Documentary Film in India: An Anthropological History [1 ed.] 9781138551732, 1138551732

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Documentary Film in India This book maps a hundred years of documentary film practices in India. It demonstrates that in order to study the development of a film practice, it is necessary to go beyond the classic analysis of films and filmmakers and focus on the discourses created around and about the practice in question. The book navigates different historical moments of the growth of documentary filmmaking in India from the colonial period to the present day. In the process, it touches upon questions concerning practices and discourses about colonial films, postcolonial institutions, independent films, filmmakers and filmmaking, the influence of feminism and the articulation of concepts of performance and performativity in various films practices. It also reflects on the centrality of technological change in different historical moments and that of film festivals and film screenings across time and space. Grounded in anthropological fieldwork and archival research and adopting Foucault’s concept of ‘effective history’, this work searches for points of origin that creates ruptures and deviations taking distance from conventional ways of writing film histories. Rather than presenting a univocal set of arguments and conclusions about changes or new developments of film techniques, the originality of the book is in offering an open structure (or an open archive) to enable the reader to engage with mechanisms of creation, engagement and participation in film and art practices at large. In adopting this form, the book conceptualises ‘Anthropology’ as also an art practice, interested, through its theoretico-­methodological approach, in creating an open archive of engagement rather than a representation of a distant ‘other’. Similarly, documentary filmmaking in India is seen as primarily a process of creation based on engagement and participation rather than a practice interested in representing an objective reality. Proposing an innovative way of perceiving the growth of the documentary film genre in the subcontinent, this book will be of interest to film historians and specialists in Indian cinema(s) as well as academics in the field of anthropology of art, media and visual practices and Asian media studies. Giulia Battaglia is a researcher in anthropology of visual/art/media practices specialised in documentary film in India. Her work is interdisciplinary and draws from a range of academic fields, including visual/media anthropology, documentary studies, visual and material cultures, art and anthropology, Indian cinema, cultural studies and film history. After receiving a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, she has worked as a lecturer and researcher in various departments of anthropology, media, arts and social science as well as in cultural institutions in England and in France. At present, she lives and works in Paris in the field of anthropology, arts and media, being part of the laboratoire de recherche IRMECCEN, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) and the laboratoire de recherche LAIOS/IIAC, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). For the latter, she is also responsible for a funded international project between art and social science, called ‘L’invention des formes de représentation à l’ère de la mondialisation’.

Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series

108 Islamic NGOs in Bangladesh Development, Piety and Neoliberal Governmentality Mohammad Musfequs Salehin 109 Ethics in Governance in India Bidyut Chakrabarty 110 Popular Hindi Cinema Aesthetic Formations of the Seen and Unseen Ronie Parciack 111 Activist Documentary Film in Pakistan The Emergence of a Cinema of Accountability Rahat Imran

115 Sri Lanka’s Global Factory Workers (Un)Disciplined Desires and Sexual Struggles in a Post-­ Colonial Society Sandya Hewamanne 116 Migration of Labour in India The squatter settlements of Delhi Himmat Singh Ratnoo 117 Gender, Nation and Popular Film in India Globalizing Muscular Nationalism Sikata Banerjee

112 Culture, Health and Development in South Asia Arsenic Poisoning in Bangladesh M. Saiful Islam

118 Media as Politics in South Asia Edited by Sahana Udupa and Stephen D. McDowell

113 India’s Approach to Development Cooperation Edited by Sachin Chaturvedi and Anthea Mulakala

119 Death and Dying in India Ageing and end-­of-life care of the elderly Suhita Chopra Chatterjee and Jaydeep Sengupta

114 Education and Society in Bhutan Tradition and modernisation Chelsea M. Robles

120 Documentary Film in India An Anthropological History Giulia Battaglia

Documentary Film in India An Anthropological History

Giulia Battaglia

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Giulia Battaglia The right of Giulia Battaglia to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Battaglia, Giulia, author. Title: Documentary film in India : an anthropological history / Giulia Battaglia. Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge contemporary South Asia series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017030540| ISBN 9781138551732 (hb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315147727 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films–India–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 B3835 2017 | DDC 070.1/8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030540 ISBN: 978-1-138-55173-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14772-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

A mio padre

Contents



List of figures Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations and acronyms



Introduction

ix xi xiv xvii 1

Documentary studies, Indian cinema and film genre  3 Living, doing and thinking anthropology  7 Beyond anthropology: the book  27 1 History’s fragments

35

Discursification of colonial film productions and activities  38 ‘Cultural performance’ and early cinema  43 Gandhi’s films  47 Flaherty in India  49 Educational films  52 Another history?  54 2 Around the Films Division

61

From national discourse to filmmakers’ agency  63 The ‘formidable gang of the documentary movement’  68 Back to the present  75 3 The growth of independent practices Independent filmmakers  83 Independent filmmaking: the New Wave  88 Independent film  95 Overlapping  102

80

viii   Contents 4 The advent of video technology

109

From early television experiments to the arrival of video technology  110 Video technology and media practices  114 Celluloid vs. video  122 Conclusion  126 5 Articulation of performance and performativity

129

Theorising performance and performativity  131 Women’s groups and feminist discourse  134 Filmmakers and films  145 Crafting forms: a focus on cinematographers  149 6 Film festivals, small media and online networks

159

Film festivals as public fora  160 Public broadcasting in 1990s India  162 Small media networks: from independent newsletters to the forum for independent films and video  164 Mobile and online networks  169 7 Sites of cultural activism

178

Independent film festivals: focus on Vibgyor  180 Public/private screenings: focus on Pedestrian Pictures  185 8 Open-­ended archives: film, art and anthropology

197

Installations and digital archive platforms  200 ‘Installing’ past and present history  204

Conversations/interviews Filmography Bibliography Index

212 215 218 241

Figures

1.1 Shooting: Dr P.V. Pathy working with Paul Zils in Indian Documentary 1.2 Dr P.V. Pathy: book collection of Pathy’s writing 2.1 Monopoly: cartoon in Docu-­Scene India 3.1 Award: cartoon in Docu-­Scene India 3.2 Sukhdev: celebratory volume 5.1 TAKE ONE. Cover of the Third World Women’s Film Festival booklet 5.2 Brainstorming: an example of collective work, in the booklet WOMEN: TAKE ONE. Beginning of a Dialogue in the Third World Women’s Film Festival 6.1 Proposal of A Vision for Television 6.2 Vikalp: images from the festival-­protest. Mumbai, festival 2004 6.3 Vikalp: slogans from the festival-­protest. Mumbai, festival 2004 7.1 Vibgyor 2009: stands of organic food, arts and crafts 7.2 Vibgyor 2009: open forum – the public 7.3 Vibgyor 2009: open forum – speakers 7.4 Vibgyor 2009: peace slogans spread out in the campus 7.5 Pedestrian Pictures: members of Pedestrian Pictures talking with filmmaker Chandra Siddan during their monthly screening activity 7.6 Pedestrian Pictures: member of Pedestrian Pictures providing material for film screening during their monthly screening activity 8.1 Cartographies sensibles: detail of Dessins Envahissants # 0 8.2 Les Fils du Destin. Contemporary art installation

39 50 68 86 104 138 141 168 173 174 181 182 182 183 187 188 201 202

Preface

(A soft but determined voice caught my attention) – I know you! – Hello! Yes, do you remember me? – Of course, we met here in Delhi once; you were doing some very important work on documentary in India, right? – Yesss! – … then, we all went to eat something together. Yes, I do remember you! How are you? (Interaction with Kesang Tseten, Visible Evidence 21, New Delhi, December 2014)

In December 2014, the 21st Visible Evidence, the international and itinerant documentary film conference, was held in India. I had taken part in a number of Visible Evidence conferences, and in the past few years, had noticed an increasing openness towards documentary films made in south Asia. Hence, when I found out that Visible Evidence 21 (VE 21) was to be held in New Delhi I was not particularly surprised. This time, the logistics of attending were much easier for me. When the conference took place, I was already in India, conducting a short period of archival research at the Films Division in Mumbai. I did not need to travel for too long – just a couple of hours’ flight – but I did have to bear a significant temperature change – from 35 to 10°C! VE 21 ran for four days at the India International Centre (IIC) and was host to papers from scholars from all over the world and parallel or complementary seminars and/or film events in affiliated universities, including the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia. Although by that time I had delivered about 30 academic presentations at both international conferences and local seminars, I admit here that for the first time in my life, I was particularly anxious about presenting part of my research. For the first time, I had to speak about my main research findings about ‘documentary film practices in India’ to an

Preface   xi audience composed of not only international scholars who specialised in documentary films but also Indian specialists and filmmakers from South Asia. This was the first time I would have to ‘face’ several of the interlocutors with whom I had extensively interacted during my 2007–2009 fieldwork, with many of whom I had not been able to keep in regular contact. With many of the participants, the last time our paths had crossed I was still a student and as yet unsure about how my doctoral thesis would develop and what kind(s) of ‘reading(s)’ about documentary film practices in India I would finally provide. This time, by contrast, I was an early-­ career scholar – with a PhD in hand and a few publications already circulating across the academic world. In other words, there was no reason for me to feel insecure about my academic interpretation(s). I had to stand by my claims and be ready for criticism, knowing that what I studied was not the common anthropological ‘other’. Rather, it was a practice articulated by individuals with ‘high’ cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984) as other academics; they were what Mahon (2000) would call ‘cultural producers’, always ready to listen to me, read me and make claims and criticism accordingly. My level of tension immediately decreased as I stepped into the main venue on the first cold morning of VE. Unsure about how long it would take me to get to the IIC from the accommodation I had booked in Delhi, I gave myself extra time and arrived a bit too early at the venue. I picked up a warm black tea, went straight into the sun to warm myself up and started looking around – as we, academics, often do during conference gatherings to see whether there are any friends or colleagues there who we have not seen for a long time. With my tea in hand, I realised that there were not many people around yet, apart from the main local organisers. Among them, there was Kaushik Bhaumik who, thanks to his academic specialisation and interest in history and south Asian cinema, I had met and interacted with on several occasions during my time in India. Kaushik was talking with a small group of people I did not know and after we had greeted each other and exchanged a couple of ‘contextual’ words regarding the Indian weather and the Indian ‘boom’ economy, while I was already moving away to go and greet someone else, he loudly commented to the group of people, in an attempt to catch my attention again, ‘Do you know, I have known Giulia from the time she was everywhere? At that time, there was no event about documentary in India that one could have gone to without finding her!’ This comment both froze and pleased me at the same time. As I was already physically too distant from the group, and was a bit embarrassed by such an unexpected comment, I simply made an ‘empty’ reply, saying something like, ‘Of course, yeah …’ with a chuckle and a smile, while continuing to walk in the direction I had already taken. Yet, I was moved. That sentence acted as a flashback to a time in India when, as Kaushik said, I was precisely ‘everywhere’.

xii   Preface This memory immediately made me feel comfortable in the still uneasy conference context. Until that moment, I had always felt that I had to work very hard to make claims about my status in the community of documentary filmmakers in India. In fact, who am I to talk about ‘them’? Is this ‘me’ and ‘them’ dichotomy a useful category for understanding how I engaged with, got involved with, studied and interpreted a ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991)? Knowing that there were some people who recognised that during almost two years’ ceaseless engagement with this community I had become a bit ‘ubiquitous’, gave me a sense of reassurance in reference to similar claims I made in my doctoral dissertation. Moreover, realising that a statement like the one made by Kaushik could have a strong sensorial imprint on my own sense of self helped me to acknowledge that this ‘ubiquity’ had been made possible not just because I was an active and determined researcher (as people like Kaushik might think or hint at in contexts such as the one just described), but because the community and all its related events became during that period of fieldwork part of my own self, pushing me towards that sort of powerful anthropological ‘between’ that is constitutive of those who not only practise but live anthropology (Stoller 2009). Indeed, for almost two years of my life, there was nothing else for me but the documentary film community in India – and, arguably, in a more diluted way, this feeling lingered until I completed my PhD in England in 2012, and it continues to have a strong impact on me now. This sense of recognition and acknowledgement ‘from the community’ returned to me during several of my unexpected interactions at VE 21. I was pleased (and sometimes surprised) to discover how many filmmakers simply remembered me without hesitation and greeted me warmly when we bumped into each other. This was the case with the aforementioned interaction with Kesang Tseten; I hardly knew him but he apparently remembered me well after one single interaction we had in New Delhi in December 2008. This was also what occurred with Ali Kazimi. We had had no further contact since meeting in Kerala in February 2009, but when Ali saw me walking towards him at the conference he put the book he was consulting back on the desk of Orient BlackSwan publishers, opened his arms towards me, and said, ‘Giulia, here you are! I read you were here, I am so pleased!’ and hugged me. We then continued to have nice conversations over the remainder of the four days. Needless to say, all these interactions gratified me and immediately made me feel ‘at home’ and relaxed about my original insecurities. VE 21 became a quintessential moment for my research, in that it placed together filmmakers, film critics, a few anthropologists, film historians and documentary scholars, from India and abroad, with whom, as individuals, I had previously shared part of my research. For the first time they had all come together in a sort of ‘feast’, celebrating not only the academic field of ‘documentary studies’, but also ‘documentary films in South Asia’ as a

Preface   xiii significant phenomenon that merits serious academic attention (cf. Sarkar and Wolf 2012). This gathering motivated me to return to this project, which I started to develop as a book soon after gaining my PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, in December 2012. Specifically, VE 21 inspired me to revisit my doctoral findings and analyses in relation to some recent changes in the practice both of documentary films in India and of anthropology. This book addresses precisely these variations while telling a story of the development of documentary film practice in India, in the hope of dialoguing with anthropologists as much as with those interested in documentary film history, Indian cinema(s) and art/media practices.

Acknowledgements

This work was conceived in 2006, when I was still a Master’s student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Over the course of more than a decade, made up of: a 20 months of fieldwork in India; a long period of writing a PhD; various teaching and postdoctoral positions in various institutions and countries; and regular visits to India, this work has inevitably taken multiple forms. Several people and institutions have supported its constant transformation. So many have been of inspiration, support and help, it would be too difficult to name them all. I therefore ask in advance for forgiveness for all significant omissions. To begin with, I would like to thank Stephen Putnam Hughes (who supervised my doctoral studies) and Christopher Pinney and Ravi Vasudevan (who examined my doctoral dissertation) for their precious critique and advice, without which this work would have not moved much further from its initial PhD form. The supporting and sometimes sharp comments of anonymous peer reviewers have also enabled the intellectual development of this work. For the period of my studies at SOAS, in London, I am particularly thankful to David Mosse, Christopher Davis, Edward Simpson, Dolores Martinez, Caroline Osella, Johan Pottier, Trevor Marchand, Annabelle Sreberny and Kevin Latham; also Nicole Wolf, Peter Loizos and my colleague and friend Paolo Favero. Among those who provided intellectual but also moral support and sometimes just a good vibe and the right inspiration, I owe my most sincere gratitude to: Brendan Donegan, Alice Tilche, Aude Michelet, Zoe Goodman, Roberta Zavoretti, Gala Olavide Sicard, Niccolò Caderni, Manuel Capurso, Alessandra Marotta, Diego Manduri, Maria Elettra Verrone, Maria Luisa Rubino, Sebastiano Miele and my everlasting friend Antonella Puopolo. During my primary long-­term fieldwork in India, I met for the first time Thomas Waugh, to whom I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude for trusting my research and sharing his invaluable 1980s archival material with me. For opening their ‘personal archives’ and sharing priceless historical material with me, I particularly thank Deepa Dhanraj, Sanjay Kak, Anjali Montairo, K.P. Jayasankar, Amar Kanwar, Lawrence Liang, Ranjan De, Fr. Benny, George Kutty, Saratchandran, Sabeena Gadhioke, Manjira

Acknowledgements   xv Datta and Pankaj Butalia. I also owe my gratitude to public, private and independent institutions and collectives in India, which have welcomed my research and provided intellectual and material support over the years. The MIDS, the NFAI, the FD, the IDPA, Majlis, Magic Lantern Foundation, the ALF, SARAI, the Anthropological Survey of India and above all, Pedestrian Pictures. It is impossible for me to name all the filmmakers I met during my years of fieldwork, with whom I spent a very exciting and significant time of my life and without whom this work would not have been possible. While thanking all of them, I must nevertheless, single out those who have engaged in much more critical discussions in this research, who strongly supported me throughout, and who occasionally commented on part of it – Deepa Dhanraj, Rahul Roy, Meghnath B., Sanjay Kak, Ranjan Palit, Pradeep Deepu, Uvaraj M., Tarun Saldhana, Ali Kazimi, Sughata Sunil, and Nilanjan Bhattacharya: thank you very much. After being awarded a PhD, several people have continued believing in this work and many others have helped me to sharpen my ideas and analyses. I am particularly thankful to Myria Georgiou, Shakuntala Banaji, Ellen Helsper, Rosie Thomas, Anil Kumar, V.S. Kundu and also to Roger Sansi, Fiona Siegenthaler, Marcus Banks, Caterina Pasqualino, Jean-­ Bernard Ouedraogo, Letizia Giannella, Tiziana Nicoletta Beltrame and Guillermo Vargas-­Quisoboni. My sincere gratitude also goes to all the doctoral and postdoctoral fellows I met while working at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, as well as the more permanent staff of the museum. Specifically, I would like to thank Anne-Christine Taylor, Denis Vidal, Frédéric Keck, Jessica de Largy, Julien Clement, Christine Barthes, Baptiste Gilles, Valeria Motta, Emilie Stoll and my intellectual and moral ‘partner in crime’ Arnaud Dubois. Lastly, I also want to thank Nadim Nehmé and Michael Dan for all the time they took to discuss this work with me, rather than our common passion in swing dance and music! I finally thank my family – my mother, my father, my brother, for being with me all through this long journey. Along with them, I also thank all those that, with distinctive love and unique attention at different moments, have become close to me and created with me always anew, supportive families. And those who stay, quelli unici perché veri! Without the support of the London School of Economics, during my one-­year LSE fellowship in 2012–2013, the postdoctoral research position at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris in 2013–2014 and the laboratoire IMERCCEN of the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 in 2015–2017, the production of this book would not have been possible. The collection and development of primary analyses of this work have been achievable thanks to my PhD studentship at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London and also thanks to public and private funding of different kinds. They include: the Public Fund for Postgraduate Students of Regione Puglia (Italy); the Homo Sapiens Sapiens – INPDAP (Italy); the Additional Award for Fieldwork – School of Oriental

xvi   Acknowledgements and African Studies; the Sir Richard Stapley Educational Trust; the Central Research Fund – University of London; the Radcliffe-­Brown and Firth Trust Funds for Social Anthropological Research – Royal Anthropological Institute. The images (not taken by the author herself ) reproduced in this volume have been used thanks to the rights provided by Films Division India, the Indian Documentary Producers Association (IDPA), Sanjay Kak and Sheba Chhachhi.

Abbreviations and acronyms

Alcom BIFF BLA CENDIT DD FAB FD FFC FFSI FIFV FTII I&B IAT ICC IDPA IFFI IFI IIC INP IPTA IRE ISRO IVFK JNU MIFF MoI NASA NFAI NGO PBS

Alternative Communication Forum Bombay International Film Festival for Documentary and Short Films Broadcast Licensing Authority Centre for Development of Instructional Technology Doordarshan Films Advisory Board Films Division Films Finance Corporation Federation of Film Societies of India Forum for Independent Films and Video Film Training Institute of India (from 1974 Film and Television Institute of India) Information and Broadcasting (Ministry of ) Institute of Agriculture and Technology Indian Cinematograph Committee 1927–1928 Independent Documentary Producers Association International Film Festival of India Information Films of India India International Centre Indian News Parade Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association Indian Rare Earths Indian Space Research Organisation International Video Festival of Kerala Jawaharlal Nehru University Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films British Ministry of Information United States National Aeronautic and Space Administration National Film Archive of India Non-­governmental organisation Public Broadcasting Service

xviii   Abbreviations and acronyms PSBT PWA SAC SEWA SITE TCM UFA UNI USIS VCP VCR VE 21 YIDFF

Public Service Broadcasting Trust Progressive Writers’ Association Space Applications Centre Self-­Employed Women’s Association Satellite Instructional Television Experiment American Technical Cooperation Mission Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft United News of India United States Information Service Video cassette player Video cassette recorder Visible Evidence 21 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival

Introduction

As a researcher, you seldom state that your research might be out of control. But all creative practices, including art and anthropology, are to some degree excursions into the unknown. The question is instead to what degree you articulate your lack of control or frame uncertainties. (Robert Willim 2013) Si je devais écrire un livre pour communiquer ce que je pense déjà, avant d’avoir commencé à écrire, je n’aurais jamais le courage de l’entreprendre. Je ne l’écris que parce que je ne sais pas encore exactement quoi penser de cette chose que je voudrais tant penser.… Je suis un expérimentateur en ce sens que j’écris pour me changer moi-­même et ne plus penser la même chose qu’auparavant. (Michel Foucault 2001 [1978])1

This work began by asking what is documentary film in India? Or, in the Griersonian functional understanding of the term, what does documentary film do in India? This was the year 2006. I had just returned from Tamil Nadu, South India, having conducted a participatory video project with street children. As a postgraduate student in anthropology of media at SOAS at that time, I was aware of many audio-­visual representations about India, mainly conducted by visual anthropologists and renowned filmmakers from outside India. Yet, I did not know much about documentary films made by local filmmakers and I became eager to discover more. I thus decided to begin a PhD project in social anthropology, which after one year of theoretical and methodological preparation, enabled me to conduct 20 consecutive months of fieldwork research between October 2007 and June 2009. My journey into the field started from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, precisely because it was a place that was already familiar to me, thanks to my previous research. Because of the extremely successful Tamil cinema industry, I believed that Chennai could also be the centre of South Indian documentary film practices. However, after taking part in a few local film events and conversing with some filmmakers based in Tamil

2   Introduction Nadu, I became convinced that this was not the case.2 Hence, my work was pushed away from the idea of studying a localised practice and towards the study of a widespread national phenomenon of scattered documentary film practices, which forced me to immediately face two main obstacles. The first was that there was not yet a published history (or written ethnography) of such practice. The second was that, despite this, there was a widespread, shared, discursive understanding in the field that the history of documentary films in India was divided into two key moments: the making of state-­government documentary films (through colonial and postcolonial institutions); and the beginning of independent practices, thanks to the 1970s activist filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, who has continued to inspire documentary filmmaking up to the present day. While at that time a written ‘history of government film institutions’ was starting to come out in a few publications (although based on only a few partial sources; cf. Chapters 1 and 2), the moment of ‘the independent documentary’ was yet to be written (cf. Chapter 3). In addition, several of the contemporary filmmakers with whom I dialogued felt that they had already moved away from Patwardhan’s filmmaking and that at present, it was more important to focus, and thus write about, a new, ‘performative’, era of documentary filmmaking (cf. Chapter 5), which did not have the specific legacy of Patwardhan’s experience except for the fact that this was its genealogical point of departure. Undoubtedly, at the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork in India, an overall history of the development of documentary film practices in India since colonial times was yet to be formulated in a comprehensive and cohesive way. In his Archaeology of Knowledge (2012 [1969]) Michel Foucault explains that if in the past ‘history deciphered the traces left by men’ (or what he calls ‘monuments’), when these traces have been converted into ‘documents’, history has become ‘that which transforms documents into monuments’, trying ‘to define within the documentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations’ (2012 [1969]: 7–8, emphasis in original). Following this logic, it was as if I had found in my field already reproduced (oral) ‘documents’ (that is, the belief that documentary film practices in India had two separate moments in history) – which created a ‘monument’ of this practice (namely, that independent practices started from a single individual, Anand Patwardhan) – and yet I found no (written) ‘document’ (that is, a cohesive written history) to read, consult, build on, problematise or challenge in relation to the widespread contemporary discourse on this practice. Rather, I found new in-­process oral narratives (such as the contemporary discourse about performative filmmaking practices), but again lacking support from (written) documents. In other words, I was left with what Foucault (1991a [1970]) calls a ‘discursive practice’. And the only way for me to question this constructed and consolidated ‘monumental’ discourse of the development of documentary filmmaking in India was to search for ‘original’ sources and place them in

Introduction   3 relation to contemporary discourses and practices. Thus, my research became an anthropological investigation of past and present histories structured around different historical moments vis-­à-vis the aforementioned traditional two. By the end of 2012, I had completed my doctoral studies with a thesis entitled Documentary Film Practices in India: History of the Present; therein I called my approach an ‘historiographical intervention’ into a history of a practice, arguing that my dissertation made a contribution to visual anthropology and more specifically to the study of film-­making. With this book, which builds on my PhD findings and analyses, I go beyond this statement. After many years of observing, listening, contributing and hence ‘living’ anthropology in my everyday academic environment(s), and not just in relation to documentary film practices in India, I now also see this work as part of the many ways in which we can practise contemporary anthropologies. The overall aim of this book is to show that studying the development of a film practice from an anthropological perspective can enable us to go beyond films and filmmakers, to focus on the process of discursification of such practice and accordingly to provide novel ways of understanding a variety of distinctive approaches to filmmaking and art practices in the present day. The study should, however, also provide intellectual stimuli that encourage the discipline of anthropology to reflect on its own contemporary practice, open up innovative forms of communication within and beyond the discipline and, thus, foster theoretical and methodological academic-­non-academic cross-­fertilisation. Accordingly, this book should attract the attention of those interested in talking about documentary films in India, beyond Anand Patwardhan and beyond film studies. Yet, it should also contribute to debates about contemporary art/media practices in anthropology by making film practices part of their discussion. Finally, the work should provide different methodological and theoretical insights for those interested in the anthropology of practices in general, and in the way in which we, as anthropologists, may engage with these practices in and outside the field. If it is able to accomplish such a difficult task, this work should then be able to demonstrate that, in engaging with each other, practice and discourse can foster an inter- and intra-­ disciplinary enriching process based on relational exchanges. The proliferation of both academic and art/media practices in both disciplinary and non-­disciplinary domains of both art and social science is certainly increasingly calling for such exchanges. Before getting into further detail though, let us start, precisely, from the domain of ‘documentary film’.

Documentary studies, Indian cinema and film genre In the early 1990s, two renowned documentary scholars, Jane Gaines and Michael Renov, set up Visible Evidence, an international conference

4   Introduction dedicated exclusively to documentary films. This was the first conference of its kind that was able to keep its focus exclusively on documentary film – as separate from the well-­developed field of film studies. When Visible Evidence emerged, it was the right time to consolidate under a single umbrella an already mushrooming phenomenon, and thus create a field of study. Starting as a biennial encounter, Visible Evidence rapidly became an annual meeting and today is considered one of the largest gatherings of documentary scholars (and practitioners) from all over the world – coming together to discuss changes in the theory and practice of documentary film. Due to its international nature, the conference has changed location every year and the 21st was held in India, bringing to south Asia the most up-­todate debates about this field of study. The conference also enabled scholars and practitioners who specialised in (or came from) south Asia to contribute to an international debate with localised examples of documentary film, which until then had not received their due attention. A succinct detour about the way in which this field of study has included/excluded film practices in/from its academic discourse and how India may fit into this academic field is necessary here. By and large, documentary scholars have written about documentary film through the history of its ‘usage’.3 If we read this history, we can see that it has been mainly centred on Euro-­American examples and has presumed a linear progression organised around historical periods associated with a specific filmmaker, a particular approach or a definite movement. Each historical period has a particular emphasis. In the present day, we read accounts of the beginning of documentary film through detailed portraits of its pioneers, such as Robert Flaherty, Dziga Vertov and John Grierson. Passing through the decades, we can also read about documentary content during World War II, followed by a history of documentary style and technology with the advent of cinema vérité in the late 1950s.4 Finally, we find a history of politics during the 1970s, and a history of documentary form as personal engagement during the 1990s. In such linear reconstruction, there is always a clear connection between the historical period and the theme around which documentary practices emerged. This linearity stopped working for documentary scholars when politics and forms of filmmaking entered the academic debate; accordingly, an extensive literature on theories of documentary film took off.5 This literature was followed by a few attempts to revisit the history of documentaries from specific vantage points, such as the ‘real’ (Winston 1995), the ‘experimental’ (Russell 1999), the ‘performative-­political’ (Chanan 2007) and the ‘fictional’ (Caillet 2014). In parallel to this, from the 1990s onwards, there has been a growing tendency to critique this linear tradition of seeing the history as emerging only from the Euro-­American axis.6 This critique has mostly come from analyses based on the Latin American film scene which, since the 1960s, have offered alternative narratives to the development of documentary

Introduction   5 practice. In particular, during the 1960s, filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino theorised about a ‘Third Cinema’ – that is, a cinema that recognised the anti-­imperialist struggles of the Third World – and influenced several activist-­filmmakers whose work became significant in the development of a ‘new’, non-­Eurocentric, academic discourse. According to Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994), the activist approach of Latin American filmmaking became a manifesto for many countries outside the Euro-­ American axis, and the term ‘Third Cinema’ soon became ‘Third World Cinema’ – that is, a cinema from Third World countries. This terminology has been modified over time. For Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn, for instance, it became ‘World Cinema’ (2006) – an expression that rapidly entered film festival circuits in the 1980s, and has since attracted film critics’ curiosity and academic discourses (Nichols 1994b). As a result, from the late 1990s onwards, documentary scholars have started to turn their focus towards other countries, and their discourses have begun also to be ‘coloured’ by places such as China (Pickowicz 2006; Zhang 2006; Johnson 2006; Robinson 2009), Iran (Chaudhuri and Finn 2006; Zeydabadi-­Nejad 2010) and Japan (Nornes and Yukio 1994; Sinkler 1996; Phillips 2006). Until very recently, India was hardly mentioned in classic works about the international development of documentary film,7 but this was in part also due to negligence in the literature on Indian cinema. When this project began in 2006, documentary filmmaking was still a marginal (if not an omitted) practice in several well-­developed academic discourses as much in India as beyond India. This film practice was yet to be considered part of Indian cinemas. Even though film scholars have always identified a fine line between the documentary ‘style’ and the practice of the late-­1960s and early-­1970s ‘new wave’ or ‘parallel’ cinema (cf. Chapter 3) documentary film practices have long been omitted from the various cinemas of India. For instance, Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel categorise the cinemas of India as ‘Hindi commercial’, ‘regional’ and ‘art-­house’ (2002: 8), excluding documentary film without justification. A possible reason for this lacuna may be that documentary filmmaking in India has been perceived by these scholars as a ‘genre’ and not a ‘cinema’, hence existing only at the level of film production. However, if we draw on theories of ‘film genre’ (cf. Neale 1980, 1990; Jauss 1982; Cohen 1986; Altman 1999), we can also say that a film genre cannot be addressed as a fixed category, because it is constantly made and re-­made depending on the historical period and the agents of classification that have constituted it – namely, the film industry, critics, audiences, film funding, film scholars. In this sense, documentary in India can be seen as a film genre as much as a cinema or a practice and, as this book should eventually suggest, it was indeed all of these things, depending on the different historical moments in which it was articulated. Accordingly, it may be more convincing to argue that unlike the other types of Indian cinema (which at different points in their history shared government funding and restrictions, filmmakers, festivals, styles or

6   Introduction themes), documentary film developed out of a separate trajectory yet to be clearly identified and articulated as an ‘industry’ and/or a ‘media practice’. Other than one single historical book, From Raj to Swaraj: the Non-­ Fiction Film in India (Garga 2007), until recently almost no literature has addressed this theme. Over the past few years a few early-­career scholars and Indian filmmakers themselves have begun publishing articles in this field and, to my knowledge, by the time this book comes out, there will be at least four volumes, other than mine, that will start debating this ‘cinema’ ‘genre’ or, as I prefer to say, ‘practice’ from various different perspectives. None of these scholars, however, has yet critically engaged with the development of documentary practices in India in relation to different historical moments, starting from the colonial period. Rather, they all identify a clear-­cut distinction between government film institutions, such as the Films Division (cf. Chapter 2), and independent practices (cf. Chapter 3). As I have said, this separation was created around the film practice of a single individual, Anand Patwardhan. He was one of the most successful filmmakers of the late 1970s and early 1980s in terms of making films as a critique of state power and presenting them to national and international audiences at official festivals and less official film screenings; accordingly, his films and narratives about his films have been circulated more than those of anyone else. As such, they have transformed him into an icon of independent documentary in India and to some extent, have made him ‘an institution’ for the understanding of the development of such film practice. Film scholars of Indian cinema, who in very recent years have gradually been including the practice of documentary film in their academic debates about Indian cinema, are also contributing to such a perception.8 However, one may want to ask: to what extent can a history of a film practice be born out of a single individual and a single set of filmmaking? The challenge of this work is precisely to demonstrate that, even if in a marginal way, we can identify other ‘independent’ film practices in the same historical period as Patwardhan, but also before and after Patwardhan. Moreover, I should also point out that in relation to the idea of ‘genre’ in film practices (cf. Altman 1999), throughout this work, the concept of ‘independent’ should also be considered a flexible category that changes its signification depending on the different historical, social and political moments in which it is discursively articulated (cf. Chapter 3). For this reason, I have chosen to speak about ‘documentary practices’ rather than ‘independent documentary practices’ and to take an inclusive, rather than an exclusive, approach to this phenomenon. Film historians, however, are yet to start taking these possible changes of significations seriously into account and to include other film practices in their narratives about the development of (independent) documentary film in India (cf. Chapter 3). Until then, there is the risk that the narratives about Patwardhan, much more than his actual persona and his films, continue to circulate more than others and to contribute to the idea of him as the pioneer of a film move-

Introduction   7 ment and, for the purposes of the analysis provided in this book, as one of the inevitable classics (although not the only one) when examining the process of discursification of a film practice from an anthropological perspective – to which I now turn my attention.

Living, doing and thinking anthropology At the same moment as I decided to move away from Tamil Nadu and start focusing my research on the widespread phenomenon of documentary practices in India, I also became overwhelmed by a series of practical ‘how’ questions regarding my way of conducting this research. Indeed, how was I to ‘grasp’ and ‘graph’ a film practice that was scattered across the whole country? How was I to start? How should I avoid a too generalist analysis of such an extensive practice? What should I prioritise and what ought I to leave out? These questions (which came to me mostly because of my pre-­ fieldwork preparation during my time at the department of anthropology at SOAS in London) made me realise that whether I liked it or not I had to start improvising beyond all my imagined, pre-­set ethnographic methodologies. Indeed, I was left with no method. It was at this moment that I took the rapid decision to start with the next film festival (the International Film Festival of India – IFFI – in Goa), and simply let myself go with whatever happened from then on. I began what Michael Jackson calls a ‘phenomenological anthropology’ (1996: 2) and which Paul Stoller re-­formed into a ‘sensuous ethnography’ (2009: 75). That is, before ‘observing’ a practice, I began to ‘listen to’ and ‘live with’ anything that was happening around me and take decisions accordingly. This shift made me feel extremely unprepared for my possible way of ‘doing’ fieldwork (especially in all my initial interactions with documentary filmmakers). Yet, on the other hand, it unconsciously enabled me to learn how to ‘live’ and ‘sense’ this particular anthropological moment before converting it into a ‘doable’ methodology – that is, into an ‘ethnographic method’. Michael Jackson (1996) argues that anthropologists often resist acknowledging the contingent nature of the ethnographic here and now, the phenomenological experience of our encounters. For Paul Stoller, this dismissive approach can be another way to ‘avoid the indeterminacies of the between – the ambiguities of social life, the tangential contours of experience, and sensuous processes of our bodies’ (2009: 33). Anthropology, Stoller continues, is arguably one of the most personal of the human sciences (ibid.: 155), hence: If you do accept the contingency of experience and present yourself fully in the vortex of the between, then your body – the scholar’s body – demands a fuller sensual awareness of the smells, tastes, sounds, and textures of the lifeworld. Such an embodied presence also means that scholars open themselves to others and absorb their words.

8   Introduction … To accept an embodied rationality is to live anthropology and dwell in the between within which you recognize, like wise Songhay sorcerers and griots, that you cannot master sorcery, history, or knowledge; rather, it is sorcery, history, and knowledge that masters you. (Stoller 2009: 33; emphasis added) It is through my ‘living’ anthropology in my everyday fieldwork that documentary filmmaking in India became part of my life 24/7 and started to ‘master’ me and my way of perceiving things around me. By letting my sensing body go with the flux of practices across the country, I learnt how to become part of a community before wanting to interpret it. In other words, while ultimately interested in how filmmakers in India approach and debate their film practice I primarily learnt how to recognise the importance of ‘living’ anthropology while conducting fieldwork in relation to them. Cristina Grasseni argues that, ‘we cannot understand how people function unless we take into consideration how they have learnt to see the world in many different, relevant and conflicting ways’ (2007: 9). In my case, while interested in how filmmakers in India see/learn the world I ended up also learning how ‘I’ was seeing/sensing the world at that particular time. In other words, I learnt how to ‘live’ fieldwork, and hence anthropology, thanks to my continuous unplanned interactions with documentary filmmakers across the country. This discovery brought me to make a set of reflections regarding the meaning of conducting fieldwork and contributing to anthropological knowledge. ‘Living’, ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ anthropology became for me the fundamental elements that enabled me to carry out this project, write this book and make a contribution within and yet beyond the discipline of anthropology. What follows is an analysis of my way of engaging with these important moments of anthropology in and outside the field – the living, doing and thinking anthropology. This exploration will be useful in terms of grasping my positionality and justifying my methodological choices in relation to the field and better engaging with my way of thinking anthropologies outside the field. While telling a story of myself during my 2007–2009 fieldwork in India (useful for those readers interested in seeing my relationship with this widespread film practice), I am also contributing a methodological and theoretical approach to the study of practices (including but not limited to contemporary art/film practices) that are (for reasons I will explain later) very difficult for conventional anthropology to grasp. ‘Living’ fieldwork and anthropology Unlike the classic methodological debates in the history of anthropology and the more recent publications about fieldwork as an ethnographic method not exclusive to anthropology (cf. Castañeda 2006; Wright and

Introduction   9 Schneider 2010; Schneider and Wright 2013; Caillet 2014; Sansi 2015), I consider ‘fieldwork’ as a way of ‘living’ anthropology rather than simply a way of ‘doing’ it. Paul Stoller states that the anthropological ‘between’ is a very personal and liminal space between senses, art and science; it is ‘the unavoidable space that creates creative and intellectual tension’ (Stoller 2009: 113). Living fieldwork should then be considered that particular ‘between’ – that is, an ‘art-­skill’ (rather than a ‘doable-­method’) which, once acquired, Grasseni argues, ‘is an essential aspect, an element of practice, a taste and a meaning-­making attitude that is developed and applied throughout everyday life’ (2007: 10). Grasseni however does not focus on what Stoller sees as the ‘creative and intellectual tension’ of fieldwork, but on the ‘output’, so to speak, of such tension – that is, the ‘skilled visions’ as the ‘constructed’ modalities through which we see and perceive the world around us. Both approaches are not far from what Tim Ingold identifies as the process of knowing and learning. As he points out in one of his most recent works, ‘knowing is a process of active following, of going along’, and it is ‘by watching, listening and feeling – by paying attention to what the world has to tell us – that we learn’ (Ingold 2013: 1). In other words, for Ingold it is through our senses and perceptions of the world that we ‘know’ and ‘learn’ (à la Grasseni), yet from the same senses and perceptions we also ‘live’ the particular fieldwork moment (à la Stoller). This is, for him, the way in which anthropology operates – that is, learning ‘from’ and studying ‘with’ the field vs. the traditional learning ‘about’ and studying ‘of ’ the field (Ingold 2013: 3). For Ingold, this is also the way in which anthropology becomes close to, while also establishing a distance from, (visual) art. Indeed, in another of his recent works, Ingold makes it clear that unlike painting and drawing, ‘anthropological writing is not an art of description’ but a science that creates dialogue and verbal correspondence (2011: 241–242). If this is the case, however, what would happen if painting, drawing, filming as well as, Sansi (2015) would add, any other form of visual or non-­visual contemporary art practice, stopped ‘representing’ and started ‘engaging’, ‘intervening’, ‘participating’ with the sensible world? Then, there would no longer be a clear-­cut difference with anthropology (à la Ingold) as painting, drawing, filming, contemporary art and so on would become ‘arts of engagement’ more than ‘arts of description’. Anthropology and art practices would then be seen as much more similar living processes. Due to its relational human nature, Robert Edmonds states that ‘documentary is simply anthropology on film!’ (1974: 14, emphasis added) and hence its significance must be understood through an anthro­ pological lens. What he signifies with this is that everything we see in a documentary film is human beings interacting with each other or with the objects around them – precisely as in the classic scenario of the anthropological field. Hence, Edmonds says, reading the process of

10   Introduction making documentary films from an anthropological perspective may be a better way to engage with such practice. Similarly, yet starting not from the textual perspective but from its production moment, Dai Vaughan argues that any kind of fieldworker, whether an anthropologist, a camera-­operator or a film director, must constantly deal with the contingent nature of experience and hence with the continuously changing reality we, as fieldworkers, try to grasp (1999: 56). Not dissimilar to these views, Aline Caillet talks about the experience of the artistic terrain as ‘une expérience de partage dans le sensible’ – that is, a sharing moment into the sensible world which forces the contemporary artist to be ‘omni-­perceptif ’ and to explore all possible sensorial variations of the field (2014: 114).  In my PhD thesis, I link these debates to what anthropologist Christopher Davis identifies as ‘documentary art’, which is, for Davis, another way of talking about the ethnographic method (2000: 11; see also Battaglia 2014a). Here, I go beyond this connection and identify this process as a way of ‘living’ fieldwork and hence anthropology – that is, a way to conduct anthropological fieldwork as a sensorial moment in which to acquire the art-­skills needed by any fieldworker who ‘lives’ his/her field – whether an anthropologist, a filmmaker, an artist or simply a curious and dedicated human being. It is not a coincidence, I would say, that in his analysis of ‘the power of the between’, Stoller associates the ultimate way to experience this perceptive moment with a filmmaker-­anthropologist, Jean Rouch – ‘a liminal figure par excellence [… who] understood the creative power of being between things’ (2009: 5). ‘Living’ anthropology is indeed a phenomenological moment of ‘living’ fieldwork, non-­distinctive of a discipline but constituent of the fieldwork process per se. It is, to paraphrase the opening sentence of this introduction, an excursion into the unknown constituent of any creative practice, including anthropology and art (Willim 2013; see also Wynne 2010; Caillet 2014). However, seeing a similitude between ‘art’ and ‘anthropology’ or ‘art’ and ‘social science’ from a contemporary postmodern perspective would, in my opinion, be restrictive. In order to be convincing and more effective with such an argument, we should start by identifying similarities by digging in much earlier anthropological and sociological discussions and in much more ‘generalist’ theories within the discipline. For instance, in his Education and Sociology in 1922, Emile Durkheim pointed out that in order to go beyond the straightforward perception of art as any ‘product of reflections which is not science’ (1956 [1922]: 100), it is important ‘to reserve the name of art for everything that is pure practice without theory’ (ibid.: 101) – that is, to the practical ‘skill’ applicable to any field because acquired precisely through experience – such as, ‘the art of the soldier, the art of the lawyer, the art of the teacher’ (ibid.). In Durkheim’s words:

Introduction   11 An art is a system of ways of doing which are oriented to special ends and which are the product either of a traditional experience communicated by education, or of the personal experience of the individual. One can acquire them only by coming into contact with the things on which the action is to be performed and by dealing with them oneself. No doubt, it is possible that art may be illuminated by reflection, but reflection is not an essential element of it, since it can exist without reflection. Also, there is not a single art in which everything is reflected upon. (Durkheim 1956 [1922]: 101) In this sense, fieldwork should also be seen as a form of art (precisely acquired through the practice) rather than as something method­ ologically constructed in its inception through its methods. Unlike those who have thus far debated fieldwork as an ‘art form’ and yet also as a ‘scientific method’ (cf. Wolcott 2005), what I am proposing here is to think of fieldwork beyond method or, as Roger Sansi has recently suggested, as something that is a bit more and yet a bit less than a method (2015: 138). Living fieldwork is an art-­skill which, when acquired, enables individuals to perceive a status of ‘between’, and hence to ‘live’ anthro­pology before ‘doing’ it. As such, it is not constitutive of the discipline of anthropology but something that can be ‘perceived’ and potentially ‘practised’ by anyone. Because of their constant relationship with the ‘field’ they want to ‘engage with’, documentary filmmakers in India (as much as, arguably, any kind of contemporary artist) are those who more than anyone else ‘live’ fieldwork in their practice. In contrast, conventionally recognised ‘anthropologists’ (students of anthropology, scholars writing in the field of anthropology, who in France are called ‘ethnologists’ and so on) are not necessarily individuals able to ‘live’ fieldwork and hence anthropology. For them, ‘fieldwork as method is most powerfully inculcated as a kind of lore, tales, coffee-­room talk and anecdotal evaluation among peers, in the pressure of expectation between student and teacher’ (Marcus 2010: 266). In the name of an academic specialisation, researchers in anthropology cannot ‘mechanically live’ anthropology; nor can ‘living’ fieldwork be ‘inculcated’ to them. Living fieldwork is an intimate, personal and sensorial experience separated from methodology. In contrast, researchers in anthropology can nevertheless learn methods and be very skilled in ‘conducting’ fieldwork and ‘doing’ anthropology through its various structured and semi-­ structured ethnographic methodologies, by and large applied in the field.9 Some examples from my fieldwork will exemplify this point. It was only after almost one year of ‘living’ fieldwork in India, namely after my participation in various film festivals, making filmmaker-­friends and accordingly being invited to formal and informal gatherings (which in turn introduced me to other filmmakers, practices and discourses), that I started

12   Introduction to feel the need for a more structured method. As I have said, because of the fact that my ‘pre-­planned fieldwork’ changed from the study of a localised practice in Tamil Nadu to the study of a widespread phenomenon of filmmaking across the whole country, up to that point I had had no choice but to go with the flow by physically following practices, practitioners and discourses all over India. At that time, I justified this change of plan to myself as a way of conducting the well-­known ‘multi-­sited ethnography’ (Marcus 1995, 1998) – that is (as I then saw it), a more ‘innovative’, ‘modern’ methodology based on multiple sites of fieldwork, which I ‘acquired’ (!) during my pre-­fieldwork preparation at SOAS. Yet, this was simply a rationale I had created for myself. I should admit that until that moment I had never understood what George Marcus really meant by ‘multi-­sited ethnography’ – that is, an investigation of sites ‘whose connections are not otherwise pre-­ established’ (1999: 103) and not, as he himself quite recently stated, in criticism, ‘the literal multiplication of successive Malinowskian periods of fieldwork at related sites’ (2010: 268). Yet, how could I investigate disconnected sites other than by going into each site and ‘living’ the particular moment? If the classic Malinowskian approach of fieldwork, namely participant observation, was ‘highly visual’ and hence too ‘cinematic in character’ (ibid.: 263), was not the suggested ‘multi-­sited ethnography’ based on an analytical approach constitutive of the ‘writing’ of anthropology rather than of its sensorial fieldwork moment? In other words, how could I practically ‘conduct’ fieldwork, by making use of Marcus’ multi-­sited ethnography, and yet ‘live’ anthropology? Even if in a much less sophisticated way, I was confronted with these questions at the point in my stay in India when I felt the need to convert my ‘living’ fieldwork into a more ‘structured’ way of researching, and thus begin to ‘do’ anthropology. I therefore started reading my field-­notes and realised that what I had noted down by then was neither a Malinowskian description of things nor a Marcusian analysis of observed-­things in relation to one another. Rather, my field-­notes were mainly based on my emotions, perceptions and opinions in relation to what the people I interacted with had communicated to me through their respective emotions, perceptions and opinions. In other words, for almost one year of my fieldwork, I had tried to capture and note down the sensible world around me through neither observation nor analysis but through my senses (Stoller 1989). The reading of my field-­notes that commented on this ‘random’, instinctive and embodied way of ‘living’ fieldwork led me, nevertheless, to be able to delineate a ‘path’ full of interesting themes to further explore through a much more structured method. In other words, the moment at which I began to look back on what I had done until then and ask more specific questions about my methodology and my way of conducting fieldwork, I was able to ‘construct’ my ‘field’ as ‘a social symbolic imaginary with certain posited relations among things, people, events, places and cultural artefacts’ (Marcus 2010: 268). A construction of fieldwork, however, was

Introduction   13 not a way of ‘living’ anthropology but rather a constitutive element of what I consider ‘doing’ anthropology, ‘ethno-­graphing’ cultures – that is, a methodology already oriented towards the final thinking–writing–graphing of anthropology. In short, my accidental fieldwork encounters taught me that before method, we can ‘live’ fieldwork. Yet, in turn, my ‘living’ moment taught me, whether in a more Malinowskian or more Marcusian way, that in order to contribute to anthropological knowledge it is important to convert the ‘living’ into a form of ‘graphing’ culture, in the field as much as far away from the field – that is, in the conventional ‘writing-­up’ moment. If this sounds not particularly different from the way in which fieldwork has by and large been theorised in the history of anthropology – namely, spending the first half of fieldwork being interested in everything and learning how to be ‘there’ and the second half reading notes and finding ideas to develop further – what I am suggesting here differs from this tradition in three fundamental ways. The first and most important of these is that, through what I call ‘living’ anthropology, we learn not from ‘observing’ but from ‘sensing’ the field. Through this process we actually learn about ourselves and not about ‘how to be’ in the field – ‘with a whole library in [our] heads’, as Marc Augé and Paul Colleyn have argued (2006: 97), which often mirrors ‘the discipline’s agenda of the moment’ (Starn 2015: 6). In other words, we do not adjust our pre-­set knowledge in relation to the field but let ourselves go along with it and hence ‘live’ the field. Second, in the tradition of anthropology, the preliminary fieldwork moment is already seen as a method (the ethnographic method) which, as I will explain in detail in a moment, precisely because of its ‘graphing’ nature, disconnects (or limits) the anthropologist from learning about his/her own self in favour of the representations of others. Last but not least, even though I see the moment of ‘living’ anthropology as one of the first stages of being in touch with the field, I am not suggesting a diachronic process of practising anthropology. Rather, when acquired, ‘living’ anthropology should be considered a free variable independent of a structured time (such as the often obligatory one-­year fieldwork imposed by university anthropology departments on new PhD students). As such, it should also be capable of influencing and re-­directing our structured methodologies as well as our subsequent ways of theorising our research outside the field. In some cases, as Paul Stoller (2009) notes for instance, it can even influence broader encounters in our personal life beyond the field. More details from my 2007–2009 Indian encounters, this time coming from my way of doing or ‘ethno-­graphing’ anthropology, will exemplify this further. Ethnography – doing anthropology The day that Swati Dandekar texted me on my Chennai phone and said, ‘There is a problem with the film. It may not happen. This is a very new

14   Introduction development. Got to know only on the weekend’, I felt very agitated and completely lost. By then, Swati and I had met a few times and had talked extensively. We had agreed that I would take part in her film project on water, the Kaveri River and city developments, and in relation to this agreement I had made up my mind that it was time to move from Chennai (Tamil Nadu) to Bangalore (Karnataka). I hence told my landlady in Chennai that I was leaving my room at the end of July and, thanks to my filmmaker-­friends’ connections, I had already found a small apartment in Bangalore from the beginning of August. Since my parents would be making a tour of India at that time, I had persuaded them to help me to move between the two cities. Yet, aside from the film project, I felt ready to go somewhere else and be more ‘structured’ in my research, so as to feel I was actually conducting ‘an ethnography of something specific’. As I wrote in my field-­notes the day I received that text message, ‘[t]he unpredictability of fieldwork is something that all researchers should constantly keep in mind. However, even though one keeps it in mind, it strikes you when it happens to you’ (field-­notes 21 July 2008). Swati was not to blame for the change of plan. Rather, she was also a ‘victim’ of the situation. After one year of dialogue and negotiation, the management of the organisation that was funding the film changed and the new ones decided to no longer produce it. In other words, she had to start again from scratch and see whether other people were interested in financing the film.10 Until then however, the whole project had to be put on hold and I was left with no specific project to be involved with. I seriously felt that I did not know how to go about spending my remaining time in India. Quetzil E. Castañeda argues that researchers doing immersive fieldwork ‘are always necessarily questioning themselves and their practice’ regarding whether the method is ‘correct’ or the data is ‘right’ (2006: 79). If for a long period of ‘living’ anthropology there was no space for me to think about a method, the researcher’s ‘questioning’ moment described by Castañeda arrived, in my case, after a ten-­month delay. As though in the middle of serious research panic, for the first time I felt like calling my supervisor in the UK to ask for advice. After listening to ‘a river of words’ that most likely meant nothing to him (due to my personality but also to the very personal and inner nature of the fieldwork I had conducted and ‘lived’ up until then), the only concrete thing my supervisor could tell me was, ‘as long as you can write something, any choice you’ll make should be fine!’ My immediate, yet controlled, reaction was obviously not positive; it was not easy for me to see what he meant in that confusing moment of my life. And, above all, he did not help me in relation to my practical here and now questions. Nevertheless, the idea of ‘being able to write something’ remained in my head for the rest of my stay in India. I could no longer simply keep going with the flow, otherwise what would have been the difference between me as a researcher, and me as a traveller?11 If the moment of ‘living’ fieldwork is an art-­skill that can come

Introduction   15 to anyone (including travellers), converting that moment into an artwork or into social science is what creates distinctions between practices. ‘Method­ological objectivism’ says Pierre Bourdieu, is ‘a necessary moment in all research’ (1977: 72). As my ultimate target was to write a piece of research, I had to start structuring my fieldwork and start doing an ethnography. For any fieldworker who is aiming for something beyond fieldwork (hence for an anthropologist as well as for documentary filmmakers in India), there is a point at which the ‘living’ moment needs to be converted into a more systematic graph-­able method. This is the moment in which we start ‘making’ and ‘constructing’ something concretely – that is, for an anthropologist the organisation of structured or semi-­structured interviews and/or group discussions and life-­histories as well as drawing, filming and archiving while simultaneously conducting a sort of continuous Malin­owskian participant observation; and, for a filmmaker, the start of a structured or semi-­structured shooting process – also using various techniques, or film ‘modes’ as Bill Nichols (1991, 1994a) would call them. It is thanks to our scientific and yet creative methodologies that we produce artistico-­scientific knowledge such as a film, an artwork or a written ethnography, to mention but a few. During our research, it is through this ‘intervening’ moment that we begin to orient our work towards our ultimate aim – contributing to a discourse of a socioscientific practice and, arguably, to art. Whether we want to call it art or social science, in both cases the ‘doing’ moment of fieldwork is when we start graphing cultures and altering reality. This graphing-­altering moment is concluded in the final stage of our process, that is, the creation of our artwork and our contribution to an academic/art field (which, in the next section, I address as ‘thinking’ anthropology). If the word ‘ethnography’ is used to talk sometimes about a methodology and sometimes about ‘a practice of verbal description’ (Ingold 2011: 242) – that is, the written final monograph (and, for some, an ethnographic film), it is because in both moments we (anthropologists and artists/filmmakers) are actually ‘graphing’ and ‘altering’ the sensible reality we have encountered. Accordingly, if the word ‘ethnography’ continues to also create a good deal of miscommunication between anthropologists (cf. Ingold 2013) and more specifically between those interested in art practices (cf. Sansi 2015: 15) this is, I would argue, because we have yet to bypass conventional dichotomies between ‘fieldwork and writing-­up’, ‘methodology and theory’ and ‘ethnography and anthropology’, or inversely, as Ingold (2011, 2013) suggests, ‘anthropology and ethnography’ (in which the first fosters the second and not the other way around). Since the 1980s Writing Culture critique (cf. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Starn 2015), anthropologists have increasingly included a reflexive process in their publications and/or films. However, as Castañeda argues, at present they still neglect this alteration in the process of doing fieldwork (see also Marcus 2010) and instead create a sort of ‘invisible theatre of

16   Introduction ethnographic fieldwork’ (Castañeda 2006: 97). That is, in the name of creating intimate, personal relationships, they in fact alter these relationships and push the discipline into ‘the burden of moral science’ (ibid.: 87). Yet, would this analysis still be valid if we started divorcing ‘living’ from ‘doing’ fieldwork and hence, in the traditional logic, seeing ‘fieldwork’ and ‘ethnography’ as two separate moments of anthropological research in the field? Would a discussion about the ‘field’ (as the French academic system has with the word ‘terrain’ for instance) rather than ‘fieldwork’ enable us to better grasp the complex work of contemporary anthropologists beyond the ‘representation’ of ‘others’? Indeed, what does ‘work’ mean in the field? Or, as Sansi (2015) rightly asks, what is ‘work’ in anthropology? In other words, would it not be easier to talk about ‘living’ and ‘sensing’ the field as opposed to ‘doing’ the field vs. ‘thinking’ in relation to the field? If the answer is yes, would then the action of graphing-­altering the field belong to the ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ moment of anthropology rather than its ‘living’ moment? In other words, can we begin to think beyond the ‘mother’ of anthropological method, participant observation, which through its imposition of sight (and hence the ‘writing-­graphing’) over our other senses (cf. Taylor 1994) has thus far created only dualistic distinctions between ‘here and there’, ‘us and them’, ‘now and then’, ‘methodology and theory’, ‘fieldwork and writing-­up’, ‘ethnography and anthropology’ and, arguably, ‘social science and art’? As is emerging from a growing literature by anthropologists interested in understanding contemporary art practices (cf. Wright and Schneider 2005, 2010; Schneider and Wright 2013; Marcus 2010, 2014; Sansi 2015; Blanes and Maskens 2015), one solution for bypassing traditional dualistic approaches and a complex theoretical discourse about a single anthropology (vs. multiple anthropologies) is to focus on ‘processes’ and find analogies with other (art) practices in the field. Contemporary art practices have already moved away from the idea of ‘representation’ of something towards a much more active ‘engagement’ with something (cf. Siegenthaler 2013; Sansi 2015). Yet, if anthropologists want to emulate or learn from, as Marcus (2010) suggests, such shift, what does it mean in practice to engage with the field rather than represent cultures from the field in anthropology and social science at large? I suggest that seeing fieldwork not as a method but as an art-­skill and ethnography as the first moment in which we graph cultures in the field, and not just outside the field, may be a starting point for circumventing conventional anthropological dualisms and related dilemmas. To better grasp this point, following the idea of fieldwork not as a scientific method but as an art, we can, in a sort of speculative way, return to Emile Durkheim and substitute for a moment the word ‘fieldwork’ for ‘art’ and ‘written final monograph’ (or if you like even ‘documentary/ ethnographic film’) for ‘science’ – in Ingold’s (2011) understanding of anthropological writing as the science of verbal correspondence. In this case, Durkheim would be arguing that between art and science ‘there is a

Introduction   17 place for an intermediate mental attitude’ – that is, the reflection on the processes of action (1956: 101). These processes, he argues, are not employed to act ‘on things or on beings in a determinate way’ and ‘not to understand and explain them’ but ‘to appreciate what they are worth, if they are what they should be, if it is not useful to modify them completely with new procedures’ (ibid.). In other words, for Durkheim, it is precisely through this ‘intermediate mental attitude’ that we begin to create theory and science. For me, this is the moment in which we start ‘doing’ anthropology and hence ‘ethno-­graphing’ our field-­encounters in preparation for the final stage of our research, what I shall call ‘thinking’ anthropology. More concrete examples from my own fieldwork will exemplify this further. After receiving the text message from Swati Dandekar that I could no longer work on her film project, I began to clearly structure the remainder of my stay in India. I managed to take part in ten days of Ranjan Palit’s post-­production of his In Camera (2009) in Kolkata and, soon after, I moved to Bangalore as I had already planned. In Bangalore, I contacted a media collective called ‘Pedestrian Pictures’, and for almost the whole of the second half of my fieldwork I conducted an ‘observant participation’ of the organisation (Turner 1990: 10). That is, I first became a member (or a ‘participant’) of the group, collaborating with different activities, and then, thanks to this ‘insider’ position, I also ‘observed’ the internal and external dynamics of the collective in relation to the larger national community of documentary film practices (cf. Chapter 7). In parallel with these Pedestrian Pictures activities, for a couple of months I collaborated with the Bangalore-­based production and post-­production of Nilanjan Bhatta­ charya’s video-­installation It’s Open (2009). All these activities gave me clearer insights into the work of editors and cinematographers and enabled me to better identify their role in the historical discursification of a documentary practice (cf. Chapter 5). Other than these activities, during the second part of my fieldwork I also became a much more active member of online listservs exclusively dedicated to documentary films in India, namely ‘Docuwallahs2’ and ‘Vikalp’. Listservs should be considered the catalysts for the formation of a ‘community of practice’ (cf. Chapter 6). For me, they were important vehicles through which to ‘enter’ a community, continue a relationship with this community beyond my limited fieldwork timeframe in India and gather a Geertzian ‘thick’ description of the multiple scattered activities and practices undertaken across the country. Thanks to Pedestrian Pictures regularly screening activities (described in Chapter 7), I was also able to directly engage with an almost regular documentary audience and circulate a questionnaire as a heuristic device that was useful for engaging in a sort of ‘audience conversation’. This latter practice was systematised towards the end of my stay in India, when I began to use the questionnaires at a few more festivals I attended, including the Tri Continental Film Festival

18   Introduction in Bangalore, Vibgyor in Trichur (Kerala) and the Delhi International Ethnographic Film Festival – DIEFF. Above all, during this period I set up a few ‘formal’ interviews with filmmakers who I had either never had the opportunity to meet or had met at a stage of my research when I was yet to be clear about what I was ‘doing’ (rather than ‘living’).12 In short, through a set of more structured activities and ethnographic methods during the second part of my stay in India, I began to ‘install’ the space of my fieldwork in a more methodological way (Castañeda 2006: 96). Within this ‘staged space’, oriented towards possible writable ‘themes’, I nevertheless continued listening to the improvisational nature of fieldwork. And, again, it was thanks to my ‘living’ anthropology (rather than my observations and my methods) that, towards the end of my stay, my research took a different and unexpected but overall clearer direction towards my thinking about such anthropological exploration. I deviated from my structured everyday life in Bangalore to visit Thomas Waugh, a professor from Concordia University, who for a single week in February 2009 was staying in Lonavala (Maharashtra). At that time, Thomas (Tom) Waugh was one of only two people I knew who had conducted research on documentary filmmaking in India before I had.13 During Vibgyor, a documentary film festival held in Trichur in Kerala (cf. Chapter 7), I met the Toronto-­based filmmaker Ali Kazimi, who told me that he knew Tom well and could put me in touch with him. I immediately agreed and, after a couple of e-­mail exchanges, first with Ali and later with Tom, I was invited to Lonavala. I felt that this was a great opportunity for me to share some of my feelings, experiences and ideas regarding my research. Hence, I left everything I had planned behind me and went to meet him. After a long walk on a very sunny, hot day in Lonavala, Tom and I sat in a local café and immediately discovered that we had mutual friends and mutual experiences regarding documentary film practices in India. Despite our considerable generation gap, we easily engaged in a long conversation, passing information from one-­to-one very smoothly. It was towards the end of this conversation, just before I had to catch my last train, that Tom told me,  I still have my VHS cassettes of the interviews that I did at that time [1988] with different directors. They need to be digitalised and maybe I can ask one of my assistants to do it. I don’t know how long this will take but if you are interested I can easily send a small compilation to you when I am back in Canada. He then stopped for a second to conclude, ‘I would be glad to know that someone was doing something with that material!’ Grateful, and enthusiastic about his generosity, I later pursued this and managed to get the 1988 video-­interviews with 19 ‘independent Indian directors’ – as Tom had called them at the time.

Introduction   19 From the moment I had the opportunity to watch part of these interviews, I was astonished to discover how in some of them I could identify the same themes and problems that up to that point in my research I had associated only with the present day.14 This realisation pushed me to conduct some more detailed historiographical research. I wanted to better grasp the way in which filmmakers talked about their practices in different historical moments and orient my research towards their (n)ever-­changing discourses about documentary practice in India. Accordingly, I sat for a short time in the National Film Archive of India – the NFAI – (in Pune) and visited the libraries of the Independent Documentary Producers Association (in Mumbai) and the Films Division (also in Mumbai), searching for scattered and patchy publications that contained similar stories to those I had experienced in person or identified in Waugh’s video interviews. In parallel to this, I continued to meet with filmmakers for more ‘formal’ interviews and this time I started asking them for any printed historical material they might have collected over time. Eventually, I created my own personal assemblage of historical documents, including festival catalogues, official reports, local reviews, campaign leaflets, pamphlets and compilations of e-­mail exchanges that had taken place over months (and before the existence of listservs), as well as oft-­forgotten newspaper and periodical articles that for too long had been kept in dusty storage. This personal collection, together with my work in the archive in India and Thomas Waugh’s 1988 video-­interviews, was finally complemented in London by my regular visits to the collections at the British Library and the British Film Institute. This personal collection started to acquire a meaning of its own, becoming a sort of ‘meaningful archive’ crying out for possible interpretations. Towards the end of my stay in India, I thus found myself ‘abandoning’ classic ethnographic methods for an historical investigation into the development of film practice. While some may find this shift a way of mixing too many methodologies and contributing to a ‘quasi-­ethnography’ and ‘quasi-­history’ that does justice neither to one method and discipline nor the other, the ‘quasi’ became, in fact, the key methodology for my research. It directed me towards the ‘interstice’ of anthropology, that is, in Nicolas Bourriaud’s words, ‘a space in human relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within the system’ (1998: 16). My shift between more strictly ‘ethnographic’ methods and more ‘historical’ methods, was possible precisely because I had always been able to separate my way of ‘doing’ from my way of ‘living’ fieldwork. While the former was for me the vehicle for gathering data useful for the later writing of my PhD, the latter was the ‘powerful between’ (Stoller 2009) that provided me with intuition and directed my decisions through my senses rather than through my structured rationality (and yet enabled me to identify in the ‘quasi’ a potential rather than a limitation).

20   Introduction When, in his well-­crafted Outline of a Theory of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu argues that our habitus, our socially and historically constituted structures, always determine our ways of doing and theorising a practice, he nonetheless acknowledges that there are also ‘different modes of acquisition’ that we may assimilate in the course of a particular individual history – such as different forms of bilingualism or pronunciation (1977: 80). If this is the case, using the same logic, we can speculatively say that precisely as with bilingualism and pronunciation, in our individual history there may be a moment in which we ‘perceive’, ‘sense’ or ‘assimilate’ a practice with a ‘mode of acquisition’ other than our structured rationality – that is, by following a sensuous experience. In this respect, ‘living’ fieldwork and thus anthropology should be considered a moment in the personal history of a researcher that can provoke a mode of acquisition different from the up to then well-­structured one. In line with Stoller (2009), I see this as part of the sensuous way in which we can live anthropology and fieldwork and challenge our systems of dispositions (or our methodologies) that increasingly impose on us rational, structured ways in which to perceive the sensible ever-­changing world. Based on my unpredictable field encounters, my way of ‘doing’ anthropology has been in constant relation to my way of ‘living’ anthropology, with the latter acting as a sort of ‘coefficient of variation’ that is, an independent variable that could at any moment affect the former. The dialectic relationship between my ‘living’ and ‘doing’ anthropology (in the field) has eventually led me to orient my ‘thinking’ about anthropology (outside the field) towards a sort of ‘archive’. As explained in more detail in a moment, archive is for me understood here as an assemblage of collected information about unpredictable encounters, which could constantly provide me with possible other interpretations – depending on the applied methodology used in relation to these encounters. The anthropology I have eventually ‘thought’ and ‘explained’ in my PhD, and more sophisticatedly ‘crafted’ for this book, should therefore be seen as not far from what Nikolai Ssorin-­Chaikov (2013) has recently called ‘Ethnographic Conceptualism’ – that is, an anthropological practice which, like ‘conceptual art’, ‘manufactures’, ‘forms’ and ‘performs’ the social reality that it studies. Yet, while Ssorin-­Chaikov makes use of this notion to conceptually intervene in the field, I follow the same logic outside the field by nevertheless continuing to engage (rather than represent) the field.15 My approach also finds a place within the emerging debates about the future of anthropology and new forms of ‘representation’, ‘communication’ and ‘engagement’ within the discipline, as highlighted in the recently published edited volume Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology (Starn 2015). Yet, unlike the intent of these recent publications, my starting point is not ‘writing culture’ or finding new forms for anthropological communication; rather, it is about how to make the ‘living’ fieldwork moment valuable for the graphing moment of anthropology – whether in the field or outside the field. In other

Introduction   21 words, as a direct consequence of my fieldwork’s feelings, encounters, participations, interventions, thoughts, graphing-­moments and so on, I place myself between Ssorin-­Chaikov’s idea of ethnographic conceptualism and Starn’s contribution to the relationship between past, present and future forms of anthropology. From this position, I then seek to rehabilitate anthropology within its traditional methodologies, relational processes and sensorial possibilities in order to direct our final writing-­graphing moment towards an open engagement with our field of study rather than towards a classic, closed, universal representation – precisely, as with contemporary art practices, an ‘open-­ended’ archive. ‘Thinking’ anthropologies – ‘open-­ended’ archives To me and others, the most interesting and urgent theoretical questions in anthropology today are precisely about its distinctive technology or aesthetics of form-­giving to knowledge, its historic culture of distinctive method and how it shapes, inhibits or encourages what the nature of anthropological knowledge is for its publics, its interdisciplinary partners and perhaps most importantly for its own disciplinary community, which is perhaps most perplexed about what ‘the ethnography’ as the major knowledge form of anthropology is becoming, and how it might still be the grounds for constituting a distinctive collective discourse that reflects anthropology as a vital intellectual project. (George Marcus 2010: 266) One question that may have thus far arisen in relation to my argument is whether the distinction between ‘living’, ‘doing’ and now ‘thinking’ anthropology is constitutive of those anthropologists who work in the field of art and film practices, or whether it is applicable to other fields of anthropology, engaging precisely with an overall anxiety regarding the intellectual role of the discipline today – as stated in the quotation above. My answer would be that accepting a separation between ‘fieldwork’ and ‘ethnography’ and hence between ‘living’ and ‘doing’ anthropology is also a way to accept the conducting of a phenomenological, more sensuous, less-­ structured, less-­observational and less-­writing/graphing-­oriented fieldwork before ‘conducting’ and ‘completing’ an ethno-­graphy (understood as two different, and yet similar, moments: a methodology of writing cultures in the field and the final outcome of anthropology). Moreover, this approach would imply accepting (for any kind of anthropologist) that there is a fine line between the process of creating artwork and the anthropological process of creating social science. As Marcus (2010, 2014) has stated in his most recent works, we are increasingly experiencing new fieldwork encounters and new terrains and circumstances of research such that neither the classic Malinowskian methodology nor the self-­reflexive turn of 1980s Writing Cultures critique may no longer fulfil contemporary anthropological endeavours. Hence, it is time to ‘learn’ from the ‘modernist line

22   Introduction of installation, performance, event-­based conceptual art movements with roots in Dada, Surrealism but also the Situationists and Fluxus, among others’ (Marcus 2010: 269; see also Wright and Schneider 2010; Schneider and Wright 2013). Accepting the separation between ‘fieldwork’ and ‘ethnography’ in the field is then one way to begin creating a concrete space for other disciplines and practices to act in it. As Roger Sansi rightly wonders, if our work and relational-­processes increasingly resemble one another, to what extent ‘can anthropologists argue for their professionalism without a certain embarrassment?’ (2015: 137). In fact, the openness towards other disciplines and practices will force us to acknowledge that ‘anthropology’ is no longer a self-­contained, elitist, ‘moral’ discipline of ‘social science’ (Castañeda 2006) but that its multiple practices can be shared with other academic disciplines and with non-­academic artistic fields. Finally, yet in a more speculative way, a separation between ‘living’ and ‘doing’ anthropology should ask us to stop identifying a clear-­cut distinction between art and social science without, nevertheless, mistaking one for the other. Thanks to our distinctive arts (à la Durkheim [1922]) we, ‘cultural producers’ (Mahon 2000), are all equally and yet differently part of a process of representation and engagement of and with others. In his Being Alive … Tim Ingold argues that ‘the study of ’ is a transitive process of ‘othering’ and the ‘study with’ is an intransitive process of ‘togethering’, which can ‘bring anthropology back to life’ (2011: 266). Yet, what Ingold, among others, forgets to analyse while developing this argument is the complexity of what exactly that ‘with’ means for those ‘others’ we are working with (rather than representing). Elsewhere, I argue that limiting our process of engagement with others within canonical dualist structures of relationships does not enable us to get out of traditional anthropological discourses about representations of others (cf. Battaglia 2014a). In such cases, we create illusions for ourselves of ‘participation’ and/or ‘collaboration’ without really engaging with the complex ‘ontologies’ of the ‘others’ (cf. Holbraad 2010). If for the tradition of ethnographic film one way of bypassing this problem may be to open up our image-­making practices to multimodal forms of representations (cf. Battaglia 2014a), for the wider discipline of anthropology it may be to follow precisely what (even though coming from completely different perspectives) Ingold (2011: 226), Wright and Schneider (2010: 20) and Marcus (2014: 399) suggest – that is, thinking anthropology (outside the field) as an open-­ended, never completed, flexible, dynamic process, yet always implicated in the specificity of the field encounter. While these anthropologists are increasingly suggesting this dynamic shift in their discourses, they are yet to be ready to employ it in their practice. Or, as emerges from Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology (Starn 2015), they are willing to do it in another space – for example, a website, a blog, a digital archive, an installation. The direction I am instead suggesting here would imply a sort of what Sansi calls ‘anti-­disciplinary approach’ (2015: 17) to be applied both in the field and outside the field.

Introduction   23 Inspired by the Foucauldian notion of ‘effective history’, in my way of ‘thinking’ anthropology (and hence specifically intervening in different discursive historical moments of the development of documentary film practices in India) I seek to create relational possibilities between ethnographic narratives, historical accounts and my ethnographic present. This approach aims to go beyond claims about a history of a practice or about anthropology as a single unified academic discipline. As an atlas (cf. Forster 1976), a prototype (cf. Marcus 2014), a lab (cf. Sansi 2015) and, more precisely, an ‘open-­ ended’ and ‘incomplete’ archive (cf. Wright and Schneider 2010) – that is, a flexible structure of collected information – my writing approach (developed in each chapter of this book) intervenes forcefully in a ‘monumental history’ of a practice (Foucault 2012 [1969]). It continuously proposes alternative interpretations without necessarily advocating a ‘third space’ of action (cf. Starn 2015: 12) or a more valuable reading of the same history. In so doing, it then ‘thinks’ about the role and function of anthropology as a discipline in relation to contemporary art and film practices, which have for a long time already employed ‘open’ structures of representations. While still working inside the tradition of anthropology, this direction challenges and hence goes beyond conventional orthodoxies (thus far imprinted in the dualistic orientation of the conventional discipline). It opens up a fruitful dialogue with other disciplines and practices and thus structures the final thinking-­writing of anthropology in relation to these extra-­disciplinary exchanges, while still augmenting anthropology. Within its limited capabilities, this book attempts to accomplish this objective. Although one of the main tasks of this work is to be able to speak to any kind of anthropology, I believe that wanting to convince everyone of my argument would be a form of ‘anthropological utopia’, rather than an ‘anthropology of utopia’ (cf. Blanes and Maskens 2015). To be more specific, imagining that we can ever create a universally accepted approach for a single anthropology – as, arguably, Ingold (2011, 2013) and Marcus (2010, 2014) may be trying to do, even though in diametrical opposition – would be in direct antithesis to the argument of this book. Starting from the assumption that there is not a single universal anthropology but rather several anthropologies, I suggest that aiming to contribute to anthropology, as a whole, would also mean creating another historically fixed ‘discourse’ for a discipline and a practice. Hence, with this work I aim to create an open-­ended archive –that is, an open-­ended structure as it is often understood in contemporary art and contemporary ‘performative’ (Nichols 1994a; Scheibler 1993) documentary film practices (cf. Russell 1999; Wright and Schneider 2010; Caillet 2014; Schneider and Pasqualino 2014; Sansi 2015). This open-­ended archive may inform or inspire other forms of anthropologies – at least by providing new practical and intellectual stimuli – as well as other academic and non-­academic practices and discourses. As such, I shall more directly contribute to those debates concerning contemporary art/film practices (cf. Wright and Schneider 2005, 2010;

24   Introduction Schneider and Wright 2013; Ssorin-­Chaikov 2013; Sansi 2015; Blanes and Maskens 2015) and specifically to those concerning art/film/media practices outside anthropology. My argument will build on Sansi’s suggestion that, ‘anthropologists can learn about anthropology precisely from the way that artists have appropriated it’ (2015: 137). Yet, at the same time, it will distance itself from this assumption because documentary filmmakers in India have never directly or indirectly appropriated the method and/or theory of anthropology for their practice;16 on the contrary, the development of documentary film practices in India has historically evolved in parallel to the anthropological anxiety of ‘representing’ and/or ‘engaging with’ so-­called ‘others’. In order to do this, this work will start neither from the ‘artefact’ (the film) as agency, as in the Gellian tradition, nor exclusively from the ‘artist’ (the filmmaker), that is, following Foster (1995), as an equally responsible agent (as the anthropologist) for altering cultures. Rather, this book will mainly focus on practices, relational processes and historically constructed discourses about such practices and processes, in line with the Foucauldian poststructuralist ideas of the ‘archaeology’ of a history of a practice. In his The Archaeology of Knowledge (2012 [1969]), Foucault moves away from a synchro-­structuralist approach to knowledge and employs a sort of diachro-­historical method that ‘identif[ies] the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us’ (1991b [1971]: 81). While revisiting the Nietzschean genealogy of morals, Foucault applies the same genealogical approach to what he calls ‘effective history’ (ibid.: 87–90). With this, Foucault advocates a history that searches for points of origin (genealogy) that create ruptures, fragments and deviations in contrast to a consolidated tradition of history that does not question ‘the document’ but rather encourages a comprehensive, holistic and continued ‘consoling play of recognitions’ (ibid.: 88). As I pointed out at the beginning of this introduction, in this work Foucault critiques the way in which the historian ‘transforms documents into monuments’ (2012 [1969]: 7–8) – that is, a history of totality and unity without frictions. Instead, doing an ‘effective history’ means to him creating a sort of ‘historical fiction’, which provokes an interference between the reality of the present and that of the past. This interference (often created thanks to those elements that do not necessarily fit the linear historical reconstruction), Foucault argues, can in turn produce real effects on the history of the present (2001 [1980]: 857). Not far from what the philosopher Robin George Collingwood highlighted back in the early 1930s (cf. Collingwood 1939), for Foucault the role of the historian should then be to acknowledge his or her contemporary position of writing, single out historical moments and size them up ‘at a distance’ by analysing how they have been constructed discursively (1991b [1971]: 89). This would mean paying attention to the historico-­discursive

Introduction   25 conditions that constitute all kinds of histories and make the production of science and knowledge possible. This also means doing neither history nor, as Foucault explains, fiction (2001 [1980]: 857). Rather, I would say, it can be one of the many ways of thinking anthropologies. In order to ‘engage with the field’ (rather than ‘represent the field’), we, anthropologists, should follow a similar Foucauldian approach, aiming for those elements that do not necessarily fit into our structured linear logic of graphing cultures but can provoke more than one interpretation and contradiction. In her ethnography ‘of global connections’, Anna Tsing talks about ‘frictions’ that is, those mechanisms of human life, ‘the grip of encounters’, that enable the creation of complexities (2005: 5). As such, Tsing argues, frictions also ‘inflect … historical trajectories, enabling, excluding and particularizing’ (ibid.: 6). Searching for such frictions in history and methodologically placing them in relation to contemporary practices may become a way of thinking of anthropology as engagement rather than as representation. In this case, the work of the anthropologist and that of the artist will be even closer to one another – challenging what contemporary scholars working in the arts may sometimes neglect (see Siegenthaler 2013). Aline Caillet (2014), for instance, justifies the way in which forms of contemporary documentary work in visual arts by delineating a contrast with anthropology. Building on how François Laplantine differentiates the arts from anthropology,17 to Caillet documentary practices are ‘dispositifs critiques’ which, unlike the work of anthropologists (or of who she calls, in the French tradition, ‘ethnologists’), do not interpret the ever-­changing sensible world but elaborate this sensible world in other sensible forms (ibid.: 114–115). In other words, following the argument that I have put forward thus far, it is as if, after ‘living’ fieldwork, contemporary artists transform (through their ethnographic methodologies) the sensible world into other forms of sensible world – that is, they reconnect themselves to the sensorial moment of fieldwork. In contrast, anthropologists transform (through their ethnographic methodologies) the sensible world they engaged with into a single, universal interpretation (as classic anthropology has by and large done and, with the 1980s Writing Culture debate, also criticised). However, as I am trying to suggest here, the work of the anthropologist can also be seen as that which transforms the sensible world into multiple possible interpretations – that is, ‘historical fictions’ (à la Foucault), which, precisely because of their ‘fictional’ and yet ‘real’ elements, should no longer be seen as far from the documentary practices described by Caillet, and hence from studies of documentary films and contemporary art practices. My personal collection of written and oral material from the field, described above, played precisely this function: it acted as the interfering element to challenge a ‘monumental’ consolidated history (around the figure of Anand Patwardhan for instance) during the moment in which I

26   Introduction began ‘ethno-­graphing’ in the field (through my mixed methodologies). In turn, when placed together (outside the field), the assemblage of material I had collected became for me the Foucauldian ‘archaeological monument’ from which to create a new type of ‘document’ – that is, my way of thinking with and beyond anthropology and hence the writing of my PhD and now this book. Nevertheless, as I was not interested in creating a ‘fixed historical document’, that is, another discourse of a history of a practice, I eventually oriented my writing about such history towards an open, dynamic ‘archive’. At a recent gathering of anthropologists interested in art practices, together with Fiona Siegenthaler, we researched and brainstormed the concept of ‘archive’ in both art and anthropology.18 What emerged from this collaborative experiment was that compared with with art practices the concept of ‘archive’ in anthropology is by and large still understudied. Nevertheless, ‘archive’ is constitutive of the history of anthropological practice (cf. Kohl 2014). Understood as a transformative physical and non-­ physical practice, an archive is a repository, a memory, a heritage, an assemblage as much as a collection of material and immaterial things. It is always becoming and in decay – that is, it is never fixed, always in process, and hence a heuristic device with which to create new archives. To me, this view is in contrast with the emerging experimentations in anthropology, which seem to open up their debate to the ‘open-­archive’ as a space other than anthropology – a ‘third space’, to be precise, as Orin Starn (2015) points out, worthy of being explored and towards which to re-­orient our contemporary anthropological research (see Rabinow 2003; Marcus 2010, 2014; Furton 2015). In such studies, this ‘third space’ seems to be the place in which practices of ‘art’ (including visual art and design) act in the present day and from which anthropologists should ‘borrow’ (Marcus 2010). Yet, thinking of ‘open-­archives’ as spaces other than anthropology would mean also to reinforce again and again classic dual dichotomies between ‘us and them’, ‘art and social science’ and ‘practice and theory’, to mention but a few. As I hope to have made clear by now, reinforcing these dichotomies will not, in my opinion, open up possibilities for creating fruitful dialogues and collaboration with other disciplines and practices or for renovating the discipline of anthropology. Rather, it would mean avoiding addressing complex questions concerning those dualities that have been historically imposed on our practices by the discursification of the discipline per se. In contrast, recognising the archive in our practice, the practice in our theory and the theory in our methods would be a way of also seeing and accepting the art in our social science and, hence, that distant ‘them’ a little bit in our ‘us’. This would mean seriously questioning our disciplinary orthodoxies (and dichotomies) for a continuous engagement with local ontologies (in the field as much as outside the field) and better identifying and highlighting those differences in our perspectives that are useful for developing productive collaborations.

Introduction   27 With this objective in mind, the open-­ended archive that I advocate here should be seen as an intrinsic way of thinking anthropology – that is, an ‘atlas’ à la Aby Warburg, an unfinished map creation that continuously generates representational possibilities for the limited vocabulary of human expression (Forster 1976: 175). In my specific research, the ‘representational possibilities’ became the ‘frictions’ (Tsing 2005) between my sensations (coming from my first-­person experience of ‘living’ the field), past and present histories of documentary film practices (which I had encountered while both ‘living’ and ‘doing’ fieldwork), and my ever-­changing knowledge in the discipline of anthropology, as much as in art, film and media practices (that is, my ‘thinking’ of anthropology at large). Like an archive, therefore, my interpretations in this book should be seen as momentary and unfinished – that is, something becoming and in decay – yet (hopefully) useful for fostering novel histories, interpretations, documents (à la Foucault) and (open) archives.

Beyond anthropology: the book In order to go beyond classic anthropological representations of ‘others’ and beyond historical documents that create new monuments (Foucault 2012 [1969]) or fixed archives, this book is structured around different historical moments of the development of documentary film practices in India. In each chapter, I construct my interpretations on the basis of oral and written material from both the past and the present. That is, I place oral and written histories from the past and the present in constant relation to one another, while highlighting historical possibilities, contradictions, potentials and interpretations other than my immediate perceptions and the ones engraved in the oral histories of filmmakers, film critics and, more recently, film scholars. If my preoccupation while conducting fieldwork was to grasp what a documentary film in India was, my question concerning transforming my experience and the information gathered in the field into an academic analysis has been: how does one write a history that does not yet exist if not in its discursive form? My conclusion is that I am not writing a history of film practice but making an anthropology of the development of such a practice, understood as an open-­ended archive (rather than a representation) that engages with the encounters of the field (in oral and textual forms) and which, in its open form, should foster further interpretations and analyses. In order to challenge the ‘monumental’ history constructed around the figure of Anand Patwardhan, this book addresses his film practice not in isolation but in relation to many other practices of the same historical period (cf. Chapter 3). The same approach is applied to other ‘monumental’ beliefs about the development of documentary films in India. For instance, this work challenges the idea of colonial films as being only war films (Chapter 1); the impression that the government’s film institution, the

28   Introduction Films Division, was established as a direct ‘descendent’ of war institutions (Chapter 2); the beliefs that female filmmakers brought a ‘performative’ aesthetics to documentary practices (Chapter 5); and the impression that independent film practices began with the arrival of video technology (Chapter 4). To better grasp and visualise where and how ‘fixed’ film discourses emerge and develop in the Indian filmmaking scene, the closing part of the book pays attention to the sites in which filmmakers interact with each other (Chapter 6) and films interact with the public (Chapter 7). Other than being an anthropological intervention in the history of the development of a practice, in such form this critical approach also contributes to the emerging literature of non-­Euro-American documentary film practices, mentioned at the beginning of this introduction. Indeed, it implicitly questions the linearity through which film scholars often present any history of documentary film practices. This work builds on the emergent critical film histories in relation to the present (cf. Edmonds 1974; Winston 1995; Russell 1999; Caillet 2014). Accordingly, each chapter explores a number of historical moments in the development of the documentary in India, to question how practices, concepts, styles, categories, modes and politics of filmmaking have been historicised and discursified and thus have influenced filmmaking practices and discourses in the present. Furthermore, while highlighting the historical process of discursification of such practice, this work also addresses its development as one of the active media ‘agents’ (cf. Gell 1998, 1999) for intervening in civil society, through film festivals and screenings. Drawing on concepts of ‘small media’ (Sreberny-­Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994); ‘alternative media’ (Couldry and Curran 2003); ‘folk and alternative media’ (Reeves 1993); ‘media activism’ (Pasquinelli 2002); and ‘video activism’ (Harding 2001), in this book, documentary film practices are understood as alternative forms of cultural/media production rather than sites of ‘cultural resistance’, within the Bourdieuian field of power (cf. Bourdieu 1993, 1996). In reference to this body of work, we can say that this book does not study the ‘field of cultural production’ within which we can find sites of ‘cultural resistance’, as several scholars have sometimes argued (cf. Fox and Starn 1997; Ginsburg 1997, 1991, 2002, 2011; Kondo 1996, 1997; Monson 1997). Rather, it focuses on what Bourdieu describes as ‘social space’ (1996: 124), wherein filmmakers create (and, following the Foucauldian approach discussed above, historically recreate) a ‘discourse’ of film practice. In this space, filmmakers discuss, share and practise documentary filmmaking as ‘independent’ from state and media power and yet as a vehicle through which to engage with politics and intervene in public debates in Indian civil society. Documentary filmmakers can indeed be considered as urban-­based activists and intellectuals (Sheth 1984), not far from what Dipankar Sinha (2000) calls the ‘Indian intelligentsia’, yet in reference to the academic-­ political Indian world. They are cultural activists (Ginsburg 1997;

Introduction   29 Bharucha 1998) working against social injustice, towards the valorisation of local forms of cultural practice and in support of those alternative perspectives on communications that Bernard Bel et al. (2005) find lacking in Indian media discourse. As should emerge in the course of this work, image-­makers have historically set up alternative communications paths in India. Their film activities have travelled from government institutions to cinema halls, artist circuits, political campaigns, travelling exhibitions, film festivals and art galleries, contributing to debates on media and development in India while also strengthening the existence of a ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991).19 Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger call a ‘community of practice’ ‘members [who] have different interests, make diverse contributions to activity, and hold varied viewpoints’ (1991: 98). In such use, ‘nor does the term community imply necessarily co-­presence, a well-­defined, identifiable group, or socially visible boundaries’ (ibid.). Rather, the authors argue: A community of practice is a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping community of practice. A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge, not least because it provides the interpretive support necessary for making sense of its heritage. (Lave and Wenger 1991: 98) What people share in a community of practice is, for Lave and Wenger, ‘participation’ and hence ‘understandings concerning what they are doing and what that means in their lives and for their communities’ (ibid.). While the ultimate goal of the authors is to explain ‘situated learning’ and to ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, for this book this definition is useful in order to make sense of a network of practitioners scattered across the country but with a common heritage. Barry Wellman’s (1979) examination of the ‘community’ is an even more suitable analysis, as it gives direct agency to the individuals who constitute the network, but it does not address ‘community’ in a traditional anthropological sense – that is as a group of individuals sharing time, space, kin, tradition, religion and so on. Wellman describes his idea of community as something that ‘does not take as its starting point putative solidarities – local or kin – nor does it seek primarily to find and explain the persistence of solidary sentiments’ (ibid.: 1203). Rather, understanding community as a network ‘attempts to avoid individual-­as-unit research perspectives … [and] is principally concerned with delineating structures of relationships and flows of activities’ (ibid.). One may, however, find these definitions too generalist. Talking about a ‘community of practice’ or about ‘structures of relationships’ may indeed also create sweeping categories of, for instance in this book, ‘documentary filmmakers’, ‘contemporary artists’ or even ‘Indian documentary’, without addressing well the single individual and/or a specific film. In other words,

30   Introduction these definitions might foster a generalisation of a single practice for a broader uncircumscribable whole. On the other hand, I believe that taking these approaches into account is also a useful strategy for going beyond the individual and the film-­text, and being able to focus exclusively on a complex historical discursification of a film practice. As I have said, rather than the usual history of documentary films and filmmakers, this work is an analysis of discourses that filmmakers, film critics and (more recently) film scholars have historically constructed in relation to documentary film practices in India. I thus beg the tolerance of those readers who find the description of films and individuals’ practices some of the most important prerequisites for seriously engaging with this theme. With this work I shall go beyond films and filmmakers and thus address a community of filmmaking as a whole in relation to key historical moments in which this practice has emerged and developed up to the present day. Certainly, I see this book as ‘an anthropology’ of the development of a film practice more than ‘a history’ of the same development. Nevertheless, I hope that those film scholars interested in film history and/or analyses of films and filmmakers will still find ways to dialogue with it. This book is organised around different historical moments, starting with the colonial period and continuing up to the present day. Chapter 1, History’s fragments, makes a critique of what I call the ‘nationalist historiography of documentary films’, written by filmmakers themselves. Juxtaposing various archival sources with this dominant historiography, this chapter looks for other possible historical interpretations that would be useful in making sense of contemporary practices of filmmaking in relation to their colonial past. Chapter 2, Around the Films Division, follows the same argument as Chapter 1, yet this time in relation to the period of Jawaharlal Nehru’s leadership. The chapter analyses perceptions of the state-­owned institution, Films Division, and, by juxtaposing my 2007–2009 data with more recent discursive changes in India, it provides evidence of how perceptions about state-­institutions modify all the time and yet function as a ‘discourse’ that affect the present day. Chapter 3 The growth of independent practices, develops around the question of what it means to be ‘independent’. In doing this, it shows that depending on various agents of significations (namely film, filmmaker or filmmaking) ‘being independent’ refers to different cinematic practices. Accordingly, the chapter argues that the concept of ‘being independent’ was a feature of various film practices and generic categorisations that coexisted and, at the same time, influenced one another. Chapter 4, The advent of video technology, expands the concept of ‘film practice’ into a more generic ‘media practice’. The chapter analyses the relationship between the development of television in India and the widespread phenomenon of video technology that facilitated the emergence and circulation of new media practices. While paying attention to some of the media collectives that became central actors of documentary filmmaking in this

Introduction   31 period, the chapter suggests that video technology built upon existing practices while nevertheless transforming documentary films into a variety of forms of media activism. Chapter 5, Articulation of performance and performativity, challenges the idea that ‘performative’ documentary practices in India have been the consequence of the entrance of women filmmakers onto the documentary scene. Juxtaposing different kinds of historical and ethnographic material, mainly concerned with the discursive articulation of performance and performativity in film forms, the chapter contends that performance and performativity began to be articulated as such in the late 1980s, thanks to the physical movement of cinematographers and editors between different film practices. To complement this discussion, Chapter 6, Film festivals, small media and online networks, focuses on the technology that made possible the creation and circulation of discourses about film practices. Starting from the central role that has been played by film festivals since the early 1990s and the changing patterns of public broadcasting in India, the chapter draws attention to two specific moments of the mid-­ 1990s and early 2000s, in which filmmakers got together as a community and, by making use of ‘small media technology’ (Sreberny-­Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994), transformed their unity into a political discourse vis-­à-vis state regulation and control. Through a purely ethnographic account of a specific contemporary film festival and a specific media collective in charge of the organisation of various film screenings in Bangalore, Chapter 7, Sites of cultural activism, seeks to investigate precisely what occurs when films and filmmakers meet their audiences. Accordingly, it shows that, as also happened with early documentary film forms in colonial India, documentary film practices act as ‘cultural performances’. To borrow from Victor Turner here, ‘cultural performances’ are not seen as ‘reflectors or expressions of culture’ but as ‘active agencies of change’ in which ‘creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting “designs for living” ’ (1988: 24). Films as cultural performances take place in what I call ‘sites of cultural activism’ that is, the loci in which one can engage with politics outside state and media power structures and the sites in which a dialogic relationship between films, filmmakers and film audiences becomes possible. The concluding chapter, Chapter 8, Open-­ended archives: film, art and anthropology, engages directly with contemporary art practices from and beyond India, and returns to some of the historico-­anthropological interpretations that I provide in the preceding chapters. Using fictional and real installations as used in the contemporary art scene, this chapter demonstrates how different historical moments can be interwoven with a range of contemporary documentary approaches to provide an alternative reading of the development of documentary practices in India. In so doing, the chapter also challenges the ‘practice’ of anthropology per se, advocating a more collaborative exchange with artistic fields.

32   Introduction

Notes   1

If I had to write a book to say what I was already thinking – that is, before having started to write it – I would never have the courage to begin. I am writing because I am yet to know what exactly I should think about this thing that I would really like to think.… I am an experimenter, in that I write to change myself and not to think the same thing as before starting writing. (Foucault 2001; author’s translation)

  2 It is important to highlight here that along with the documentary scene per se, over the past ten years the use of digital technologies has developed significantly in and beyond India. While we can now easily search for specific practices and practitioners on the Internet, at that time hardly any information could be found online.   3 During the 2011 conference, ‘Documentary Now!’, this point was underlined by Charlotte Govaert and the renowned scholar Brian Winston.   4 Some of the many key texts that present such a linear history are Jacobs (1979); Barsam (1992); Barnouw (1993); Macdonald and Cousins (1996); Aufderheide (2007).   5 To read about theories of documentary film, see Waugh (1984, 2011); Nichols (1991, 1994a, 2001); Renov (1993, 2004); Marks (2000, 2008); MacDougall (1998, 2006); Bruzzi (2006); Ellis and McLane (2005), to mention just a few.   6 For a criticism of Eurocentric documentary history, see Gabriel (1982, 2006); Chanan (1983, 2004); Burton (1985); Shohat and Stam (1994, 1996).   7 A few references to Indian documentaries are available in: Barsam (1992: 134–135); MacDonald and Cousins (1996: 163–164); and in Waugh (1984), who included an essay written by Patwardhan (1984) in his edited volume.   8 See Gopalan (2011); Skvirsky (2011); Vasudevan (2011); Sarkar and Wolf (2012).   9 With the changes in the Anglo-­Saxon higher education system – which has become more interested in ‘fast’ and ‘efficient’ academic production than in long periods of research – we, anthropologists, are increasingly forced to move away from the canonical Malinowskian fieldwork towards more structured ethnographic research practices. This shift is also creating more scope for other social science disciplines to make the ‘ethnographic method’ constitutive of their own academic practice. Other than this, the shift is also pushing younger generations of anthropologists to concentrate more on the ‘method’ and therefore the ‘doing’ of anthropology, rather than on understanding the value of ‘living’ anthropology – that is, a non-­transferable art-­skill, but something one might acquire with life experience. Arguably, the French distinction between the ‘ethnologue’ and the ‘anthropologue’ denotes precisely this inability of every ‘ethnologue’ to ‘live’ anthropology, despite his/her potential to conduct ethnographic research in the field (des enquêtes). Indeed, conducting an extensive number of enquêtes over the long period of a lifetime enables the ‘ethnologue’ to acquire the skill of ‘living’ anthropology and then to become an ‘anthropologue’. The limit of this distinction, however, is that it associates the capacity of ‘living’ anthropology with the life-­experience of an ‘ethnologue’ rather than with an art-­skill that any human being can acquire in any moment of his/her life, including the first time he/she goes into the field. In other words, rather than theorising about what anthro­ pology as a discipline is and does in relation to its theory and practice, the French approach reinforces a hierarchical structure, which continues to reproduce both itself and conventional disciplinary discourses. Some of these points emerged clearly during a recent workshop called, ‘Encountering Concepts in Art and Anthropology’ held in Barcelona 11–12 June 2015 (see also note 18). I will take

Introduction   33 this chance to thank all the participants of this gathering for producing a stimulating conversation, which enabled me to expand on with various aspects of the argument presented in this introduction. 10 Swati Dandekar eventually completed what later became Water and a City (2011) after I had left India. 11 For similarities between anthropology and tourism, see Crick (1985). For a reflection on differences between travellers and anthropologists, see Errington and Gewertz (1989). For a more recent reading about the overlapping nature of backpackers and anthropology, see Richards and Wilson (2004). See also my film about travellers and anthropologists at https://vimeo.com/108922631. 12 It is important here to note that I have never recorded interviews. Rather, thanks to my previous experience of ‘living’ anthropology, my interviews were always in function of what I had already ‘lived’ rather than in function of the ‘recorded encounter’ – as a sort of ‘objective’ data/content that could facilitate further analysis. One critique of my approach can be that my way of referring to filmmakers’ discourses can occasionally sound like television ‘sound bites’. Yet, as I hope to have thus far argued, the ‘doing’ should always be seen in relation to the ‘living’ anthropology so as to enable a ‘thinking’ analysis without being pretentious about creating objectivities by referring to ‘interviews’ as objective data. In other words, contextualising my semi-­structured, non-­ recorded interviews in a larger experienced fieldwork structure was for me a useful method by which to continue to conduct this research. For this reason, in this work, I also call my interviews ‘conversations’. 13 When I began this research, I was aware of only two scholars who had conducted studies on documentary film in India: Nicole Wolf and Thomas Waugh. Nicole Wolf studied women’s filmmaking practices in India throughout the 1990s and 2000s but was yet to publish her work as a cohesive piece. Thomas Waugh published a 1990 article entitled Words of Command: Notes on Cultural and Political Inflections of Direct Cinema in Indian Independent Documentary (reprinted in 2011). 14 Thomas Waugh made an hour-­long compilation of the material he shot in the late 1980s. He transferred this compilation from VHS to DVD, and sent the DVD to me while I was still in India. I had to wait to return to England to receive the whole set of interviews thanks to the great work of Sylvain Verstricht (at that time Thomas’s assistant) who made the transfer technically possible. 15 Nikolai Ssorin-­Chaikov has theorised ‘Ethnographic Conceptualism’, placing ‘concepts’ (as in ‘conceptual art’) in relation to ‘ethnography’ as a method and not as the writing-­up or theorisation of that method (à la Ingold). With this approach, Ssorin-­Chaikov offers an alternative to the theoretical Writing Culture debate of the 1980s by shifting attention from the writing–thinking ethnography (outside the field) to the active, ‘interventionist’ doing of ethnography (in the field). In other words, he moves ‘conceptualism’ (by and large associated with the writing-­up moment of anthropology) to the field by deliberately intervening in the field. George Marcus (2010, 2014) and Roger Sansi (2015) propose something similar in their respective works. Nevertheless, if we start to identify the ‘graphing’ moment of anthropology in both the methodology of the field and the writing-­up outside the field, and differentiate these two similar moments from the ‘living’ moment of fieldwork that precedes them (as I have thus far suggested with my argument), then ‘Ethnographic Conceptualism’ can also be applied to the writing-­up/thinking moment of anthropological research. The difference between this and the Writing Culture critique will, in this case, remain. Indeed, while in the 1980s the question concerned the altering moment of anthropology in relation to the process of writing per se as a form

34   Introduction of representation, with Ethnographic Conceptualism the question concerns the altering moment of writing for engaging with (rather than representing) the field – as I am trying to suggest here in relation to my research. 16 One counter-­argument to this statement could be that ‘documentary filmmakers’ in India are different from ‘contemporary artists’. As I shall demonstrate in this work, however, documentary film practices and discourses in India have always overlapped with other artistic discourses to the extent that in the present day, the work of a number of documentary filmmakers is increasingly entering national and international galleries of contemporary art. Moreover, some of the most internationally celebrated names on the Indian contemporary art scenes come from the tradition of documentary filmmaking, e.g. Amar Kanwar, RAQS Media Collective, Anjali Monteiro and Jayasankar. Last but not least, if it is true that the ‘social’, ‘documentary’ or ‘ethnographic’ turn in art (Foster 1995; Bourriaud 1998) has affected contemporary art practices in India, this, I would argue, has not necessarily occurred in the positive, collaborative sense that some anthropologists have thus far discussed (cf. Wright and Schneider 2005, 2010; Schneider and Wright 2013; Sansi 2015). Rather, the words ‘anthropological’ and ‘ethnographic’ seem to take on different significations (cf. Battaglia 2018 forthcoming). As I discussed with Parul Dave-­Mukherji after her presentation entitled ‘Art history in India and its discontent in global time’, at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris on 18 June 2014, for some artists and filmmakers in India this signification may still refer to the ‘colonial anthropological gaze’ (see also Pinney 2011). In other words, it is as if there still exists a discrepancy between the way in which the academic world refers to this turn (namely as a collaborative intellectual endeavour) and how some practitioners in India make use of the same vocabulary to make a critique of anthropology (namely as a colonial, patronising look on others). This discrepancy needs to be given/requires specific academic attention. 17 For full interview, see: http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?rubrique11 (last accessed 21 December 2015). 18 This was a meeting led by Roger Sansi and organised at the Universitat de Barcelona on 11 and 12 June 2015, as part of The Anthropology of Art interest group within VANEASA. This group was first launched at the 2012 EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) conference in Paris and developed further at the 2014 EASA in Tallinn. The gathering in Barcelona was a direct consequence of discussions held in Tallinn and was called ‘Encountering Concepts in Art and Anthropology’. It was collectively designed as a shared exercise around key concepts in art and anthropology. Concepts included: ‘participation’, ‘method’, ‘institutions’, ‘creativity’, ‘research’ and ‘archive’. Participants researching/brainstorming these concepts included: Weronika Plinska, Anton Nikolotov, Roger Sansi, Rodrigo Ferreira Nunes, Lidia Rossner, Jonas Tinius, Alex Flynn, Thomas Filitiz, Fiona Siegenthaler and myself. 19 To read about classic debates on media and communication in India, see Luthra (1986); Chatterji (1987); Singhal and Rogers (1989, 2001); Reeves (1993); Kishore (1994); Ninan (1995); Johnson (2001) and Das (2005a).

1 History’s fragments

The twenty-­first century has signalled the explosion of documentary film practices in India. The rapid growth of film festivals across the country is one manifestation of this, with locations ranging from small urban centres to metropolitan cities, and from South to North India. With a special focus on documentary film, these festivals overlap in time with each other and attract multiple audiences. Whether funded by local non-­governmental organisations, international aid agencies, universities, film societies, collectives of friends or local or national governments, film festivals have become the sites of interaction for filmmakers and a diverse Indian audience. They are new public fora in which to engage with social issues, organise political actions or simply be entertained against a backdrop of issues of social relevance. Special seminars and post-­screening discussions feature at most of the festivals. Stands selling books and DVDs, together with food and tea stalls, act as arenas of interaction between screenings for both audiences and filmmakers. Filmmakers create the dynamics of the festivals by talking about their films both after the screenings and during breaks and seminars. They connect with each other through discussions about other films and filmmakers, and also by answering questions from the public and creating a dialogue with interested participants. On these occasions, filmmakers’ concerns are often about whether the festival has a good crowd, whether the public has responded with interesting questions and/or whether their films have opened up an enriching audience discussion. In contrast, audiences’ concerns are about whether the films were of social relevance and whether they were interestingly made. Indeed, film festivals in India are the places through which documentary film enters Indian public debate and sets up a ‘dialogue’ with the audiences through its form and content. They are the places in which filmmakers witness, mediate and endorse this dialogue. In short, they are the ‘concrete’ sites wherein we can recognise the existence of a well-­established film practice in constant dialogue with its active audience. This might be a familiar scene and an easily convincing argument for all those who have participated at least once in a contemporary documentary film festival somewhere in India. Yet, to understand the scale and

36   History’s fragments complexities of contemporary documentary practices it is necessary to look back at the past and with contemporary eyes try to identify the historical legacies that, even if often neglected, persist in the present day. Indeed, how did it all begin? In order to address this question, this chapter explores the colonial period as one of the key moments in the development of documentary film practices in India, but also as the most neglected moment in terms of finding connections with contemporary practices. During my 2007–2009 stay in India, many of my interlocutors refused to recognise any possible association between contemporary documentary practices and the colonial period. They identified the beginning of contemporary independent filmmaking as being as recent as the late 1970s and early 1980s – when individuals such as Anand Patwardhan began making state-­independent films and screening them for an Indian public, and when video technology was enabling documentary films to circulate more freely across the country (cf. Chapter 4). The extensive colonial period of approximately 50 years of filmmaking has never been considered part of the history of contemporary documentary practices. By and large, it has been seen as a period of neither creativity nor self-­determined politics; rather, according to my interlocutors, this ‘moment’ of history was simply synonymous with ‘war’ and ‘propaganda’. Why was this the case? In the early 1980s, the Subaltern Studies Group came together to criticise the elitism of the historiography of colonial India and to provide ‘other historiographical points of view and practices’ (Guha 1988: 43). This chapter (and the one that follows) aims to do something similar in relation to what I shall call ‘the nationalist historiography of documentary films’. While searching in a number of different archives for scattered and patchy documentation of this historical period, I came across a series of accounts which, while talking about the documentary productions of Independent India (cf. Chapter 2), also contributed to what, at the time of their writing, was for them the development of documentary film productions during colonial India, thus influencing the contemporary perception of this historical moment.1 These accounts consider Indian documentary as a ‘war baby, conceived by the British and nurtured by the Indians’ (Garga 1987a: 25), leaving out of their discussions other elements that today are considered useful for a better understanding of the genealogy of a variegated scene of contemporary documentary practices. Among these accounts, I shall single out those of B.D. Garga, Jag Mohan and Sanjit Narwekar, whose writing on this subject has been extensive. Arguably, B.D. Garga’s contribution has been the most detailed. In several 1987–1988 articles for the film quarterly Cinema in India, and in his more recent book, From Raj to Swaraj (2007), he has presented a thorough history of film institutions during World Wars I and II (henceforth WWI and WWII). Garga was able to do this thanks to the help of an individual who was influential in the late 1930s and 1940s, J.B.H. Wadia. During WWII, Wadia worked as the chairman of a film institution called

History’s fragments   37 the Film Advisory Board, set up by the British government of India. In 1980, Wadia donated to Garga ‘three thick files neatly marked “Film Advisory Board 1940–41–42” ’ (Garga 2007: ix). As Garga himself states, these files comprised ‘official correspondence, minutes of meetings, the yearly programme, and notes on films and persons’ (ibid.) and they became the central unit of his historical analysis. Garga’s contribution thus provides a unique view of the history of documentary film in colonial India. However, his approach does not critically interrogate the collected data nor does it consider wider sources beyond the donated files. Similarly, Jag Mohan neglected to explore, or compare his findings with, other historical sources. He entered the documentary scene in India, thanks to the influential personality of Dr P.V. Pathy, who convinced him to move from Madras to Bombay and participate in the emerging documentary scene. Mohan never became a filmmaker; however, he worked as a scriptwriter and a film critic in close contact with filmmakers. From the late 1940s, Mohan wrote about documentary film in India, relying exclusively on his own first-­hand experience of the filmmaking scene and hence making the activities of Independent India more central in his analyses than those undertaken in colonial India. In other words, his account provides a history similar to that presented by Garga – that is, written from a ‘nationalist’ perspective and not sufficiently analytical regarding the colonial moment. More recently, Sanjit Narwekar has also begun to write about documentary in India. Narwekar has always worked closely with the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) and the state-­run Films Division, and in turn has relied rather unquestioningly on both Garga’s and Mohan’s historiographies. Since the early 1990s, Narwekar’s writings have served as key sources for the government of India, which, in 1996, decided to make a film about this history, entitled Through a Lens Starkly (Khandpur 1996). This film is today part of the Films Division collection and contributes to a particular nationalistic view of both colonial and Films Division documentary. Over time, Sanjit Narwekar has continued working and writing in collaboration with the Films Division. When, by chance, I bumped into him while conducting research in the NFAI library in Pune, he confidently told me, among other things, ‘… Even today the so-­called community of documentary filmmakers exists thanks to the Films Division’. Scholars interested in postcolonial India (cf. Chatterjee 1994, 1995; Roy 2003, 2007; Sarkar 2009; Jain 2013) have occasionally paid attention to the film activities undertaken by the Films Division with the gaining of Independence (cf. Chapter 2); yet they all begin their discussion from the history of colonial India provided by the aforementioned authors. After consulting sections of the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report, 1927–1928; the Indian Cinematograph Committee Evidence, 1927–1928; and the Handbook of the Indian Film Industry, 1949 – all directly connected to documentary films produced and circulated in colonial India

38   History’s fragments – I came to understand that the history provided by Jag Mohan, B.D. Garga and Sanjit Narwekar was, in reality, only a limited history and that it needed to be critically questioned. ‘Film history, like every field of history, has its points of amnesia’, writes film historian Stephen Bottomore, and early ‘non-­fiction’ film is, without doubt, one of the areas that scholars have often overlooked (1995: 495). By searching for what Bottomore calls ‘points of amnesia’, this chapter will make use of the Foucauldian approach of ‘effective history’ and critically challenge the accounts that contributed to the nationalist historiography of documentary films. To do this, it will make use of other ‘historical fragments’ I encountered during my research. As ‘disturbing element[s], a disturbance, a rupture … in the self-­representation of particular totalities and those who uncritically uphold them’ (Pandey 2006: 66), the ‘historical fragments’ presented here will seek to rehabilitate the colonial period as something more than just war and propaganda. Presented in a non-­chronological way, this approach will enable us to open up a critical discussion about a genealogy of documentary filmmaking in India that will be a more useful tool for grasping a multitude of contemporary documentary practices.

Discursification of colonial film productions and activities When I had the chance to converse with Gargi Sen for longer than our usual hurried interactions, she was astonished to hear that I was interested in analysing contemporary filmmaking practices through a colonial lens. When I passed on this information to her, she was sitting beside me in front of her office computer and abruptly replied, ‘Why the “colonial”? It was all about war and propaganda!’ After saying this, she searched through her files on the computer and forwarded me an essay about Nazi cinema that she had written some time before. Then she added, ‘you mention Paul Zils, but he was simply a filmmaker associated with Nazi cinema’.2 This statement might sound like a clear-­cut radical position that leaves no space for further interpretations; strikingly though, at the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork, Gargi Sen’s opinion was not exceptional. Several other filmmakers provided me with a similar reading, which was precisely the perspective presented in the nationalist historiography of documentary films. This historiography describes Paul Zils as a filmmaker who began his career in Germany as ‘a favourite of Goebbels [Hitler’s minister for propaganda] because of his handsome blond looks and “full Aryan credentials” ’ (Garga 1987c: 34). He was a German, who started his filmmaking career as an apprentice at the Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) in Berlin in 1933. Due to his obsession with Asia, which began when he read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, he decided to travel the world and, consequently, he found himself working in Hollywood, Japan and Bali.

History’s fragments   39 Jag Mohan narrates that while Zils was in Bali, ‘a ship in which he was travelling was hit by a submarine…. He was lucky to survive but he was rounded up as a prisoner-­of-war and brought to India’ (1972: 44). The British sent Zils to a detention camp in Bihar where other Germans and prisoners of the Indian freedom struggle were located. As Zils himself narrates, in this context he had the chance to meet a number of people and become friends with several influential personalities who introduced him to Buddhism, Indian dance, Indian theatre performance, Indian films and the reality of Indian life (1955: 8). Garga points out that, thanks to his idea to organise musicals at the camp, the British noticed Zils (1987c: 34). Hence, they offered him a position at Information Films of India (henceforth IFI), one of the WWII film institutions. Here Zils met Dr Pathy, a leading Indian filmmaker from the mid-­1930s. As soon as the IFI had closed down, with the end of WWII, Zils began working with Dr Pathy on a film called India’s Struggle for National Shipping (see Figure 1.1), sponsored by the Scindia Steam Navigation Company. The film was about Jawaharlal Nehru’s politics and the message of freedom that he addressed to the newly formed country (see also Vidal 2003a, 2003b). This film was released in 1947 and screened in cinema halls the week following Independence (Zils 1955: 5). According to the accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films, this moment signalled the beginning

Figure 1.1  Shooting: Dr P.V. Pathy working with Paul Zils in Indian Documentary. Source: courtesy of the IDPA.

40   History’s fragments of the ‘Indian documentary’. This is the point from which many others have constructed their narratives about the documentary film practices of this period (cf. Chatterjee 1994, 1995; Roy 2003, 2007; Raghavendra 1998; Sarkar 2009; Jain 2013), which in turn have fed into a number of contemporary opinions about this historical past. In contrast to Gargi Sen and others, at the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork, Vijaya Mulay (or Akka), who worked with Zils in the early 1950s, associated the name of Paul Zils with the revolutionary time of the ‘Indian documentary movement’. When I met her in her house in New Delhi, she was 88 years old and a veteran of documentary film practices in India.3 As soon as she started conversing with me she said, ‘When Jag Mohan and Paul Zils were there, it was a revolutionary front for the documentary movement’. She went on, ‘both Paul Zils and Jag Mohan should be considered as part of the historical moment of the FD and the IDPA, which together contributed to the development of documentary film in India’.4 The Films Division (FD) and the Independent Documentary Producers Association (IDPA) were two important institutions for the development of documentary film soon after Independence and individuals such as Paul Zils, Dr P.V. Pathy and Jag Mohan should be considered to be among the independent actors of the colonial period who fostered this development. Nevertheless, while the accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films pay attention to these individuals, they do so in function to the historico-­political context of their own present moment of writing (that is, the recently attained Independence) rather than in relation to the specific historico-­political context in which these practitioners emerged and practised filmmaking. By so doing, these accounts limit their descriptions to the ‘exceptionality’ of these individuals, often in relation to war institutions (as in the case of Paul Zils). War institutions indeed, are considered in this historiography as the most important agents for the emergence of the Films Division in Independent India.5 The conventional argument contained in the nationalist historiography of documentary films is that documentary in India is a ‘war baby, conceived by the British and nurtured by the Indians’ (Garga 1987a: 25). In relation to this belief, the accounts of the historiography narrate that, thanks to the establishment of war institutions, India expanded its documentary production dramatically. Through these institutions, a great number of men received technical training, acting as the key agents for the development of the documentary in India. In addition, the accounts of this historiography argue that thanks to new regulations, issued during wartime, for the first time documentary film began to reach an audience in India through compulsory exhibition in cinema halls. Indeed, the government issued an order, under rule 44A of the Defence of India Act, which made war films, with a minimum running time of 20 minutes, compulsory for every cinema exhibitor (cf. Mohan 1960, 1969, 1972, 1990; Garga 1987a, 2007; Chanana 1987; Narwekar 1992; Varma 1998).

History’s fragments   41 According to P.V. Pathy, the wartime period of documentary film in India began ‘in the twilight of the nineteen-­thirties, some six months after the outbreak of the Second World War’ (in Mohan 1972: 64). As he narrates, ‘the then Government commissioned the production of two or three documentaries, destined for propaganda, related to the needs of War Effort’ (ibid.). The films were about the Royal India Navy, the India Air Force and the way in which Nazis were compelling ‘Indian students living in Berlin to broadcast lies to India’ (Garga 2007: 63). They were war productions, but under the guidance of Wadia Movietone. At that time, Wadia was a respected figure in the film industry and, according to Garga, well-­ known for his anti-­fascist views. Before long, the government asked Wadia to serve as chairman of the Films Advisory Board – a film-­institution that formally came into existence in July 1940 and played a central role in the documentary films produced during these days. It seems, therefore, that if we want to talk about documentary films and wartime we must talk about film institutions. There were four main institutions that emerged during the war: the Films Advisory Board (henceforth FAB), set up in 1940; The Army Film Centre (or Unit), set up in 1941; Information Films of India – IFI – set up in 1943; and the Indian News Parade (henceforth INP), also set up in 1943. The nationalist historiography of documentary films focuses mainly on the intricate relationship between the FAB and the IFI, as the Army Film Centre and the INP were involved in different matters. Indeed, the Army Film Centre was a training centre. It produced and made use of training films to recruit new people for the army – as ‘it was found that, by the use of films, the training period could be reduced by nearly fifty percent’ (Bhavnani 1960: 4; 1987).6 The INP was a newsreel service, the aim of which was to report on the war effort and provide weekly packages of war-­related issues to be screened in cinema houses, for free, together with the main film show. According to Garga, this service was not directly related to war propaganda and that, under the guidance of chief producer (the equivalent of a contemporary director) William J. Moylan, it tried to show the ‘human face’ of the war (2007: 102).7 By and large, the FAB and the IFI have been the main centres of the discourse provided by the nationalist historiography of documentary films. We can probably regard them as siblings, victims of the same controversial narratives. From conventional accounts, it is not clear whether they were the same institution, whether they pursued the same objectives or whether, even, they somehow competed with each other. It is, however, clear that the FAB closed down in 1943 in favour of the newer IFI and that the former was an institution set up mainly by the British government, while the Indian government was behind the latter. According to the British Ministry of Information (henceforth MoI), Desmond Young, Chief Press Adviser to the Government of India and Editor of the Pioneer newspaper in India, set up the FAB with the intention of controlling film production and ensuring publicity about and distribution of propaganda films related

42   History’s fragments to the war effort (see also Woods 2001: 296). Over the period of three years, the FAB experienced two different chief producers: A. Shaw and V. Shantaram. When in 1943 Shantaram resigned from his position, Ezra Mir, a respected figure in the film industry, replaced him, but this time leading a ‘new’ film institution, the IFI. According to Garga, thanks to Mir’s organisational skills, in 1944 the IFI’s output went up to 54 documentaries per year compared with the previous annual average of 27 (2007: 108). Similarly, Pathy points out that after Ezra Mir’s success, the IFI had to be considered ‘the first organised effort at a regular production … to claim a chapter in any history of our cinema that may be written’ (Mohan 1972: 64).8 To some extent, it is thanks to the great achievements in the final years of the IFI that the accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films have developed their argument about the success of documentary in India during wartime. The accounts also argue that, as a result of these achievements, with the end of the war filmmakers continued making documentaries independently and ‘a film unit became “an expression of nationhood, a chronicler of achievements” ’ (Garga 1987b: 24). It is in this context that, according to the same historiography, the Films Division emerged. When I began to conduct more focused historical research at the National Film Archive of India in Pune, and also at the British Library and the British Film Institute in London, I came across sources different from the one mentioned thus far in this chapter. I discovered that ‘outside’ what I have called the nationalist historiography of documentary films, there were ‘fragments’ of history that were useful for beginning to think about a different colonial history of documentary film. These sources enabled me to identify a much more complex colonial scenario of practices, practitioners and productions, which was useful for no longer seeing the Films Division as a descendent of the war institutions. While in the next chapter I will specifically explore the role of the Films Division, in the remainder of this chapter, I shall try to shed light on these missing historical fragments. My approach should be seen as a critical intervention in an already created Foucauldian ‘monumental’ history about the colonial period (seen only as a moment of political oppression and war propaganda). With the apparently disconnected fragments that I present here, I do not claim to write history but to offer another reading, as an open-­ended ‘archive’ of these historical moments. My reading of this history will be momentary yet beneficial for the overall argument of this book in relation to the contemporary documentary practices I encountered during my 2007–2009 fieldwork. Nevertheless, my hope is also to encourage interested film historians (and/or anthropologists working with history) to revisit this historical moment, starting precisely from the fragments of history that have thus far been neglected. I will begin by turning my attention to the first forms of cinema that emerged with the arrival of the twentieth century, to then move on to a discussion about the confiscated films made about Mahatma

History’s fragments   43 Gandhi. I shall pass through individuals such as Robert Flaherty, who visited India when the ‘genre’ of documentary film was beginning to be discursively articulated, and finish with an analysis of the widespread circulation of educational films that had no connection with war and direct propaganda. These elements will finally lead us to think of a possible ‘other’ history of the emergence and the initial development of documentary film forms in the colonial time.

‘Cultural performance’ and early cinema The beginning of ‘moving pictures’ in India is typically associated with the name of Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar – better known as Sewa Dada. On the rainy monsoon evening of 7 July 1896, Bhatwadekar was one of the paying audience members at the Lumière Brothers’ show at the Watson Hotel in Bombay. Different accounts (including those contained in the nationalist historiography of documentary films) describe Bhatwadekar as a person intrigued by ‘the magic of the Lumières’ machine which could bring alive inanimate images’ (Garga 2007: 4) or as someone ‘enamoured of the new art’ (Varma 1998: 62) and ‘hypnotised’ by the ‘latest wonder of the world’ (Mohan 1987: 10). Soon after the Lumière Brothers’ first show in Bombay and before importing a camera and starting to make films on Indian subjects (cf. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980; Herbert and McKernan 1996; Varma 1998; Watve 2004; Garga 2007), Bhatwadekar mainly worked as a film exhibitor, initiating in Bombay a tradition of touring exhibitors and showmanship. The showman generally equipped himself with films for two or three programmes. Having exhausted the possibilities in one location, he moved elsewhere. Showing in parks and empty lots of big cities soon led to showings in smaller cities and towns and eventually to the rural ‘travelling cinemas’ still important in India. (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 7) According to the 1927–1928 Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC),9 although by the end of the 1920s there was a limited number of cinema halls, there was also ‘a somewhat indefinite number of travelling cinemas’ organising ‘performances’ (para. 47, p.  24) across the whole country. Stephen Hughes (2010) argues that it is precisely through touring exhibitors that cinema arrived in South India. Touring exhibitors provided mixed programmes of European entertainment, introducing to India what today may be understood as ‘documentary footage’ (ibid.). According to Hughes, the 1897 exhibition of the film of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee procession in London was a ‘major public event staged on a lavish and unprecedented scale’ (ibid.: 159). This event was organised by T. Stevenson, an influential figure in the promotion of cinema in India, and

44   History’s fragments the local press described the audience as actively and very positively participating at the event. ‘It was fine to see how the pictured crowd waved hats, handkerchiefs and sticks, and how the audience responded to the demonstrations with hand-­clapping and cheers when the Queen went past’, wrote the Madras Times (1 September 1897, as quoted in Hughes 2010: 159). In other words, in the late nineteenth century we can already identify in India a dialogic relationship between ‘documentary’ footage and a responsive audience, contributing to what Milton Singer (1972) would call a ‘cultural performance’. To Singer (1972: 385), ‘cultural performance’ is a sort of institution that encompasses different cultural activities or events with the ‘capacity to incorporate innovations into an expanding and changing structure of culture and society’. As he argues, ‘cultural performance’ suggests a need to talk about a process of ‘indigenization’ or ‘traditionalization’ in contrast to the classical modernisation. Cinema in India is without doubt an example of this. Thus far, Indian cinema has demonstrated that ‘Indian civilization is becoming more “modern” without becoming less “Indian” ’ (ibid.: 247). As Hughes points out in the context of the Madras Presidency, cinema began to circulate thanks to the first touring exhibitors who ‘were part of a world market of variety entertainment’ (2006: 36). Consequently, cinema ‘did not arrive with its mass media audiences preordained, but was deployed by a range of entrepreneurs as part of a variety of screen practices, entertainment genres and distribution circuits with which Madras audiences would have been already familiar’ (Hughes 2010: 152). It was precisely in this context that the early (documentary) cinema came-­intobecoming a ‘cultural performance’ in which both audiences and exhibitors played a performative role. In her study about the arrival of moving pictures in Calcutta, Ranita Chatterjee recognises a relationship between early film shows, various existing forms of ‘cultural performances’ (such as theatre and popular culture) and ‘global colonial circuits of entertainment’ (2012: 71; see also Chatterjee 2011). She argues that, unlike the official accounts of the history of Indian cinema, when we talk about the beginning of film history in India we should start by talking about a synchronic emergence of cinema in both Calcutta and Bombay (ibid.). Most likely, the almost synchronic appearance of cinema was possible precisely because touring exhibitors arrived in Calcutta with a cinema package about six months after the first Lumière Brothers’ exhibition in Bombay. The first cinematograph screening in Calcutta, Chatterjee argues, dates back to 20 January 1897 in the Theatre Royal, and it was organised by an exhibitor known as Mr Hudson. After only a few days, another exhibitor called Mr Arthur Sullivan organised some programmes showing ‘animated pictures’ (ibid.). Afterwards, Mr Stephens, or Professor Stevenson, a name that is more often cited in the official accounts of Indian cinema and most likely the same person who organised mixed entertainment programmes in

History’s fragments   45 South India (cf. Hughes 2010), arrived in Calcutta with a Bioscope, between 1897 and 1898 (Chatterjee 2012: 72). Stephens/Stevenson initiated into the moving picture field another pioneer of the first decade of moving pictures in India, Hiralal Sen (cf. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1994; Herbert and McKernan 1996). Like Bhatwadekar in Bombay, Hiralal Sen in Calcutta began to make films on Indian subjects while also producing advertisements, news and recordings of political events. In Mriganka Sekhar Ray’s words, Hiralal Sen used his camera ‘not only on circus tents, wrestling arenas and the turf-­tracks, but also on the varied aspects of the social and political movements like the agitation against the partition of Bengal in 1905’ (1991: 1). Samik Bandyopadhyay (1995) narrates that because of his recording of a 22 September 1905 anti-­partition demonstration at the Town Hall in Calcutta, Hiralal Sen should be regarded as the maker of India’s first political (documentary) film. Before and after making films though, Sen was also involved in screening films – in this period the two activities were practically inseparable. Nevertheless, the official accounts of Indian cinema, especially those on documentary film contained in the nationalist historiography of documentary films, have preferred to focus on the films made by these individuals (namely, Sen or Bhatwadekar), rather than on their exhibition activities. All these elements suggest that in the first decade of moving pictures in India, the production and distribution of (documentary) films were intrinsically linked and thus should not be analysed in isolation. In an article about anthropology and the problem of audience reception, Stephen Hughes argues that it is not possible to speak about any visual media without assuming some relationship with an audience (2011: 289). He shows that different disciplines, from anthropology to film and cultural studies, have in the past 40 years slowly turned their attention to audience reception. Advocating a need to approach ‘film genre’ as a ‘multi-­ discursive’ practice, Rick Altman makes a similar point and writes that ‘the very notion of genre depends on the existence of audience activity’ and that ‘no genre critic can afford to treat so-­called generic texts in a vacuum’ (1999: 83–84). Building on these arguments, we can then state the following. If films can never be thought about without an audience in mind, and if early cinema in India developed in relation to other existing cultural activities, we should start to consider the emergence of documentary film in India as a ‘cultural performance’ (Singer 1972) and, as such, as a practice with a direct link to precisely the contemporary documentary film festivals and activities described at the beginning of this chapter. If we take into account what film historians identify as the first recordings of Indian subjects (the Delhi Durbar) and the first recognised ‘documentary film’ made in India in 1911 (by Dhundiraj Govind Phalke), this argument acquires even further support. For the 1902/1903 and 1911 Delhi Durbar, Bhatwadekar and Sen separately recorded ‘featured actualities’ (Bottomore 1995), most commonly

46   History’s fragments known as ‘newsreels’ (cf. Barnouw 1993; Barsam 1992; Ellis and McLane 2005). The Persian word Durbar signifies the whole life of a ruler’s court, and in the Indian context at the beginning of the twentieth century it was translated into two massive events to celebrate kings, queens, coronations and so forth. Apart from being a significant attraction for foreign filmmakers, unfamiliar with Indian colours, elephants and extravaganza during festivals and parades, it also attracted Bhatwadekar, who took footage of the 1902/1903 Durbar (Bottomore 1995), and Hirarlal Sen, who took footage of the 1911 one (Bottomore 1997). These early Indian newsreels engaged with a ‘parade spectacle’ (cf. MacAloon 1984; Beeman 1993), which both filmmakers, Bhatwadekar and Sen, captured in the form of what Hughes calls ‘film event’ (2010: 147, 148). Although the newsreels of the Delhi Durbars did not circulate much across India (Bottomore 1995, 1997) and hence did not have a chance to directly dialogue with an audience, the descriptions provided above regarding the mixed programme screening activities as well as the double ‘profession’ of exhibitors and filmmakers for individuals such as Bhatwadekar and Sen leads us to speculate that the shooting of the Delhi Durbars already envisaged an Indian audience. Moreover, we can suggest that the first (documentary) footage in India emerged in relation to other cultural events, as sorts of ‘cultural performance’. The experience of the renowned individual Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, whose first ‘documentary film’ came into being only ‘by accident’ (cf. Watve 2004; Gangar 2006; Kaul 1998), should also be seen from this perspective. In fact, what several accounts refer to as ‘accident’ was most likely a choice made in relation to the performative aspect of the new moving image technology and its potential audience. After experiencing the moving picture Life of Christ, Phalke decided he wanted to make a similar film but on Lord Krishna. In order to do this, he needed financial support. Accordingly, he decided to chase a few friends to advance him a loan. The only friend who agreed with Phalke’s request was Yeshwantrao Nadkarni who, nevertheless, asked him for something that could prove he was capable of making a film. Hence, Phalke decided to make a ‘topical short’ film, centred on a theme and therefore different from the newsreels that were by then circulating in India. After importing a camera from England, Phalke planted a pea in an earthenware pot and over one and a half months, recorded its growth. When Phalke showed the film to friends and curious people in an electrical shop, it was a great success. In fact, ‘the use of the time-­lapse technique dumbfounded the audience and prompted Nadkarni to sign over the money immediately’ (Varma 1998: 63). The result was what filmmakers, film critics and film scholars still consider to be the first Indian documentary, known as The Growth of a Pea Plant (1911) or, as we can now say, the first Indian documentary explicitly made for a specific audience.

History’s fragments   47

Gandhi’s films Garga is probably the only author associated with the nationalist historiography of documentary films who has ever provided a list of confiscated films about Gandhi. This list was first published in August 1937 in the Journal of the Motion Picture Society of India.10 However, Garga did not present enough detail for us to be able to place the films in their proper context. He does not offer any reason for the conspicuous silence surrounding these films during the 1930s; and, above all, he does not create possibilities for evaluating these films as an alternative way to look at the history of documentary film in India. In contrast, scholars such as Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (1980), Theodore Baskaran (1981), Gautam Kaul (1998) and Richard Barsam (1992) provide us with further context. They point out that the reason for this material being missing was the fact that the British in India tried, throughout the 1930s, ‘to keep the passions of independence out of the film medium’ (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 123). Baskaran and Kaul separately provide information about the way in which these films arrived in South India. Baskaran argues that the concept of nationalist films inspired the subsequent Tamil cinema (1981: 103). Kaul (1998) points out that thanks to the touring cinemas, and to a performing arts movement in South India, the message of the freedom struggle reached even the remotest village. In his words, ‘Mahatma Gandhi was better known to remote rural audiences than some of their own regional leaders’ (ibid.: 41). Apart from these accounts, however, a detailed history of the confiscated films is yet to be written. Through Barsam (1992) and Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (1980), we can read how Gandhi’s passive resistance campaigns of the early 1930s encouraged Great Britain to adopt new social and cultural reforms. We also read that by 1936 Congress, pressured by both radical factions and pacifist, gradualist factions, warned Great Britain that India would not participate in another ‘imperialist war’ (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 123). It was in this context that, according to Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, in 1937 the British made an effort to encourage an atmos­ phere of harmony by allowing the release of a number of topical films that had long been banned – some since 1930 (ibid.; see also Baskaran 1981: 143). This attempt was one of a number of efforts – including the launch of an Empire short-­wave radio service from London and the upgrade of the government-­operated Indian radio system (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 125). Unsurprisingly, this was all meant to eventually ‘win Indian public opinion’ (ibid.: 124). As a result, the banned documentary films about Gandhi became accessible in 1937 but disappeared again in 1942 when, with the ‘Quit India’ movement, the British government decided to take repressive political measures, including the confiscation of all the negatives and prints of the activities of both Gandhi and the National Congress (ibid.: 124).

48   History’s fragments If we investigate this historical period in more detail, we discover that repressive measures towards ‘political’ or ‘nationalist’ films (those perceived as a challenge or threat to the colonial state power) were adopted even earlier than with the aforementioned Gandhi films. For instance, the documentation of the political events that unfolded a few years after the Amritsar massacre of 13 April 1919 should be considered earlier examples (see Pinney 2009: 35).11 As narrated by Christopher Pinney, three years after the massacre, the American cinematographer A.L. Varges captured images of an Akali protest procession walking towards the Guru-­ka-Bagh, which was a shrine 20 kilometres away from Amritsar (2009: 35). The Superintendent of Police CID Punjab, V.W. Smith, perceived these images as a sort of ‘poison’ (ibid.: 37) – that is, a ‘possible ill-­effect … in fostering anti-­British feeling in the United States’ (ibid.: 36). As a result, Varges’ films were prevented from being shown in India and elsewhere (National Archives 1922, in Pinney 2009: 37). Pinney reads this incidence as part of the complex relationship between the notion (and perception) of indexicality (as cure) and manipulation (as poison) of still (and cine) images of 1920s and 1930s India, in relation to the colonial state (2009: 37). Additionally, he connects this occurrence with the way in which the censor board still today perceives documentary films as ‘eyewitnessing’ and often creates uneasy controversies with filmmakers (ibid.: 40; see also Chapters 4 and 6). What I think is important to highlight with these examples is, that there are several fragments of ‘political’ film made during colonial India that ought to be investigated further and placed in relation to contemporary documentary practices. These films vanished in both their material and discursive form. In other words, they became missing fragments of what we know today about the history of documentary film in India. A thorough historical reconstruction of the production and circulation of Gandhi’s (as well as other ‘political’) films may, in fact, challenge the idea held by contemporary filmmakers that colonial documentaries were films only about war and colonial propaganda or that ‘political’ filmmaking belongs only to the contemporary time. Before moving on to another missing historical fragment, however, allow me to use a contemporary ethnographic example to support this argument. The extract comes from my encounter with filmmaker-­activist Meghnath during my 2007–2009 fieldwork. One day, I visited Meghnath at his media activist organisation, Akhra, in Ranchi (Jharkhand). He welcomed me very warmly and engaged with me in a conversation about political filmmaking in India. Even though we had met before, this was the first time we had had a long discussion. He talked about figures such as Anand Patwardhan, Ranjan Palit, K.P. Sasi and Tapan Bose (filmmakers who made their first documentary films in the late 1970s and/or early 1980s, and who I will discuss in the course of this book) giving them agency because of their pioneering work in the political/ independent documentary in India. After this, Meghnath picked off his

History’s fragments   49 bookshelf B.D. Garga’s latest book, From Raj to Swaraj. He asked me whether I knew of the book and he opened it at page 93. At that point, he showed to me the long list of Gandhi’s films that had never circulated across the country because of the British repression. Then he said: ‘this list proves that the political/independent documentary was in existence in India long before any Anand or Tapan’.

Flaherty in India Information about Flaherty in India is today available in a number of publications (cf. Calder-­Marshall et al. 1966; Murphy 1978; Ruby 1979, 1980; Jaikumar 2006, to mention just a few). In 1983, Jay Ruby arguably published the most detailed account available to us. He found a volume about Robert Flaherty, published in an unedited form in 1966 by Calder-­ Marshall and based on data collected by Paul Rotha. This data was gathered from primary material, including original writings and interviews that Paul Rotha and Basil Wright had conducted after Robert Flaherty’s death in 1951. Along with this, Ruby found the papers and letters of Robert Flaherty’s wife, Frances Flaherty. Through these sources, he was able to put together a different story to that which had previously circulated among documentary scholars and anthropologists about the so-­called pioneer of documentary/ethnographic film, Robert Flaherty. Ruby narrates that after finding the material, he requested Rotha’s permission to work towards another publication of the book, which became a biography of Robert Flaherty. What interested me, while reading this book, was that an entire chapter was dedicated to Flaherty’s travel to India during the shooting of Elephant Boy (1937). It is in this chapter that we can find details of India responding to the arrival of Flaherty’s crew. Rotha recounts that Flaherty and his eldest daughter ‘set out for Bombay about the end of February 1935’ (in Ruby 1983: 165). It emerges from this narration that from the outset of production ‘the unit in India was to swell at times to at least fifteen non-­Indian persons plus local assistants and helpers’ (ibid., emphasis added). Furthermore, ‘wide publicity heralded Flaherty’s arrival in India’ (ibid.: 166). Interestingly, this was more or less at the same time as Dr P.V. Pathy, one of the pioneers of the documentary movement of 1930s India, moved from Madras to Bombay. Despite this, the accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films do not mention any connection between Pathy and Flaherty. This information is not even present in Dr Pathy’s celebratory book (see Figure 1.2). To better understand this missing connection, let us turn our attention to Dr P.V. Pathy. According to the nationalist historiography of documentary films, P.V. Pathy was a Doctor of Letters from the Sorbonne University and for this reason was known among his contemporaries as the ‘Doctor of Indian Documentary’. As Mohan (1972) points out, his contemporaries called him Dr Pathy. He was a South Indian Brahmin who, from an early age,

50   History’s fragments

Figure 1.2  Dr P.V. Pathy: book collection of Pathy’s writing.

nurtured an interest in the mechanical reproduction of sound and moving images. His father was involved in the selling of gramophones at the time of the development of silent cinema in Madras.12 His mother was an accomplished artist. Pathy’s original name was Pittamandalam Venkatachalapaty but he shortened it in 1929 when he went to study in Paris. According to Mohan (1972), it was during this period that Pathy developed an interest in documentary films. This occurred first through his reading of Grierson’s and Rotha’s writings and later his learning of documentary technique, when he enrolled at the ETPC – the School for Photographic and Cinematic Technique. When Pathy returned to India in 1934, he began his career as a freelance filmmaker. He received an assignment from Universal News to record one of the most disastrous earthquakes in India’s history, in the Quetta district (today Baluchistan, Pakistan). His 1938 three-­reel film on the Haripura

History’s fragments   51 Congress, National Congress Session – Haripura, was, however, probably his most important production. The accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films regard Pathy’s Haripura as the ‘grand pioneering effort in the genre of the documentary’ (Wadia, in Mohan 1972: 3). By then, Pathy was involved in a wide circle of filmmakers, producers, exhibitors and film lovers who related to him in different ways and also contributed to the articulation of documentary film in India as a film genre. Pathy moved from Madras to Bombay and met J.B.H. Wadia, who was the founder of Wadia Movietone. In time, Pathy convinced Wadia to work for him as a sort of commissioning editor. Pathy set up the Amateur Cine Society with K.S. Hirlekar and a number of other individuals (both Indian and British), including A.J. Patel, H.E. Ormerod, R.V. Leyden and Stanley Jepson. Their intention was to promote film classics to members of the society. Among Pathy’s most acclaimed contemporaries were D.G. Tendulkar, K.S. Hirlekar and A.K. Chettiar, and they were also considered noteworthy figures in the promotion of the development of documentary culture in India. While Pathy had received filmmaking training in France and, partially, in England, these individuals had been influenced by the German, Russian, Japanese and American film and photographic experiments of the 1920s and 1930s,13 but they were all connected to an international discourse about the emerging documentary film genre.14 How was it possible, therefore, that when Robert Flaherty arrived in India he did not interact with this scene? If Pathy and his contemporaries were such important figures in the emerging documentary film genre in India, and were all based in Bombay, how could they not have been aware of Flaherty’s visit? Would the ‘local assistants’, mentioned in Jay Ruby’s historical reconstruction, not have been involved in the emergent documentary scene, and film industry, in Bombay? Apart from relying on Paul Rotha’s original conversations with Flaherty, Jay Ruby’s (1983) reconstruction of Flaherty’s biography also includes a letter from Mrs Flaherty in India to her daughter. In this letter, Mrs Flaherty compares the experience of shooting Elephant Boy (1937) with that of shooting Man of Aran (1934) and here significant details about India’s response to Flaherty’s crew emerge. I wish you could see us here; you who saw us in Aran! How you would open your eyes! It is so different that we hardly know what to do about it – so many people about, doing for us all the things we have usually had to do ourselves – a fleet of cars flying here and there, a lorry as full of people as a Sunday School picnic plying daily from town (two miles) to our ‘bungalow’; thousands of cameras; thousands of racks bristling with tripods; a stills department with two assistants and I don’t know how many still cameras; thousands of carpenters, electricians, tailors, bearers, coolies, sweepers, mahouts, animal-­trainers, clerks, accountants, interpreters-­you would think we were a b-­y factory! (Mrs Flaherty, in Ruby 1983: 167–168, emphasis added)

52   History’s fragments This extract suggests that there must have been some connection between Robert Flaherty and the emergent documentary scene in India. If this was the case, did he contribute, then, to the articulation of the emerging film genre? This question without doubt requires further academic investigation. Yet, this missing historical fragment already suggests that the colonial documentary scene was a collaborative endeavour between foreigners and Indians, and that individuals (most likely trained abroad) independent of war institutions contributed to this development.

Educational films Thus far, thanks to the missing historical fragments presented in this chapter, we can suggest that cinema emerged in India as a ‘cultural performance’ travelling from small town to small town, and then on to villages, and that from its first exhibition, the cinema programme, or ‘event’, also included early documentary forms. Due to the repressive measures taken by the British government in respect of ‘political’ or ‘nationalist’ films, there is no evidence of the relationship between these ‘political’ film productions and the emergence of documentary practices as cultural performances. However, through the elements that I had been able to place together, we can speculate that there could have been a relationship between the emerging international scene of documentary practices and discourses around Robert Flaherty and the development of the film genre in India. All these disconnected pieces nevertheless suggest that, in the pre-­WWII period, documentary film in India had already established itself as a genre in progress (cf. Neale 1980, 1990; Altman 1999; Jauss 1982; Cohen 1986) to be investigated in its multiplicities and in relation to the different historical, social and political moments, wherein it took its various shapes. This also entails thinking of the development of documentary film in relation to an audience. It is thanks to this constant relation to a possible audience that we can retrospectively make distinctions, or classifications, regarding different typologies of film. The last historical fragment, the ‘educational film’, should thus be framed within this possibility. Even though John Grierson first used the term ‘documentary’ in 1926, the genealogy of the genre can be traced back to what in India was previously called ‘educational’ film. As Richard Barsam points out, the period that followed the wide-­reaching Lumières’ exhibitions was a moment of change all over the world for both the subject and form of the factual film. In this period, the genre was articulated in different ways, including ‘actualités, documentaires, topicals, educational, interest films, expedition films, travel films, and travelogues’ (1992: 28). In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the scene in India was not dissimilar from what Barsam describes in relation to other parts of the world. Indeed, before the term ‘documentary’ came into use, the category was articulated in other forms, which were simply other

History’s fragments   53 ways to describe different typologies of documentary film – precisely as occurs today with multiple documentary film practices. The accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films categorise under the generic name ‘topical’ all films up to the 1930s that recorded ‘actuality’ (Pathy in Mohan 1972: 62). According to these accounts, it was Dr Pathy who, inspired by his reading of Grierson and Rotha, oriented his filmmaking away from the ‘topical’ and towards the ‘documentary’ form, understood as a ‘creative treatment of actuality’ central to social critique.15 This film practice, says Jag Mohan, had for Pathy ‘a philosophy of its own’ (1972: 33) which, accordingly, ‘could do good to a predominantly illiterate country like India’ (ibid.). It could provide ‘interpretations of the past as well as problems and events of the present’ (ibid.). According to the ICC Report, however, in the 1920s – that is before the return of Pathy to India and before John Grierson conceived the term ‘documentary film’ as an educational, social medium – filmmakers in India were already distinguishing ‘news and topical’ films from a wider category called ‘educational and public utility’ films. On the basis of this information, we can envisage that in the 1920s, the category of ‘topical’ was designed to describe information and news films produced on a regular basis to ‘inform’ people (which, translated into modern-­day language, may signify an equivalent of our television news or web-­links to video-­reports on newspapers’ websites),16 whereas the category of ‘educational and public utility’ film was the equivalent of what today we might want to call a ‘documentary film’ – that is, a film genre closer to an ‘educational’ rather than an ‘informational’ mode of address. To the 1927–1928 Cinematograph Committee, the ‘educational and public utility’ film was, in fact, a much wider film category, encompassing subjects such as travel, health, sanitation, agricultural methods, cooperation and cottage industries.17 The distinction between topical and educational films during this historical period becomes even clearer if we consider the ICC Evidence of 1927–1928. In the ICC Evidence, there are several transcribed interviews with figures of 1920s film, with whom the Cinematograph Committee had the chance to engage. In this document, these individuals seem to make a precise distinction between ‘topical’, ‘newsreel’ and ‘educational’ films. Strikingly, they also use the category of ‘educational’ film interchangeably with that of ‘propaganda’ and ‘publicity’ film. For instance, an amateur cinematographer from Madras, Mr S. Devasankar Aiyar, and a cinema exhibitor trained in filmmaking also from Madras, Mr Raghupathi Prakasa, as well as providing a rich picture of the variety of film activities that existed in the 1910s and 1920s in India, clearly articulate their understanding of the categories of factual films of that time and express their willingness to expand the production of newsreels, topical and educational films in India.18 Because of the significance of the category of ‘educational and public utility’ films, the Cinematograph Committee felt a need to dedicate an

54   History’s fragments entire chapter of its report to this category. Accordingly, in Chapter 5 of the Report, the committee writes about its proposal to create a central cinema department with a specialised film library dedicated to educational films. It makes it clear that its understanding of ‘education’ is not limited to school education but also includes ‘adult education’ and, therefore, as far as it is concerned, ‘publicity’ or ‘propaganda’ activities. Furthermore, in the same chapter, the Committee envisions the possibility of employing travelling cinemas to screen educational films as part of their entertainment packages. From this chapter of the ICC Report, it emerges that in the 1920s there was a great number of educational films already available across the country. It also emerges that although each province of India had public money to produce educational films they hardly made use of these films in public spaces for educational purposes – this was, for instance, the case with the Indian Railways films (cf. Majumdar 2007). Above all, what emerges from the Cinematograph Committee’s documents is that from the 1920s onwards, most educational films were considered ‘of distinct entertainment value’,19 suggesting that films began to develop a dialectical relationship with their audiences as early as this pre-­WWII period. In short, if we place together all the historical fragments thus far mentioned in this chapter, a reading different from the one presented by the accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films may emerge. I shall now attempt to highlight the potential of this ‘alternative’ reading of colonial film practices and activities, which although not sufficiently ‘historiographical’ should nevertheless be useful in leading us to a clearer understanding of the contemporary scene of documentary film practices in the subcontinent. In order to do this, I need to return to the history of the war institutions, interrogate what we know about this history, and then integrate this knowledge into the historical fragments thus far discussed as well as into other existing historiographies of the war institutions and the colonial time.

Another history? What we know thus far about the war institutions is that in 1943, the FAB closed down in favour of the IFI and that the three key chief producers of these two institutions were, in sequential order, Alexander Shaw, V. Shantaram and Ezra Mir. We also know that the IFI was shut down at the end of WWII and that the FD emerged soon after Independence, reproducing the IFI’s structure. If in the nationalist historiography of documentary films the connection between the IFI and the FD is associated with the end of WWII, it is not clear why the FAB was closed in favour of the IFI. This missing connection can be useful in thinking of an historical reading different from the one presented by the conventional accounts. In Dr Pathy’s understanding, one of the main reasons for the FAB’s failure was related to the fact that most of its members, apart from J.B.H.

History’s fragments   55 Wadia, did not have sufficient (or any) experience of documentary film and newsreels, or not enough knowledge of India (Mohan 1972: 64–66). This could have been the case during Shaw’s leadership, as he was a person with sufficient knowledge about documentary but not enough about India, but certainly not under Shantaram, who was an established filmmaker and founder-­partner of the Prabhat Film Company. Pathy’s opinion was not shared by everyone and, indeed, different narratives exist today in this regard. According to Garga, despite the immediate difficulty of understanding what the FAB was meant for (was film propaganda directed at Indian or overseas audiences?; Woods 2001: 293), the first chief producer, Alexander Shaw, was able to put together a small team, composed of Ezra Mir, Baskar Rao and A. Mitra, who contributed to the production of six films on modern India that were not connected to the war, called India Today (Garga 2007: 75). The aim was to exhibit these films to the war allies and show not an India of ‘pucca [proper] sahibs and wandering sadhus’ but an India as a growing industrial land, also modern in ‘science and some progressive social movements’ (Shaw, in a letter to Purshottam Trikamdas associated with the Congress Radio, in Garga 2007: 74). It was thanks to this series of films that Shantaram later developed his idea about Indian heritage, to which I will turn my attention in a moment. Hence, if Shaw was successful in his position of leadership in production, why did he resign, enabling Shantaram to move into it? Garga points out that in October 1941 Shaw handed in his resignation and later confessed that this was partly due to personal issues but also because he felt ‘not accepted by the Indian industry’ (Garga 2007: 80). In his historical research about war films in India, film scholar Philip Woods underlines that in those days, the Indian film journal Filmindia described Alexander Shaw as ‘an unknown man, even in England’, when in reality Shaw had built up a solid reputation by contributing to the documentary movement of John Grierson (Woods 2001: 293). Filmindia accused Shaw of not being enlightened enough about India or determined enough to establish a satisfactory film unit in wartime. As Garga also highlights, the Indian press accused the FAB of being a film institution intended as a war instrument and controlled by the colonial government against everyone else’s will (Garga 2007: 78–80). In reaction to this accusation, the Anglo-­Indian press, such as The Illustrated Weekly and The Times of India, took the issue ‘personally’ and began to respond in defence of Shaw. A back-­and-forth series of articles resulted, which went on for a few months until being brought to an end by the legislative assembly, which finally declared, ‘there are no Indian experts in this particular branch of film production’ therefore Alexander Shaw is ‘the right man for the job’ (Garga 2007: 70). Despite this, according to Wood, Shaw ‘declined to renew his original one-­year contract, complaining that his work had been obstructed by the leading figures in the Indian film industry’ (Woods 2001:

56   History’s fragments 293). Shaw’s position in the history of the FAB seems to be pretty clear from these narratives. The question that remains problematic, however, is why after Shaw, Shantaram also resigned. According to Garga, it was Wadia who suggested that Shantaram be appointed as the new chief producer (1987a: 29). By this time, Shantaram had already been successful in social films while working for the Prabhat Film Company (a leading production house) and he had a strong background in Indian arts (cf. Woods 2001: 302). In other words, he was an ideal choice in the wake of the press controversy about Alexander Shaw. Under Shantaram, the FAB produced several films that were not about the war but about Indian heritage and social conditions, to great acclaim from the public as well as the local press (Garga 2007: 85–86). Furthermore, with Shantaram, the FAB’s activities attained a certain regularity. Hence, why did he resign? And, above all, why was the FAB transformed into the IFI? In light of the research carried out by Woods (2001), Dr Pathy’s aforementioned explanation certainly falls apart. Indeed, if it was true that Alexander Shaw was not sufficiently experienced in documentary film in India, this could not be the case with Shantaram. According to Garga, the FAB always lacked coordination (Garga 2007: 78). To Woods, Shantaram ‘felt trapped between a rock and a hard place, between his desire to contribute to winning the war against fascism and his loyalty to the nationalist movement’ (2001: 302). In this confusing scene, I suggest that in order to understand the FAB’s ambiguous transformation into the IFI, and the role that these figures occupied within these institutions, it is important to take other historical fragments into account and propose a reading of the war institutions that is different from the one provided by the nationalist historiography of documentary films. To start with, it is important to underline that war propaganda experimentation occurred in India during World War I (henceforth WWI) also. According to Woods, they were unsuccessful due to a lack of clarity about audience definition and because of policies of use and distribution (1995: 549–550). Indeed, propaganda for whom? This problem was not resolved during WWI and it remained after the establishment of the FAB during WWII. In fact, while Filmindia was accusing Alexander Shaw of incapacity, Shaw was dealing with the meaning of propaganda film for the FAB. In doing this, he had to moderate between the Indian government – more interested in films made for Indians – and the MoI in Britain – interested in films made for oversees audiences (Woods 2001: 297). According to Marilyn Gold Koolik, before WWII, and in particular prior to Goebbels and the Nazis’ power, the meaning of the word ‘propaganda’ did not have any negative connotations (1992: 2). To her, it was during this latter period that film was exploited as a ‘medium for tyrannical purposes’ and ‘film propaganda have become dirty words’ (ibid., emphasis in original). Not far from this argument, Woods provides evidence of the fact that although in the Indian context the word ‘propaganda’ was in use during

History’s fragments   57 WWI, its meaning was not fixed and it changed drastically between wartime and peacetime (1995: 550). This turned out to be one of the main reasons for the failure of war propaganda films in India during WWI, which, in fact, were educational or information films (ibid.) – not dissimilar from those that the Cinematograph Committee (mentioned above) discovered existing across the country in the late 1920s. In other words, in the 1920s the word ‘propaganda’ was being used as a synonym for ‘publicity’. In our contemporary reading, the juxtaposition of ‘publicity’ and ‘propaganda’ may seem obvious. However, according to the aforementioned ICC Report and Evidence, at that time propaganda meant education or information without necessarily having any political implications. Internationally, the words ‘publicity’ and ‘propaganda’ also meant ‘education’ (see Barnouw 1993; Barsam 1992) – that is, the equivalent of the more contemporary and generic term ‘expository’ documentary. In Bill Nichols’ words, the expository documentary ‘arose from a dissatisfaction with the distracting, entertainment qualities of the fiction film’ (1991: 32), advanced an argument about the historical world, and functioned as ‘the primary means of relaying information and persuasively making a case since at least the 1920s’ (ibid.: 34, emphasis added). In other words, the expository (or educational) documentary functioned as a ‘propaganda’ or ‘publicity’ mode of address. To some extent, the ‘loose’ meaning of ‘propaganda film’ did not change in the Indian context with WWII, nor even with the setting-­up of the FD, after Independence. However, because the accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films fail to identify a connection with pre-­war film activities (beyond the politicised use of ‘propaganda film’ during wartime), a distorted understanding of the colonial moment remains up to the present day. In addition, if we read how the nationalist accounts talk about war institutions in India from a different angle, we may also notice that there is hardly any mention of films meant purely for war or propaganda purposes. Rather, whether with Alexander Shaw, Shantaram or Ezra Mir and the IFI, the accounts of the historiography focus on those films that were produced by the war institutions but not for war or propaganda purposes – that is, films about agriculture, industry, communication, public heath, handicrafts, art, heritage and architecture. Even Garga points out that Ezra Mir’s contribution to the growth of the IFI was that ‘he realized that the future of Indian documentary could be made secure not on war propaganda, which was transitory, but with films that dealt with the socio-­ economic and cultural life of the people’ (2007: 108–109). During WWII, these practitioners did not contribute to the ‘war’ or ‘propaganda’ film, which simply functioned, to use Altman’s words, as a ‘temporary by-­ product of an ongoing process’ (1999: 54 emphasis in original). Rather, they continued a tradition of educational films that developed further with the arrival of the FD after Independence. A reading of the 1949 Handbook of the Indian Film Industry gives further support to this point.

58   History’s fragments In his introductory essay of the Handbook of the Indian Film Industry, I.K. Menon provides us with sufficient information to prove that the articulation of educational film was already part of the rhetoric of the Indian film industry prior to WWII. Menon (1949) talks about the Indian Motion Picture Congress that was held in Bombay in May 1939 (a few months before the outbreak of WWII), and the way in which the participants agreed, among other things, to sustain the production of educational films and newsreels. He also mentions a number of parallel conferences and one in particular, held on 2 May 1939, which was dedicated exclusively to educational films (ibid.). This information gives us enough scope to think about the scale of the articulation of this film ‘genre’, if not at a practical level at least at a discursive one. After providing details of these gatherings, Menon declares, ‘before the spirit of these Conferences could be consolidated, the second World War broke out which brought new problems in its wake’ (1949: XXII). Despite the ephemeral life of the Indian Motion Picture Congress, the information about it prior to WWII supports the following argument. If, however, the war institutions found an already established scene of documentary practices in India, they failed to neglect ‘educational’ or ‘public utility’ films in favour of war and propaganda ones. The war institutions reinforced the existing tradition of educational film, which was adopted by the Films Division in the days of Independence. In other words, the Films Division was not the direct consequence of the war institutions but the natural development of educational practices and discourses that existed before WWII. With this argument, I have, however, not answered the questions as to why during WWII there was the transition from the FAB to the IFI, and why, in this respect, the accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films provide multiple, and often contradictory, views. While centring their narrative on only film institutions and war films, the conventional accounts have failed to grasp the nuances of this historical period. Moreover, they have created historical lacunas that are yet to be resolved. If we want to understand the transition from the FAB to the IFI we need to go beyond an analysis of the war institutions. To me, the controversy about Alexander Shaw and the FAB mirrored the antagonist relationship between the Congress Indian nationalist and the British government, which then worsened in the 1930s (this argument is also supported by the examples concerning the banned films about Gandhi, mentioned earlier in this chapter). Arguably, replacing the FAB with the IFI was an action that symbolised a transfer of power from the British to the Indians. It was a metaphor that, in 1943, anticipated Independence. In this respect, the rhetoric around the two war institutions mainly informs us about the nationalist perspective from which the conventional historiography of documentary films has emerged. My reading finds support in Woods (2001), when he provides information about the initial relationship between the government of India and the MoI in Britain. Woods points out that while the MoI expected that it would have a

History’s fragments   59 ‘fairly free hand’ on filmmaking production (as it did in other colonies during the war), ‘the position in relation to India was less clear-­cut’ (ibid.: 297). In his words, the Government of India was expected to control film which was targeted at Indian audiences…. The Government of India was adamant that the peculiarities and sensitivities of the Indian situation were such that it must keep complete control over all forms of propaganda relating to India.… The Government of India’s priority was inevitably propaganda within India itself, which meant film directed at a predominantly illiterate audience…. However, … the Government of India could not raise enough money to carry out an independent propaganda policy and thus reluctantly recognised it would need to depend upon the MoI for some funding and this would inevitably mean losing complete control of the propaganda. (Woods 2001: 297) In other words, if we take into account the antagonist relationship between India and Britain, the history of the war institutions tells us more about the national struggle for Independence than about filmmaking and war. Conversely, the history of filmmaking and war informs us more about the genealogy of documentary film in India as educational films – born as cultural performances and entrenched with national and international individuals in constant relation to local audiences – than about war institutions. To sum up, the fragments of history presented in this chapter have sought to rehabilitate the colonial moment as something more than propaganda and a mode of colonial governance. Outside the nationalist historiography of documentary films we are able to read the colonial period as a moment of creativity in film production. As such, this period fostered the development of subsequent documentary film practices and some of its legacy can even be identified in contemporary film screenings and film festivals, which act as sites of cultural performance (cf. Chapter 7). Although the colonial moment seems far from contemporary documentary practices, it should become clearer in the next chapter that it is crucial for understanding the way in which several contemporary filmmakers read this history and position their film practices and discourses accordingly – if not directly in relation to colonial times, certainly in relation to the Films Division, long perceived of as the direct consequence of the colonial film institutions.

Notes   1 The accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films are mainly the works of Garga (1960, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c, 1987d, 1988a, 1988b, 2007); Mohan (1960, 1969, 1972, 1984, 1987, 1990); Bhavnani (1960, 1987); Datt (1969); Khandpur (1985); Chanana (1987); Gangar (1987); Ray (1991); Narwekar (1992, 1994); Kamath (1994); Thapa (1985); Varma (1998).

60   History’s fragments   2 Conversation with Gargi Sen, 21 April 2009.   3 At that time, Akka was still actively researching, filming and writing about film in India.   4 Conversation with Vijaya Mulay, 22 April 2009.   5 In this chapter, ‘film institutions’ and ‘war institutions’ are interchangeable categories that refer to film institutions that emerged in the colonial period during WWII. ‘War’ and ‘wartime’ refer only to WWII, unless otherwise specified.   6 To read more about the Army Film Centre, see Bhavnani (1960) and Garga (2007).   7 To read more about the INP, see Mohan (1969, 1990), Garga (2007) and Narwekar (1992).   8 To find out more about Ezra Mir, see Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (1980), Garga (2007) and Kamath (1994).   9 The ICC Report is an historical document written by a committee appointed by the government of India in September 1927 to examine, and make recommendations about, several matters related to censorship, production and the exhibition of films across the country. The committee was composed of both English and Indian members and was chaired by a lawyer from Madras, T. Rangachariar (see Shoesmith 1988). 10 Some of the confiscated films include Mahatma Gandhi’s Historic March (1930); Gandhi in England (1931); The Return of Mahatma Gandhi from the Round Table Conference (1931); Bombay Welcomes Mahatma Gandhi (made by Billimoria with vernacular subtitles [date not found]); and Forty-­fifth Indian National Congress at Karachi (with Gujarati titles [date not found]), to mention but a few. The companies involved with these films include Sharada Film Co., Krishna Film Co., Indian Topical Co., Imperial, Krishnatone and Eastern Film Co. The full list of films can be found in Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (1980: 123–124) and Garga (2007: 93). 11 On this date, thousands of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims gathered together in the Jallianwalla Bagh (a public garden in Amritsar, Punjab) for the traditional festival of vaisakhi. The brigadier-­general Reginald Dyer went to the location with a group of armed soldiers and fired into the crowd. To read more about this history, see Sarkar (1989: 189–191). 12 To find out more about the relationship between gramophones in silent cinema and the development of the talkies, see Hughes (2002, 2007). 13 To read more about Tendulkar, Hirlekar and Chettiar, see Mohan (1969: 9, 1987: 11); Ray (1991: 1–2); Narwekar (1992: 15–17); Thapa (1985: 514); and Garga (2007: 53–55). See also Venkatachalapathy (2007). 14 To read more about the genesis and articulation of documentary film, see Barsam (1992: 28–30); Barnouw (1993: 3–30); MacDonald and Cousins (1996: 1–6); Jacobs (1979: 2–9); Ellis and McLane (2005: 3–9); Aufderheide (2007: 3–4). 15 To read more about Grierson and Rotha, and more in general about the British Documentary Film Movement, see Swann (1989) and Aitken (1990). 16 To read more about topical and news film, see paras. 48 and 75 of the ICC Report. 17 This information is available in the following paragraphs of the 1927–1928 ICC Report: 110, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 208 and 259. 18 Written statement made by Mr S. Devasankar Aiyar, amateur cinematographer, Madras, dated 1 December 1927 (ICC Evidence 1927–1928, Vol. III, p.  135) and oral evidence given by Mr Raghupathi Prakasa, taken on Saturday, 7 January 1928 (ICC Evidence 1927–1928, Vol. III, p. 337). 19 ICC Report, para. 208.

2 Around the Films Division

The Films Division has been a gigantic failure in generating any noteworthy freshness or vibrancy in documentary film making in India. (Amrit Gangar 1987: 27) Besides, the ordinary people, after being exposed to compulsory viewing of inane documentary of FD, got allergic to the word documentary. (Madhusree Dutta 2002: 51) Many said bad things about the FD because they confused the compulsory screenings of newsreels with all our other activities, of course! (Conversation with Anil Kumar, 2 December 2014)

Shortly after Independence, the first government of India set up a branch of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (henceforth I&B) to specialise in the production and distribution of documentary and short films. In 1948, this branch was called the Films Division (henceforth FD). According to several accounts, the FD quickly became ‘the single largest producer of documentary films in the world’ and, in India, ‘could claim an average audience strength of eight million viewers every week’ (Roy 2007: 34; see also Thapa 1985: 514–515). This was true up until 1994, during which time, the FD could distribute its own films to be compulsorily shown in cinema halls before the main feature film. Because these were films produced by a state institution and compulsorily screened to a general Indian audience, as the first two quotations suggest, several filmmakers have long regarded the FD as a black mark on the history of documentary in India, that it made ‘ordinary people … allergic to the word documentary’ (Dutta 2002: 51; see also Dixti 1991). This sentiment was also widespread during my stay in India between 2007 and 2009, but between that time and the present day, things have radically changed. In the past few years, several filmmakers have begun reconsidering the role and function of the FD, in both the past and present history. One of the main reasons for this change of perception has been the creation of the

62   Around the Films Division ‘FD Zone’, a film programme that, since July 2012, has been opening up the FD theatre halls to a general public and organising screenings of films produced over the history of the FD. This initiative has transformed closed, controlled, structured, ‘archived’ FD productions into an ‘open-­access archive’ with which different kinds of public can interact on a regular basis and get to know the work and life of filmmakers who worked for/with the institution and also beyond it. As Premraj Rajgopal told me during one of my recent visits to the FD,  I was surprised when Mr Kundu [the new director] said ‘let them make pirate copies of our DVDs and let the FD be known!’ New generations of filmmakers have in fact forgotten or don’t even know about the existence of this institution. With the FD Zone, the idea has been to open up the institution and its resources to everyone!1 In response to this recent change of perception, this chapter conducts an analysis of the FD during its establishment after the gaining of Independence, focusing on two different levels: the institutional level and the efforts of individuals who worked in collaboration with, in antagonism with, or for the FD. Building on the argument made in Chapter 1, this chapter continues to investigate the accuracy of the nationalist historiography of documentary films, this time, however, specifically in relation to the FD.2 It interrogates the extent to which these accounts assumed narratives of the nation that were later reproduced by scholars interested in postcolonial India (cf. Roy 2003, 2007; Sarkar 2009). In particular, the chapter questions the centrality of the FD to national discourses about representation, education and development (as promoted by the first prime minister of Independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru) and places the FD in relation to its apparent antagonist, the Independent Documentary Producers Association (henceforth IDPA). By disconnecting the role of the FD as a state-­institution from that of an institution made up of people not necessarily employed by the FD, the chapter aims to demonstrate two main things. The first is that there were different kinds of filmmakers in postcolonial India, who collectively contributed to the national idea of development through arts and media forms (and to what I have called the ‘nationalist historiography of documentary films’), and the second is that, although a consequence of this, the FD film programmes were not a direct evolution of the war films but rather continued the production and articulation of ‘educational’ films, which began prior to WWII. In other words, if perceived merely as an institution in relation to its colonial past, the FD should be connected to the independent activities and initiatives that existed in colonial times beyond war institutions. We will explore this historical moment, paying attention to the historical ‘frictions’ (Tsing 2005) in understanding the FD as an institution, as well as to collaboration between individuals. We shall do this by juxtaposing written

Around the Films Division   63 narratives that emerged at the time and more contemporary readings of this history, along with pre-­FD documentation of the growing practice of documentary filmmaking in the subcontinent.

From national discourse to filmmakers’ agency The accounts associated with the nationalist historiography of documentary films describe the FD as an extension of the colonial film institution, the IFI. As pointed out in the previous chapter however, in their narrative, these conventional accounts do not make sufficiently clear how for them the IFI was different from its predecessor war institution, the FAB. Due to the fact that this historiography started to be written precisely during the first years after the attaining of Independence, these accounts failed to make it clear that from their nationalist perspective, the IFI was already an ‘Indian’ film institution, and thus different from the FAB, which they had seen as a tool of ‘British’ oppression and propaganda. Without making this point explicit while narrating a history of colonial documentary film practices, I contend that these accounts have added to the confusion about how to read the development of the FD in relation to its colonial past. Indeed, at present, we hear from those who have relied rather unquestioningly on this historiography (for instance, many of my interlocutors during my 2007–2009 fieldwork) that, just as in colonial times film institutions were instruments of war propaganda, the FD was an instrument of government propaganda. As I aim to demonstrate, however, this argument is only a partial reading of that history because it sees the FD only from its institutional perspective and does not take into account the debates that fostered the formation of this institution before WWII (namely those held during the Indian Motion Picture Congress in Bombay in May 1939, cf. Chapter 1) or the agency of the filmmakers who were working as ‘freelancers’ of a kind during this period, beyond institutional restrictions. In the late 1980s, south Asian scholars associated with the Subaltern Studies Group criticised the way in which the postcolonial historiography of modern India had been ‘authorised by European imperialism and the Indian nation-­state’ (Prakash 1994: 1485), overshadowing other histories.3 As Gyanendra Pandey put it, most national historiographies have created an ‘official’, ‘total’, ‘objective’ history, ‘privileging … the so-­called “general” over the particular, the larger over the smaller, the “mainstream” over the “marginal” ’ (1992: 50; 2006: 43). For instance, the history of ‘independent’ India has, by and large, sidelined the history of ‘partition’;4 the history of the ‘elites’ has written over the history of the ‘subalterns’;5 and the history of ‘secular’ India has rerouted the history of the ‘governmentalization’ of Hindu India (Hansen 2001).6 Similarly, we can say that the nationalist historiography of documentary films has overshadowed the period of colonial India and thus presented a history of the postcolonial FD in relation to the newly formed state rather than to the

64   Around the Films Division multiplicity of filmmaking activities and Indian-­foreign collaborations that already existed before Independence. By so doing, the accounts have also influenced those who have relied on this historiography and built their argument accordingly. To better understand this point, let us explore this ‘confusion’ in more detail. While explaining the way in which the decolonisation period saw one history taking over multiple others, Chatterjee (2010, 1998) and Pandey (1984) make use of the concept of ‘representation’ used by Jawaharlal Nehru. They underline the way in which Nehru was capable of building his persona and politics through his own writings, especially through his The Discovery of India (1946).7 Pandey argues that Nehru introduced the ‘bourgeois idea of “representation” ’ which presented him as ‘appropriating’ rather than ‘discovering’ India (1984: 10). The idea of ‘representation’, Pandey points out, was a form of ‘new responsibility’ and ‘education’ (ibid.: 11), which Nehru gradually transformed into ‘leadership’ – ‘in the narrow sense of controlled guidance, of direction along the correct channels, and of the disciplining of those who strayed’ (ibid.: 15). The state-­ funded FD acquired significance in Nehru’s nation-­building project, making use of the same idea of ‘representation’ as ‘education’. This included ‘the schooling of the “masses” in the political ideas of nationalism and democracy, and in their own political rights and obligations’ (ibid.: 11). In other words, from an institutional perspective, we can say that the FD was perceived by Nehru as part of the programme of ‘development communication’, which India, along with several other newly independent countries, employed after their independence (cf. Reeves 1993; Kishore 1994). The first questions about development communication emerged soon after WWII in relation to those countries that were beginning to see the end of European colonisation. As Krishna Kishore points out, following decolonisation the leaders of these countries viewed mass media as ‘magic multipliers’ on the one hand – that is, as a means of accelerating development – and as instruments of power and propaganda on the other (1994: 99). This view arose from the work of scholars including Daniel Lerner (1958) and Wilburn Schramm (1964), who in that period published, among other books, The Passing of Traditional Society and Mass Media and National Development, respectively. They stressed the importance of mass media in national development and believed that this could be achieved with the help of the government. Of the two, Schramm was the more influential regarding the development of infrastructures for mass media communication in India.8 Up to the present day, his name remains a reference point for a number of media practitioners and documentary filmmakers involved in media and development projects. The media development theories proposed by these two scholars informed what Singhal and Rogers later called the ‘dominant paradigm of development’9 – that is, a paradigm ‘mainly concerned with what a government did to and for its

Around the Films Division   65 people’ (1989: 20, emphasis in original), within which we can identify the institutional growth of the FD in Nehru’s India.10 Documentary films (together with radio broadcasting) were indeed one of the first forms of media-­art that the Nehruvian government used to disseminate messages of development to a largely illiterate India. By making use of the already successful entertainment film industry, the first independent government of India introduced a regulation requiring theatre exhibitors to screen short documentaries made by a government film institution before the main feature film (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980).11 While the idea was that Indians would learn about each other, by showing costumes from different parts of the country, and to facilitate ‘development’ in the newly formed nation, by the 1970s it had become clear that this strategy was not successful, either in terms of content or of chosen medium. In the specific case of the FD, we can say that the failure of the government’s documentary films not only prevented development objectives from being achieved; it also had negative consequences for the way in which institutional documentary films were perceived in India. Singhal and Rogers considered this ‘failure’ as part of the ‘crisis’ of the 1950s paradigm of development. In their own words, by the 1970s ‘it became increasingly clear that the role of mass communication in facilitating development was often only indirect and contributory, rather than direct and powerful’ (1989: 21). They point out that the paradigm was reconsidered during the 1970s and 1980s, when ‘pluralistic’ attempts were made to pursue ‘many pathways to development’, creating spaces for several new forms of communication to be integrated with traditional ones (ibid.). Some of the filmmakers with whom I interacted during my 2007–2009 fieldwork, however, referred to the government’s failure to make use of films for national development as an inability to understand the importance of the ‘form’ and ‘exhibition’ of such a powerful visual medium. They remembered the compulsory FD exhibitions in cinema halls as the moment when the lights were still on and people were entering the cinema and finding their seats. They also remembered that these films were never screened in their entirety because exhibitors cut them off in order to allow enough time for the main feature.12 In fact, while exhibitors were obliged to include a minimum length of approved films in every cinema programme, they were never told how to screen these films and could therefore act according to their own will.13 Despite such debate about the efficacy or otherwise of the institutional function of the FD in postcolonial India, according to recent scholarship with a specific focus on this institution during the first period of Independence, the FD consolidated the elite idea of development and functioned as an active player in nation building (cf. Roy 2003, 2007); it was part of the state’s recognition of cinema in national life and, to some extent, part of a wider concept of national symbolism, expressed through cinema and various other arts (cf. Sarkar 2009).14 On the basis of these readings, we

66   Around the Films Division can probably say that the FD and other cinemas in Nehru’s India were conceived of as not far from what Michael Shapiro has called ‘cinematic nationhood’ (2004: 142). Drawing on Susanne Hayward’s (1999) essay ‘Questions of National Cinema’ and on the Foucauldian notion of power and invisibility, Shapiro regards ‘cinematic nationhood’ as a process through which film acts as a form of panoptic-­control (2004: 142). In his view, film is part of the cultural articulation of nation building, providing a space in which entertainment and ‘invisible’ state-­power can merge. In other words, film serves as an important political arena in which to exert state power and ideology without directly imposing it on people. Bhaskar Sarkar’s (2009) understanding of the FD as part of the national institutional symbolism of the newly formed India fits Shapiro’s description. However, Srirupa Roy (2003, 2007), who published specifically on the role and function of the FD in the nation state, seems to disagree with this view. Roy argues that ‘panoptic-­disciplinary power’ (2003: 261) is not an adequate reading for understanding postcolonial India, which was characterised by the ‘hypervisibility of the apparatus of power’ (ibid.). To her, it is within such hypervisibility that we should perceive state institutions such as the FD – that is, not as forms of ‘cinematic nationhood’ (as they are for Shapiro) but as a ‘vertical link of authority between the state-­asdocumenter, and the nation-­as-audience’ (2003: 247). In such parallelism. it is as if there is a direct link between the documenter (that is, the filmmaker or the producer of documentaries?) and their ‘audience’ (that is, a unified body of individuals?), as much as between the ‘state’ and its ‘nation’. If this is the case, it is as if from Roy’s perspective documentary film were understood as a ‘film-­text’, fixed in the meanings constructed by its ‘documenter’, which have a direct ‘effect’ on its audiences. Moreover, it is as if documentary film is also a direct product of state power, which, in turn, has a direct effect on its nation. In such a reading, the FD as an institution becomes the responsible agent for employing individuals trained in filmmaking and capable of working with audio-­visual material, who in turn are ‘forced’ to work in line with state politics. Moreover, in such a reading we can also sense that audiences can be indoctrinated by a film screening. While leaving the discussion about the audience’s agency for later in this volume (cf. Chapter 7), what is interesting to understand here is the relationship between documentary filmmakers in the newly formed nation and the ‘vertical’ authority of the state manifested, according to Roy, through the FD. Of course, this was not a question that was of direct interest to Roy’s argument, which was more focused on understanding the development of postcolonial nationalism and nation-­state ideologies. Yet, if we connect it to the way in which the FD historiography has arrived with us, the question may become more relevant. Roy’s argument in relation to the FD builds on the idea that the FD is a continuation of the WWII film institutions. In other words, she builds her analysis starting precisely from the

Around the Films Division   67 accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films which, as I have already argued, overemphasised the function of film institutions during WWII and left out other historical fragments (such as filmmakers’ and audiences’ agencies) that are useful for re-­activating the colonial history as a moment of something more than oppression (cf. Chapter 1). Paying attention to the agency of those people who were involved in the filmmaking activities of colonial and postcolonial India may indeed enable us to start to see the FD not only as a state institution but also as an organisation in which different kinds of individuals worked and also contributed to its development (and the development of documentary films in India in general), despite state politics and regulations. As Pierre Bourdieu argues in his renowned essay, ‘The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods’,  it is not sufficient to say that the history of the field is the history of the struggle for the monopolistic power to impose the legitimate categories of perception and appreciation. The struggle itself creates the history of the field; through the struggle the field is given a temporal dimension (Bourdieu 1980: 289, emphasis in original)  Echoing Bourdieu’s view, I suggest going beyond the idea that through the FD the ‘monopolistic power’ of the state imposed a nationalist sentiment on documentary filmmakers – and audiences (see Figure 2.1). Rather, by giving agency to those filmmakers who during the Nehru era were actively involved in making so-­called ‘social’ documentaries for the nation, I shall highlight the need to look at this history through the lens of the ‘struggle’ between the state (of which the FD was a manifestation) and those filmmakers working both within and outside the FD. A different reading of the conventional historiography will reconnect the FD with the already discussed emergence of educational films during the colonial period. Without being ‘victims’ of state power, I shall argue that during this period all kinds of filmmakers were actively part of the national discourse of development and in their own ways reinforced this discourse, independently from the institutional function of the FD. Moreover, while contributing to several of the films that were compulsorily screened in cinema halls (which, it has been argued, made the audience ‘allergic’ to the word ‘documentary’ – cf. Dixti 1991; Dutta 2002, 2007a, 2007b), they also made feature-­length films, which were not necessarily included in the state’s ‘propaganda’ programme but were screened at venues in which public and private film productions circulated more freely. As Thapa (1985) points out, only short films could fit with the compulsory screening regulation imposed by the FD;15 nevertheless, by 1956 the production of full-­length documentaries had increased. Full-­length films were, in fact, distributed through publicity units in mobile vans, and quite often

68   Around the Films Division

Figure 2.1  Monopoly: cartoon in Docu-Scene India. Source: Chanana 1987. Courtesy of the IDPA and the FD.

this length-­typology of films was increased in number by non-­FD filmmakers because ‘the Films Division could not cope with the increasing demands of the various Ministries keen on publicising their achievement and future plans’ (Zils 1956a: 9). According to Mohan (1969), the government occasionally obtained and screened films made for international agencies, such as Burmah Shell and TCM, which, as I am about to explain, as for the FD, contributed to the development of documentary as a film genre (Altman 1999) much more than the development of documentary as propaganda. To better understand the interlaced relationships between private corporations, all kinds of ‘freelance’ filmmakers and the FD, let us look at this history in more detail.

The ‘formidable gang of the documentary movement’ If we want to understand how documentary film practices developed in India beyond colonial and state power, we should give agency to filmmakers and to how they contributed to the growth of both film institutions and the documentary ‘film genre’ (Altman 1999). There are several names

Around the Films Division   69 that belong to this moment of documentary in India, and two principal institutions – the FD and the Independent Documentary Producers Association (henceforth IDPA). According to the accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films, for about 20 years these two institutions functioned as the ‘public’ and ‘private’ documentary film sectors, respectively. For these conventional accounts, this dichotomy stems from the different funding sources but also from their mutual rivalry (cf. Narwekar 1992, among others). Indeed, if the FD was to become associated with the newly formed nation-­state, this was not necessarily the case for the IDPA. In September 1947, the Standing Finance Committee approved a proposal to set up a unit for the production and distribution of documentary films, called the ‘Film Unit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’, which, in April 1948 was officially named the ‘Films Division’, or FD. In contrast, the IDPA came out of the ‘independent’ tradition of filmmakers such as Dr Pathy, A.K. Chettiar and Ambalal J. Patel, who, before WWII, were making films commissioned by private companies or international organisations. In the late 1950s, the FD set up a special panel called ‘Approved Producers’, designed to sponsor filmmakers not working within the FD (Zils 1956a). However, it was only in 1967, 20 years after Independence, that the relationship between the FD and outside filmmakers (or as they called themselves, ‘independent producers’) became collaborative.16 The reason for this delay may lie in their separate trajectories more than in rivalries between filmmakers, as the conventional accounts have, by and large, emphasised. In fact, as Clement Baptista noted in a 1987 article, as soon as ‘outside producers [were] given their due status and freedom … many of them proudly fe[lt] that they [we]re an integral part of the Films Division’ (1987: 18). A number of people, including Ezra Mir, Jean Bhownagary, K.L. Khandpur, Jagat Murari, Ravi Prakash, V.R. Sarma and Mushir Ahmed, received training at or worked for the FAB or the IFI during WWII. Yet, they left India soon after the war, either to work in film or to study cinema abroad. When they returned to India from their experiences abroad they all became involved in the FD’s activities. In contrast, Dr Pathy (along with a few others) did not work directly for film institutions during the war and did not leave the country after the war. Rather, he benefited from the years between the end of WWII and the establishment of the FD. In this period, ‘independent producers’ worked as ‘freelancers’, making self-­funded films, films for private sponsors and films for their own distribution (Mohan 1960: 9–12). As detailed in Chapter 1, it was at this time that Pathy met Paul Zils and convinced Jag Mohan to move from Madras to Bombay. Mohan describes this moment as the ‘golden age’ of the Indian documentary (1987: 13) and Zils refers to the same period as ‘the most exciting one … of an all-­round awakening’ (1956a: 7). We read about how, at this time, different filmmakers interested in documentary film started to get together under the name of the Short Film

70   Around the Films Division Guild. The beginnings of the guild were similar to the way in which the British Documentary Film Movement had started 20 years previously.17 Rather than meeting in London at The Coronet in Soho Street or at the Café Royal, Indian filmmakers met at the India Coffee House or the Parisian Dairy Restaurant in Bombay. In these places, they discussed issues related to the growing genre of documentary film and decided to begin a periodical called Indian Documentary. In Mohan’s words: During the days when Pathy was shooting films for Paul Zils, I was inevitably drawn into the circle of Documentary film people. Discussions on films were daily rituals conducted in the mornings at the India Coffee House and in the evenings at Parisian Dairy Restaurant on the Marine Drive. A fruitful result of these discussions was the starting of ‘Indian Documentary’ in 1949 with Paul Zils as the publisher and myself as the Editor. Pathy was largely instrumental in getting this started and in my editing it. And, by then, I had evolved into a film critic. (Mohan 1972: 51) This cheerful atmosphere ended in 1949, when the FD started to dominate the production and distribution of films, in effect excluding ‘independent producers’ by not funding ‘independent’ films and not allowing them to be screened in cinema halls. In both the FD’s publications (cf. Datt 1969; Chanana 1987; Narwekar 1992, 1994) and in the literature about the FD that followed this historiography (cf. Roy 2003, 2007), it is difficult to find information about why the FD left ‘independent producers’ outside the production and distribution of documentary in India (apart from the fact that the government played a role in the decision-­making). In the ‘independent producers’ periodical Indian Documentary, however, a resentful tone is immediately apparent, which denounces ‘the monopolistic attitude’ of the FD and demands that ‘independent producers’ be allowed to screen their films in cinema halls together with those of the FD (Zils 1956b: 8). From this periodical, it is clear that although they felt ‘independent’ in their professional activity, non-­FD filmmakers (or, as they called themselves, ‘independent producers’) never wanted to be ‘antagonists’ of the state, or of the FD. They simply wanted to take part in ‘the great adventure of building the new India’ (Narwekar 1992: 37). In other words, they wanted to be active agents in the development of the nation as envisioned by Jawaharlal Nehru. At the time of the periodical Indian Documentary, ‘independent producers’ lamented their exclusion from the nation-­building project, wondering, ‘Who speaks for the nation?’ Politically, however, they never aligned themselves with anything other than the national discourse. For this reason, their films did not differ radically in content from the feature-­length films made by the FD or from the previously discussed

Around the Films Division   71 category of ‘educational’ film. As a result, as soon as the FD decided to  collaborate with these filmmakers by funding and screening some of their films, ‘independent producers’ accepted this without any problem. In  other words, the FD and the IDPA soon became interchangeable institutions. In this context, it seems important to stress that the ‘social’ responsibility that both FD and non-­FD filmmakers decided to develop through the making of their documentary films in the Nehru era was similar to the responsibility described by Pandey in relation to Nerhu’s national discourse and to the idea of ‘schooling of the masses’ (1984: 11). Transposing Pandey’s (1984) concept of ‘representation’ as ‘education’, we can accordingly suggest that at an individual level filmmakers felt ‘socially’ responsible for the images they created of the nation and for the nation (cf. Krishnaswamy 1955). Yet, because they were limited by the institutional regulation of film production and distribution, they began to articulate documentary film as a ‘socially oriented documentary’ or simply as a ‘social documentary’ at a discursive level.18 It is precisely through this shared social responsibility that filmmakers from both the FD and the IDPA came together to form a ‘gang’ (Mohan 1984) of film practitioners – that is, a ‘community of documentary filmmakers’, the first of its kind. Further details will clarify this point. Indian Documentary ceased publication after only five issues, due to a lack of financial support. At that time, Mohan Bhavnani was chief producer of the FD (he took up this position in July 1948). According to Garga, ‘Bhavnani was a veteran of mainstream cinema, having begun his career well before the advent of sound’ (2007: 131). He studied at the College of Technology in Manchester in 1921 and worked as an apprentice at the UFA Studios in Berlin, an experience that then influenced his own films, such as Vasantsena (1931) and The Mill (1934). Jagat Murari remembers the FD of Bhavnani as a moment of new discovery in which filmmakers ‘were constantly on the move, searching and filming the soul of India’ (in Narwekar 1992: 40). Most of the accounts of the nationalist historiography of documentary films, however, describe the arrival of the half-­Parsi and half-­French Jean Bhownagary as the key moment in the history of the FD. Similar to Ezra Mir, Bhownagary worked for the IFI during WWII and left India as soon as the war came to an end. Garga (2007) asserts that due to his exposure to and study of western documentary, UNESCO offered Bhownagary a position as an official in Public Information’s Press and Audio Visual Division in Paris. In 1955, Bhownagary was able to join the FD as a deputy chief producer on loan from UNESCO, and he kept this position for about three years before returning to his UNESCO job in France. As explained in the nationalist historiography of documentary films, because of his love of the arts and his specialisation in documentary filmmaking, Bhownagary positioned himself on the same level as filmmakers working within and outside the FD.

72   Around the Films Division Indeed, it was thanks to Bhownagary that the FD set up the panel for ‘Approved Producers’ and began to provide better remuneration for filmmakers (Mohan 1969). It was at this time that the ‘independent producers’ came together formally as the aforementioned IDPA and re-­launched of the periodical Indian Documentary thanks to new funding possibilities from the public as well as the private sector. In the first article of the new edition, the editor Jag Mohan declared: By a series of progressive steps the Government began to relax its monopoly over the production of Short Films and had to invite outside independent producers.… It is in this context of favourable circumstances that INDIAN DOCUMENTARY is having its ‘re-­birth’ so that it could stimulate the growing interest in the ‘Indian Documentary’ once again and concern itself with the future of the Documentary Film Movement primarily in India and foreign countries incidentally. (Mohan 1955: 4) This moment overlapped with that of the presence of other international figures who were not directly related to the FD. James Beveridge was one of these. He was an officer at the National Film Board of Canada and a colleague of John Grierson. In the early 1950s, he set up a film unit in India with the international corporation Burmah Shell, and provided ‘independent producers’ with the opportunity to receive film funds outside the FD. In S. Sukhdev’s words, this was ‘the only pucca [proper] documentary activity on a large scale, apart from the Films Division’ (1984a: 22). Similarly, international agencies, such as the United States Information Service (USIS) and the American Technical Cooperation Mission (TCM), and industrial companies, such as Tata, Scindia, ICI, Hindustan Lever, ITC and Dunlop, competed with the FD’s patronage and contributed to the growth of ‘independent producers’ (cf. Sethna 1960). As noted by Zils, these international agencies were often flexible in terms of theme and approach; they wanted to be ‘near to the heart of a documentary director’ (1956a: 8; see also Sukhdev 1984a). If this sounds like a personal statement from the ‘inside’ perspective of this history, in reality, as Erick Barnouw points out when referring to John Grierson’s 1930s writings and Basil Wright’s 1930s films, at that time the concept of ‘sponsors had a different rationale’ (1993: 91). The idea was more one of working with artistic representations of industries in order to invite people not to reject these industries. With such an objective in mind, the line between documentary art and industrial propaganda became very thin for filmmakers as they could fall back on their artist identity to do whatever they wanted. This was particularly true with films such as Song of Ceylon (Wright 1935) which, because of its ability to work between abstraction, art amusement and the documentation of a specific culture (Ceylon, today Sri Lanka) has been historically considered as one of the films ‘that made

Around the Films Division   73 the rising British documentary movement known throughout the world’ (Barnouw 1993: 93) much more than as one that promoted the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, which originally funded it. The situation in India was very similar. International agencies and private corporations not only sponsored full-­ length documentary films made in India but also created their own film libraries for educational purposes and organised their own screenings of films dubbed into several Indian languages – specifically aimed at educational institutions (Garga 2007). In other words, they created alternative screening fora for filmmakers. And, because these bodies were not restricted by the compulsory cinema hall screenings and the 20-minute length regulation, they fostered the development of different documentary film productions much more than the FD did. The FD became specialised in short films or what today we might call ‘advertisement/ads’ films, confusing, as the third of the opening quotes of this chapter suggests, the overall understanding of the FD and its productions, but also, I would add, the growing genre of documentary film in postcolonial India. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (1980) point out that, despite the great effort made by national and international sponsors to develop the documentary film genre in India, towards the end of the 1950s these sponsors suddenly stopped financing documentary films for reasons that remain unclear. At the same time, Ezra Mir became chief producer of the FD. After the war, he went to work abroad and, when he returned to India, he started making independent films. Mir accepted the position of chief producer of the FD with the idea of increasing the production and quality of the FD’s documentaries. N.J. Kamath recounts that over five years Mir was able to produce 400 documentaries and was ‘personally involved with the production of almost all these films right from the moment of their conception to the time of their completion’ (1994: 109). In Mir’s words: I used to spend three-­fourths of my time in the editing room, personally editing every film produced at the Films Division. It is my firm belief that editing is the very heart and soul of filmmaking and that unless the editing of a film is of the higher order, no documentary can be a success. (Mir in Narwekar 1992: 41) It was probably due to Ezra Mir’s meticulous control over the editing of the FD’s films that, despite the existence of the panel for ‘Approved Producers’, ‘independent producers’ had no space within this state-­funded institution at a time when private sponsors had stopped financing them. They had to wait for the return of Jean Bhownagary before they could fully collaborate with the FD. This occurred in 1967 or thereabouts, around the time of the 20th anniversary of Indian Independence. In taking up the position of chief producer after coming back from the French

74   Around the Films Division experience of cinema vérité, Bhownagary allowed filmmakers to experiment with form. In his words: I plunged into the task of trying to improve the quality of our productions by encouraging existing and new talents to probe deeper into their subjects, to make structured films instead of enumerations of our treasures and achievements as so often required by non-­filmmakers in the Ministry. I wanted each director to find and create his individual style and stamp the film with his own personality. (Bhownagary in Narwekar 1992: 42) In this time, documentary filmmakers in India were beginning to get together regardless of their level of association with the FD. They consolidated themselves into a ‘community’ of practitioners with similar objectives, and took advantage of any possible funding sources, whether the state or private sponsors. In addition, they started ‘acting’ as a community of colleagues/friends at public occasions. Shuttling between the two organisations, filmmakers became so close to each other that they formed what Mohan calls ‘the formidable gang of the Documentary Movement’ (1984: 160). In his words, ‘we made a lot of noise at seminars and symposiums, issued statements and tried our best to improve the Documentary Movement.… The sixties were enlivened by all of us’ (ibid.: 170). In short, we can say that the filmmakers of postcolonial India, whether or not directly associated with the FD, gradually came together and took part in the same dominant discourse of nation building advocated by Jawaharlal Nehru (cf. Pandey 1984; Chatterjee 2010, 1998). The active agents of this community collectively advocated the importance of the documentary film as a form of visual ‘art-­medium’ that was socially responsible for Indian development yet beyond its main recognised institution, the FD. However, because of existing state regulations regarding the production and distribution of documentary films, filmmakers’ writings about their films and their understanding of the role that films should have played in relation to the forming nation have had a much more central role in the written history of the development of documentary films in India than the films themselves. Moreover, as I have thus far argued, due to their unique position in the postcolonial debates that began circulating after the attaining of Independence, these writings have also contributed to creating a nationalist vision of the documentary film practices of this period, which, in turn, became an unquestioned historical Foucauldian ‘monument’ on which others have relied. To be more precise, in my reading of this history, I do not see filmmakers as ‘objects’ of nationalist discourse. Rather, I describe them as part of the elite outlined by Sudipta Kaviraj (2000) and Francine Frankel (2000). These two scholars talk about the Indian elite as a group of individuals who benefited from the new arenas of public life that emerged in

Around the Films Division   75 postcolonial India (cf. Kaviraj 2000; Frankel 2000). Similarly, I depict the filmmakers of postcolonial India as upper-­class individuals who, through film productions, contributed to (rather than became victims of ) the national discourse of development in India. Just as the FD, the IDPA and the first independent government of India, these filmmakers wanted documentary film to act as ‘the “honest broker” between the government and the public’ (Zils 1956a: 9) and as ‘a new kind of folk poetry of our age’ (Documentary Film Editorial in Marg 1960: 1). In other words, they advocated (and discursively continued) the pre-­wars project described in the ICC Report, to create a central cinema department interested in ‘publicity’ and ‘educational’ films. The ICC Report proves that the idea to create such a department was already in the air before the outbreak of WWII (cf. Chapter 1). If this was the case, we can assume that the FD was a direct consequence not of the war institutions but of debates that emerged between WWI and WWII in relation to educational films and their possible function in the development of an independent nation state. It is precisely thanks to the few colonial and postcolonial full-­length ‘educational’ films (produced with both public and private funding), the published discussions about them and their independence from the compulsory distribution in cinema halls, that documentary as a specific film genre was born, grew and has discursively survived up to the present day in India. What I am suggesting here is that paying attention to the agency of those filmmakers who acted during postcolonial India with and ‘against’ the FD, as well as to practices of and discourses about documentary films that emerged and circulated before WWII, in colonial times, can enable us to better understand the genealogy of contemporary documentary film practices and discourses, and better contextualise the novel relationship between the FD and the independent filmmakers of the time – to which we will now return.

Back to the present Since V.S. Kundu was appointed as director of the FD in 2012, the institution has experienced a radical change and both filmmakers working for the FD and those independent of it have remarked on this transformation. During my visit in 2014 and in occasional e-­mail exchanges with longstanding filmmaker-­friends, I have noticed how pleased many filmmakers have been since Kundu took up the leadership of the FD. He has provided the possibility of imagining a collaborative development of the contemporary documentary scene. On 17 April 2015, in a message sent to one of the Indian documentary mailing lists, Docuwallahs2, I counted 98 names of people from all over India who were united behind a letter of support to the Ministry of I&B, asking for Mr Kundu’s employment as director of the FD to be made long term (rather than just the regulation

76   Around the Films Division three years). For the first time in the history of the FD, the Ministry of I&B had appointed someone whose heart was close to the filmmaking scene yet who was from an administrative rather than a filmmaking background.19 This change enabled the FD to deal with questions of visibility and management, ‘revitalising’ the state-­institution. As Kundu himself told me in a conversation that he let me record when I met him in his office in Mumbai: From 1990 until 2012 it was all redundant. We lost funding from the government; we lost people working for us; we lost connections with filmmakers outside the institution; and the screenings of our films were also no longer there [referring to the compulsory screenings in cinema halls]. This was probably also the reason why the government felt the need to have an administrator run the organisation. I am the first person who came to help this organisation from an administration background.… When I arrived I found people who had already lost their self-­esteem. All the other government-­organisations treated the FD people as if they were doing nothing. It was no longer like in the 1960s and 1970s, when the FD played an important role for all kinds of ministries! At that time the FD was very well respected. So, when I arrived, I found people without self-­esteem who wanted things to change. We began by organising an event for Mani Kaul, one year after he passed away; we invited all the people who worked with him and made screenings of some old prints people had never watched before.… From here we started taking pride in things we are doing.… We have a huge archive of films that nobody watches and we have a beautiful theatre. So, this was the most economical step we could have taken because it required nothing. (S.V. Kundu, 4 December 2014) Kundu and other FD employees told me that the FD then began to organise regular screening activities, inviting filmmakers not working for the FD to ‘curate’ packages of FD films. These outside curators named this initiative the ‘FD Zone’ and, over time, the small initial group came to be fully in charge of all the screenings under the initiative. At the time of my visit in November 2014, they alternated screenings of films made by the FD with others produced outside the institution. This openness towards film productions from outside the FD pleased several filmmakers who, between the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork and the present day, have radically changed their opinion of this institution. Yet, as this chapter should have demonstrated thus far, this was not the first time the FD had opened up its activities to independent practitioners not working for the FD. As with the period in which Jean Bhownagary was chief producer (or director) of the FD, we can say that the period of V.S. Kundu’s directorship is the most satisfactory one so far, both for those working at the FD and for those who until now have felt antagonism towards this institution.

Around the Films Division   77 At this stage of my argumentation, this point should have become almost redundant. However, it is important to re-­emphasise it here. As I explained to Kundu in one of our interactions, the first time I heard positive stories about the FD from contemporary filmmakers I had known for a long time, I could not at first believe what I was hearing. As clearly argued in my PhD dissertation, the sentiment of many of my interlocutors during my 2007–2009 fieldwork was more similar to that conveyed by the first two quotations of this chapter. That is, they did not want to be associated with the history of the FD, believing that, unlike them, the FD confused Indian audiences about the role, function, aesthetic and form of documentary filmmaking in the subcontinent. ‘That history has already been written; let’s focus on us now!’ was indeed what I often heard from the filmmakers with whom I interacted in 2007–2009. In the past few years, that antagonism towards the FD has rapidly and quite ‘magically’ disappeared from the public discourse, thanks to the activities of the FD Zone and other initiatives promoted by S.V. Kundu. And on one of my last visits to India, I felt as if the previously held antagonism had already been forgotten by many and hence omitted from conversations about the institution. Rather than ignoring these transformations of perception, for the purposes of this book, I have decided to emphasise them, to better contextualise and grasp the way in which films, institutions and practices are perceived and therefore always categorised (and re-­categorised) in different moments of history. To summarise, this chapter has argued that although we must acknowledge that the postcolonial state made use of the FD for its own publicity at an institutional level, we should rehabilitate the organisation by looking at it from the filmmakers’ perspective. Indeed, to understand the complexity and multiplicity of film practices in the present day, we should not restrict our understandings of the FD to only its institutional role. If during my 2007–2009 stay in India this was a very difficult point to make – as the FD was still for many an instrument of state power and a black mark in the history of documentary film (cf. Dutta 2002, 2007a, 2007b) – while I have been writing this book, this perception has radically changed. Thanks to the activities of the FD Zone, at present we are experiencing a revival of the FD and a growing interest in discovering an unknown or, should I say, an underestimated history. Perhaps then, it is time to stop considering FD documentaries simply as state propaganda. Propaganda should, if at all, be identified in the short films, or ‘ads films’, that were compulsorily screened in cinema halls until the mid-­1990s, but not necessarily in the few educational films that were screened through mobile vans in local districts. The latter were the screenings that fostered, more than short films, a vibrant discourse about documentary films in postcolonial India. Moreover, we should stop considering the FD from a purely holistic institutional perspective that excludes filmmakers’ agency as well as other activities that exist beyond, yet interlaced

78   Around the Films Division with, the FD. Rather, the birth and growth of the FD should be linked to the agency of filmmakers, and to their initial articulation of documentary film as a socially responsible medium for information, knowledge and education beyond the activities undertaken by the FD. During the transition between colonial and postcolonial India (and during the first two decades of Independence), all documentary filmmakers contributed to Jawaharlal Nehru’s nation-­building project – whether they were working for the FD or not. It was precisely in the pursuit of this clear national objective that, in this period, filmmakers’ practices included not only film-­ making but also film-­writing, which contributed to what I have called the nationalist historiography of documentary films. This historiography has thus far acted as a documentary ‘discourse’ of colonial and postcolonial India, and for too long it has remained unquestioned, misinforming many contemporary filmmakers by portraying this historical past only as a moment of propaganda and oppression. Although the colonial and postcolonial moments seem to be far from contemporary documentary filmmaking, in reality they are crucial for understanding the way in which contemporary filmmakers often read this history and position their film practices accordingly. The recent changes in the relationship between ‘independent’ filmmakers and the FD prove that there is a need to engage with this history even more. In the next chapter, I will continue this investigation, in relation to the concept of ‘being independent’ and the multiple categories of film, filmmaker and filmmaking associated with this term.

Notes   1 Conversation with Pramraj Rajgopal 3 December 2014.   2 As in Chapter 1, by ‘nationalist historiography of documentary films’, I refer to the work of: Garga (1960, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c, 1987d, 2007); Mohan (1960, 1969, 1984, 1987, 1990); Datt (1969); Khandpur (1985); Chanana (1987); Ray (1991); Narwekar (1992, 1994); Khamat (1994); Thapa (1985); Varma (1998).   3 To read about postcolonial historiographies, see Guha and Spivak (1988), Pandey (2001), Chakrabarty (1992) and Kaviraj (1997, 2000).   4 To find out more about the two conflicting histories of Indian Independence and India-­Pakistan Partition, refer to Pandey (1992, 2001, 2006). Consult Sarkar (2009) for a transposition of Pandey’s analysis of the history of Partition to the study of cinema in India.   5 For an overview of the Subaltern Studies Group publications, initial objectives and eventual decline, see Chatterjee (2010: 289–301) and Pandey (2006: 56–59).   6 Thomas Blom Hansen (1999, 2001) provides a detailed analysis of secular/non-­ secular India. Patricia Uberoi (2003) develops this concept in relation to the making of calendar art in the newly formed Independent India.   7 For a full analysis of Nehru’s narratives about the Indian nation, consult Chatterjee (1986, 1993).   8 To read more about development and media in India, see Singhal and Rogers (1989, 2001), Vasudev (1989), Kohli (2005) and Bel et al. (2005).

Around the Films Division   79   9 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, this paradigm was transformed into a new paradigm of development which, as will be shown in Chapter 4, directly or indirectly inspired video practices in 1980s India. The new paradigm was ‘pluralistic’, recognising ‘many pathways to development’; it focused on the ‘weaker sections of the population’; it called for ‘popular participation’ by paying attention to ‘empowerment’; it stressed the possibilities of ‘local resources’; and it created spaces for other forms of communication (referred to as ‘little media’) to be integrated with the traditional modes (referred to as ‘big media’) (Singhal and Rogers 1989: 22). 10 By and large, Indian media scholars who talk about this historical moment have focused on public broadcasting systems, in particular radio and television production in South Asia, leaving out of the debate the development of the Films Division. To read about this development, see Luthra (1986); Chatterji (1987); Singhal and Rogers (1989, 2001); Reeves (1993); Ninan (1995); Johnson (2001); Das (2005a). 11 This directive reproduced a colonial regulation which, under rule 44A of the Defence of India Act, made war films, of a minimum running time of 20 minutes, compulsory for every cinema exhibitor during wartime (cf. Mohan 1960, 1969, 1972, 1990; Garga 1987a, 2007; Chanana 1987; Narwekar 1992; Varma 1998). 12 Some of these points are also raised in Dixti 1991, and in Waugh, video-­interview 1988) and Dutta (2002, 2007a, 2007b). In both cases, the filmmakers draw the conclusion that Indian audiences became ‘allergic’ to the word ‘documentary’. 13 To read more about this compulsory exhibition in cinema halls, see Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (1980: 192–198) and Khandpur (1985). 14 The establishment of the Films Finance Corporation (FFC), the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) and the Film Training Institute of India (FTII) – transformed into the Film and Television Institute of India in 1974 (cf. Yusufi 1985) – were indeed part of the same national project. To find out more about nationalism and Indian arts, consult Guha-­Thakurta (1995, 1997) and Ramaswamy (2003). 15 Chapter 3 will look in more detail at these ‘short’ film productions in connection with the idea of ‘being independent’. 16 In the remainder of this chapter, I will refer to this group both as ‘independent producers’ and as ‘outside producers’, as at that time, they were switching between these two definitions. If we want to use more contemporary terminology, we may want to think of them as ‘freelance’ filmmakers. Under all these denominations, in this chapter, I mainly refer to those filmmakers who were not employed by the state and were free to take on projects financed by private and/ or public funding. For a full discussion of the meaning of ‘being independent’, see Chapter 3. 17 To read more about the gatherings of the British Documentary Film Movement, see Aitken (1990: 97–99), Swann (1989: 36–37), T.M.R. (1990/1992: 4–7) and Ruby (1983: 161). 18 To read more about the ‘social documentary’, see Jag Mohan’s (1984) edited book, S. Sukhdev Filmmaker: A Documentary Montage (see Ray 1991). 19 It is interesting to highlight here that the ‘director’ has always been called the ‘chief producer’ – precisely because the institution was conceived of as an assemblage of specialists in filmmaking and the leadership was to go to an expert, a senior film producer/maker rather than an administrator. It can be argued that the FD inherited this tradition from the controversy around the leadership of the IFI during WWII (cf. Chapter 1).

3 The growth of independent practices

When in July 2008 I found myself in Aswani Pankaj’s office, in Ranchi (Jharkhand), this had happened by chance and for reasons unknown to me. The day I arrived in Ranchi, the activist-­filmmaker Meghnath, who I had planned in advance to converse with, was not around. Apologetically, Meghnath told me on the phone that he had found other things for me to do while waiting for him. He then sent someone to pick me up from my hotel and take me to Aswani Pankaj’s office. Yet, Meghnath did not clearly inform me (or I did not clearly understand) who this person was and how he was related to my research interests. When I arrived at Aswani Pankaj’s office, I found someone who seemed to me to be the ‘director’ of a small ‘media enterprise’. He was the only person there able to communicate with me in English and yet he was not completely fluent – or he spoke with a strong accent that not everything he said was clear to me. Having already spent almost a year in India and having dealt with different people from different states, towns, cities and villages speaking English with different degrees of difficulty, and certainly with different accents, I was by now trained to place myself in a sort of apparently ‘incomprehensible’ listening mode (which I had developed as a multilingual speaker who learned her languages by listening to and using them, rather than through studying the grammar and books). In other words, I settle myself into a sort of ‘passive mode’ of listening that searches not for consequential, ‘graphable’ meanings but for very few significations and many images, emotions, sensations and associations – that is, to use Bourdieu (1977), a particular ‘mode of acquisition’ typical of bilingualism or language pronunciation, or as in the introduction to this book I call ‘living’ fieldwork and anthropology. Thanks to this ‘listening-­living’ mode of interaction aimed at ‘nothing’ except sensing, in a slow mode, the moment, towards the end of my conversation with Aswani Pankaj, not only did I start to better comprehend his form of communication (through his use of English) but also to make links to a history that until that moment I had never considered highlighting in my research. Indeed, I began to realise that I had the chance to talk to a person who, already in the 1980s, had developed his own filmmaking practice beyond the national

The growth of independent practices   81 circuit of documentary films. Aswani Pankaj’s practice was in fact only aimed at tribal people of Jaharkand. And he justified this choice with very few but clear words, saying, ‘Today it is very important to return to the local because most documentary filmmakers are essentially interested in their success. But for me, this was true also at that time’. The question that came to me while he continued telling me his story was: where did his inspiration come from? The answer was that from a young age, he had developed an interest in films. He had watched not only commercial films but also the FD films that were screened, during his childhood, in cinema halls. ‘Everyone dreamt of making a film then, but it was unimaginable to do it because of the expense’, Aswani said. He chose, therefore, to work in the theatre. But as he explained to me, ‘theatre was for me also a visual medium’. It was towards the mid-­1980s, he continued, that: video arrived and we could hire a camera for 2000 Rupees a day … and at that time also a technician was coming with the camera … so, I thought, why not use this medium now to talk about my people’s struggle? Although he advocated local activism and kept away from the national circuit of documentary, Aswani Pankaj confessed that at that time he had nevertheless heard the name of Anand Patwardhan, and that, before he started making films he had the chance to watch Patwardhan’s milestone Hamara Shahar/Bombay our City (1985). However, Aswani emphasised,  I could only see this specific film … So I can’t say I was influenced by Anand Patwardhan’s films … but … I was inspired by his ideology! I read his articles translated into Hindi and I found inspiration in what he said about screening films and bringing them to people. I was inspired by his screening ideology and not by his filmmaking!  (Emphasis added)1 In the growing academic debate about documentary filmmaking in India, the name ‘Anand Patwardhan’ is the one most associated with the image of the independent filmmaker (cf. Gopalan 2011; Skvirsky 2011; Vasudevan 2003, 2011; Sarkar and Wolf 2012). Patwardhan made his first film in the mid-­1970s and since then, has been known as an independent filmmaker at a national and international level. As the introduction of this book clearly states, the discourses that over time have been developed about and around Patwardhan have contributed to the creation of what Foucault (1969) would call a ‘monumental’, ‘fixed’, ‘unquestioned’, ‘holistic’ history of the development of documentary film practices in India. Today, this given history is for many divided into two distinct moments: the pre-­independent filmmaking period (that is, the colonial and the FD

82   The growth of independent practices moments together) and the independent filmmaking moment, which (separate from the colonial and FD history) started with Patwardhan and continues influencing film practices in the present day. In contrast, this book seeks to go beyond this dichotomy. If in the previous chapters the book proposed a way to rehabilitate the colonial and FD moments in order to understanding the development of contemporary documentary film practices; now it shall try to disassociate the concept of ‘being independent’ from the image Anand Patwardhan only. Disassociating the idea of ‘being independent’ from Anand Patwardhan does not however mean bypassing the significant work that Patwardhan has done since the 1970s. Rather, it signifies analysing (and thus integrating) Patwardhan’s filmmaking within a wider historical context made up of other independent practices that emerged before or simultaneously to his. Moreover, this means acknowledging (once again) that film practices are often discursively constructed through categorisations concerning ‘films’, ‘filmmakers’ or ‘filmmaking’. Categories are constitutive of history and the way in which we talk about films and filmmakers, but in order to talk about them we should take into consideration how the process of categorisation takes place in relation to specific films and filmmakers. If not interrogated in relation to one another, these categorisations always contribute to a fixed, historical discourse (à la Foucault) that overshadows some possible others (cf. Guha and Spivak 1988). In the previous chapter we saw, for instance, how discursive categorisations of FD films have created (over a long period of time) an ‘objective’, ‘single’ idea about the FD vis-­à-vis its multiple productions and activities. This chapter continues to look at the historical mechanisms through which film practices and discourses are constructed and classified by film critics, film scholars and filmmakers themselves; yet this time in relation to the question of ‘being independent’. As I argued in my PhD thesis, from my numerous 2007–2009 conversations with documentary filmmakers it emerged that for several of my interlocutors the association of their contemporary practice with Anand Patwardhan was sometimes ‘fictitious’ because often, as with the aforementioned case of Aswani Pankaj, it was associated with what Aswani called Patwardhan’s ‘screening ideology’ – that is, the importance of screening films to people (explored in more detail in Chapter 4) rather than with his films. Stating that a sort of Patwardhan ‘screening ideology’ existed during the 1980s is also a way of acknowledging that, during this period (and beyond), there was widespread information about Patwardhan’s activities. This information circulated through the written narratives that Patwardhan produced about himself and more importantly, as I argued in my PhD, through what scholars and critics ‘fixed into a discourse’ by reproducing and ‘objectivising’ these narratives into a universal meta-­narrative about ‘independent’ film practices in India. My 2007–2009 conversations with filmmakers demonstrate that the concept of ‘being independent’ was a much more controversial

The growth of independent practices   83 category, and it was not necessarily associated with Patwardhan. By and large, it was coupled with those filmmaking practices in India that existed outside state control and against state power, yet sometimes it was associated with being independent from funding bodies and, for some, even from mainstream cinemas (cf. Battaglia 2012a). Because of this multiple understanding of ‘being independent’, during the last period of my fieldwork (and during the writing-­up of my PhD – that is, while doing my ethno-­graphy of my first-­person encounters with filmmakers in India; cf. Introduction) I pushed myself towards an exploration of the multiple meanings of ‘being independent’ during the 1960s and 1970s – that is, before and during Patwardhan’s first filming activities. This exploration brought me towards three main categories of ‘being independent’ in the 1960s and 1970s. This classification depends on where we place our accent when talking about independent practices: the filmmaker, the filmmaking or the film? As this chapter will point out, these three categories also reflect different types of independent ‘cinema’ that existed in this particular historical period. These ‘cinemas’ shared a number of practitioners, making the concept of ‘independent’ a blurred category that was constantly shifting between different cinematic forms. Nevertheless, let us look at these categories and film practices one by one.

Independent filmmakers If we return for a moment to the history of the activities of the FD and we begin to believe that the FD was not a homogeneous state institution but an organisation that encompassed a multiplicity of different film practices, then we can say that the category of ‘independent filmmaker’ emerged from precisely the antagonism between the IDPA and the FD, discussed in Chapter 2. Indeed, in the 1950s, ‘being independent’ never meant independence from the national discourse. Rather, it meant being able to make films outside the official control of the FD. For this reason, often ‘independent filmmakers’ were also referred to as ‘outside producers’, stressing the fact that they were not employed by the government to make films but rather free to accept proposals from independent funders. It is precisely because the film activities of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ filmmakers (or ‘producers’ as they called themselves at that time) were not different in their political intention that when in the mid-­1960s the FD allowed ‘independent’ filmmakers to collaborate with the institution, the latter accepted benevolently. In fact, independent filmmakers not only embraced this opportunity but also stopped making the concept of ‘independence’ central to their discourse. For them, the FD simply became another source of funding (cf. Baptista 1987). As I pointed out in the previous chapter, opening the FD up to independent filmmakers was an initiative undertaken by chief producer Jean Bhownagary. When Bhownagary returned to the FD in the mid-­1960s, he

84   The growth of independent practices brought to the institution the experience of cinema vérité that he had acquired during his years in France. Accordingly, the FD began to make different kinds of films in which the filmmaker could experiment with form, going beyond the FD’s classic expository mode. Interestingly, those who worked with Bhownagary were not necessarily filmmakers employed by the FD. Often they were independent, or ‘freelance’, filmmakers alternating productions for the FD with those for private sponsors. The mixed group of FD and non-­FD filmmakers of this period included Fali Bilimoria, Clement Baptista, Santi Chowdhury, Homi Sethna, N.S. Thapa and Gopal Dutt, to mention but a few. However, the names that today are most associated with the vibrant atmosphere of the mid-­1960s are K.S. Chari, S.N.S. Sastry, Pramod Pati and S. Sukhdev, filmmakers who were not necessarily employed by the FD. The nationalist historiography of documentary films, however, has largely neglected this fact,2 providing a narrative in which K.S. Chari, S.N.S. Sastry, Pramod Pati and S. Sukhdev are presented as the pride of the FD. In contrast, I believe that these filmmakers’ practices should be contextualised in relation to other independent practices that were simultaneously growing across the country. But to better grasp the creative atmosphere of this period, let me provide some specific details about these filmmakers and their films. In 1966, K.S. Chari made Face to Face in collaboration with T.A. Abraham. In Narwekar’s words, ‘for the first time in the history of the Films Division the camera and the microphone had been brought down to the street level with the man on the street doing the talking’ (1994: 23). By employing a cinema vérité style (cf. Rouch 1975, 1978, 2003), the film captures contemporary opinions about the meaning of democracy by interviewing people ranging from students to taxi drivers, to intellectuals and workers. Chari continues with this technique and develops it further in his subsequent film Transition (1967), in which he goes on to the street to explore the mood of the people during the 20th anniversary of India’s Independence. At the same time as Transition (1967), S.N.S. Sastry made a film called I Am Twenty. This film enters the private space of young people born in 1947, who talk about their dreams and aspirations and express their hopes and fears about the future of their country. According to Garga, the hopes of these young people are ‘placed in sharp contrast with distressing scenes of contemporary India’ (2007: 172–173). Narwekar describes Sastry’s style as always ‘nervous and flashy’, mixing ‘pretty images’ with ‘harsh sounds’ (1992: 49; 1994: 24). He states that Sastry studied his filmmaking technique in response to an imagined audience who had come to see not a documentary but a feature film in a cinema hall (ibid.). Hence, Narwekar argues, Sastry ‘demanded attention, raised questions and probed beneath the surface of the gloss and accepted viewpoints’ (Narwekar 1994: 24). If we are to identify a specific element that makes I Am Twenty a unique documentary thus far in Indian history, it would be its characters’ fearless speaking in front of the camera. In James Beveridge’s words, 

The growth of independent practices   85 I Am Twenty has been a very successful example … of this [direct camera] approach. India’s people come at you, right off the screen, with force and pungency. They are real. Each is an individual. What they say is so much more convincing, or noteworthy, than what the impersonal commentator can say. (Beveridge 1969: 24) Equal in provocation but much more experimental in form and abstraction was the work of Pramod Pati. According to Garga, Pati was probably ‘the most original talent working within the Films Division’ (2007: 171). Apart from his early 1960s work, such as Our India (1961) and Hamara Rashtragan (1964), Pati excelled at a variety of short films, some only one- or two-­minutes long. His works include Perspectives (1966), Claxplosion (1968), Explorer (1968) and Trip (1970). In Shai Heredia’s view, ‘Pramod Pati was one of the key filmmakers at this time. His personalized syntax in both image making and sound design defied genre specificity’ (2006: 43). For instance, in Explorer Pati does not use any commentary and he juxtaposes tantric symbols with images of teenagers doing the twist; he also repeats images of young people, which Garga reads as ‘all of them searching, seeking, exploring’ (2007: 172). In line with this approach, in the late 1970s Vijay B. Chandra made Child on a Chess Board (1979), and from this time on the FD began to classify these films under the category of ‘experimental documentaries’. Heredia describes Pati’s and Chandra’s films as the beginning of ‘a distinctive genre of short experimental filmmaking in India’ (2006: 44). Shyam Benegal in contrast, asks the question: ‘What [film] can you deal with in 13–15–20 min [compulsorily imposed by the FD for theatrical exhibition]? Definitely not all the subjects you want. So, you have to deal with it in an “impressionistic” way’ (in Waugh, video-­interview 1988). Hence, for Benegal, experimental films were simply a response to length restrictions imposed by the FD (see Figure 3.1). Whether these films initiated a distinctive genre of experimental film in India (Heredia 2006), or were simply the result of the strict film-­length limitation imposed by the FD (Benegal, in Waugh, video interview 1988), it is hard to ignore the fact that they were part of the same vibe of multifaceted independent film practices that mushroomed in this historical moment. In particular, I would categorise Pati’s and Chandra’s films together with the new wave experimentations which, as I shall illustrate in a moment, arrived in India in the same period thanks to the work of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, who, among other things, made films for the FD (Gangar 2006). Nevertheless, the film industry figure who more than anyone else in the 1960s and 1970s acted as a bridge between FD and non-­FD productions, as well as between experimental and non-­ experimental films and pro-­government and anti-­establishment sentiment, was without doubt, S. Sukhdev.

86   The growth of independent practices

Figure 3.1  Award: cartoon in Docu-Scene India. Source: Chanana 1987. Courtesy of the IDPA and the FD.

Sukhdev Singh Sandhu, as Sukhdev was originally called, came from a peasant Sikh family near Ludhiana and later moved to Bombay. He lost his father when he was still young, and his mother, sister and brother-­in-law helped him to go to college. Mohan describes him as ‘a rebel [who] cut off his hair, shaved off his beard and discarded the turban, the comb and the bracelet while studying at Khalsa College and he lost his stipend for violating the Khalsa ideals’ (1984: 6). According to Mohan (1984), Sukhdev did not ‘resist’ more than two years in college before dropping out; his future was in cinema. In the mid-­1950s, Sukhdev started working as an apprentice for Paul Zils – that is, one of the key figures of the 1950s who initiated the periodical Indian Documentary and the IDPA. He used to spend time at Zils’ editing table ‘picking up the rudiments of editing from M.I. Sheikh, Fali Bilimoria and Paul Zils and from Hari S. Dasgupta and Jim Beveridge and from the late Dr P.V. Pathy and Jean Bhownagary’ (ibid.: 168). According to Mohan (1984), after three years of apprenticeship, Sukhdev secretly compiled photographs and stock shots about Zils’ career and gave them to Zils as a present for his birthday. Zils left India for Germany in 1959. By then, Sukhdev had become a director: he finished his first film, Wazir the Kaghzi, in 1958. The film was about the handmade paper industry and was sponsored by the Khadi and Village Industries Commission. Sukhdev set up his own production house called ‘United Film Arts’ and from this period onwards began to make films as an independent filmmaker. He made Man the Creator (1964) and The Saint and the Peasant (1966) for the Khadi and Village Industries Commission. However, it was And Miles to Go (1965) that signalled the beginning of Sukhdev’s success both in India and abroad. Sukhdev’s contemporaries labelled this film the

The growth of independent practices   87 first ‘angry’ documentary, as it built on inequalities in Indian society by playing with juxtapositions of poverty and wealth (cf. Mohan 1984). The film won the special prize of the jury at the Third International Film Festival of India (henceforth IFFI) held in New Delhi, and it ‘initiated’ Sukhdev into a well-­known circuit of national and international filmmakers and film critics, such as Satyajit Ray, Lindsay Anderson, Mikhail Kalatozov and Chidananda Das Gupta. However, Sukhdev narrates that when Lindsay Anderson asked him ‘do you like your film?’ he replied, ‘I like the first half but not the second half…. Because the censor made the second half ’ (Sukhdev, 1979 in Vasudev and Lenglet 1983: 308). Despite the success of And Miles to Go, which convinced the FD to acquire the film and make it part of its collection, Sukhdev was never convinced about it. Its original title was The Great March, The Great Promise and before being cut by the censor board it was a 30-minute film. Sukhdev talks about the transformation of his film as follows. … When I showed the film And Miles to Go [to the first censor officer I met], he said, ‘Young man, what do you think you are doing. Do you want to change the Government?’ I was staggered. I said, ‘Sir, do you think I can?’ And for three months I was at his office. And he made half of that film. Actually, the film was called The Great March, The Great Promise. But they wanted me to change the title … At that time, Nehru just died. (Sukhdev, 1979 interview in Vasudev and Lenglet 1983: 308) To Sukhdev, the most difficult step for an independent filmmaker was to get a film accepted by the censor board. When that step had been achieved, it was easier to receive the FD’s approval for distribution. In this respect, Sukhdev believed that the censor board had always been a problem for documentary filmmakers making films on social issues. In his words,  it’s always like that. Before the emergency, it was the same. When I made India ’67, it was the same thing. Nothing has changed. With these chaps … we never discuss films. Has it passed? Yes, it has passed. That’s all. (Sukhdev, 1979 interview in Vasudev and Lenglet 1983: 305) At the time of my fieldwork, Sukhdev was mostly remembered for his India ’67, which Barnouw and Krishnaswamy describe as ‘a witty stimulating, sardonic – and at the same time inspiring – juxtaposition of footage, music, and sounds from all parts of India, which identified achievement as well as continuing problems’ (1980: 268). This film, which reached Indian audiences in an ‘approved’ 20-minute version called An Indian Day (ibid.), transformed Sukhdev into a ‘rebel’, ‘angry’, ‘anti-­establishment’ filmmaker in the eyes of both film critics and his contemporaries.3 In 1971–1972,

88   The growth of independent practices Sukhdev made Nine Months to Freedom and, because of the political engagement with Partition and the birth of Bangladesh (explored in the film), Mohan, among others, even attributed to Sukhdev the label of ‘committed filmmaker’ (1984: 69). In contrast to these categorisations, Sukhdev saw himself simply as part of a category of independent filmmakers who did not make ‘personal cinema’ in the name of art for art’s sake (Sukhdev 1984b: 97) but made films of ‘social relevance’ or in the name of a sort of ‘socialism’, as he himself pointed out in a public speech at the premiere of Nine Months to Freedom. In our country, there are many new things happening and I think this is one of them [showing documentary films in commercial theatres] … that the documentary film is going to find its own place. And not get lost in these huge Hindi glossies … and chaps like me, who has made this film, my name is Sukhdev … We intend to create this revolution in mass media. In order to … well, what is called … I still haven’t understood the word … ‘socialism’ but I suppose we are getting somewhere. (S. Sukhdev, 1976 public speech. In Shabnam Sukhdev’s The Last Adieu, 2014) This statement tells us not only about Sukhdev’s need to make a cinema of social relevance but also about his need to show his film to a large public. Moreover it tells us about the achievement of this, by the mid-­1970s, on a collective basis – that is, as a collective ‘we’, active in different film-­fields yet away from mainstream cinema. By drawing a clear line between ‘commercial Hindi’ and ‘other’ cinemas, Sukdhev somehow suggests that independent filmmakers of this period were all engaged with other independent (non-­commercial) practices. If this was the case, new wave cinema cannot be excluded from this discussion.

Independent filmmaking: the New Wave In 1969, Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969) received three different national awards: one for best film, one for best direction and one for best actor (Vasudev 1986; Carrigy 2011a). Around the same time, Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti (1971) arrived as a ‘shock’ (Vasudev 1986: 99) or a ‘scandal’ (Cossio 1998: 123) for filmmakers and critics of cinema in India. Both films attracted critical reaction from the well-­established Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who accused Bhuvan Shome of not being sufficiently innovative and succeeding only because of its use of popular cinematic conventions (1976: 99), and Uski Roti of making use of a too private mode of expression vis-­à-vis a genuine interest in human beings (ibid.: 105). In spite of Ray’s criticism (which was most likely read in the light of his widely-­ acknowledged filmmaking practice and his fame in the 1960s), Bhuvan

The growth of independent practices   89 Shome and Uski Roti signalled the beginning of a new form of independent filmmaking in India, by and large known as the ‘new wave’.4 A decade after the establishment of the Films Division (FD), the Nehruvian government set up other state institutions related to film practices. One of these was the Films Finance Corporation (FFC), which from the early 1960s started to provide loans to ‘independent’ films such as Bhuvan Shome and Uski Roti.5 The FFC started out with the objective to ‘promote and assist the mainstream film industry by providing, affording or procuring finance or other facilities for the production of films of good standard’ (Gangar 2006: 12) – that is, it emphasised the ‘good standard’ of mainstream cinema rather than of ‘independent’ films. By the end of the 1960s, however, the FFC’s policy, under the influence of Indira Gandhi, had changed.6 It began to promote low-­budget and experimental proposals for films detached from the commercial circuits, thus acting as a ‘midwife to the birth of talented film makers’ (Das Gupta 1983: 42). The FFC therefore became a sort of patron of a new institutionalised independent filmmaking. Along with other private agencies, which Vasudev (1986) rightly points out also supported independent films,7 the FFC funded a new generic form of filmmaking that became known as the ‘new wave’. Yet, what kind of films emerged thanks to these new funding opportunities? And to what extent did they overlap with documentary practices? Today, we can retrospectively identify several filmmaking directions and among them the development of two main new wave styles which, borrowing respectively from descriptions provided by Vasudev (1986) and Raghavendra (1990), I categorise as ‘experimental’ and ‘social realist’. These two categories come from the work of Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray, two well-­known 1950s Bengali filmmakers, who began a new tradition of cinema in India. According to Vasudev, Ray was ‘the aristocratic product of an intellectual and artistic family in a Bengal that subsumed the classical culture of the East and the West’ (1986: 22) and his cinema was ‘sophisticated, subtle, committed to a universal humanity that transcends barriers’ (ibid.). In contrast, Ghatak was ‘deeply steeped in Indian culture, classical and popular’ and ‘Marxism [wa]s his political philosophy’ (ibid.). According to Haimanti Banerjee, Ghatak was a ‘restless, hyperactive man constantly searching for new dimensions of the aspects of objective reality as well as its transformation in the work of art’ (1985: 12–13). To some extent, we can say that the aforementioned Uski Roti (Mani Kaul 1969) and Bhuvan Shome (Mrinal Sen 1969) were the continuation of these two traditions initiated by Ghatak and Ray, laying the foundations for the emergence of ‘experimental’ and ‘social realist’ films. To grasp the significance of these two film categories in relation to other independent filmmaking practices, we should look at them separately. Moreover, we should pay attention to the way in which filmmakers associated with these categories described their own practice, and how film critics and scholars talked about them too.

90   The growth of independent practices The experimental approach FTII graduates, Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, are perhaps the most representative of what I call the ‘experimental approach’. From the beginning of their practice, these filmmakers became important names in new wave cinema. They adopted Ritwick Ghatak’s aesthetics and began a new ‘experimental’ style, which blurred the boundaries between fiction and documentary film. This style prioritised formal experimentation around topics concerning music, art, literature and cultural traditions.8 Arun Khopkar (1989) regards Mani Kaul’s films as the work of a master craftsman made with patience, care and meticulous attention to detail – always in search of technical solutions (see MacDonald and Cousins 1996). Similarly, he describes Kumar Shahani’s technique of creating a single ‘unit’ in each shot as ‘the cut in the gesture [which] does not coincide with a change of shot, but occurs within a shot allowing for fluid and subtle transitions’ (Khopkar 1985: 196, emphasis in original; see also Mishra 1990: 5). To some extent, both Kaul’s and Shahani’s films were ‘daring attempts made to establish through interesting and formalistic experiments a defamiliarized way of looking at contemporary India’ (Cooper 1991: 34). In a 1988 video-­interview with Thomas Waugh, Mani Kaul describes his filmmaking technique as aimed at ‘non-­dramatic, non-­narrative, non-­ psychological’ films, which treat the ‘being’ not as a ‘phenomenon but as a life tension’ (video-­interview 1988).9 He asserts that he never worked with a script and preferred to improvise by ‘responding to life … letting emotions respond to the location’ (ibid.). To Kaul, improvisation was possible only through an unstructured filmmaking scheme – that is, a scheme that ‘disciplines’ but within which everything is allowed (ibid.). It is only through this technique, Kaul argues, that a filmmaker can let images ‘tell their stories’ and locate them and their characters back in their own time and space (ibid.; cf. also Kaul 1991). Shahani’s view was not far from Kaul’s. In his writings, Shahani points out that, ‘ “facts” are not absolute figures. Facts are constituted, mediated through human agency’ and because of this mediation ‘a film, whether named documentary or fiction, re-­formulates for us a reality, itself full of constituted things, objects, and events’ (1988: 28). Shahani continues by saying that ‘it is up to the artists and filmmakers … to question given truths as facts; … to restore links between emotion and knowledge, inference and experience’ (ibid.: 31). This view is reflected in Shahani’s films, which different scholars have regarded as situated between avant-­garde and mainstream cinema (Mohamed 1991), as non-­conformist cinema (Mishra 1990) as using a mix of Ghatak’s and Ray’s teaching to attempt to present the events always ‘at an alienating distance from the spectator’ (Cooper 1991: 35). As emerges from Kaul’s and Shahani’s accounts, this experimental approach did not make any straightforward distinction between fiction and documentary film genres. These two genres were two aspects of the

The growth of independent practices   91 same filmmaking process that advocated a different relationship between the filmmaker and the film subject, implicitly challenging audiences’ reactions. This relationship should be positioned not far from the sensorial film experience that Laura Marks named ‘haptic visuality’ (2000: 2). It was indeed a cinema that ‘invite[s] the viewers to respond to the image in a more intimate, embodied way, and thus facilitate[s] the experience of other sensory impressions’ (ibid.). To some extent, we can say that Kaul’s and Shahani’s film practices moved away from Ghatak’s political approach, drawing attention to the form and the human agency of the film medium, more than to its political value. However, despite the way in which we, critics and scholars, may perceive and discuss these films, this is not how the filmmakers themselves necessarily perceived them. According to Shahani, the influence of Ghatak’s cinema on younger generations of filmmakers is not to be seen in the way in which they reproduced his techniques but in the way in which they appreciated his ‘disenchant[ment] with those of his colleagues who wanted to maintain a false unity and were not, implicitly, pained enough by the splintering of every form of social and cultural values and movements’ (in Carrigy 2011b: 131). It is precisely in the tension between the craft of filmmaking and the sensitivity to social and cultural values of reality that, I suggest, we should identify continuity with documentary practices of the present day – especially those that are more artistically oriented. Although this relationship may not seem obvious, we can retrospectively identify connections between the 1970s work of Shahani and Kaul and those contemporary documentary filmmakers who have been interested in giving lives to images – even politically charged images – in a more ‘experimental’ way. A statement such as ‘I don’t want to be avant-­garde at all … I just want to make films I believe in’, may sound familiar to scholars and contemporary artists who have engaged at least once with Amar Kanwar – a nationally and internationally renowned contemporary Indian filmmaker and artist. However, these words were pronounced in the late 1980s by Kumar Shahani and published in an article written by Khalid Mohamed dedicated to Shahani’s work (1991: 110). Such a connection should start by suggesting that contemporary twenty-­first century film practices may not necessarily be perceived as something ‘new’ in their style, but rather as a continuation of practices that emerged in specific historical moments. In short, with Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, the experimental new wave style opened up possibilities of merging fiction and non-­fiction filmmaking techniques in the late 1960s and 1970s, while also informing some of the contemporary documentary practices interested in bridging the same filmmaking gap. The social realist approach In contrast to the experimental approach, two other well-­known filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, Mrinal Sen and Shyam Benegal, built

92   The growth of independent practices upon Satyajit Ray’s humanism and explored more directly forms of social realism in their films. Moinak Biswas states that Sen’s films ‘attempt to answer the call for a political cinema more ardently’ than Ray’s (2006: 5). Similarly, Raghavendra highlights that while ‘Mrinal Sen attempted to integrate Ray’s lyricism with social concern’, Pather Panchali (1955), among other films made by Ray, ‘shows us poverty but doesn’t attempt to explain its social causes’ (1990: 6). In contrast to these views, Sen’s filmmaking was by and large depicted as employing Ray’s humanism. This provoked a reaction in Sen himself who stated: [Bhuvan Shome was meant to be] a kind of comedy which would poke fun at the morality which dominated our society, determined it and continued to build on it. My intention was never to ‘tame’ a tough bureaucrat. On the contrary, my intention was to corrupt a bureaucrat suffering from Victorian morality, yes, by using his own yardstick. But funnily, the popularity of the film was on the belief that I had humanised a tough bureaucrat. This was far from my intention. (Mrinal Sen in Manjula Sen 1991: 98) Drawing on this dual interpretation of Sen’s filmmaking (was his style reproducing Ray’s humanism or not?), Raghavendra provides further analysis. He describes Bhuvan Shome as a film that created the category of ‘social realist cinema’ and paved the way for two other filmmaking approaches: ‘passive humanism’ and ‘angrier cinema’ (1990: 8–9). While the first, ‘passive humanism’, was a cinema that highlighted poverty, suffering and endurance (which others have also called ‘middle’ or ‘regional’ cinema),10 ‘angrier cinema’ was for Raghavendra a different type of category as it opened up new forms of filmmaking beyond Sen’s style. ‘Angrier cinema’ was a cinema that was angry at the political instability of the late 1960s and 1970s. According to Raghavendra, it included the (documentary) filmmaking of Goutam Ghose, Utpalendu Chakraborty and Buddhadeb Dasgupta, but also of individuals such as Shyam Benegal who, by and large, were associated with Satyajit Ray’s humanism. Raghavendra argues that Benegal recognised ‘social anger’ as ‘a particular easy emotion’ (ibid.: 11). ‘Where the passive humanist [approach] has victims for empathy, Benegal also added villains to despise’ (ibid.). Sangeeta Datta describes Benegal’s filmmaking ‘as an instrument for social commentary and change’ (2002: 30). Thomas Waugh prefers to use the term ‘documentary sensibility’ (video-­interview 1988); Jyotika Virdi rather talks about an approach made of ‘distinctive vanguard politics and aesthetic conventions’ (2011: 149). Quite detached from the way in which others talked about his films, in a 1988 interview with Thomas Waugh, Benegal described his work as filmmaking with strong ‘location involvement’. In other words, to him his

The growth of independent practices   93 approach was something that brought the process of filmmaking and the real life of people much closer to each other.  You get into the life rhythm of the village and you eat the food that they produce and you drink the milk of their cows. All this must happen. And you get into a kind of rhythm which is the rhythm of the people there.  (Benegal, in Waugh video-­interview 1988)  It is precisely this strong relationship with the local environment that, for Benegal, made a film more real and to some extent closer to the documentary approach. This attitude was not far from both Ray’s humanism and Italian neorealism, which was an inspiration for several filmmakers during this period in India (cf. Biswas 2007, 2011). Because of this resemblance, Maithili Rao classifies Benegal’s work as part of ‘middle cinema’ (Rao 1991: 26). In her words, middle-­cinema is ‘a sincere preoccupation with significant themes, adopting mostly a realistic narrative style for greater accessibility. And yet, it leaves room for innovation and individual expression’ (ibid.: 23). It is, therefore, as if Benegal fitted into both the ‘passive humanism’ and the ‘angrier cinema’ that Raghavendra (1990) identifies in his subcategories of Sen’s social realism. We can also argue that as with that of Mrinal Sen, Benegal’s filmmaking does not find any fixed place in the literature of Indian cinema. Indeed, both Sen’s and Benegal’s films should be regarded as part of the same social realist approach that opened up further ways to make ‘new wave films’ (including ‘middle cinema’, ‘passive humanism’ and ‘angrier cinema’); but they also stimulated new ways of thinking about the documentary film genre beyond the classic boundary between fiction and non-­fiction films. It is precisely thanks to the flexible nature of the category of social realist films, that the filmmaking of Sen and Benegal can also be connected with the category of cinema of ‘social relevance’, as advocated in the same period by the well-­ known documentary filmmaker Sukhdev. As has already been said, the independent film practices that emerged in this period all overlapped with each other, oscillating between a sort of angry cinema, a quasi-­angry cinema and a not-­quite-exclusively Rayan passive humanism. Indeed, like the independent new wave filmmaking, the documentary cinema of social relevance was ‘new’ in its sensitivity to Indian social life but it never questioned the politics of the nation state, which in a way made its ‘new’ practice not far from that of filmmakers such as Sen and Benegal. Hence, if we are to connect Shahani’s and Kaul’s film style to that of Sen and Benegal in relation to documentary practices, we can say that directly or indirectly they all influenced the documentary scene with an ‘experimental’ and/or ‘social realist’ approach that continues even in the present day. The connection between the new wave filmmaking and other independent documentary practices, however, is not limited to filmmaking style

94   The growth of independent practices and filmmakers’ intention. The role played by filmmakers in both the new wave cinema and documentary practices is thus far a neglected aspect in the literature on late-­1970s Indian independent filmmaking. If we search for the names of filmmakers whose films are associated with the new wave in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1994), we discover that apart from the well-­discussed fiction films there are very large numbers of documentaries that, thus far, seem to have been left out of academic analysis even though the documentary genre was in the air. Ironically, there is no filmmaker associated with the new wave who, according to the Encyclopaedia …, did not make a documentary film in the 1960s or 1970s. Several of them are still making documentaries today. Benegal, for instance, made 14 documentaries between 1962 and 1973 before making his landmark feature film Ankur (1973). By 1988, he had completed least 30 different documentaries (in Waugh, video-­interview 1988), and he continues to make documentary films even today. His Lost Childhood (2007) is an example of one of his latest. It is a film about child labour and inequalities in India, which may suggest that Benegal has always had a parallel attachment to the documentary genre, which more adequately deals with certain topics such as, in this case, child labour.11 Furthermore, several filmmakers trained by the FTII and in receipt of FFC funds, made documentary films sponsored by the FD. Amrit Gangar, who set up a database of the FD’s productions between its inception and 1995, states that, Mani Kaul has made several interesting documentaries for the Films Division, as an outside independent producer. And there are many other young and old leading filmmakers – including Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Arvindan, Kamal Swaroop, Rajat Kapoor – whose films are in the FD’s collection. (Gangar 2006: 13)  As Raja Narayan points out, many of these filmmakers ‘turn[ed] to documentaries for various reasons – the freedom and the immense satisfaction the medium provides and to take a break from the travails of feature filmmaking’ (1997: 28). For Shyam Benegal and Goutam Ghose, the reason for the overlap between fiction and documentary practices was more precise.12 Both argue that although it is true that many new wave filmmakers also made documentary films, several of them did not pursue this avenue further due to the strong restrictions imposed by the FD’s distribution system (Benegal, in Waugh video-­interview 1988) and the control over film production (Ghose in Mohamed 1988). In fact, during the 1970s, opting for FFC funding was for independent filmmakers simply a way of being able to deal with film subjects independently. Yet, what if filmmakers wanted to clearly distance themselves from state politics? What if they had a clear anti-­establishment voice in their films? It is precisely in this case

The growth of independent practices   95 that we should talk about ‘independent film’. This category of film practice is connected with the period of political instability of the late 1960s and early 1970s that preceded the 1975–1977 Indian State of Emergency, and it is to this that I now turn my attention.

Independent film Sudipta Kaviraj divides the history of Indian politics into five main periods: ‘Realignments, 1946–1950’; ‘Experimentation, 1950–1956’; ‘Consolidation, 1956–1964’; ‘Instability, 1965–1975’; and ‘Crisis, 1975–1987’ (Kaviraj 1988: 2429). In the contemporary understanding of the development of ‘independent’ documentary practices in India, the 1975–1977 State of Emergency is often used as a point of departure. My starting point is that 1970s independent films were not a consequence of the Indian State of Emergency – that is, to use Kaviraj’s terminology, of the period of ‘Crisis’. Rather, they were the product of the period of ‘Instability’, which preceded the State of Emergency. According to Kaviraj, India went through a deep political crisis in the few years after Nehru’s death. In policy terms, this crisis was fraught, Kaviraj argues, ‘with the most serious retrograde possibilities’ (1988: 2437). In 1966, Indira Gandhi succeeded her father Jawaharlal Nehru unexpectedly, and formally became Prime Minister in 1967, when she led her party to an election victory (Guha 2007: 433). Indira Gandhi became part of the paradox of continuity, which historically marked the politics of the Congress Party (Kaviraj 1988).  No one would normally claim that Indira Gandhi wished to take the country on a very different line of development or diverge sharply from the policy design left behind by Nehru; yet no one would probably claim that she left this design unaltered.  (Kaviraj 1988: 2437) In other words, Nehru had to discover a way to lead a country towards ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ while being aligned with the ideals of the pre-­ Independence freedom struggle movement (see Chatterjee 1986, 1993), and in the late 1960s, Indira Gandhi’s ideological leadership had to build upon Nehru’s image. But, Ramachandra Guha (2007) states, the parallel ends there. Whereas Nehru had sought to unite a divided India through the articulation of his four main pillars: democracy, secularism, socialism and non-­ alignment, Indira Gandhi’s ‘core belief had not been revealed to either party or public’ (2007: 434). In this respect, Thomas Blom Hansen argues that the new politics of the late 1960s gradually became seen as an ‘ “immoral vocation”, a site of unprincipled pragmatism, corruption, nepotism and greed’ (1999: 56). With the 1969 split in Congress, Indira Gandhi consolidated a system of authority based on her persona. Through this system, 

96   The growth of independent practices the formal structures in the party were bypassed, internal elections were continuously postponed and stalled, and large groups of ambitious but inexperienced politicians made fast careers in the political apparatus by virtue of their unconditional loyalty to the central leadership. (Hansen 1999: 135) If corruption and nepotism were two of the negative elements of Indian politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, poverty, insufficient basic education, and an increasing gender divide were others (Guha 2007: 477). It is at this historical juncture that, in 1974, student demonstrations took place in different part of the country, known today as the ‘JP movement’ (cf. Chandra 2003; Guha 2007). In Guha’s explanation, due to a notorious regime of corruption, in January 1974 Gujarati students led a movement demanding the dissolution of the Congress of their state-­government (2007: 477). This demonstration ‘inspired students in Bihar to launch a struggle against misgovernance in their own state’ (ibid.). The Bihar movement gained popularity when the Gandhian reformer, Jayaprakash Narayan, took over as a leader. From this moment, the Bihar uprising took the name of the ‘JP movement’.  ‘JP’ [a short form of Jayaprakash Narayan] was now seventy-­one, a veteran of movements, militant as well as peaceful, the upholder or instigator of a hundred mostly worthy causes.… The call from the students was one he found impossible to refuse. For, long ago, he had started out as a student radical himself.  (Guha 2007: 478) This political instability turned into what is known as the 1975–1977 State of Emergency. On the morning of 26 June 1975, Indira Gandhi announced the Emergency, declaring on All-­India Radio, ‘There is nothing to panic about’. To her, the Emergency was a necessary response to ‘the deep and widespread conspiracy which has been brewing ever since I began to introduce certain progressive measures of benefit to the common man and woman of India’ (in Guha 2007: 493). Following this declaration, political leaders started to be imprisoned, the independent press was censored for the first time in the history of post-­1947 India (Sainath 1998: 18–19), and all forms of media, from press to cartoons to radio and film, started to be controlled (Guha 2007; Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980). Despite all this, Bipan Chandra points out, none of the public institutions stopped functioning (2003: 261). On the contrary, with no more political agitations, public institutions functioned better than before. On this basis, there is reason to believe, Chandra (ibid.) argues, that ‘Indian democracy’ was used as the main justification for the declaration of the Emergency as much as it was

The growth of independent practices   97 used by the JP movement to justify its stance in relation to what it saw as the corrupt politics of the state. It is in this context of antagonism between Indian citizens and Indian state politics that I place the beginning of the making of ‘independent films’. As I have already said, films had by now become significant vehicles for the promotion of state politics. The new FCC policy in support of new wave independent filmmaking, for instance, was also part of the state’s agenda to propagate its own politics in spite of the period of political instability (cf. Prasad 1998; Sarkar 2009). Similarly, the return of Jean Bohwnagary to the FD as chief producer occurred because of a specific request made by Indira Gandhi (cf. Narwekar 1992: 50). Although other independent film practices emerged in these years, neither the new wave filmmaker nor the independent documentary filmmaker, working within and outside the FD, questioned state politics. This was probably due to the fact that, in Vasudevan’s words, the ‘Indian state, social, and civil institutions, organizational frameworks and cultural forms underwent a crisis whose ramifications were not immediately clear’ (2011: 304). The independent films that emerged in these years were an immediate response to this political context. Nevertheless, filmmakers who started making independent films in this period were not disconnected from one another. Rather, they built upon (or maintained a connection with) new wave cinema and other independent practices. I believe that focusing on the way in which film critics, film scholars and filmmakers themselves talked about these practices can be a useful starting point to better understand the links among the different ranges of independent film practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Films and filmmakers Individuals such as Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Goutam Ghose and Utpalendu Chakraborty began their filmmaking practices in Calcutta. In Bengal, there was already a political tradition linked to the arts, in particular to the politics and activities of the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (henceforth IPTA).13 Because of this existing tradition of politics and art, Vasudev names 1970s Bengali filmmaking as ‘the second breath’ (1986: 65–74). She contextualises these practices in the universities of the late 1960s, which, in her words, ‘became seats more of revolutionary fervour than of learning’ (ibid.: 66). Despite this, Vasudev (ibid.) associates this ‘second breath’ of filmmakers with new wave cinema and makes no reference to any other form of independent documentary that was emerging in this period. As with the documentary films made by Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal and Adoor Gopalakrishnan (discussed in the previous section), to date, no study I know of explores the documentary films made by Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Goutam Ghose and Utpalendu Chakraborty. Film critics, such as Vasudev (1986), do not provide sufficient documentation about these

98   The growth of independent practices documentaries, as their attention immediately switches to the feature films that these filmmakers directed. In the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, however, we read that Dasgupta made four documentaries between 1969 and 1978. Ghose made three between 1973 and 1979 one of which, Hungry Autumn (1976), ‘won critical acclaim and several awards’ (Vasudev 1986: 67). Chakraborty made a significant documentary called Mukti Chai (1977), which campaigned for the release of political prisoners during the Emergency. After this, he went directly into fiction films; yet neither he nor Dasgupta or Ghose have ever completely left the documentary genre, right up to the present day. However, as Anand Patwardhan pointed out to me, Dasgupta, Ghose and Chakraborty ‘disappeared from the documentary scene in India as they used the documentary form to enter the feature industry’.14 In spite of this, there is scope for believing that these filmmakers were the first in the early 1970s to address the widespread inequalities across the country and also the first to question ‘the basic formation of the modern state’ (Dutta 2002: 51). Their film practices and narratives are important to better frame the beginning of independent film in this period and juxtapose them with the work and discourses of more well-­known figures of the same period, such as Tapan Bose and, above all, Anand Patwardhan. Parallel narratives: Dasgupta, Chakraborty, Ghose, Patwardhan and Bose Little has been written about Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s documentaries. According to Vasudev, he began as a writer of poetry but due to ‘the flame of youth and anger’ burning brightly inside him and a context of ‘despair, destruction and cynicism … film was the obvious medium that could contain all these and convey them most powerfully to large numbers of people’ (Vasudev 1986: 66). Dasgupta made documentaries, such as Continent of Love (1969), Fishermen of Sundarban (1970), Dholer Raja Khirode Natta (1973) and Saratchandra (1974), before making his first feature film Dooratwa (1978). After this film, he became interested in exploring the contemporary middle-­class situation in Bengal in response to the Naxalite movement (cf. the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema). Unlike with Dasgupta, more has been written about Utpalendu Chakraborty’s and Goutam Ghose’s lives and documentary films. Vasudev notes that for Chakraborty ‘life is real, life is earnest, so is anger’ and that for this reason his films ‘come closest to the concept of the Third Cinema’ (ibid.: 69).15 Vasudev recalls that Chakraborty wanted to study art but was forced by his parents to study modern history (ibid.). He took part in the Calcutta food riots in 1966, when he was 18 years old, and was arrested during a demonstration. He became an active member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and worked as a teacher for tribal communities in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.

The growth of independent practices   99 Faced with the reality of absolute deprivation and unending exploitation, [Chakraborty] returned to the city determined to make others confront the truth and the terror.… He borrowed a movie camera and the result was Mukti Chai (1977), a 50-minute documentary on the mass movement for the release of political prisoners, incarcerated during the Emergency. (Ibid.; see also Chatterji 1994: 18) Goutam Ghose’s history and his personal narratives about his documentary films have circulated far and wide, to a much greater extent than those of his contemporaries.16 He was a journalist who travelled across India in the mid-­1970s, making ‘direct contact with the reality which la[id] behind the idealism of student politics’ (Vasudev 1986: 67). He crossed over to India from Bangladesh during Partition and went to live with his uncle from whom he received a Brownie camera. Ghose began by taking family pictures and was convinced by a close friend that he had a natural talent (Daylal 1991: 31–32). His interest in cinema came from watching Italian neorealist films and making small experimentations with the medium ‘in the cinema vérité style on the power crisis’ (ibid.: 33). As Ghose himself narrates, he became close to Sukhdev, who convinced him to make his own films (ibid.). Ghose made New Earth in 1973. It was a 20-minute black and white film on the plight of workers building a dam. These workers knew they had nowhere to go after the construction was over and, for this reason, sang songs that reminded them of their plight. According to Ghose, New Earth was seen widely and shown to theatres (Mohamed 1988: 17), which means that the film must have been approved by both the censor board and the FD. Ghose became successful, however, with his Hungry Autumn (1976). This film was shot in 16 mm with a Paillard Bolex and Ghose recounts that, because this was one of the first documentaries made using this technology in India, ‘People laughed at us in Calcutta, they thought we were crazy’ (ibid.). To make this documentary, Ghose and his team travelled ‘through the famine-­stricken areas of Bengal to report on the terrible starvation that the people were going through’ (iDaylal 1991: 33). This was the autumn of 1974. Soon after shooting the film, the team ran out of money and the film was shelved for about eight months. In 1976, under the Emergency, the censor board refused to approve it. The film, Ghose recounts, was passed by the board only later (Mohamed 1988: 17). Because of this delay, Ghose decided to screen his films ‘privately’ with the help of trade unions. In his words, ‘I organised shows in various cities to make the people aware of what was happening in the rural areas’ (ibid.). Ghose’s subsequent film was Chains of Bondage (1976) – made for the FD. The film was about rural indebtedness in Bihar, Bengal and Orissa, and to some extent it signalled the end of Ghose’s contribution to the documentary genre. This is how he narrates it:

100   The growth of independent practices The initial reaction of FD’s approval committee was negative. Again, Sukhdev intervened. He argued for my freedom of expression … the FD told me to include the 20-point programme in the documentary somehow. My stand was, I have only shown what it was actually happening. If they wanted to show how the government was trying to solve the issues of indebtedness, they would have to do it on their own. After this experience, I never tried to make a serious documentary again. (Goutam Ghose, in Mohamed 1988: 17) Although Ghose, Dasgupta and Chakraborty contributed to the documentary scene for only a short time, they should nevertheless be considered as some of the first documentary filmmakers in India making films with politically independent content. Like Patwardhan and Bose (to whom I turn my attention in a moment), these filmmakers were driven by the political distress that characterised India in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and they faced difficulties in making or circulating their independent films during this period. More or less contemporary to these practices was Anand Patwardhan’s arrival on the independent filmmaking scene in India. As I have already pointed out, his narratives are today well known in India and abroad and, as such, they deserve particular attention in the context of the emergence of the independent documentary of the 1970s. When he made his first film, Waves of Revolution (1975), Patwardhan was a young upper-­class man who had just returned to India after studying sociology at Brandeis University in the US. In 1974, he went to Bihar to join the JP movement and was asked to keep a record of police violence against the non-­violent movement during one of its demonstrations. As he narrates (Patwardhan 1984, 1989), the footage was taken first with a Super8 camera and later with a 16 mm camera borrowed from a friend who had used it during WWII.17 The sound was recorded separately on a non-­synch cassette recorder. From this material, a ‘primitive’ version of Waves of Revolution emerged. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared the State of Emergency and film went underground, with Patwardhan having no choice but to screen Waves of Revolution illegally. When I met Anand in his father’s house in Pune, he told me:  During the Emergency, I managed to screen my film only four times. The risk of being arrested was too high … There was nothing to do in India during the Emergency and I decided to leave the country and accept a scholarship for a Masters’ programme in Communication Studies and an assistantship at McGill University in Montreal.18  Anand thus managed to smuggle the film out of India and reassemble it in Montreal, although the precise details of how this was done are unknown. However, we can speculate that Patwardhan’s family connections in the

The growth of independent practices   101 Indian political scene made this enormous risk possible.19 What we know is that in the end Waves of Revolution was re-­edited in Canada and began to be screened abroad, with the aim of turning public opinion against the Indian Emergency. As soon as the Emergency was over, Anand Patwardhan returned to India without finishing his studies. He was ‘welcomed’ with an article in India Today entitled ‘Underground: the film that got away’, which described the genealogy of Waves of Revolution (1975) and expressed the wish ‘that the subject will continue to serve as a reminder even to the new government’ (India Today, 1–15 July, 1977). However, the article’s positioning of the Emergency in the past was premature. Patwardhan discovered that although the Emergency was over, a number of political prisoners were yet to be released. This discovery was the premise of his Prisoners of Conscience – shot just after the Emergency and finished in 1978. In Patwardhan’s account, Prisoners of Conscience was a film that first asked the question, ‘what is the social structure that makes people fight?’, and subsequently inquired, ‘what happened to those people in prison?’ (in Waugh, video-­interview 1988; see also Kagal 1978). The film was made specifically for a middle-­class audience and, according to Kagal (1978) had the aim of to having an impact on government policy, but it lacked a distribution outlet in 1970s India. As we will see in the next chapter, Anand Patwardhan’s films had to wait for the arrival of video technology in order to start circulating among a wider audience and be transformed into a form of ‘activism’ in the way that documentary filmmakers understand it today. Tapan Bose’s film practice arose in parallel to Anand Patwardhan’s 1970s filmmaking. Tapan Bose asserts that his interest in politics stemmed from his undergraduate days at Delhi University, when he joined the student front of the Communist Party, breaking his middle-­class ‘civil servant’ family tradition (in Waugh, video-­interview 1988). He developed a strong interest in political science, cultivating the idea of pursuing an academic career, but soon realised that the academic system would not fulfil his political desires. At the same time, he found documentary film ‘a powerful art form … [and] a kind of antithesis to feature films’ (ibid.). This idea was reinforced after his encounter with Sukhdev during one of the screenings of India ’67 at Delhi University. This was the late 1960s and Tapan Bose began to develop a friendship with Sukhdev that facilitated his entrance into the documentary scene in India. As Bose recounts in his 1988 video-­interview with Thomas Waugh, at the beginning of the 1970s Sukhdev asked him for help in fundraising for a film on the Indo-­Pakistan conflict. Even though by then Bose had begun working for the United News of India (henceforth UNI), he decided to help Sukhdev with this venture. They started working together on the script; Bose finalised the script; and Sukhdev got excited and convinced Bose to resign from his job and work with him full time on the Indo-­Pakistan

102   The growth of independent practices project – which soon afterwards became Nine Months to Freedom (Sukhdev 1972), a film about the liberation of Bangladesh and one of the most successful films made by Sukhdev. To some extent, Sukhdev transformed Bose into a documentary filmmaker. However, in the mid-­1970s, at the time of the student uprisings in India, Bose realised that, in reality, his own politics were not in line with Sukhdev’s. Hence, just before Sukhdev’s unexpected death, Bose decided to distance himself from him. The reason for this decision was Bose’s realisation that, ‘beyond Sukhdev’s anger and all his humanism there was a political conservatism that he could not break through’ (in Waugh, video-­interview 1988). In other words, Bose realised that his political view was not similar to Sukhdev’s, as it had seemed to be at the beginning of their friendship and film collaboration. For a short period, Bose left filmmaking behind and began working on something new. However, after a pause of a few years he returned to documentary filmmaking, making his own ‘independent films’ with the idea that through this medium he could put ‘into practice the Marxist tradition of primary analysis’ (ibid.). An Indian Story, a film shot in 1979 but released in 1982 due to censor restrictions, was one of the most well-­ known product of this approach. The film investigates the causes behind the 1979 police brutality in Bhagalpur, Bihar, in which 34 under-­trial prisoners were blinded, ‘by puncturing their eyes with a thick needle and then pouring acid on the wounds’ (Garga 2007: 189; see also Ray 1991: 6–7). The news hit the headlines in 1979 and 1980 and stimulated a debate among human rights organisations. At the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork, several of my interlocutors remembered this moment and cited this film, as well as Bose’s subsequent film Bhopal Beyond Genocide (1986), as the beginning of a new type of documentary film in India. Unlike Ghose, Dasgupta and Chakraborty, Tapan Bose and Anand Patwardhan have continued making films up to the present day and, for this reason, several of the contemporary filmmakers with whom I interacted during my 2007–2009 fieldwork cited them as the first independent filmmakers in India. However, as I have already shown in this chapter, these individuals were not the only ones who were ‘independent’. Being independent was a condition that affected various filmmakers, films and film practices.

Overlapping The three ‘independent’ film practices that I have mentioned so far come from different types of cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, and because of this the literature on Indian cinema (and the growing literature on Indian documentary filmmaking) has, by and large, analysed them as disconnected from one another. Yet, there is scope to believe that these practices were not separate but, in fact, interconnected. An emphasis on some of the already introduced filmmakers and the way in which they oscillated between film practices may help us to better see these connections.

The growth of independent practices   103 I have already pointed out that the majority of (if not all) filmmakers who contributed to the development of new wave cinema alternated their practice between ‘fiction’ (art) cinema and documentary production (cf. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1994), trying to maintain some ‘independent’ integrity in their work. Similarly, those independent filmmakers who were sometimes funded by the FD also produced independent films of strong political significance, as in the case of Sukhdev. In contrast, figures such as Dasgupta, Ghose and Chackraborty began their filmmaking practice with independent documentary films and went on to make fiction films within the categories of the independent new wave cinema. If we take as an example the independent filmmaker Goutam Ghose, we can go as far as to say that his filmmaking was at the intersection between the three independent film practices described here: he contributed to new wave cinema, as much as to the activities of the FD, while also producing some of the most anti-­establishment films of this period. Indeed, the independent activities of the late 1960s and 1970s did not emerge in a vacuum. They all built upon each other, even though the available literature often analyses them separately. To make this point even clearer, let us take as an example, the case of Sukhdev. Sukhdev’s importance as an ‘independent filmmaker’ has not received appropriate attention from film scholars or film critics, nor from most of the filmmakers with whom I interacted during my 2007–2009 fieldwork. This was due to a ‘misconception’ of Sukhdev’s role as an ‘anti-­establishment’ or ‘committed’ filmmaker and to a sort of ‘over-­categorisation’ of Sukhdev’s practice. A critical reading of Sukdhev’s narratives may indicate that this misconception was probably connected with how Sukhdev portrayed himself and his filmmaking during his interviews, interactions and public speeches.20 In fact, on Sukhdev’s unexpected death in 1979, his contemporaries rushed to ‘read’ his narratives, in the form in which they had been presented to them, and published the same unquestioned histories in a celebratory volume dedicated to Sukhdev (see Figure 3.2).21 Up to the present day, nobody has investigated beyond what this filmmaker constructed of himself. Only very recently did his daughter Shabnam Sukhdev decide to discover more about her father’s life. She made The Last Adieu (2014), a film that shows many other aspects of Sukhdev’s personal and filmmaking life, while being somewhat centred around a conflictive father–daughter relationship. As the film also demonstrates, Sukhdev’s success occurred over a period of less than 15 years and, since his death, a too rapid representation of him has been created. This representation remains unquestioned, and has created oppositional readings about this independent practitioner. For instance, in the nationalist historiography of documentary films, we can read that Sukhdev was accused of changing his politics under the 1975–1977 State of Emergency (Chopra 1984; Ray 1991; Vasudev and Lenglet 1983) and that, even though not employed by the FD and therefore ‘independent’, he was part of the history of this

104   The growth of independent practices

Figure 3.2  Sukhdev: celebratory volume.

organisation (Narwekar 1992, 1994; Thapa 1985; Garga 2007, among others). The main polemic about Sukhdev’s politics and relationship with the state, however, emerged after the making of Thunder of Freedom (1976), a film that was part of the ‘Twenty-­Point Films’ commissioned by Indira Gandhi in support of her ‘Twenty-­Point Programme’ (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 271). Sukhdev’s Thunder of Freedom was shot at the beginning of the period of the Emergency and dealt with its problems and achievements by focusing on specific communities in Delhi and the state of Haryana. The film did not investigate the politics of the Emergency per se or the centralised control over media and freedom of speech that invaded the country between 1975 and 1977. As a result, Sukhdev’s contemporaries narrate that audiences and commentators accused him of reverting ‘to the old official kind of filmmaking’ (Ray 1991: 6; see also Mohan 1984) and ‘felt that the rebel ha[d] joined the establishment’ (Chopra 1984: 71). However, to what extent was Sukhdev really a rebel in relation to state politics and the official kind of filmmaking? With no evidence that Sukhdev rejected

The growth of independent practices   105 the national discourse, there is reason to believe that some of his films, such as And Miles to Go, were part of the ‘educational’ advocacy of the government and the FD. As this chapter should have by now shown, during the 1950s and 1960s filmmakers working as ‘independent producers’, and/or for the FD, were indeed all followers of the national discourse advocated by Jawaharlal Nehru. Sukhdev certainly stems from this tradition; he never was an ‘anti-­establishment’ filmmaker. Thunder of Freedom should be understood from this perspective; it was simply a documentary of social relevance. In other words, Sukhdev’s filmmaking should be seen as an extension of the existing tradition of educational films (cf. Chapters 1 and 2), yet still as an independent approach and, as such, not too far from other independent practices that emerged and developed in this particular historical moment. This interpretation can help us not only to position an influential, and to some extent ‘unknown’, filmmaker in the literature of Indian cinema, but also to better understand the multiplicity of the meaning of ‘being independent’ in the late 1960s and 1970s. What do we mean by ‘being independent’? Being independent in choosing the film style? Being independent of state and/or private funding? Being independent in choosing what to film, how to film and for whom to film? Being independent of state politics? Being independent from the censor board? Was Sukhdev an independent filmmaker even though he made Thunder of Freedom (1976) as part of Indira Gandhi’s ‘Twenty-­Point Films’? What seems more probable is that Sukhdev, just like any other independent filmmaker of this historical moment, was a filmmaker who created and re-­created narratives of himself in relation to his own filmmaking practice. Bourdieu (1980) describes the construction of identities among different artistic groups as a way to establish an ‘advanced position’ and a ‘chronological hierarchy of the opposing positions in a given field’ (1980: 290). If this is the case, Sukhdev’s discourse (as much as, for instance, Patwardhan’s) functioned as a rhetorical practice (cf. Garro and Mattingly 2000) that established an ‘advanced position’ (Bourdieu 1980: 290) of himself and his films within the larger category of independent filmmaking, and this position made him ‘different’ from others. In other words, while on the one hand his films can be classified under the banner of films of social relevance, Sukhdev also created ‘life-­histories’ (Crapanzano 1984) of his own filmmaking practice, which later on resulted in many misleading interpretations of his persona and film activities. Returning to the case of Tapan Bose in relation to Sukhdev can help us to better explain this point. Bose admitted that when he was a student at Delhi University he became fascinated by Sukhdev’s film and speeches and, because of this, he tried his best to start working as Sukhdev’s assistant (in Waugh 1988 video-­ interview). After achieving this, however, Bose discovered that despite the narratives created about Sukhdev and his film practice, Sukhdev’s politics were not really ‘anti-­establishment’ and therefore they could not continue

106   The growth of independent practices to work together. Sukhdev was undoubtedly an independent filmmaker concerned with social issues. However, he was also ready to compromise his politics for the purpose of making films. His approach was similar to that of some of his precursors, such as P.V. Pathy and Paul Zils (cf. Chapter 1). Nevertheless, he was an independent practitioner of the late 1960s and 1970s and, as such, directly or indirectly influenced other independent film practices (such as those of Tapan Bose and, partially, Gautam Ghose). In other words, whether he worked for the state or against the state, Sukhdev cannot be excluded from the discussion about ‘being independent’ that characterised this historical moment. Moreover, I suggest that his practice and his narratives should start to be analysed in relation to all the other independent practices that emerged and developed in parallel to his. If we want to compare Sukhdev’s way of making himself ‘independent’ with Anand Patwardhan’s for instance, we can say that while Sukhdev’s narratives were quickly turned into an edited book, which today sits in the National Films Archive of India and has only recently been revisited by his own daughter, Patwardhan’s narratives, although emerging more sporadically have circulated more broadly, thanks to their author’s wider international network. Furthermore, whereas Sukhdev’s contribution to independent filmmaking ceased in the late 1970s due to his unexpected death, Patwardhan has continued as an active filmmaker up to the present day. Garro and Mattingly believe that ‘a story, especially a personal story, allows us to see that – from other perspectives and/or through alternative “editing” – other stories might have been told’ (2000: 18). Accordingly, it would be limiting to think of Patwardhan as the sole pioneer of the beginning of the 1970s independent film practices. And it would be inaccurate to exclude Sukhdev (as well as other practitioners not necessarily associated with Patwardhan) from the emergence of a collective public discourse about independent film practices in India. It is precisely thanks to these connections that documentary film practice had continued developing in the subcontinent, building on (or distancing itself from) its own past. In other words, it is precisely thanks to filmmaking exchanges in practice and discourse that a specific ‘independent’ state of being has continued to grow. As with any film genre (cf. Neale 1980, 1990; Altman 1999; Jauss 1982; Cohen 1986) documentary film practices are always in progress and build upon, or are in contrast with, each other. It is for this reason, this chapter suggests, that ‘being independent’ in late 1960s and 1970s India, did not have a specific significance connected to a distinct category of filmmaking. Rather, it was a state of being that encompassed a multiplicity of film practices simultaneously connected and disconnected from one another. However, as we will see in the next chapter, these multiple practices had to wait for the advent of video technology to be transformed into a form of activism and a socially recognised participatory media practice.

The growth of independent practices   107

Notes   1 Conversation with Aswani Pankaj, 14 July 2008.   2 As pointed out in Chapters 1 and 2, ‘nationalist historiography of documentary films’ refers to the work of: Garga (1960, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c, 1987d, 1988a, 1988b, 2007); Mohan (1960, 1969, 1972, 1984, 1987, 1990); Bhavnani (1960, 1987); Datt (1969); Khandpur (1985); Chanana (1987); Gangar (1987); Ray (1991); Narwekar (1992, 1994); Kamath (1994); Thapa (1985); Varma (1998).   3 To read more about the various ways in which Sukhdev was described by his contemporaries, consult Mohan (1984).   4 Film scholars have referred to new wave cinema in various ways, including ‘new cinema’, ‘new wave’, ‘art cinema’, ‘art-­house cinema’, ‘parallel cinema’, ‘new Indian cinema’, ‘Indian new cinema’, ‘Indian new wave’, ‘new cinema movement’ and, very recently, ‘independent cinema’ (cf. Willemen and Gandhy 1982; Das Gupta 1983; Vasudev 1986; Chakravarty 1993; Prasad 1998; Cossio 1998; Dwyer and Patel 2002; Datta 2002; Virdi 2011; Carrigy 2011a, 2011b). One of the reasons for this variety of expressions stems from the way in which Satyajit Ray perceived this cinema throughout the 1970s and consequently influenced commentaries made by film critics and scholars. In his essay entitled ‘An Indian New Wave?’, Ray criticises the use of the term ‘new wave’ – borrowed from the French ‘nouvelle vague’ (1976: 81–99). To him, in contrast to French cinema and the language that filmmakers created in France in the 1950s and 1960s, the Indian new wave was a cinema that did not generate a new language. In this book, I have chosen to use the term ‘new wave’ believing that the argument made by Ray in the 1970s is no longer relevant in the 2010s.   5 Other institutions were the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) and the Film Training Institute of India (FTII) – after 1974 known as the Film and Television Institute of India but keeping the same acronym. While the NFAI served as a structure for collecting films, the FTII and the FFC respectively trained filmmakers and sponsored independent films. Without doubt, these three governmental institutions should be regarded as part of the same project of nation building and preservation of national culture and symbolism that characterised postcolonial India (cf. Sarkar 2009).   6 To read more about the new policies of the FFC, see Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (1980: 251–259); Vasudev (1986: 32–35); Prasad (1998: 121–123, 188–190); Gangar (2006: 12–13); and Rajadhyaksha (2009: 233–237).   7 As we see later in this chapter, the well-­known filmmaker Shyam Benegal can be regarded as an example in support of Vasudev’s point. Although he was one of the filmmakers associated with new wave cinema, Benegal was the first of them who did not benefit from the FFC’s support, emerging instead from the advertising industry (cf. Vasudev 1986; Datta 2002).   8 To read more about this style, see Rajadhyaksha (1988: 42–43, 2009: 44–45); Khopkar (1985: 191, 1989: 24); MacDonald and Cousins (1996: 165); Bhatnagar (1991: 26–30); Cooper (1991: 34).   9 I remind my reader that I owe my gratitude to Thomas Waugh, who generously donated to me 20 hours of video-­interviews that he conducted in the first few months of 1988. In this book, these interviews are treated as archival data in the same was as any other archival or found written document. 10 To find out more about ‘middle’ or ‘regional’ cinema, see discussions in Vasudev (1986: 75–97), Datta (2002: 19–20), Gopalan (2011: 6–7) and Prasad (1998: 192–193). What is interesting to note in relation to the way in which generic film classifications take shape and constantly change form is that, by the mid-­1970s, part of what before was called ‘new wave’ turned into what film scholars have also called ‘middle cinema’ or ‘regional cinema’. In such cases, the

108   The growth of independent practices classification of ‘new wave’ remained for those ‘innovative auteur filmmakers [who] found creative ways to make films’ (Gangar 2006: 12) – that is, what I have called the ‘experimental’ approach. 11 To read more about Benegal’s Lost Childhood (2007), see The Hindu 2007, 13 February; available at: www.hindu.com/2007/02/13/stories/2007021323160300. htm (last accessed 21 December 2015). 12 I discuss Goutam Ghose’s filmmaking later in this chapter. 13 Following the 1935 cultural movement of the Progressive Writers’ Association (henceforth PWA), in 1943 a group of artists and intellectuals formed the IPTA in Calcutta with the intent to fight imperialism and fascism, and promote an awakening of vernacular culture through theatre, cinema and music. According to the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, the IPTA was informally affiliated to the Communist Party and ‘for a brief period following WWII and in the early years of Independence, virtually the entire cultural intelligentsia was associated with or influenced by IPTA/PWA initiatives’ (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1994: 109). As Biswas points out, thanks to leading figures in the IPTA, such as Nimai Ghosh, cinema came to be ‘a new political practice’ (2011: 67). Sarkar (2009) argues that the cinema promoted by the IPTA was a form of ‘cultural activism’, which dealt simultaneously with the aesthetics and the politics of filmmaking. 14 Conversation with Anand Patwardhan, 20 February 2009. 15 To read about debates on non-­Euro-American documentary practices or the so-­ called ‘Third World Cinema’ or ‘Third Cinema’, see Shohat and Stam (1994), Grant and Kuhn (2006), Nichols (1994b), Burton (1985) and Gabriel (1982), among others. 16 Ghose’s interviews are available in Mohamed (1988) and Daylal (1991). Brief discussions about his films can be found in Garga (2007: 189) and Chatterji (1994: 18). 17 See also India Today 1977, 1–15 July; Gandhy (1983); Waugh, video-­interview 1988; and Media Mail 1998a. The same narratives were repeated to me during an interview held in February 2009. To read more about Patwardhan’s writing and people’s writing about him, see www.patwardhan.com (last accessed 21 December 2015). 18 Conversation with Anand Patwardhan, 20 February 2009. 19 Patwardhan’s mother was a Gandhian and Patwardhan’s father was connected to the rise of the Socialist Party in India. To read more about Patwardhan’s background, see Akomfrah (1997: 74–76) and Akomfrah and Halberstadt (1997: 80). 20 Most of Sukhdev’s writings and interviews are available in a monograph entitled S. Sukhdev Filmmaker: A Documentary Montage, which Jag Mohan compiled in 1984. See also an interview in Vasudev and Lenglet’s (1983) edited volume entitled Indian Cinema Superbazaar. 21 I classify Sukhdev’s contemporaries as some of the contributors to the nation­ alist historiography of documentary films.

4 The advent of video technology

To make an anthropology of the development of a film practice does not mean to focus necessarily on films, their content and the ‘effect’ of this content on a possible public. Rather, as we saw in the previous chapters, among other things it signifies paying meticulous attention to the agency of filmmakers and those who write about filmmaking (whether filmmakers themselves, film critics or scholars like myself ). This also means placing filmmakers, and their narratives (produced by themselves or by others), in relation to us, as writers, speakers, theorists and ethnographers who constantly interact with them or with their written narratives. Yet, to focus on these individuals – that is, on the actors who constitute a history of a practice – does not mean leaving out of this discussion the technolog(ies) that made possible its development, to which this chapter gives its attention. As I extensively discussed in my PhD thesis, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, ‘media’ as a subject came forward as a field of anthro­pological study. That is, anthropologists began to focus on what people do with various forms of media and technologies – which had by then ‘invaded’ the regions where anthropologists had traditionally worked (Mahon 2000: 468; see also Ginsburg et al. 2002; Askew and Wilk 2002). While this debate has, over time, evolved into more contemporary discussions about digital technology and has interlaced with other disciplines such as media studies (cf. Brauchler and Postill 2010), it may, however, be useful to reconnect it with other technologies that have constituted the development of a practice, namely ‘the video turn’ (Battaglia 2014b)1 – and other disciplines or practices such as documentary films and/or contemporary visual art. As already argued, this book locates documentary films not far from other contemporary visual art practices and considers them as ‘dispositifs critiques’ (Caillet 2014) that can engage well with the sensible world (and hence with the discipline of anthropology, cf. Introduction). However, in order to understand these documentary films as dispositifs critiques it is important also to contextualise them in the wider media environment in which they emerged and developed. This means paying attention to the social function that technology plays at the time filmmakers conceptualise, realise, debate and circulate their films.

110   The advent of video technology If for some this might sound like switching from an anthropological analysis to a more specific media studies analysis, let me stress that pausing to consider media technology does not mean moving our conversation from an analysis of ‘individuals’ and ‘narratives’ towards an analysis of ‘media systems’ and ‘media forms’. Rather, it means dedicating our attention to the social role that the technology of filmmaking, its materiality and its social transformation play in the context of the development of a yet-­to-be-­constituted film practice. In this respect, the arrival of video technology in 1980s India played a crucial role. Until this moment, documentary film practices had taken place in an erratic and inconsistent way and the emergent documentary scene strongly benefited from the new possibilities that video brought at the production and circulation level, and it is precisely thanks to video that documentary films became more visible across the country. To better understand this development, this chapter focuses mainly on the relationship between state politics and the growth of television in India, the emergence of different types of media practices beyond state control and the legacies that existing filmmaking forms left to the new video practices. I shall examine these elements one by one.

From early television experiments to the arrival of video technology For many, the year 1982 signalled the beginning of the arrival of video technology in India. Indira Gandhi’s government used the 1982 ASIAD Games in New Delhi as an opportunity to introduce colour and cable television to India and relax the import restrictions on video cassettes, video recorders and television sets (Pendakur 1989; Raval 1986; Sengupta 1999; Singhal and Rogers 1989, 2001; Kohli 2005). By now, India had television sets, but there was neither a great number of them across the country nor mass consumption of the medium. An overemphasis on the Asian Games was a good strategy for transforming television into a popular phenomenon and to reinforce appreciation of Indira Gandhi’s leadership. As Manjunath Pendakur puts it,  the state wanted to cash in on the tremendous popularity of those games by visually demonstrating that Indira Gandhi’s government could produce results, whether by organizing games or by some other means. An estimated one million television sets came into India as a result of this policy.  (Pendakur 1989: 71)  This change in government strategy should not be read out of context. As much as with other media and cultural forms, Indira Gandhi had invested in television sets since becoming Prime Minister. In fact, by 1982, television in India already had a significant history.

The advent of video technology   111 No academic account of the role of television in India has left out of its discussion the early educational experimentations of either the 1960s or the period of the Emergency in the mid-­1970s (cf. Singhal and Rogers 1989, 2001; Chatterji 1987; Ohm 1999; Kohli 2005; Singh 1997; Sarkar 1997; Kalathil 1999; Poduval 1999, among others). From these accounts, we know that television arrived in India in 1959 through the Dutch electronics company Philips Ltd. (Ohm 1999: 77) and transmitted an experimental educational service thanks to a grant from UNESCO (Singhal and Rogers 2001: 56). Six years later, it began some regular daily broadcasting in New Delhi, guided by All India Radio and the Ford Foundation (Chatterji 1987). From the beginning, television was government owned and regulated, acquiring the name of Doordarshan. However, as Britta Ohm points out, although the Indian state was the only legal owner of this new technology, the advent of television was initially ‘uninvited’ (1999: 77). Nehru, who had already invested in audio-­visual communications through the Films Division (henceforth FD), considered this technology a ‘luxury’ (Chatterji 1987: 52), and while he allowed it to enter the country, he relegated the Indian state to a ‘passive role’ (Ohm 1999: 77–78). In Ohm’s words, ‘the Dutch electronics company Philips, made India as a whole a receiver and therewith re-­opened a gap of self-­determination that just 10 years back seemed to have been closed by India becoming an independent nation-­state’ (ibid.: 77). The situation changed when Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister. One of her key policies was, from the outset, to invest in communications technology – understood as an important catalyst for social change. Unlike her father, Indira Gandhi did not regard television as a medium for the entertainment of the rich but rather as a potential medium for the education of the socially deprived (Chatterji 1987: 52). Accordingly, between 1972 and 1975 she started regular television services in Bombay, Srinagar, Amritsar, Pune, Calcutta, Madras and Lucknow (Singhal and Rogers 1989, 2001). Above all, in 1969, Indira Gandhi signed an agreement with the United States National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA). The agreement between the government of India and NASA consisted of launching the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE). This was a one-­year pilot project between 1975 and 1976 (under the State of Emergency), which still today is regarded as a landmark of Indian media history, not only by media scholars but also by media practitioners (such as documentary filmmakers) in India. If we place the importance of SITE in relation to the development of documentary practices we can see a twofold significance. On the one hand, it signalled the beginning of a ‘national’ television service in line with the state agenda. On the other, it initiated the first audio-­visual experimentations in which local communities became part of the process at a participatory level. In other words, it gave importance to the ‘process’ of audio-­visual media on which several documentary filmmakers successively built.

112   The advent of video technology SITE was an educational-­development project that broadcast special programmes to six rural clusters encompassing 2,400 villages and several million people (Singhal and Rogers 1989: 64). Its objectives were to advance primary school education in rural areas, to improve agriculture, health, hygiene and nutritional practices, to provide teacher training and to contribute to family planning and national integration (ibid.). Villagers were included as part of the process of making educational programmes. This experiment provided Indian technicians with an opportunity to gain expertise in operational satellite problems (ibid.). In addition, it created a space for young people, interested in audio-­visual media, to experiment with community projects. When in February 2009 I visited Chandita Mukherjee in her office in Mumbai, she pointed out that, when she graduated from the FTII in 1975, there were few opportunities for filmmakers who did not want to work as ‘government servants’ (referring to the FD but also to the general political situation during the State of Emergency). In this context, she stated, ‘SITE was a good compromise for me. It dealt with education, science and technology, which were my main interests. And it followed participatory methods’. Above all, Chandita argued, ‘this was a way to make “films” without being entirely controlled by the government’.2 In fact, although Doordarshan was in charge of SITE’s programming, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was involved in the setting-­up and maintenance of the receivers across the country, and the Space Applications Centre (SAC) in Ahmedabad coordinated the communication research component. Different kinds of individuals, from technicians to scholars and media practitioners, were part of the experiment. They were focused on participatory methods and the facilitation of ‘participatory democracy’ (Sen 2000: 10) and interestingly, as we will see in a moment, with the arrival of video technology, many of them became active independent filmmakers. Ashok Vaishnavi (1985) points out that, above all, SITE transformed the importance of the national television, Doordarshan, in India. To some extent, we can in fact say that SITE created the ideal conditions in which to develop a national television. However, this was not SITE’s only raison d’être. To paraphrase Madhava Prasad, television was an institution that bore traces of other cultural formats – such as the written news and feature magazines of print culture, as well as cinema and broadcasting, which were also based on modern technology (1999: 120). In other words, television built upon existing media to both ‘educate’ and ‘please’ Indian audiences, with educational and entertainment films respectively. Unsurprisingly, both the film industry (cf. Singhal and Rogers 1989) and the FD (cf. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980; Garga 1988b) felt threatened by the expansion of Doordarshan in the early 1980s. In particular, the role of the FD, as a state institution, changed dramatically. Singh argues that, ‘the history of Indian television had been marked by the ongoing attempts to “uplift the masses” through educational programs’ (1997: 80). Poduval adds that,

The advent of video technology   113 from its inception, development-­oriented television sought to approximate the Griersonian mandate advocated for the documentary genre, that is, public utility (1999: 109). With the potential to become a mass medium, during the 1980s Doordarshan surpassed the FD and, in Garga’s words, ‘became the government’s favoured child’ (1988b: 26). After 1982, television in India quickly became a mass medium, helping to create a sort of Andersonian ‘imagined’ national community (cf. Mitra 1993; Singh 1997; Prasad 1999). Mitra points out that with the pan-­Asian ASIAD games, ‘the role of television in producing a national image became critical’ (1993: 40). Indeed, it was not a coincidence that the first popular Indian soap opera, Hum Log, came out a couple of years after this media event. Hum Log was conceived as an educational programme about family planning and, in Veena Das’ words, ‘it was the best example of how the global bureaucratic culture conceptualises popular consciousness in countries like India and seeks to transform this through the use of mass media’ (1995: 169). Watching Hum Log with millions of others, ‘united’ Indians as a sort of national community (Singh 1997: 80; Prasad 1999: 124). In this respect, according to Arvind Rajagopal, television viewing created a ‘free’ viewers’ experience, to be understood in line with the rhetoric ‘of the gift rather than of the contract’ (1999: 70). To him, the question is whether the gift needed to be returned and, if it did, to whom. With the illusion of being truly free, Rajagopal argues, Indian audiences contributed to a ‘ “counter-­gift”, of talking back to others, to the medium or its sponsors’ (2001: 5), which transformed the television experience into ‘commodity consumption or ideological allegiance’ (1999: 70). With the arrival of other TV serials, this time connected to Indian-­Hindu epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, watching television reinforced the ‘myth’ of a Hindu nation (Singh 1997; Hansen 1999; Mitra 1993), creating partial readings of Indian history. In Satish Poduval’s (1999) words, television became a key locus in the Foucauldian understanding of invisible control, which regulated modes of knowledge. If we return for a moment to our discussion about the development of the FD (cf. Chapter 2), we may find an immediate connection between Poduval’s understanding (among others) of national television and the role that the FD’s documentary cinema may have previously played in relation to its nation. As stated by Michael Shapiro, when ‘national’ cinema acts as an invisible political construction, it creates in the audiences’ imagery a sense of ‘cinematic nationhood’ (2004: 142). Placing Poduval and Shapiro together, we can probably then say that after the arrival of cable and colour television in the 1980s, Doordarshan played a similar role to that of the FD (understood here as a single national institution and not in relation to its multiple internal activities) – as if it had directly evolved from the national ‘responsibility’ that the FD had in the first 20 years after Independence. If this is the case, the question should be: was the expansion of Doordarshan simply a replica of the FD’s growth? The answer, I would say, lies again in the central role

114   The advent of video technology that the actors at that time played in creating ‘parallel’ independent activities. Yet, this time, the accent should be placed on their ability to make use of ‘video technology’ in developing their own independent practices. As we will see in a moment, if, for some, television was a sort of passage to later investing in more strictly independent filmmaking, for others if represented the potential to circulate documentary films though VCR cassettes that could be play on multiple televisions sets (and hence in most Indian households and activist organisations) or to learn how to transform filmmaking into a more ‘successful’ participatory media practice. In one way or another, as had already happened several decades before, individual practitioners found a way to distance themselves from national media discourses while nevertheless making use of the same technology promoted by state media practices. In the 1980s, indeed, both the government and independent individuals made use of video technology to develop their media practices. Yet, to what extent was video a technology that ‘revolutionised’ existing film practices? As we will see in the remainder of this chapter, while on the one hand video enabled a multiplication of film practices and film distribution outlets – as a sort of ‘expansive realisation’ (Miller and Slater 2000) – on the other, the material quality of video never convinced professional filmmakers, who instead used video as a ‘residual media’ (Acland 2007) that must ‘build’ on previous technologies.

Video technology and media practices According to Rele, at the beginning of the 1980s video technology flooded into India, with an average of 20,000 video cassette recorders (VCRs) and players (VCPs) entering the market every month (1985: 303; see also Singhal and Rogers 1989). They cost three times less what they had been sold for previously in India. People who visited Hong Kong, Singapore or Dubai in the 1980s often returned to India with a VCR in their luggage (Rele 1985: 303). In a few years, this new technology had flourished in metropolitan India and, according to Manjunath Pendakur, ‘Sony commodities became the new status symbol for the middle class’ (1989: 71). In addition, video libraries mushroomed across the country. Their owners would rent a VCR for about 10 Rupees per day, and, watching videos in public spaces, such as at tea stalls or in restaurants, or on private air-­conditioned intercity buses, soon became common practice (Singhal and Rogers 1989: 129). Most significantly in 1983, a new kind of showplace began to emerge, and rapidly grow, in India. By the end of the 1980s, people came to know this as the ‘video parlour’ or ‘video café’ (Pendakur 1989). As with the film industry, the video industry was, from the beginning, privately owned (Singhal and Rogers 1989). In Pendakur’s words, ‘an entrepreneur would acquire a 20-inch colour television set and VCR, place it in a hall that could hold 50 to 100

The advent of video technology   115 chairs, and show feature films in various languages from 9:00 am until 2:00 the next morning’ (1989: 71). The films screened in these places were mostly pirated copies of domestic and imported feature films, and the audience was mainly constituted by men – women avoided video parlours because they were ‘not considered respectful places for women’ (ibid.: 72). Furthermore, video technology created new possibilities for highly reproducible and portable ‘small-­media’ practices (Sreberny-­ Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994; Spitulnik 2002). These practices began to circulate through narrowcast networks, creating ‘strong bounds’ among different groups of people. A good number of individuals and organisations started practising video-­making, ranging from marriage-­videos (Sengupta 1999) to Hindu nationalist-­videos (Brosius 1999, 2005), following the path of ‘committed’ (Waugh 1984) and ‘independent’ documentary films like those of Patwardhan, Bose and Ghose, discussed in the previous chapter. The practice of video-­making was mainly initiated by non-­governmental organisations (NGOs), independent media collectives and students – that is, what we might call ‘social action groups’ (Kamat 2002) interested in questioning the governmental status quo and advocating grassroots activism through video-­ making activities. In order to understand the role that video technology played in transforming existing documentary film practices, these groups ought to be given specific attention. Non-­Governmental Organisations (NGOs) During the 1980s, one of the pioneering non-­governmental organisations involved with ‘community’ media was the Delhi-­based Centre for Development of Instructional Technology better known as CENDIT. CENDIT was a non-­profit organisation interested in instructional technology and rural communication that had been active since the late 1970s. Its interests varied from the early development of the internet to audio-­visual media, including the early forms of video technology. In 1983, Sumanta Banerjee wrote for Deccan Herald that CENDIT’s intent was not to lead social action or a movement but to: inform the people, create awareness through analysis of the socio-­ economic reality, and thus produce a fertile field where the activists of voluntary organisations or political parties can sow the seeds of movements that will mobilise the rural poor in their struggle for changing the situation.  (Banerjee, Deccan Herald 1983, 6 July) Alongside the use of other traditional media for social change – such as street theatre, puppets, posters and cartoons – CENDIT preferred to use film. In the words of one of its founder members:

116   The advent of video technology Our initial work was in the nature of research, to show films in rural areas and to see how people reacted to it, how they felt about it, what the impact of various development communication materials could be in rural areas. In the early 70s when we started, educational or developmental films were essentially a monopoly of Films Division (FD). So we took a whole lot of FD films to Saharanpur [Uttar Pradesh], showed them in villages and talked to people.… Through this experiment we learnt many things. We found that most of the FD films were totally irrelevant.… They tried to communicate to everybody, and in the process didn’t manage to communicate to anybody. (Rajive Jain, in Alternate Media Times 2000: 21) With the arrival of video technology, CENDIT expanded its film activities. It started making its own films in video format and training people in how to use video technology to make films. When various people across the country started making their own independent video-­films, CENDIT collected them together and screened them in rural areas beyond state control.3 In addition, CENDIT set up several short video workshops across the country, organised in collaboration with local NGOs and aimed at attracting young people interested in communications and activism. In other words, CENDIT transformed documentary filmmaking into a ‘small media’ practice, initiating a new tradition of filmmaking. During my time in India in 2007–2009, I interacted with a few contemporary filmmakers who had begun their film practice thanks to CENDIT. Having received training from the organisation in the 1980s, they had since developed their own filmmaking in multiple ways. Among these were Ranjan De and Gargi Sen. According to Ranjan, both he and Gargi had learnt the medium of video through their interaction with CENDIT. Thanks to this training, they were able to set up their own media NGO, called Magic Lantern. ‘Magic Lantern emerged in 1989 with the making of our first independent film on forest rights called Because of Our Rights (1989)’, Ranjan told me. ‘The film was shot in the Shivalik foothills in Uttar Pradesh where Gargi and I had actively worked as media professionals and social activists since 1986’.4 From this moment onwards, Magic Lantern began to expand its activities in various ways – from documentary film production and exhibition to independent publishing and film distribution – and, from the time I left India to the present day, it has arguably transformed itself into one of the largest distributors of Indian documentary films at a national and international level. Anjali Monteiro, at present a renowned scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, was one of the people trained during the 1980s in one of CENDIT’s short workshops. As she told me in one of our interactions, ‘by then, I was already involved in other forms of small media-­activism, such as photographic documentation, shot in a documentary style and exhibited through slide-­show exhibitions’.5 This photographic/slide-­show activity

The advent of video technology   117 should be read as a pre-­video ‘mode’ of filmmaking that could bypass government restrictions. Several filmmakers, who began their filmmaking practices with video, came from this background. Anjali Monteiro organised slide-­ show exhibitions together with the aforementioned Chandita Mukherjee who, after working for SITE, found in the slide-­show practice ‘the only way to make “independent” documentaries’.6 They both became members of the Science Education Group in Bombay, which made numerous slide-­show compilations about human rights violations. In 1982, Chandita and Anjali contributed to the establishment of an audio-­visual educational library in Bombay called AVEHI (from the Sanskrit word avehan, meaning ‘deep knowledge’) – a resource centre equipped with ‘multimedia’ material. Today, AVEHI continues its work as a charitable educational trust pursuing a number of different activities.7 Anjali Monteiro gradually changed her practice from slide-­show exhibition to video production. Over time, she has also become an academic and has been able to maintain both her academic career and her work as a filmmaker involved in social issues. From the beginning, she has always worked in partnership with K.P. Jayasankar. Pani Panchayat (1986), which documented a water cooperative movement of small farmers in a drought-­prone area of Maharashtra, was the beginning of their joint filmmaking career. Chandita Mukherjee’s background is that she has worked at Comet Media Foundation since 1992, while also making occasional independent documentary. From the mid-­1980s onwards, in addition to CENDIT, other NGOs began to be interested in audio-­visual documentary practices. These organisations were often involved in other forms of local activism and video was an additional tool with which to support an NGO’s objective. To some extent, these audio-­visual activities can be classified among those which, during the 1980s, were academically known as video for development (de Vreede 1990) or theatre for development (Abah 1996, 1997; Harding 1998), and were used extensively in several regions of Africa and South America based on Paulo Freire’s (1970, 1973) concept of ‘conscientisation’ or ‘empowerment’ (cf. Boal 1979). Most of the time, these activities were the result of foreign initiatives. The Gujarati Video SEWA unit of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) was one of these. It was initiated in 1984 by a New York-­based organisation called Martha Stuart Communication and it aimed to train uneducated women to utilise video technology as a tool for empowerment (Raval 1986). Over time, video became an integral part of SEWA women’s activities. These women used the camera to shoot images of their choice, promoting ‘community-­to-community development’ (Samprickal 2003: 59; see also Jain 2007). Abhivyakti, a Maharashtran organisation, followed a similar logic to that of SEWA. It specialised in media for development, supporting community learning and paying attention to under-­privileged and marginalised people. Its community media projects focused on local voices and community participation. Drishti Media (or simply DRISHTI) was another organisation

118   The advent of video technology interested in community projects, ranging from radio to video productions. In partnership with Video Volunteers, from the early 1990s it developed a joint initiative across India, with the involvement of several other NGOs. The Community Video Unit project was one of the most effective, as it trained ‘community producers’ in all aspects of video production in order to create the monthly Video News Magazine and other community video formats (Das Gupta 2007). Furthermore, in 1996 the Deccan Development Society, in Hyderabad, initiated a participatory media programme with Dalit (or ‘untouchable’ caste) peasant women, who were mostly illiterate. This project was made possible due to financial support from UNESCO. The women of the Deccan Development Society received training in filmmaking and, according to Vijaya Mulay (2010), were given the chance to discuss their own community concerns with a variety of audiences – and, by doing this, to feel a sense of belonging to a wider community. In all these cases, filmmakers took on the role of trainers, facilitators or supervisors who shared their knowledge with the community involved in making the films, and the process of filmmaking as an act of ‘empowerment’ became more important than the result. At the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork, most of these organisations were still active in the field of audio-­visual community participation. In 2004, a selection of the Deccan women’s films was accepted by the Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films (MIFF ) and attracted the attention of film critics, who described the unexpected films as a ‘unique package of films shown at MIFF ’ (Rao 2004: 60). Throughout the 1990s, NGOs became more interested in commissioning documentary films in line with their own agendas than in making films themselves or with communities. If on the one hand this approach facilitated ‘independent’ film production for filmmakers, on the other it created a new dependency, which affected both the politics and the form of filmmaking in India. Rahul Roy, who began his filmmaking practice in this context, addresses this phenomenon as the development of ‘documentary films without author’s signature’.8 Although this will not be directly explored here, what I find curious is that in a context in which many other NGOs were starting to provide funding and training for young practitioners, CENDIT, according to Ranjan De, ‘decided to stop its filmmaking activity and be more focused on internet technology’9 – as if there were no longer a need for CENDIT in this field. The question then is: why did NGOs become interested in documentary forms? The answer can be found in connection with the emergence of a solid network of independent media collectives and student activities, to which we will now turn our discussion. Media and student collectives Beginning in the mid-­1980s, a number of media collectives emerged across the country in parallel with the diffusion of video technology and video infrastructure. Among them, two deserve specific attention, as their contribution

The advent of video technology   119 to documentary film practices in India has been remarkable. The first was led by a charismatic figure who began his media-­activism as a cartoonist in Kerala and turned to filmmaking in 1983. His name was K.P. Sasi; he came from a Malayalam Communist family and from the beginning worked with several other people as a group interested in the same social and political causes. The second was a group of students from the University of Jamia Millia Islamia – a female collective based in New Delhi. They called themselves Mediastorm and film critics often categorise them under the banner of 1980s women filmmakers (cf. Rao 1994; Kazmi 1995; Mulay 1996). I shall explore the contribution of these two groups separately. Campaigning with video was a widespread activity in the South India of the 1980s and an integral part of the activities of K.P. Sasi and his collective. As the independent quarterly Media Mail points out, the campaigns were organised ‘with the active participation of NGOs, environmental and social action groups, colleges, schools, human rights and consumer groups’ (Media Mail 1997a: 6)10 and they advocated ‘direct communication with people and their concerns’ (ibid.). K.P. Sasi’s group was originally called Media Collective and based in Kerala. Between 1987 and 1988, the group took on the name of Alcom (an acronym for Alternative Communication Forum) and changed its base to New Delhi. Most of the people in both Media Collective and Alcom were from Trichur (Kerala) where Sasi came from; and according to K.P. Santosh Kumar, ‘many of us considered Sasi to be the leader of the group’.11 Alcom continued to function until 1996, after which Sasi became involved in activities with other people, particularly in Kerala and Karnataka. The contribution of Media Collective and Alcom to the documentary scene in India was through films about environmental, health and women’s issues in South India. These include Living in Fear (1987); In the name of Medicine (1988); A Valley Refuses to Die (1990); and Ilayum Mullum – Thorns and Leaves (1994). The films were all directed by K.P. Sasi. The rest of the group was involved in other aspects of production and in the use of the films for campaign purposes. Sathish K. shared his own experience in a 1997 article for Media Mail: By the mid-­eighties we had already made four films and were in the process of making another film on hazardous radiation from the Indian Rare Earths’ (IRE) plant in Alwaye, Kerala. We wanted to use the film for an extensive campaign. But before that we needed to assess the potential of the medium. With this in mind we collected nearly 37 videos and set out a Video Rally as it was called, in 1986. This rally travelled all across Kerala with video films, right from Payyanur in the north to Trivandrum in the south. We had hired a VCR for the rally and went from village to village. Wherever we were provided with a TV – be it a library, a school or a college – we screened the films. That was a huge success. (Sathish K., in Media Mail 1997a: 6)

120   The advent of video technology The combination of video technology and television infrastructure inspired several other media groups in South India, which directly or indirectly followed Sasi’s initiative. Video technology created possibilities to both make documentary films and circulate them among different groups of people, without censorship restrictions. In addition, it encouraged younger generations of filmmakers to be involved in making films. The experience of the second collective I want to discuss here, Mediastorm, was different. It emerged as a university phenomenon initiated by a few young women trained in mass communications at Jamia Millia Islamia. Some of the initial members were Shohini Ghosh, Sabina Kidwai, Sabeena Gadihoke, Ranjani Mazumdar, Shikha Jhingan and Charu Gargi. According to Ranjani Mazumdar, ‘we became a group after being inspired by the concept of “independent documentary”, which at that time was for us synonymous with Bombay Our City [1985]’.12 This film was one of Patwardhan’s landmark films, about pavement dwellers in 1980s’ Bombay, which, according to Reena Mohan, ‘made Patwardhan known across India’.13 After participating in one of the college screenings of Bombay Our City, Mediastorm’s women decided to become a group and, as Mazumdar told me, to use the documentary medium to react to social issues that were close to them. In comparison with other media collectives, the members of Mediastorm benefited from the fact that they all came from the same university and therefore from similar technical and theoretical backgrounds – although financially their university provided little assistance with this venture. According to both Ranjani Mazumdar and Sabeena Gadihoke, Mediastorm members were able to make their first film by going door by door in search of funding. They hired a studio and equipment on credit, and the loan was later paid back from the sale of the film. Their subsequent films took a similar journey – at the beginning they were self-­ financed with only 1,000 Rupees from each member. Video technology made it possible for the group to go ahead with their venture; as Sabeena pointed out to me, it was ‘economically more convenient for the independent film venture of the group’.14 Mediastorm made three films between the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first film was called In Secular India (1986) and investigated rights on divorce for Muslim women in relation to the Muslim Women Bill passed by Parliament in early 1986. In Bandana Ray’s words ‘there is no doubt that the film has been able, in a large measure, to capture the reality behind the Act, even if a little amateurishly’ (1987: 58). Subsequently, the group focused on the Hindu funeral practice of of sati – which requires the widow to immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. Although sati is no longer a legal practice and occurs rarely, in September 1987 Roop Kanwar, an 18-year-­old woman, committed sati in the Deorala village of Sikar district in Rajasthan. The Mediastorm collective felt particularly moved by the event and decided to investigate the matter through film. The result was From the Burning Embers (1988), a film that begins with the reciting of a mantra followed by a scene of a

The advent of video technology   121 burning fire and a woman’s cries of pain and agony. The beginning of the film is an enacted scene, as the filmmakers were not allowed to shoot at the actual site of the sati. Then the film goes back to the incident of 4 Sep­ tember 1987, and analyses the theme as a human rights violation as well as in connection to the growing religious fundamentalism in India. When the film was finished, the group screened it in a private auditorium in New Delhi on 22 May 1988, attracting press coverage. Articles, in The Hindu (23 and 27 May 1988); Indian Express (30 December 1988); India Today, Illustrated Weekly of India, Hindustan Times, Statesmen and The Pioneer, to mention but a few, gave great visibility to the collective,15 and in September 1988 Doordarshan broadcast the film.16 Thanks to the money received from the sale of From the Burning Embers, as well as Doordarshan’s payment, Mediastorm began its third and final film, Kiska Dharm, Kiska Desh, shot in 1989 but finished only in 1991 due to financial difficulties. Unlike the previous two, this film was less observational and more analytical. It attempted to analyse the problem of Hindu fundamentalism and the repeated communal riots across the country without depicting a particular event or confining itself to just one place in India. For this reason, Sabeena Gadihoke pointed out to me that during a Delhi screening (in a private auditorium, by invitation only) the film was accused of lacking ‘objectivity’ and ‘reality’ in relation to particular places and events (see Prakash 1991: 8). In response to such criticism, the collective replied that the film was ‘an expression of [their] understanding of communalism, which developed through [their] interactions with people in various parts of the country and from discussions within Mediastorm, before and during the making of the film’ (Sabina Kidwai in Prakash 1991: 7). Moreover, Ranjani Mazumdar argued, the group believed that objectivity did ‘not exist either in literature or in the press, and least of all in the audio-­visual media’ (Prakash 1991: 8). In 1991, Mediastorm received the Media Foundation Chameli Devi award for its contribution to journalism (cf. Hindustan Times 26 March 1992; The Pioneer 26 and 27 March 1992). However, it chose to stop making films, as its need to explore social issues in filmmaking – both politically and in terms of form – was not possible given its financial constraints. Most of these women (namely, Shohini Ghosh, Sabina Kidwai, Sabeena Gadihoke and Ranjani Mazumdar) went on to become academics, who in their different ways have never stopped working with film. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the question of ‘form’ became central to documentary film discourse and, because of this, some of the members of Mediastorm have continued to be related to documentary practices in India up to the present day. It was thanks to their initiative that the first international conference on documentary film, Visible Evidence, took place in India at the end of 2014. Finally, as with K.P. Sasi’s media collective, Mediastorm inspired several generations of young student-­filmmakers to make politically charged films,

122   The advent of video technology also engaging in terms of form. Jamia Millia Islamia (and more specifically its Mass Communications Research Centre) is still regarded as one of the most important universities in India where documentary film production is concerned. Yet, to return to the purpose of this book, to what extent did all these small media video practices intersect with the existing documentary scene? A specific reflection on the material properties of video technology is necessary at this point.

Celluloid vs. video According to Asa Briggs and Peter Burke (2002), when we talk about the rapid development of new media forms, we should also start enquiring about the social history of media by investigating the relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’ technology (see Silverstone 1999). To them, history plays a central role in understanding the development of media forms (Briggs and Burke 2002: 2). In this respect, we can probably say that, based on the examples above, video functioned as a sort of ‘expansive realisation’ (Miller and Slater 2000) that enabled a multiplication of film/video practices across the country. Nevertheless, this was not the only function of video technology. The encounter between old and new film practices also created what Charles Acland (2007) called ‘residual media’ – that is, something familiar from the previous technology, dragged into the newer media contexts. In Acland’s words, ‘the introduction of new cultural phenomena and materials rests on encounters with existing forms and practices’ (ibid.). Hence, in this context, celluloid films (and, more specifically, 16 mm cameras) played the role of ‘residual’ media when video knocked on the door of the existing documentary film practices. Allow me to explain this point further. If we agree with the argument that, globally, video revolutionised the way in which films were made, reproduced and circulated (Boyle 1997), we should highlight that this ‘revolution’ did not occur immediately for documentary film practices in India. We have already discussed how, during the 1970s, various independent documentary practices emerged across the country; yet, what we have not yet said is that most of them made use of 16 mm cameras. The 16 mm technology transformed documentary filmmaking into a portable medium as, compared with the traditional 38 mm celluloid format, 16 mm cameras were lighter and more manageable. They were ideal for documentary filmmakers interested in investigating those aspects of Indian society that were bypassed by state politics. In Manjira Datta’s words, ‘the mobility of 16 mm technology allowed the filmmaker to enter private spaces’ and hence grasp different nuances of Indian social life.17 Accordingly, several documentary filmmakers used this technology until the early 1990s. Despite this, the state-­government strictly controlled 16 mm technology. Although a few cameras entered the independent filmmaking scene, thanks

The advent of video technology   123 to a few individuals with foreign contacts, 16 mm projectors, and film rolls, were not available outside state control. The Film Publicity Unit, run by the FD, was the only unit in India that had 16 mm projectors and, by law, it was only allowed to screen films that had a censor certificate. According to Anand Patwardhan, during the early 1980s independent filmmakers who made films without receiving a censor certificate had to convince local organisations or trade unions to take documentary films seriously and buy 16 mm projectors. Nevertheless, Anand told me, ‘the cost of 16 mm projectors was expensive and NGOs were not easy to convince on this matter’.18 In addition, 16 mm was not a technology for everyone. Only a few privileged independent filmmakers, by and large with a foreign education or with well-­established local contacts, could access this technology. I have already pointed out the way in which slide-­show exhibitions, for instance, developed because of the lack of available film infrastructure. Until video became a widespread technology, which did not occur until the early 1990s, only a few upper-­class filmmakers made documentary films in India. Apart from the already mentioned Anand Patwardhan and Tapan Bose (cf. Chapter 3), during the 1980s Suhasini Mulay, Meera Dewan, Manjira Datta, Ranjan Palit, Vasudha Joshi, Ruchir Joshi, Deepa Dhanraj and Navroze Contractor began their independent filmmaking practice with 16 mm technology.19 By this time, filmmakers who had begun their career with celluloid film were already professional filmmakers and did not immediately accept video technology. For a short while, traces of the previous technology were visible in the new one. The transition, indeed, occurred gradually. According to Deepa Dhanraj, most of these filmmakers began to convert their 16 mm films into video formats. In this way, ‘it was possible to circulate the film across the country without a censor certificate’,20 and cinematographers were able to maintain the material quality of the film without any ‘unreal plastic colours’ (Palit, in Waugh, video-­interview 1988). Films such as An Indian Story (Bose 1982) and Kya Hua is Shaher Ko/What Happened to this City? (Dhanraj, Contractor and Jadhav 1986) had to wait a long time before receiving their censor certificates. In order to receive a certificate, Deepa Dhanraj told me, the filmmakers were asked to make a few cuts to the final version submitted to the censor board and resend the material together with the pieces of negative that had been cut from the film (see Bose 1998: 45–46). It is at this juncture that video technology played a significant role. As Deepa narrated, ‘since the government requested us to make significant cuts to the original film, we decided to transfer the whole film into video before making the cuts for the government’.21 As a result, Kya Hua is Shaher Ko/What Happened to this City? (1986) had two ‘final’ versions: one for the censor board and one for the new ‘uncontrollable’ video distribution network. In other words, the three directors made sure that their film (without the adjustments made for the government) could freely circulate on easy duplicable video cassettes.22

124   The advent of video technology With the arrival of video technology, Anand Patwardhan, among others, told me how NGOs started to acquire video recorders and projectors, or to connect VCRs to televisions, which by then were available across the country.23 In other words, thanks to the widespread availability of televisions and video recorders, documentary filmmakers in India started to have a platform on which to screen their films outside state control. Since 16 mm projectors were rare among non-­state organisations, the value of the censor certificate to screen the film in public did not compare with the potential of video technology, which could reach Indian audiences privately. Hence, if it is true that video functioned as an ‘expansive realisation’ (Miller and Slater 2000) of existing documentary practices and that films did not circulate to an Indian audience until this time, how is it possible that during the pre-­video era there were already a number of known independent films and filmmakers? In other words, for whom were filmmakers making films if there was no alternative circulation for the screening of these films? One argument is that given their upper-­class status and international connections, they were making films for an international audience more than for India. Yet, this would be only a partial reading of this history. A brief historical detour needs emphasis here. From ‘Odessa’ to video distribution The concept of ‘travelling’ or ‘mobile’ cinema is not new in the history of documentary in India. Films reached their audiences through mobile cinemas in colonial India, transforming the film screening into a special event or ‘cultural performance’. Throughout the 1980s, a similar phenomenon occurred in Kerala. It was called ‘Odessa’ or ‘Odessa Movies’ and was led by John Abraham, an FTII graduate often known for his contribution to the development of new wave cinema. Vasudevan Unni writes that throughout the 1970s the name ‘John Abraham’ ‘was synonymous with open revolt’ (1988: 5). As he narrates, John Abraham was born in Kerala as a middle-­class Christian, but as an adult rejected both Christianity and middle-­class culture (ibid.). He spent most of his life walking to villages and towns encouraging people to rediscover their roots and reject middle-­ class culture, understood ‘as a superior-­imposition’ (ibid.: 6). Cinema was, for Abraham, understood as an art for the masses and as truth, not as an industry. Marxism and Russian filmmaking strongly influenced his ideals, of which Odessa was the product. According to Chalam Bannurakar, in the late 1970s John Abraham began discussing with some of his friends the possibility of creating a different kind of cinema. ‘Odessa emerged in 1981 out of these ideas’, Chalam told me.24 The name Odessa came from an episode of Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925), which focuses on the Potemkin Stairs in Odessa, Ukraine.25 Although today some contemporary filmmakers, film lovers and activists may remember Odessa as a sort of

The advent of video technology   125 ‘people’s movement’, which involved several types of individual advocating the same cause, in reality during the 1980s it was more of a ‘mobile cinema’ (cf. Unni 1988, 1990). Without any regular funding, this mobile cinema survived thanks to individual contributions until John Abraham’s death in 1987. Odessa was motivated by the political idea that good films should travel to towns and villages, creating a film exhibition network that was an alternative to the commercial film industry. When I visited Chalam in his house in north Bangalore, he remembered this period with nostalgia and, as if he was thinking aloud, he told me, ‘all of us involved with Odessa travelled from city to city with John Abraham either as part-­time or full-­time members. Odessa’s audiences were always affluent and varied in size from a hundred to even thousands of people’.26 Similarly, Unni describes Odessa’s screenings as follows: With a 16 mm projector, John Abraham and his apostles screened world classics [such as films from the Italian Neorealism, the French Nouvelle Vague and the Soviet cinema] and his own films to diverse groups of people in College campuses and village squares, in hospitals and prisons. And the shows were free. At the end of the screening, donation were welcome, but even otherwise, the show would happily go on.… Contributions, big (Rs.100/-) and small (Rs.2/-) were easily collected. (Unni 1988: 10) Thanks to Odessa’s 16 mm projector, independent documentary filmmakers of the 1980s (such as Patwardhan, Dhanraj, Palit, Joshi, Bose and Mulay) had the possibility of travelling with their films to an Indian audience for the first time. Documentaries were alternated with what Abraham conceived of as ‘films of art’ – that is, international non-­commercial films and films made by new wave filmmakers in India. However, Odessa was extremely well-­rooted in the Kerala cultural milieu of the 1970s and 1980s and followed the tradition of film societies, which were established in different regions of India from the late 1940s onwards.27 Odessa never expanded beyond this, limiting the possibility of increasing its audience and transforming the phenomenon into a national alternative circulation network. Despite this, among the few filmmakers who, with 16 mm technology, were able to make independent documentary films, Odessa was well known and appreciated. To some extent, it contributed to the formation of a number of future screening initiatives that emerged with the advent of video technology. In this respect, Odessa should be regarded as the antecedent to the development of the alternative video circulations that expanded in the late 1980s. As has already been said, video should not be considered as a ‘revolution’ of filmmaking practices in India, nor as the moment when independent film practices emerged in the subcontinent (cf. Sarkar and

126   The advent of video technology Wolf 2012). Rather, video acted both as an ‘expansive realisation’ (Miller and Slater 2000) of documentary films – increasing the circulation of existing filmmaking practices – and as the ‘residual media’ (Acland 2007) of the same practices – continuing the legacy of previous technologies while at the same time being dragged into the new media context.

Conclusion What we have seen in this chapter is that with the arrival of video technology and television in India documentary films could start to be screened on television, but that this did not occur due to the strict state control over national television programming. As a result, albeit for a few exceptions, television broadcasting did not bring a new circulation platform to independent documentary practices. Thanks, however, to the large numbers of television sets available all over the country (precisely because they were promoted by Indira Gandhi’s national politics) and thanks also to independent initiatives undertaken by NGOs and independent media collectives, video technology expanded beyond the state and its television, and contributed to the creation of alternative circulation platforms for independent films. By this time, initiatives such as Odessa, which made use of 16 mm technology, already existed in certain parts of India; however, 16 mm cameras were not accessible to everyone because they were mainly controlled by the state. Thanks to video technology, more people started to make documentary films and more state-­independent films started to circulate across the country. If this scenario was ‘ideal’ for those who before the advent of video ‘struggled’ to make documentary films with other visual forms (through slide-­show documentation, for instance), it was also congenial for those few filmmakers who had been in the privileged position of being able to use 16 mm films before the advent of video. Indeed, although the latter rejected the material properties of video (when compared with 16 mm films), video still played an important role for them because it created the possibility of bypassing censor restrictions when circulating their films. As often occurs with the arrival of new media (Silverstone 1999), due to the varying material quality of the new technology practitioners tend to hold onto the old media (Acland 2007). However, if the new technology contributes to changing the historical context in which a media practice has developed (as in the case of India’s video turn) it may still act as a foundation for a revolutionary moment. ‘Thanks to the sale of my films, I could not only recover the cost of the film but also save part of the profit to invest in a new film project’, Anand Patwardhan said to me, while also emphasising the beginning of a new ‘era’ for independent filmmaking.28 With the freedom to both make films outside state control and screen them to Indian people, thanks to the video turn for the first time filmmakers in India had the possibility of actively engaging with their

The advent of video technology   127 film-­subject and their film-­viewer, seen as two important aspects of their filmmaking practice. Video technology made it possible for filmmakers to go public (Fox and Starn 1997) and become more involved in grassroots politics and activism. The video turn was a moment in which documentary films acquired a life beyond the film-­text. In other words, without losing the material quality of the previous celluloid technology, in the 1980s documentary filmmaking turned into something more concrete, visible and tangible, as precisely an ‘expansive realisation’ of existing documentary practices, which up to this point had faced considerable sociohistorical restrictions. From this historical moment onwards, the documentary ‘screening’ as a live-­event or cultural performance has gradually become a fundamental feature of documentary film practices in India. Anticipating engagement with a possible audience (cf. Hughes 2011) led several filmmakers to create a series of new discourses about documentary film, which, arguably, are still pertinent in the present day. They include the ‘feminist’ and the ‘performative’ modes of address and ‘freedom of speech’ to which, in turn, I give my full attention in the remaining chapters of this book.

Notes   1 A shorter version of this chapter, containing reference only to the material properties of video technology, has been published in the journal Visual Anthropology under the title ‘The Video Turn: Documentary Film Practices in 1980s India’.   2 Conversation with Chandita Mukherjee, 18 February 2009.   3 In this context, I use the word ‘independence’ to highlight video-­film practices that were different from the traditional FD productions.   4 Conversation with Ranjan De, 1 December 2008.   5 Conversation with Anjali Monteiro, 18 April 2009.   6 Conversation with Chandita Mukherjee, 18 February 2009.   7 To read more about AVEHI see: www.avehiabacus.org (last access: 16 October 2017).   8 Conversation with Rahul Roy, 28 November 2009.   9 Conversation with Ranjan De, 1 December 2008. 10 Media Mail (later known as Alternate Media Times) was an independent quarterly magazine published between 1997 and 2001. It was run by Magic Lantern and supported by readers’ contribution. During its short-­lived existence, this independent quarterly reported on most of the documentary film activities and other media-­related topics in India. 11 Conversation with Santosh Kumar, 1 February 2009. 12 Conversation with Ranjani Mazumdar, 21 April 2009. 13 Conversation with Reena Mohan, 17 April 2009. 14 Conversation with Sabeena Gadihoke, 22 April 2009. 15 I owe my gratitude to Sabeena Gadihoke who during our conversation shared this material to me, and I apologise to my readers as most of it is not dated. 16 I return to the relationship between Doordarshan and independent documentaries in Chapter 6. 17 Conversation with Manjira Datta, 28 November 2008. 18 Conversation with Anand Patwardhan, 20 February 2009.

128   The advent of video technology 19 Chapter 5 covers the work and lives of some of these practitioners. 20 Conversation with Deepa Dhanraj, 30 April 2009. 21 Conversation with Deepa Dhanraj, 30 April 2009. 22 For a detailed analysis of the relationship between cinema and censorship, see Mazzarella 2013. 23 Conversation with Anand Patwardhan, 20 February 2009. 24 Conversation with Chalam Bannurakar, 1 May 2008. 25 The film was a dramatised version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against the officers of the Tsarist regime. Eisenstein constructed the film with meticulous montage techniques which inspired a number of filmmakers from all over the world. 26 Conversation with Chalam Bannurakar, 1 May 2008. 27 As Vijaya Mulay pointed out, film societies brought to India a knowledge of international films that was not available through the mainstream circuits, but they did not contribute to the spread of documentary culture (conversation with Vijaya Mulay, 22 April 2009). To find out more about film societies in India, consult Narahari Rao (2001). 28 Conversation with Anand Patwardhan, 20 February 2009.

5 Articulation of performance and performativity

It may be too much of a simplification to say that the earlier forms of film-­ making, which were impatient with the ideas of subjectivity and intimacy, and even of ornamentation, were more masculinist styles. While an overwhelming number of documentary practitioners and theorists have been men, women have certainly practised documentary in this way as well. But what is discernible is that many of the shifting approaches to documenting reality did come from feminist theory and discussion…. While these approaches are diverse, they have collectively achieved a strong breakthrough: no longer do we make films in terms of a fixed reality; there is a recognition that often the subject performs an aspect of themselves for an aspect of you, the film-­maker at the time; there is also an incorporation of this element of mutual performativity into the form of the film and its claims to reality and truth. (Paromita Vohra 2011: 49–50)

When in April 2009 I attended the second Persistence Resistance film festival, in New Delhi, one of the main topics discussed in one of its parallel seminar-­sessions was the relationship between ‘real’ and ‘performed’. Among other filmmakers, Madhusree Dutta, Paromita Vohra and Gargi Sen were the most outspoken in defence of the ‘performative’ role of film in the documentary scene in India. The fact that Ravina Aggarwal, a programme officer at Ford Foundation India, was invited as a speaker, made the conversation even livelier – as if it was necessary to convince her to expand her personal ‘classification’ of films and to include (for a hypothetical funding project) documentary films that did not respect ‘traditional’ documentary canons associated with the ‘real’. The overriding remark made by the aforementioned filmmakers was that in India there was not sufficient performativity in documentaries, or that at least in the majority of cases it was not deliberate. This, they concluded, was most likely due to the fact that the funders of documentaries were not (yet) interested in this ‘fresh’ way of making films. In conversations with me, several of my interlocutors justified the absence of ‘performative documentaries’ in India as being ‘because of its

130   Performance and performativity history’ – that is, as with Rahul Roy for example, because of the legacy that Indian documentary received from the Griersonian understanding of realism.1 For a number of women filmmakers, however, moving towards a more performative mode of address in documentary films was the result of the gender consciousness of the 1980s, which brought ‘a huge number of women into documentary filmmaking’ and ‘a different style to documentary’ (Dutta 2002: 52; see also Vohra 2011). Yet, in response to the question ‘what is a performative documentary?’, often the response I received from the filmmakers with whom I interacted between 2007 and 2009 was a relational one. That is, performativity is something that exists in film when the idea that the film must ‘reproduce’ a ‘fixed reality’ does not prevail – as this chapter’s opening quotation may suggest (see also Rajagopal and Vohra 2012). The majority of women filmmakers with whom I interacted believed that this ‘new’, ‘fresh’ approach to filmmaking had emerged from ‘feminist theory and discussion’ (Vohra 2011: 49). When I began my conversations with male filmmakers on the same subject, they were more sceptical about the idea, but scepticism also came from the more senior women filmmakers. Those who were actively part of the 1980s women’s movement, for instance, at that time ‘rejected’ the idea of ‘feminism’ as theorised and practised at an international level because it was not directly applicable to women’s groups and women’s struggle in India (see Anantharam 2009). According to Deepa Dhanraj, films have played a key role in the discourse of the women’s movement in India. The women’s journal Manushi, for instance, was one of the promoters of this discourse. It was the first periodical to give special attention to the political function of films in Indian society. From this point on, Deepa said, ‘women’s groups have started to give importance to cinema, understood as something serious to take seriously’. Yet, she continued, while women’s groups in the 1980s started to give importance to women’s subjects in films and to introduce ordinary women into their film practices, the next generation of female filmmakers moved towards debating the making of ‘different kinds’ of films. ‘What they mean by this different’ – she concluded – ‘I personally do not understand’.2 This later shift was characterised by what, in a different context, Elizabeth Birmingham might today call ‘feminist value and aesthetics’, which, in fairly abstract terms, signifies a way to create something ‘beautiful, tactile, poetic, and collaborative’ (2011: 247). This chapter explores the limits of the meaning of ‘feminist aesthetics’ and suggests that the importance of women filmmakers in understanding contemporary documentary practices in India is to be identified in their discourse more than in their practice. While crucial for the development of a new documentary discourse about filmmaking ‘forms’, the women’s movement was not solely responsible for creating new ‘performative’ forms of documentary film in India. As with the concepts of ‘colonial’ film, ‘FD film’ and ‘independent’ practice (previously discussed in this volume), the

Performance and performativity   131 idea of ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’ has by and large been fixed within a specific historical discourse, leaving out alternative possible others. Aiming to go beyond such fixity and hence show the different ‘articulations’ – understood as the processes of creating connections (cf. Hall 1980; Slack 1996) – of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ in the film practices of late-­1980s and early-­1990s India, this chapter unfolds around two main phenomena: the emergence of ‘women’s groups’ interested in films (and the subsequent ‘feminist discourse’) and the circulation of editors and camera-­operators as the ‘mediums’ through which new discourses about documentary forms spread out. To achieve this, I make use of first-­person encounters juxtaposed with written and audio-­visual archival material from the 1980s collected during my 2007–2009 fieldwork. Before examining these two phenomena in relation to each other though, let us begin with a short theoretical discussion, to better locate the subject of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’.

Theorising performance and performativity If it is true that many of my interlocutors in 2007–2009 India talked about ‘performativity’ in films in a relational or oppositional way to the ‘real’, understanding the ‘performative’ in relation to previous film practices has arguably also been akin to theories about ‘performativity’ that emerged in film studies in the 1990s – and in particular to those of international scholars specialised in documentary film. In the early 1990s, two well-­known film scholars, Michael Renov and Bill Nichols, proposed ‘four fundamental tendencies or rhetorical/aesthetic functions attributable to documentary practices’ (Renov 1993: 21) and ‘five modes of documentary representation’ (Nichols 1994a: 94). For Renov the four functions were ‘modalities of desire, impulsions which fuel documentary discourse’ (1993: 22), namely: (1) to record, to reveal, or preserve; (2) to persuade or promote; (3) to analyse or interrogate; and (4) to express. Nichols identified five modes of documentary representation ‘suggesting how each attempt[ed] to provide redress for a deficiency in the previous mode while eventually presenting limitations of its own’ (1994a: 94). These five modes were expository, observational, interactive, reflexive and performative documentary. Within such specific and, for some, ‘excessively crude’ and ‘simplistic’ definitions (Bruzzi 2006: 3), Renov’s preoccupation was mainly to reflect on the concept of ‘poetic’ in documentary film, while Nichols was interested in discussing the ‘performative’ mode of documentary as the latest documentary mode to distance itself from the previous modes.3 Whether we call it ‘poetic’ or ‘performative’, both arguments were constructed in a relational way – that is, as if in order to talk about a new form/style/mode of address of documentary film we needed to distance ourselves from the previous one – exactly as most of my interlocutors in India did to justify the ‘performative turn’ in documentary filmmaking practices.

132   Performance and performativity In this context, Susan Scheibler’s (1993) bold explanation of ‘perform­ ativity’ is, for me, one of the most convincing of those days. She states that performativity in film involves an element of self-­reflexivity that questions the relationship between filmmaker and film subject (1993: 136). The performative form recognises the filmmaker-­camera-spectator as an observer (ibid.: 142) and ‘allows language to become a field of enjoyment, of play and desire.… The performative plays with language, unsettling and destabilizing it’ (ibid.: 146). Even though not placed in an explicit way, Scheibler seems to add the role of the ‘observer’ to the analysis of how a ‘film text’ is constructed (namely, through a relationship between the filmmaker and her subject). In other words, the observer, viewer, audience, spectator is also conceived of here as part of the film performance and hence as someone actively involved in the production of meanings and significations. In this way, Scheibler gives us scope to frame the debate about ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ beyond the classic discussion in film studies (which is mainly concerned with the film-­text and/or the relationship between filmmaker and film-­subject). Moreover, she enables us to become somewhat closer to more strictly anthropological concerns – interested in the larger social structure of the ‘performance’ and hence, among other things, also in its relationship with audiences. A brief detour to these anthropological approaches will help us to better see connections with the theory of performativity in documentary studies and create a richer framework within which to understand the development of these concepts in India. From Victor Turner (1969, 1988), Richard Schechner (1985) and Johannes Fabian (1990), we have learnt how ‘performance’ is a ‘creative act’ that enables us to understand larger complex phenomena around, and beyond, the act. Performance is in this sense understood as the ‘act of creation’, the ‘giving form to’, as Fabian (1990) would say, rather than as an expression or a mise en scène of the sensible world. While these approaches have informed anthropological studies of cultural performances and rituals in general, the most persuasive work that has influenced more recent theories of performance in anthropology (and beyond) comes, without doubt, from Judith Butler’s (1990, 1997) concept of gender as performance. Borrowing from linguistic theories of speech-­act, Butler argues how gender does not exist if not for its performative act of enunciation which, in the moment of its actualisation, produces and constantly re-­produces ‘action-­ reactions’, fixing (rather than liberating) identities. In this sense, gender performance (in the same way as any other performance) ‘performs’ itself through precisely its ‘performativity’ and, as such, is always constituted by ‘performative acts’. If this is the case, while this approach has been inspirational in relation to gender theories, I agree with Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius that the risk involved in understanding performance in general from this perspective is that any ‘performance-­aspect’ is reduced or restricted to a ‘performative-­aspect’ and hence the ‘perlocutionary force’ of perform­ ativity is emphasised over reflections around and about the performance

Performance and performativity   133 per se – its affects and effects (2015: 7). Theories of performance and performativity in anthropology have indeed built on but also moved away from Butler’s understanding of the terms, towards reflections about ‘political performances’ (cf. Flynn and Tinius 2015) or ‘experimental spaces’ of performance (cf. Latour 2012) to mention just two. When placed together with the aforementioned theories about ‘performative documentary’ in film studies, however, in their complexity these debates enable us to locate some of the visual and discursive approaches to film fostered by (visual) anthropologists and (visual) artists in more contemporary times (cf. Schneider and Pasqualino 2014). Here, I refer to those approaches that emphasise the hermeneutical and ‘emotional-­sensorial’ approach of filmmaking (the performativity?) beyond simple relational oppositions to the ‘classic’ representations of the real. By combining debates in anthropology and documentary studies, these novel approaches do not solely experiment with ‘forms’ and film-­subjects, but also aim to create a direct dialogue with audiences. As Laurent Van Lancker puts it, this is an approach ‘concerned with producing knowledge via experience’ (2013: 135, emphasis added). Or, in An van Dienderen’s terms, it is a form of ‘performative ethnography’ wherein the performance does not ‘express’ anything but rather is ‘the text at the moment of its actualization’ (2004: 58). Thus, as I have elsewhere argued, it is a form of film that enables the spectator to become closer to the sensible experience of the film-­subject and thus to embody and inhabit the ‘invisible’ (Suhr and Willerslev 2012, 2013) of the fieldwork encounter4 – constituent, as said in the introduction to this book, of both anthropology and (visual) art practices. To return to India, I certainly see its contemporary documentary film practices and debates as part of this larger ‘performative’ cross-­disciplinary discussion. Yet, as with film studies and anthropology and their respective historical contexts, I believe that in order to expand the understanding and use of ‘performative’ film practices in the subcontinent (as pointed out by the filmmakers cited at the beginning of this chapter) it is important to begin from where and how the ‘discourse’ about performance and performativity emerged in India. If we make use of ‘performance’ and ‘perform­ ativity’ as tools or methodologies to precisely explain this phenomenon, we can say, borrowing from Erving Goffman (1974) and more recently Deborah Kapchan, that performances are also ‘patterns of behavior, ways of speaking, manners of bodily comportment – whose repetitions situate actors in time and space, structuring individual and group identities’ (1995: 479). That is to say that both individual ‘performances’ and ‘staged’ performances contribute over time to the development of what Foucault (1991b) would call a ‘discursive practice’, the ‘space’ within which performances exist – that is, precisely the ‘space of performance’ (Kapchan 1995: 483). In our case, if the ‘staged’ performances are films (as both a codified ‘text’ and a relationship between filmmaker and film-­subjects) then the ‘individual’ performances are those ‘created’ by filmmakers and the

134   Performance and performativity ‘space’ of these performances is the discourse about ‘performativity’ that all these actors simultaneously create. I return to the discussion about this ‘space’ in Chapters 6 and 7. For now, let me stress that while filmmakers and film scholars have been very attentive regarding reflections on the relationship between the filmmaker and the film-­subject/text, they are yet to pay attention to the way in which discourses about ‘performativity’ in filmmaking, are constructed, articulated and performed (cf. Hall 1980; Slack 1996) – an aspect to which we should now turn our attention.

Women’s groups and feminist discourse In the late 1980s, a number of women entered the documentary scene in India. They were filmmakers, film critics, editors and camera-­operators, inspired by the first discourses about women’s emancipation in India and interested in the arts and media. As Reena Mohan pointed out to me, ‘in the 1980s the feminist journal Manushi was already circulating, and as a woman it was clear that either you had to get married or start doing something else’. She continued,  I did not want to get married and I had to search for something else. At that time the FTII at Pune was widely publicised and when I saw the advert in the newspaper I thought that my father could afford it.… Finally, this is how I got into filmmaking. At that time I did not have any clue about filmmaking and not even editing.5 Like Reena Mohan, who, since the late 1980s, has been one of the most well-­known and successful documentary film editors in India, several other educated middle-­class women turned their attention to filmmaking in that decade. By the 1990s, film critics and newspapers in India had begun to talk more about documentary filmmaking, addressing the phenomenon as an ‘independent film movement’ and sometimes even as a movement of ‘women filmmakers’. The latter was due to the great number of women who suddenly entered this scene (cf. Zaidi 1992; Masud 1992 in Indian Express, 16 February; Rai 1992 in Indian Express, 23 February; Rao 1992 in The Hindu, 22 March) not only as filmmakers but also as film writers (cf. Rao 1994; Kazmi 1995; Mulay 1996). Out of these founding debates specific questions regarding the ‘femininity’ of films started to arise. Some of them included, ‘does the gender of a filmmaker make any difference in perceptions, treatment of subject and choice of subjects’ (Mulay 1996: 1)? Or more specifically, ‘do women have an instinctive affinity with the documentary and its special way of “seeing” ’ (Rao 1994: 29)? Not far from these questions, Madhusree Dutta argued that the 1980s women’s movement ‘helped make the borders of all kinds more fluid, all identities less rigid, all expressions more multi-­cultural and thus more layered’ (2002: 52).

Performance and performativity   135 As I show in the following pages, what seems more convincing to me, however, is that early 1980s women’s groups generated a sensitivity about ‘women’ and documentary films that rapidly turned into a new discourse about documentary films. The women’s movement fostered a form of discursivity about women in films and film practices that opened up a number of possible applications. In Foucault’s words, ‘unlike the founding of a science, the initiation of a discursive practice does not participate in its later transformations’ (1991b: 116). Similarly 1980s women’s groups generated a discourse that positioned the next generation of women filmmakers within the framework of ‘feminist’ or ‘women’s’ filmmaking, in turn affecting the way in which contemporary filmmakers perceive the role of women in the history of documentary films. There now follow specific examples of this, taken from 1980s archival material.6 Festivals and seminars about women and film In March 1981, a Bangalore-­based women’s group called ‘Vimochana’ discussed the possibility of organising a film festival about women. Their intent was to ‘develop a critical understanding of existing trends in the portrayal of women in films’ and to suggest the making of new films ‘with a strong feminist view point’ (Festival booklet 1983). Vimochana was motivated by the realisation that ‘film ha[d] turned into yet another industry producing commodities for consumption’ and therefore had the potential to ‘reinforce the attitudes and values that legitimise[d] the status quo’ (ibid.). The group organised the festival with film screenings and post-­film discussions and, according to the following year’s festival booklet, it received such positive responses that they decided to make it an annual event (ibid.). This was one of the first attempts by women’s groups in India to engage with audio-­visual forms as a way to begin a dialogue with and among women. At the beginning of the 1980s, several women’s initiatives relating to film took place in India. The basic principles of these initiatives were in line with those expressed by Vimochana and, by and large, were inspired by the periodical Manushi. By the 1980s, a debate about women’s justice had developed in urban India, and today women filmmakers remember and refer to this period as the ‘women’s movement’.7 Women’s groups recognised that ‘the visual medium offers choices which the written narrative may not’ (Jain and Rai 2002: 9) and decided ‘to look at Indian films from the point of view of gender’ (ibid.). Due to the extensive popularity of cinema across the country, in a 1986 festival booklet Sheba Chhachhi (1986: 26) argues that several women felt the need to explore this medium further through the making of films from a gender perspective. This was a bold choice given that video was not yet a widespread technology and celluloid was an expensive way to begin a new venture (cf. Chapter 4). For this reason, women’s contribution to filmmaking practices was not evident

136   Performance and performativity until the early 1990s. Despite this, the 1980s debates fostered a distinct discourse related to women and film, which women filmmakers adopted and reproduced in the 1990s. As is clear from several of Vimochana’s festival booklets, in the 1980s, women’s collectives were interested in deconstructing popular films through a ‘gender lens’ and in identifying ‘sexist’ approaches to filmmaking that they wanted to discuss with female audiences. These women also envisioned a different kind of filmmaking – less hierarchical, more democratic and with ordinary women featuring as speaking subjects. At that time, the independent films that sporadically circulated were mostly interested in issues directly related to state politics, whereas new wave cinema had a bigger audience and wider circulation (cf. Chapter 3). However, as Deepa Dhanraj pointed out the first time we met in her house in Bangalore, ‘women’s groups never found the social realism of new wave cinema satisfactory’.8 This point comes across very strongly in several publications of this period (cf. Vimochana Festival Booklet 1985, Dhanraj, in Bhushan 1988). Moreover, Deepa repeated it to me more than once during our conversations. Indeed, although new wave cinema gave visibility to women subjects, it treated issues such as dowry, rape and the relationship between independent women and traditional family structures as a ‘social reality’ of India without giving voice to the affected women. C.S. Laxmi argues that new wave filmmakers used images in a denotative way without giving any attention to their connotative aspect (1986: 10). Similarly, Vimochana states: This is not to say that all the [new wave] films being made around these issues are superficial…. The effectiveness and provocative value of these individual films is sometimes lost when it forms part of a general wave or trend. What therefore is the impact of any movement on society is a larger question within which we must locate our specific concern with films. (Vimochana, A Festival of Films on Women 1985) The discussion about existing films and new possibilities to make films from a gender perspective was consolidated in 1986 during the Hyderabad International Film Festival, known as ‘Filmotsav’.9 On this occasion, several women’s groups from India gathered together. The festival hosted a special session entitled ‘Third World Women’s Film’ within which three major workshops took place, focusing on the following themes: ‘Politics of Personal Struggle and Film’, ‘Films for Consciousness Raising’ and ‘The Relationship between Films and the Women’s Movement’. The participants included women’s groups from Gujarat, New Delhi, West Bengal, Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka, as well as from foreign countries, such as England and Holland. These groups were either involved in women’s activism or committed to women’s justice,

Performance and performativity   137 even if also supporting other social and political campaigns. The workshops brought together filmmakers and film critics with the aim of starting a dialogue ‘on the potential use of the medium in the interest of women, and on the relationship of film with the women’s movement’ (Bhaiya and Agarwal 1986: ii). The result of this gathering was a publication called, WOMEN: TAKE ONE. Beginning of a dialogue in the Third World Women’s Film Festival, edited by Abha Bhaya and Sheba Chhachhi from Jagori, a New Delhi women’s organisation (see Figure 5.1). From the essays contained in a publication that came out of the workshop ‘Third World Women’s Film’, it emerges that the participants felt the need to ‘invent’ a different kind of cinema, one that functioned as an alternative to the dominant mainstream, and was politically charged. As several women pointed out, this cinema needed to be politically conscious and go beyond the idea of ‘capturing reality’ or being voyeuristic (Vanita 1986: 34), to intervene and seek to provoke the audience yet without presenting an impartial view as the only acceptable truth (Chhachhi 1986: 26). Its role would be to engage the viewer in critical debates regarding social discrimination and to question the status quo of both film content and the traditional filmmaking form (ibid.). According to these essays, the distinction between a ‘women’s cinema’ and a ‘feminist cinema’ lies in the relationship between the filmmaker and the viewers (ibid.: 27). And unlike a ‘women’s cinema’, a ‘feminist cinema’ would be a cinema that focused on women and was also interested in going beyond the representation of women – carefully considering both the chosen visual form and the connotative aspects of this (ibid.). Describing a different context but resembling these narratives, Rick Altman argues that the major task of the international feminist film criticism of the 1980s ‘has been to rehabilitate the term women’s film and thereby restore value to women’s activities’ (1999: 77). Altman explains that, before this period, the term ‘melodrama’ in films was associated with ‘family melodrama’ and often referred to as ‘women’s film’ – intended as a light family topic, which attracted more female than male viewers. With the rise of the international feminist discourse in the 1980s, the term ‘women’s film’ entered serious critical debates ‘as a weapon in the ongoing struggle to empower women’ (ibid.) and, Altman says, ‘once it could be divorced from specific films and pre-­existing genres, the women’s film was free to take on a life of its own’ (ibid.). Talking about this new film genre, Julia Lesage argues that, in the Euro-­American context, feminist documentary filmmaking ‘developed as a cinematic genre related to a political movement, the contemporary women’s movement’ (1984: 223). She points out that the movement was concerned, among other things, with the complex ways in which a female viewer responded ‘to looking at beautiful or suffering women characters in films … [as] probably … a mixture of pleasure, identity, and distance’ (ibid.: 239). When feminist women began to make films in line with the politics of the movement, Lesage explains

Figure 5.1  TAKE ONE. Cover of the Third World Women’s Film Festival booklet. Source: courtesy of Sheba Chhachhi.

Performance and performativity   139 that they deliberately decided to use ‘ “realistic” documentary structure’ because they saw making these films ‘as an urgent public act’ (ibid.: 225). In other words, feminist filmmakers wanted their films to enter ‘libraries, schools, churches, unions, and YWCAs, to bring a feminist analysis to many women it might otherwise never reach’ (ibid.). In India, the significance of feminist or women’s film in women’s debates was not immediately clear. As Deepa Dhanraj pointed out, the movement emerged as an indigenous reaction to the Indian social structure and not as a result of international debates about feminism.10 Hence, without any clear internal organisation, during the 1980s there was a clash in women’s debates regarding whether the focus in India should be on encouraging more women to make films or on producing more films with feminist values. In addition, it is important to highlight that in the mid-­1980s no film in India could be described as ‘feminist’ or, rather, one was yet to be made. For this reason, there was much debate regarding what was not a feminist approach. One film that exemplifies these debates is the internationally acclaimed Indian Cabaret (1985), directed by Mira Nair. The controversy concerning Indian Cabaret In addition to an increase in the number of women making films in India in this period, some Indian women with international connections also began to make films with foreign cinematographers, often targeting an international audience. Mira Nair’s Indian Cabaret (1985) and Nilita Vachani’s Eyes of Stone (1990) are examples of this type of film. The first film ‘explores the stereotypes of the “respectable” woman and the “fast” woman in the Indian society’ of the 1980s, focusing on the life of a bar dancer (Chatterjee 1990: 27). The second centres on the rural belief-­practice that women are possessed by a devil (Prabhu 1990: 71; see also Rao 1994: 35–36). In 1986, Indian Cabaret was shown at Filmotsav in Hyderabad and attracted major criticism. Members of the women’s movement appreciated the film because it was made by an Indian woman and was about women’s issues in India. However, they condemned the fact that the female director, Mira Nair, made use of a sexist [male-­foreign] camera for her representation (Bhushan 1986: 16; Lall 1986: 31; Vanita 1986: 34). To them, this camera reinforced the negative perception of bar dancers in Indian society. While these interpretations are today printed in the aforementioned publications that came out of the festival, Mira Nair’s response to the accusations did not circulate widely. Nevertheless, Nair addresses the controversy caused by the film in a video-­interview with Thomas Waugh, which took place a few years after this incidence. This interview is part of the collection of video-­interviews that Waugh donated to me during my stay in India which, to remind my reader, I analyse in this book as part of my personal collection of archival materials (cf. Introduction).

140   Performance and performativity According to Nair, Indian Cabaret is an exploration of what it means to be ‘good women’ and ‘bad women’ in India in connection to sexuality. Nair’s intention was to explore these dynamics and contradictions by using a woman who herself was used and labelled by others as a ‘bad woman’ – that is, a cabaret dancer. Despite this, Nair argues that the film ‘received criticism from the “so-­called feminists” since it did not take a particular position to defend women and it lacked of morality’ (in Waugh, video-­interview 1988). In response to this critique, Nair points out that the film was not about morality but about the spirit of survival of those women who, like the main character Rekha, decided to ‘emancipate’ themselves. To Nair, Rekha symbolises this act of emancipation when she decides to leave the group of bar dancers by getting married. In other words, looking at the matter from Nair’s perspective we can say that the film did not aim to engage with the women’s movement in India but was rather a film that was made in line with an international cinematic debate about representation, reality and form in filmmaking. Mira Nair was introduced to the international film circuit during her university days in New Delhi, and, as soon as she graduated, she left India for Montreal, Canada. Because she made Indian Cabaret with foreign ‘privileges’, Waugh describes this film as an example of a ‘hybrid Northernized perspective of its emigrant director and American cameraman cemented through the mechanics of the shot and the structure of the film as a whole’ (Waugh 2011: 261; see also Waugh 1990). We can argue that the film came out of a context different from that of the 1980s women’s movement in India. Despite this, the film became the most debated film during Filmotsav in 1986, raising more questions about the meaning of ‘women’ and ‘feminism’ in filmmaking. Should women make only feminist films? Should feminist films represent only women? What about films made by a woman but without an approach accepted by the women’s movement? What about men? Should men be excluded from the category of ‘feminist’ film? What about those men who make films in line with the filmmaking approach pursued by the women’s movement? What about those rejecting feminism but sensitive to women’s issues? (see Figure 5.2). These were only some of the questions that emerged from Filmotsav 1986 and, at that time, these were unanswerable. In fact, neither a ‘feminist’ Indian film nor a recognised ‘movement’ of documentary filmmaking in India existed as yet. Deepa Dhanraj and Sumitra Bhave’s community activities with women and filmmaking were probably the only tangible examples of films made with and about the ordinary women of India. But the question remained: were these films ‘feminist’? Or, were they part of the existing category of independent films (cf. Chapters 3 and 4) but with a focus on a different subject and using a different approach? Above all, was this being done only by women or were men also involved in these new way of engaging with women’s film subjects? Before drawing any conclusions, allow me to give some attention to the films made by Dhanraj and Bhave in the 1980s, in order to enrich this discussion.

Figure 5.2 Brainstorming: an example of collective work, in the booklet WOMEN: TAKE ONE. Beginning of a Dialogue in the Third World Women’s Film Festival. Source: courtesy of Sheba Chhachhi.

142   Performance and performativity Deepa Dhanraj and Sumitra Bhave Deepa Dhanraj and Sumitra Bhave are among the most well-­known and productive women-­filmmakers who, during the 1980s, began working on women’s issues at a participatory level. While I met Deepa several times in Bangalore during my stay in 2007–2009 and have kept in contact with her ever since, meeting her in cafes and shops and trying out her Italian home-­ cooking, I have never had the chance to meet Sumitra Bhave. It was Thomas Waugh who, when I met him in Lonavala (Maharashtra) in February 2009, drew my attention to Sumitra, who by then was no longer part of the documentary scene. Nevertheless, to better describe the scenario of women filmmakers of the 1980s, when I began to analyse my data I thought it worth including Sumitra Bhave’s 1988 video-­interview with Thomas Waugh and placing it in relation to Deepa Dhanraj’s. Deepa joined the women’s movement in the late 1970s and, together with Navroze Contractor and a few other activists, set up a media collective called Yugantar. At that time, Navroze was a male cinematographer who had been trained at the FTII and in a few international workshops. He was, by and large, involved in the feature film industry in India. He worked as a cinematographer on most of the films directed by Deepa. Sumitra came from a Pune-­based research project called ‘Srivani/Women’s Voice’, which focused on issues concerning Dalit (untouchable) women. She turned to audio-­visual practices through her work in this project. As she narrated to Thomas Waugh, at that time the audio-­visual medium was the only way to work at a participatory level with illiterate women (Bhave in Waugh, video-­interview 1988). Yugantar made three films between 1981 and 1983. The first, Molkarin/ Maid Servant (1981), was shot in Pune, Maharashtra, and focused on the oppressive conditions faced by domestic workers. The second, Tambakoo Chaakila Oob Ali (1982), was shot in Nipani, Karnataka, and depicted tobacco workers’ struggle. The third film, Idhi Katha Matramena/Is this Just a True Story? (1983), was shot in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, and made in collaboration with the women’s movement there. This film was a fictional reconstruction of domestic violence, in which members of the women’s movement contributed their personal stories. Due to ‘the nature of the subject’, Deepa said, ‘we felt the need to make an enacted film and not a documentary’. According to Deepa Dhanraj, all three films were made ‘in a collaborative way – that is, with strong participation of the women chosen as film-­subject, whether domestic workers, tobacco pickers or women’s activists’.11 After these films, Deepa directed Sudesha (1983), a portrayal of a woman activist from the Chipko Forest Conservation Movement in the foothills of the Himalayas. As she pointed out to me, ‘from its inception the women’s movement collaborated with other struggles and organisations across the country – including with the Chipko Forest Conservation

Performance and performativity   143 Movement’.12 Deepa carried out a few other small film projects on women’s issues, but her popularity grew at a national and international level (through film festival circuits) with the making of Something Like a War (1991) and Kya Hua is Shaher Ko/What Happened to this City? (1986). The latter was co-­directed with Navroze Contractor and Keshav Rao Jadhav and was based on the violence of the communal riots that occurred between Hindus and Muslims in Hyderabad in September 1984. Because of the importance of its theme, the film was the subject of much debate in local newspapers (cf. Chandramouli 1986 in Indian Express, 6 June; Punwani 1986 in The Sunday Observer, 2–9 August). Something Like a War (1991) was a film about very different issues, the family planning politics pursued by the Indian government and the way in which patriarchy has always victimised women in Indian society. Due to its strong criticism of government policies, the film generated much controversy at the second Bombay International Film Festival for Documentary and Short Films (BIFF ), in 1992, which no local newspaper or periodical failed to discuss (cf. Zaidi 1992; Masud 1992, in Indian Express, 16 February; Rai 1992, in Indian Express, 23 February; Rao 1992, in The Hindu, 22 March). In addition, Something Like a War came to be seen retrospectively as the representative ‘feminist film’ to which, up to the present day, a number of filmmakers continue to refer. Unlike Deepa Dhanraj, Sumitra Bhave did not continue making films for long, and filmmakers with whom I interacted during my 2007–2009 stay in India rarely mentioned her in their narrative about history. In the early 1980s, however, Sumitra also worked in a team with a mixture of men and women. Those who worked with her include Divhiya, Sunil and Sati Bhave (in Waugh, video-­interview 1988). Sumitra’s films focused on Dalit women’s narratives and the most successful were Bai (1987) and Pani (1987). Based on the oral history of a Dalit woman, Bai describes the protagonist’s daily struggle with an alcoholic husband, and Pani is about the collective effort of a group of women to bring drinking water to their village. Both films were made at a community level. As Sumitra Bhave narrates in her interview with Waugh, this meant that the films were discussed with local women and enacted following improvisation; each time the ‘film’ was ‘rehearsed’ the women came out with variations of the same story. At the official shoot, the women improvised the scene once more, ‘making up’ a ‘new’ reality. In other words, the characters not only contributed with their personal narratives but also ‘played themselves’ in the filmmaking process. This is a ‘practice’ that is widely discussed in recent commentary on documentary filmmaking (cf. Waugh 2011) but it is also a feature of contemporary documentary debates and practices in India. I regard Sumitra Bhave’s and Deepa Dhanraj’s activities as unique examples of the debates within women’s groups in the 1980s. These two filmmakers made use of films as an extension of their politics, while the next generation of women filmmakers made films as an expression of their

144   Performance and performativity politics. By ‘extension’ I signify here a film practice that sees politics coming before the chosen medium of representation. In this respect, Bhave’s and Dhanraj’s filmmaking is closely linked to the independent film practices of Patwardhan, Bose, Sasi and the Mediastorm collective, for instance, which have previously been discussed in this book. Rather than questioning the power of the state, Bhave and Dhanraj stressed the importance of women subjects and their unheard voices. In other words, these women filmmakers should not be considered as having made ‘feminist films’ but as contributing to the participatory video/film practices that emerged in the 1980s. What these two filmmakers brought to documentary practices, however, was the promotion of films that could give a voice to ordinary women. To achieve this, they also worked in collaboration with other people, including men. In other words, both men and women influenced new forms of filmmaking, forms which expanded throughout the 1990s. If we now return to the debate about the ‘feminist’ aesthetic and filmmaking, we can say that, throughout the 1980s the women’s movement was noteworthy for its dialogic critique of visual forms and practices but it did not influence film practice itself. The women’s movement did not produce ‘female’ or ‘feminist’ aesthetics, and was not responsible for the emergence of ‘new’ documentary forms. Rather, it fostered the creation of a discourse about documentary film practices in India that was associated only with women. It was a debate that emerged from women’s groups in the early 1980s, gradually entered film festival circuits and, was used by filmmakers in the 1990s retrospectively to talk about women’s film practices, such as those of Dhanraj and Bhave, mixing an international debate about feminism with localised practices for and with women. Maithii Rao explains that the 1980s was ‘the period when activism of all kinds coalesced, feminists, ecologists and leftists finding that they had much in common and thus often spoke from a shared platform’ (1994: 30, emphasis added). In other words, women’s/feminist filmmaking did not emerge on its own – rather, it was part of a wider network of political and social activism. In the 1980s, D.L. Sheth called these new practices ‘grassroots initiatives’ (1984: 259) and recently, academics have referred to them as ‘social action groups’ (Kamat 2002: 13). Although these definitions were not meant to describe documentary practices specifically, from the examples thus far presented in this discussion we can say that 1980s Indian documentary practices were all part of similar discussions and practices. Nevertheless, as happened with collectives such as Mediastorm – discussed in the previous chapter – during the 1990s the debate moved towards questions about the ‘form’ of documentary films, linked to an international debate about film practices, much more than about other politically charged and socially sensitive media and grassroots activities that were taking place across the country. This ‘new’ direction has not only turned towards international debates concerning ‘performative’ documentaries (Nichols 1994a; Scheibler 1993),

Performance and performativity   145 but has also influenced the way in which the development of women’s filmmaking in India is retrospectively perceived today. During one of the discussions about women’s contributions to the development of the Indian documentary film scene, held in London in November 2011,13 the association between women filmmakers, feminism and performative documentaries was more than once evoked by participants such as Gargi Sen, Saba Dewan and Rahul Roy, and not without raising scepticism about different kinds of participants, such as Deepa Dhanraj.14 Even more recently, during the women’s workshop organised by Nicole Wolf for the 21st Visible Evidence conference, in New Delhi (December 2014), Madhursree Dutta raised this point of ‘performativity’ and ‘documentary form’, while more senior women practitioners such as Sheba Chhachhi and, precisely Deepa Dhanraj, emphasised the importance of women’s groups beyond concepts of feminism and filmmaking ‘form’ during the 1980s. If we can assume that a retrospective reading has been attributed to women’s contribution to filmmaking, the question that remains to be explored is, why? In other words, how has this reading been conceived, articulated and performed? How did a discussion of the ‘form’ of films suddenly become central to filmmakers’ discourses about documentary practices? To use a cinematographic term, a wide angle on 1980s and early-­1990s practices and actors ought to be given some attention here.

Filmmakers and films During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a multitude of new documentary film practices emerged at both the collective and individual levels. While we have already discussed some of the collective activities (cf. above and in the previous chapter), it is impossible for me to dedicate sufficient space to all the ‘individual’ practices that emerged in this period. Moreover, it would be absurd to suggest that the information I collected represents the totality of existing individual practices of 1980s and early-­1990s India. However, there are some names that deserve to be mentioned here. Apart from Tapan Bose and Anand Patwardhan (cf. Chapter 3), K.P. Sasi and the Mediastorm collective (cf. Chapter 4) and Sumitra Bhave and Deepa Dhanraj (mentioned above), filmmakers such as Manjira Datta, Suhasini Mulay, Vasudha Joshi, Ranjan Palit, Meera Dewan, Shashi Anand, Anajali Monteiro, K.P. Jayasankar, Sameera Jain, Chandita Mukherjee, Soudhamini, R.V. Ramani, Reena Mohan, Chalam Bannurakar and Ruchir Joshi contributed to the transformation and expansion of documentary film practices in the 1980s and early 1990s. Hamara Shahar/Bombay our City (Patwardhan 1985); The Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya (Datta 1988); Bhopal Beyond Genocide (Bose and Mulay 1986); Voices from Baliapal (Joshi and Palit 1988); Gift of Love (Dewan 1983); Man vs. Man (Anand 1983); Eleven Miles (Joshi 1990); Kutty Japanin Kuzhandaigal/Children of Mini Japan (Bannurakar 1990); Saa (Ramani

146   Performance and performativity 1991); Something Like a War (Dhanraj 1991); Kamlabai (Mohan 1990); Totanama (Mukherjee 1991); Pani Panchayat (Monteiro 1986); and It Rested (Soudhamini 1988), were all films that started to circulate across the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s, thanks to Odessa and video technology (cf. Chapter 4). Even at the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork, several filmmakers debated and discussed these films with me – many of them were, at that time, the focus of ‘retrospective packages’ at local independent film festivals. What is worth underlining here is how, directly or indirectly, all these practices and practitioners influenced each other in developing new approaches to filmmaking and, more specifically, to documentary form. Each filmmaker either began his or her independent documentary film practice in partnership with another filmmaker – Anajali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar, Vasudha Joshi and Ranjan Palit, Tapan Bose and Suhasini Mulay, R.V. Ramani and Soudhamani, and Deepa Dhanraj and Navroze Contractor among others – or, was somehow exposed to international filmmaking practices and discourses – this was the case with Anand Patwardhan but also with Manjira Datta, Vasudha Joshi and Navroze Contractor, to mention but a few. Accordingly, it was thanks to this flow of cinematographers and editors (a mixture of both males and females) that for the first time in the history of documentary in India independent filmmakers started to hear about each other and ‘collectively’ develop and practise new kinds of documentary ‘style’ and ‘form’. These forms did not belong to the women’s discourse that was emerging across the country, nor were they purely ‘Indian’, as they were influenced by international practices and debates. Moreover, they were not completely disconnected from other forms of cinemas, such as new wave (cf. Chapter 3), as the cinematographers and editors also worked for cinemas other than documentary. Let us expand on these points. Documentary styles and techniques In a 1990 article (reprinted in 2011), Thomas Waugh analyses documentary films in India and identifies a specific style of filmmaking that he calls ‘talking groups’ or ‘collective interview’ (1990: 31). This style was, for Waugh, the opposite of the traditional documentary technique of the ‘talking head’ – that is, a middle-­shot with a single person interviewed as the expert voice of the film. By ‘talking groups’, Waugh refers to several voices coming together while the filmmaker enters the space of marginalised or evicted people (ibid.). In Waugh’s description, these voices ‘are fast and emotional, in unison, overlapping, yielding to each other and taking turns, or interrupting, seconding or disagreeing with each other’ (1990: 31, 2011: 245). Waugh illustrates his point through three different films: Hamara Shahar/Bombay our City (Anand Patwardhan 1985), The Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya (Manjira Datta 1988) and Voices from Baliapal (Vasudha Joshi and Ranjan Palit 1989). Although the category of ‘talking

Performance and performativity   147 groups’ may exclude other film practices that emerged in the late 1980s, this is without doubt an element that featured in several independent films of this period. Around the same time, Manjunath Pendakur (1995) wrote an article for the journal Documentary Box of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (henceforth YIDFF ), which focuses on independent documentary films in India. He calls this kind of filmmaking ‘cinema of resistance’ and identifies a common element in the films of the 1980s and early 1990s: music (Pendakur 1995). In Pendakur’s argument, the viewer can perceive a certain musicality in documentaries made in India through the traditional ‘voice over’, the use of location music, and additional songs placed as ‘critical tools of communication’ (1995: 3). Pendakur draws examples from several films made by Anand Patwardhan, including Hamara Shahar (1985), Ram Ke Naam/In the Name of God (1992) and Pitra, Putra aur Dharmayuddha/ Father, Son and Holy War (1995), but also from Voices from Baliapal (Joshi and Palit 1988) and Kutty Japanin Kuzhandaigal/Children of Mini Japan (Bannurakar 1990). Waugh’s and Pendakur’s articles both analyse the ‘text’ of the Indian documentary, focus on its ‘form’ or ‘style’ and identify elements that make it different from other documentaries made in other countries. In other words, these textual elements seem to be what makes the documentaries mentioned above Indian. If analysed from an anthropological rather than a film studies perspective, it is problematic to label a variety of country-­wide practices as ‘Indian documentaries’ – such categories are indeed always reductive and inaccurate. As has already been pointed out, categories often come from the way in which film critics, film scholars and contributors of articles to film festival catalogues interpret and talk about films. In a late-­1980s interview, Ranjan Palit points out how international film festivals (such as the aforementioned YIDFF ) have always labelled documentary practices coming from the ‘South’ as ‘Third World Film’. To Palit, this labelling is a way to differentiate some films from the mainstream Euro-­American films and to divert the attention of critics, funders and juries from the ‘quality’ of the film (in Waugh, video-­interview 1988). In his words: We should have the right to respond to and reject certain kinds of classifications imposed on us as a kind of formula, style and look classified as ‘Third World Films’ in a film festival.… I find this very patronising and insulting. I believe Indian documentary matches others kinds and even those which lack resources … actually allow more creativity and to play with form. (Palit, in Waugh video-­interview 1988) In response to the 1992 Toronto Film Festival, the well-­known film scholar Bill Nichols (1994b) argues something similar to Palit. He explores the imbalanced relationship between film festival circuits (mainly composed of

148   Performance and performativity middle-­class western organisers, critics, juries and film scholars) and the so-­called ‘Third World Cinema’ (see Shohat and Stam 1994). While making use of his embodied experience, Nichols argues that during any international film festival, the ‘new’ is always placed in relation to the familiar patterns of Euro-­American cinema – something already shared by film critics and festival goers (1994b: 21). Nichols recognises that these patterns are often not adequate for an understanding of the ‘new’ and hence that these films probably need to be evaluated through other models that do not yet exist. Drawing on this discussion, and relying on both my first-­person experience of debating their past histories and present practices with different filmmakers and the various types of archival material collected about the film practices and discourses of this period, I shall set out here elements of the documentary films of the 1980s and early 1990s in India, other than those presented by Waugh (1990) and Pendakur (1995). I suggest thinking of this period (and arguably any other historical moment) as an ‘in-­ progress’ experimentation with form. When Rick Altman (1999) talks about ‘genre in progress’ he refers precisely to the constantly changing variables that constitute any illusionary ‘fixed’ genre. Yet, while in his analysis Altman focuses on the passage between already constituted or recognised genres, here I am interested in reflecting on the moment before the genre, form or style is recognised, or formed – that is, the ‘craft’ of the film, which, borrowing from Glenn Adamson (2007), is something always in motion, a ‘moving target’ (2007: 75) or, as I argue elsewhere, a series of positions taken in relation to the process of representation (Battaglia 2014a). This is, for me, the moment in which ‘form’ is performed as both a technique and a style and also as a discourse. In other words, it is the space in which we can better understand how the ‘performative’ is articulated in documentary practices. And it is the space in which ‘editors’ and ‘cinematographers’ play a central role. To better grasp this point I shall now draw on examples from films shot by the cinematographer, Ranjan Palit. I have decided to focus on Palit not just because he was one of the cinematographers who shot most of the documentary films produced in the 1980s and early 1990s, but also because, due to a series of unexpected accidental encounters during my fieldwork – which typically happens to a fieldworker – I directed my research towards a close observation of Palit’s work. A short description of two specific incidents are needed here. The day when one of my closest filmmaker friends, Nilanjan Bhattacharya, found out that I had yet to watch Voices from Baliapal (shot and directed by Ranjan Palit in the late 1980s), he jokingly, and somewhat seriously, reproached me early in the morning at Mumbai airport saying, ‘What kind of history of documentary are you looking at, then?’ Although I considered Nilanjan a friend, I did not know how to answer such an unexpected provocation and thus kept quiet. But he continued, ‘You must see this film. Ranjan is part of the history! Don’t tell [him], but I’ll give you a copy!’

Performance and performativity   149 This was just a day after the end of the international film festival of documentary films, MIFF 2008, and six months after the beginning of my 2007–2009 fieldwork.15 I was waiting for a flight to Chennai (at that time my main base) and Nilanjan was returning to Calcutta, where he is from. Surprisingly though, a few moments after Nilanjan pronounced his words ‘against’ me and ‘in favour’ of Ranjan Palit, and just as I was about to write down the name of the film he had mentioned, he received a pat on the back that shocked him and disrupted our conversation. It was no other than Ranjan Palit – also returning to Calcutta, but from a shoot in Mumbai rather than from the MIFF. We all laughed! Then Nilanjan introduced me to Ranjan as someone doing research in India, as well as as a friend, and Ranjan immediately became friendly with me. This was the first time I had met him, and thanks to this unexpected and welcoming interaction I later managed to convince him to let me join part of the post-­ production of In Camera (one of his latest documentary films, which explored his relationship with the documentary films he had shot in India from the 1980s up to that time). Towards the end of my fieldwork, and more specifically when I had the opportunity to watch the first compilation of the video-­interviews conducted by Thomas Waugh in 1988, I had the chance to ‘interact’ again with Ranjan, yet in a ‘mediated’ way. He was one of Thomas’ interviewees as well as one of the people most mentioned by the other filmmakers interviewed. On this occasion, I was staggered to find out that several of the topics that Ranjan, and his fellow filmmakers, raised in their interviews with Tom were very similar to, if not the same as, the conversations we had had in his house while editing In Camera.16 While for some readers this may sound like a simple coincidence, when contextualised in the wider framework of the articulation of ‘performative’ film practices in India the elements I managed to place together across the decades and the different sorts of collected material became central for developing my understanding regarding this intriguing debate about a ‘new’ discursive form in the 1980s and 1990s.

Crafting forms: a focus on cinematographers As pointed out in the Introduction to this book, fieldwork is constituted by different sensible experiences that can constantly inspire and divert our understanding of the field. The ‘living’ moment of fieldwork is precisely the moment in which we allow variables to surprise us, despite our rational pre-­set methodological structures that orient us in the writing or graphing of such experiences. My encounter with Ranjan Palit and the discovery of his narratives in Waugh’s video-­interviews played precisely this role, and in a second moment they directed me to discover more about the meaning, use and articulation of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ in 1980s filmmaking practices. Accordingly, in the following pages we will specifically

150   Performance and performativity look at some of the films that Ranjan shot during the 1980s and early 1990s and observe how a discursive articulation about film-­form and more specifically the ‘performativity’ of that form has developed in India as a collaboration between filmmakers, editors and cinematographers. Ranjan Palit, more than anyone else, moved between these different practices. Having said this, my selection of films and the focus on Palit should not be taken as the most ‘representative’ of the variety of documentary films that were made and circulated in India between the late 1980s and early 1990s. In fact, we might have been able to make a similar argument by focusing on films shot by Navroze Contractor and R.V. Ramani for instance, or edited by Reena Mohan and Sameera Jain. Rather, the point made with the chosen examples will be that all the filmmakers who specialised either in ‘camera’ or ‘editing’ contributed to the crafting of new films forms. These filmmakers are those who, since the late 1980s have fluctuated most between the different independent documentary practices. In doing this, they have enabled the circulation of discourses regarding film styles, forms and genres. Moreover, they have physically contributed to developing new ‘in-­process’, ‘crafting’ experimentations of documentary ‘forms’ in India. We shall now look precisely at these in-­process dynamics of crafting films while focusing on the films shot by Palit. Shooting Hamara Shahar The two elements that Waugh (1990) and Pendakur (1995) describe as belonging to documentaries made in India during the 1980s and early 1990s (respectively ‘talking groups’ and ‘music’) are key aspects of one of the landmarks of independent ‘Indian’ documentary: Hamara Shahar/ Bombay our City (1985). This film was made by the well-­known director Anand Patwardhan and shot by Ranjan Palit. As with other films by Patwardhan, Hamara Shahar is a critique of state politics in India. It is a film that talks about the displacement and daily battles of pavement dwellers in Bombay. The film criticises government policies and the upper-­middle-class opinion of slum-­dwellers. It is constructed following the multiple voices of the evicted people (who Waugh calls ‘talking groups’) and it makes use of location songs to narrate the struggle of this marginalised group. In addition, the film juxtaposes images of the slum-­dwellers with shots of upper-­ class Bombay. To do this, Patwardhan makes use of ‘Western’ jazz music to underline differences in class between the two typologies of people. In Khalid Mohamed’s words, the film ‘shows the contradictions with rigour and exposes the wasteful and flashy props of city life so incisively that we reflect on the fake neon-­lit and glittering environment around us’ (1985: 66). According to Shoma Chatterji, Hamara Shahar ‘marks a turning point towards a more lucid definition of the political documentary … leading to the evolution of a movement that is gathering momentum by the day’ (1994: 18). Yet, similarly to how, as already discussed, a single individual,

Performance and performativity   151 such as Anand Patwardhan, cannot be solely responsible for the development of a history of a film practice, a single film is never made by a single man or a single idea. Here, then, Ranjan Palit, plays a role. Ranjan was a graduate of the FTII when he met Anand in the early 1980s. Even in the present day, Ranjan considers Anand to be the person with whom he learnt to make documentary film. ‘With Anand I learned more than I did in three years of film institute’, Ranjan told me in his house while he was finalising his ‘film citation’ of Hamara Shahar in his latest In Camera.17 The success of Hamara Shahar led Ranjan Palit to work for several other directors across the county. At that time, there were not many documentary film practices in India and not many cinematographers interested in the documentary film genre; hence, Ranjan was in demand. Through working for different filmmakers, he rapidly improved his camera skills and techniques. In 1988, in fact, Ranjan told Thomas Waugh that he had already worked on 25 documentaries as a cameraman (video-­interview 1988). Local papers immediately appreciated his cinematography, perhaps because it was perceived as different from the FD’s use of camera in documentary film. Shankar Menon, for instance, describes Palit’s camera techniques in Hamara Shahar as follows: The camera is never a voyeur…. It is a very beautiful and elegant camera catching the mystery of the coal fire on a murky evening on the streets without romanticising the poor of their terrible lot. The poor for perhaps the first time in Indian cinema have a face, a shape, a voice which is uniquely theirs. There is poetry of a pure and unsullied form in their simple statements of anger, their physical ugliness has a moral truth and simplicity which is transcended by their stories. This is documentary as the best form of art. (Menon in Financial Express, 7 July 1985) If it is true that Palit is a cinematographer who has always had a particular sensitivity to documentary film subjects, it is also the case that his camera techniques have developed in relation to the people with whom he worked. Ranjan Palit likes to tell a story that occurred during the shooting of Hamara Shahar. He says that this story influenced the way in which he dealt with future film-­subjects; for this reason, over several years he has repeated the story to different interlocutors.18 The story relates to a particular scene in Hamara Shahar in which a baby dies of fever because his mother ties him to her back and participates, in the rain, in a demonstration against the demolition of pavement-­dwellers’ huts. Ranjan recalls that when he heard of this death he was reluctant to film the scene, as to him it was a violation of the family’s mourning. However, Ranajn also recounts that Anand – considered a political activist as much as a filmmaker – insisted on filming the death of the baby, because the parents requested it. In Ranjan’s words, ‘They insisted it would be the only record of the baby

152   Performance and performativity if it [was] on film … Anand felt that the death of the baby had an organic connection to the story being told as well’ (in Waugh, video-­interview 1988; also in Pendakur 1995). The scene of the death is one of the key moments of pathos in Hamara Shahar. At the same time, the shooting of this scene was a learning process for Ranjan Palit. Certainly, working with someone like Anand Patwardhan, who had foreign filmmaking experience and was heavily involved in local political activism, had a significant influence on Palit’s future camera techniques which, as we will see, he employed for shooting documentaries for other filmmakers in India. Babulal and Baliapal Manjira Datta’s The Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya (1988) is another successful film shot by Ranjan Palit (which circulated widely, both nationally and internationally). The film seeks to reconstruct the sequence of events and the circumstances that led to the death of Babulal Bhuiya, who was shot dead by the Central Industrial Security Force in February 1981 at Mailagora (‘place of dirt’) in Bihar. The film was shot in a valley ravaged by the industrialisation process, where a community of people was surviving by collecting coal dust. The Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya raises questions about sexual harassment and police corruption, while showing images of a devastating scenario. It also provides ‘conflicting reminiscences of a fellow salvager who has been enshrined as a martyr to the cause’ (Waugh 2011: 247). A combination of ‘talking groups’ (ibid.) and a different kind of ‘poetic’ mode (Renov 1993: 19), made up of subjective narratives and stylistic photographic choices, makes The Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya stand out among other independent documentaries of the 1980s.19 But if we turn the question we asked about Hamara Shahar and Anand Patwardhan on its head, can we say that this film was the result only of Palit’s camera? A negative answer seems to be the obvious one here. Indeed, The Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya was the product of a combination of a female director with foreign experience, Manjira Datta, and Palit’s growing knowledge about how to use his camera with documentary subjects. Allow me to expand on this point. The Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya was directed by Manjira Datta, who contacted Ranjan Palit on the suggestion of Reena Mohan – a filmmaker who specialised in editing. Reena studied with Ranjan at the FTII, and she edited Manjira’s first film Raaste Bandh Hain Sab (1985). Manjira was one of the filmmakers who had had the possibility of studying abroad before becoming a documentary filmmaker in the early 1980s. At first, she was interested in photography, after receiving a Kodak Instamatic from her uncle. A few years later, Manjira attended Ealing College in London, which introduced her to the concept of the ‘form’ of images beyond their content.20 While engaging with discourses and practices of still images, she

Performance and performativity   153 decided to make use of this knowledge in the Indian context and explore issues of class and caste discrimination through photography (also in Waugh, video-­interview 1988; D. Gupta 1998). As Manjira narrated to me when I met her in the rented studio where she was editing in South Delhi, ‘as soon as I returned to India I realised that there was no possibility to use photography as a way to be involved in political activism. Photography, in fact, was not as developed as I expected!’.21 Consequently, she decided to convert her photographic skills into documentary film practices. In other words, she brought practices and discussions about the aesthetics of photography to documentary filmmaking in India. According to both what Manjira Datta told me and what Ranjan Palit told Thomas Waugh in the late 1980s, the making of The Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya benefited from the combination of Datta’s photographic approach and Palit’s sensitivity to the documentary genre. During my encounter with Manjira, in fact, she enthusiastically described to me Ranjan’s ability to transform the requests she made as director even at short notice. For instance, she said that in a particular moment of the shooting, when a woman was picking up water with her hands, she felt that the shot should have been taken in slow motion. Hence, she brusquely communicated this to Ranjan, who skilfully was capable of satisfying her need.22 Similarly, in his late-­1980s interview with Thomas Waugh, Ranjan talked very enthusiastically about the encounter with Manjira Datta, seeing it as a moment in which they both wanted to make a film that was ‘different’ from the traditional activist-­documentary type. They wanted to focus on new ‘forms’ of documentary film and engage with the visual material in a sensual (performative?) way. In contrast to the feminist discourse, the encounter between Manjira Datta and Ranjan Palit is one endorsement, among many, of female-­male collaboration as more central than any specific gender contribution to documentary film practices. I have already made this point in relation to Deepa Dhanraj’s and Sumitra Bhave’s filmmaking. Yet, Voices from Baliapal – a film about the people of Baliapal, in Orissa, ‘living under the threat of being ousted from their homes by the missile test firing range’ (Rao 1994: 32) – is without doubt another film that stresses this point. Voices from Baliapal was both shot and directed by Ranjan Palit, in collaboration with Vasudha Joshi, his wife and work-­partner. As with The Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya, with Voices from Baliapal the two co-­directors aimed to develop a different ‘documentary look’ (Palit, in Waugh, video-­ interview 1988). As Vasudha told me during one of the numerous gaps in the post-­production of In Camera – that is, when we were all sitting in the living room or lying down on the queen size bed to rest – ‘I began my filmmaking venture with foreign television programmes and I tried to bring something different to the film’. When Ranjan and Vasudha decided to make Voices from Baliapal, Vasudha could indeed bring a ‘foreign’ television aesthetic into the process, whereas Ranjan could make use of his

154   Performance and performativity extensive experience gained in other film practices in India. Several other practices were developing in India at this time, and we can say that thanks to the increasing number of combinations of different filmmaking experiences – naturally shared among collaborators during the making of a new film – filmmakers in India gradually began to create a collective discursive knowledge about various types of documentary form and approach. This collective knowledge can be read in close relation to what Friedrich Kittler (1990, 1997) calls ‘discourse network’, an evolution of a discursive practice through the advancement of material, media(ted) techniques – in our case, with regard to documentary aesthetics and new filmmaking styles. In short, and to repeat, it was thanks to the flux of cinematographers and editors between different film practices and thanks to each filmmaker’s personal insights, that the documentary genre in India began to develop towards new film forms. It is precisely at this juncture that debates about ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ in filmmaking also emerged. Conceptualising performance: from Eleven Miles to Kamlabai and In Camera The apex of Palit’s experimentation with documentary forms dates back to the making of Eleven Miles (1990). This film was directed by Ruchir Joshi, who first studied photographic documentation at Chitrabani Social Communication Centre in Calcutta, and later visual art at Goddard College, Vermont, in the US. Before making Eleven Miles, Joshi shot and directed Bargain (1985) – a film about upper-­middle-class Calcuttans and their ‘curious’ habit of shopping at the famous New Market, built by the British in central Calcutta. In his interview with Thomas Waugh, Ruchir Joshi explains that in Bargain he wanted to experiment with the meaning of ‘political’ documentary, choosing a subject like himself – an upper-­middle-class Calcuttan. Joshi’s intention was to reflect on his own community, a practice close to what, in the early 1990s, Bill Nichols described as ‘recent’ documentary trends ‘to suggest incompleteness and uncertainty, recollection and impression, images of personal worlds and their subjective construction’ (1993: 174). Joshi developed this self-­reflexive approach further in his next film venture, Eleven Miles (1990), deliberately experimenting with the form of documentary film, making use of Ranjan Palit’s cinematography. Since Ruchir was a close friend of Vasudha Joshi, he rapidly became acquainted with Ranjan as well. At that time, these filmmakers were all based in the city of Calcutta. Their intimate relationship facilitated discussions and practices regarding ‘new ways’ of making documentary in India. This emerges clearly in Ruchir’s and Ranjan’s 1988 video-­interview with Thomas Waugh, in which Waugh interviewed the two filmmakers together. This video-­interview clearly shows the closeness between the two filmmakers, who act and interact as a well-­matched pair in front of the camera. At the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork, this close relationship still existed.

Performance and performativity   155 Indeed, several of the stories told to Waugh in the late 1980s were repeated to me in the late 2000s. Nevertheless, what was new to me from watching their 1988 video-­recorded interaction was how at that time a ‘collective’, ‘collaborative’ discursive knowledge about documentary ‘forms’ was being formed. In a joking and intimate way, and as a sort of visual performance (either for the camera or for Waugh, a western interlocutor), Palit and Joshi bring up several issues concerning documentary films of that time. In particular, Ranjan makes constant reference to other films he has shot and the kind of relationship he developed with other directors in the shooting process. Ruchir emphasises how he developed further the concept of representation both by working on other film projects and while sharing his ideas with Ranjan. In addition, they both talked about the project they were at that time crafting together, Eleven Miles, which was yet to become a film that signalled a moment of documentary film history in India. More details need to be given emphasis here. At the time of Waugh’s video interview, Eleven Miles had just started to be shot and neither Ruchir nor Ranjan could foresee its future success. Despite this, the language they used to talk about this new venture (placed in relation to other films shot by Palit) intrigued me: it anticipated the debate about ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ in filmmaking that characterises the contemporary scene of documentary practices in India. In the video-­interview, Ruchir said that he wanted to make a film about Baul singers from an area in Bengal called Birbhum and to discard ‘pretentious’ filmmaking objectivity. He described his ideas about how to pursue this, mentioning new ways of using the camera. For instance, he suggested following the steps of the folk singers while they were dancing, shooting out of focus or in slow motion. Also, Ruchir pointed out that he wanted to recreate or interact with the reality created by the folk performances. One of the Baul musicians’ techniques, indeed, was to pull the audience inside their performance or distance themselves from this same audience. Because of this constant movement between the performers and the audience, Ruchir narrated that he decided to place the camera in the middle of the performance and make it an actor itself. The result of the discussion and the early footage mentioned in Waugh’s video-­interview was Eleven Miles – a two hour and thirty minute feature-­ length film, which took about three years to complete. The final film is about Baul folk musicians from Bengal and it focuses on their ritualistic and repetitive way of performing, typical of this kind of folk music. While entering the space of these ‘minstrels’ of Bengal, the film also explores the ‘Baul’ identity, which in the Bengal context meant going beyond both the traditional Hindu and Muslim religious practices and male and female cultural differentiations. On the day I visited Ruchir and he showed me Eleven Miles, he underlined how it was constructed according to the logic of association in contrast to the traditional linear narratives that often emerge from film-­subjects’ narratives. In order to achieve the sense of movement and immersion, which for

156   Performance and performativity Ruchir was a sort of performative dimension of the film, he said that he had decided to complement Ranjan’s camera.23 In other words, he became the second cameraman who dialogued with the first camera but also with the shot performance. Of the two, Joshi was perhaps the more courageous because, as he was less experienced, he was more willing to experiment with the camera. This is clear also in the 1988 video-­interview with Thomas Waugh, in which Ruchir explains the new way of using the camera as if he was already certain about the final result. Shot in 16 mm, the film was a success in terms of the filmmakers’ understanding of new forms of documentary practices but, due to its length, Ruchir found it difficult to screen the film widely (see Joshi 2000). Despite this, from this moment onwards Ranjan Palit’s cinematography and approach to film-­subjects developed substantially and contributed to the development of new forms of documentary in India. If Eleven Miles was the apex of Ranjan Palit’s discussions and technical experimentation with new ‘performative’ forms of filmmaking, Kamlabai (1990) was the first film in which his acquired techniques were put into practice. This film was directed by the well-­known editor, Reena Mohan. Reena had also, by this time, acquired extensive experience with filmmakers across the country (but as an editor, not a cinematographer). Kamlabai is about the life of one of India’s first film actresses, Kamlabai Gokhale, who was 92 years old at the time the film was made. It focuses on her past but also enters her present private space – a small flat in which she was living on her own. In this context, Palit follows the old woman around her house while she walks, eats and reads. The camera follows Kamlabai’s every move. It creates a natural relationship between the camera and the subject which, in Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni’s word, makes Kamlabai’s persona ‘explode on the screen in a manner which is impossible to forget’ (1992: 17). As Vasanthi Sankarananrayanan points out, ‘the rapport between the director and the protagonist [Kamlabai], the empathy they developed and the bond which grew in the process, is evident in the film’ (1992 The Economic Times, 22 March). For this reason, film critics of the early 1990s regarded Kamlabai as a ‘very unusual kind of film suggesting new and dynamic methods of making a documentary’ (Nadkarni 1992: 16). Since the making of Kamlabai, Ranjan Palit has continued to (re)search and develop the concept of ‘performativity’ in his work. In a way, this (re)search culminated in his most recent retrospective film, In Camera (2010). Here the concept of performance acts as a central feature of his narrative, which focuses on how the film/camera, as an ‘actant’ (Latour 1988), has developed during his 25-year engagement with documentary practices in India. To sum up, all these examples demonstrate that film ‘forms’ or ‘styles’ or ‘genres’ are constant in-­process phenomena. As such, they are always articulated in different ways depending on the discussion that is circulating at the time of their actualisation. In this respect, we can say that, despite the retrospective reading by women filmmakers about the association

Performance and performativity   157 between more women in filmmaking and the development of a new performative mode of address, the concept of ‘performativity’ emerged out of debates that circulated in the 1980s among filmmakers, cinematographers and editors, both male and female. Indeed, it was their dialogic and continuous exchange that contributed to the development of new debates about documentary forms in India. The role of the women’s movement in this development was, in fact, to encourage more women to be active members of this in-­process, ever-­changing scene, as film subjects, filmmakers and film critics, and accordingly to make ‘performativity’ central to their discourse. In short, we can say that since the mid-­1990s ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ have become terms used retrospectively to connect different practices and practitioners in India, although sometimes confusing their historical articulation. These discourses continued to circulate and expand thanks to the flourishing of film festivals. As we will see in the remaining chapters of this book, festivals acted as the arenas in which filmmakers could meet and in which discourses and practices of filmmaking could develop further, contributing to the development of a national community of documentary practitioners.

Notes   1 Conversation with Rahul Roy, 28 November 2009.   2 Conversation with Deepa Dhanraj, 30 April 2009.   3 In 1994, Nichols introduced the concept of ‘performative’ to the four modes – expository, observational, interactive and reflexive – that he had originally theorised in 1991 (cf. Nichols 1991).   4 Battaglia, Giulia. ‘Ethnographic Film as Image-­Archive’, Film in Ethnographic Exhibitions, National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, 8 October 2015.   5 Conversation with Reena Mohan, 30 November 2008.   6 I owe my immense gratitude to Deepa Dhanraj who shared with me the majority of the documents analysed here.   7 It is beyond the scope of this work to investigate the women’s movement in India in detail. Anita Anantharam (2009) provides a comprehensive understanding of the development of this movement in the periodical Manushi. She points out how women in India wanted to distance themselves from the ‘Western’ feminist discourse in order to preserve cultural traditions. In line with contemporary filmmakers’ way of describing this movement, in this chapter, I refer to ‘women’s movement’ without questioning the terminology.   8 Conversation with Deepa Dharaj, 1 May 2008.   9 The next two chapters touch upon the role of festivals in documentary practices. As we will see, documentary film became more visible in public fora thanks to the emergence of documentary film festivals and specialist seminars within larger international film festivals. 10 Deepa Dhanraj, personal communication, 7 November 2011. 11 Conversation with Deepa Dhanraj, 30 April 2009. 12 Conversation with Deepa Dhanraj, 30 April 2009. 13 The festival was a ‘delocalised’ celebration of a regular Indian film festival called Persistence/Resistance: Documentary Practices in India (cf. Battaglia 2012b).

158   Performance and performativity 14 It might be worth underlining that Deepa Dhanraj is one of the few (if not the only) woman who was active in the 1980s women’s movement in India, has made acclaimed films on women’s subjects since the 1980s, and at present is still very much an active filmmaker working on women’s issues and beyond. If we want to draw a parallel, she can be considered an equal to Anand Patwardhan where her contribution to documentary practices in India is concerned. Accordingly, at present she is one of the most invited speakers to debates about women’s issues in Indian filmmaking. 15 For a detailed discussion of this festival, see Chapter 6. 16 To get a comprehensive sense of the compilation of images and histories explored in In Camera, see Sharma (2010). 17 Conversation with Ranjan Palit, 28 July 2008. 18 The same narrative was told to me, as well as to Thomas Waugh. Moreover, Palit reproduced the same narrative in his In Camera (2010). I found out later that the story is also cited in Pendakur (1995: www.yidff.jp/docbox/7/box7–4-e.html). 19 I owe my most sincere gratitude to Sanjay Kak, for introducing me to Manjira Datta’s work, letting me watch The Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya in his studio flat and pushing me to contact her. 20 Conversation with Manjira Datta, 28 November 2008. 21 Conversation with Manjira Datta, 28 November 2008. 22 During the time of celluloid, many visual effects were created ‘in camera’ and not in post-­production – a skilled cinematographer was therefore very useful to a zealous director. 23 Conversation with Ruchir Joshi, 2 March 2009.

6 Film festivals, small media and online networks

The development of a film practice must be understood not only from the films that it has created and its principal actors (that is, the filmmakers who made this creation possible), but also from the discourses that filmmakers (as much as critics and scholars) have articulated in different historical moments. Furthermore, as we saw in Chapter 4, it is also important to pay serious attention to the technologies that made the development of the practice possible. Yet, what about paying attention to the technology that fosters the development of a discursive practice? In other words, if a film practice such as documentary film in India has developed in relation to the technology as well as to the discourses articulated in different moments of history, where, and concretely how, did these discourses take place? This chapter attempts to answer these questions. It focuses on the spaces in which filmmakers meet and articulate their filmmaking practice, and it argues that it is precisely thanks to the emergence of these spaces that we can today talk about a ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991). Borrowing from the concept of ‘small media’, (Sreberny-­Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994; Spitulnik 2002), we will see that through the spaces in which discourses are articulated, filmmakers have gradually been able to come together as a community on a national scale, articulate discourses about their practice and claim space in the media public discourse. Through a direct focus on technology, this chapter looks at the development of such spaces. It starts from the function that film festivals have played in giving visibility to documentary practices and then moves to a description of the changing patterns of public broadcasting in India against which, in the early 1990s, documentary filmmakers mobilised. The analysis of two specific moments of ‘togethering’, the Forum for Independent Films and Video and Vikalp – Films for Freedom, will be crucial here for identifying the way in which filmmakers got together as a community and transformed this moment of unity into a political discourse vis-­à-vis state regulations and control. In this respect, it may be useful to underline from the outset that we will regard ‘society and technology’

160   Festivals, small media and online networks (Boellstorff 2008) and ‘communication and politics’ (Bel et al. 2005) as two sides of the same coin, believing that, both in general and in this specific context, the one cannot be separated from the other.

Film festivals as public fora The Films Division (FD) functioned as an important state organ in the production of documentary films until the 1980s when, with the arrival of video technology, a multiplication of non-­state film practices transformed the situation (cf. Chapter 4). Challenged by the development of the state television channel Doordarshan, in 1994 the FD stopped making the screening of its films compulsory. This moment, however, also coincided with the setting-­up of the first Bombay International Film Festival for Documentary and Short Films (henceforth BIFF ) in which both the FD and independent practitioners became actively involved. Let us look back in time, through a survey of earlier initiatives, to see how this festival emerged. As pointed out in Chapter 2, in December 1956 independent filmmakers not officially working for the FD formally got together and created the Independent Documentary Producers Association (IDPA). Arguably, it is thanks to this association that India’s first documentary festival took place. This was 1958. A group of independent filmmakers organised in Bombay what they called ‘The IDPA Documentary Film Festival’ and, following in the colonial tradition of travelling cinema, travelled from Bombay to Delhi, Madras and Calcutta (cf. Mohan 1972, 1990). By then, however, the government of India had already set up, with the support of the FD, the International Film Festival of India (henceforth IFFI), which at its outset in 1952, also travelled to different Indian cities. The IDPA festival did not however continue with its activities, instead merging them with those of the FD, and the IFFI had to wait until 1975 to become a regular competitive international film festival. From 1975 until 1989 the IFFI was a biennial event held in New Delhi, which alternated with a non-­competitive festival called Filmotsav, which, in contrast, changed location every year.1 It was at the biennial IFFI that documentary films began to be screened. According to Pankaj Butalia, this development occurred in 1985, and was the initiative of a single female filmmaker, Meera Dewan, with the support of the Federation of Film Societies of India (henceforth FFSI).2 ‘Documedia’, during the 1985 IFFI, was the first ‘documentary panorama’ created in India for international documentary films, and ‘Shorts-­1’ was the second such attempt. The latter was organised in Calcutta by the Seagull Film Society and the FFSI, with private funding. ‘Shorts-­1’ screened several international films and a couple of films made in India in the early 1980s – Shashi Anand’s Man vs. Man and Meera Dewan’s Gift of Love – both financially supported by the FD. Due to inadequate funding, ‘Shorts­1’ failed to grow over the following years (cf. Narahari Rao 2001). Despite this, A.K. Dey argues, the festival was perceived as a great success and ‘led

Festivals, small media and online networks   161 the Government of India [to] entrust … the Federation [FFSI] with the responsibility of organising the Documedia in both the Filmotsav ‘86 [in Hyderabad] and the 11th IFFI [in New Delhi]’ (1987: 46). Between 1986 and 1988 the FFSI took charge of the organisation of the documentary panorama within the IFFI. During this period, different kinds of specialised seminars also occurred. One of these dealt with the possibility of creating a separate film festival dedicated solely to documentary films (cf. Chanana 1988). According to Pankaj Butalia, ‘although the idea was to create a state-­ independent festival, managed by the FFSI, in the end the government created another state-­institution for documentary film, run by the FD’.3 This was the beginning of BIFF, a biennial international festival of documentary film today also known as MIFF (the acronym changed when Bombay changed its name to Mumbai). Since 1990, BIFF has served as a platform for filmmakers both to screen their films and watch other documentary films made in India. If the first BIFF was not particularly successful – and focused primarily on international documentaries (cf. Prabhu 1990; Zaidi 1992) – the second, in 1992, should probably be considered the turning point for documentary practices in India (Prabhu 1992: 69). For the first time, Indian filmmakers met and shared their concerns and knowledge. BIFF became a platform for filmmakers to articulate debates about documentary practices, to get to know each other and, as already argued (cf. Chapter 5), to shine a light on women filmmakers who had up to that point been left at the margins of the history of documentary film. As the only physical place in which to meet with fellow filmmakers (and media practitioners in general), BIFF acted as a sort of ‘material conduit’ (Larkin 2008) that enabled the production and free circulation of what Friedrich Kittler (1990) has called a ‘discourse network’ on documentary film practices. Indeed, because of its immediate popularity, BIFF brought together practices of filmmaking that by then were scattered across the country. Nevertheless, BIFF, and later on MIFF, has since remained another state institution at odds with independent film practices. As such, about ten years after it was set up it had to deal with the complicated censorship problem of a mass medium like cinema in relation to its audience. To understand film censorship in India, William Mazzarella develops a theory of ‘performative dispensation’ suggesting that, ‘any claim to sovereign power is also a claim on a particular relation between sensuous incitement and symbolic order’ (ibid.: 3). It is precisely at this complicated juncture that in late 2003 and early 2004 independent practitioners from all over the country came together as a community to initiate an alternative festival-­protest called Vikalp – Films for Freedom, in the name of freedom of expression. To better grasp the way in which filmmakers were able to mobilise, however, let us first observe their position in relation to public broadcasting and the way in which a group of them from New Delhi tried to mobilise against it, in the 1990s.

162   Festivals, small media and online networks

Public broadcasting in 1990s India From the 1980s onwards, the Indian government became eager to pursue an information route to development (Singhal and Rogers 2001; see also Kohli 2005), and in 1991 the state opened its doors to the new economic policy, which emphasised privatisation, globalisation, liberalisation and commercialisation (Singhal and Rogers 2001: 92). In this respect, Biswajit Das points out how power was strengthened, new dependencies were created and new social discrepancies were brought about (2005b: 38). Moreover, he argues, the ethical questions in relation to media and communication became ‘subsumed under the banners of science, progress and development’ (ibid.). In this context, documentary filmmakers, whose film practices had mushroomed across the country, gradually began to feel constrained by state regulations. They found no alternative but to start ‘dancing with the state’.4 During the 1980s, the state television Doordarshan (henceforth DD) rapidly expanded, together with cable and video technology. The DD soap opera Hum Log was a big success right from its first broadcast and, according to Singhal and Rogers, it played an important role in launching commercially-­sponsored programmes (1989: 79). From this point on, the Indian government opted for the commercialisation of public broadcasting. Nevertheless, the popularity of commercial channels in India should be seen in association with the arrival of satellite television. This occurred through the popularity of CNN during the 1991 Gulf War and the launching of the Hong Kong satellite Star TV, immediately well-­liked across South Asia (Singhal and Rogers 2001). Satellite television ‘revolutionised’ the existing broadcasting system, as it created an alternative to state television. However, for reasons I will explain below, it also reduced the possibility of documentary filmmakers gaining space for their independent films. In the early 1990s, the Indian state opened its doors to the new economic policy and allowed the expansion of private and commercial satellite channels. In 1992, the first Hindi commercial satellite channel, Zee-­TV, ‘began beaming programs to cable television systems in India’ (ibid.: 92). Accordingly, Page and Crawley argue that the new economic policy ‘pushed Doordarshan into a commercially competitive television environment’ (2001: 75) and made it realise that ‘it needed to capitalise on its technological strengths’ (ibid: 128). As a result, in 1993 DD launched another metro entertainment channel, several regional-­language channels, a sports channel, an international channel and a 24-hour news channel (Singhal and Rogers 2001). Ironically, several of the programmes introduced on the regional channels were based on successful satellite commercial television channels (Page and Crawley 2001). In Singhal and Rogers’s words, DD’s ‘public service mandate increasingly took a back seat, and revenue maximization became the mantra’ (2001: 92). In this new commercial context, Uma Chakravarti points out

Festivals, small media and online networks   163 that there was ‘no place for the documentaries that attempted to conscientize the middle classes on various themes’ (2005: 306). It is precisely at this historical juncture that filmmakers based in New Delhi felt the need to unite their collective voices and demand space in the existing public broadcasting system. In order to understand the political and media context in which the group of ‘Delhi filmmakers’ emerged, it is important to underline three additional aspects of the transforming public broadcasting system. First, at the beginning independent filmmakers perceived the satellite ‘invasion’ as something positive. Given state control over media productions, satellites provided a glimpse of ‘plurality’ in the media system. It was only in a later moment that independent filmmakers (and television producers) realised that dozens of channels did not necessarily signify more choice or better alternatives (cf. Kak 1996: 10; Butalia 1996: 13). Second, it is worth mentioning that before DD became commercial, the Indian government had already decided to transform it into an autonomous state organ. In 1990, Parliament passed the Prasar Bharati Bill, which gave autonomy to DD and All India Radio. However, due to political wrangling, this Bill was not implemented until 1997–1998 (Singhal and Rogers 2001: 83). By the time the Prasar Bharati Bill had been implemented, DD’s rhetoric had already become consistent with the new economic policy of 1991, which, as I have pointed out, emphasised privatisation, globalisation, liberalisation and commercialisation (ibid.: 92). In other words, when DD became autonomous there was no longer a suitable space for documentary film productions in its agenda. Third, in 1994 a small group of people, working for DD, initiated a ‘cultural channel’ called DD3. This channel was in English and drew inspiration from international satellite channels, such as Star Plus, BBC World Service and MTV (Sanghvi 1997). For a short period, DD3 gave hope to documentary filmmakers that they could obtain a space in public television broadcasting. DD3 was broadcast via satellite, which was then delivered through cable networks. Unlike DD1 and DD2, this third channel employed an external preview committee for its programmes (Chadha 1994; Hindustan Times, 14 September). To better understand the connection between these three elements of the transforming public broadcasting scene and independent filmmakers, allow me to expand on the function of DD3, with reference to the ethnographic data I collected in 2007–2009. Among those who initiated DD3 were Bhaskar Ghose and Jai Chandaram, two members of DD from its inception. And among those who were part of the external preview committee were Shohini Ghosh and Sabeena Gadihoke, two members of the women’s collective, Mediastorm. I had the chance to discuss the brief existence of DD3 with Jai Chandaram and Sabeena Gadihoke. Sabeena shared with me the official invitation letter she received in 1994 from the DD general director, R. Basu, to serve as one of the external committee members. According to her, although the letter stated that DD3 would accept proposals ‘from independent

164   Festivals, small media and online networks producers’, it also made it clear that the channel was meant ‘for a discerning and educated audience’. This, for Sabeena, signified that the channel would have only partially contributed to the circulation of independent documentaries, and to a small section of Indian audiences.5 I discussed the same point with Jai Chandaram a few hours after I had sat with Sabeena to talk about this history, and she confirmed: We believed that everything was to be driven by art. To us art was the way to better understand the world that surrounds us.… We were interested in a specialised cultural programme but not another musical programme. We wanted a programme of art with all its different dimensions – including literature, documentary, and even the academia.6 These narratives suggest that DD3 was viewed with some hope by documentary filmmakers: they were eager to obtain a space in the transforming public broadcasting system and, in terms of scale, to screen their films to a larger audience. However, although bigger in size, DD3’s audience was also perceived by filmmakers as another ‘specialised audience’ similar to the one created by Odessa during the 1980s or the one created by local NGOs after the expansion of video technology (cf. Chapter 4). By the mid-­ 1990s, however, documentary filmmakers were no longer satisfied with only politicised or elite audiences. Regardless of whether the experience of DD3 was successful for documentary productions, the channel did not actually last for long. The importance of this channel in the history of television in India has been so limited that renowned scholars, such as Singhal and Rogers (2001), Saksena (1996) and N. Gupta (1998) have not even given to its short existence any attention.7 Despite this, a confluence of factors emerged in the mid-­1990s – the short life of DD3, the pending implementation of the Prasar Bharati Bill and the realisation that multiple private satellite channels did not signify ‘plurality’ or ‘alternative’ in the Indian media scene – and motivated independent documentary filmmakers, based in New Delhi, to come together and begin to raise their voice against this system. This unification occurred through the use of small media technology.

Small media networks: from independent newsletters to the forum for independent films and video Annabelle Sreberny-­Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi define ‘small media’ as ‘participatory, public phenomena, controlled neither by big states nor big corporations’ (1994: 20). These media can also be called ‘alternative media’ (cf. Couldry and Curran 2003; Reeves 1993) and are ‘vehicles for direct participation in the mediated communications process and for the extension of the voices of groups and ideas otherwise not heard’ (Sreberny-­ Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994: 21). The unheard voices are ‘creative

Festivals, small media and online networks   165 and spontaneous’ and make use of small media and traditional networks without following ‘formal parties or organized unions’ (ibid.: 22). In the New Delhi of the early 1990s, different small media networks emerged to contest state power and corporations, by asking for space for independent film and media practices. Let us explore some of these networks. CENDIT for instance (cf. Chapter 4) was an organisation that was involved in multiple small media practices making use of various small media technologies (from video to independent publications). Yet, it was also part of a global debate about the use of technology for social change.8 For this reason, in February 1994 the organisation co-­organised a symposium called ‘New Technologies and Democratisation of Audiovisual Communications’, held in New Delhi.9 A mix of practitioners, researchers and non-­governmental organisations, from 30 different countries, took part in this initiative (Ambrosi 1994). Among other things, the symposium focused on discussions about the satellite invasion and on alternatives for media and communications globally. Examples of alternative media practices from Australia, the USA and Canada formed the basis of a number of discussions at the symposium. According to Ambrosi (ibid.), this gathering was an international expression of discomfort about the changing media policies, not only in India but worldwide. These international discourses started to circulate in urban India through independent newsletters that reached media practitioners directly in their homes. As with the feminist discourse, a debate about the use of small media for alternative political communication patterns started to circulate in urban India through symposia and independent publications. Videoscape was one of the newsletters circulating in the early 1990s, later followed by the independent quarterly Media Mail. Videoscape was set up by Gargi Sen, Ranjan De, Sujit Ghosh and Rajive Jain. Its objective was ‘to share views and information about the role of media in movements’ and to employ new technologies as a form of democratisation (cf. Videoscape 1994a, editorial). With the exception of Rajive Jain, who was one of the founding members of CENDIT, the editorial team was composed of media practitioners trained by this NGO. Several members of the editorial team were also founding members of Magic Lantern (cf. Chapter 4), and in the late 1990s they set up their own independent quarterly, Media Mail, following in the footsteps of Videoscape. Media Mail (later known as Alternate Media Times) existed from 1997 to 2001 and was supported by readers’ contributions. If we compare the role of Media Mail with that of Videoscape we can say that Videoscape reported most of the activities, symposia and discourses that CENDIT promoted or was involved in, while Media Mail became the voice of independent media practices, and in particular of documentary film activities across the country. For instance, the Forum for Independent Films and Video (henceforth FIFV) and discussion around the Prasar Bharati Bill were some of the topics covered in depth by Media Mail (1997b, 1997c, 1997d, 1997e, 1997f, 1998b, 1998c).

166   Festivals, small media and online networks In 1996, the FIFV emerged out of existing connection between filmmakers (which, as stated above, solidified thanks to the film festivals) and out of the thought-­provoking alternative media discourses circulating in New Delhi. At this time, the shared belief among various media practitioners was that information was becoming a commodity and putting democratic institutions in danger (cf. Videoscape 1994b, editorial; Media Mail 1997g, 1997h). As Sanjay Kak told me over the phone, on one of the days when I was trying to clarify for myself how the FIFV had emerged, ‘several independent filmmakers and television producers based in New Delhi came together in the middle of 1996 when they felt that the meaning of public service broadcasting was getting absorbed by advertising and privatisation’.10 By this time, there were several independent filmmakers and producers based in New Delhi. Many were friends and thus in a position to come together and think about an alternative broadcasting system. The FIFV was the product of these discussions and informal gatherings (cf. Media Mail 1997f ). In order to be heard, the group wrote a public document called ‘A Vision for Television’ which, among other things, stated that the FIFV represented ‘the common demand for an active and vigorous film culture’, and was interested ‘to bring together film makers and technicians working in film and video, with researchers, scholars, film enthusiasts, and students of film and communication’ (A Vision for Television 1996: 13). Furthermore, the public document asserted that the FIFV’s objective was to ‘ensure a greater public space for independent film’ and to ‘work towards a climate in which images rather than being passively consumed, [were] freely produced and actively debated within society’ (ibid.). However, why did the FIFV need to write a public document to raise the concerns of a group of filmmakers in an urban centre such as New Delhi, when fora and discussions were already taking place? Another point needs emphasis here. ‘A Vision for Television’ was not only a document that underlined the opinion of a group of media practitioners based in New Delhi, it was also a proposal for the yet-­to-be-­established Prasar Bharati. This is the way in which the group presents its intentions on the first page of ‘A Vision for Television’, dated August 1996: As an association of independent film and video professionals we have watched with growing unease the emerging character of our television culture. Situated at the sidelines, we have seen the end of Doordarshan’s monopoly, the rise of giant broadcasting and production companies, as well as the proliferation of channels. But this has not translated into better, more stimulating, or innovative television. … Our intervention seeks to act as a catalyst for an informed debate on these issues, and lay the ground for action towards realising an alternative structure of broadcasting.

Festivals, small media and online networks   167 We are anxious to involve many other voices in this public debate because we believe that broadcasting is too important a social activity to be left unquestioned and unexamined. (A Vision for Television 1996: 1) According to this presentation, the ultimate aim of these media practitioners was to stimulate a public debate and transform this debate into a possible alternative action. They suggested the creation of a ‘Public Broadcasting Service’ (henceforth PBS) as part of the yet-­to-be-­established Prasar Bharati. Inspired by broadcasting systems in the UK (Channel 4), USA (PBS) and Germany (ZDF ), the FIFV envisaged that the PBS would both allow for a plurality of programmes and give space to independent productions. It was to be guided by the principles of autonomy, access and plurality (cf. The Pioneer, 22 July and 18 August 1996) and, unlike the above-­mentioned DD3, it was to address ‘the broadest spectrum of the audience and not be narrowed down by education and class’ (ibid.: 3). The PBS was to be an alternative to the existing commercial and state channels (see Figure 6.1). In addition, it was to function as a decentralised organ – independent from Prasar Bharati. The FIFV suggested a different kind of regulatory body, called the Broadcast Licensing Authority (BLA). This body would allow the PBS to disconnect itself from Prasar Bharati and invite the intervention of universities, public initiatives and other institutions interested in contributing programmes ‘in the field of learning, culture and community service’ (ibid.: 7). To ensure that the proposal was wholly convincing, the FIFV outlined the feasibility of the PBS, and its benefits in relation to mass audience reception, audience participation, social and cultural value, the funding system and broadcasting technology. Regarding the technology, the group was inspired by the ephemeral DD3, and proposed to make use of the same cable transmission so that they could begin to broadcast the PBS channel without delay (cf. A Vision for Television 1996). All these points were made clear in both written and oral form on 23 August 1996. On this day, the FIFV organised a seminar at the India International Centre in New Delhi, inviting the Nitish Sengupta Committee to participate. This committee was set up by the government of India to put into practice the Prasar Bharati legislation, which had been waiting to be implemented since 1990. During this seminar, The Hindustan Times counted ‘over seventy young filmmakers’ (23 August 1996). While this figure was probably calculated by counting people who dropped by simply out of curiosity, it can still help us to imagine the widespread circulation of alternative media discourses in 1990s New Delhi. In other words, whether the participants were part of the FIFV or not, they had to have been informed about the event and be interested enough to participate. In different moments, Sanjay Kak, Sabeena Gadihoke and Pankaj Butalia (who at that time were all active members of the 1996 FIFV) pointed out to me that the ultimate aim of the suggested PBS was to

Figure 6.1  Proposal of A Vision for Television. Source: courtesy of Sanjay Kak.

Festivals, small media and online networks   169 provide the concrete possibility of an alternative public space, which either Prasar Bharati or any other individual or organisation could establish. In Sanjay’s words, ‘PBS was meant to go to the people!’.11 In this respect, it could be predicted that the FIFV’s members would advertise the 23 August seminar widely, making use of not only newspapers but small media networks (made up of leaflets, newsletters and telephone communications). In their narratives, the filmmakers with whom I interacted during my 2007–2009 fieldwork often made reference to ‘phone calls’, but without specifying the technology they had used at that time – whether it was a landline or a mobile. According to Sirpa Tenhunen, the introduction of mobile technology in India dates back to 1995 and since then the rate of mobile phone sales has been record-­breaking (2008: 515). However, mobile telephony did not develop in India until the very late 1990s and early 2000s (cf. Jeffrey and Doron 2011, 2013), therefore it was only in a later moment that mobile phones functioned as an important technology in the coordination of filmmakers’ activities. Even though for the FIFV’s mobilisation we cannot give agency to mobile technology, we can still regard telephone (landline) communications as an important aspect of small media networks, which anticipated the use of mobile and internet technology. In fact, as Chandita Mukherjee pointed out to me, ‘before mobiles, you needed a house to have an address and a landline; otherwise, it would have been difficult to start working as an independent filmmaker’.12 In short, alternative media discourses and small media networks made it easier for independent filmmakers based in New Delhi to gather as a group and express their political discomfort about public media broadcasting in India. The eventual outcome of the FIFV’s mobilisation was twofold. First, it inspired the future establishment of the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (henceforth PSBT) – a trust formed as a 51:49 joint venture between Prasar Bharati and private funding.13 And second, it prepared the ground for the coordination of a national mobilisation of filmmakers which, as we are now going to see, occurred through the use of internet (and mobile phone) communications.

Mobile and online networks According to Debra Spitulnik, the literature on democratisation has forgotten to give due attention to ‘the whole set of alternative small media that are significant in helping people create meaningful communicative spaces for themselves’ (2002: 177). These media create alternative spheres of communication and challenge state power, although they ‘are not always in direct dialogue with agents of the state’ (ibid.: 178, emphasis in original). Recently, some scholars have included in the meaning of small media the use of internet platforms, such as blogs or listservs, when they express ‘a big [media] pain’ (Sreberny and Khiabany 2010: 146) or mobilise groups (Spitulnik 2002: 181). In this respect, Spitulnik argues that today small

170   Festivals, small media and online networks media are often localised in more territories but operate in cyber or virtual spaces, sometimes expanding beyond the nation (ibid.: 179). Echoing Sreberny-­Mohammadi and Mohammadi (1994), Spitulnik points out that these media occupy an intermediary position between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’, and function as ‘expressive devices in the formation of group identities’ (2002: 181). In Sreberny-­Mohammadi and Mohammadi’s words ‘small media can help to foster an imaginative social solidarity, often as the precursor for actual physical mobilization’ (1994: 24). The 2004 campaign-­festival Vikalp – Films for Freedom (henceforth Vikalp) fits into all these descriptions of small media technologies and practices. It emerged thanks to e-­mails and listservs communications (cf. Bel 2005), which functioned as the ‘precursors for physical mobilisation’ but also built upon an existing sense of ‘community’ that had been established through film festival gatherings (such as BIFF/MIFF ) and previous localised campaigns (such as the FIFV). Moreover, between the 1996 FIFV and the 2004 Vikalp, mobile phone communications expanded in India and, as such, they strengthened existing social ties while also facilitating the coordination of many activities (cf. Tenhunen 2008; Ling 2008; Jeffrey and Doron 2013), including alternative political actions. In this respect, mobile phones are also part of those small media practices that cultivate an imaginative solidarity (cf. Sreberny-­Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994). Yet, let us see how all these small media networks came together and facilitated the creation of a community of a practice. Vikalp – Films for Freedom Vikalp is a bit like Rashomon! It never existed in a formal shape, it does not exist, yet it never stopped existing, and it will always exist. It is an intriguing range of memories and perceptions, many layers of varying and overlapping truths, seemingly in conflict, yet in a state of benign coexistence. (Rakesh Sharma, listserv communication, July 2009) I am sure everyone will tell you a different story. My memory is that in July 2003 I read the advert for MIFF 2004 and realised that in order to participate, films required a censor certificate. I started wondering what this was and I sent a few e-­mails to find out. I received an immediate response from other filmmakers who were wondering the same thing. From here somehow it all began. (Sanjay Kak, personal communication, June 2008) In the history of documentary film practices in India, Vikalp should be regarded as a film movement, which in February 2004 mobilised filmmakers from all over the country and made them into a community of film

Festivals, small media and online networks   171 practitioners. For the first time, 250 filmmakers came together. They fought the arbitrary introduction of the censor certificate as a mandatory precondition for Indian documentary films entered into MIFF 2004. However, as the quotations above suggest, narratives about the emergence of Vikalp are often contradictory. Kurosawa’s film Rashomon is accurately used in this context to highlight these incongruities.14 During my 2007–2009 fieldwork, I tried to engage in conversations with filmmakers about the beginning of Vikalp. I noticed that every time I attempted to start the discussion with information obtained from another filmmaker, my interlocutor would often respond: ‘This is not true’. Precisely because ‘Vikalp is a bit like Rashomon’, it might be useful to highlight its historical significance outside the position of the existing contradictory narratives, focusing on the technological and socio-­historical elements that brought this ‘community’ together. To do this, let us start from the online debate that emerged in July 2003 (prior to Vikalp), led by New Delhi film practitioners. The filmmakers in New Delhi who were involved in the July 2003 e-­mail exchange against the new regulations at MIFF 2004, included Amar Kanwar, Pankaj Butalia, Rahul Roy, Saba Dewan, Sameera Jain and Sanjay Kak. By this time, most of these filmmakers had already been involved in the FIFV’s campaign. In this case however, thanks to the de-­ territorialisation of internet technology, the discussion was not limited to only New Delhi filmmakers. Approximately 90 filmmakers from across the country immediately responded to the early e-­messages, or ‘digests’ – as filmmakers at the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork called the exchange of e-­mails that occurred between July 2003 and March 2004. In a couple of months, this number tripled. However, the six ‘Delhi-­based filmmakers’ listed above functioned as influential ‘leaders’ of the virtual conversations and as a sort of already established sub-­group of practitioners. Indeed, by analysing the communication that occurred in the digests one can observe that these practitioners frequently talked on behalf of each other and never as disconnected individuals. This was probably due to their past experience with the FIFV campaign, which had already enabled them to establish a ‘temporary’ community through which to express their rights as filmmakers. Thus, like any other small media, Vikalp built upon existing ties but functioned as an ‘expressive device [...] in the formation of group identities’ (Spitulnik 2002: 181). The name ‘Vikalp’ does not date back to the initial formation of this documentary community in India. At the beginning, the group called the movement: ‘Campaign against Censorship at MIFF ’.15 The intention of the group was to present filmmakers’ concerns about the introduction of censor certificates at MIFF 2004 to the press and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Together with the FD, the Ministry of I&B was in charge of organising MIFF. With this specific target in mind, the online crowd of filmmakers grew fairly rapidly and by September 2003 the group had already

172   Festivals, small media and online networks reached the public domain. Newspapers, such as The Hindu (16 and 19 September 2003), The Times of India (19 September 2003), Hindustan Times (16 September 2003), and The Indian Express (17 and 19 September 2003), dedicated columns to detailed descriptions of the mobilisation and, within a few months, the campaign had escalated. As a result, in December 2003 MIFF withdrew the censor certificate precondition for film entries. Five months of intense campaigning had made it possible to both attain a victory and create a community of practices. The New Delhi group wrote a follow­up e-­mail to the online network of filmmakers. Dear friends, Over the past five months there has been an unprecedented coming together of documentary practitioners from all over the country on the issue of censorship at MIFF. This might be read as an expression of the general frustration we feel at not being able to fight those who would attempt to extend control over our minds and lives. But it is also indicative of the fact that the documentary community feels that the time is ripe to exert some control over institutions which determine the production and distribution of its work. The question that seems to be on the lips of many is ‘What now?’ Do we consolidate our efforts in the form of an organisation that intervenes in different situations? Should we be content to remain a pressure lobby which materialises whenever there is a need, and disappears when there is none? Or should we be more pro-­active in shaping institutions which support and influence documentary film-­making? …  These are only some of the questions that have been raised in the past few months. Please do take this seriously and find the time to think about these, discuss with others so we can share our responses. In solidarity, Amar, Pankaj, Rahul, Saba, Sameera, Sanjay. (12 December 2003, emphasis added) As emerges from this e-­mail, by December 2003 the New Delhi group was already addressing the online network of filmmakers as a ‘documentary community’ with shared feelings about the production and distribution of films. Up to this point, the ‘community’ existed only in an online form and was constituted by names and places listed together on virtual pages. Perhaps it would have remained as such if, at the end of 2003, some filmmakers had not noticed that in reality MIFF had informally maintained the censor restrictions. In fact, even though it officially withdrew the censor certificate precondition from the entry form, MIFF made sure to exclude films submitted without certificates. Filmmakers interpreted this manoeuvre as a ‘lobby’ against their campaign and, in their words, they were ‘horrified to see some of the best and most provocative films left out’ (Films for Freedom Festival booklet 2004: 4). It is in response to this later development that, from the beginning of 2004, filmmakers decided to come

Festivals, small media and online networks   173 together physically and organise a festival-­campaign against censorship (see Figures 6.2 and 6.3). This campaign chose the name ‘Vikalp – Films for Freedom’ and it took place in parallel with MIFF in Mumbai. In other words, the already established online network had, in fact, functioned ‘as the precursor for actual physical mobilization’ (Sreberny-­Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994: 24). And, I add, a virtual community of filmmakers was transformed into a physical community. As the result of a quick decision taken by filmmakers over e-­mail and mobile phones, Vikalp took place in February 2004. For the first time in

Figure 6.2  Vikalp: images from the festival-protest. Mumbai, festival 2004. Source: courtesy of Sanjay Kak.

174   Festivals, small media and online networks

Figure 6.3  Vikalp: slogans from the festival-protest. Mumbai, festival 2004. Source: courtesy of Sanjay Kak.

the history of documentary in India, filmmakers from all over the country were brought together. The rapid organisation of the festival-­protest was facilitated by the fact that in January 2004 the World Social Forum was taking place in Mumbai and several Indian filmmakers and films were already located in Mumbai for that reason. This combination of already available films and filmmakers speeded up the process of organising a film

Festivals, small media and online networks   175 festival-­protest for February. As Anjali Monteiro narrated to me, ‘all Mumbai-­based filmmakers made Vikalp physically possible. From the beginning, they coordinated the organisation of the event through mobile communications’.16 In other words, while New Delhi practitioners were in charge of the coordination of the event online (and expanded the network to include international filmmakers and academics), Mumbai-­practitioners took care of the offline logistics. With VHS film copies and a minimum contribution of 500 Rupees per film (at that time equivalent to approximately £10 Sterling) to cover festival expenses, in less than a month independent filmmakers were able to organise a parallel, alternative and ‘small media’ film festival. Some 58 films were screened at Vikalp, covering a wide range of issues including communal politics, caste, gender discrimination and the politics of development – all topics frequently repressed by the censor board. The event ran for a week and, according to what filmmakers wrote in one of the festival booklets, it was ‘an unprecedented success’ (Films for Freedom Festival booklet 2004: 4). Both national and international media reported on the alternative festival, including the BBC (6 February 2004), Guardian (3 February 2004) and Aljazeera (8 February 2004).17 At a national level, The Hindu (22 February 2004), The Indian Express (25 January 2004), Hindustan Times (6 February 2004) and The Telegraph India (28 January 2004) supported the festival-­ protest with positive headlines and reports. In particular, the Telegraph drew attention to an incident that can help us to imagine the widespread support that Vikalp secured. The incident concerned the renowned playwright Girish Karnad, who decided to resign as chairman of the jury for MIFF 2004 – ‘in the wake of a tussle between independent documentary film-­makers and the Films Division over censorship and selection’ (Telegraph, India, 28 January 2004). As Karnad narrated to the Telegraph, after the threat of a total boycott by independent filmmakers a new method of selection was introduced in which, though the members of the selection committee were under no political pressure, the final collation of marks awarded by these members was left to an officer of the Films Division, with no independent member participating in the final decision. (Ibid.) At this historical juncture, the relationship between independent documentary filmmakers and the state became increasingly bitter. Accordingly, Vinay Lal asserted after Vikalp that ‘one can consequently indulge oneself in the belief that documentary film-­makers will no longer exist at the margins of political and artistic activity in India’ (Lal 2005: 185). Using the argument thus far built up in this book, however, we can say that thanks to Vikalp filmmakers have begun to reconsider their film practices in relation to the

176   Festivals, small media and online networks state. Moreover, for the first time, the use of small media practices made publicly visible an independent documentary film movement, and physically possible the existence of a community of film practice on a national scale. Nevertheless, despite the collective energy that emerged in the early 2000s, this movement did not last for long. ‘Vikalp should be considered as the first and the last movement of documentary filmmakers in India’, says Reena Mohan.18 Indeed, to date there has been no other wide-­scale mobilisation of filmmakers (see Waugh 2012). And, when I searched for the ‘spirit’ of Vikalp in contemporary filmmakers’ practices, I immediately realised that it had become a depository-­memory. At the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork, several filmmakers talked about Vikalp as Rashomon – perhaps to avoid further questions about the fact that Vikalp had faded from the documentary scene. If Vikalp was the first and maybe the last film movement, however, it also signalled the beginning of the consolidation of a community of filmmakers. Filmmakers never physically mobilised again, but an ‘official’ online community of documentary filmmakers had emerged. Although by this time online listservs were already being used by filmmakers (for example, a listserv called ‘Docuwallahs’ has existed since 2001 – although in a second time transformed into Docuwallahs2), a national network of practitioners was yet to be formed. With Vikalp, a specialised listserv emerged, restricted to those filmmakers who participated at Vikalp. This new listserv not only united filmmakers across the country but also helped to revitalise other listservs, such as Docuwallahs. Over time, both Vikalp-­listserv and Docuwallahs-­listserv have served as virtual spaces in which to discuss, to inform and to mobilise documentary practitioners. They have been ‘resistant’ to more contemporary social media platforms such as Facebook, and hence require further academic investigation. In addition, the activities and initiatives shared in the listservs have fostered the emergence of a multiplication of small-­scale independent film festivals and screenings across the country. It is as if practitioners have begun to be linked through virtual spaces but have continued to act locally in their physical space. With the exception of Bangalore, Calcutta and Shillong, Vikalp did not travel further than the site of its first festival-­protest. However, while for many filmmakers the name ‘Vikalp’ has come to be a depository-­ memory, as we will see in the next chapter, the spirit of ‘alternative’, ‘independent’, and ‘small media’ festivals has remained, though manifest through other regionalised and more localised ‘small’ media practices.

Notes   1 I thank Pankaj Butalia for helping me to reconstruct a history that is often narrated and written in multiple and contradictory ways. (See also: http://dff.nic.in/ iffi.asp (last accessed 21 December 2015).   2 Conversation with Pankaj Butalia, 20 April 2009.   3 Conversation with Pankaj Butalia, 20 April 2009.

Festivals, small media and online networks   177   4 I borrow this expression from Paul Pickowicz (2006), who talks about the relationship between independent documentary practices and the state with reference to China.   5 Conversation with Sabeena Gadihoke, 22 April 2009.   6 Conversation with Jai Chandaram, 22 April 2009.   7 Similarly, throughout my 2007–2009 fieldwork, several filmmakers told me about the short existence of a private television channel called BITV, which no scholars paid attention to. According to these filmmakers, BITV emerged in parallel with DD3, with the aim of sponsoring independent documentaries. However, it had a short life and was not even able to pay back several of the commissioned films.   8 To read about this debate, see Singhal and Rogers (1989); Kishore (1994); Singhal et al. (1988); Lerner (1958); Schramm (1964); Reeves (1993); Bel et al. (2005); Hallin (1998), to mention but a few.   9 The symposium was organised by Videazimut, in collaboration with CENDIT. Videazimut was a coalition of various independent media practitioners from all over the world who met during a 1990 international symposium in Montreal on alternative communication and the democratic use of video and television. According to Park (2007), the coalition was founded by Alain Ambrosi from Canada, Regina Festa from Brazil, Antonio Onorati from Italy, Felisberto Tinga from Mozambique, Derek Hall from Hong Kong, Rafael Roncagliolo from Peru, Mokonenyana Molete from South Africa, and Rajive Jain from India. Jain was also one of the founders of CENDIT. 10 Conversation with Sanjay Kak, 10 May 2009. 11 Conversation with Sanjay Kak, 10 May 2009. 12 Conversation with Chandita Mukherjee 18 February 2009. 13 It is important to underline here that the PSBT emerged not solely in response to the FIFV but also because of the travelling film festival ‘India’s Quest’. This was a joined initiative by the Ford Foundation and the Dalai Lama Foundation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Indian Independence (Conversation with Rajiv Mehrotra 25 January 2009; see Mehrotra 2006: 152–156). In addition, according to several former members of the FIFV, although the PSBT was modelled on the PBS proposal it eventually lost its autonomy. In fact, rather than an independent organ of public broadcasting, supported by public money, over time the PBST has become an organisation dependent not only on Prasar Bharati but also on NGO funding. Today, the PSBT plays a role in the Indian panorama of multiple documentary practices but it is not central to filmmakers’ discourses and practices. 14 Rashomon (1950) is a well-­known Japanese film, directed by Akhira Kurosawa. It talks about the rape of a woman and the murder of her husband through the contradictory narratives of different witnesses. The whole film is constructed through a flashback mode. 15 To read more about the campaign, consult the 2004 unpublished seminar/ report entitled Resisting Censorship: Celebrating Freedom of Expression. 16 Conversation with Anajali Monteiro 18 April 2009. 17 The BBC’s article is available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/ 3466691.stm (last accessed 21 December 2015). The article written by Guardian is available at: www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/feb/03/festivals/print (last accessed 21 December 2015). Aljazeera’s article can be found at: http:// english.aljazeera.net/archive/2004/02/20084913115164590.html (last accessed 21 December 2015). 18 Conversation with Reena Mohan 30 November 2008.

7 Sites of cultural activism

That [documentary film is a filmmaker’s argument] could be so, were it not for the intervention of the audience. Audiences may see the film in the way it has been constructed for them, but they are also capable of taking apart the apparently seamless argument to read their own meanings from the images and sounds that they are provided. Audiences can liberate the arguments of a film from the details of their construction. They can help the arguments rise and float away to another sphere, or else, equally doggedly, tether them to the ground. (Kak 2000: 21, emphasis in original)

When I met Sanjay Kak at the first International Video Festival of Kerala (IVFK) in May 2008, he immediately pointed out to me the importance of small, alternative and independent film festivals and screenings in India. On that occasion, Sanjay asserted that there was a need to support young generations of media activists to screen documentary films and bring them to the people. ‘Portable digital technology’, he argued, ‘made alternative screenings possible in contemporary India and because of their ability to easily reach audiences they have also provided films with multiple lives’.1 At this point in my 2007–2009 fieldwork, I had already taken part in several film festivals and had noticed that, on these occasions, the performative/dialogic correlation between films and audiences was one of the most-­debated topics. Some filmmakers often pondered ‘how should I engage with an audience?’ while discussing how to make or edit a film. And ‘how will an audience respond to this film?’ was the second question that concerned them, as believers in the idea that audiences hold multiple interpretations. Among the interactions that I had on this subject, the one with Sanjay Kak was the clearest to me. Sanjay even published his argument in an essay entitled ‘Playing with Flux – Constructing an Argument in Documentary Films’. In this essay, he asks whether we can ever suggest ‘that a documentary film is a filmmaker’s argument, a one-­dimensional construction from the raw material of real life’ (2000: 21), and he goes on to say, as the opening quotation suggests, that audiences do play a role in the construction of a film argument. Indeed, it is the triangulation between

Sites of cultural activism   179 reality, filmmaker and audience that ‘makes the documentary a much more democratic form of expression’ (ibid.). If this is the case, we should probably ask how documentary filmmakers might invite the spectator to participate in this ‘democratic’ form of expression. As this chapter should demonstrate, ‘sites of cultural activism’ ought to be given attention. It is thanks to these sites that a dialogic correlation between films, filmmakers and audiences emerges. If in the overall history of the development of documentary practices in the subcontinent screening films has always occurred in a limited way, after the Vikalp experience this situation radically changed. Documentary filmmakers have moved away from contesting state-­power and have begun to search for ‘alternative’ sites (cf. Couldry and Curran 2003; Reeves 1993) in which to engage with their audiences and political discourses. In other words, filmmakers have created new physical spaces that are disconnected from state or mainstream media power and therefore outside the official film festival circuits (such as Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films), outside state institutions (such as the Films Division) and outside national television channels (such as Doordarshan). While these last three institutions can be regarded as part of what Bourdieu calls the ‘field of cultural production’ and the ‘field of power’ (1996: 124), I consider sites of cultural activism as ‘alternative’ or ‘small media’ practices that are correlated with, but not entirely part of, the same fields. The social activist Rustom Bharucha makes use of the term ‘cultural activism’ to describe ‘cultural performances’ aimed at secular activism in India (1998: 112). In such case, ‘cultural performances’ are not understood, as also Victor Turner (1988) pointed out, as ‘reflectors or expressions of culture’ but as ‘active agencies of change’.2 For Bharucha these include theatre, dance, installations, poetry readings, slogan-­painting and cartoons. Bharucha identifies forms of activism in different cultural sites and dates them back to the 1940s, in particular to the cultural activities of the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (henceforth IPTA).3 It is precisely in terms of this history that I frame the contemporary sites of cultural activism for filmmaking practices, sites that are the product of small media technologies and alternative networks. On this basis, this chapter investigates what kinds of interaction occur in the sites of cultural activism and suggests that they are ‘performative social events’ (Hughes 2003: 29) in which films negotiate their initial argument with different audiences (cf. Kak 2000: 21; Straw 2005: 183). The sites of cultural activism enable engagement with politics on a collective basis, through the experience of watching and debating a film. These sites provide opportunities for both the participants and the organisers to think critically about the social, political and cultural aspects of Indian society, beyond the analyses of mainstream media representations and state politics.

180   Sites of cultural activism Drawing on data collected in South India, this chapter is an ethnographic account of what in my 2007–2009 fieldwork I identified as examples of sites of cultural activism. Specifically, the chapter makes reference to two organisations, Vibgyor and Pedestrian Pictures, which at the time of my stay in India were involved in film activities in Kerala and Karnataka, respectively. While Vibgyor was a collective involved in the organisation of an annual independent film festival, Pedestrian Pictures engaged in multiple film-­related activities and staged regular film screenings. All these activities were well-­known among the national community of documentary filmmakers. The latter organisation receives more attention than the former here, not only because of its variety of screening activities but also because it was my work-­base and centre of attention for about ten months between 2008 and 2009. These two organisations should be considered as only a fraction of the wider network of film festivals and screening activities that proliferated after Vikalp in India.

Independent film festivals: focus on Vibgyor Film discussions play a fundamental role in bridging gaps between documentary filmmakers, film subjects and audiences. Films are indeed mobile cultural entities that acquire different ‘lives’ depending on the context in which they are exhibited. In this respect, independent film festivals and film screenings become the sites that transform documentary films into ‘performative social events’ (Hughes 2003: 29), and post-­film discussions play a significant role in these. To give a concrete example of one such site, let us pay specific attention to Vibgyor – a South Indian film festival held in Thrissur, Kerala, and co-­organised by different media collectives. Vibgyor’s name is composed of the initials of the seven colours of the rainbow – violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. As the organising committee explains in several Vibgyor festival publications (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009), from the beginning the festival’s objective has been to bring together the diversity and complexity of human experience under a single voice. Accordingly, each Vibgyor to date has covered a spectrum of seven social and political issues concerning India and/or South Asia. These have included Dalit realities (or caste), gender and sexuality, the environment, indigenous people, fundamentalism vs. diversity, the relationship with the nation state, and globalisation. I participated in the May 2009 Vibgyor film festival, which took place on a large campus close to the centre of Thrissur. The film festival was not only about films; it was a combination of film screenings, film discussions, special seminars, open meetings with filmmakers, an organic food fair, and music and dance performances (see Figure 7.1). Under a colourful blue gazebo on the right of the entrance, the ‘open forum’ functioned from 1–4 p.m. – it was a place where people met, discussed and confronted each other without any restrictions. Filmmakers and media activists worked

Sites of cultural activism   181

Figure 7.1  Vibgyor 2009: stands of organic food, arts and crafts.

together to make this space a productive forum for dialogue, and an average of 30–40 people participated in the forum every day. If required, a last-­minute film, made by a local filmmaker, was also projected on a mobile screen, and discussed afterwards. From the first to the last day of the forum-­discussion, there was never a spare chair for the latecomer and not always the time to pass the microphone to all those interested in speaking (see Figures 7.2 and 7.3). In parallel, films were screened in two different auditoriums throughout the day. The programme was assorted and audiences were asked to make choices according to their preferences. I stood in front of the main entrance to help the organisers, and while doing this I often engaged in conversations with the participants. Here, I observed how some participants picked up their delegate cards and went directly inside the main auditorium – always more populated than the other spaces. While in the morning the auditoriums were often occupied by entire classes of students from local schools and colleges, in the afternoons there were mainly entire families. Weekends were busier than any other day. However, the auditoriums were full throughout the five-­day festival, with an average of 100 but sometimes 200 people per show. By the end of the fifth day, the clothes, books, arts and crafts and food that were for sale at the different stands located around the festival’s courtyard were almost sold out. Filmmakers such as

Figure 7.2  Vibgyor 2009: open forum – the public.

Figure 7.3 Vibgyor 2009: open forum – speakers. Left to right: T.G. Ajay, K.P. Sasi, Kazmi Ali, Menon Gopal, Virmani Shabnam and the moderator.

Sites of cultural activism   183 Shabnam Virmani and Ali Kazimi, invited as special guests of the festival, communicated to me their excitement about the large turnout and the high levels of participation. All over the campus there were banners with messages of peace, democracy and ‘alternative globalisation’ (see Figure 7.4). However, these messages were easily confused with the shiny colourful advertisements. Adverts were a recent addition to the festival, a decision the organisers had made because of the substantial losses incurred at previous Vibgyors (which had been funded through individual contributions only). Both banners with messages of peace and colourful adverts created a path through the campus that led the audiences towards the courtyard in which night-­time activities took place. Every night a maxi screen projected a short film, followed by music and dance performances, sometimes initiated by the audience. Filmmakers and participants were asked to contribute with songs or short performances to entertain the rest of the public until late in the evening. Some of the organisers, such as Father Benny Benedict, K.P. Sasi and Sarathchandran, interpreted the active public participation in line with what they felt was ‘the spirit of Vibgyor’. Vibgyor was, in fact, more than a film festival; it was a ‘feast’, a cultural performance, a site of cultural activism where one could engage in politics and art and celebrate people and their diversities.

Figure 7.4  Vibgyor 2009: peace slogans spread out in the campus.

184   Sites of cultural activism This description suggests that Vibgyor was a successful independent film festival. However, several filmmakers with whom I interacted claimed that previous Vibgyors had not been as good as the one in which I participated. Similarly, Vibgyor’s organisers narrated to me that previously the activities had been decentralised in different places and the turnout was unsatisfactory. So, how was it that Vibgyor 2009 thrived? I suggest that Vigbyor 2009 succeeded because it was organised as a sort of ‘performative social event’ (Hughes 2003: 29), in which films and other related activities coexisted. As a social event, it was also organised making use of ‘small media’ (Sreberny-­ Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994; Spitulnik 2002), which facilitated the creation of a network of filmmakers, organisers, activists and, in this case, even audiences. While in the previous chapter we emphasised the importance of listservs in the organisation of an independent festival such as Vikalp, here we can see that at a local level small media technologies include something different from online networking. During Vibgyor 2009, these technologies ranged from mobile screens (moving from the ‘open forum’ to the evening open space), to multiple DVD players and projectors, independent magazines (reporting about the festival every day from laptops), mobile phone coordination and loudspeakers. In a study of internet community radio in Sri Lanka, Don Slater, Jo Tacchi and Peter Lewis found that ‘people’s understandings of the various media were based on their sense of locality’ (Slater et al. 2002: 22) and that loudspeakers were ‘a hugely significant communication technology … for public announcements, for religious and social events, for political rallies, for advertising’ (ibid.: 24; see also Slater 2014). In the context of Vibgyor 2009, loudspeakers were the ideal ‘residual’ (Acland 2007) technology to combine with new media technologies (cf. Silverstone 1999). They were placed all over the campus, and they reproduced the sound of either the films being screened inside the main auditorium or the forum discussions. Loudspeaker technology communicated directly to the people, drawing their attention. For instance, during one of the 2009 open forums about communal violence in India, one person decided to pick up the microphone and contribute his opinion. While talking, this person acknowledged that he did not know what the forum was about, let alone the festival, but that he had heard the discussion from the street and decided to join in. This indicates that loudspeakers functioned as a key means of communication for local people who were not necessarily involved in the festival or interested in documentary film activities. And, when combined with the attraction of maxi screen film exhibitions and a food fair, they contributed to transforming the Vibgyor film festival into a feast in which politics, art and entertainment coexisted. Will Straw suggests that ‘each new film or act of artistic activism … presumes an implicit negotiation with the context in which it seeks to emerge’ (2005: 183). During Vibgyor 2009, documentary films and other related activities – which Straw might call ‘artistic activism’ (ibid.) – continuously

Sites of cultural activism   185 negotiated their ‘text’ with the specific context. Film discussions and various performative interactions acted as the central activities of this negotiation. It was precisely the negotiation between films (or ‘artistic activism’) and other local interactions that transformed Vibgyor into a site of cultural activism, enabling the construction of multiple ‘lives’ for documentary films. To paraphrase Sanjay Kak, it is the encounter with different contexts (composed of different audiences and different activities) that allows the argument of a film to rise and float away or tether it to the ground (2000: 21). Similar to the Vibgyor experience in Kerala, in many other regions of India, such as Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh, small and independent urban film festivals took place at the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork, attracting filmmakers from all over the country. They multiplied thanks to the easy circulation of information through listservs, and they significantly expanded the network of alternative film screenings and festivals. Of course, the multiplication of film festivals also occurred in Indian metropolises. Yet, in such cases, they were not far from the public/private screenings organised there, to which we should now turn our attention.

Public/private screenings: focus on Pedestrian Pictures There are many organisations in India that deserve detailed attention to be paid to their regular screening activities. Marupakkam in Madurai (Tamil Nadu), Akhra in Ranchi (Jharkhand), Third Eye Communication in Cochin (Kerala), Vikalp-­Bangalore in Bangalore (Karnataka), Vikalp Prithvi in Bombay (Maharashtra) and Media Solidarity in Kolkata (West Bengal) are but a few names. Pedestrian Pictures in Bangalore (Karnataka) should be considered as one example among many possible others. Moreover, although Bangalore acts as a growing or ‘promising’ metropolis (Nair 2005; Stallmeyer 2010), the activities that occur at a cultural level are not dissimilar to those occurring in New Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata. Besides, as several filmmakers pointed out to me, because of its cosmopolitan qualities – in part the result of the growing IT industry – Bangalore benefits from an easy relationship with other metropolises without developing a sense of competition about being ‘first’ or ‘better’ in media and cultural activities. For this reason, over the years the organisation I analyse here has developed a collaborative relationship with filmmakers based in different cities of India, and it is these networks that have made Pedestrian Pictures’ screening activities possible. Pedestrian Pictures is a Bangalore-­based media-­activist organisation created in 2001. At the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork, the organisation was composed of self-­funded young individuals, known locally as ‘pedestrians’, who made use of different media (mainly films and independent publications) as vehicles for their social and political activism. The group

186   Sites of cultural activism was relatively small. When I joined them, there were three main members, but over the year a number of other individuals (principally university students) became an active part of the group. Prior to my visit, several other people had been part of Pedestrian Pictures. For various reasons these individuals were no longer active in the organisation when I arrived but they continued to consider themselves ‘pedestrians’. The pedestrians always worked as a team, agreeing on a number of principles regarding the organisation, such as to be self-­funded, to share one’s own profit, to make use of donations to cover the expenses of Pedestrian Pictures’ activities, and to be ready to help or to work with other organisations. For this reason, I will not single out individuals but will talk about them as a cohesive group. When I worked with them, the strength of the group was its ability to be involved in multiple mutually enriching activities. As the well-­known Bangalore-­based filmmaker, Deepa Dhanraj, emphasised to me,  unlike other groups in India, Pedestrian Pictures succeeds because they [the pedestrians] go beyond film screenings. They are connected to other groups which make them part of a larger ‘political thinking’. They are always up to date and always ready to confront themselves with other groups. They are part of broader contemporary discourses.4  This, according to Deepa, was also one of the reasons why the film screenings organised by Pedestrian Pictures never lacked interested audiences. During my period of ‘full-­time’ work with Pedestrian Pictures, I was able to corroborate Deepa Dhanraj’s opinion while conducting an ‘observant participation’ (Turner 1990: 10) of the group and all their screening activities. This included ‘monthly’ and ‘college’ screenings and the occasional organisation of a film festival. Here, I shall focus on Pedestrian Pictures’ monthly and college screenings, considering them as part of the organisation’s wider network of activities and activism but also as fundamental practices that enabled the national network of documentary filmmaking to engage with audiences in alternative forums. I suggest that Pedestrian Pictures (as well as other media groups across the country) created the possibility of decentralising state power over cultural production – constituted by the FD, the DD and MIFF – towards alternative sites of cultural activism. As with the independent festivals, these screening-­sites are loci of active participation, (inter)action and sharing, which provide multiple lives to films. Monthly screenings Pedestrian Pictures’ monthly screening activities were a half-­day event on the last Saturday of each month in a private auditorium at the Institute of Agriculture and Technology (henceforth IAT), in a central area of Bangalore. The auditorium was located through the side entrance of the IAT, in

Sites of cultural activism   187 Queen’s Road, and had a large open parking space and a courtyard in which tea and coffee breaks were held in front of it. The venue (see Figure 7.5) never changed, as Pedestrian Pictures felt that this was the only way to ‘create a regular audience’. The number of participants varied between 30 and 100. During the last few years, more than 800 people have subscribed to Pedestrian Pictures’ mailing list after attending a monthly screening session. For every screening, a sign-­in sheet was placed outside the main door of the auditorium. In this way, the pedestrians always made sure to get the names, e-­mail addresses and phone numbers of all the participants, ‘in exchange’ for the programme (see Figure 7.6). Monitoring their audiences through e-­mail addresses and phone numbers helped the pedestrians to establish regular communication with them and keep them informed about future screenings and other activities. Pedestrian Pictures’ network was completely dependent on ‘small media’. The easily accessible quality of this technology made it particularly efficient for their needs. Over the years, Pedestrian Pictures became a reliable organisation, which always received sufficient audience contributions to rent the IAT auditorium and provide tea and coffee for participants. Occasional profits covered the travel expenses from Pedestrian Pictures’ office to the venue. The logic behind the screenings was to create a space ‘for the people, by the people’ without anyone making a profit.

Figure 7.5 Pedestrian Pictures: members of Pedestrian Pictures talking with filmmaker Chandra Siddan during their monthly screening activity.

188   Sites of cultural activism

Figure 7.6 Pedestrian Pictures: member of Pedestrian Pictures providing material for film screening during their monthly screening activity.

Monthly screenings were ‘public’ events, in the sense that they were open to anyone and even advertised in newspapers. However, they were also ‘private’ events as they made use of a private auditorium. What might sound like a contradiction was in reality an escamotage that several media organisations and groups of independent filmmakers in India have often pursued to avoid problems when screening films without a censor certificate. In contemporary India, groups such as Pedestrian Pictures have made use of private places as public fora. In other words, they have created a sort of ‘platform’ where, in Bharucha’s words, ‘participative politics’ can occur (1998: 54–55). In line with Bharucha, the problem with these kinds of organisation is to understand ‘what happens to the heterogeneous elements that assemble around a platform which has been determined ideologically by a few members in the group’ (ibid.: 55). Pedestrian Pictures organised its monthly screening in a way that, despite the strong political framework of the group, created a heterogeneous forum beyond the ideology of the group and another site of cultural activism in which to engage with politics and art. During my stay, I made use of questionnaires as heuristic devices to engage in conversation with audiences watching documentary films. At

Sites of cultural activism   189 Pedestrian Pictures’ monthly screenings, this placed me in a privileged position from which to interact with, monitor and discuss the importance and meaning of documentary films with a Bangalore audience. Questionnaires also helped me to observe or be part of interactions that varied continually. Over time, I came to be perceived not only as a foreigner but also as a familiar face with whom to exchange opinions. There were people who liked talking about politics and those who preferred discussing or questioning the detail of the film. There were always a few who did not get the chance to speak or articulate themselves enough in the post-­film discussion and decided to explain their point to me in private. Many wanted to know more about Pedestrian Pictures’ activities; others wished to become part of the group or to set up their own screening-­group. For each monthly screening, there were some who came to meet old friends and others who were willing to make new friends. The ‘most regular’, the ‘most chatty’, the ‘most annoying’, or the ‘most supportive’ participant was always there, and immediately identified by the pedestrians and pointed out to me. Occasionally, audiences bought DVDs or booklets that were on sale in front of the entrance, but many used the material as an excuse to open up new discussions or to expand on the theme of the day. The time before the screening and the thirty­minute interval made these interactions possible. Overall, the atmosphere of interaction between members of the audience and the film-­event was similar to that of the film festivals described in the previous section. In both cases, there was a sort of dialogue and peformativity between audiences and the film-­text (cf. Kak 2000). Yet, how were these screenings organised? The half-­day was generally planned around two or three films, often grouped together under a single theme in order to create a further context for discussion. The theme was usually related to contemporary politics and social debates. The formula of the screenings varied little: one full-­length film (up to one hour) or two short films; discussion; a half-­hour break and another full-­length film. In addition to the general discussion, a few comments (made either by the public or by a pedestrian) always followed each film. This formula changed only when a pedestrian knew that a non-­ Bangalore-based filmmaker was in town. In this case, the group preferred to invite the filmmaker to screen one of his or her films and changed the screening dynamic into a more traditional format: introduction, film screening and discussion. In these cases, Pedestrian Pictures allowed the filmmaker to lead a one-­to-many discussion, acting as the ‘cultural producer’ (Mahon 2000: 467) of his or her own politics or as the cultural ‘intermediary’ (Bourdieu 1996: 387; Negus 2002: 511–512) between the film and the audience. This was a common practice among many filmmakers in India who were less concerned with the ‘performativity’ of their films as cultural products (or art forms) and more preoccupied with their political intention or their ‘performance’ as filmmakers for a public (cf. Chapter 5). At the same time, this practice attracted criticism from other filmmakers who were interested in the ‘performativity’ of their films. The

190   Sites of cultural activism latter interpreted the post-­film discussion as a way to devalue both the films and the audiences’ agency. For Pedestrian Pictures, a one-­to-many discussion was an exceptional case, and during the regular screenings pedestrians initiated a many-­to-many debate, and the public felt part of a group to which they could bring their own experience and knowledge. In these cases, a pedestrian acted as ‘moderator’ of the debate, a role similar to that of an academic chairing a conference seminar. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1984) concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘cultural capital’, Bradley Levinson and Dorothy Holland (1996) argue that people are educated both inside and outside educational institutions and that ‘all cultures and social formations develop models of how one becomes a fully “knowledgeable” person, a person endowed with maximum “cultural capital” ’ (ibid.: 21). To some extent, it is as if Pedestrian Pictures’ screenings functioned as other sites of ‘education’, which, however, stressed the making of ‘cultural activism’ (Bharucha 1998) more than of ‘cultural production’ (Bourdieu 1993, 1996). In other words, these screenings functioned as ‘alternative’ sites in which to experience films as art-­products and to engage with politics. A specific example will illustrate this point. During one of the screening sessions, which was a rare example of an apparently non-­Indian theme – the financial crisis – a member of the public questioned the usefulness of the many-­to-many discussion formula employed by Pedestrian Pictures. On this particular day, not many people were in the discussion, as a number had left soon after the film was over. Those who had stayed, however, were eager to contribute to the debate and to problematise the meaning of ‘the 2008 credit crunch’ in relation to India – bringing their own experiences to the forum. It is in this context that one man (henceforth M), who nobody had ever seen before, emerged from the public. He was there because he had read about the film screening in the newspaper and was interested in the proposed topic of discussion. However, M did not know about the discussion formula of the forum. He was very self-­confident and felt that he could contribute ‘the truth’ to the debate. After M made his points regarding the financial crisis in the Indian context, other people responded to or commented on what he had said and added their own opinion and experience while also posing problematic questions. This kind of follow-­up confused M who eventually could not resist asking: ‘Can you please tell me what the meaning of this discussion is? Are we going anywhere with this?’ And then he added,  I believe that this discussion can be useful only if we keep a detailed subject as a focus, otherwise we will simply carry on telling whatever we experienced in our life. Is this useful? Why are we doing this? What will happen after this discussion when we all step out of this room?5  This incident suggests that new participants went to the film screenings with the idea that they would gain concrete answers from the discussion

Sites of cultural activism   191 or, in Levinson and Holland’s understanding, to be ‘culturally produced’ (1996: 15) by the context. Thus, as soon as M’s expectations were disrupted by the many-­to-many discussion formula pursued by Pedestrian Pictures, he felt destabilised. What interested me on this occasion was to understand in detail how the participants who were not new to the screenings responded to the incident. Usually, the monthly screening sessions were moderated by a senior pedestrian, who was always ready to explain the purpose and mission of Pedestrian Pictures in relation to film screenings. However, on the day when the aforementioned M took part in the screening, all the senior pedestrians were absent. For the first time therefore, I had to perform my role as a pedestrian and intervene in the discussion, explaining what the platform was for. My intervention stimulated both other pedestrians and people from the audience to build upon this new debate, led by the question: What are film discussions for? In brief, the debate widened, focusing on two main interwoven arguments. The first stressed the fact that contemporary societies no longer let people speak openly; individuals are always in contexts in which they are told what to say and how to say it. The second underlined the value of hearing ordinary people whose voices do not come across in the mainstream media and are therefore never heard. In other words, the audience convincingly explained to M that ‘opinions matter’ and were needed in such contexts – even though they might seem to raise more questions than answers. Finally, in response to the question ‘What next?’ the public’s answer was that it did not matter; what mattered was ‘What now?’ Any discussion, someone argued, ‘in the end is useful to simply take home’.6 That day, this bottom-­up (re)action from the audience convinced me of the ability of these alternative screening activities to act as sites of cultural activism. In these loci, individuals can come together at a post-­screening discussion and act collectively, either temporarily in the discussion forum or through future actions/activities. An analysis of my ‘observant participation’ (Turner 1990: 10) of this kind of interaction, my face-­to-face exchange with audiences (such as the one described above), and the reading of anonymous comments (which many people wrote in the blank sections of my questionnaires) suggest that Pedestrian Pictures’ monthly screenings were sites in which to watch films, share ideas, debate politics, buy cultural artefacts (such as documentary DVDs and booklets), engage with new people and construct oneself as an active citizen connected to politics, art and media. The screenings created a site for participation, (inter)action and sharing. Often they stimulated audiences either to be involved in further activities or to invent new sites of cultural activism, such as new places in which to watch, make or debate films. To paraphrase Bharucha, the grammar and vocabulary of specific cultural forms are often the most meaningful way to question politics (1998: 100). However, the role of Pedestrian Pictures was not limited to the moderation of post-­screening discussions

192   Sites of cultural activism during its monthly screening. The group also screened films in colleges, which was a different context but, in my opinion, one that should still be considered as a site of cultural activism. College screenings In many ways, college students should be considered the principal audience for documentary film in India.7 They participate in film festivals and film screenings across the country on a regular basis and are often the initiators of media groups and collectives interested in screening films. Most of the people who became involved with Pedestrian Pictures, for instance, became interested in documentary film activities when they were still students. This raised the question: How do documentary films reach students? Working in partnership with local colleges and using film as a teaching method is a common practice in India. Moreover, screening films for educational purposes is not new, but a practice that resembles the way in which the documentary film genre emerged in colonial India – that is, in association with ‘education’ (cf. Chapters 1 and 2). Documentary films or ‘educational films’ have been used by educators since the 1920s to engage students with specific social topics. Although the original educational significance of documentary film was marginalised by war and propaganda films during World War II, the educational advocacy was to some extent reproduced by the FD with Independence. In other words, documentary films have historically functioned as important educational vehicles for conveying messages, and they have always been useful in classrooms. Accordingly, documentary filmmakers have always been aware of the ‘educational mode of address’ that characterises the documentary film genre per se. In this respect, they have often considered students among their target audiences. It is precisely in this context that I want to place the importance of Pedestrian Pictures’ college screening activities. The activities pursued by Pedestrian Pictures included the screening of documentary films in different Bangalore colleges. To some extent, college screenings should be considered its most successful activities. At the time of my stay with the organisation, the screenings were not formalised in a fixed schedule but depended on colleges’ availability and calendars. And the screenings were the product of collaboration between Pedestrian Pictures and the colleges. Pedestrian Pictures was in contact with 20 private and public colleges in Bangalore and worked in collaboration with different departments in each. The organisation’s members never approached colleges themselves; it was always a member of the college (for instance the principal or a lecturer who had participated in a Pedestrian Pictures’ monthly screening) who contacted them. The network of pedestrians and colleges was created through mobile phone communications and word-­ofmouth at other screenings or activities, and at meetings in which Pedestrian

Sites of cultural activism   193 Pictures was involved. College screenings were free but were open to donations, and often the donations were sufficiently generous to sustain the main activities of the group. The films to be screened were suggested either by the course lecturer or the college principal together with a pedestrian, and were always chosen from Pedestrian Pictures’ film library. Because of the organisation’s successful screening activities, filmmakers from across the country often offered it free copies of their films. Accordingly, Pedestrian Pictures’ library was always well resourced and could provide a broad range of film options to the different colleges. College screenings were always a success, to the extent that, occasionally, Pedestrian Pictures was also asked to run short workshops or courses on documentary film theory and practice. During my stay, this was, for instance, the case with St. Joseph’s College and Christ College, with whom I also collaborated. Running extra-­curricula film activities helped Pedestrian Pictures to develop closer relationships with college students. By and large, those who studied ‘communications’ were the most interested. College students often had no knowledge of documentary filmmaking in general or of documentary film in India in particular. The students with whom Pedestrian Pictures worked were mostly upper-­middle-class youth, educated in English. Some were followers of Marxist ideology and others were simply sensitive to social issues in India without defining themselves in terms of any particular political perspective. They had an interest in audio-­visual media, and some hoped to find jobs in this area in the future. To some extent, Pedestrian Pictures’ aim was to introduce students to the documentary culture and help them to get together and create their own ‘media activist’ groups. In reality, what generally occurred was that, after a few screenings in their colleges, some students became interested in Pedestrian Pictures as an organisation and chose to become part of the group. As all pedestrians worked on an unpaid basis, and as the organisation was officially registered as a trust, many students worked voluntarily for Pedestrian Pictures and some converted their voluntary work into an internship – often required for finishing their degree. By the end of 2009, the organisation had grown enormously because of the internship arrangement with students. Pedestrian Pictures benefited greatly from this, in terms of its becoming more efficient in the organisation of its film activities. However, how did Pedestrian Pictures gain so much popularity among students? How did it run the college screenings? And what role did pedestrians play in relation to the film screened and a student-­audience that was often unfamiliar with documentary film practices? The ‘educational mode of address’ (Hughes 2011: 295) was not necessarily identifiable in the films that Pedestrian Pictures presented to college students. However, as pointed out above, students as an audience have always been one of the targets of many documentary filmmakers in India, because of their regular participation in film festivals and their overall

194   Sites of cultural activism interest in filmmaking. Pedestrian Pictures employed a sort of educational approach to mediate the relationship between the film screened and the young audience. For instance, while the post-­film discussions at the monthly screenings followed a ‘many-­to-many’ approach, the college screenings were run using a ‘one-­to-many’ formula. Pedestrians functioned as ‘educators’ or as ‘cultural/political mediators’, or even as ‘specialists’ responsible for stimulating students to think critically about politics and society in India. Pedestrians aimed to increase the ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1984) of these students and attempted to transform them into ‘knowledgeable’ people (Levinson and Holland 1996: 21), even if outside of (or critical of ) the field of power as described by Bourdieu (1993, 1996). With these screenings, Pedestrian Pictures aimed to enable students to think about documentary films as cultural art forms through which to engage with politics and activism. In addition, pedestrians were also in charge of explaining the films in relation to the issues raised. There were always two pedestrians present at the screenings, one in charge of the technical aspects of projection and the other more responsible for running the post-­film discussion. When the group went to screen a documentary film to a new class of students, the pedestrian in charge of the discussion would speak for most of the time and only a few students would intervene, but at subsequent screenings with the same group of students, a more interactive debate would emerge. However, the discussion was always addressed to the pedestrian as ‘the expert’ on the subject. To some extent, this relationship changed over the period of my stay, as the pedestrians were always trying to improve their ability to stimulate interest through the films rather than to impose their opinions and politics on the students. As pedestrians told me several times, for them college screenings were activities ‘in progress’, to be continuously improved on. Despite the way in which Pedestrian Pictures acted in these contexts, the role of college screenings should be considered as another site of cultural activism, which helped to stimulate debate and curiosity among students about both the documentary tradition in India and certain nuances of Indian political and social life. Having an external ‘expert’ come to their class helped students to think beyond the institutional/educational system in which they were being educated. To some extent, it is as if they were able to see the possibility of going beyond the system to be involved in an alternative site of audio-­visual practice. This was something that all those students who became close to the group through a workshop or by volunteering shared with the pedestrians and with me. These students’ interest was in ‘making’ alternative media – whether through a screening activity or the making of a film. For pedestrians, college screenings and the consequent relationship with students was to be understood as a form of media activism, which could stimulate students to carry out other filmmaking activities or be involved in small media practices. It was a way for them to

Sites of cultural activism   195 become politically active in their own society. As pointed out by a member of Pedestrian Pictures who was still active in the organisation when I (re) visited in December 2014,  now, we need to understand what is our function at a moment when everyone makes and screens films … but the good achievement is that there are so many students to whom we have screened films who today are either teachers, and hence always happy to organise screenings with us, or they work in media somewhere in town and when they meet you in public, they always greet you with great respect!8 To bring this discussion to a close, let me return for a moment to the years after Independence. In a 1955 article in the independent magazine Indian Documentary (cf. Chapter 2), James Beveridge suggested that documentary films needed to create a figure, such as the ‘showman’, which could bring documentary films to Indian audiences (1955: 7). Through a number of independent activities organised by media collectives, such as film festivals and screenings, documentary films have reached audiences in contemporary India in a performative and dialogic way. Media collectives today function as the ‘showmen’ envisioned by Beveridge in the mid-­1950s. However, while Beveridge called for ‘showmanship’ with the idea that films needed someone to highlight a moral, or illuminate ‘a great truth’ (ibid.), in contemporary India this figure facilitates an open and critical understanding of truths. Whether as cultural producers, moderators or educators, these new figures have helped documentary film in India to achieve multiple lives and to travel beyond institutional and individual agencies. It can be said that while contemporary filmmakers grew up watching the compulsory screenings of the FD first, and hearing about Anand Patwardhan later, new generations are being exposed to other filmmaking practices and discourses about documentary film in India. At present, they are contributing to the creation of multiple sites of cultural activism, in which independent documentary film plays a significant role. These multiple sites are decentralising filmmaking practices from institutions and particular individuals because they are locally rooted in their own contexts. At the same time, sites of cultural activism maintain their connections with the national network of practitioners through online platforms. In other words, these sites are providing different lives to documentary films without, however, losing contact with the historical and well-­established ‘community of practice’ that today characterises the documentary film genre in India. While remaining active and united online, documentary practices seem increasingly to be decentralising across the country – acquiring multiple nuances and contributing to the multiple lives of a film, as advocated by Sanjay Kak (2000). It is as if a synergetic relationship between small, localised physical practices and large online networks is emerging across the country and becoming a feature of contemporary documentary film practices.

196   Sites of cultural activism

Notes 1 Conversation with Sanjay Kak, 25 May 2008. 2 See also Ginsburg (1993, 1997, 2011). Faye Ginsburg employs the term ‘cultural activism’ in reference to a broad movement for cultural autonomy and self-­determination advocated by Aboriginal activists in Australia. This movement emerged through media practices such as film, video and television. In this context, Ginsburg studies practices of ‘cultural activism’ as forms of resistance within the ‘field of cultural production’, as described by Bourdieu (1993, 1996). 3 See Chapter 3 to read about the IPTA in relation to documentary films. 4 Conversation with Deepa Dhanraj, 27 April 2009. 5 Fieldnotes, 4 April 2009. 6 Fieldnotes, 4 April 2009. 7 A ‘college’ is what in the UK is called a university, but which also offers pre-­ university courses. The age of the students I refer to is between 18 and 23. 8 Conversation with Pradeep Deepu, 20 December 2014.

8 Open-­ended archives Film, art and anthropology

– It is only later on that I have realised that je suis un anthropologue!

Gérard Chouchan said to me a few days before I wrote the last words of this book, when we met by chance in the jardin partagé of the Butte Bergeyre – where I have been spending most of my walking and thinking time since I moved to Paris. I replied that this was one of the key points I had tried to raise, first in my PhD and now in this book; yet I also pointed out that it is quite a complicate point to make: an anthropologist as much as a filmmaker/artist (in India) is skilled in the art of engaging with the people he/she interacts with and the art of abstracting about such experience in a book, a film, an exhibition, an interactive website or an open archive, somehow all complement each other. – But not all kinds of filmmakers and artists can do this! … only those who are capable of taking their time and being there in the terrain with their film subjects without a real immediate objective. – Of course – I responded – not even all kinds of anthropologist can do this. – Then, I want to read your thesis! – Gérard abruptly added. – It’s in English! And I am also about to finish a re-­write of this concept for a different book. – Oh well, I can read English very well. What do you think? – Gérard remarked with a laugh. And then, focusing more specifically on the idea of ‘re-­writing’ or ‘continuing developing’ the same concept, he continued, I don’t like seeing my films again at this age but recently I returned to Les Halles [1969] and, you know what, I actually felt pleased with what I watched because I realised that I have never lost my coherence with myself as a person, nor my acquired film structure/approach or my long-­term engagement with my film-­subjects. You should have

198   Open-ended archives faith in what you do and continue to believe in it without hesitation. This is the key, ma petite!1 Gérard Chouchan concluded like this – an 81-year-­old French man, documentary filmmaker since the early 1960s, and at present a ‘creator’ of any kind of spontaneous ‘amateur art’, from theatre to cinema to music to gardening to debating life, art and politics with people he meets par hasard in his own way – that is, in his own way of living anthropology. Although Gérard Chouchan and I understood each other in a matter of seconds, during our two hours of conversation we also agreed that not everyone shares or gets our view; hence, we both asked, whose fault is this? While I ‘blamed’ anthropologists for not being capable of communicating with other disciplines and with artists, Gérard ‘blamed’ filmmakers and artists, who are not sufficiently informed about what contemporary anthropology is and does. Whether emphasising one side of the debate or the other, certainly though, there exists a common ground of representation/ engagement of/with others that artists and anthropologists share even though they often do not recognise it. Such common ground is based on the fact that through our ‘living fieldwork’ practice, we principally learn about our interlocutors by making them become part of us and letting them influence our way of seeing the world. That is, while continuing to maintain our integrity as filmmakers, academics, artists and anthropologists, we constantly question and thus enrich our acquired knowledge, opening up possibilities for better engagement with so-­called others yet without losing our integrity. While I have extensively explained this point in the introduction to this book in relation to what I have called ‘living’ and ‘doing’ anthropology in the field, it is time to return to what I have called ‘thinking’ anthropology, that is the means and modalities of communication that we choose to ‘abstract’ from our experience in the field in order to communicate within our discipline/practice – whether anthropology, documentary film or contemporary art – yet also beyond our discipline and practice. If ‘living anthropology’ can be synthesised as our individual way to approach the sensible world and thus as the inner drive that makes us explore possibilities in the field, then ‘doing anthropology’ is the modality/ methodology we choose to employ to make sense of this world in relation to ourselves, in order to start ‘talking’ about it. In contrast, ‘thinking anthropology’ is how we concretely transform these embodied experiences into concepts, discussions, images, ideas and forms of art which, being contingent on the previous two moments, can in turn become either unquestionable Foucauldian ‘monuments’ or ‘documents’ that are always ready to be re-­evaluated and contested. In this book I have chosen to create a ‘document’ that talks about filmmaking practices in India, which are often transformed into ‘monuments’. To do this, I have explored the development of these practices, placing the ‘monuments’ in relation to how

Open-ended archives   199 filmmakers have always (re)articulated (cf. Hall 1980; Slack 1996) their practice in relation to different historical moments – that is, to the dialectic relationship between filmmakers’ ‘living’ and ‘doing’ anthropology in their own field. Whether in relation to the arrival of cinema in India as a theatrical moment in which audiences played a central role (cf. Chapter 1), the establishment of war institutions interested in transforming ‘entertainment’ into ‘propaganda’ (cf. Chapter 1), the first independent government of India seeing in arts and media a potential for creating a new form of nationhood (cf. Chapter 2), or the idea of ‘being independent’ (cf. Chapter 3), and whether in relation to adapting to technological changes (cf. Chapter 4), responding to national and international debates about the ‘form’ of films and ‘feminism’ (cf. Chapter 5) or being capable of seeing filmmaking practices as part of a wider context of ‘small media’ (cf. Chapter 6) that can be adapted to a variety of regional specificities (cf. Chapter 7), documentary filmmakers in India have always oriented their way of ‘living’ and ‘doing’ their practice according to various socio-­historico-technological contingencies. Yet, they have always continued to maintain their individual specificities and differences. If anthropologists have as part of their own history changed approaches, frameworks, theorisations and angles of analysis in the name of a better engagement with the ‘world’ they have chosen to study, filmmakers in India have made the same excursus, asking questions about representation, independence, participation, collaboration, methodology and technology, as their practice has developed in history. Similarly, as anthropologists have historically created discursive ‘monuments’ about the discipline – namely, emphasising dualisms between fieldwork and writing-­up, ethnography and anthropology (cf. Introduction), images and discourses (cf. Banks and Morphy 1997; Wright 1998; Schneider and Pasqualino 2014), art and social science and so on – by writing about their own practice, documentary filmmakers in India have created ‘monumental beliefs’ about the development of the documentary film genre. This book has aimed to challenge these monuments in understanding the historical development of the documentary film genre in India and in practising anthropology. That is, while searching for historical points of rapture (Foucault 2012 [1969]) or frictions (Tsing 2005) in the contemporary and historical understanding of the development of the documentary film genre in India, this work has sought to provide a different way of conducting anthropology, with the aim of creating an open-­ended archive rather than a traditional closed ethnography. Like a heuristic device, I have envisaged this open-­ended archive as an atlas (á la Aby Warburg) for a dynamic rather than a static way of thinking, avoiding fixities and universalisms. Yet, what does it mean to create an open-­ended archive in anthropology, and in documentary filmmaking? In other words, what kind of ‘form’ should a written anthropological monograph or a documentary film take in this respect? I will try to answer this question by making use of a

200   Open-ended archives fictional example inspired by recent research conducted in Paris with contemporary artists. I will then reconnect this with more contemporary image-­making practices that are emerging in India and see this as a chance to create more dynamic representations of past and present histories.

Installations and digital archive platforms Let us imagine entering an art space that starts from a single door and has many branches that lead us in various possible directions – that is, different doors, rooms, objects, images, corridors and histories. Each path can or cannot be linked to the others; yet each of them can always generate new paths, narratives and perspectives. In my recent fieldwork with contemporary artists in Paris, I engaged with some of them in a conversation about ‘installations and the archive’. Among them, Letizia Giannella, who specialises in drawing and specifically in ‘cartographies sensibles’,2 confessed to me that she had always had a film project in mind, envisioned as an open installed archive:  I know the form of this but I am still looking for what I can use as a subject. My idea is to show that each point of history, of interactions, of possibilities can always lead to something else and that each point is equally as important as its point of departure.  She continued by describing how she envisioned this work installed and said that she imagined an installation like the one mentioned above – that is, a single point of departure which, precisely like her recent drawing series (cf. Figure 8.1), develops in several directions, creating new encounters and thus functioning as both a composition of single independent unities and a cohesive joint piece. As she continued to describe this idea to me, Giannella said,  I also see the end of this film. It would be the re-­encounter of all these different narratives. The spectator would then be faced with the reality that, in their final development/form, these narratives would have in common only the end credits.3  While at the time of my encounter with Letizia Giannella this was just an idea for her, Arnaud Dubois, an artist and an anthropologist specialising in colours and contemporary art practices, had already turned a similar idea into reality. Working in collaboration with a team of researchers from the Interdisciplinary Research Program ‘Practicing Comparatism’ held at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), early in 2015, Arnaud Dubois was appointed to transform social science research around the theme of ‘destiny’ into a

Open-ended archives   201

Figure 8.1 Cartographies sensibles: detail of Dessins Envahissants # 0. Installation in situ 2013. Encre blanche sur papier noir; 70 × 2,350 cm. Source: courtesy of Letizia Giannella.

comparative, sensorial, itinerant art installation. Situated at the heart of the main EHESS hall, the installation, Les Fils du Destin, ran for about 18 days in June 2015, attracting both curiosity and scepticism from scholars and students in France. The key idea was to stimulate academic spectators to think about scientific research in a sensible way and bring comparative perspectives to bear. While some of the main aims of Dubois’ work were presented in Aberdeen in September 2015 at the ‘Beyond Perception’ conference, what I think is interesting to highlight here is the modality of representation/ engagement that Arnaud Dubois chose to adopt. When I went to the opening of Dubois’ installation, at first glance I had the impression that he had installed it the ‘wrong’ way. On entering the main hall of the university, the public could only see the back of the installation and a single door. This sort of ‘inverted logic’ of representation forced the spectator to go to the small door, and check out what it was all about. At the door, the spectator was given some information about the project, which explained that it was about multiple research studies conducted by specialists in history, anthropology, philosophy and philology on the theme of ‘destiny’ as practised in various contemporary and ancient traditions – including Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome, China, Japan, India and West Africa. After crossing the threshold, the spectator was left

202   Open-ended archives alone in small corridors, fictional caves, and square black rooms in which images, objects, drawings and artefacts reproduced the ‘sensorial essence’ of destiny in a variety of traditions, with the aim of giving the spectator the experience of a ‘living’ moment rather than of a didactic ‘installation’ of interpretations (see Figure 8.2). Although bifurcated in different directions, unlike Letizia Giannella’s idea, Arnaud Dubois did not create a structure that arrived at a final destination. Rather, he created a cyclical labyrinth, which somehow forced the spectator to constantly return to his/her point of departure and continuously interact with and create connections between the various rooms, traditions and histories. Why talk about all this though when we should be drawing a conclusion about the development of documentary practices in India? Juxtaposed with much more ‘straightforward’ audio-­visual examples and more directly connected to India and its documentary filmmaking tradition, these ‘installed’ examples of ‘knowledge encounter’ can, in my opinion, be associated with some of the directions in which contemporary documentary filmmakers have, in different ways, oriented their practices.

Figure 8.2 Les Fils du Destin. Contemporary art installation. Image from the last floor of the Batiment de France, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, June 2015. Source: courtesy of Arnaud Dubois.

Open-ended archives   203 Along with Favero, I have elsewhere argued how contemporary practices of image-­making in India have increasingly become ‘multi-­linear’ and how, in this context, video installations have acquired significant weight by going beyond traditional film narratives and film text (cf. Battaglia and Favero 2014). Due to their recognition in the national and international contemporary art scene, the work of the Raqs Media Collective and that of the stand-­alone individual Amar Kanwar are surely some of the most remarkable examples of crossover between documentary filmmaking and art installation in the Indian context. Yet, as Favero and I have pointed out, these are not the only practices that exist in the subcontinent. Less well-­known at an international level, yet very relevant for understanding this transition, is the work of Bharat Haridas, Nilanjan Bhattacharya, Venkatnarayanan Soudhamini and Rajula Shah, and groups of individuals such as Chitrakarkhana/CAMP and Majlis Culture, to mention but a few. Among these, the most cutting-­edge imaging experimentations in the Indian context are those specifically designed to create digital ‘archive’ platforms. The Public Access Digital Media Archive, better known as ‘Pad. ma’ (see Pad.ma), is one example of these new directions. Five organisations, Chitrakarkhana/CAMP from Mumbai, Oil21 from Berlin, Majlis Culture from Mumbai, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore and Point of View from Mumbai, launched this project in February 2008, precisely in the middle of my 2007–2009 fieldwork. In its current form, Pad.ma pursues the idea that the conventional use of video-­ making needs to be challenged through an open online platform that works as an archive of hard-­to-access footage (such as unfinished films, found films, digitised films and out-­dated films). The five organisations that launched Pad.ma created an online archive of footage aimed at stimulating interactivity among film practitioners in India, as well as among scholars, researchers and activists interested in audio-­visual forms. In this archive, the uploaded footage is always accompanied by annotations, to which users can add information or comments, and which can be re-­used in other visual projects. In other words, as with other contemporary forms of art installation (see above), in Pad.ma each ‘film’ can take multiple directions, opening up the possibility of interpreting and developing the original ‘point of departure’ into further multiple others. Functioning like an open-­ended archive, or an art installation, this chosen ‘form’ of ‘filmic’ representation does not constrain its maker-­creator into a fixed position aimed at forms of universalisms, but rather acts as a flexible open structure that creates representational possibilities among possible others, precisely as this book has thus far tried to do. As Roger Sansi (2016) points out in a review essay entitled ‘Art, Anthropology and Globalisation’, whether in India or elsewhere these new film/art approaches raise important questions and thus invite further academic investigation. Yet, if they need advanced reflection from an art perspective, I would add that they also need seriously to be taken into account by the discipline of anthropology which, as pointed out

204   Open-ended archives in the introduction to this book, has been advocating in parallel for a ‘third space’ of representation (Starn 2015), gradually blurring its boundaries with those of art practices. Moreover, if it is true that anthropology has been increasingly questioning how it presents its argument and its positioning, orienting its approach towards more engagement, sharing and collaboration, it is perhaps time to expand this ‘new’ direction with a ‘reverse gear’, which starts from challenging classic orthodoxies before pointing to possible future perspectives. In this respect, in order to bring this discussion to a close I propose to make use of examples of contemporary art ‘installations’ of archival knowledge (like the ones envisioned by Giannella, created by Dubois and fostered by Pad.ma) as possible frameworks, flexible structures or open-­ended archives through which we can comprehend this book and think about further ways of engaging with anthropological histories of film/art practices. Specifically, this approach should enable us to sidestep classic dichotomies concerning the development of documentary film practices in India (for example, colonial vs. Independent India, state vs. independent documentaries) and hence eliminate some ‘monuments’ in favour of other types of ‘document’, showing that taken all together these ‘documents’ are constitutive of this film practice and, as such, some of them still resonate in the present day.

‘Installing’ past and present history In the conclusion to my PhD, I made use of the word ‘activism’, demonstrating that through this word we can create various forms of film category in the present, but that these are always linked to different pasts. Accordingly, I suggested that we stop identifying novel forms of filmmaking and interpreting them in relation to their history – dating back even to colonial times. Instead, I am going to limit this analysis to the bringing out a number of elements from the book’s previous chapters, with the aim of reinforcing my point that an open structure of representation – an open-­ended archive – can come closer to the idea of engagement and hence, to use Tim Ingold (2013), a way to make a study ‘with’ rather than ‘of ’ people. From the fragments of history presented in this book, and borrowing from the way in which film scholar Bill Nichols (1994a) has classified documentary film practices (cf. Chapter 5), we can identify three main traditions: one more ‘documentary’ in the strict sense of the term – that is, in the sense of the documentation of actuality; another more ‘interventionist’ and participatory, interested in direct engagement with the people filmed; and one more ‘performative’, aimed at engagement not only with the film subject but also with multiple audiences who also actively engage with the film. If our intent was to create new ‘monuments’ of this history, we could probably say that the heritage of the ‘documentary’ approach was to be

Open-ended archives   205 found in the moment in which cinema was born and soon after was transformed into an instrument of propaganda, first by the world wars and later by the independent state. From this perspective, the ‘interventionist’ approach can be seen as a legacy of the 1970s – that is, when ‘independent’ practices emerged with the work of Anand Patwardhan, and multiplied with the advent of video technology. And the ‘performative’ approach would then be identified as the moment in which more women came onto the scene – that is, when filmmakers such as Deepa Dhanraj made women central to questions of representation and subsequently a new film aesthetic developed in the subcontinent’s documentary film tradition. This last mode of address would then be, from this perspective, the documentary film form that was closest to contemporary practices which, as some have already argued (Vohra 2011), have moved away from a discourse of the real towards a more performative variety of contemporary practice. However, with this book I have not been interested in creating another Foucauldian historical ‘monument’ but rather in letting different possible historical ‘documents’ that are useful for making sense of the present day emerge. From a ‘document’ perspective then, we can retrospectively say that these three ‘traditions’ have together been constitutive of documentary practices in India since their inception in colonial times. And yet, we can say that their ‘discursive’ articulation in relation to different contingencies has prioritised one over the others in different historical moments. As always happens, discourses about film practices travel further and faster than films. Thus, in this context, they have eliminated the possibility of identifying diversities in different historical moments by prioritising certain meta-­narratives and discourses about films and filmmakers and overshadowing others. Yet, what exactly does this mean in relation to the present day? I shall use some examples from my 2007–2009 fieldwork to show that ‘overshadowed’ historical possibilities can open up possibilities for differently comprehending contemporary practices. If we focus, for instance, on the filmmakers Meghnath and Biju Toppo, who, at the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork were known for their films, including Development Flows from the Barrel of the Guns (2003), Iron is Hot (2009) and Gadi Lohardaga Mail (2004), their film practice fitted the tradition of ‘documentation’, as highlighted above, and was not dissimilar to K.P. Sasi’s activist work (cf. Chapter 4) or the work of Anand Patwardhan himself. Yet, by moving away from a history of ‘independent’ practices that started only in the 1970s with the figure of Patwardhan, and moving away also from a mere textual analysis of films, we may come out with a different narrative. To do this, I would like to look at the historical engagement of these filmmakers with their practice and see whether there is a way to identify a colonial legacy. In brief, Biju Toppo, an Adivasi (tribal) from Jharkhand, received training from Meghnath, and became, towards the end of the 1990s, his

206   Open-ended archives associate. Meghnath was a Bengali activist who moved to Jharkhand in the 1980s, married a tribal woman and in 1990 founded an organisation called Akhra (cf. Meghnath 1997). Prior to this, Meghnath had begun his career as a filmmaker-­activist working as an assistant to Tapan Bose, who Meghnath himself defined to me as ‘my filmmaking guru’.4 As discussed in Chapter 3, Bose was one of the filmmakers, contemporary with Anand Patwardhan, who in the late 1970s and 1980s, was influential in making films that questioned state politics. However, Bose began his filmmaking career in the early 1970s, working with Sukhdev, from whom he learnt the craft and politics of filmmaking (in Waugh, video-­interview 1988). In other words, it is possible to draw a ‘genealogical tree’ between the contemporary filmmaking practice pursued by Meghnath and Biju Toppo on the one hand, and that initiated by Sukhdev in the 1960s on the other. Furthermore, as I have argued in Chapter 3, Sukhdev’s significance in the history of documentary in India was his ability to work between the FD and independent producers, following in the tradition of filmmakers such as Paul Zils and Dr Pathy. These two figures were influential filmmakers in India between the 1930s and the 1950s (cf. Chapters 1 and 2). Following this logic, there is scope to believe that in this tradition of filmmaking, strictly interested in ‘documentation’ or, in Jyotsna Kapur’s words, in ‘represent[ing] material conditions urgently in need of transformation’ (2003: 5), we can identify a colonial legacy that thus far has been neglected by both filmmakers and film scholars. In other words, from Pathy to Zils, Sukhdev, Bose, Meghnath and Biju, although varying over time in relation to different contingencies, this documentary filmmaking approach has continued to exist up to the present day. Moving on to the ‘interventionist’ perspective, at the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork, K. Stalin, who was actively involved in the activities of the NGO Drishti Media (cf. Chapter 4), was one of the most outspoken filmmakers regarding his interventionist participatory filmic methods. At that time, his interest in talking about his approach was in relation to the then both acclaimed and disputed India Untouched – Stories of a People Apart (2007) – a film about the omnipresent problem of untouchability in contemporary India, across different states and religions. In Stalin’s opinion, unlike that of other filmmakers his approach was inclusive, engaging and participatory. It created proximity and trust with its subjects who, as Stalin narrated to me, were always asked to check the images shot and choose whether to accept or reject them.5 As we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, other filmmakers had, of course, already developed a similar approach. The ‘interventionist’ mode of address was widely used with the advent of video technology, but also with the multiplication of community activities that started before video (cf. Chapter 4).6 By and large, these activities have been brought to light by women such as Sumitra Bhave and Deepa Dhanraj (cf. Chapter 5), as well as by Chandita Mukherjee and Anjali Monteiro (cf. Chapter 4). The political engagement with local communities as

Open-ended archives   207 developed by Anand Patwardhan (cf. Chapters 3 and 4), and to some extent Tapan Bose (cf. Chapter 3), should also be considered part of this approach, as should the activities conducted by students and media collectives such as Mediastorm and Alcom in the late 1980s (cf. Chapter 4). Yet, at the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork, having a comprehensive discussion about this ‘interventionist’ participatory approach and excavating its possible legacy was very difficult. This was most likely due to the fact that, over time, NGOs have taken over this ‘interventionist’ filmic attitude in the name of ‘social activism’. As Saba Dewan made clear to me, ‘the NGO market should not be confused with contemporary documentary film­making! NGOs have distorted documentary practices, investing filmmakers with unnecessary moral responsibilities for society’.7 In other words, if on the one hand we can identify legacies of participatory interventionist film approaches in activities undertaken throughout the 1980s, on the other hand there is currently a tendency to dismiss discussions regarding this approach because it is often confused with the market of NGOs, which since the 1990s has been invading India (and meriting an academic investigation of its own; see Sundar 2010). Yet, ‘rejecting’ the interventionist approach is linked not only to this context but also to the awareness, as discussed in detail in Chapter 5, that films as artefacts have a performativity per se and thus do act as political performances beyond a close engagement between the filmmaker and the film-­subject. This leads us on to the third tradition of documentary practice that emerges in this book. ‘In a more “performative” and “communicative” approach the “how” becomes a central question’, J.P. Jayasankar told me in one of our interactions during a film festival in New Delhi. ‘It is by asking a “how” question that reflexivity and hence the intentionality of the filmmaker become more explicit in the filmmaking process’, he continued, ‘and films can better engage with their audiences’.8 At the time of my fieldwork, the majority of filmmakers with whom I interacted agreed with this point, trying their best to translate this idea into a sort of ‘new’ filmic style. As Jyotsna Kapur points out, for the first time ‘progressive Indian documentary filmmakers’ questioned their middle-­class knowledge and skill by inserting ‘the self in relation to the Other’ (2003: 3–4). Among the filmmakers interested in developing this approach at the time of my 2007–2009 fieldwork were Madhusree Dutta, Paromita Vohra and Amar Kanwar. More than anyone else, at that time these three filmmakers were trying to push the ‘performative’ argument in both their practice and discourse. While Dutta and Vohra have been among those who, as discussed in Chapter 5, connected this approach to the development of feminism in India, Kanwar was one of the first to specifically debate this approach in connection with documentary filmmaking as an artistic practice per se (and for this reason he has later fallen into the category of contemporary international artist much more than into that of documentary filmmaker from India). To Amar Kanwar, filmmaking cannot merely ‘talk to a single point’ because reality is not

208   Open-ended archives ‘uni-­dimensional’ but ‘multiple’ (Kanwar in Rutherford 2005). ‘Multi­ plicity’, he says, is a ‘constellation of self definitions, special experiences, important events and moments bound together by thoughts; fragments that span a life-­time of history, woven together to create a variable personal self ’ (Kanwar 2004: 26). As he explained to me, this constellation of self-­ definition works ‘according to the “unexpected” … similar to the way our dreams work’. It is for this reason that, according to him, filmmakers should listen to the unexpected, and relate to it with ‘multiple’ open images rather than with closed definitions and interpretations.9 Between my 2007–2009 fieldwork and my finalising of this book, an increasing number of filmmakers from India have redirected their approach towards the ‘multiple’, the ‘open’, the ‘performative’, the ‘reflexive’, the ‘engaging’ and the ‘communicative’. During my latest visit to Bangalore for instance, even the media collective, Pedestrian Pictures, with which I worked between 2008 and 2009 (cf. Chapter 7) remarked that they were in a phase of re-­articulation of their own function. ‘With all possible forms of media telling the same story again and again, today the point is how to tell the “same” story and make sure that our different political view is heard’,10 said Deepu, one of the collective’s founding members. In other words, whether at a more local activist level or connected to a contemporary international art scene that is constantly re-­evaluating open approaches in filmmaking practice from different parts of the words,11 the ‘performative’ approach seems to be the one that is most-­widely practised and debated in contemporary filmmaking in India. If this is the case, the final question that needs to be answered here is whether this should be considered a novel contemporary documentary approach. In Chapter 5, we emphasised that the question of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ must be linked to the circulation of cinematographers and editors across the country. In Chapter 3, we talked about the central role that independent filmmakers associated with the new wave might have played in the development of documentary film practices. In this respect, it is not difficult to envision that editors and cinematographers also shifted between film practices (those more strictly associated with documentary or those connected with new wave cinema), enriching their technical skills and constantly bringing to the growing documentary film genre novel approaches. From this perspective, I suggest that it may be useful to reconnect contemporary ‘performative’ documentary practices to 1960s and 1970s documentary ‘new wave’ practices, as developed by filmmakers such as Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul. As we saw in Chapter 3, these filmmakers were very much in contact with the other film activities that were going on around them at that time and hence were not disconnected from the Films Division or from those filmmakers who inherited their film tradition from the pre-­Independence period (cf. Chapter 2) and thus, arguably, not disconnected either from the inner essence of the early forms of cinema as ‘cultural performances’ (cf. Chapter 1).

Open-ended archives   209 As emerged at a recent conference, held in Paris in February 2015, based on the concept of ‘cinema of prayoga’ as developed by Amrit Gangar (2006), an emerging scholarship is orienting its discourse in this direction.12 To Gangar, the cinema of prayoga focuses on ‘experimentation’ through ‘presence’ and ‘co-­presence’, rejecting the idea of simple ‘representation’. The genesis of this cinema is, for Gangar, to be identified in certain Indian filmic traditions, including the first experimentations of Phalke (cf. Chapter 1) and those of Shahani and Kaul, which built on the cinema of figures such as Ritwik Ghatak (cf. Chapter 3). Gangar and a few of his ‘followers’ could be seen to be limiting their observations and analyses to a few films and a few traditions, disconnecting them from the development of documentary film practices in India, but I prefer to see these approaches as part of the tradition of the development of documentary/art film practices in the subcontinent which, as this book has pointed out, began with the concept of ‘cultural performance’ and ended (!) with the ‘sites of cultural activism’. To make this point more explicit, and to bring this discussion to a close, let us return to our fictional art installation which, as we have seen, may resemble one of the films ‘archived’ in Pad.ma, Dubois’ exhibition Les Fils du Destin, or Giannella’s idea of a film as a cartographie sensible. Within this dynamic structure, the various histories and filmmaking possibilities highlighted in this book and briefly synthesised in this conclusion may be understood as different branches that developed in multiple directions. In so doing, these branches constantly connected the past with present histories, creating the possibility of interpretations rather than fixities. If this is the case, where can we see these branches heading? While the aforementioned installations do not envision a final point of arrival – although Giannella does foresee her work ending in a space in which the branches are no longer connected to each other – in this book, I do see an end. The historical possibilities highlighted in each chapter of this work meet in what I have called the ‘sites of cultural activism’ (cf. Chapter 7) – that is, the spaces in which films act as ‘political performances’ in relation to their maker and their audiences, creating, to borrow from Flynn and Tinius, ‘ephemeral, precarious, and collective spaces akin to the temporary democratic communities’ (2015: 8). If Nicolas Bourriaud (1998), on whose work these two authors build, addresses these spaces as ‘micro-­utopias’, Flynn and Tinius see in political performances the possibility of finding (and thus studying and engaging with) relational encounters of aesthetic, cultural, social and political values. In this respect, documentary films can be understood as ‘political performances’, and the ‘sites of cultural activism’ as the concrete loci in which we can see these performances enacted and on which we should base our analyses.

210   Open-ended archives With the advent of Pad.ma and new forms of imaging digital archives and installations, the sites of cultural activism are expanding further in India and taking on multiple different forms (cf. Battaglia and Favero 2014). With the development of digital and internet technology, these loci are becoming spaces that cross national boundaries and open up new ‘global’ questions concerning arts, representations, engagement and the politics of being which, as the recent literature demonstrates, is affecting contemporary filmmaking art practices in India (and beyond) as much as contemporary forms of anthropologies (Kaur and Dave-­ Mukherji 2014; Sansi 2015). Whether we are filmmakers in India, anthropologists or contemporary artists, as cultural producers we are all equally (yet differently) part of a process of representation of, and engagement with, ‘others’, and we must acknowledge and seriously include this process in our practices. Acknowledging proximity between anthropological and artistic practices can, in my opinion, make it possible for anthropology to engage more deeply with local ontologies and challenge ‘monumental histories’ of its own practice. Similarly, this acknowledgement can enable those film/art practitioners who are sometimes still sceptical about the work of the anthropologist (in India and beyond) to feel less ‘objectified’ by the single, unified discipline and instead feel enriched by a critical approach that can question and revitalise fixed ways of writing and understanding histories of practices, with a view to creating a more innovative artistico-­intellectual ‘alliance’. Within its limited possibilities, this book has attempted precisely to create a structure for such an alliance – that is, to begin a constructive dialogue, and to stimulate collaboration and cross-­fertilisation between academic and less-­academic practice.

Notes   1 Conversation with Gérard Chouchan, 15 November 2015.   2 See: www.apogei.com/letizia-­giannella-cartographie-­sensibles (last accessed 21 December 2015).   3 Conversation with Letizia Giannella, 8 November 2015.   4 Conversation with Meghnath, 15 July 2008.   5 Conversation with K. Stalin, 1 August 2008.   6 From the historical fragments highlighted in this book, we cannot go further back than the 1980s; yet, we should not exclude this possibility if further research is carried out.   7 Conversation with Saba Dewan, 13 June 2008.   8 Conversation with J.P. Jayasankar, 18 April 2009; see also Paranjape 2006.   9 Conversation with Amar Kanwar, 20 June 2008. 10 Conversation with Pradeep Deepu, 20 December 2014. 11 It is important to highlight here that from July to November 2013, Project Space at Tate Modern in London, in collaboration with the Kho¯j International Artists’ Association from New Delhi, held an exhibition called Word. Sound. Power, curated by Loren Hansi Momodu and Andi-­Asmita Rangari. A range of documentary filmmakers and contemporary artists from India contributed their

Open-ended archives   211 work, including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Caroline Bergvall, Amar Kanwar, Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar, Pallavi Paul and Mithu Sen (See: www.tate.org.uk/whats-­on/tate-­modern/exhibition/ project-­space-word-­sound-power, last accessed 21 December 2015). The same exhibition was installed in New Delhi in January/February 2014 by the Kho¯j International Artists’ Association. 12 International Conference – FFAST, Expérimentation(s): comment définir et faire exister une scène transgressive en Asie du Sud?, INALCO, 26–27 January 2015.

Conversations/interviews

Abraham, Ayisha Bhartiya, Tarun Bhattacharya, Meghnath Bhattacharya, Nilanjan Bhaumik, Kaushik Basu, Arghya Bannukar, Chalam Barua, Raj Bedi, Nandini Butalia, Pankaj Chandaram, Jai Chandran, Sarath Chouchan, Gérard Dandekar, Swati Datta, Amlan Datta, Manjira De, Ranjan Desamangala, Mustafa Dev Halver, Bishnu Dewan, Saba Dutta, Madhusree Dhanraj, Deepa Gadihoke, Sabeena Giannella, Letizia Gopalakrishnan, Adoor Gosh, Ranu Gupta, Pankaj Heredia, Shai Joshi, Ruchir Joshi, Vasudha K. Nitin K. Stalin K.P. Jayasankar K.P. Sasi Kak, Sanjay Kamath, Ranjan

Conversations/interviews   213 Kanwar, Amar Karmakar, Shyamal Kazimi, Ali Kumar Anil Kumar, Santosh Kutty, George M. Uvaraj Malhotra, Namita Manimekalai, Leena Mazumdar, Ranjani Mehrotra, Rajiv Menon, Gopal Mohan, Reena Monteiro, Anjali Mukherjee, Chandita Mukherjee, Debjani Mulay, Suhasini Mulay, Vijaya Norhona, Frederick Palit, Ranjan Pankaj, Aswani Patwardhan, Anand Pradeep Deepu Radhakrishnan, Revathi Raja, Vinod Rajgopal, Premraj Roy, Rahul R.P. Amudhan R.R. Srinivasan R.V. Ramani Sabnani, Nina Saldhana, Tarun Sanjit, Narwekar S., Sanjana Sen, Gargi Sen, Supriyo Sharma, Rakesh Srinivasan, Anu Subramaniam, Vani Tangella, Madhavi Teckwani, Ramesh T.G., Ajay Thozhur, Vasudha Tseten, Kesang Varghese Chiramel, Fr Benedict Venkatesh, Chakravarthy Venkatnarayanan, Soudhamini Virmani, Shabnam V.S. Kundu Vohra, Paromita

214   Conversations/interviews

Thomas Waugh’s video-­interviews (1988) A. Aravindan Benegal, Shyam Bhagwan Das, Garga Bhave, Sumitra (with Divhiya, Sunil and Sati Bhave) Bose, Tapan Contractor, Navroze Datta, Manjira Dewan, Meera Dhanraj, Deepa Dixit, Pradeep Gopalakrishnan, Adoor Joshi, Ruchir Kaul, Mani Mulay, Suhasini Nair, Mira Palit, Ranjan Patwardhan, Anand Sharma, Rakesh Vijay B. Chandra

Filmography

A Valley Refuses to Die. K.P. Sasi, 1990. An Indian Story. Tapan Bose, 1982. And Miles to Go. S. Sukhdev, 1965. Ankur. Shyam Benegal, 1973. Bai. Sumitra Bhave, 1987. Bargain. Ruchir Joshi, 1985. Because of Our Rights. Ranjan De and Gargi Sen, 1989. Bhopal Beyond Genocide. Tapan Bose and Suhasini Mulay, 1986. Bhuvan Shome. Mrinal Sen, 1969. Bombay Welcomes Mahatma Gandhi. Billimoria [date unknown]. Chains of Bondage. Goutam Ghose, 1976. Child on a Chess Board. Vijay B. Chandra, 1979. Claxplosion. Pramod Pati, 1968. Continent of Love. Buddhadeb Dasgupta, 1969. Development Flows from the Barrel of the Guns. Meghnath and Biju Toppo, 2003. Dholer Raja Khirode Natta. Buddhadeb Dasgupta, 1973. Dooratwa. Buddhadeb Dasgupta, 1978. Elephant Boy. Robert Flaherty, 1937. Eleven Miles. Ruchir Joshi, 1990. Explorer. Pramod Pati, 1968. Eyes of Stone. Nilita Vachani, 1990. Face to Face. K.S. Chari and T.A. Abraham, 1966. Fishermen of Sundarban. Buddhadeb Dasgupta, 1970. Forty-­fifth Indian National Congress at Karachi. [Director and date unknown]. From the Burning Embers. Mediastorm, 1988. Gadi Lohardaga Mail. Meghnath and Biju Toppo, 2004. Gandhi in England. [Director unknown], 1931. Gift of Love. Meera Dewan, 1983. Hamara Rashtragan. Pramod Pati, 1964. Hamara Shahar/Bombay Our City, Anand Patwardhan, 1985. Hungry Autumn. Goutam Ghose, 1976. I Am Twenty. S.N.S. Sastry, 1967. Idhi Katha Matramena/Is this Just a True Story? Deepa Dhanraj, 1983. Ilayum Mullum – Thorns and Leaves. K.P. Sasi, 1994. In Camera. Ranjan Palit, 2009. In Secular India. Mediastorm, 1986.

216   Filmography In the Name of Medicine. K.P. Sasi, 1988. India ’67. S. Sukhdev, 1967. India Untouched – Stories of a People Apart, Stalin K., 2007. India’s Struggle for National Shipping. Paul Zils, 1947. Indian Cabaret. Mira Nair, 1985. Iron is Hot. Meghnath and Biju Toppo, 2009. It Rested. V. Soudhamini, 1988. It’s Open. Nilanjan Bhattacharya, 2009. Kamlabai. Reena Mohan, 1990. Kiska Dharm, Kiska Desh. Mediastorm, 1991. Kutty Japanin Kuzhandaigal/Children of Mini Japan. Chalam Bannurakar, 1990. Kya Hua is Shaher Ko/What Happened to this City? Deepa Dhanraj, Navroze Contractor and Keshav Rao Jadhav, 1986. Les Halles, Gérard Chouchan, 1969. Living in Fear. K.P. Sasi, 1987. Lost Childhood. Shyam Benegal, 2007. Mahatma Gandhi. A.K. Chettiar, 1940. Mahatma Gandhi’s Historic March. [Director unknown], 1930. Man of Aran. Robert Flaherty, 1934. Man the Creator. S. Sukhdev, 1964. Man vs. Man. Shashi Anand, 1981. Molkarin/Maid Servant. Deepa Dhanraj, 1981. Mukti Chai. Utpalendu Chakraborty, 1977. National Congress Session – Haripura. P.V. Pathy, 1938. New Earth. Goutam Ghose, 1973. Nine Months to Freedom. S. Sukhdev, 1972. Our India. Pramod Pati, 1961. Pani. Sumitra Bhave, 1987. Pani Panchayat. K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro, 1986. Pather Panchali. Satyajit Ray, 1955. Perspectives. Pramod Pati, 1966. Pitra, Putra aur Dharmayuddha/Father, Son and Holy War. Anand Patwardhan, 1995. Prisoners of Conscience. Anand Patwardhan, 1978. Raaste Bandh Hain Sab. Manjira Datta, 1985. Rashomon. Akhira Kurosawa, 1950. Ram Ke Naam/In the Name of God. Anand Patwardhan, 1992. Saa. R.V. Ramani, 1991. Saratchandra. Buddhadeb Dasgupta, 1974. Something Like a War. Deepa Dhanraj, 1991. Song of Ceylon, Basil Wright, 1935. Sudesha. Deepa Dhanraj, 1983. Tambakoo Chaakila Oob Ali. Deepa Dhanraj, 1982. The Battleship Potemkin. Sergei Eisenstein, 1925. The Last Adieu, Shabnam Sukhdev, 2014. The Return of Mahatma Gandhi from the Round Table Conference. [Director unknown], 1931. The Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya. Manjira Datta, 1988. The Saint and the Peasant. S. Sukhdev, 1966.

Filmography   217 Through a Lens Starkly. K.L. Khandpur, 1996. Thunder of Freedom. S. Sukhdev, 1976. Totanama. Chandita Mukherjee, 1991. Transition. K.S. Chari, 1967. Trip. Pramod Pati, 1970. Uski Roti. Mani Kaul, 1971. Voices from Baliapal. Vasudha Joshi and Ranjan Palit, 1988. Water and a City, Swati Dandekar, 2011. Waves of Revolution. Anand Patwardhan, 1975. Wazir the Kaghzi. S. Sukhdev, 1958.

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Index

1975–1977 State of Emergency 95, 96, 100, 103, 111, 112 Abraham, John 124, 125 Abraham, T.A. 84 activism: artistic activism 184, 185; cultural activism 28, 178–96, 196n2, 209, 210; of Latin American filmmaking 5; local activism 81, 117, 208; media activism 28, 31, 48, 116, 119, 178, 180, 185, 193, 194; political activism 151, 152, 153, 185, 186; social activism 144, 116, 207; traditional activist-documentary 153; video activism 28, 101, 106, 115; see also women filmmakers; women’s movement actualités, documentaires 52 advertisement/ads films 73 Ahmed, Mushir 69 Aiyar, Mr S. Devasankar 53 Akhra 48, 185, 206; see also activism Alcom 119, 207 All India Radio 96, 111, 163 Alternative Communication Forum see Alcom Alternative Law Forum 203 American Technical Cooperation Mission see TCM Amritsar massacre 48 Anand, Shashi 145, 160 Andhra Pradesh 136, 142, 185 And Miles to Go 86, 87, 105 angrier cinema 92, 93 Ankur 94 anthropology: anthropological utopia 23; colonial anthropological gaze 34n16; doing anthropology 11–13, 17, 20–2, 32n9, 198, 199;

ethno-graphing anthropology 13; filmmaker-anthropologist 10; living anthropology 3, 8–10, 13, 14, 18, 20, 32n9, 33n12, 198; phenomenological anthropology 7; thinking anthropology 7, 8, 15, 17, 21–3, 25, 27, 198; visual anthropology 3 anti-establishment 85, 87, 94, 103, 105 Approved Producers 69, 72, 73 archive: digital archive 22, 200, 210; meaningful archive 19; open-access archive 62; open-ended archive 21–2, 23, 26–7, 31, 42, 197–210; see also Pad. ma Army Film Centre 41 audience: audience’s agency 66; Bangalore audience 189; educated audience 164; female audiences 136; Odessa audiences 125; rural audiences 47; students as an audience 193 A Valley Refuses to Die 119 avant-garde 90, 91 AVEHI 117 A Vision for Television 166–8 Bai 143 Bangalore 14, 17, 18, 31, 125, 135–6, 142, 176, 185–6, 189, 102, 203, 208 Bangladesh 88, 99, 102 Bannurakar, Chalam 124, 145 Baptista, Clement 69, 84 Bargain 154 Battleship Potemkin, The 124, 128n24 Baul 155 Because of Our Rights 116 Bengal 45, 89, 97–9, 136, 155, 185, 206 Benegal, Shyam 85, 91–4, 97, 107n7

242   Index Beveridge, James (Jim) 72, 84–6, 195 Bhattacharya, Nilanjan 17, 148, 203 Bhatwadekar, Harishchandra Sakharam (a.k.a. Sewa Dada) 43, 45, 46 Bhave, Sati 143 Bhave, Sumitra 140, 142–5, 153, 206 Bhavnani, Mohan 71 Bhopal Beyond Genocide 102, 145 Bhownagary, Jean 69, 71–4, 76, 83, 84, 86 Bhuvan Shome 88, 89, 92 Bilimoria, Fali 84, 86 Bombay 37, 43, 44–5, 49, 51, 58, 63, 69, 70, 86, 111, 117, 120, 150, 160, 161, 185; see also Mumbai Bose, Tapan 48, 98, 100, 102, 105, 106, 115, 123, 125, 144, 145–6, 206–7 Bourriaud, Nicolas 19, 34n16, 209 British Documentary Film Movement 70 British Ministry of Information see MoI Broadcast Licensing Authority (BLA) 167 Butalia, Pankaj 160–1, 163, 167, 171 Calcutta 44–5, 97, 99, 108n13, 111, 149, 154, 160, 176; Calcutta food riots 98; see also Kolkata cartographies sensibles 200–1 CENDIT 115, 116–18, 165, 177n9 censor board 48, 87, 99, 105, 123, 175; see also independent filmmakers Centre for Development of Instructional Technology see CENDIT Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board 73 Chains of Bondage 99 Chakraborty, Utpalendu 92, 97–100, 102 Chandaram, Jai 163, 164 Chandra, Vijay B. 85 Chari, K.S. 84 Chettiar, A.K. 51, 69 Chhachhi, Sheba 135, 137, 145 Chhattisgarh 185 Child on a Chess Board 85 Chipko Forest Conservation Movement 142–3 Chitrabani Social Communication Centre 154 Chitrakarkhana/CAMP 203 Chouchan, Gérard 197–8 Chowdhury, Santi 84 cinema of resistance 147

cinema vérité 4, 74, 84, 99 Claxplosion 85 colonialism: colonial anthropological gaze 34n16; colonial films 27–8, 37, 38, 42, 48, 54, 59, 63, 130, 204; colonial government 55, 59; colonial legacy 205, 206; colonial propaganda 38, 48, 57, 59; European colonisation 64; historiography of colonial India 36; political film 48, 52; see also mobile cinema; postcolonialism Communist Party of India 98, 101, 108n13 community: community of documentary filmmakers 17, 37, 71, 173, 176, 180; community of practice 17, 29, 30, 159, 172, 195; community-to-community development 117; imagined national community 113; see also Vikalp Community Video Unit 118 Congress Party 95 Continent of Love 98 Contractor, Navroze 123, 142, 143, 146, 150 Dalit 118, 142, 143, 180 Dandekar, Swati 13, 17 Dasgupta, Buddhadeb 92, 97, 98, 100, 102–3 Dasgupta, Hari S. 86 Datta, Manjira 122, 123, 145, 146, 152–3 DD3 163–4, 167, 177n7 Deccan Development Society 118 Defence of India Act 40, 79n11 Delhi Durbar 45–6 De, Ranjan 116, 118, 165 destiny 200, 201, 202 Development Flows from the Barrel of the Guns 205 Dewan, Meera 123, 145, 160 Dewan, Saba 145, 171, 207 Dhanraj, Deepa 123, 125, 130, 136, 139–46, 153, 158n14, 186, 205, 206 Dholer Raja Khirode Natta 98 Discovery of India, The 64 dispositifs critiques 25, 109 Documedia 160–1 documentary footage 43, 44, 46 Documentary Movement 40, 49, 55, 68, 73, 74 Docuwallahs 176

Index   243 Docuwallahs2, 17, 75, 176 Dooratwa 98 Doordarshan (DD) 111–13, 121, 160, 162, 166, 163, 179 DRISHTI 117, 206 Drishti Media see DRISHTI Dubois, Arnaud 200–2, 204, 209 Durkheim, Emile 10–11, 16–17, 22 Dutta, Madhusree 61, 129, 134, 145, 207 Dutt, Gopal 84 École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales see EHESS educational films 43, 52–9, 62, 67, 75, 77, 105, 192 EHESS 200–2 Eisenstein, Sergei 124, 128n24 Elephant Boy 49, 51 Eleven Miles 145, 154–6 Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema 94, 98, 108n13 ethnography: Ethnographic Conceptualism 20–1, 33n15; ethnographic fieldwork 16, 32n9; ethnographic narratives 23; ethnographing 13, 17, 26; multi-sited ethnography 12; performative ethnography 133; quasi-ethnography 19; sensuous ethnography 7 experimental documentaries 85 Explorer 85 Eyes of Stone 139 FAB 41–2, 54, 55–6, 58, 63, 69 Face to Face 84 FD 6, 19, 28, 30, 37, 40, 42, 54, 57–9, 61–78, 79n19, 81–9, 94, 97, 99–100, 103, 105, 111–13, 116, 123, 130, 151, 160, 161, 171, 175, 179, 186, 192, 195, 206, 208; non-FD filmmakers 68, 70–1, 84, 85; pre-FD documentation 63; FD Zone 62, 76–7 Federation of Film Societies of India see FFSI femininity 134 feminism: development of feminism in India 207; feminist aesthetics 130, 144; feminist cinema/films 137, 140, 143–4; feminist discourse 131, 134, 137, 153, 157n7, 165; feminist documentary filmmaking 137, 139, 144; feminist view point 135;

feminist theory and discussion 130; freedom of speech 127 FFC 79n14, 89, 94, 107n5, 107n7 FFSI 160–1 FIFV 165–7, 169–71, 177n13 Filmindia 55–6 film festivals: Bombay International Film Festival for Documentary and Short Films (BIFF) 143, 160, 161; Delhi International Ethnographic Film Festival (DIEFF) 18; Hyderabad International Film Festival (Filmotsav) 136, 139–40, 160, 161; International Film Festival of India (IFFI) 7, 87, 160, 161; International Video Festival (Kerala) (IVFK) 178; Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films (MIFF) 118, 149, 161, 170–3, 175, 186; Persistence Resistance film festival 129; Toronto Film Festival 147; Tri Continental Film Festival 17; Vibgyor 18, 180–5; Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF) 147 Film Publicity Unit 123 Films Advisory Board see FAB Films Division see FD Films Finance Corporation see FFC Film Unit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting see FD Fils du Destin, Les 201–2, 209 Fishermen of Sundarban 98 Flaherty, Robert 4, 43, 49–52 Forum for Independent Films and Video see FIFV Foucault, Michel 1–2, 23–7, 32n1, 81–2, 133, 135, 199 From the Burning Embers 120, 121 Gadihoke, Sabeena 120, 163, 167 Gadi Lohardaga Mail 205 Gandhi, Indira 89, 95–7, 100, 104–5, 110, 111, 126 Gandhi, Mahatma 42–3, 47–9, 58 Gangar, Amrit 61, 94, 209 Garga, B.D. 36–42, 47, 49, 55–7, 71, 84, 85, 113 Gargi, Charu 120 genre: film genre 3, 5, 45, 51–3, 58, 68, 73, 75, 90–1, 93, 106, 137, 151, 192, 195, 199, 208; genre of documentary film 43, 70, 73

244   Index Getino, Octavio 5 Ghatak, Ritwik 89–91, 94, 209 Ghose, Bhaskar 163 Ghose, Goutam 92, 94, 97–100, 102, 103, 106, 115 Ghosh, Shohini 120, 121, 163 Ghosh, Sujit 165 Giannella, Letizia 200–2, 204, 209 Gift of Love 145, 160 Gopalakrishnan, Adoor 94, 97 Great March, The Great Promise, The 87 Grierson, John 1, 4, 50, 52–3, 55, 72, 113, 130 Growth of a Pea Plant, The 46 Halles, Les 197 Hamara Shahar/Bombay our City 81, 120, 145–6, 150 Haridas, Bharat 203 Hirlekar, K.S. 51 human rights 102, 117, 119, 121 Hum Log 113, 162 Hungry Autumn 98, 99 Hyderabad 118, 136, 139, 142, 143, 161 I Am Twenty 84–5 I&B 61, 75–6, 171 ICC 43; ICC Evidence of 1927–1928 54; ICC Report 53, 54, 57, 60n9, 75 Idhi Katha Matramena/Is this Just a True Story? 142 IDPA 19, 39, 40, 62, 68, 69, 71–2, 75, 83, 86, 160 IFFI 7, 87, 160–1 IFI 39, 41, 42, 54, 56–8, 63, 69, 71, 79n19 Ilayum Mullum – Thorns and Leaves 119 In Camera 17, 149, 151, 153, 154, 156 Independence of India 36–9, 40, 54, 57–9, 61–5, 69, 74–5, 78, 84, 95, 108n13, 113, 192, 195, 204, 208 Independent Documentary Producers Association see IDPA independent film 6, 28, 36, 70, 73, 82, 85, 89, 93–5, 97–8, 100, 102–3, 106, 107n5, 116, 118, 120, 124–6, 134, 136, 140, 144, 146, 147, 161, 162–6, 176, 180, 184; see also film festivals independent filmmakers 36, 75, 78, 81, 83, 86–8, 94, 103, 105–6, 112, 122–3, 126, 146, 160, 163, 166, 169,

175, 188, 208; being independent 30, 78, 79n16, 82, 83, 102, 105, 106, 199; pre-independent filmmaking period 81; see also censor board independent filmmaking 36, 81–2, 88–9, 94, 97, 100, 105, 106, 114, 122, 123, 126 independent Indian directors 18 independent producers 69–73, 79n16, 105, 206 Indian Cabaret 139–40 Indian Cinematograph Committee 1927–1928 see ICC Indian Day, An 87 Indian Documentary 70–2, 86 Indian documentary movement 40 Indian Motion Picture Congress 58, 63 Indian News Parade see INP Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association see IPTA Indian Railways films 54 Indian Story, An 102, 123 India ’67 87, 101 India’s Struggle for National Shipping 39 India Today 55, 101, 121 India Untouched – Stories of a People Apart 206 Indo-Pakistan conflict 101 Information Films of India see IFI INP 41 In Secular India 120 In the name of Medicine 119 IPTA 97, 108n13, 179 Iron is Hot 205 It Rested 146 It’s Open 17 Jain, Rajive 116, 165 Jain, Sameera 145, 150, 171, 177n9 Jamia Millia Islamia 119, 120, 122 Jayasankar, K.P. 34n16, 117, 145–6, 207 Jhingan, Shikha 120 Joshi, Ruchir 123, 125, 145, 154–6 Joshi, Vasudha 145, 146, 147, 153, 154 JP movement 96–7, 100 Kak, Sanjay 163, 166–7, 170–4, 178, 179, 185, 189, 195 Kamlabai 146, 156 Kanwar, Amar 34n16, 91, 171, 203, 207–8 Karnad, Girish 175

Index   245 Karnataka 14, 119, 136, 142, 180, 185 Kaul, Mani 46, 47, 76, 85, 88–94, 208, 209 Kazimi, Ali 18, 183 Kerala 18, 119, 124, 125, 178, 180, 185 Khandpur, K.L. 37, 69 Kidwai, Sabina 120, 121 Kiska Dharm, Kiska Desh 121 Kolkata 17, 185; see also Calcutta Kundu, V.S. 62, 75–7 Kutty Japanin Kuzhandaigal/Children of Mini Japan 145, 147 Kya Hua is Shaher Ko/What Happened to this City? 123, 143 Last Adieu, The 88, 103 length-typology 68, 20-minute length regulation 73, 87 Life of Christ 46 Living in Fear 119 Lost Childhood 94 Lumière Brothers 43, 44 Magic Lantern 116, 165 Majlis 203 Man of Aran 51 Man the Creator 86 Manushi 130, 134–5, 157n7 Man versus Man 145, 160 Marxism 89, 124 mass media 44, 64, 88, 113 Mazumdar, Ranjani 120, 121 Media Collective 34n16, 119 Media Mail 119, 165–6 Mediastorm 119–21, 144, 145, 163, 207 Meghnath, B. 48, 80, 205–6 micro-utopias 209 middle cinema 93, 107–8n10 Mill, The 71 Ministry of Information and Broadcasting see I&B Mir, Ezra 42, 54–7, 69, 71, 73, 139–40 Mitra, A. 55, 113 mobile cinema 124–5; see also travelling cinema mobile phone 169–70, 173, 184, 192; see also small media Mohan, Jag 36–40, 49, 50, 53, 68–72, 74, 86–8 Mohan, Reena 120, 134, 145, 150, 152, 156, 176 MoI 41, 56, 58–9

Molkarin/Maid Servant 142 Monteiro, Anjali 116–17, 145, 146, 175, 206 monumental: monumental beliefs 27, 199; monumental discourse 2; monumental history 23, 27, 42, 210; see also Foucault, Michel Mukherjee, Chandita 112, 117, 145, 169, 206 Mukti Chai 98, 99 Mulay, Suhasini 123, 145, 146 Mulay, Vijaya 40, 118, 128n26 Mumbai 19, 76, 112, 116, 118, 148, 149, 161, 173–5, 185, 203; see also Bombay Murari, Jagat 69, 71 Muslim Women Bill 120 Nair, Mira 139, 140, 185 Narayan, Jayaprakash 96 Narwekar, Sanjit 36–40, 69–74, 84, 97, 104 National Congress Session – Haripura 51 National Film Archive of India see NFAI nationhood: cinematic nationhood 66, 113; new form of nationhood 199 Naxalite movement 98 Nehru, Jawaharlal 30, 39, 62–7, 70–1, 74, 78, 87, 89, 95, 105, 111 New Delhi 18, 40, 87, 101, 104, 110–11, 115, 119, 121, 129, 136–7, 140, 145, 153, 160–72, 175, 185, 207 New Earth 99 newsreel 41, 46, 53, 55, 58, 61 New Technologies and Democratisation of Audiovisual Communications 165 new wave 5, 85, 88–91, 93–4, 97, 103, 107n4, 107n7, 107n10, 124–5, 136, 146, 208; see also women filmmakers NFAI 19, 37, 42, 79n14, 107n5 NGOs 115–19, 123–6, 164, 165, 177n13, 206–7 Nine Months to Freedom 88, 102 non-fiction film 38, 91, 93 non-governmental organisations see NGOs Odessa/Odessa Movies 124–6, 146, 164 Oil21 203 Orissa 98–9, 153, 185

246   Index other/Other 22, 24, 27, 207; ontologies of the others 22 Our India 85 Pad. ma 203–4, 209, 210 Palit, Ranjan 17, 48, 123, 125, 145–56 Pani 143 Pani Panchayat 117, 145 Pankaj, Aswani 80–2 parallel cinema 5, 107n4 passive humanism 92, 93 Patel, Ambalal J. 51, 69 Pather Panchali 92 Pathy, Dr P.V. 37, 39, 40–1, 49–56, 69, 70, 86, 106, 206 Pati, Pramod 84–5 Patwardhan, Anand 2, 3, 25, 27, 36, 48, 81–3, 98, 100–6, 108n19, 115, 120, 123–6, 144–7, 150–2, 158n14, 195, 205–7 PBS 167, 169, 177n13 Pedestrian Pictures 17, 180, 185–95, 208 performance: cultural performance 31, 43–6, 52, 59, 124, 127, 179, 183, 208–9; experimental spaces of performance 133; individual performances 133; performanceaspect 132; political performances 209; space of performance 133, 133; theories of performance 132, 133 performativity 31, 129–57, 189, 207–8 Perspectives 85 Phalke, Dhundiraj Govind 45–6, 209 Pitra, Putra aur Dharmayuddha/Father, Son and Holy War 147 Point of View 203 postcolonialism: filmmakers of postcolonial India 74–5, 77; postcolonial historiography 63; nationalism 62, 65, 66, 75; see also colonialism; educational films; Independence of India Prabhat Film Company 55–6 Prakasa, Mr Raghupathi 53 Prakash, Ravi 69, 121 Prasar Bharati Bill 163–7, 177n13 Prisoners of Conscience 101 propaganda: ads films 73, 77; British oppression and propaganda 63; colonial propaganda 48; documentary as propaganda 68, 205; entertainment into propaganda 199; independent propaganda 59; Nazis

propaganda 38, 56; publicity and propaganda 41, 53, 54, 57; state propaganda 77; war and propaganda 36, 38, 41, 42, 43, 56–8, 192; see also colonialism; educational films Public Access Digital Media Archive see Pad. ma Public Broadcasting Service see PBS publicity 57; see also propaganda Quit India movement 47 Raaste Bandh Hain Sab 152 Ramani, R.V. 145–6, 150 Ram Ke Naam/In the Name of God 147 Rao, Baskar 55 Rao Jadhav, Keshav 143 Raqs Media Collective 34n16, 203 Rashomon 171, 177n14 Ray, Satyajit 87–94, 104, 107n4, 120 residual media 114, 122, 126 Rouch, Jean 10 Roy, Rahul 118, 130, 145, 171 Saa 145 Sacrifice of Babulal Bhuiya, The 145–6, 152, 153 Saint and the Peasant, The 86 Saratchandra 98 Sarma, V.R. 69 Sasi, K.P. 48, 119–21, 144–5, 182–3, 205 Sastry, S.N.S. 84 Satellite Instructional Television Experiment see SITE Sathish, K. 119 Seagull Film Society 160 Self Employed Women’s Association see SEWA Sen, Gargi 38, 40, 116, 129, 145, 165 Sen, Hiralal 45 Sen, Mrinal 88–9, 91–4, 97 Sethna, Homi 84 SEWA 117 Shahani, Kumar 85, 90, 91, 93, 208–9 Shah, Rajula 203 Shantaram, V. 42, 54–7 Shaw, Alexander 42, 54–8 Sheikh, M.I. 86 Short Film Guild 69–70, 72 Shorts-1, 160 SITE 111–12, 117 slide-show exhibition 116–17, 123

Index   247 small media 28, 31, 115–16, 122, 159, 164–5, 169–71, 175–9, 184, 187, 194, 199; see also mobile phone social realism 92–3, 136 Solanas, Fernando 5 Something Like a War 143, 146 Song of Ceylon 72 Soudhamini, Venkatnarayanan 145–6, 203 Srivani/Women’s Voice 142 Stalin, K. 206 Sudesha 142 Sukhdev, S. (a.k.a. Sukhdev Singh Sandhu) 72, 84–8, 93, 99–106, 206 Sunil, Sughata 143 symbolism 65–6, 107n5 talking groups 146, 150, 152 Tambakoo Chaakila Oob Ali 142 Tamil cinema 1, 2, 47 Tamil Nadu 1, 7, 12, 14, 136, 185 TCM 68, 72 television in India: cable television 110, 113, 162; foreign television 153; history of television 30, 110–13, 164; independent filmmaking 114, 124, 126, 153, 163, 166; Satellite television 112, 162–5 Thapa, N.S. 84, 104 Third Cinema 5, 98 third space 23, 26, 204 Third World Cinema 5, 148 Third World Women’s Film 136–8, 141 Through a Lens Starkly 37 Thunder of Freedom 104, 105 topical films 47, 53 Toppo, Biju 205–6 Totanama 146 Transition 84 travelling cinema 43, 54, 160; see also colonialism; mobile cinema Twenty-Point Films 104, 105 UNESCO 71, 111, 118 United Film Arts 86 United News of India (UNI) 101

United States Information Service (USIS) 72 Uski Roti 88, 89 Vachani, Nilita 139 Varges, A.L 48 Vasantsena 71 Vertov, Dziga 4 Video News Magazine 118 Video Rally 119 Videoscape 165–6 video technology, arrival of 28, 30–1, 36, 101, 106, 109, 110–27, 146, 160, 162, 164, 205–6 Vikalp 17, 159, 161, 170–6, 179–80, 184–5 Vikalp – Films for Freedom see Vikalp Vimochana 135–6 Vimochana Festival Booklet 136; see also film festivals Virmani, Shabnam 182–3 Visible Evidence 21 (VE 21) 3–4, 121, 145 Vohra, Paromita 129–30, 205, 207 Voices from Baliapal 145–8, 153 Wadia, J.B.H. 36–7, 41, 51, 54–6 Wadia Movietone 41, 51 Waugh, Thomas (Tom) 18–19, 33n14, 90, 92, 107n9, 139, 142, 146–8, 149–51, 153–6 Waves of Revolution 100, 101 Wazir the Kaghzi 86 women filmmakers 31, 33n13, 117–20, 129–31, 134–46, 156, 157, 161, 163, 205–6 women’s movement 130, 134–40, 142–4, 157, 157n7, 158n14 World Cinema 5 Wright, Basil 49, 72 Yugantar 142 Zils, Paul 38–40, 68–70, 72, 75, 86, 106, 206