Film is indeed an art form, but the medium can also function
as a teacher in how it conveys values and wisdom. Both of these features of
film are salient in Gandhi (1982), whose
director, Richard Attenborough, says in his audio commentary that the film has done much keep Gandhi’s
philosophy alive in the world. In using the film’s star protagonist to explain
what is behind his approach, viewers become, in effect, students. The strength
of film here lies in its use of both audio and visual means to engrave the
lessons in memories. In Gandhi, the
main concept to be explained and illustrated is nonviolent active
non-cooperation or defiance of unjust laws or regimes.
In a speech to his fellow Indians, Gandhi declares, “We must defy the
British.” The crowd erupts. “Not with violence,” he explains, that will inflame
their will, but with a firmness that will open their eyes.” He then advocates
burning clothes manufactured in Britain. “If you are left with one piece of
homespun, then wear it with dignity!” Active, nonviolent defiance strengthens
self-esteem. The strategy also has a strength that counters the force of the
unjust.
For example, guards at the Salt Works hit the Indians
protesting the British monopoly on salt. As the unarmed Indians walk row by row
into the guards, wood swiftly comes down on heads, shoulders, and backs. “Women
carried the wounded and broken bodies from the road, an American reporter reads
into a phone, “until they dropped from exhaustion. But still, it went on and
on.” Then, crucially, he reaches the essential point. “Whatever moral
ascendancy the West held was lost here today. India is free, for she has taken
all that steel and cruelty can give and she has neither cringed nor retreated.”
In the voluntary taking on of suffering is a kind of invisible force that
confronts the aggressors with their sense of being good rather than evil. In
other words, the suffering is like a mirror making the dark side of the human
psyche inexorably transparent. Not even a tyrant can put down such a squalid
self-image. The image is also likely broadcasted to third parties and even the
world at large, likely resulting in the very human sentiment of disapprobation,
which Hume calls the moral sense. The culprits may find themselves cornered,
psychologically and perhaps even politically and economically.
“I think our resistance must be active and provocative,”
Gandhi tells the Congress Party leaders meeting in Jinah’s living room to
strategize. “Where there’s injustice, I always believed in fighting,” Gandhi
states at another point in the film. “The question is, do you fight to change
things or to punish? For myself, I’ve found we’re all such sinners, we should
leave punishment to God. And, if we really want to change things, there are
better ways of doing things than derailing trains or slashing someone with a
sword.” Nonviolent non-cooperation is geared to changing the unjust by forcing
them to confront themselves.
“I wish to embarrass all those who wish to treat us as
slaves. All of them,” Gandhi tells the Congress Party leaders at Jinah’s house.
He then illustrates his point. Specifically, he asks the servant for the tray
of tea and starts to serve “I want to change their minds, not kill them for
weaknesses we all possess.” He then
suggests a day of prayer and fasting, which of course would have the same
impact as a general strike. The prayer and fasting are oriented to confronting
a person’s own demons, while the societal discomfort draws attention to the
demons plaguing the oppressors who are living comfortably while exploiting the
Indians. Awareness is the first step on the road to change.
“What about very powerful tyrants like Hitler? Do you really
believe you could use nonviolence against Hitler?” a photographer from Life magazine asks Gandhi in a later
scene. “Not without defeats and great pain,” he replies. “But are there no
defeats in [World War II]? No pain? What you cannot do is accept injustice from
Hitler or from anyone. You must make the injustice visible; be prepared to die
like a soldier to do so.” The strength in active nonviolent defiance is subtle,
unlike that of a club or gun; the impact on the oppressor psyche is reflected
in the excessive measures that it takes in reaction.
For example, Gandhi remarks at one point that “Marshal law
[in Bengal] only shows how desperate the British are.” Surely some kind of
force had provoked the desperation that the British rulers could not shake. The
strength of Gandhi is essentially the innate ability of any human being to make
force a confrontation within another person between a self-image, which can be
so convenient to the self, and the demons that inhabit every person.
More broadly than in nonviolent civil disobedience, the
demons plaguing another person’s soul can both be made more transparent and
exculpated by means of restorative suffering. While Gandhi is on a
hunger-strike to end Muslim-Hindu violence in the newly independent India, a
violent Hindu man approaches Gandhi and tosses some bread on the old man’s
chest.
“Here! Eat! I’m going to hell, but not with your death on my
soul.” Unlike the typical oppressor, the man is already aware of his demons.
“Only God decides who goes to hell,” Gandhi retorts.
“I killed a child,” the man explains. “I smashed his head
against a wall.”
“Why?”
“The Muslims killed my son! My boy.”
“I know a way out of hell,” Gandhi offers. “Find a child—a
child whose mother and father have been killed . . . and raise him as your own.
Only be sure he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.”
The hardened murderer is stunned, and collapses at the foot
of Gandhi’s slender bed. The great soul has given the angry sufferer a way to
reintegrate his soul that is plagued with pain; in coming to see the Muslim
side by raising a Muslim child, the man would come to see the other side in the
societal strife and therein create space in his own soul for the otherness of
the other in place of the seemingly intractable demons. For being a man of
peace, Gandhi does an awful lot of fighting.
Just before Gandhi is assassinated by a fellow Hindu, he
tells the photographer from Life that
“(t)he only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts,
that that’s where all our battles ought to be fought.” Civic clashes are
essentially projections of those which take place in the human mind between
contending urges, and ought to be viewed and attacked as such by opening eyes.
