Meeting with Gandhiji inspired Charlie Chaplin to make his classic movie 'Modern Times'

Mahadev Desai, Mahatma Gandhi’s secretary from 1917 to 1942, was the only journalist present when Charlie Chaplin and Gandhiji met during the latter’s visit to London for the Second Roundtable Conference in 1931.

Mahadevbhai’s was the only eyewitness report of this meeting published in Young India. There are photographs of the two but no reports in any of the newspapers other than Young India. His meeting with Gandhiji impressed Charlie Chaplin so much that the great comedian acknowledged in his autobiography that the meeting with the Mahatma inspired him to make the movie ‘Modern Times’ five years later. The movie highlighted the dehumanizing effect of automation.

Here is what Mahadev Desai reported :

Charlie Chaplin Meets Gandhiji (Young India, October 8, 1931)

Perhaps few would believe that when Gandhiji was told that Mr Charlie Chaplin would like to see him, he innocently asked who that distinguished person was. For several years Gandhiji’s life has been such as to allow him no time to see or hear or read anything that does not come to him in the ordinary course of work that he has cut out for himself. But as soon as he was told that Mr Chaplin, came from the people and lived for the people and that he had made millions laugh, he agreed to meet him at the house of Dr Katial who has placed himself and his car at our disposal during Gandhiji’s stay in London.

Mr Chaplin struck me to be a genial, unassuming gentleman and nothing like we find him in the film. But perhaps in concealing himself lies his skill. Gandhiji had not heard of him, but he had evidently heard of Gandhiji’s spinning wheel and the very first question he asked was why Gandhiji was against machinery.

The question delighted Gandhiji who explained to him in detail why the six months’ unemployment of the whole peasant population of India made it important for him to restore them to their former subsidiary industry.

“Is it then only as regards cloth?”

“Precisely,” said Gandhiji, “In cloth and food every nation should be self-contained. We were self-contained and want to be that again. England with her large-scale production has to look for a market elsewhere. We call it exploitation. And an exploiting England is a danger to the world, but if that is so, how much more so would be an exploiting India, if she took to machinery and produced cloth many times in excess of its requirements.”

“So the question is confined only to India?” said Mr. Chaplin grasping the point quickly. “But supposing you had in India the independence of Russia, and you could find other work for your unemployed and ensure equable distribution of wealth, you would not then despise machinery? You would subscribe to shorter hours of work and more leisure for the worker?”

“Certainly,” said Gandhiji. The question has now been discussed with Gandhiji for the hundredth time, but I have not come across a lay foreigner who grasped the situation so quickly. The reason was perhaps his freedom from prejudice or prepossession and certainly his sympathy.

This sympathy came vividly out when Sarojinidevi reminded him of his visit to an English prison. “I can face a crowd of rich people,” he said, “but I cannot face these prisoners."

“But for the Grace of God, say I to myself, you would have been with them. One feels quite inferior to the occasion as one cannot do anything. What difference is there between us and them excepting that of the bars around them? I am for radical prison reform. Crime is a disease like any other and it should be treated not in prisons but in houses of correction.”

-Nachiketa Desai