Gandhi & 'Gandhi':
Strenski, Ivan
THE POWER OF RELIGION VERSUS HOLLYWOOD HOLINESS Gandhi & 'Gandhi' IVAN STRENSKI "E.T FOR Adults"? or "The Film-Event of the Year"? "Motion Picture of a Lifetime"? or "Jesus Movie"? Sometimes...
...He dresses our sacred norm of the equality of all humans in homespun Hindu myth-untouchables are our "equals...
...But, note as well: poof...
...Gandhi knows these words in ways many of us will find chilling after the human portrayal Kingsley gave us...
...Scene: Wedding Feast of Cana...
...And what has this to do with the idea of a (Hindu) saint...
...This surprises me little, since religion is something we are almost duty-bound not to understand these days...
...The saints, says Orwell, are inhuman...
...He comes first to Hindu scripture through Victorian English translations...
...So Gandhi succeeded as much as he did because he dared to "confuse" East and West, religion and politics...
...We all know how "inhuman" the image of the rugged individualist can often bethey are impervious to social pressures, hardened by the discipline of their self-inflicted regimens of work and duty, and so on...
...Yet enlightening as all this may be, the film is burdened with cliches that seem to blot out much of the light it brings...
...Gandhi's remarkable influence certainly did show how traditional forms of spirituality fused with modern strategies and instruments of politics can shake the foundations of empire...
...Whether this is finally good or not, India's history may or may not show...
...For by the time we meet him in the film, Gandhi is already a very strange mix of Hindu and, yes, Christian...
...an E.T.-for-adults-cum-Jesus movie...
...Those of us in the West whose minds and hearts have been warmed by the thought of the compassionate Buddha might well compare the harder advice this traditional Indian renouncer gave to those, like Gandhi, who would follow the renouncer's path...
...It is worth remembering how true the film is here to Gandhi's ignorance of traditional India-midway through life he admitted to a ' 'nodding acquaintance with Hinduism...
...But like it or not, religion is at the center of the identity of Gandhi himself, and our ignorance of Gandhi's religious identity very much at the center of the storm raging about this film...
...sturdiness and sheer power of will...
...It is easy to imagine India a "lost world" of archaic-exotic culture, but it is not...
...the movie Gandhi hadn't a clue.movie Gandhi hadn't a clue...
...Poof...
...And, what did he learn...
...I will go out on a limb here and say that Gandhi was as successful as he was precisely because the traditional-Indian ideal of the renouncer is not all that different from the Western ideal of the perfect man-the individual...
...In India the renouncer has always been the major source of cultural change...
...So what was Gandhi doing anyway...
...Hard pills to swallow...
...No more wine...
...I do not think this extraordinary man can be understood unless we realize that Gandhi was deliberately trying to do two seemingly contrary things: he was trying to co-opt the 'magic' of the traditional holy man of India-the "re-nouncer"-while infusing it with some of the "magic" (and science) of the modern West...
...In the Kingsley-Gandhi satyagraha, soul-force is made palpable flesh...
...He infuses ancient Indian sanctity with the Western belief in the sanctity of the individual...
...But to do that we will have to learn what makes Gandhi such a luminous character...
...Take his adoption of the traditional Indian garb and manner of a ' 're-nouncer.'' What was all that about...
...It's magic, and wow...
...he stands for innovation against the tradition...
...And quite frankly, I do not care much how well this may replicate the Gandhi of history, or how it may have banished down the memory hole our 1940's news-reel world of Gandhi as wimp-in-a-diaper, the concave human insect...
...Maybe At-tenborough was only blinded by Gandhi's light, or simply afraid to get burnt by the fire...
...But in the meanwhile, the religious depths, or lack thereof, in Gandhi seem to have escaped most reviewers...
...In this sense he was no more "confused" than the India of his day-and ours...
...No, it wasn't...
...We will have to understand what kind of saint he was...
...They have chosen God...
...But all Atten-borough can (or is willing to) do is leave us wondering how so many bad things could go "poof...
...Poof...
...But with our boys home from the embassy in Teheran, we are back staring at our navels again...
...Enter Gandhi...
...yet they are the background of Gandhi's renunciation of sex, love, and friendship alike...
...Those India Civil Service elites seemed real supermen, able to go on without visible social nurture, yet bound by service and duty to some (for them) lofty cause...
...Modern culture did...
...And how he walked...
...One of the ironies of cultural contact is that traditional Indians early on recognized this isomorphy: westerners were admired (beef-eating and pleasure-maximizing aside) precisely for the same reasons Indians admired their own renouncer individualists...
...So it is no surprise when we see that Gandhi puts aside more than meat, alcohol, and tobacco when he assumes the traditional Indian renouncer's role: he renounces sex, as we all know, but also love and friendship...
...And what both Gandhi and the Ayatollah would teach us, who smugly think the world runs on economics and politics alone, is that religion can still stir political movements of great strength and influence...
...he has led the major traditional movements against caste there...
...All these things are essential to understanding Gandhi as a "saint," yet are absent from a film freighted with the magic and sentimentality of Hollywood holiness...
...NOW I CONFESS I may be using Kingsley-Attenborough as convenient targets...
...I do not claim to know...
...Why, indeed, as the film makes admirably clear, does Gandhi need to learn about traditional India by a deliberate process of self-education...
...his preoccupation with hygiene only looks like fastidious Hindu ritual purity-Ganges water notoriously does not "clean": it "purifies," it sanctifies...
...Typically he is deeply introspective and disciplined, which in India takes the form of otherworldly and mystical orientations...
...Our model of the sturdy, free-thinking, conscience-guided, self-reliant individualist shows much of the discipline of the Yogi, even if it is directed at life in this world...
...Gandhi's deliberate "confusion" of traditional religion and modern politics only repeats on another level the kinds of ' 'confusions'' the British Raj had already achieved...
...At opposite ends of the globe, the same weird fascination is to be found: ordinary people are drawn by those who dare to be everything we are not...
...Well, much the same can be said of Gandhi...
...we" have chosen man...
...As in many other things, time may tell and pass the final verdict on this film...
...This is easily understood, since to portray Gandhi or Jesus as magicians is to say that they do things in ways they cannot understand...
...They didn't invent the conventions of magic and schlock spirituality attached to saints...
...Gandhi's India (and ours) was already in the throes of syncretistic change-political, economic, or linguistic...
...Sometimes Gandhi the movie seems to sail along on the tradewinds of triumphant acclaim (not to mention its own self-generated promotional flatulence) only to get buffeted by unfriendly storms stirred up in the columns of Commentary or the New Republic...
...In India, the cult of the renouncer thrives much like our cult of success, the hero, or even the outlaw...
...In Attenborough's hands, Gandhi's sanctity is transformed into magic...
...And the resemblances go deeper...
...Ayatollah...
...Shah...
...Revolutionaries and captains of industry both make notoriously bad fathers or mates because they are consumed by tasks which simply leave little time for the pleasures of humanity...
...And whatever Hollywood may know, it does not know what saints are...
...He was both tonsured ascetic and barrister-both in search of personal salvation and champion of the rights of the individual...
...they, too, become inhuman-at least because such consuming devotions demand a withdrawal from the warmth and leisure we naturally associate with ordinary human life...
...Gandhi's magic was light thrown off by a fire of sanctity burning within, fueled by sources unknown even to E.T...
...They are no more guilty of failing to penetrate the inner nature of Gandhi's religious self-conception than any ordinary one of us is...
...Enter Jesus...
...and Gandhi as magician...
...Now what's so wrong with the magical mysterious Gandhi (or Jesus...
...One would have thought that even our American penchant for learning slowly the lessons of Third World relations and forgetting them with equal speed would have been shaken by such fiascos as the Iran mess...
...Like traditional Hindu renouncers, they represented stunning achievements of personal power all the more remarkable to a people swaddled in snug supporting social networks we can scarcely imagine or even comprehend...
...And, if we consider it at all, we consign it to some nether world, far out of sight of the "real" worlds of economics or politics...
...Remember The Robe or The Greatest Story Ever Told...
...That's incredible...
...An afternoon of nonviolent resistance-cum-head-bashing, and poof...
...Both the British elites and the traditional renouncers got respect because they made a show of being superhuman individualists...
...On his return from South Africa, he literally needs to become acquainted with India...
...Gandhi thought this might be so...
...For the record, I want to be clear in my admiration for the way Ben Kingsley enlarges our image of what a saint might be...
...Much the same can be said of those who choose duty, the job, the movement or whatever as their "god...
...Typically he goes his own way, becomes a kind of law' unto himself...
...Bred of our own movie-house Saturday afternoons with other magicians like Saints Charlton Heston or Victor Mature, we simply perpetuate Hollywopd holiness and project it onto the rest of the history of religions...
...Who will forget the Kingsley-Gandhi IVAN STRENSKI is chairman of the religious studies department at Connecticut College...
...They just broadcast it, and make it look worse even than it has a right to be...
...his non-violence and civil disobedience spring as much from Tolstoy, Thoreau, and the Sermon on the Mount, as they do from any recollection of traditional Hindu piety...
...Scene: Racist South Africa, or the British Raj...
...his universal, humanistic morality and egalitarianism is certainly much more Victorian Christian liberalism than the particularist, castedominated Hindu dharma...
...But swallow them we must if we would understand the inner side of this ' 'great soul...
...Heaviest of all are the cliches weighing on Gandhi's sanctity...
...These are worlds well lost...
...Wasn't that the sixties...
...The ideal of the saint-and a Hindu one at that -r- has perhaps never been more generally incomprehensible than it is today...
...GANDHI WAS, however, virtually unique among previous renouncers of traditional India: he was an individual in both traditional Indian and Western senses...
...In the West (at its best), the individual has also been less Ayn Rand's transcendental narcissist than reformer, revolutionary, and re-newer of traditions...
...When it tries to tell about saints, Hollywood inevitably tells us they are magicians...
...Big, strong, smashing strides...
...so easily...
...Water into wine...
...There the Buddha likens love and friendship to "hooks in the throat" and urges us to "walk lonely like the rhinoceros...
...But the schlock sentimentality of golly and wow tell us nothing about the guts of that "Great Soul," nothing about where even the real magic of sanctity originates, because they know nothing about the guts of sanctity itself-and certainly nothing about sanctity in traditional India...
...Indeed, George Orwell developed this theme at length in his marvelous essay on Gandhi in 1949...
...Now Gandhi...
...his worldly asceticism is more Calvinism-cum-the-Social-Gospel than it is the message of the Bhagavad Gita...
...Racist South Africa turns tail...
...Gandhi's genius does more than replicate either the ideal of Western individualism or Hindu renunciation: he fuses the two...
...But I Jo claim we can go past "poof...
...they are "Hari-jans"-literally children of God...
...Materializing E.T.-like from some outer space in the first-class compartment of a train chugging across South Africa, Gandhi sets out on a magical mystery tour de soul force, wonderworking his way across the screen between bouts of self-inflicted under-eating...
...Out of his turban come Jesus-stunts of various sizes and shapes...
...Thus, Attenborough's magic can only trap the pious and credulous in smogs of unknowing...
...Why did Gandhi need to shave his head, abandon sex, adopt a life of poverty in order to get the British to quit India...
...The British Raj evaporates...
...A demo here, a strike there, and poof...
...What a marvel, moreover, Gandhi's manifest sexiness-holy trickster rolling those big brown eyes, flexing the muscles of his well-defined brown back...
Vol. 110 • June 1983 • No. 11
