Revisiting Jagaran aur Gavahi: Gandhi's Truth For a Divided Nation

The 1991 film Jagaran aur Gavahi: Tees Janvari, produced and directed by late Ramachandra Gandhi and Suhas Borker, was recently screened at the India International Centre in New Delhi. The renewed watching of this film – on Mahatma Gandhi's martyrdom – had a deep impact on the audience. It was impossible to watch it in today’s context without feeling the theme’s profound contemporary significance.

What makes the situation in today's India alarming is the replay of pre-Partition times in popular discourse. Hindutva forces and their leaders, who control the state apparatus, relentlessly peddle toxic narratives reminiscent of the era when the Mahatma was assassinated by a politically motivated and hate-driven individual from the same ecosystem.

It may surprise some that India's only TV channel – the state-owned Doordarshan National Network – telecast Jagaran aur Gavahi on no less a day than January 30, 1992, the forty-fourth anniversary of his killing. Even more surprising from today's perspective is that an effort to censor a scene in the film was thwarted. In it, political leaders are shown paying floral tributes to Gandhi's memorial at Raj Ghat, with an off-screen voice saying, 'Raat honay say pehlay hi Gandhi toh bhula diye jayengay – Gandhi will be forgotten before nightfall.'

But no cut was made and the sequence remained as the film-makers had imagined it: the camera performing a ‘parikrama’ around the memorial. The message was blunt, loud and clear.

At the 2025 screening, Professor Ashis Nandy, noted Gandhian Dr Varsha Das, Suhas Borker and Ashok Vajpayee discussed the contents of the film. Each highlighted how India today reflects the same divisive narratives and violence that formed the backdrop to Gandhi’s assassination.

The film itself has an interesting history. It was produced after a night-long vigil held at the Gandhi Smriti (at Birla House in Delhi, where Gandhi was shot) on January 30, 1991 in which musicians, Gandhians and activists struggling to defend the idea of India the father of our nation envisioned participated.

Also read: Mahatma Gandhi Was the First Victim of Hindutva

The film-makers perhaps had a premonition of how much toxicity would be generated by contemporary political developments: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L.K. Advani had kick-started his so-called rath yatra, in pursuit of a temple dedicated to Lord Rama, which the Hindutvadis demanded must come up at the spot where the Babri masjid then stood in Ayodhya. On December 6, 1992 the mosque was indeed razed and, after a long legal battle, the Supreme Court, in 2019, allowed the construction of the temple. It did describe the act of destruction of the mosque as an “egregious violation of rule of law”, but that could not protect the mosque.

This brings us to the opening of Gandhi and Borker's film. Prominent freedom fighter Aruna Asaf Ali asks Mahatma Gandhi what she should do when her heart pulls her towards him but her intellect draws her towards Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi responds: follow your heart. Looking on is Ramu Gandhi, as Ramachandra Gandhi was fondly known. He guides the audience through the narrative, explaining that the Partition sparked large-scale deaths in a communal conflagration that should never have occurred in independent India, snuffing out innocent lives.

It is moments like this in the film that reminded viewers of the divisive narratives in play today; the voices of those in power, who still call for boycotting Muslims from the social and economic spheres, and even for their genocide. When on January 30, 1948, Gandhi fell to three bullets, scores of people across India did not cook food in mourning.

Gandhi’s ashes

While shooting the film, Ramachandra Gandhi, referring to the original footage of Mahatma Gandhi, had said to Borker: “These frames are like Gandhiji’s ashes, let us be very careful in working with them.'

The film then begins with a distressing note – the voice-over declaring that siyasat (politics) and hukumat (those who control power) remember Gandhi for a day and forget him thereafter.

In the last roughly eleven years, the siyasat of Hindutva and its hukumat remember Gandhi on his birthday and the day of his martyrdom. For the rest of the year, however, they consciously spin narratives to celebrate those who killed him. Former BJP member of parliament Pragya Singh Thakur raised the slogan 'Long live Godse', eulogising his killer, yet she was still elected to the Lok Sabha. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he would not excuse her from his heart, but she faced no consequences.

Also read: After Gandhi's Assassination, Nehru Saw the Hindu Right as a Threat to the Indian State

The Modi regime showed scant respect for Gandhi when it arbitrarily made his iconic spectacles the logo of its Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, reducing Gandhi to the cause of cleanliness, as if he stood for nothing else. This blinkered view of Gandhi has been recurrently projected since 2014, when the BJP came to power with a majority for the first time. It is contrary to his all-encompassing worldview, which influenced not just the Indian psyche but also the world. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama have considered him an exemplar of non-violent struggle, resistance and civil rights activism.

In the film, King invokes Gandhi's name when he struggles for equality and civil rights for the blacks in the United States, while Mandela spent decades imprisoned to end apartheid in South Africa, heralding an era of peace and reconciliation in his country. Successes like these, instances of which are dotted around the world, testify to Gandhi's triumph despite his assassination by those who swear by exactly the opposite ideals in his own country.

Divide that troubled Gandhi

Ramchandra Gandhi expresses anguish in the film that the divide that bothered Gandhi the most was spreading to every nook and corner of the country. He referred to the infamous rath yatra, and shows other BJP leaders, including Murli Manohar Joshi, declaring that anyone who opposed the construction of the temple in Ayodhya would be thrown out of India.

The divide that bothered Gandhi the most has, thirty-six years later, been deepened, expanded and amplified daily by prime minister Modi and his cohort of Hindutva leaders. Consequently, India’s constitutional values are increasingly endangered, and its social fabric is increasingly and willfully torn apart.

Music as Rhythm, Harmony and Order

Varsha Das, speaking after the film was screened, said that the divisive scenes people had just watched – on account of Advani's yatra and many other violent episodes through the country – were emotionally unbearable. It was the music of the film, vocal and instrumental, the thoughtful use of Gandhi’s favourite bhajans, Vaishnav Janato, Raghupati Raghav, Lead Kindly Light, and others, she said, that helped calm the tension of the events unfolding on screen.

Gandhi also had a lesser-known but profound view of music. To him, music represented harmony, rhythm, and order. He lamented that India lacked it in every aspect of life. This absence of rhythm, he believed, contributed to the indiscipline and chaos that afflicted the collective life of the country. For Gandhi, attaining Swaraj – self-rule – required not only Hindu-Muslim unity, the abolition of untouchability and cleanliness, but also the presence of music as a guiding principle for social and moral order. (In fact, he once said that without music, India would not get Swaraj.)

Jagaran aur Gavahi: Tees Janvari should resonate in the India of 2025 with all those who are troubled by the noise of communal rhetoric. It is worth watching, as a reminder of Gandhi's enduring vision to protect our country and the ideas enshrined in its constitution.

S.N. Sahu served as officer on special duty to President of India K.R. Narayanan.

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