Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently said that the world became curious about Mahatma Gandhi only after his biopic released in 1982. (Photos: Wikimedia Commons/ Express file photo by Partha Paul)
The Mahatma has had an unexpected cameo in Elections 2024.
The Prime Minister, while talking about the Congress government’s various failings, commented that in the last 75 years it should have been our responsibility to let the world know of Mahatma Gandhi. Instead, he said “it was only after the film Gandhi that the world became curious about him.”
I was a boy in Kolkata when that Richard Attenborough film came out in 1982. Our neighbours, a kindly professor couple, took all the neighbourhood children to see it at Globe Theatre in Kolkata. We were probably more excited about the outing (and the popcorn) than the subject matter. It was not because we weren’t familiar with Gandhi but because we were almost too familiar with him. His bald-headed visage was everywhere and we craved polyester not khadi. But our parents’ generation had actually seen Gandhi and Nehru and Jinnah. They were excited to see them come to life on screen.
Certainly Gandhi and its eight Oscars made Mahatma Gandhi part of international pop culture’s mainstream. But to say the world only became curious about Gandhi after the film is sheer mann ki baat, not fact. The big studios are not the National Film Development Corporation of India, making and distributing films on worthy subjects no one is curious about. Though Attenborough struggled for years to find the funding for what was deemed a “non-commercial” project, the reason he made the film was precisely because there was curiosity about the famous “seditious half-naked fakir” who had inspired the likes of Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela. In fact, neither King nor Mandela would have been aware of Gandhi if indeed no one knew about Gandhi before 1982.
While many of India’s problems can be laid at the Congress government’s door, without Indira Gandhi’s active cooperation Gandhi the film would not have been made. In his book Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom (2022), Ramachandra Guha recounts that Gandhi’s associate Madeline Slade aka Mira Behn wrote to Indira Gandhi requesting her to meet Attenborough and scriptwriter Robert Bolt when they visited India in 1966. Mrs Gandhi replied, “I myself am greatly interested in the Gandhi film as I feel a good film on this subject would be of tremendous help to us, and it is probably easier for an outsider to make it.” Bolt dropped out, the project languished, the Janata government came to power. Finally, in 1980, it was Indira Gandhi — who had returned as Prime Minister — who sanctioned a large grant that helped make the film a reality.
One might ask why did an Indian filmmaker not honour the Father of the Nation? Why did it take Attenborough? But Mrs Gandhi was right. An Indian film about an Indian leader would have ultimately been local. Attenborough made it an international project. For all its flaws, it helped Gandhi find new audiences which is what had excited Mira Behn about the project.
But that’s not to say Gandhi had been forgotten before 1982.
He is the only Indian on stamps in scores of countries including Great Britain, even though the British Postmaster General fretted that no other overseas leader like Roosevelt or Eisenhower had received that honour. Philip Glass composed the opera Satyagraha in 1980. His statues are in cities around the world. When I first visited San Francisco, I found, to my surprise, seagulls perching on Gandhiji as he looked out at the fog rolling in across the bay. He featured thrice on the cover of Time magazine. There were impassioned debates on whether it was a travesty that he had not received the Nobel Peace prize. Albert Einstein famously had a portrait of Gandhi in his study in Princeton calling him the “greatest man of our age.”
Whether he indeed was “the greatest man of our age” is a different debate. In Accra, some university professors demanded his statue be removed from the campus because of comments he had made about race. Despite those problematic views, the African American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin was so inspired by Gandhi, the “angelic troublemaker”, he came to India in 1948 for seven weeks to study his philosophy of non-violence.
Even now companies like Apple and Mont Blanc pens want to use Gandhi to sell their expensive products. And everyone from Barack Obama to B2B marketers exhort us to be the change you want to see in the world. The world might be hurtling away from Gandhi’s vision but if there is anything India managed to export successfully to the world other than curry and yoga, it’s undoubtedly Mahatma Gandhi. The New York Times game Spelling Bee refuses to accept “tiffin” as a valid word but is okay with “mahatma”!
Now if we could just get the world to stop calling him Ghandi.
Roy is a novelist and the author ofDon’t Let Him Know
