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Gandhi & The Life of
the Law
by Professor Shubha Ghosh
South Africa. 1893. A year after Homer Plessy boarded a first
class coach in Louisiana, a newly minted barrister is riding
first class to Pretoria. A white passenger sees him and runs
to get a ticket collector. A black porter advises the passenger
if he has ever been in South Africa before. We are informed that
this is the first trip. The collector arrives with the irate
passenger and asks how a coolie got a first class ticket. "I
am an attorney and I purchased the ticket through the post,"
the seated barrister responds. The porter becomes nervous as
the passenger and collector grow irate. "There are no colored
attorneys in South Africa," the passenger curtly states.
A lawerly syllogism follows: "Sir, I recently entered the
bar in London and since in your eyes I am colored, that proves
that there is a colored attorney in South Africa." The barrister,
bags, and all, is shown being thrown off the train in the next
scene.
 Richard
Attenbororugh's film epic Gandhi begins with a depiction
of the assassination of the hero. The train scene is the second
one, a flashback to the beginning of the public life of Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi (whose name literally translates from the Gujarati
to "Action-slave Fascination-Moon Grocer"), also known
as the Mahatma (or Great Spirit). The movie depicts in a cursory,
yet dramatically compelling way, the major events of Gandhi's
life and more importantly the critical historical events in Indian
history from World War One to Independence in 1947. Some of Gandhi's
contradictions come through Attenborough's glass darkly: his
autocratic manner and his holiness, his mysticism and his practicality,
his public devotion and his narcissism. Other sources, particularly
Stanley Wolpert's 2001 biography of Gandhi, Gandhi's Passion,
and Shyam Benegal's 1998 film The Making of the Mahatma,
have more depth and insight. I talk about Attenborough's film
here for one simple reason. I was asked to write about Asian
and Asian American lawyers in the movies and the Gandhi was the
only serious candidate I could find.
Maybe I missed something while
strolling down the aisles of Blockbuster or Buffalo's great Mondo
Video or surfing the various film web sites. Maybe my colleagues
missed something when I asked them for examples of Asian lawyers
in the film. All they could find was a cameo of Whoopi Goldberg's
lawyer in Boys on the Side and Hunter Thompson's Samoan paladin
in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The small screen offers
Lucy Liu as the dragon queen on Ally McBeal. Asian lawyers
are sight gags, much like Arche Bunker's reference to the only
law firm in Queens he trusts, Rabinowitz, Rabinowitz, & Rabinowitz.
You can always count on a Jew lawyer for results; you can count
on an Asian lawyer for laughs. With this raw material to work
with, I really had only one choice in writing about Asian lawyers
in film.
The irony is that Gandhi by
his own admission was a terrible attorney. He hated public speaking
and was not very good at court appearances, as his Autobiography
more than once attests. He did show a knack for negotiation,
and he was able in several instances to bring difficult disputes
to settlement. As a leader in the independence movement, Gandhi's
skills (and weaknesses) as a negotiator were clearly on display.
Attenborough depicts these all well, but once again people serious
about understanding Gandhi are referred to the Wolpert book and
the Benegal film. I would argue that Gandhian style politics
and negotiation represent the worst of the politics of the personal
and the narcissism of piety. Gandhi would be appalled by how
the current Indian government uses his iconography to support
an aggressively capitalist and anti-Muslim agenda. The man's
virtues were his universalism and his attempts to unify, even
at the expense of repressing the expression of legitimate political,
economic, and social interests (as with his disasterous treatment
of the Muslim League that led to the bloodbath that was partition
and with his unwillingness to grant concessions to the Untouchables
whom Gandhi felt should recognize and accept their lot in the
social order). But given Gandhi's style, the current state of
Gandhi iconography was inevitable. For Gandhi, politics was personal
and that meant the requirement that followers had to embrace
an alignment, however dangerous, between the interests of a developing
nation and the wants of a Great Spirit. As the poet Sarojini
Naidu famously quipped, it cost the nation of India a fortune
to keep Gandhi in poverty.
But to focus on the negative,
ideas that have been explored in other fora, would miss the lessons
of Gandhi's life, all of which is so exquisitely captured in
the train sequence in Attenborough's film. The echo of Homer
Plessy's ride should resonate with lawyers, if not with the average
film goer. When the film came out in 1982, some members of the
audience would have seen the parallels with the sit-ins of the
1950's and 1960's but even then I am afraid that those connections
were already fading from the nation's memory. Plessy's ride lead
to a law suit that resulted in a devastating decision that sparked
legal battles and debates that continue today . Now seats in
a university classroom rather than on a first class rail coach
are at issue. Gandhi's ride sparked a man to think about how
to deal with oppressive power. The scene on the train is quintessential
Gandhian politics. Gandhi is seated throughout the scene, his
audience is standing. The audience consists of three types: the
angry white passenger, the oppressed black porter, and the ticket
collector representing the force of the state. Gandhi is outnumbered
but he relies on his strength to shock the audience into response.
No one expects a colored attorney; no one expects that he could
have simply purchased a ticket through the mail. And no one expects
the syllogism. But it is the syllogism that fails. A newly minted
barrister has to try out his recently acquired legal reasoning.
And it is the legal logic that fails in front of law's violence.
The rest of the film, the rest of Gandhi's career is about discovering
the true life of the law, the life that was turned into a cruel
instrument of oppression by the use of violence.
It should not be surprising
to point out that the train scene did not really happen. At least
there is no mention of the scene with its details in Gandhi's
Autobiography. Gandhi does discuss being denied a seat on a train
because of his color. He does mention an instance when he was
riding first class and the collector attempts to throw him off.
But in that incident, a fellow passenger said he did not mind
having a colored person on the train, and the collector ignored
the violation. Gandhi's experiences on the South African rails
sparked what is known as the South Africa campaign, one that
lasted until 1915 when Gandhi returned to India permanently.
Initially Gandhi came to South Africa to assist a law firm in
the settlement of a commercial dispute. Once that problem had
been resolved, Gandhi turned his energies to challenging the
South African government's treatment of Indians, largely Muslims,
both under the system of social apartheid and under appalling
economic conditions in the diamond mines. The South African campaign
is viewed as the start of Gandhi's experiments in political activism
that were refined and then carried over to the Independence movement
in India after World War One. The South African campaign has
largely been viewed as a failure. The government grew more oppressive
during the twenty two years that Gandhi spent in South Africa.
There isn't space here to provide
all the details that explain why South Africa was so difficult
to change. Needless to say the diversity of groups and interests
had much to do with the problem. An example of the conflicts
Gandhi faced is provided by his siding with the British government
against the Zulus in the Zulu Wars. This episode is ignored in
Attenborough's movie but is mentioned without apology in the
autobiography. According to Gandhi, if he wanted the full benefits
of British citizenship, the goal of the South African campaign,
then he felt a duty of loyalty to the British government in its
objectives, even if it meant the oppression of another group.
Gandhi's work with the ambulance corps in the Zulu Wars is commented
upon by director Shyam Benegal in his film about Gandhi. The
episode, in my opinion, reflects the complexity of the South
African scene as well as the continuing desire of Gandhi to be
the good, well-trained British barrister falling back on syllogisms
in a first class coach. Gandhi's break with this role would come
much later.
Attenborough attempts to capture
the transformation in the scene of Gandhi's return to India from
South Africa in 1915. He is shown coming off the ship at the
port of Bombay dressed in cotton shirt and dhoti with an oversized
turban. Western passengers on the ship comment on his dress and
wonder at how such a man could have challenged the South African
government. It is true the Gandhi's reputation had grown during
the South Africa campaign. But the transformation to Asian sage
was much slower and more complicated. Gandhi's personal transformation
goes back to his youth, his child marriage, his Western education
in England, his discovery of the Gita, Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Thoreau.
Attenborough suggests that Gandhi's Indianness was turned on
as a symbolic challenge to the Empire. The scene on the boat,
as well as the rest of the movie, views the battle as one between
authentic Indianness and oppressive Western machinery, whether
in the form of guns or the colonial bureaucracy.
To the extent that the term
authenticity means anything (and I question whether it does),
Gandhi was far from authentic. He was a reformer, a consciousness
raiser. His success was his ability to synthesize Western ideas
and Eastern symbols in a way that dislocated and challenged settled
assumptions of hierarchy and power. What is amazing about Gandhi,
why he will always resonate as a Great Soul, is that he was one
person who through will and personality was able to catalyze
a movement. He combines the symbolic defiance of Rosa Parks or
Fred Korematsu with the leadership of Martin Luther King or Malcolm
X. Gandhi's strength, however, rested on the first role rather
than in the second. But Gandhi's symbolic politics is a complicated
one drawing on a rich past, both Western and Eastern. At its
best, his politics provides a rich view of the universal; at
its worst, it is mere petulance, reducing complicated social
and political choices to ones of what type of clothing to wear,
of whether or not to drink orange juice, or how to practice one's
sex life.
If taken as entertainment,
Attenborough's film is a grand one. Perhaps it falls into that
newly vintaged category of "infotainment." As one of
the few, perhaps the only, representation of an Asian or Asian
American lawyer on the big screen, the film needs to be treasured.
The scene on the train captures much of what is at stake. Law's
violence is juxtaposed against law's logic, with logic ending
up in a pile on a dirty platform at the end. Law as play is carefully
delineated with Gandhi as actor, challenging the symbols held
unquestioned by the trinity of oppressor, oppressed, and state
agent. And Gandhi's life, whether squeezed into pure theater
in Attenborough's movie or in the pages of Gandhi scholarship,
is about transforming law as logic into law as play. For what
Gandhi did for all of us, starting with his training as barrister
and moving to his skills as negotiator, was to create experience
by staging moments that challenged law's violence and by showing
how law's logic needs to be supplemented with law's practice
and action.
There was one colored attorney
in South Africa. There seems to be one Asian attorney in the
Movies. Is there some film maker out there willing to add more?
Eric Paul Fournier's documentary Of Civil Wrongs and Rights:
The Fred Korematsu Story provides an excellent time capsule
of the various attorneys who were instrumental in the coram nobis
petition that lead to reparations for the internment during World
War Two. More work like that would be invaluable. I have got
ideas. Call me. Otherwise, we will be stuck still trying to get
a ticket on a first class coach to anywhere.
Posted January 14, 2003
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