BOOK OF THE MONTH: SEPTEMBER 2014

                                                       
Title        : In Search of Gandhi
Author    : Richard Attenborough
Pages      : 240
Publisher: The Bodley Head Ltd
Price       : $ 124.99
ISBN       : 13: 978-0370309439

Since that winter day in 1962 when he sat down in St. Moritz to read Louis Fischer's biography of Gandhi, a book that had been pressed on him by Motilal Kothari, who had made it his life's goal to persuade someone to make a film about the Mahatma, Attenborough has lived with Gandhi the legend and 'Gandhi' the film as a kind of backdrop to his distinguished acting and directing career.

When hopes of finding a backer were high, he turned down parts to clear the way for work on the film - work that never did begin until 1980. When the project touched bottom again and again, he accepted acting roles to help pay the bills. The film became so much a part of him that Attenborough couldn’t stop writing a book on it: 'In Search of Gandhi'.

‘In Search of Gandhi’ is, sometimes consciously, sometimes perhaps not, less a filmmaking epic and more the autobiography of a stubborn, resilient man. For twenty years, Richard Attenborough has been a man with an obsession: to bring to the screen the life of Mahatma Gandhi - and to prove in the process that there is a place in contemporary cinema for the big biographical film.

Attenborough calls his 'Gandhi: A Human Biography'. There are politics in the film, because Gandhi was a master politician, but there is no psychology, no analysis. ''I worked as an actor'' he says, ''to involve an audience by engaging their emotions, to interest them in the story you are putting before them”. This film is old-fashioned in its shooting. It is a narrative film”.

His first task was to go to India and win the approval of Prime Minister Nehru. Their first meeting, in 1963, was arranged by Lord Mountbatten, Britain's last Viceroy of India and a friend of Nehru. ''I had never been to India and knew nothing about it until I read that Fischer biography,'' Attenborough says. ''I suppose during this 20-year period I have now spent more than two years of my life there, making 25 or 30 trips.''

It was Nehru who impressed upon Attenborough the importance of steering clear of mythology and hagiography and sticking close to Gandhi's humanity. Nehru was closer to Gandhi than anyone else. When the filming of 'Gandhi' was about to begin, Nehru told him: “Look, he had all the frailties, all the shortcomings. Give us that. That's the measure, the greatness of the man''

Courtesy: http://www.nytimes.com