5:15 AM
Muhammad Zai Khan
A new documentary film detailing the life of Pashtun leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, popularly known as the “The Frontier Gandhi” for his espousal of non-violent means for political change in the region, will premiere in the US next month.
‘The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, a Torch for Peace’ was directed by filmmaker and writer T C McLuhan, daughter of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who says she spent 21 years to bring Khan’s story to the screen.
Sixty-year-old McLuhan made numerous trips to Afghanistan and other places linked to Khan’s life even as American bombs fell in Taliban-held Afghanistan after the September 11 terror attacks and through the dangerous times that followed to shoot the film, the Los Angeles Times reported.
She filmed in India, Afghanistan and Pakistan’s troubled North West Frontier Province and made use of archives that Afghan film officials hid from the Taliban. An Afghan warlord became her guide and McLuhan persevered despite her equipment being thrown into the street by police.
The film completes a journey that started for McLuhan in September 1987 in Berkeley, when an acquaintance gave her ‘Nonviolent Soldier of Islam’, a book by the late Eknath Easwaran, who knew Khan.
McLuhan said her long commitment to the project grew from her feeling about Khan’s “uncommon greatness. And that was accompanied by, certainly, uncommon courage. I felt a depth of spirit that I simply wanted to know more about.”
On receiving Easwaran’s book, she said: “I looked at it and thought, ‘I don’t know anything about this part of the world,’ and three weeks later, at about three in the morning, I picked it up and felt all the electrons around me shift.”
McLuhan followed Khan’s life from his start as the member of an aristocratic family in Charsadda a town that recently witnessed an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Khan’s grandson Asfandyar Wali Khan by a suicide bomber to his disappointment with the partition of India.
Actor Om Puri provided the voice speaking Khan’s words in the picture, reading lines like: “There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or a Pashtun like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence…It was followed 1,400 years ago by the Prophet all the time he was in Mecca.”
The film also features interviews with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who speaks of meeting Khan as a boy, and former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who makes it clear he does not view Khan as a Pakistani patriot.
Khan founded a group called the “Khudai Khidmatgar” or servants of God which was known as the “Red Shirts” for the red cotton clothing worn by its members. McLuhan gathered and filmed 82 former Khudai Khidmatgars, five of them women and some in their 90s.
The film, which also dwells on the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Khan, who spent about two-thirds of his life imprisoned by British and then Pakistani authorities, who feared his influence.
Khan, who died at 98 in 1988 in Peshawar, also founded the Awami National Party, which today rules the NWFP and is a key member of the coalition at the centre. The film will have its American premiere in New York at the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival, an art film showcase organised by a group that includes novelist Salman Rushdie
