Review of the film “GANDHI”

Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film of Mahatma Gandhi is over three hours in length.

The film covers Gandhi’s life from his arrival in South Africa in 1893, through to his assassination in Delhi in 1948, and in telling the Mahatma’s own story, it tells the tale of India’s struggle for freedom from colonial rule from 1915 onward. The story is told by expanding on a selection of key events in his life.

The first part of the film examines Gandhi’s long struggle to force the South African government to end discrimination against Asians. In the early scenes, the young lawyer Mohandas K Gandhi seems naive, apparently surprised to discover that he and other non-whites are treated as second class citizens, something which seems to him at odds with his perception of the British Empire as a source of enlightenment in the world. The struggle that follows sees Gandhi and his fellow dissenters develop formidable notions of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance against a regime that seems more than happy to resort to brutality or incarceration to maintain the social order.

The second, much longer section begins in 1915 with Gandhi’s return to India - by then an unfamiliar country to him after 20 years abroad. As he is driven through the back streets of Bombay soon after arrival, he is deeply affected by the scenes of poverty he witnesses. At a later garden party, he is introduced to other major characters.

The film picks up on the seminal moments in the independence struggle, one of the most shocking perhaps being the massacre of 1919, in which the cold blooded General ordered his troops to fire on a meeting of unarmed civilians (400 deaths and 1500 injured).

Gandhi want the Indians to weave their own cloth and not buy that woven in British mills. Events are interspersed by various periods of imprisonment…

The movie ends where it begins; with Gandhi’s assassination.

Mahatma Gandhi is undoubtedly a legend; a towering moral force and one of those very few figures of the 20th century whose universal message and contribution to humanity transcends the events that made him famous.

Whatever the may film lack in historical accuracy it makes up for in overall sentiment. Attenborough has crafted a work of both epic scale and great detail that offers a sympathetic, convincing and accessible version of Gandhi as both man and myth, while telling one of the great stories of a nation’s emancipation from tyranny. A truly great movie.

Review of “Heat and Dust”

Heat and Dust views India through the eyes of two English women living fifty years apart. Olivia is the first wife of an English government official assigned to India in the 1920s. The unnamed narrator of the story is the young granddaughter of the same official by a later wife who, intrigued by family rumors about Olivia, travels to India seeking answers to Olivia’s mysterious existence. How, in a segregated society, did Olivia meet an Indian prince of questionable character, and why did she leave her husband for him? What happened to her afterwards? As the narrator stays in the town where Olivia lived and visits places that influenced Olivia’s life, we witness India’s past through Olivia’s letters and journals and the narrator’s imagination. For Olivia, removed from the day-to-day existence of the Indian people, India “was like being not in a different part of this world but in another world altogether, in another reality.” In contrast, the narrator sublets a room that shares a courtyard with an Indian family and learns much about their life. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala shows us both pre- and post-independent India, exposing the similarities and differences of India’s impact on each of these women.

GANDHI (the film)-list of key scenes

Gandhi was kicked out of the train

Gandhi blew passes into little bits (south africa)

Gandhi had an argument with his wife

Gandhi shaved off his scalp hair and changed his dress

Gandhi began to announce his message

Gandhi did hunger strikes because of the mistakes of the Indians

Gandhi retrieve the salt-march

independence of india

hindu-moslem conflicts

death of Gandhi

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in 1927 and is an Anglo-Indian writer, who started as a novelist in the 1950s, and then in the mid-1960s began her successful career as a screenwriter with the Ivory-Merchant film team. Jhabvala won her first Academy Award for A Room with a View (1985) for best adapted screenplay. The second came for Howards End (1992). Both films were based on E.M. Forster’s novels. Jhabvala’s novel Heat and Dust was awarded the Booker Prize in 1975.

“But I think I could not have learned from films if I had not written all these novels and really learned how to set characters in motion. If you just sit down and write a screenplay, I don’t think you can.” (from Conversations with Screenwriters by Susan Bullington Katz, 2000)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Cologne, Germany. Her father, a lawyer, was of Polish-Jewish origin and her mother was German-Jewish. Jhabvala attended Jewish segregated school before she emigrated in 1939 with her family to Britain. The family settled in Hendon, northwest London, where Jhabvala attended Hendon Country School. In her new home country she switched from German to English at the age of twelve. During the war years she read the works of Dickens; Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind she took with her during the bombings of London to an air raid shelter. Jhabvala’s committed suicide in 1948 after learning that the rest of his family had died in the Holocaust.

In 1948 Jhabvala became a British citizen. She studied English literature at the University of London, receiving her MA in 1951 from Queen Mary College. In the same year she married a Parsee architect, C.S.H. Jhabvala, with whom she moved to India. For the next 24 years she lived in New Delhi. Increasingly disenchanted with India Jhabvala moved in 1975 to New York City, dividing in the following years her time between two countries. Later Jhabvala also became a US citizen.

Jhabvala started to compose stories at an early age, but as a housewife in Delhi, she found enough time to write seriously. Her first novel, To Whom She Will, appeared in 1955. She also began to contribute short stories to the New Yorker. Her early novels depicted ironically the life and manners of Indian middle-class families, Europeans trying to understand India, and the clash between Eastern and Western cultures. Often her stories are seen from the point of view of an outsider. Some Indian critics have labelled her authorial detachment as a sign of old-fashioned Western attitudes toward India. “Jhabvala is a connoisseur of divided souls, conceiving characters whose inner longings are at odds with their outer protective coloration,” wrote Deborah Mason in her review of Jhabvala’s short story collection East Into Upper East (1998). The “East” in the title refers to New Delhi and the “Upper East” to New York. Noteworthy, Jhabvala’s German-Jewish heritage has never occupied a central place in his work.

Jhabvala’s Booker Prize novel Heat and Dust was a love story, which contrasted the 1920s and the 1970s. Olivia, a bored colonial wife, is married to an English officer, Douglas Rivers. She falls in love with the local nawab, a minor Indian prince. She becomes pregnant, has an abortion, and abandons her husband. Fifty years later her step-granddaughter, the narrator, travels to India to investigate the enigma of the family scandal. “Fortunately, during my first few months here, I kept a journal, so I have some record of my early impressions. If I were to try and recollect them now, I might not be able to do so. They are no longer the same because I myself am no longer the same. India always changes people, and I have been no exception.” In her diary she tells about her own affair, she also becomes pregnant but she decides to have the child. The Washington Post compared the setting of the novel and its theme of Anglo-Indian relationships to E.M. Forster’s famous novel A Passage to India. In In Search for Love and Beauty Jhabvala changed her scene from India to New York City, but used again one of her favorite themes, the way “odd shards and fragments of the past” affects the present. The story dealt with Austrian and German immigrants in New York and their destinies through three generations. Out of India (1986) was chosen by the New York Times Review of Books as one of the Best Books of 1986.

Jhabvala’s collaboration with the producer Ismail Merchant and the director James Ivory in their beautifully crafted film productions started in the 1960s. Merchant had read in Hollywood Jhabvala’s novel The Householder (1960). The domestic comedy told of a newly-married couple, Prem and Indu, Prem’s new obligations, and his road to achieve the position of a householder. In Delhi Merchant and the American director James Ivory, with whom he had established a production company, approached the author. The two filmmakers had heard that Jhabvala guarded her privacy fiercely, which was proved when at first on the telephone she pretended to be her mother-in-law. In an interview Jhabvala later confessed that she wasn’t even a film buff, and she hadn’t seen many films. However, their meeting led to one of the most extraordinary collaborations in film production.

Jhabvala’s adaptations of classic English novels include works by Henry James and E.M. Forster. In Conversations with Screenwriters Jhabvala revealed that when she writes a scene, she doesn’t think much about it, how it’s going to be in the film. “I just think, ‘How are these two characters going to interact with each other?’ I know it can’t be the same as on the page in a novel - it must be much more direct and the language has to be simpler.” The adaptation of A Room with a View was very faithful to the original text, although Jhabvala made small changes to streamline Forster’s work for film by combining events.

A Room with a View was the first Forster novel to be adapted by Merchant Ivory Productions. It was followed by Maurice (1987), written by Kit Hesketh-Harvey and James Ivory, and Howards End, for which Jhabvala won her second Oscar. In 1990 she won the Best Screenplay Award from the New York Film Critics Circle for Mr.& Mrs. Bridge (1990), starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and in 1994 she received the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) Screen Laurel Award. - Ismail Merchant died in May 2005. At the time of his death he was working on The White Countess, based on a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Point of View

The narrator’s parts of this novel are told in the first person. She relates Olivia’s parts

sometimes in the first person but usually in the third. The points of view are those of women.

Their voices are separate in time by about 50 years. The events forever changing Olivia’s

life occurred in 1923. The precise year that the narrator’s life changed is never stated.

 

Setting

India: the towns and roads between Bombay, Satipur, Khatm and the village in the mountains. Khatm is about 15

miles from Satipur and the house in the mountains is somewhere on the steep foothills of the Himalayas.

 

Language and Meaning

The novel is written in English, which is occasionally compared to other languages: poems

written in Urdu come out flat in English; Douglas delivers “deadly insults” to the rich men of

Satipur in Hindustani (since English would be unsuitable for doing so); the Nawab uses

extremely polite English to express contempt. Some of the words used are of religious origin

(the narrator encounters Maji in a state of “samadhi;” she thinks of seeking refuge in an

“ashram“). Curiously, some people and things are not named: we do not know the narrator’s

first name (although her last name is probably Rivers, because Douglas and his second wife

had a son); the old beggar woman in Satipur who died did have a name (but none other

than Maji knew it); X was the name of the town where Olivia lived the rest of her days—and

the exact year the narrator arrived is never stated.

 

Structure

This novel is divided into twelve unnumbered major parts. The first is untitled and the other

eleven are titled with the year “1923.” In the first part, the first date—in the narrator’s

journal—is “2 February” and the last, “24 February:” She has just arrived in India. She was

in India, because that is where Olivia had lived when she wrote Marcia. Before the end of

this first part, the narrator has taken a room in Satipur, the town where Olivia had lived when

she began writing. Each of the remaining eleven parts in the novel is titled “1923,” because

that was the year when Olivia had begun writing Marcia (about herself and the Nawab)—

and this, the narrator says repeatedly, is Olivia’s story: since she had brought the letters with

her to India, the reader can reasonably conclude that Olivia’s sections are the narrator’s

synopses of what she had written Marcia some 50 years earlier. More journal entry dates

follow each synopsis: “24 February” in the first part is followed by “8 March” in the second

part and “31 August” in the eleventh. In the twelfth part—like the others titled “1923″ and

beginning with Olivia’s section (but this time ending in the 1950s)—the narrator has entered

no dates in her journal: she has reached X and the house in which Olivia had lived, in the

steep foothills of the Himalayas, after she had stopped writing letters about herself and the

Nawab (in the 1950s).

Religions

On one side of the road into Satipur are the old Muslim tombs and on the other side, the

Hindu suttee stones, the bodies of those who died belonging to one religion and those who

died because of a different one. What is religion? Dr. Saunders said that some of the

mutilations he’d seen were enough to make him proud to call himself an atheist. Was Chid a

“sadhu,” because he had spent a little time studying Hindu scripture and wore an orange

robe? Inder Lal was impressed by what he said while Maji found everything about Chid

amusing. Most of Satipur’s inhabitants are depicted as too busy meeting the basics—food,

clothing and shelter—to be overly zealous about any religion: intellectually interested, yes;

fanatic, no. Another perspective is that of Inder Lal’s mother and her friends, who take the

narrator to Baba Firdau’s shrine on the “Husband’s Wedding Day”—it is more like taking a

holiday at a resort than performing a sacred ritual. The Christians, in contrast, are shown to

be a particularly pious lot (except for the ailing Chid, after he’d changed his orange robe for

checkered pants, after he’d converted). Their graveyards are well maintained: the bodies of

Christians who lived in heathen lands were transported for proper burial with other Christian

bodies. There were, the narrator noted, many British cemeteries in India. Yet, the first

warning she receives after arriving in India is from a Christian missionary: there is no hope.

Places

Satipur

City where the narrator rents a room from Inder Lal. City where Olivia and Douglas had lived

together in 1923.

 

Khatm

A squat little town that had grown up in the shadow of the Nawab’s palace. The Begum

arranges for Olivia to visit the midwives in the back alleys of Khatm.

 

The Nawab’s Palace

The palace is described as rising like a jewel above ugly Khatm. On it is Baba Firdau’s

shrine, built by one of the Nawab’s ancestors to acknowledge one who had once given him

shelter when he had desperately needed it. The shrine becomes religiously significant—

many make pilgrimages to it—once a year, on the “Husband’s Wedding Day,” an annual

fertility festival. It is near here that Olivia and the Nawab—and the narrator and Inder Lal—

become lovers. Since the Nawab left no heirs, his nephew Karim inherited the palace and its

grounds in 1953.

 

The Mountains

The village in the steep foothills of the Himalayas where Olivia lived the quarter century after

she had miscarried in the Satipur hospital and fled to the palace.

 

Characters

The Narrator

She is the granddaughter of Douglas and Tessie Rivers. Her first name is never mentioned. She is in her 20s. She

travels to India to learn what had happened to Douglas’ first wife, Olivia. She travels light,

arriving with little more than basic necessities, her journal and the letters Olivia had written

to Marcia back in 1923. One of the first things she does after renting a room in Satipur is

purchase Indian clothing—loose pants and a long shirt—at the bazaar (because they are

more practical).

When summer arrives, she sleeps with the other inhabitants of her building in the open court

yard (because the heat makes sleeping inside unbearable). She is befriended by her new

landlord’s mother, who introduces her to the other women of Satipur. She and Inder Lal later

become lovers (near the spot where Olivia and the Nawab became lovers). Only she and

the Satipur midwives know she is pregnant.  

 

Olivia Rivers

The first wife of the narrator’s grandfather. She and Douglas lived in Satipur (she was newly

arrived while he had grown up in India). On the trip to the Nawab’s palace in Khatm for the

dinner party, she looked forward to everyone seeing her in her evening gown and jewelry.

After the Nawab first visited her in Satipur—as she knew he would—she began writing

detailed letters to Marcia. Her visits to the palace became more-and-more frequent. She and

the Nawab became lovers. When she realized she was pregnant, she decided on an

abortion and the English Dr. Saunders was outraged (Olivia fled to the palace). The Nawab

bought and maintained a house for in the mountains. Nothing more about her is known other than that she lived there a quarter century and, at her request, when she died, a few years after the Nawab, her body was cremated—and her

ashes thrown along the mountainside—instead of added to one of the many British

cemeteries in India.

 

Douglas Rivers

The narrator’s grandfather. He grew up in India and served as a junior officer in the British

colonial government.  Sincere and hard working, he had the respect of both British and Indians. After he divorced Olivia, he

married Tessie, Beth Crawford’s sister. They had one son: the narrator’s father—when he

was twelve, the entire family returned to England (the author’s age when her family had

emigrated there from Germany).

 

Tessie Rivers

The narrator’s grandmother. After Indian Independence, the Rivers and the Crawfords—

Tessie and Beth were sisters—returned to England. Long after Tessie and Beth had been

widowed, Harry gave them Olivia’s letters (which Marcia had given him).

 

The Nawab

He became a prince when he was 15, when his father died of a stroke. He was married but

not living with his wife. After many daily visits—whiling away time in pleasant

pursuits in the pleasant surroundings of the palace—the Nawab and Olivia became lovers.

The British colonial governors were all convinced that the Nawab was generally a cad (if not

a criminal) and had exploited Olivia to exact his revenge on them and their government. He

died childless—and close to penniless—from a stroke in 1953, in the arms of his mother the

Begum, who by then lived in New York City. His nephew Karim, who lived in London,

inherited the palace (and had sold off most of its furnishings long ago).

 

Harry

Harry, whose last name is never mentioned, had been with the Nawab for 3 years, as a

semi-permanent guest in the palace: Harry sometimes wanted to return to England—his

mother was ill—but couldn’t (or the Nawab wouldn’t allow him). He finally returned (or

escaped) shortly after Olivia’s “disgrace.” Many years after everyone—Douglas, the Nawab,

Olivia—had died, he gave Olivia’s letters to Beth, who, by that time, shared a house in

England with her sister Tessie, Douglas’ widow, the narrator’s grandmother.

 

Inder Lal

He lived in Satipur during the narrator’s time, with his unnamed mother and his wife Ritu and

young children. He is at first the narrator’s landlord (she thinks the only reason he talks to

her is to practice his English). His mother becomes the narrator’s friend and through her,

she meets the other women of the village, especially Maji (who—she describes herself as a

retired midwife—can bring herself in and out of the bliss of samadhi). Inder Lal’s mother and

his wife go on a pilgrimage, accompanied by Chid—a young British man who had studied

some Hindu religious texts, donned an orange robe, proclaimed himself an ascetic and

sponged off whomever he could (including the narrator). Inder Lal and the narrator, who had

become friends, become lovers. The narrator does not tell him, before she leaves Satipur, that she is pregnant.

Parallelisms between 1923 and the 1970s

- the place: both characters live in india (for example in satipur), the narator often visits places, where olivia lived ( the palace of the Nawab, the mountains at the end of the novel)
- missing integration: both can not really integrate
- the “husbands wedding day” is a topic in both plots
- both become pregnant after visiting the shrine
- both think about having an abortion
- both put down their experiences (olivia writes some letters to her sister marcia and the narrator writes this novel)
- the wives of their new freinds are mentally ill (for instance the wives of the Nawab and Inder Lal)

 

 

The two plots of “Heat and Dust” (summary)

H+D consists of two plots, both of which deal with the reactions of British people in India.
There is a plot set in 1923, when the British still ruled India.The protagonist is Olivia, the wife of Douglas Rivers, a British administrator.He has a strict sense of duty. Olivia is bored with her lonely life-while her husband is working-and by the rather dull British community to which she belongs. She feels attracted to some exotic notion of India which she finds in the local prince, the Nawab, who has a bad reputation among the British officials. Olivia goes out of her way to make friends with the Nawab, eventually becomes his mistress and gets pregnant. In the end she decides to have an abortion performed by native midwives. After that she changes from the British to the Indian side, leaving her husband and spending the rest of her life in a house in a mountain resort in the Himalayas which the Nawab provides for her.The plot of the 1970s deals with the step-granddaughter of Olivia, the nameless narrator of the novel. She heard about the scandal surrounding Olivia and after having read Olivia’s letters to her sister Marcia, she has become fascinated by the story. She travels to India to find out more and understand what happened in the 1920s, looking for traces of Olivia’s life. She also writes about her own experiences in India, about some Western hippies and her relationship to Inder Lal, her Indian landlord. She too becomes pregnant, and also considers an abortion, but then she decides to have her child in the same hill resort where Olivia spent the rest of her life.
The narrator leaves her own story unfinished.