The Father of the Indian nation, and the apostle of nonviolence. He worked for India's independence from the British rule. And gave us the awesome power of nonviolence. A social reformer, he taught the world the eternal values of love and truth. His fight for human rights, protection of environment and religious tolerance was mankind's finest hour.

GandhiServe's Mission

Mahatma Gandhi's youngest son Devadas had a dream: to visually document his father's life day-by-day. In the 1950's he contributed to it by putting together the first major collection of film footage and photographs on his father for the Gandhi Films Committee, which made for the later production of Vithalbhai Jhaveri's cinematographic venture MAHATMA and Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi.

Jhaveri was a bombay-based biographer of Mahatma Gandhi. He made it his life's mission to collect photographs of the Mahatma - his life, time and work, from sources around the world.

Today, it is GandhiServe's dedication to carry on and complete the task of Devadas Gandhi and Vithalbhai Jhaveri. Over the past decades audio visual material on Gandhi has been gathered from 600+ sources all over the world with the help and support of many, many friends and well-wishers.

On GandhiMedia you find rare audio visual content about Mahatma Gandhi and India's freedom struggle.

The family of Mahatma Gandhi contributed to GandhiMedia by making precious and rare material available and so did journalists, Gandhi's followers and associates, freedom fighters, archives, museums and leading researchers in India and abroad.

Therefore, this archive forms the specific legacy of the generation of India's independence movement to the present and coming generations.

Bringing Mahatma Gandhi to Life!

Initiated by GandhiServe India, in an interdisciplinary project Gandhi scholars, historians, photo experts and graphic designers joined hands in order to turn black and white photographs into colour images, thus making them true documents of history. After scanning, all photographs have been cleaned digitally and colourized by skilled Indian hands according to the historic settings. When the photographs were taken the actual colourful scenes were reduced to black and white photographs due to technical limitations of those days. Now in a complex process Indian experts add the missing colours. With this the intention is not to manipulate or adulterate pictures but to bring them closer to the colourful image the photograph documents.

Moreover, greatest care has been taken to caption the photographs and other media items properly. However, any additional information that helps restoring and captioning them is welcome!

Thank you for your cooperation!

GandhiMedia has been dedicated to the conscience of humanity.

GandhiServe's films and photographs are the images of history rescued from the oblivion of mortality. Long after those who died to take these pictures are gone, long after those of us who knew them and survived them and remember their experience are gone in our turn, the images they captured will remain to show generations to come the face of India's struggle for independence.

- Jayan Mitra, Founder-Director of GandhiServe India Trust