Mahatma Gandhi's influence on Hindi cinema

Mahatma Gandhi/ File Image

After cinema found its voice, Mahatma Gandhi’s message became bolder and easier to interpret in Hindi Cinema. The release on 14 March 1931 of the first Indian talkie, Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara, would be followed, not long afterwards, by a serendipitous meeting in London between Charlie Chaplin and Gandhi in September 1931. Five years later, in 1936, Chaplin produced what was to eventually become a cult classic: Modern Times. Depicting the dehumanizing effects of the machine that was increasingly replacing manual labour, the film endorsed, in a way, Gandhi’s opposition to rampant mechanization. The Gandhi–Chaplin meeting provides an interesting anecdote for Indian history. According to a programme on BBC Radio 4, ‘Making History: Gandhi and Chaplin’, the Mahatma was in London to attend the Second Round Table Conference and had refused to stay in a West End hotel, instead choosing to be with people from the working class at Kingsley Hall in East London. The Kingsley Hall Community Centre in Bow was run by Muriel Lester, a Christian pacifist who had visited Gandhi’s ashram in India in 1925. She shared his political beliefs and his idealism. In her book Entertaining Gandhi, published in 1932, Lester tells the story of the Mahatma’s visit and his meeting with Chaplin. ‘One of my clearest mental pictures,’ she writes, ‘is of Mr Gandhi sitting with a telegram in his hand looking distinctly puzzled. Grouped round him were secretaries awaiting his answer. As I came in, the silence was being broken by a disapproving voice saying, “But he’s only a buffoon, there is no point in going to meet him.” The telegram was being handed over for the necessary refusal when I saw the name. “But don’t you know that name, Bapu?” I inquired, immensely intrigued. “No,” he answered, taking back the flimsy form and looking at me for the enlightenment that his secretaries could not give. “Charlie Chaplin! He’s the world’s hero. You simply must meet him. His art is rooted in the life of working people, he understands the poor as well as you do, he honours them always in his pictures.” So, on 22 September 1931, at Dr Katial’s house in Beckton Road, Canning Town, the local people were given the double thrill of welcoming both men.’ The Gandhian imprint was also apparent in Hindi films based on women’s emancipation, marking a significant departure from the way the growing industry had progressed till then. Shantaram’s Amar Jyoti (1936), for instance, dealt with the heroine’s revolt against her alcoholic husband, marking a trend in a period during which a large number of women had cast off the yoke of social restrictions to take part in the freedom movement. Though it was a period film, the heroine’s resistance to extreme ‘patriarchal laws’ was the central plot of the film. The process of economic liberalization in the early 1990s introduced certain hedonistic changes in the cinematic preferences of the masses. The Mahatma’s ideal of simple living and high thinking was no longer as abiding an inspiration for the cinema-going public as it had once been. Declining interest was increasingly evident in the low viewership for films on Gandhi. While an earlier film on the Mahatma, Sir Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), had turned out to be one of the most successful international films ever made, the times were changing. Fourteen years later, The Making of the Mahatma (1996) by Shyam Benegal turned out to be a commercial failure. Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram (2000), with Naseeruddin Shah in the role of Gandhi, also proved to be a flop. Gandhi, however, would be reinvented and his image resurrected by Rajkumar Hirani. With his film Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006), the director gave an irresistible contemporary twist to the Mahatma’s message that caught the imagination of the masses. The revival of Gandhian nationalism in Indian cinema of the twenty first century, along with the positivity that drove it, was a heartening phenomenon indeed, coming as it did in the wake of declining interest in the Father of the Nation, a trend apparent in the films of the 1990s. Ironically, that optimism had been absent from the films that were made in the wake of Independence, a period that had begun on a note of abiding optimism. Indian cinema of that era reflected, instead, the despair, disillusionment and anger of the country’s suffering citizens, faced with a grim economic scenario following the end of colonial rule. Interestingly, Gandhi was himself an avid film watcher. But he deeply influenced many film makers at home and abroad. Dadasaheb Phalke, V. Shantaram, Mehboob Khan, Raj Kapoor, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Aamir Khan and Rajkumar Hirani worked around Gandhian principles and teachings for their celluloid ventures. While these film-makers may not have imbibed his ideas consciously, their films revealed his influence, all the same, and it became a guarantee for success. Gandhism was, after all, too dominant an idea for idealistic film-makers not to be swayed by it. Author-columnist Rasheed Kidwai is a visiting fellow of ORF. Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs and views expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this website are personal and do not reflect the opinions, beliefs and views of ABP News Network Pvt Ltd.