Gandhi the Star

Excerpted for A Gandhian Affair by Sanjay Suri 

A role in cinema was not among the many truths Gandhi experimented with. But cinema experimented with his ideas all the time. It experimented, in fact, with no ideas other than those associated with him. The idea of Gandhi found a dominant role in cinema for generations after his death. We quite actually see and hear ‘Gandhi’ in this cinema. All his resurfacing portraits, all those invocations in dialogue add up to screen appearances enough to give Gandhi the billing of a long-running career in cinema.

Those images didn’t just show up, they were stocked in studios to be shown. Given the frequency of appearance, these were clearly on the A list of props in all the studios where the cinema was produced. That inventory was itself a picture of the spell of Gandhi on film-makers of the time. ‘So let’s have that Gandhi portrait again…’ It would be somewhere on the top of the pile in every studio. The pervasive is not always immediately noticeable – because it is pervasive.

Images of Gandhi the man appear through representations of him at pivotal moments of truth and justice. He appears when the hero needs to be nudged, or judged, and we need to be reminded as audience just what the right thing to do is – the right thing as Gandhi would see it going by all that was recalled of him. If Gandhi was in the producers’ studios, it’s because he was on their minds. The props were not going some way other than the script.

Such a ‘career’ is only the visible manifestation of the Gandhi spell. Extensive as it is, this on-screen career is only a small part of the picture, just the visible tip of the iceberg. But these sightings are a telling clue that interlace ideas seen at the time as Gandhian with the casting of the hero’s character and subsequently his plotted path. He appears in portrait and reference like the sighting of Hitchcock in one of his films; he’s never there long, he turns up as visible reminder that he directed the film. So we see Gandhi in fleeting appearances but we see that he directed this cinema in directing which way the hero goes. The Gandhi idea directed producers.

The actually visible images of Gandhi, frequent as they are, still fade before his position as the director of producers. The parade of Gandhi representations in portrait and script comes as outwardly manifest reminder of just how much Gandhi was on the minds of producers, how high up on the minds of scriptwriters. It comes as reminder that values associated actively and specifically with Gandhi – and not just vaguely Gandhi-like – were summoned by producers to turn the plot of almost every film.

The cinema found a role for Gandhi as a moral guide more than it did for Gandhi the historical figure of the freedom struggle. The political projections of Gandhi were fundamentally moral. Non-violence, satyagraha, a felt oneness with the poor that doubled humaneness into socialism. The cinema had little of the Gandhi of the independence struggle. The spell on cinema is that of Gandhi the man, not Gandhi the political figure. It’s the moral values associated with Gandhi that cast a spell on cinema, not the Gandhi of the freedom struggle. The political success over Independence only gave Gandhi elevation to show up his moral values.

So far as the freedom movement goes, Bombay cinema made Subhas Chandra Bose more its hero than it did Gandhi, though it didn’t go on very much about Bose either. The young couple in Shaheed (1948) pays respects to both Gandhi and Nehru – but Bose is the ideal who drives the freedom-fighting hero. The hero of Samadhi (1950) follows Bose but does salute a portrait of Gandhi. Gandhi could be brought in for anything good and right, for anything personally sacrificial in a higher moral cause.