What made his great-grandfather pick it up as his moral compass? Born in Porbandar, it’s easy to see how the “seeds of the song may have been sown in his childhood,” says Tushar in the film. Research suggests that Gandhi first consciously introduced ‘Vaishnav jan to’ around 1907 to fellow residents of the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm in South Africa.
The film’s title is a deliberate irony to draw attention to Narsinh and his astonishing body of work,” says Mayank. Every morning, Doordarshan’s regional channels play an instrumental version with images of Gandhi ashrams across the country, but again don’t mention the poet. It rankled me that Narsinh Mehta’s name did not find a mention even in the video commissioned by the government in 2019 to commemorate the Mahatma’s 150th birth anniversary, featuring singers from around the world rendering the bhajan. A journalist for four decades, who began his career in Mumbai’s Fress Press Journal and authored the only authorised biography of the Dalai Lama by a non-Buddhist author ( Dalai Lama: Man, Monk, Mystic), Mayank began making Gandhi’s Song in 2015 “to let people know that Gandhi did not write the bhajan. That he is not known beyond Gujarat bothered Mayank. He wrote in ecstasy about Krishna, and his immensely popular bhajans and aartis - many sung to this day - give him a place in Gujarati literature as an Adi Kavi. In the documentary, scholar Jawahar Baxi says that although Gandhi hasn’t mentioned it, it was likely that Narsinh inspired him to fight against untouchability.īelieved to be unlettered, Narsinh’s poetic language was yet highly developed. Born in Talaja village, Junagadh, in Saurashtra in an upper-caste family of Nagars, Narsinh is believed to have angered his community by mingling with everyone and considering all humanity as equal.
History records Narsinh Mehta (1414-1480) as a poet-mystic of the Vaishnava sect, from the Bhakti era when a wave of devotional poet-saints swept across medieval India, led by Mirabai, Tulsidas, Surdas and Kabir.