‘On Heroes’: Bapu Goes West

Abstract

Released on 30 November in India and 3 December in the UK, it could be said that Attenborough’s Gandhi inaugurated the 1980s Raj revival cycle. Although it shares some formal and narrative characteristics with subsequent Raj films of the decade, Gandhi presents significant variants. The most obvious feature that distinguishes Attenborough’s film from the other Raj productions is that it is based on actual historical events, not on literary fictions. While, as discussed in Chapter 3, Black Narcissus inaugurated a tendency towards the feminisation of the empire film, Gandhi still relied on the biopic formula, with the portrayal of the public deeds of a great man as the driving force in a linear conception of history.

From Thomas Carlyle’s book title On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1840).