Mystic India

In June 1792, an eleven-year-old boy named Nilkanth left his home in northern India and did not stop walking for seven years. By the time his journey ended in Gujarat in 1799, he had crossed roughly twelve thousand kilometers on foot, through the Himalayas, Bengal and South India, before he would become known to his followers as Swaminarayan. That journey is the founding story of the movement BAPS carries forward today, and in 2004 the organization chose to tell it not in a temple hall but on some of the largest cinema screens in the world.

Mystic India was financed and produced by BAPS Charities itself, directed by Keith Melton and narrated by Peter O'Toole, whose voice guided audiences through recreated shrines and festival scenes built with a volunteer cast BAPS describes as exceeding forty five thousand people, filmed across more than a hundred locations. The score paired a Western symphony orchestra with Indian classical musicians, Sam Cardon working alongside Pandit Ronu Majumdar, a deliberate blending of registers to match a film its own producers billed as the first large format production about India made by an Indian organization.

The film found an audience outside the movement as readily as inside it, winning the Audience's Choice Prize at the International Large Format Film Festival in Paris and Most Popular Film honors in San Jose, and it continues to run in giant-screen theaters through the industry's own distribution channels. It is not an outsider's account of Swaminarayan spirituality. It is BAPS telling its own founder's story, in the format built for the biggest audience it could reach.