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Meet the Hindustani Malcolm XLooking for pulse-pounding excitement in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi.

By Reihan SalamPosted Monday, March 26, 2007, at 7:25 AM ET

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The truth is, Gandhi would have been a lot less boring if it had been a little less worshipful. But a more nuanced portrait would have undermined Attenborough's central point: that Gandhi shamed the British into quitting India. That's a somewhat-generous take. Some Britons embraced Gandhi's message of peace, love, and vegetarianism; at least one, Madeleine Slade, actually moved to India to be his personal assistant. (Imagine this sequel: The Devil Wears Loincloth.) Yet others cheered on the renegade general who gunned down more than 1,000 defenseless Indians in 1919. And then there were those, like Winston Churchill, who fought tooth and nail against independence, predicting (correctly) that it would lead to an unspeakable bloodbath.

A less-worshipful Gandhi would also have raised all sorts of uncomfortable questions about post-independence India. But for Attenborough to capture the country on the epic scale he wanted, he needed the cooperation of the Indian government. (When you consider that 400,000 Indians showed up to recreate Gandhi's 1948 funeral in the heart of New Delhi, you'll see what I mean.) So, did Attenborough pull his punches to make sure everything went smoothly? After all, Attenborough warmly cites Indira Gandhi's role in shepherding the project. And Indira Gandhi, lest we forget, was no mahatma. She was behind the suspension of Indian democracy in the mid-1970s and certainly shrewd enough to recognize that Attenborough's film would be a massive propaganda coup. Sure enough, Pandit Nehru—Indira's dad—is portrayed in the film as second only to Gandhi in the pantheon of heroic Indians.

In stark contrast, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, is played as a classic screen villain. The only thing missing is the eye patch. Partition was a massive human tragedy. My parents are from Bangladesh, a heavily Muslim country first carved out of India as part of Pakistan, and they lived through the (still-reverberating) ramifications. But partition wasn't a dastardly plot hatched by an oleaginous Anglophile. Indeed, some historians argue that "Pakistan" was a negotiating strategy gone wrong: Jinnah asked for a Muslim state so he could gain leverage to protect the interests of Muslims in a united India. He never expected Nehru to call his bluff. This Nehru was no saint. He was something a lot more interesting. When you consider that India and Pakistan had been at war three times before Gandhi was made, Attenborough's interpretation of partition takes on added significance.

Smart critics have exhaustively cataloged Gandhi's other errors and elisions, and I could go on. But there's something a little churlish about this. As directors go, Attenborough is insanely humble, acknowledging that he had to leave out large and important parts of Gandhi's story. Yes, Gandhi is a hagiography and not a nuanced, darkly shaded, or even very convincing portrait of an ambitious and deeply strange man. And as an account of the muddled, messy origins of Indian independence, the film is guilty of historical malpractice. But taken as a black-and-white morality play, Gandhi is unmatched. Simplifications and all, this is the movie my parents wanted me to see as a child—and it's the movie I'd want my own (purely theoretical) children to see as well.