By —
March 1983
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 Theo-sophist, 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 equalitariansim 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 so 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
the 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 seem 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’ horror 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’être 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 I 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 the knives and clubs of their
fellow Indians in savage butcheries when the British finally withdrew.
_____________
Although the movie sneers at this 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 prinicple 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
Beneš 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
Führer 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, O 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 of 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 there 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 the Indian “deification of filth.” (Decades later, Krishna Menon, a
Gandhian and one-time Indian Defense Minister, was still fortifying his
sanctity by drinking a daily glass 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 Gandhi an
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
obedence 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 Blériot, 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 hand-picked 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, on 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 1930′s, Gandhi, although by
now world-famous, was in fact in sharp decline. Did he at least “get the
British out of India”? Some say no. India, in the last days of the
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 Noël Coward’s super-patriotic 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), Gold-crest 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 hyper-patriotism, 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—would thank God for
childhood traumas and lack of parental affection if such were needed to
provide a 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-let 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 harebrained 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. Mount-batten, 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 Om, the Hindu dream of nothingness, the Ultimate Void.
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