Mahatma Gandhi has inspired various political activists, writers and filmmakers across the world. Mark Robson’s Nine Hours to Rama (1963), Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), Shyam Benegal’s The Making of the Mahatma (1996) and Feroz Abbas Khan’s Gandhi, My Father (2007) are all well-known films about Gandhi, and Rachel Dwyer lists a few short films and documentaries as well. These constitute a list of cinematic works through which different aspects of Gandhi’s personality have been explored. Likewise, Louis Fischer and Joseph Lelyveld have authored books on Mahatma Gandhi, and various visual artists have paid tribute to him through their art. However, in our patriarchal world, artistic representations of Mahatma’s wife, Kasturba Gandhi, are few and far between. She, who had participated in the freedom struggle along with Mahatma Gandhi, has been under-explored and under-represented to the extent of neglect. Except for a couple of plays and books on Kasturba Gandhi, for example, Neelima Dalmia Adhar’s The Secret Diary of Kasturba (2016), Arun Gandhi’s The Forgotten Woman: The Untold Story of Kastur, Wife of Mahatma Gandhi (1981) and N. C. Beohar’s Kasturba Gandhi: The Silent Sufferer (2018), few books about her exist. Vinod Ganatra proposed to make a documentary about Kasturba Gandhi’s life, but his proposal was rejected by the Films Division of India. This rejection was unequivocally criticised by the filmmaker and by Tushar Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grandson. Kasturba Gandhi suffers from a serious intellectual and creative neglect by Indian society. Arun Gandhi, the son of Manilal Gandhi, Kasturba’s second son, depended upon oral histories to reconstruct his mother’s narrative for the book he wrote about her. With few historical or literary works available, Kasturba Gandhi, as a historical figure, stands marginalised in historiography and cultural studies. The present chapter looks at the representation of Kasturba Gandhi in Benegal’s film The Making of the Mahatma (1996) and through it attempts to compensate for her intellectual neglect.

Acknowledging cinema as an influential art form, the Indian state intervened in its production by establishing the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) and the National Film Development Corporation (NDFC) to promote cinema in the country.