Sem-3 Paper-11 Assignment

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Name: Kajal Keraliya

Topic: Salman Rushdie’s view on “Attenborough’s Gandhi”

Roll no.: 18

Paper no 11:Post-colonial Literature

M.A: Sem-3

Enrolment no.:2069108420180030

Year: 2017-19

E-mail: Www.kajalk1@gmail.com

Submitted to:

Smt. S.B. Gardi Department Of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji

Salman Rushdie

             Salman Rushdie, (born June 19, 1947, Bombay [now Mumbai], India), Indian-born British writer whose allegorical novels examine historical and philosophical issues by means of surreal characters, brooding humour, and an effusive and melodramatic prose style. His treatment of sensitive religious and political subjects made him a controversial figure. His first published novel, Grimus, appeared in 1975. Rushdie’s next novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), a fable about modern India, was an unexpected critical and popular success that won him international recognition. A film adaptation, for which he drafted the screenplay, was released in 2012. He novel Shame (1983), based on contemporary politics in Pakistan, was also popular, but Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, encountered a different reception. Despite the standing death threat, Rushdie continued to write, producing Imaginary Homelands (1991), a collection of essays and criticism; the children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990); the short-story collection East, West (1994); and the novel The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). In 1998, after nearly a decade, the Iranian government announced that it would no longer seek to enforce its fatwa against Rushdie. He recounted his experience in the third-person memoir Joseph Anton (2012); its title refers to an alias he adopted while in seclusion.           

Imagery Homeland

       “Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”     

                                                                                           Imaginary Homelands is a collection of Salman Rushdie’s essays. These essays also a different collection of various articles, seminar papers, reviews published over a decade of his literary lifetime during 1981-1991.Imaginary Homelands is incisive, intellectual, probing, eloquent and lively. From this essay one can take issue with its wide scope. Salman Rushdie selects different subjects like political, social, and literary topics in this essay with various deals and critical approaches. After reading this book, the reaction to such book can only be personal and subjective and it is not a story that can be discussed with some degree of detachment. Imaginary Homelands is a personal conversation by Rushdie. From his writing we can see a power of Rushdie over media and he is that kind of a writer.Every reader has different view about this book. It is depend on our individual mindset. Rushdie’s literary style is full of innovation because of being a migrant and an author. It’s base on reality and Rushdie feels a kinship with the writers who writes their books with fantasy and reality.   

       ATTENBOROUGH’S GANDHI :-

About the Attenborough’s Gandhi

In the essay “Attenborough's Gandhi' in which salman Rushdie talks about the movie 'Gandhi'. The film is about a biography, not apolitical work. Even if one aspects this distinction, one must reply that a biography, it is not turn into hagiography(see only one side) aspect of the subjects as well as loveable side.

 Attenborough's Gandhi-essay deals with the Indian called Mohandas karamchand Gandhi.

  

 

·        #Why Should an Englishman want to deify Gandhi?
#The writer gives three board heading:

• First, the exotic impulse, the wish to see India as the fountainhead of spiritual-mystical wisdom.

• Second, there is what might be termed the, Christian     longing, for a 'leader' dedicated to ideals of poverty and simplicity, a man who is too good for this word and is therefore sacrificed on the altars history.

Third, there is the liberal-conservative political desire to hear it said that revolutions can, and should, be made purely by submission, and self-sacrifice, and non-violence alone.

      To make Gandhi appeal to the western market, he had to be sanctified and turned into Christ-an odd fate for crafty Gujarati-lawyer-and the history of one of the century's greatest revolutions had to be mangled. This is nothing new. The British have been mangling Indian history for centuries.

Amritsar massacre

We can say that Amritsar massacre is perhaps the most powerful sequence in the film. Both the massacre and the subsequent court-martial at which outraged Englishman question the unrepentant Dyer with basely suppressed horror are staged accurately and with passion. In this Dyer represents the cruel itself. The crowd sent him for the killing. But Dyer this two scenes mean is that Dyer’s actions at the Jallianwala Bagh where those of a cruel over jealous individual and that they were immediately condemned by Anglo-Indian.

         The court martial may have condemns Dyer but the colonist did not. He had taught the wags a lesson he was a hero. And when he returned to England he was given a heroic welcome. An appeal fund launch on his behalf made him a rich man. Tagore discussed by the British reaction to the massacre return his knighthood.

         In the case of Amritsar, artistic selection has altered the meaning of the event. It is an unforgivable distortion.

          Another example: the assassination of Gandhi. Attenborough considers it important enough to place it at the as well as the end of his film; but during the intervening three hours, he tells us nothing about it. Not the assassin’s name. Not the name of the organization behind the killing. Not the ghost of a motive for the deed. In political thriller, this would be merely crass; in Gandhi it is something worse.

          We all know that Gandhi was murdered by Nathuram Godse, a member of the Hindu-fanatic RSS, who blamed the Mahatma for Partition of India. But in the film the killer is not differentiated from the crowd; he simply step out the crowd with a gun. This could mean one of three things: that he represents the crowd-that the people turned against Gandhi that the mob threw up a killer who did its work; that Godse was ‘one lone nut’, albeit a lone nut under the influence of a sinister–looking sadhu in a rickshaw; or that Gandhi is Christ in a loincloth. We know why Christ died he died that others might live. But Godse was no representative of the crowd. He did not work alone. And the killing was a political, not a mystical, act. Attenborough’s distortions mythologize, but they also lie.          

         Rushdie says that British have been mingling Indian history for centuries. Much of debate has been done about this movie that why Subhas Chandra Bose? Why not Tagore? Why not Nehru? The answer is the centre is important for any artistic work because that creates a well designed story.

         The film is a biography not a political work. Even if one accepts this distinction one must reply that a biography if it is not to turn into hagiography must tackle the awkward aspects of the subjects as well as the lovable side. The Bramcharya experiments during which Gandhi would live with young naked woman all night to taste his will to abstain are well known not without filmic possibilities and they are of course ambiguous events. The film omits them. It also omits Gandhi’s fondness for Indian billionaire industrialist so.

         This is a rich area for a biographer to mine the man of the masses, dedicated to the simple life, self-denial, asceticism, who was finance all his life by super capitalist patrons, and some would say hopelessly a compromise by them. a written biography, which failed to enter such murky water would not be worth reading we should not be less critical of a film.

         In the movie Godse was not representative of the Mob because he was not alone in his war the awkward aspects are there in the movie. The movie also omits Gandhi’s fondness for Indian billionaire industrialists. He died in Birla house in Delhi. Gandhi also represents the portrayal of most of leader who struggle for the independence. Sardar Patel is a hardworking man where he is like a clown here, Jinnah is portrayed as a count Dracula and we can see the most important change in the personality of Nehru.

         Nehru was not Gandhi’s disciple. There debate was central to the freedom movement-Nehru, the urban sophisticate who wanted to industrialize India, to bring it into modern age versus rural handicraft loving. And keep India in the modern age to increase industrialism. Sometime medieval figure of Gandhi: the country lived this debate, and it had to choose. In this film, Nehru becomes acolyte of Gandhi. Here Bose was evident. He improved the movie. The message of Gandhi was to fight against oppressors without weapon, without violence but it was all non-sense. The leader in India did succeed because they were moral then British. The British were smarter, craftier, better fighting politicians then their opponents. Gandhi shows as a saint who vanquished an Empire. This is a fiction.

          Rushdie says that it in a satirized manner that it was better film of 1983, according to hidden agenda Oscar sididh committee and god help the film industry. It was expensive movie.  Thus Rushdie gives his views about Attenborough’s Gandhi and at the end he significantly said that,

“What it is an incredibly expensive movie about a man who was dedicated to the small scale and to asceticism”.

Conclusion:

          A Few words more, we can say that Salman Rushdie has written an article about “Attenborough’s Gandhi” in which he has indicated about Gandhi and also made criticism on him. He didn’t write only good things about but also wrote and made mockery on him. He writes also about Nathuram Godse and told that he was right according to him and Gandhiji was also right at his place. Therefore Rushdie has given his views about Gandhi in this essay.

Work cited

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3377031?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

https://www.scribd.com/document/73141630/Attenborough-s-Gandhi

Ø A The essay starts with the word ‘Deification’, and Rushdie further said that deification is an Indian disease, as Attenborough might now about it and he has construct Gandhi as a ‘Mahatma’, as it is  

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