THE GANDHISERVE ARCHIVE
Welcome to The GandhiServe Archive!
The Father of the Indian nation, and the apostle of nonviolence. He worked for India's independence from 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 the environment and religious tolerance was mankind's finest hour.
The best digital archive of photographs, writings, films and audio of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – the Mahatma – in terms of quality and quantity!
Here you find rare audiovisual content about Mahatma Gandhi and India's freedom struggle, totalling to nearly 85,000 curated and uncurated items, with a possibility of immediate download in high resolution! This platform has been designed to support research and teaching associated with Mahatma Gandhi and India‘s independence movement.
This archive is a unique documentary record of one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century. It traces the journey of his life – a journey that had a profound effect on the history of his homeland and provided the world with a hugely influential example of a nonviolent route to revolutionary change. Gandhi himself famously remarked, My life is my message: this archive is a unique and powerful insight into that life.
The precious and rare material which forms this archive has been acquired from the family of Mahatma Gandhi as well as from journalists, Gandhi's followers and associates, freedom fighters, archives, museums and leading researchers in India and abroad. Hence, this archive forms the specific legacy of the generation of India's independence movement to the present and coming generations.
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.
Jhaveri's work was dedicated to the conscience of humanity.
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.
How this archive came about
Search-n-Research was the theme for an ongoing 35-year project of systematic oral history and search for yet unknown material on and by Mahatma Gandhi. Peter Ruehe, the founder of GandhiServe, visited numerous associates and relatives of Gandhi, photographers, collectors and contemporaries of the Mahatma all over India and also abroad. He recorded reminiscences and first-hand information about Gandhi and India's independence movement, and helped safeguard treasured films, letters, photographs and documents.
This archive was assembled by Peter Ruehe from the mid-1980s onwards, when he began to travel widely in India in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi. He acquired the material in several stages from the Kanu Gandhi and Jhaveri heirs, following extensive work with them on the organisation, conservation, and copyrights of their collections. The property was exported from India to Germany as it was acquired, between 1988 and 1994, and has been used by Peter Ruehe and GandhiServe to promote Gandhi’s legacy in the years that have followed. Now, all material is also available in digital form and can be viewed, purchased and downloaded from Gandhi.Media.
Learn more about Peter Ruehe and how he gathered the Gandhi collection, in his own words
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 colourised 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 the technical limitations of those days. In a complex process, Indian experts, lead by GandhiSeve India president Jayan Mitra, added 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, the greatest care has been taken to caption the photographs and other media items properly. However, any additional information that helps restore and caption them is welcome!
Thank you for your cooperation!