Arts & Culture
The lives of saints
Published 23 April 2007
Gandhi is idealised in the west, but in Indian culture he is emerging as a complex figure.
In April 1930, Mohandas Gandhi challenged the British empire by making a fistful of salt from the Arabian Sea at Dandi in Gujarat. He had just led a 240-mile march in protest against the salt tax. It was among the biggest manifestations of satyagraha, or the force of truth, Gandhi's non-violent technique of civil disobedience.
Winston Churchill was not amused. Speaking to the Council of the West Essex Unionists the following year, he said it was "alarming to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor".
Today, the world does not consider Gandhi's tactics as seditious; rather, he is spoken of in holy terms. This past week, I went to see English National Opera's production of Philip Glass's Sat yagraha at the London Coliseum. This year also happens to be the 25th anniversary of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, which won eight Academy Awards. Sony has issued a special double DVD of the film and, in an ironic postmodern twist, a writer for the website Slate has called Gandhi "the Hindustani Malcolm X". Next January will mark the 60th anniversary of Gandhi's assassination. In the west, the canonisation of India's founding father is well under way.
Satyagraha opens with the image of the barrister Gandhi being tossed on to a railway platform in Pietermaritzburg because he was the wrong colour for a first-class carriage, although he had a valid ticket. It follows his metamor phosis into a spiritual force in the face of taunts, arrests and beatings. At one level, the story does not need words; at another, it demands constant retelling in our violent times. Shorn of vocabulary and drama, it makes Gandhi's life resemble a tableau of iconic images, where the man of peace battles a series of gro tesque creatures.
The Glass opera has never been staged in India, but Attenborough's film has been screened there, and it evoked quite a reaction even before the first scene was shot. Veteran Gandhians, including Usha Mehta, who at that time was overseeing the Gandhi Museum at Mani Bhavan, his home in Mumbai, told me: "We are not prepared to give our Gandhi to anyone." That possessiveness stemmed from apprehension that a foreigner might transform his story into a Hollywood spectacle. To Usha Mehta's credit, after she saw the Attenborough film, she praised it.
The film was widely loved. In India, one friend told me: "At last I feel proud of being an Indian." There were also misgivings, however. When I interviewed him in 1983, Salman Rushdie commented: "Deification is an Indian disease. Why should Attenborough do it?" His point was that, in order to enhance Gandhi's greatness, Attenborough had made his contemporaries - formidable politicians all - look like lesser figures. Maul ana Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel were well-meaning subordinates; Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was one-dimensional. Rushdie observed that some of the sequences, such as the Kolkata riots, which took place before independence, were shown to have occurred afterwards. Was this artistic licence? Or was the film seeking to rewrite history?
Concerned about some of these issues, several leading Indian directors responded by making their own historical films. In 1993, Ketan Mehta made Sardar: the iron man of India, a biopic of Vallabhbhai Patel, India's first home minister, whom some felt should have been prime minister. Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar (1998), directed by Jabbar Patel, was about the leader of India's dalits, or "untouchables". In 1996, Shyam Benegal's The Making of the Mahatma looked at Gandhi's politically formative years in South Africa, and his later Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: the forgotten hero (2004) focused on a Bengali leader who chose violent means to liberate India.
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose highlighted how complex Gandhi's response to violence was. When the revolutionary Bhagat Singh was sent to the gallows by the British, Gandhi said: "His way is not my way, but I bow my head before one who is ready to give his life for the freedom of his people." Gandhi and Bose parted company, however, when Bose decided to seek the support of Adolf Hitler and the Japanese during the Second World War. Gandhi told his Bengali counterpart that their paths were fundamentally different, even though their destination (India's freedom) "may appear, but only appear, to be the same". For him, means were just as important as ends, if not more so.
However, Indian artists, writers and film-makers have not only resurrected alternative heroes, they have also cast Gandhi in a less flattering light. This was partly due to the rise in the 1990s of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist movement whose followers, and some of its leaders, blame Gandhi for his policy of appeasement towards Muslims. A Gujarati writer, Dinkar Joshi, wrote the novel Prakash no Padchayo ("Shadow of Light"), about Gandhi's dysfunctional relationship with his eldest son, Harilal, who became an alcoholic. The Marathi writer Ajit Dalvi wrote a play based on this book, Mahatma versus Gandhi, which had a successful run in 1998. Later, a Marathi director resurrected Pradeep Dalvi's Mi Nathuram Godse Boltoy ("It's me, Nathuram Godse speaking"), which contains a monologue by Gandhi's assassin. This play used Gandhi's death to articulate the Hindu nationalist view at a time when the old secularist consensus was fading and a new one had yet to emerge. Gandhi, despite his deeply religious nature, became the standard-bearer of the secularist view that the BJP later sought to discredit.
In recent years, however, a more mature approach has emerged. Gandhi is increasingly presented as a human being, rather than a saint or a god. Last year's delightful Bollywood hit Lage Raho Munnabhai ("Carry on, Munnabhai") was about a Mumbai thug who becomes smitten by a radio DJ. To please her, he pretends to be an expert in Gandhian philosophy. Over the course of two entertaining hours, Munnabhai is transformed into a man of peace, winning her heart and helping India look at Gandhi with a fresh pair of eyes - as a formidable leader who led a strong ethical life, who was neither God nor an appeaser, but a human being. A new biography of Gandhi published this year, Mohandas: a true story of a man, his people and an empire, humanises Gandhi even more. Written by his grandson Rajmohan, the book explores some of his shortcomings and describes his personal life, which Indians usually gloss over. Mohandas Gandhi famously said that his life was his message; he would surely approve.
"Satyagraha" is at English National Opera, London WC2, until 1 May. Info: http://www.eno.org
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