174 - Gandhi: Moral Man In Immoral Society

Gandhi: Moral Man In Immoral Society
By Paul Younger

TO VIEW Richard Attenborough's film "Gandhi" is to be confronted with the moral predicament of our century. The documentary style of the film gives it an air of authenticity as an accurate portrayal of the twentieth century predicament Reinhold Niebuhr characterized as that of "moral man and immoral society." The story is an "epic" story, but like any good epic it is told in a way which allows the listener or viewer to enter in and take up one of the roles in the drama. For many of us, the hero might just as well be Martin Luther King, Jr., and the location Alabama. Wherever it is set, the scenes of violence and injustice are scenes of the twentieth century, and whoever the actors, the actions are those of moral courage. However near or far our acquaintance with Gandhi and Indian independence, we come away with the same questions: How does society become so immoral? Whence the courage to act morally? How do we share the courage of our fellow human beings? Do we always know what is right? Will the right prevail?

I

The world or society in which Gandhi found himself, as he came to adulthood toward the end of the last century, was a confusing world. His mother's piety reached backward to a world of small kingdoms and closed castes, but it had not been redefined in terms of the legal world he was entering. Christians of many stripes were able to tell him as a young law student in England of the universal values they believed in, but they were the first to admit that those values no longer governed the actions of their imperialistic government. It was, however, South African society which really forced him to pay attention to the particular forms of injustice which characterize the modern world. There it was that he found Indian traders and European rulers cloaking themselves in a few of their traditional ideals while at the same time systematically exploiting the local population. The sensitive Gandhi had earlier been distressed by social injustices he thought be detected in India and England, but he was stunned to find that the immorality of South African society was obviously at the root of the whole structure of the

Paul Younger is Professor of Religious Studies, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. lie is a graduate of Lafayette College, Banaras Hindu University, Serampore College, and Princeton University where he received his doctorate. A specialist in the history of religions, he and "Susie" have often visited India, and when not teaching and studying they manage a farm near Hamilton and, among other things, raise sheep.

175 - Gandhi: Moral Man In Immoral Society

social order. By the time he returned to India, Gandhi knew that the evils he must address were those that pervaded the whole social order.

II

The problem of identifying the sources of Gandhi's moral courage has occupied psychiatrists and religious historians for years. By ignoring those inconclusive investigations, the film version of his story helps us see the extent to which he was a very ordinary man whose courage emerged in the arena of conflict itself, as he felt the natural revulsion of the human soul at the inhumanity of injustice. In the language of Simone Weil, who was herself a twentieth century saint schooled in the brutalities of Hitler's Europe, his courage was the result of paying close attention to the powers which she has called the "orders of necessity." It is precisely his defiance of those forces which constitutes what she has characterized as the "turn to the Good," the watershed which transforms completely his relationship to his world. In taking his stand, he did not take refuge in any tradition or ideology which he felt to be superior or any community he felt he could trust, but he confronted the immoral order directly in terms of the injustice it perpetrated, and it was in that confrontation that his courage was born.

III

One of the interesting stories in the film is the way Nehru and his friends came to share Gandhi's moral courage. Nehru knew better than anyone that as a fellow strategist in the struggle for Indian independence Gandhi was anything but a genius. Probably B. G. Tilak's uncompromising Hindu nationalism or S.C. Bhose's all-out modernism would have brought independence sooner. Nehru, as a brash young man, found himself at Gandhi's side and when thirty years later he finally took the reins from Gandhi's hand and pushed on to independence, he himself had a moral character of exceptional clarity and courage.

There was real danger in Gandhi's case that his towering moral presence might result in either subservience or rebellion among members of his family or among his co-workers in the political arena. While there are sad stories of people who responded to him in both ways, the film's careful focus on the way in which Nehru and his colleagues matured and took charge provides the important sense the viewer needs that it is ordinary people like us who are called upon to take up this extraordinary challenge.

While Nehru and his colleagues learn the difficult lessons of moral courage in the day-to-day activities of the political arena, Gandhi seems to spend an inordinate amount of time with Western reporters, followers, and government officials. This part of the film is portrayed unevenly, for Attenborough was understandably a bit self-conscious about it, but it was an important part of Gandhi's perspective and it needed to be spelled out. It was important to Gandhi's perspective because as much as he wanted Indians to feel like masters in their own

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house, he was much more concerned with convincing the British that it was they who were tangled in a moral predicament and it was they who should be wanting to leave. As Gandhi understood it, the moral predicament of our century was a predicament of communication. His call was not an appeal to tribal ethics or a return to traditional Indian values. His call was for a new form of dialogue, for the development of a new kind of moral authority, an authority capable of coping with the forms of evil which modern military, commercial, and industrial power had unleashed.

IV

The latter half of the film is less gripping because the ambiguities of the moral path onto which Gandhi had committed himself were becoming increasingly apparent. But the script-writer and director continue to treat the-viewer with respect, as we are allowed to witness the-ambiguity and to fit it into our moral universe in our own way. The film does not tell us whether to side with Nehru or Gandhi about further delays in independence, or about further compromises with the Muslims. We are even allowed to feel that maybe the ardent Hindus, among whom stands the youth who will kill Gandhi, have some point. As Niebuhr argued so forcefully, our moral predicament is not faced when it is redefined to give us the ideal choices we might long for, but when we learn to weigh carefully the ambiguous alternatives we are given to work with in concrete situations. In Ben Kingsley's portrayal of the aging Gandhi, we see him wrestle with the ambiguities which his own actions have set in motion and we know that in some sense we are at that point in the presence of even greater moral character than we witnessed in the courageous young lawyer who gripped our consciences at the beginning.

While the ambiguity of the problems faced in the second half of the film teaches us about the complexity of the moral life, one never feels overwhelmed or fearful of losing the long-range sense that good will eventually prevail. The increasingly serene Gandhi tells those about him "we are in command" or "the right cannot lose" as the forces which appear threateningly chaotic swirl about him. By the end, we are prepared to go with him to what we know will be his death-but not his defeat. In the beginning of the film, we had followed the killer (the immoral society) as he moved through the crowd to that same death scene. Now the camera lets us go more slowly, this time with the Mahatma, as he has one last strategy chat with a political leader and one final word with Western friends before he enters the garden with arms resting on the shoulders of his young nieces. Again the pain of violence is piercing, but in an important sense one feels that this time "moral man" has had the last word.