Let me reproduce parts of a book 'The Gandhi nobody knows' by Richard Greiner.
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.
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.)
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) . The screenplay was checked and rechecked by Indian officials at every stage, often by the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself, with close consultations on plot and even casting. 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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
SOME Indians feel that after the early l930's, Gandhi, although by now world-famous, was in fact in sharp decline. Did he at least ''get British out of India''? Some say no. India, in the last days of 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. 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 then picks a Fabian socialist, already drawing up Five-Year Plans, as the country's first Prime Minister.
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.''
