"Repent, Harlequin!" said the Ticktockman

Rating: Null/10 (23 March 2012)

Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" charts the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the political and spiritual figure who led a non-violent resistance movement against British Colonial rule in India. The film touches upon all the now famous cornerstones of Gandhi's life. We watch Gandhi being educated in Britain, follow his life as a provincial lawyer, and observe his work in South Africa. It is here, in 1893, that he began to represent indentured Indian labourers, emerging as a voice of conscience and a representative of those subjected to racial discrimination.
The film then watches as Gandhi returns to India in 1915. Here he seeks to ignite a "moral reformation" which renders the British occupation - responsible for almost 1.8 billion deaths over a roughly 200 year period - defunct. Gandhi's strategies for non-violent civil disobedience (satyagraha) initially appear impractical, but they soon begin drawing support.
In 1920, under Gandhi's leadership, local Congress was reorganised and given the explicit goal of seeking self governance. Gandhi then urged the Indian people to boycott British education institutions, courts and products, to resign from government employment, to refuse to pay taxes, and to forsake British titles and honours; full spectrum resistance. Gandhi's party was then transformed from an elite organisation to one of mass national appeal.
In his writings Gandhi would express his belief that "radical non violence ultimately brings one's oppressor around to one's own side". This was true to some extent, as Attenborough ably shows. On the other hand, it was really WW2, many violent Indian protests and the sheer contradictions of capitalism which made the Empire collapse. The British Raj was itself but the outcome of the nationalization or "bailing out" of failing private financial cartels. In other words, Gandhi simply struck when the system was crumbling anyway.
But Attenborough doesn't care. Instead he offers your typical Gandhi tale: against the Goliath of the modern, imperial super-state, it was the diminutive Gandhi who stood up, David-like, against its might. He showed the modern world that people should never be overlooked. He paralysed Britain, thwarting its imperial ambitions, revealing the limits of its power by undermining its economic self-sufficiency through coordinated, mass campaigns of non-violent non-cooperation. This, some say, was also the path that in the end "defeated" the even more muscular Soviet Union. We also see the emergence, during this very same period, of Gandhi's more violent alter ego, Mao Tse-Tung, whose revolutionary violence was equally effective in winning independence from his more brutal foes, both the imperial Japanese and the industrial Nationalists.
"Gandhi" contains a last-act subplot in which Gandhi rejects the proposal for the partitioning India and the "creation" of Pakistan. But of course it was Gandhi who first signed onto the proposal. He was a thoroughly caste-oriented Hindu, offering only moral friendship to Muslims, who shrewdly wanted political power too. When Pakistan and India split, you then had much bloodshed, many massacres and long-lasting tensions. Blaming this on Gandhi, though, is perhaps unfair. The British Empire tirelessly pushed for the splitting of India; all Empires practise divide and conquer tactics, especially when "granting independence" to their ex-colonies. The goal is destabilisation, fragmentation and the continual plundering of these nations by proxy.
"Gandhi's" pure Hollywood, so other complexities are ignored. The irony of Gandhi "freeing" Indians in South Africa, for example, whilst being outwardly racist to Africans is neglected (in 1906 he'd actively participate in the war against blacks). The caste system - where society is arranged on a four level hierarchy based on skin colour - is itself the bedrock of Hinduism, the darker skinned relegated to the lower levels. None of this is in Attenborough's film. One other irony is that Gandhi emerged at a unique historic moment just as the Age of Empire began its rapid post-War decline, beginning its de-colonial contraction from an era marked by a global land grab to a more insular and self-governing age. But how much did the effectiveness of Gandhi's channelling of "latent energy into massive non-violent expression" depend directly on violent expression, namely Hitler, WW2's toil on the British Empire and massive bloodshed in Europe?
Attenborough's film is well shot, paced, epic and engrossing, but also ultimately shameless hagiography, with a little Oscar baiting and David Lean pretensions sprinkled about. Attenborough, an actor himself, is very much a man or surfaces, direct statements and the literal. What you see is what you get.
The film stars Ben Kingsley as Gandhi, whom Attenborough elevates to sainthood by mercilessly stripping away all psychology or inner life. Kingsley's fitting or wildly miscast (a white guy as Gandhi?) depending on what you smoke. Attenborough also errs in seeing the independence struggle solely as a battle between British colonialists and the Indian nationalist leadership. This is an elitist history that suppresses the voices and actions of the subaltern, the Indian peasantry, who were highly engaged in fighting colonial rule. Both the British and Indian elites wrongly viewed the subaltern as being pre-political and regressive.
Today India has adopted Western-styled economic reforms. She is now one of the largest economies in the world (as she once was pre the arrival of the British). This has not abated massive rises in poverty, income inequality, environmental damage, exploitation and malnutrition. Over half of India's population now lives below the poverty line, and she contains more poor people than all of sub-Saharan Africa. Attenborough directed "Cry Freedom" in 1987, a preachy film about apartheid.
8/10 – Good, but overly reverential, one-note, holy and white. See "A Dry White Season", "Mishima" and Pontecorvo's "Burn!".