Lessons of Ghandi

Another one of my School Paper articles.

Occasionally one finds the rare film which cannot be discussed without considering the real-life ideas and events behind it. In such cases the ideas of the film are the ideas of the philosophy or the man behind it. One such film is ‘Gandhi,’ directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Ben Kingsley in the title role of the small Indian attorney who conquered the British Empire without firing a shot.
The film itself is truly excellent. In the midst of all its epic scenes and moral philosophizing, it never fails to emphasize the humanity of its subjects. A sweet scene has Gandhi and his wife reenacting their marriage vows, their words and actions full of simple love and something almost like shyness. A humorous earlier scene has a priest friend of Gandhi’s nervously climbing up to the top of a moving railcar to join the travelers riding up there…and having to be reminded to duck as the train enters a tunnel.
However, I found watching it that I was more excited by the figure of Gandhi than anything in the film itself. That is not to say the film failed to hold my interest; far from it. Rather, it is meant to show how fascinating the film’s subject truly is. Before this I had only the vaguest knowledge of Gandhi; I knew he was an attorney who broke British colonial rule in India through passive resistance and was then assassinated, but little more. In the film, I found out both how little I knew, and where I was mistaken. As Gandhi himself points out in the film, there is nothing ‘passive’ about the resistance he proposes; it is simply aggressive on a different line. “Our goal is to provoke them,” he says, “if they don’t react, we will go on provoking them until they do.”
The principle is laid out very clearly at several points in the film; if a subject simply refuses to obey his ruler, the ruler has only two options: to lessen his rule over the subject or to become a monster. But even if he chooses the latter option the subject has still won, since people cannot be monsters for long. Sooner or later either their own conscience or the conscience of others will step in and stop them. This is demonstrated in several striking scenes, the first being during Gandhi’s (rather pathetic) first rally, when South-African Indians burn their ‘passes’ (which non-whites were required to carry at all times). A brutal police sergeant starts beating Gandhi as he tries to burn them, but he continues to try even after he’s been beaten to the ground, finally causing the policeman to almost tearfully ask him to stop (and it’s later noted that Gandhi could have pressed charges against him).
Even worse is the Amritsar Massacre, a historical incident where British troops under General Dyer opened fire on an unarmed crowd, including women and children. The film immediately cuts from that brutal scene to Dyer being court marshaled and cuttingly rebuked by his superiors, who are ostensibly on the side of the British. Later comes a wrenching sequence in which wave after wave of quiet, unarmed protesters walk straight into the waiting clubs of policemen. They do not fight or resist, they simply try to get past and are brutally and repeatedly cut down, but keep going for what are later told was hours. After the incident an American reporter (Martin Sheen) comments that any moral superiority the occupiers had was lost. Not long afterwards, India is free.
The most inspirational aspect about the film is not the obvious fact that a small, humble man did what armies had been unable to do, nor the idea that tyrants and oppression cannot last forever, but something deeper. Gandhi’s principle is based on the basic decency of humanity; that man is not naturally a monster. His victory did more than free India. It did more than just show the power of nonviolence. It proved, before the eyes of the world, the essential goodness of man.