Blinkered pastiche of a cliché

The modern world would have failed Gandhi’s moral force. Munnabhai makes a virtue of his limited utility and mocks at the make-believe

Prasenjit Chowdhury Kolkata

The rollicking success of Rajkumar Hirani’s Lage Raho Munnabhai disinters the relevance of Gandhi and his teachings of ahimsa and satyagraha in modern times—non-violence and passive resistance to fight injustice—as recipes for coming to grips with the essential philistinism of India. A paunchy, ageing, sleazy-eyed ‘hero’ of the Hindi screen, as a noted commentator puts it, becomes the brand ambassador of the scrawny little man and his cult, now known as Gandhigiri. Is it all hype? Is the film a travesty of what Gandhi essentially

stood for?

But Munnabhai is not the first fictional presentation of Gandhigiri. Dramatic reconstructions of Gandhi’s life in film and fiction range from Richard Attenborough’s Academy Award winner in 1982 (Gandhi) to Indian novels like Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. Or take the instance of R.K. Narayanan’s Waiting for the Mahatma, which tells the story of Sriram, a 20-year-old student of Swaraj. Gandhi becomes Sriram’s rite de passage— as he becomes Munnabhai’s—through his service to India. At the very first meeting he is intimidated and Gandhi, sensing this, “looked up at Sriram and said, ‘Sit down, young man. Come and sit as near me as you like’.” To a fearful Sriram, Gandhi said, “By the time we meet again next, you must give me a very good account of yourself.” In the novel, Gandhi always seems to the fully himself as in Naraynan’s depiction of Sriram’s encounter with Gandhi—the message is exactly that. Munnabhai, too, reforms himself, he turns into a moral do-gooder from a goon.

If Gandhi is a model to look up to or his ideals are so emulating, there is a formidable corpus of hagiography and iconoclasm vying with one another. Some myths, some stock-in-trade of history, mix with metaphors of the larger-than-life image of Gandhi. While one resorts to Gandhism, or the mongrelised version of what is known lately as Gandhigiri, there are some obvious bottlenecks.

If pastiche of history, for instance, is taken from Gandhi’s autobiography, when he, at 16, expresses his morbid shame of having given in to the carnal desire to have sex with his wife at the time of his father’s death in 1845, one can see the difficulty. It was not until some 15 years later, after the birth of his fifth child, that he began in earnest to try to restrain his sexual needs. He had long believed that abstinence was the only morally defensible method of birth control. He embraced celibacy, after possibly he had enough, and found in the art of reining in the senses, through brahmacharya, a way to attaining divinity. He was apparently a highly over-sexed man and  found mastering his sexual needs a daily struggle, like “walking on the sword’s edge”.