gandhi

I watched Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi again last night. This makes it probably the 12th time I’ve seen it. When I was a kid, my parents, like lots of subcontinental types, were obsessed with hammering the Gandhi story into their children’s consciousness. I think it was because of the values of discipline and truth that he stood for (which my father thought we obviously needed a drubbing in). The film itself rather exalts Gandhi, without going really into the depth of what made him so complicated, difficult to live with (can you imagine being his wife and having your husband take a vow of celibacy- he was also widely recognized as a bad father) and also of leaving a rather complicated legacy behind (of a divided India). The film glosses over the horrors of Partition (where over a million people died in the largest cross-border exchange ever known to man) and cannot make up its mind whether it was a result of the divide and conquer tactics by the British or the own, parochial power-hungry interests of Jinnah and Nehru. The film too paints Nehru in a one-dimensionally rosy light . And it also doesn’t examine how Untouchability and the repression of women has not ended in India, despite Gandhi’s best efforts and his statement that these are the two kinds of slavery in India. Nevertheless, in 1948, India had 350 million people, not the billion that it has today. And it is remarkable that the birth of a nation has not produced more bloodshed than it has. But still. As the Amritsar Massacre pre-independence by the British has shown, it was nonetheless tragic.

However following on the South African theme below, the film was illuminating for showing how Gandhi was successful in repealing anti-Indian legislation in South Africa (then a British colony) and how his principles of ahimsa, nonviolent noncooperation was born through his struggles there. It is also interesting that the Indians in South Africa have managed to carve out since a separate identity for themselves (either or not as a result of his efforts), as neither black nor white but somewhere in between , with all the requisite privileges.

Oh, I do so desperately want to write and make film and create and produce. It seems such an impossibly far away dream and I seem to be on another path entirely and I wonder when everything will coalesce, and I am both professionally and personally stable.