish terrorists, which proves how frightful all that sort of thing
is, Sir Dickie says, and how we must end it all by imitating Gandhi. Not the
Gandhi who called for seas of innocent blood, you understand, but the
movie-Gandhi, the nice one.
THE historical Gandhi's favorite mantra, strange to tell, was 'Do or Die' (he
called it literally that, a "mantra"). I think Sir Dickie should reflect on
this, because it means, dixit Gandhi, that a man must be prepared to die for
what he believes in, for, himsa or ahimsa, death is always there, and in an
ultimate test men who are not prepared to face it lose. Gandhi was erratic,
irrational, tyrannical, obstinate. He sometimes verged on lunacy. He believed in
a religion whose ideas I find somewhat repugnant. He worshipped cows. But I
still say this: he was brave. He feared no one.
On a lower level of being, I have consequently given some thought to the proper
mantra for spectators of the movie 'Gandhi.' After much reflection, in homage to
Ralph Nader, I have decided on Caveat Emptor, "buyer beware." Repeated many
thousand times in a seat in the cinema it might with luck lead to 0m, the Hindu
dream of nothingness, the Ultimate Void.