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"Kasturba and Gandhi: A Minor Spat in South Africa"

"Kasturba and Gandhi: A Minor Spat in South Africa" is a deeply feminist text where Kasturba is revealed as a woman ahead of her times. Kasturba cared deeply for women's rights as well as her own rights as a woman. In a male-dominated society that expected women to obey several unwritten rules of decorum, a woman who chose to speak her mind and not abide by such standards would certainly be considered revolutionary and defiant. Kasturba, the wife of the famous Mahatma Gandhi, clearly fits this outline. She is not as well known to the modern world as her famous husband. It is not known that the concept of 'Satyagraha' was given to Gandhi by his wife. It is not known that Gandhi would have serious arguments and fights with his wife, Kasturba, who was always known as a demure and obedient wife. Kasturba acted entirely of her own accord, and she was not willing to agree to a situation simply because society dictated it to be proper. Kasturba was unwilling to compromise her own beliefs in order to please the populace. She also acted in unprecedented ways, not only for women, but for people in general. Most women would simply accept their husband's word and obey their wishes. However, Kasturba would not relinquish her own values to please society. Her progressive behavior was certainly unheard of in the nineteenth century! She is in some ways prototypical of the age, though she also breaks free of the typical nineteenth century woman in that she has a number of the classical signs of being an uneducated girl from Gujarat, India, and from a well-to-do family.

  • Nishi Chawla
    Director
  • Nishi Chawla
    Writer
  • Nishi Chawla
    Producer
  • Suma Muralidhar Muralidhar
    Key Cast
    "Kasturba Gandhi"
  • Anil Joseph
    Key Cast
    "Gandhi"
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Runtime:
    10 minutes 10 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    February 19, 2024
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Nishi Chawla

Nishi Chawla is an academician and a writer. She has seven collections of poetry, nine plays, four feature films,  and two novels, to her credit. She has also co edited an anthology of poems, "Singing in the Dark" published by Penguin Random House in 2020. Another poetry anthology edited by her and titled "Greening the Earth" was published in 2023, again by Penguin Random House.
Nishi Chawla holds a Ph.D. in English from The George Washington University, Washington, D.C. She has also done a two year post doctoral study at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. After teaching for nearly twenty years as a tenured Professor of English at Delhi University, India, she had migrated with her family to a suburb of Washington D.C. She has taught at the University of Maryland from 1999 until 2014. She is recently retired from the faculty of Thomas Edison State University, New Jersey, USA.

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Director Statement

I have made four feature films, three of which are streaming on Prime. I have written and directed a film on Gandhi and MLK titled, 'The Peace Activists.'
I have written and directed a movie titled MIXED UP whose story is set in the 1970s, and that is about inter racial love.
Here is a link to a trailer of her movie on inter cultural love. The movie is a composite of Indian, Iranian, and American culture.
https://vimeo.com/490543200/08ede20aa7.
My second movie, "The Strange Case of Normalcy" is a subtle examination of how each of us lives on the edge of normalcy while we construct an illusion of "the normal" by which we define ourselves.
latest feature film, “TechNous” is also on Amazon Prime. The film is about the widened economic gulf and the huge concentration of wealth that technology has created globally. The film is also about the power of tech money to change the nature of sibling rivalry between two brothers, wherein a struggling liberal arts professor undergoes a moral transformation as he sees his brother make it big in Silicon Valley.
My fourth feature film, “The Peace Activists,” places Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., within the crucible of a dramatic plot that brings out their remarkable similarities in the cause of peace and non-violence and in their pursuit and engagement with civil disobedience as a methodology and a tool to secure freedom and justice. Along with the white philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who inspired both leaders, the black MLK and the brown MKG, Chawla’s movie offers a philosophical rumination on the contemporary world situation as it relates to Gandhi’s and MLK’s broader vision.I am now very excited to make this short film that will foreground Kasturba as a bold and independent minded woman.