Richard Attenborough's Gandhi frames its subject's religious life as expansion rather than conversion. Gandhi remained a practising Hindu throughout the story the film tells, from his early years as a lawyer in South Africa to his death in India in 1948, but the film is equally interested in showing him deliberately studying Christian and Islamic teaching, not to replace his own faith but to widen the ground he thought all three traditions genuinely shared, chiefly a shared demand for nonviolence, truthfulness and human dignity.
That widened ground was not an abstraction in the film's own telling of events. Gandhi's insistence on Hindu-Muslim unity, which the film treats as inseparable from his religious conviction rather than as a separate political calculation, put him directly at odds with Hindu nationalists who wanted partition-era India defined against its Muslim minority rather than alongside it. The film's final scenes stage his assassination on January 30, 1948 as the direct, foreseeable consequence of that same insistence: his killer was a Hindu nationalist who believed Gandhi had betrayed Hindu interests by extending sympathy and protection to Muslims.
Ben Kingsley plays Gandhi across roughly fifty years of his life, from young lawyer to elder statesman, in a performance that won him the Academy Award for Best Actor and that critics on release, including Roger Ebert, credited with making an unusually disciplined, spiritually motivated public figure legible as a fully realized human being rather than a distant icon.