"As a young boy," Khan once said, "I had violent tendencies. The hot blood of the Pashtuns ran through my veins. We have an abundance of violence in our nature."
McLuhan uses an actor representing a generic (and sinister) British official to recite historical accounts of how the British empire used its military "streamroller" in the tribal areas to play the "great game" for regional influence against Russia. The British ignored the general welfare of the Pashtun people. Like Gandhi, Khan cultivated nationalistic fervor in the soil of deprivations, including poor education and hunger. He convinced villagers that the old ways of feuds and vendettas thwarted collective progress.
At 20, he opened a local school, making education the root of broader reforms. McLuhan says he started to develop his nonviolent philosophy before meeting Gandhi, after a sort of vision that she never quite details. "There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or a Pashtun like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence," he says, in a line from McLuhan's film (the voice speaking Khan's words throughout the picture belongs to Indian actor Om Puri). "It was followed 1,400 years ago by the Prophet all the time he was in Mecca."
Khan founded a group called the Khudai Khidmatgar, or servants of God, known as the Red Shirts for the red cotton clothing worn by members, who defied ancient local and religious divisions to join. "The more conservative figure for how many there were at their height is the one I say -- more than 100,000," McLuhan says. "Others have said more than 300,000. There were representatives of many different tribes. Muslims, Hindu, Sikh, Christian and Buddhist."
McLuhan recounted how she gathered and filmed 82 former Khudai Khidmatgars, five of them women, many in their 90s: "One of them had saved his complete uniform." In one interview, we hear how Khan taught people from a warrior world that their oppressors "may kill, but we won't. They may harm us, but we won't harm them."
"Do you know the one word BK used when asked to define nonviolence?" McLuhan asks with hushed intensity, eyes wide with a delight that often infuses them when she speaks of her hero. " 'Nonviolence,' he said, 'is patience.'
"Most certainly the heart of the film," she continues, is the "tone poem" she wove of those at-the-camera faces of the Khudai Khidmatgars as they passionately, in six languages, including Urdu and Pashto, speak the oath they learned when they were being jailed and tortured by the British for following Khan, who spent about two-thirds of his life imprisoned by British and then Pakistan authorities who feared his influence.
