Gabriel Pascal - Meher Baba and India

Meher Baba and India

In 1934, during a trip to Hollywood, Pascal was contacted by Princess Norina Matchabelli (wife of the perfume manufacturer) about a film project based on the teachings of her guru Shri Meher Baba. Pascal became very interested in this project, bringing writers Hy Kraft and Karl Vollmöller into helping him work up treatments and even making a trip to India to discuss the project further with Meher Baba. By the time Pascal arrived in India, however, Meher Baba did not seem in any hurry to complete the film, saying it could wait and inviting Pascal to travel with him in India. Most ordinary men would have been discouraged, but Pascal took energetically to the austere life of an eastern ascetic, even shedding his western garb for eastern clothing. He took a liking to Meher Baba and maintained a correspondence with him for the rest of his life. Meher Baba nicknamed Pascal his "Phoenix" and alternately his "Black Panther." Pascal was one of the few people Meher Baba named as a genius, a short list which included Friedrich Nietzsche and the Dutch filmmaker Louis van Gasteren.

Pascal remained in close correspondence with his guru Meher Baba right up to the end of his life and met with him for the last time in Scarsdale, New York in 1952. Even in this final meeting there was talk of films that Pascal had planned to produce for Meher Baba. Thirty years before Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi, Gabriel Pascal had a written agreement with the prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru to produce a movie of Gandhi's life.