Few historical figures have proven as difficult to capture on screen as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a man who spun thread, fasted for peace and somehow became the moral conscience of a nation twice over, once in life, and again every time an actor has dared to play him. Indian and international cinema has circled him for over four decades now, sometimes reverently, sometimes combatively, always aware that the role comes with a weight few performances can bear. This Gandhi Jayanti, here are eight films worth revisiting, each offering a different lens on the man the world calls Bapu.

 

In This Article

Gandhi (1982)

Director: Richard Attenborough

Cast: Ben Kingsley, Candice Bergen, Edward Fox, John Gielgud, Rohini Hattangadi

The film that set the template, and arguably still the one by which every other is measured. Ben Kingsley’s Academy Award-winning performance remains the definitive cinematic Gandhi for most of the world, tracing his journey from a young lawyer humiliated on a South African train to the architect of a nation’s independence. Attenborough shot it as grand historical epic, but its quietest moments, Gandhi at his spinning wheel, Gandhi in silence, land hardest.

 

Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006)

Director: Rajkumar Hirani

Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Arshad Warsi, Vidya Balan, Boman Irani, Dilip Prabhavalkar

Proof that Gandhi’s philosophy could survive a Bombay gangster comedy and come out stronger for it. Dilip Prabhavalkar’s gentle, twinkly-eyed Gandhi, who appears only to a bemused Munnabhai, turned “Gandhigiri” into a cultural phenomenon and introduced an entire generation to satyagraha through laughter rather than lecture. It remains the rare film that made Gandhian thought feel contemporary.

 

Gandhi, My Father (2007)

Director: Feroz Abbas Khan

Cast: Darshan Jariwala, Akshaye Khanna, Shefali Shah, Bhumika Chawla

The most unflinching film on this list, because it refuses to look away from the cost of greatness. Darshan Jariwala’s Gandhi is seen entirely through the eyes of his estranged eldest son Harilal, played with aching restraint by Akshaye Khanna, a man destroyed by the impossibility of living up to his father’s legend. It is less a biopic than a tragedy, and it does not let the Mahatma off easy.

 

The Making of the Mahatma (1996)

Director: Shyam Benegal

Cast: Rajit Kapur, Pallavi Joshi

Before he was the Mahatma, he was simply Mohandas, a young, uncertain lawyer arriving in South Africa in 1893. Benegal’s film, an Indo-South African co-production, is the rare one that treats Gandhi’s 21 years abroad, and the racial humiliations that radicalised him, as the real origin story. Rajit Kapur plays him not as icon but as a man still becoming one.

 

Hey Ram (2000)

Director: Kamal Haasan

Cast: Kamal Haasan, Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukerji, Naseeruddin Shah, Vasundhara Das

The most audacious film here, and the most divisive. Kamal Haasan’s fictional protagonist is radicalised after the Partition riots and sets out to assassinate Gandhi himself, only to be transformed by a final, fateful encounter with the man he meant to kill. It is less about Gandhi than about the hatred his philosophy stood against, which perhaps makes its point more sharply than reverence ever could.

 

Sardar (1993)

Director: Ketan Mehta

Cast: Paresh Rawal, Annu Kapoor

Ostensibly a biopic of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, but its real power lies in how it reframes Gandhi, played here by Annu Kapoor, through the eyes of his most pragmatic lieutenant. Watching Gandhi’s idealism collide with Patel’s realism, especially over Partition and the integration of princely states, offers a sharper political portrait than most films attempt.

 

Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara (2005)

Director: Jahnu Barua

Cast: Anupam Kher, Urmila Matondkar

A film about Gandhi without really being about him at all. Anupam Kher plays a retired Hindi professor whose encroaching Alzheimer’s convinces him that he, not Nathuram Godse, is responsible for the Mahatma’s assassination. It is a meditation on memory, guilt and inherited national trauma, with Gandhi functioning as a ghost at the edge of every frame.

 

Gandhi Godse: Ek Yudh (2023)

Director: Rajkumar Santoshi

Cast: Deepak Antani, Chinmay Mandlekar

The most recent, and most contested, entry on this list. Santoshi’s film imagines an alternate history in which Gandhi survives the assassination attempt, setting up an extended ideological confrontation between Gandhi, played by veteran stage actor Deepak Antani, and his killer Nathuram Godse. It courted controversy on release for the space it gives Godse’s arguments, which makes it essential, if uneasy, viewing for anyone interested in how India continues to argue with its own history.

 

Eight films, eight different Gandhis: saint, father, ghost, provocation. Perhaps that is the truest tribute cinema can offer a man who never claimed to be anything more than an ordinary human attempting the extraordinary.

 

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