Shortage of Indian People in 1984 Apparently! With an update...

UPDATE: I have just received news from Gabe that Ben Kingsley IS actually ("half") Indian! My friend's granddad played cricket with him at prep school back in the day. This means that the brown makeup isn't technically brownface at all. I DO want to state for the record, however that Alec Guinness, Dustin Hoffman, AND Anthony Hopkins were originally chosen to play Ghandi before the movie people settled on the more-appropriately-ethnic Kingsley.

But I still think it's crazy that Ben Kingsley had an iPod in 1982!

----Original Post:
I just finished watching a film called "A Passage to India" on Netflix. It came out in 1984. It basically plagiarizes To Kill a Mockingbird. Tom Robinson gets replaced by an Indian Muslim man named "Aziz". After they cast Victor Banerjee as Aziz, they must have run out of Indian people! Because the second-most important Indian is a Hindu named Professor Godbole and I guess the best they could do was get Alec Guinness. He is known for his spirituality and deepness. I guess that makes sense. . .
As we all know, India doesn't have much of a movie industry or anything. Nor does it have many people. So it makes sense that Anglophone films continued to cast old white guys in the parts of Indians back in the 1980s. Particularly when these films are about liberating Indian people from Anglo-oppression. It just makes sense!

(Sir Kingsley pictured above with his 4th wife: Brazilian waitress Kingsley.)
Ben Kingsley as Ghandi. With his iPod headphones.

This reminds me of a time of ol' yore when the film industry ran out of black people. Then they also turned to white people with makeup to compensate for this dearth.