Vaishnava Jana To entered world history through Mahatma Gandhi, who grew up with it in Gujarat and made it the moral anthem of his movement. It was sung constantly at his ashram prayer meetings, and he referred to its definition of the true Vaishnava as the standard by which he wished to be measured, compassion for the suffering as the whole of religion. Through him the hymn attached itself to the public memory of Indian nonviolence, sung at his commemorations, at Gandhian institutions, and at the sites of his life and death.
For the sesquicentenary of his birth in 2019, India's foreign ministry organized recordings of the hymn by artists in scores of countries, a fifteenth century Gujarati text performed around the planet as a diplomatic gesture, probably the widest single dissemination any bhakti hymn has received. The hymn also remains what it was before Gandhi, part of the living Narsinh Mehta repertoire of Gujarat, sung in his native region with the prabhatiyan and padas of its author, whose memory Gujarat keeps in shrines, festivals and a literary award bearing his name. Its double life is instructive, within Gujarat a beloved piece of a poet's corpus, outside it a freestanding ethical statement, carried by a melody plain enough to survive both uses.