A Documentary Worth Seeing

There’s a new documentary out that we who grew up in India may want to see.

It’s about a man who was the main Muslim proponent of nonviolence—ahimsa—titled “The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, A Torch for Peace.” He and Gandhi were great friends, together led the resistance movement to the British in India, and both spoke out against the British plan to divide India for they feared that communal enmity would arise and take hold, as indeed it has. But I certainly did not know about him (that I remember (!))

Badshah Khan, or Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988), was from an aristocratic family in the warrior Pashtun community in the North-West Frontier Province, which overlaps between Afghanistan and Pakistan. (It’s now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, to be PC). He was a huge man with a violent temper as an adolescent, but somehow in early adulthood thru his Koranic and Islamic studies, came to ahimsa, to the understanding that violence and warfare solved nothing; the only real strategy for progress or political change is nonviolence. He also was a big advocate for education and women’s rights.

He was a remarkably humble yet charismatic figure. One story that the filmmaker told (it’s not in the movie) was that when Badshah Khan came into a village, he’d ask for a broom and then sweep the village square or streets for hours. (Also, interestingly, he was educated in a mission school—that also wasn’t revealed in the movie.)

In any case, he raised a nonviolent army (Khudai Khidmatgar--Servants of God) of 100,000 men and women—Hindu, Muslim, Parsee, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians—who dressed in bright red, and who came together in nonviolent struggle. In the film there are interviews with some of these warriors, all over 100 years old—and what characters they are.

Badshah Khan spent about 35 years in jail in India with the Gandhi movement and also in Pakistan, after partition in 1947. He was so popular with the people, the government feared him; he also held that the Pashtun area should be autonomous in some way, which of course, was threatening to political figures.

The filmmaker, Teri C. McLuhan, originally from Toronto, now connected with Columbia University and New York City, could have been one of us. She kind of fell into this project of documenting Badshah Khan’s life and then spent 23 years creating the film—interviewing hundreds of people, including the presidents of both Afghanistan and Pakistan; going thru thousands of documents and newsreels and films from the period; making many trips to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India, and so forth. It’s clearly her life work.

And now her challenge is to get it out to the world. Getting distribution is not easy. Not cheap. Perhaps not even safe. (She’s been threatened by people who don’t want the world to know that Islam is also a religion of nonviolence.) One of the reasons I’m writing about this is that you may know of some place in your community where it could be shown—perhaps a college where there’s a department that focuses on international studies or peace studies or such; or a church community that might be interested, or a film festival. The film won the top prize at the Middle East International Film Festival in 2009.

I don’t know for sure, but I think the filmmaker is willing to travel to speak to groups for very little $$. I got to see this documentary and hear her at CalPoly in Pomona, CA; the screening was sponsored by a small group of people who’ve created the Ahimsa Center here. I found out about it through some Indian and Pakistani friends, one of whom is on the WOSA Board.

For more info, check Badshah Khan out in Wikipedia, or just google the film. BTW, the first part of the film is a bit slow, I thought, but the ending is worth waiting for.