The oath turns into verbal music, the English translation orchestrated over the still-audible voices. (The music was overseen by composer-performer David Amram.) "I am a Khudai Khidmatgar," it begins. "And as God needs no service, serving his creation is serving him. I promise to serve humanity in the name of God."
Khan, offered the leadership of the Indian National Congress during India's independence fight, rejected it to avoid becoming a purely political figure. It was a larger focus shared by Khan and Gandhi, who were personally close.
Unlike Gandhi, Khan did not leave a large written record or become a media sensation. But McLuhan found photos of them together that are surprising for their glow of mutual warmth. The petite Gandhi is joined by an Islamic sage who stands towering and sinewy in simple cotton clothing, his gentle-fierce aura something like Gandhi's -- only different.
How, one wonders, can Khan be so little known? In the film, M.J. Akbar, one of India's best-known journalists, gives McLuhan an answer: "The market for nonviolence was so used up by Mahatma Gandhi there was no space left for an alternative Gandhi, for a second Gandhi. You know, this is one of the problems of media -- that even history becomes an exercise in brand building. So the brand was built around Gandhi, and not on Badshah Khan."
