Gandhi The Person Vs The Movie Gandhi

Some of the most enduring memories of Gandhi might not necessarily come from his life but from Attenborough’s historical blockbuster that re-introduced the legend to a new generation around the world.

- Mayank Shekhar

An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind,” is a famous Mahatma Gandhi line that, like the rest of the world, had impressed the then US President Ronald Reagan’s speech writers very much. They wished to quote the line in one of Reagan’s forthcoming speeches. Except, they were unable to figure out exactly when and where Gandhi had said it.

Anybody would sympathise with Reagan’s fact-checkers — as much for the lack of Google back then as for the fact that, well, let alone books on and by him, records of Gandhi’s personal writings (speeches and letters included), stretch to about a hundred archived volumes.

Reagan’s speechwriters therefore approached John Briley, who had scripted Gandhi, the 1982 Richard Attenborough film, for help. Briley told them Gandhi had never said, “An eye for an eye…” It was Briley who had written that twist on the Biblical command, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” for Ben Kingsley’s part in the movie. This is that moment in the film when Gandhi is upset over the Chauri Chaura incident.

Such is the reach and power of a medium that one of the most famous quotes (it was even the opening slate of Anurag Kashyap’s film Black Friday), attributed to one of the most quoted men in history, belongs not to the person himself, but a film based on his life.

This is ironic, I’m sure Gandhi would have disapproved. Because he admittedly hated the movies, and chose to stay away from them all his life, except once, it is reported, when he watched a mythological Ram Rajya by Vijay Bhatt. Of cinema he said, “The evil it has, or is doing, is patent. The good, if any at all, remains to be proven.”