In his entire life, Mahatma Gandhi just saw two films, and neither completely. The two were Mission Moscow and Ram Rajya – the first made him angry because of scenes showing ‘skimpily clad women’ and the second he liked, patting the filmmaker Vijay Bhatt for a job well done. He gave only one interview on film, with James Mills of Associated Press, that too after laying down several conditions.
But Gandhi understood the power of cinema as a tool of communication and allowed newsreel crews to follow him everywhere.
Yet he objected to cinema because he felt that films had took viewers away from more important tasks, says Prakash Magdum, in this podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia. When he was director of the National Film Archives of India, Magdum set out on discovering all the films in which he was shot or were made about him, and discovered scores, if not hundreds. His new book The Mahatma on Celluloid lists some of them, in different languages.
