Kranti Gatha | The Unsung Flame

The Film

Kranti Gatha: The Unsung Flame is the official museum film for the Kranti Gatha Museum, produced as part of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav. It covers lesser-known figures of the Indian freedom struggle.

It plays on a fixed loop for walk-in visitors, most of whom arrive partway through, so it is built to work from any point rather than from the beginning.

The Subject

The Kranti Gatha gallery occupies a space that had been lost. Beneath the lawns
of Raj Bhavan in Mumbai, the British had built an underground bunker — armament
storage rooms, a shell store, a gun-shell lift — which was sealed at some point
and then forgotten entirely. It was rediscovered in 2016, its existence
unrecorded in the working memory of the building above it.

The decision to convert it into a gallery of revolutionaries gave the material
an unusually apt setting. A colonial arms store, reopened and dedicated to the
people who took up arms against the power that built it, does a good deal of the
argument before a single exhibit is read.

The gallery is dedicated to the revolutionary strand of the independence
movement — the figures whose contribution sits outside the negotiated,
constitutional account that dominates the standard telling, and who are
disproportionately Maharashtrian. It opened in 2022, during Azadi Ka Amrit
Mahotsav, the seventy-fifth anniversary programme under which a great deal of
this commemorative work was commissioned.

Where It Landed

The film was inaugurated in the presence of senior RSS figures and scholars including Vikram Sampath, and is installed as a permanent part of the museum's core exhibit.