Difference between documentary and biography of mahatma

“No man’s life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime.

What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record and try to find one’s way to the heart of the man….” -Mahatma Gandhi

So reads the preamble to Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi. Released in , the three-hour-plus epic encompasses more than 50 years of history and attempts to chronicle the life of the man who has come to be hailed as the father of modern India.

But how accurate is the film?

It took 20 years to get the movie made

A labor of love for director Attenborough, the preamble wording above is perhaps in some way his excuse if the verisimilitude of the project does not always add up for scholars.

“Clearly Attenborough was faced with the challenge that western audiences and audiences outside of India would only have cursory knowledge of Gandhi and th