“Gandhi” three-part documentary on BBC TV, UK
There has been much talk recently about the script of a film portraying the romance between the wife of the last British Viceroy of India and the country’s first prime minister.
The Indian government has demanded that some of Indian Summer’s scenes be rewritten and depictions of physical intimacy between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten be cut out before granting permission to film on location in Delhi, Punjab and Kashmir.
All foreign films shot in India must be approved by a vetting committee which screens the script to make sure “nothing detrimental to the image of India or the Indian people is shot or included in the film”.
The drama was based on Alex Von Tunzelmann’s book Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of Empire (published in 2007 to coincide with the 60th anniversary of independence), which tells the story of the pair’s “intense and clandestine love affair” both before and after 1947.
The same historian features in a new three-part BBC series on the other half of India’s political dynasty: Mohandas Gandhi. Also filmed on location in India, it now prompts the question whether or not Mishal Husain’s script was vetted by India’s Information and Broadcasting Ministry over concerns about portraying Gandhi in a poor light?
If so, with the newsreader’s declaration at the outset that Gandhi’s life “is not what it seems”, senior officials might have had cause for concern - wondering just what had gotten through their net. She promises revelations of a dramatic kind when retracing Gandhi’s first and last footsteps (1869-1948). Yet, produced to commemorate his birth 140 years ago last month, Indian officials need not have worried. What the ordinary viewer thinks about the three-hour documentary, however, is quite a different matter.
Granted, we learn about the young Gandhi working for the advancement of the rich merchants as opposed to the poor labourers; that while in South Africa he formed an Indian ambulance corps to assist the British fight their colonial wars; and that in later life he was “cruel” to his family, taking a vow of celibacy and choosing to become distant with his children. But these facts are hardly remarkable - interested readers, not only those to have ventured “beyond the veil of divinity cast about the figure of the Mahatma [Great Soul],” can testify to this.
Rather, it is what we do not learn about him that is revelatory – and, indeed, the likes of which that may provide us with an answer to our earlier question. Contrary to media belief, some academics argue that Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns of nonviolent resistance were politically unsuccessful. Husain is just the latest in a long line of journalists to misrepresent the success of his Non-Cooperation Movement. By overlooking the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) - a Marxist organization who sought independence through the use of terrorist means - she underplays the political leverage nationalist terrorism provided Gandhi in humbling the British Raj. Randall D. Law, author of Terrorism: A History, reminds us that he understood the mechanics of “contradictory but mutually reinforcing movements”: “If you will work [with] the Congress for all it is worth”, Gandhi said to British officials in 1931, “you will say good-bye to terrorism; then [Indians] will not need terrorism.”
While terrorism may be considered “detrimental to the image of India” and thus a valid case for editorial intervention, the question must be asked (if, indeed, it was also cut) how a very different kind of affair between an Indian and a Briton could be considered “detrimental to … the Indian people” and therefore not warrant inclusion? I am, of course, talking about Gandhi’s “epic rivalry” - to quote Arthur Herman, author of Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age – with Winston Churchill.
Despite being born five years and seven thousand miles apart, the pair struggled for the hearts and minds of the British public, and of world opinion, for over forty years. Their shared life experiences are most striking (from a belief in destiny and imprisonment in South Africa to years of political irrelevance and ultimately an achievement at the expense of his own principles); so striking, in fact, it demands that one be referenced whenever the other is studied.
Notwithstanding various scenes discussing terrorism and a reference to Churchill, Richard Attenborough does say in the foreword of his three-hour 1982 biopic:
“No man’s life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime. What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record and try to find one’s way to the heart of the man…”
Against this charge-sheet, it must be concluded that not only does Husain, like Attenborough before her, capture the “spirit” of the man but, unlike his nine-time Oscar-winning film, her documentary remains “faithful … to the record”: allocating sufficient “weight” to the student’s time in London; acknowledging the campaigner’s first reaction to Amritsar; providing an unbiased account of the politician’s return from the 1931 Round Table Conference; and not downplaying the moral power of the Father of the Nation’s fast in halting Hindu-Muslim violence in Calcutta. To be sure, both script and camera serve only as a canvas upon which Husain paints a personal and heart-warming picture of a great soul.
The Indian government has demanded that some of Indian Summer’s scenes be rewritten and depictions of physical intimacy between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten be cut out before granting permission to film on location in Delhi, Punjab and Kashmir.
All foreign films shot in India must be approved by a vetting committee which screens the script to make sure “nothing detrimental to the image of India or the Indian people is shot or included in the film”.
The drama was based on Alex Von Tunzelmann’s book Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of Empire (published in 2007 to coincide with the 60th anniversary of independence), which tells the story of the pair’s “intense and clandestine love affair” both before and after 1947.
The same historian features in a new three-part BBC series on the other half of India’s political dynasty: Mohandas Gandhi. Also filmed on location in India, it now prompts the question whether or not Mishal Husain’s script was vetted by India’s Information and Broadcasting Ministry over concerns about portraying Gandhi in a poor light?
If so, with the newsreader’s declaration at the outset that Gandhi’s life “is not what it seems”, senior officials might have had cause for concern - wondering just what had gotten through their net. She promises revelations of a dramatic kind when retracing Gandhi’s first and last footsteps (1869-1948). Yet, produced to commemorate his birth 140 years ago last month, Indian officials need not have worried. What the ordinary viewer thinks about the three-hour documentary, however, is quite a different matter.
Granted, we learn about the young Gandhi working for the advancement of the rich merchants as opposed to the poor labourers; that while in South Africa he formed an Indian ambulance corps to assist the British fight their colonial wars; and that in later life he was “cruel” to his family, taking a vow of celibacy and choosing to become distant with his children. But these facts are hardly remarkable - interested readers, not only those to have ventured “beyond the veil of divinity cast about the figure of the Mahatma [Great Soul],” can testify to this.
Rather, it is what we do not learn about him that is revelatory – and, indeed, the likes of which that may provide us with an answer to our earlier question. Contrary to media belief, some academics argue that Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns of nonviolent resistance were politically unsuccessful. Husain is just the latest in a long line of journalists to misrepresent the success of his Non-Cooperation Movement. By overlooking the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) - a Marxist organization who sought independence through the use of terrorist means - she underplays the political leverage nationalist terrorism provided Gandhi in humbling the British Raj. Randall D. Law, author of Terrorism: A History, reminds us that he understood the mechanics of “contradictory but mutually reinforcing movements”: “If you will work [with] the Congress for all it is worth”, Gandhi said to British officials in 1931, “you will say good-bye to terrorism; then [Indians] will not need terrorism.”
While terrorism may be considered “detrimental to the image of India” and thus a valid case for editorial intervention, the question must be asked (if, indeed, it was also cut) how a very different kind of affair between an Indian and a Briton could be considered “detrimental to … the Indian people” and therefore not warrant inclusion? I am, of course, talking about Gandhi’s “epic rivalry” - to quote Arthur Herman, author of Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age – with Winston Churchill.
Despite being born five years and seven thousand miles apart, the pair struggled for the hearts and minds of the British public, and of world opinion, for over forty years. Their shared life experiences are most striking (from a belief in destiny and imprisonment in South Africa to years of political irrelevance and ultimately an achievement at the expense of his own principles); so striking, in fact, it demands that one be referenced whenever the other is studied.
Notwithstanding various scenes discussing terrorism and a reference to Churchill, Richard Attenborough does say in the foreword of his three-hour 1982 biopic:
“No man’s life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime. What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record and try to find one’s way to the heart of the man…”
Against this charge-sheet, it must be concluded that not only does Husain, like Attenborough before her, capture the “spirit” of the man but, unlike his nine-time Oscar-winning film, her documentary remains “faithful … to the record”: allocating sufficient “weight” to the student’s time in London; acknowledging the campaigner’s first reaction to Amritsar; providing an unbiased account of the politician’s return from the 1931 Round Table Conference; and not downplaying the moral power of the Father of the Nation’s fast in halting Hindu-Muslim violence in Calcutta. To be sure, both script and camera serve only as a canvas upon which Husain paints a personal and heart-warming picture of a great soul.