"The Mahatma, the Great Soul, endures in the best part of our minds, where our ideals are kept: the embodiment of human rights and the creed of nonviolence. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is something else, an eccentric of complex, contradictory and exhausting character
most of us hardly know. It is fashionable at this fin de siecle to use the man to tear down the hero, to expose human pathologies at the expense of larger-than-life achievements.
No myth raking can rob Gandhi of his moral force or diminish (his) remarkable importance."
– Time Magazine, December 31, 1999,
naming Gandhi as
runner up "Person of the Century" after Albert Einstein
"Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that
such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."
– Albert Einstein
"If humanity is to progress Gandhi is inescapable."
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Making of "The Hero's Journey of Mahatma Gandhi"
Project Status Report, Spring, 2013
By Kell Kearns, Director
Our feature length documentary will guide the audience through the climactic, last eight years and four months of Gandhi’s life. We begin with onset of World War II when the consequences to the British empire of global conflagration sent Gandhi’s decades long leadership of the movement for a free India hurdling rapidly toward success. But at what price? In the end as many as two million would be slaughtered in inter-religious conflict, a fractured India would emerge with Muslim nations to the East and West. Suspicion and discord between India and Pakistan continue to this day, both of which have armed themselves with nuclear weapons against those with whom they once shared the ancient power and wisdom of the Indian subcontinent.
And, Gandhi, The Great Soul, the Father of the Nation, who peered into the human heart and found no enemies and acted every waking moment for a unified, diverse India which would lead the world into an era of peace and dignity, spent his last days in self-imposed exile from deciding the momentous events of partition and independence.
He believed that to tear India apart was to tear his own being asunder. That the children of Mother India would slaughter each other he viewed as a personal failure of his mission to raise Ahimsa to the level of a communal, organizing principle that would guide his people to nonviolent nationhood. In his final years, Gandhi, the leader of the greatest movement in history for peaceful social change, found himself buffeted by great storms of violence, rushing from atrocity to atrocity, putting out the infernos of communal bloodshed, fasting, praying, speaking, offering his own life to bring love where there was hatred, peace where there was violence. His sacrificial efforts were amazingly successful in saving lives and teaching the way in which to live.
Death by assassination always had its hand upon his shoulder. He did not fear it. If one held to truth, love, and nonviolence, then death at the mis-guided hand of hatred would only bring forth the triumphant truth of the intimate oneness of all of life. Beyond the furies, only love remains and sustains. His was a profound faith in humanity. Was he a tragic figure or was his faith in us and the future justified?
Gandhi packed an enormous amount of living into every day of his turbulent times of tragedy edged with triumph. As he stays the course of the quintessential Satyagrahi even unto his assassination, while waves of fear, violence and hatred crash upon the rock of his spiritual foundation, his last, heroic years will transfix the audience and provide ample opportunity for flashbacks to reveal his whole story.
There is hope. Gandhi would have been the last to abandon it. In the 21st century the principles and practices he initiated on the planet continue to grow. He may be more important even than when he walked the earth. As we bring his story to a new century, we will show his relevance to our times. Therefore, our locations and interviews include not only scholars of history and first hand witnesses to his life, but the works and words of Gandhians who are, today, continuing and expanding his legacy to offer solutions to our local and global crises.
Read more about Our Sources, Locations, Interviews, Archival Footage and Photographs, and Date of Completion.