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Third Text, Vol. 19, Issue 2, March, 2005, 175–185

Travails of the Nation

Some Notes on Indian Documentaries

1. A voluminous literature
has grown up around what
Vinay Lal
constitutes
‘documentaries’, and I
suspect that the revival
which documentaries are
presently enjoying, in Though ‘Bollywood’ has become synonymous with Indian cinema to the
Third
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Original
Taylor
202005
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Text
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& Article
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Ltd (online)

countries such as the

United States and India, uninitiated, there are an ample number of other traditions of film-
will lead to further making in India, not least of which is a tradition of political documenta-
speculation on the forms
that documentaries will
ries.1 The Indian independence movement, led in the 1920s and 1930s
take in the future. by Mohandas Gandhi, was the subject of the first concentrated phase of
‘Documentary’ became a documentary film-making. The bulk of these films, however, never
movement in Britain in the
1930s, and documentaries
received any public screening. The Cinematograph Act of 1918 intro-
have ever since been duced censorship in India, and the Indian Cinematograph Committee of
understood to be vehicles 1928, while urging the censors to curb their enthusiasm for bringing
of social comment and
change. The sense that
films before the cutting-board, unequivocally reaffirmed the moral
John Grierson conveyed necessity of censorship, especially in a country among whose natives, as
about the documentary, many British in India believed, passions reigned supreme.2 The various
when apropos of Robert
Flaherty’s Moana, he spoke regional censor boards did not only certify Indian films for exhibition
of it as a ‘visual account of but also regulated the entry of foreign films into India and their public
the daily life of a screenings. Indeed, ‘cheap American films’, which were viewed (in the
Polynesian youth’ that had
‘documentary value’ still words of one English clergyman) as engaging in outright sensationalism,
remains with us today. See proliferating in ‘daring murders, crimes and divorces’, and, more point-
Forsyth Hardy, ed, edly, as degrading white women in the eyes of Indians, were especially
Grierson on Documentary,
Faber & Faber, London, targeted for censorship.3 By the mid-1930s, Gandhi had become a figure
1979, p 11. of worldwide veneration; moreover, the Government of India Act of
2. See the useful discussions 1935, which allowed some measure of autonomy to Indians, implicitly
in Erik Barnouw and S. recognised that the Indian objective of full independence was no longer a
Krishnasway, Indian Film,
2nd edn, Oxford
mere utopian dream. Consequently, numerous documentaries that had
University Press, New been banned were now made available for public screenings, among
York, 1980, pp 43–58 and them Mahatma Gandhi’s March for Freedom (Sharda Film Co),
Prem Chowdhry, Colonial
India and the Making of
Mahatma Gandhi’s March, March 12 (Krishna Film Co), and Mahatma
Empire Cinema: Image, Gandhi Returns from the Pilgrimage of Peace (Saraswati).4
Ideology and Identity, While the history of Indian documentary film-making is well beyond
Manchester University
Press, Manchester, 2000, the ambit of this paper, it is instructive to those who might wish to think
pp 17–38. about political documentaries in contemporary India. Censorship
3. Barnouw and remains, as will be seen, the most pressing problem for documentary
Krishnaswamy, ibid, p 43. film-makers; and the irony is further compounded when we consider, for
4. Ibid, p 123. example, that Gandhi is as much of a pariah figure to the modern Indian

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2005 Kala Press/Black Umbrella
[Link]
DOI: 10.1080/0952882042000328089
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176

state as he was to the government of British India. Two recent documen-

taries, Final Solution (2004) and War and Peace (‘Jang aur Aman’,
2002), both of which have earned accolades around the world,5 furnish
an ample introduction to the manner in which Indian film-makers seek
to understand the resurgence of Hindu militancy, the marked drift
towards zero-sum politics which is everywhere becoming characteristic
of the modern nation-state, the normalisation of politics, and more
broadly the political culture of the Indian state. In late February 2002,
following the attack, which left nearly sixty people dead and many more
with severe burn injuries, by still undetermined assailants on a train near
Godhra station in Gujarat carrying Hindu devotees returning from
Ayodhya, a pogrom was unleashed upon the Muslim population of
Gujarat. Scores of journalists and eyewitnesses, and at least a dozen
investigative committees, have documented the orchestrated violence
that took 2000 (largely Muslim) lives, rendered 150,000 people home-
less, and decimated entire Muslim families and communities.6 Armed
gangs with lists of Muslim-owned houses and shops freely roamed the
streets, committing arson and pillage; policemen stood by idly while
women were speared in their genitals, or systematically raped by one
man after another before being hacked to pieces. Murder and mayhem
continued for three days, unchecked by the forces of the state except for
the brave conduct of a few solitary policemen whose only reward was
reprimands, before any attempt was made to bring the situation under
control. Not until a month later had the violence subsided sufficiently
that one could aver that the city was no longer hostage to murderous
criminals and their political patrons.
21 Final Solution, 2004, Rakesh Sharma

5. Final Solution, directed

by Rakesh Sharma, is the
first Indian film ever
nominated for the
Grierson Award, one of
the most notable awards
conferred on
documentary films; it is
also the recipient of
awards at film festivals
in Berlin, Hong Kong,
and Zanzibar. War and
Peace is the recipient of
awards at film festivals
in Tokyo, Zanzibar,
Karachi, Mumbai,
Sydney, and elsewhere.

6. A dozen investigative
reports have been put
together in The Gujarat
Pogrom: Indian
Democracy in Danger,
Indian Social Institute,
New Delhi, 2002; see
also Siddharth
Varadarajan, ed,
Gujarat: The Making of
a Tragedy, Penguin, New
Delhi, 2002. Final Solution, 2004, Rakesh Sharma
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177

Final Solution, 2004, Rakesh Sharma

Barely two or three months had elapsed before the first documenta-
ries on the Gujarat killings were beginning to circulate. Gopal Menon’s
Hey Ram! Genocide in the Land of Gandhi allows the victims a domi-
nant voice: here a retired man who describes how his forty years of
savings went up in smoke when rioters ransacked his home, there a
woman who recalls her pregnant niece, whose stomach was slit open and
her foetus tossed into the fire. But Menon’s film illustrates all the diffi-
culties to which political documentaries, particularly those made to meet
the exigencies of a situation, are susceptible. The opening frames of the
film establish what Menon construes as the genealogy of the violence in
Gujarat, namely the conflict over the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, a
sixteenth-century mosque eventually destroyed by Hindu militants in
December 1992, that was claimed by them to have previously housed a
Hindu temple.7 Menon’s film offers no insight on the rise of Hindu mili-
tancy, the ideology of Hindu supremacy, caste and class politics in
Gujarat, or the relationship of communal violence to urbanisation. It is
true that the people aboard the train that was partly set ablaze at
Godhra were Hindus and their families returning from Ayodhya, but
Menon entirely overlooks the troubled history of Hindu–Muslim rela-
tions in Gujarat over the last four decades, and is unable to offer any
account of why the conflagration should have commenced in Gujarat.
Most viewers would have thought that the words ‘Gandhi’ and ‘geno-
7. See Vinay Lal, The History
cide’ stand in stark opposition, but in Menon’s film they occupy much
of History: Politics and too easily, and inexplicably from the point of view of the common
Scholarship in Modern viewer, the same space. One cannot doubt that the film-maker intends to
India, Oxford University
Press, New Delhi, 2003, pp evoke the mournful irony that the very same state which proudly claims
141–85. Gandhi, the principal practitioner and theorist of non-violent resistance
[Link] Page 178 Thursday, January 6, 2005 7:48 PM

178

in modern times, as its native son should have been the breeding ground
for sustained eliminationist violence against Muslims. But neither
‘Gandhi’ nor ‘Mahatma’, the honorific (meaning ‘Great Soul’) by which
he was known throughout the world, have ever been words that had
only a monochromatic existence. As far back as 1920–22, during the
first nationwide non-cooperation movement against the British under
Gandhi’s leadership, violence was committed in Gandhi’s name. In the
north Indian town of Chauri Chaura, Indian nationalists burned down a
police station and killed over a dozen Indian policemen while shouting
slogans, ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’, ‘Long Live Mahatma Gandhi’.8
Gandhi was aghast at these developments, as is, evidently, Menon today.
But that the killings might be waged with ruthless abandon precisely
because in Gandhi’s Gujarat one expected otherwise is a consideration
which seems far removed from the film-maker’s mind.
As Menon’s camera moves from one victim to another, it begins to
read much like one of the many first-hand, partly investigative reports
that surfaced amidst the killings and in the immediate aftermath. The
film as sociopolitical document does not necessarily have the advantage
of immediacy, and it might be handicapped by lack of distance. More
complex is Bombay film-maker Suma Josson’s Gujarat: Laboratory of
Hindu Rashtra (2002). Josson charts the ascendancy of Hindutva, the
ideology of Hindu supremacy that seeks to distil Hinduism into its
purest essence, and interviews with its advocates, as with civil rights
activists and political opponents of Hindutva, furnish some backdrop to
understanding how Gujarat has become the site of efforts to secure a
Hindu nation (rashtra). Josson’s film adds more sociological depth to
the narrative of Hindu violence in Gujarat. But that question again
surfaces: just how did Gujarat, ‘the land of Gandhi’, become so hospita-
ble to advocates of Hindu militancy? One might have thought that the
legacy of Gandhi would have worked to make Gujarat, which also
boasts higher degrees of urbanisation, literacy, and industrial develop-
ment than most other Indian states, into a model state for the rest of the
country.9 Yet Gujarat has been subject to insistent communal strife.
These apparent anomalies are left unexplained, which is again inexplica-
ble considering the argument advanced that Gujarat represents the labo-
ratory of the Hindu nation. If, as we know, the word ‘laboratory’ exists
on multiple registers, we must perforce ask how far Gujarat mirrors the
nation, and what Gujarat portends for the future. In his own way,
Gandhi turned Gujarat into a laboratory for the perfection of his
8. Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as
doctrine of satyagraha, non-violent resistance. How far are the advo-
Mahatma: Gorakhpur cates of Hindutva playing on this legacy?
District, Eastern University Rakesh Sharma’s The Final Solution (2004) is easily the most capa-
Press, 1921–2’, in Selected
Subaltern Studies, eds
cious of the handful of documentaries on the Gujarat killings. Though it
Ranajit Guha and Gayatri has travelled widely on the international film festival circuit since it was
Chakravorty Spivak, completed in early 2004, the film still awaits a certificate from the Censor
Oxford University Press,
New York, 1988, pp 288–
Board of India. In denying the film certification, the censors objected that
346. ‘the film promotes communal disharmony among Hindu and Muslim
9. Achyut Yagnik, ‘The groups and presents the picture of Gujarat riots in a way that it may
Pathology of Gujarat’, arouse the communal feelings and clashes among Hindu [and] Muslim
Seminar, no 513, 2002, groups’. They noted, in particular, that the film is detrimental to
pp 19–22. The entire issue
is devoted to the Gujarat ‘national unity and integrity’, and that ‘certain dialogues involve defama-
killings. tion of individuals or body of individuals. Entire picturisation is highly
[Link] Page 179 Thursday, January 6, 2005 7:48 PM

179

provocative and may trigger off unrest and communal violence. State
security is jeopardized and public order is endangered if this film is
shown.’10 Considering that, as the reams of evidence collected by various
investigative groups have indubitably established, the killings were
orchestrated with the complicity of the state,11 the argument that Final
Solution jeopardises ‘state security’ would have been comical if it were
not macabre. Yet, the words ‘Final Solution’ are clearly calculated to
provoke, and in the course of the film Sharma seeks, and not always
obliquely, to establish similarities with Nazi Germany. The authority of
the Oxford English Dictionary is invoked as the word genocide is
splashed across the screen, followed by the definition of genocide
contained in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide (1948). Whether the dialectic of the text, the
image, and ‘commonsense’ works, in this instance, to the director’s
advantage is disputable. Article 2 of the Convention describes genocide
as various acts of injury, harm, and killing ‘committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such’.12 Were the perpetrators of the killings intent on destroy-
ing Muslims as a group, or were they keen that the killing of some
Muslims should serve as an object lesson to other Muslims and even,
from the standpoint of the killers, to Hindus – especially Hindus who, led
astray by the tolerant traditions of their faith and the non-violent teach-
ings of Gandhi, are construed as soft, effeminate, and incapable of
comprehending that Islam is incapable of existing alongside another faith
in peace and harmony?13 The textual definition of ‘genocide’ hobbles the
film-maker’s case, but in some conversational sense of the term to which
the images speak the word ‘genocide’ does not seem entirely misplaced.
In its longest version, the film runs for 3 hours 40 minutes; however,
10. Personal email
communication from
since audiences are not habituated to documentaries of this length,
Rakesh Sharma, 25 Sharma generally screens one of two shorter versions, either 100 minutes
September 2004. or 148 minutes in length. Part I, entitled ‘Pride and Prejudice’, offers
11. ‘We Have No Orders to insights into Hindutva’s vociferous attempts to instil pride in an
Save You’: State unabashedly militant conception of their faith among Hindus, and the
Participation and
Complicity in Communal
price that the Muslims of Gujarat have had to pay to make Hindus feel
Violence in Gujarat’, ‘secure’ in their own homeland. Initial shots of ‘Gaurav Yatra’, or a
Human Rights Watch, Hindu pilgrimage of pride, are interspersed with interviews of school-
14:3, April 2002.
boys and their teachers; the camera then moves on to the refugee camps
12. George J Andreopolulos, where nearly 150,000 victims of the pogrom were lodged. Even as
ed, Genocide: Conceptual
and Historical Dimensions, victims recount the brutalities they survived, or were forced to witness,
University of Pennsylvania the camera cuts, with chilling effect, to a speech by Narendra Modi, the
Press, Philadelphia, 1994, Chief Minister of Gujarat, who pompously declaimed on first being told
pp 229–33.
of the massacres, ‘Every action has an equal and opposite reaction’.14
13. For a more elaborate
interpretation along these
The subsequent three parts, ‘The Terror Trail’, ‘Hate Mandate’, and
lines, see Vinay Lal, ‘On ‘Hope and Despair’, are similarly structured. Occasional footage from a
the Rails of Modernity: Gujarat Government VCD on Godhra, snippets from the Concerned
Communalism’s Journey in
India’, Emergences, 12:2,
Citizens Tribunal Report, and coverage of speeches by Narendra Modi
November 2002, pp 297– and other ideologues of Hindutva, such as Praveen Togadia and the reli-
311. gious leader Acharya Dharmendra, punctuate scores of interviews with
14. As reported in the Times of victims and their families, perpetrators and their patrons, and bystand-
India, 2 March 2004 and ers. Among the very first shots with which Final Solution opens is of a
other dailies: see The
Gujarat Pogrom, op cit, pp schoolboy, perhaps six or seven years old, describing the mutilation of
6, 126. his father and the rape of his aunt; and, as the film closes, the boy
[Link] Page 180 Thursday, January 6, 2005 7:48 PM

180

appears in an extended conversation with Sharma himself. He describes

all Hindus as ‘bad’, and says, quite unbelievably, that he is prepared to
kill them all. Sharma reminds him that he, too, is a Hindu. We witness
the boy struggling with this difficult truth: if the film-maker before him
appears to be a nice man, then all Hindus surely do not stand
condemned. But if they do, then Sharma cannot be the Hindu he claims
to be: this appears to be, logically speaking, the easier reality to accept. If
framing devices are ordinarily intended to furnish closure, Sharma reso-
lutely refuses such comforts; moreover, by concluding with excerpts
from his conversation with the schoolboy, he draws sustained attention
to the question, generally little explored in India, of what the voices of
children tell us about communalism and how they mediate unspoken
social truths.
It has become customary, in political documentaries, such as those
made on the Gujarat killings or on the movement to prevent the
damming of the river Narmada, to interview civil rights leaders, human
rights lawyers, peace activists, liberal academics, and others whose sane
and politically resistant voices in the name of peace, human dignity, and
justice provide assurance, howsoever slight, that the institutions of civil
society are not entirely corrupt and that some modicum of decency
remains amidst flagrant and openly contemptuous displays of murder-
ous and intimidating violence. Rakesh Sharma offers no such placebos:
there are no candlelight vigils in the memory of victims, nor does he
show any street demonstrators holding placards with the usual slogans
demanding justice and insisting on ‘peace not war’. Some might argue
that there is no effective political intervention that does not hold out
hope for the future, and that Sharma’s evident aim in shaming, exposing,
and penetrating Hindutva is at odds with his failure to show resistance
to Hindutva at work. I wish to suggest, however, that Sharma’s evident
intent in showing the violence unadorned, in all its nakedness, augurs a
new and important stance on the part of the Indian documentary film-
maker. It is remarkable, too, as a clip from Part II, quite inexplicably
deleted from a shorter version of the film, unequivocally suggests how
much the spectre of Gandhi still looms large over those who are inclined
to see him as effeminate old man whose death was necessary to pave the
way for the emergence of India as a muscular Hindu nation-state.15 One
victim of the massacre at the Gulbarg Housing Society in Ahmedabad
remarks, ‘They say Gujarat is Gandhi’s land, the home of non-violence.
But it [the violence, as policemen stood by] was bestial. It was terror-
ism.’ Sharma’s camera then cuts to a speech by Praveen Togadia, a
physician by training who might reasonably be dubbed the Hindu
doctor of death, so palpable is his hatred of the Muslim and his embrace
of violence: ‘Terror was unleashed at Godhra station because this coun-
try follows Gandhi. We don’t want Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence.’ It
is Gandhi’s non-violence, Togadia argues, that compelled the Hindu to
15. The definite piece remains kneel before the Muslim, and fed the Muslim’s habit of engaging in
Ashis Nandy’s ‘Final terrorist activity. As I have previously remarked, the fear of Gandhi ties
Encounter: The Politics of
the Assassination of the modern advocate of Hindu militancy across decades to the British
Gandhi’, in At the Edge of who came to see Gandhi as an unusual, determined, and irrational foe of
Psychology: Essays in the colonial state.
Politics and Culture,
Oxford University Press, Sharma’s achievement, considerable as it is, is not unique. At least
Delhi, 1980, pp 70–98. among documentary film-makers working in the socialist tradition,
[Link] Page 181 Thursday, January 6, 2005 7:48 PM

181

Anand Patwardhan has no peers in India. His career has spanned three
decades, and his oeuvre includes films on the Bombay textile strike of
1982–83, political prisoners, Indian farmworkers in British Columbia
and their efforts to unionise, the dispute over the now-destroyed Babri
Masjid, the politics of masculinity and sexuality in contemporary India,
the controversy over the damming of the Narmada river, and India’s
nuclear testing. Patwardhan has been there to document the principal
milestones in the political life of the nation over the last three decades,
and it would be no exaggeration to suggest that Indian documentary
film-makers, even when they have surpassed him, have initially had to
work in his shadow. Patwardhan has remained resolutely uncompromis-
ing both in his objections to Hindu militancy and in adhering to a rigor-
ous critique of the culture of violence generated by the political
arrangements of the modern Indian state, and his films have repeatedly
encountered the opposition of the Censor Board. Indian authorities engi-
neered the removal of his epic film, Jang aur Aman (‘War and Peace’,
2002) as the inaugural film of the Kolkata Film Festival in May 2002,
three months after officials at the American Museum for Natural
History (New York) shamefully succumbed to the pressure of supporters
of Hindu militancy in the United States and postponed scheduled screen-
ings of Patwardhan’s films.16 ‘My film is based on the Gandhian philos-
ophy of non-violence’, says Patwardhan. ‘It exposes the political
hypocrisies of India, Pakistan and the United States regarding the
nuclear issue. They have a problem with the way I have put forward my
argument. But [they] cannot point a finger at the factual data I have used
in the film as it is true.’ An essay by Patwardhan, entitled ‘How We
Learned to Love the Bomb’, is more explicit in its denunciation of the
obscenity of nuclear armaments and does not mince words: ‘I now have
the same feeling of disbelief at the moral bankruptcy and intellectual
idiocy of a nation that is mindlessly euphoric about its acquisition of
weapons of mass destruction.’17
Jang aur Aman, though largely an exploration of the political climate
of India and Pakistan following the nuclear testing by both countries in
May 1998, draws on the precedent created by the nuclear bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Patwardhan is just as daring in his criti-
cism of the aggressiveness of the American military and nuclear machine
as he is of the nuclear pretensions of India and Pakistan. Advocates of
nuclearism within the Indian and Pakistan militaries are allowed a voice
in Jang aur Aman – but this is all the more effective because, when
placed in juxtaposition with the immense problems of the poor in both
countries, and particularly of the rural populations around the test sites
and the uranium mines, the military perspective begins to look short-
sighted, even demented. Yet Patwardhan understands that the nuclear
16. Ronita Torcato, ‘Through ambitions of both states have widespread support among diverse strata
the Viewfinder’, Hindu of society, and not merely among rabid communalists and the support-
Magazine, 14 April 2002,
online at: http://
ers of Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. Achievement in this domain
[Link]/thehindu/ is viewed as an index of technological prowess, and many people have
mag/2002/04/14/stories/ come to accept the view that nothing earns a nation-state respect in the
[Link]
world as much as its nuclear status. Both in India and Pakistan, as Jang
17. Online at: http:// aur Aman poignantly reminds us, the ‘successful’ nuclear tests of 1998
[Link]/
thenews/spedition/nuclear/ were celebrated on the streets with explosions of firecrackers and the
[Link] distribution of sweets.
[Link] Page 182 Thursday, January 6, 2005 7:48 PM

182

Patwardhan has been active on behalf of the rights of the urban poor,
slum-dwellers, refugees, the industrial proletariat, tribals, and political
dissenters; and while he works, in many respects, from the periphery of
Indian society, he retains a discerning eye for the gravity of politics.
Though his 1990 film, Ram Ke Naam, or ‘In the Name of Ram’, an
exploration of the controversy over the Babri Masjid before the mosque
was torn down by militant Hindus in December 1992, might be said to
have earned him very wide recognition, Patwardhan had already earned
a considerable reputation for himself with films such as Prisoners of
Conscience (1978, 45 min). Here Patwardhan offered a withering
critique of the internal emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi from 1975
to 1977, which led to the incarceration without trial of 100,000 people;
however, as the film plainly makes clear, these were not the only ‘prison-
ers of conscience’ in India. Political issues have generally been at the
forefront of Patwardhan’s work, and in 1995 he entered into the raging
debate over the Sardar Sarovar project which, when completed, will
have displaced not less than 150,000 people (largely adivasis), and possi-
bly many more. Patwardhan’s Narmada Diary (co-directed with Siman-
tini Dhuru, 60 minutes) focuses on the efforts of the Narmada Bachao
Andolan, or Save the Narmada Movement, to make the economic,
social, cultural, indeed moral costs of development, to which state plan-
ners are oblivious, widely known.
Among Patwardhan’s films, Pitra, Putra, aur Dharmayuddha, known
in the English-speaking world as Father, Son, and Holy War (1994), has
been of particular interest to students of cinema and observers of
contemporary Indian life. Completed shortly after the destruction of the
Babri Masjid and the bomb blasts that tore apart Bombay in early 1993,
Patwardhan attempts in this daring film of two parts to weave together a
narrative on political violence that considers the nexus between commu-
nalism, the changing culture of the contemporary Hindi film, violence
towards women in many domains of Indian society, vernacular forms of
masculinity, and other aspects of Indian society and culture. Patwardhan
is nuanced enough to understand, unlike some other liberal and secular
commentators, that communalism cannot merely be viewed as the logi-
cal outcome of illiteracy and deep-seated traditions, and some of the
film’s most touching moments are seen in the interviews conducted with
working-class women who are firmly persuaded that there is no insepa-
rable gulf between ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ and that tensions between
the two communities are greatly exploited by politicians. Indeed,
Patwardhan’s suggestion, borne out by many scholarly studies, is that
the educated are more attracted by communal thinking, and the conceit
that the Hindu tradition is a spectacular and unrivalled repository of the
world’s timeless truths sometimes leads the educated Hindus to embrace
absurdities. Patwardhan’s camera takes us to a Hindu temple in south
India where a ceremony is held for childless couples whose greatest
desire is to have progeny, and it then lingers on a highly educated couple
(with university degrees from Britain) who state, with the utmost seri-
ousness, that the ritual chanting of the Vedas produces sonic vibrations
that can render a barren woman fertile. Hindu women, the viewers are
told with perfect assurance, commingle freely with their men, and unlike
Muslim women have not been held back by obscurantism and repressive
traditions. Though there is something comical in the argument that the
[Link] Page 183 Thursday, January 6, 2005 7:48 PM

183

highest truths of physics were all anticipated in the Vedas, this supposed
‘insight’ has a firm place in middle-class Indian consciousness. We have
here entered the domain, not of the irrational, but of the hyper-rational.
Precisely because Father, Son, and Holy War is Patwardhan’s most
43 Father
War andSon
Peace
and (Jang
Holy War,
aur Aman,
1994, Anand
2002), Anand
Patwadhan
Patwadhan

ambitious film, it is also emblematic of the conceptual and political

shortcomings of Patwardhan’s firmly liberal and humanistic worldview.
A crude distinction between matriarchy and patriarchy furnishes the
framework for Patwardhan’s cinematic observations, and Patwardhan
overlooks the fact that didacticism is often cinema’s weakest point, just
it is of poetry. When Patwardhan revels in the detail, in (to use Clifford
Geertz’s famous phrase) the ‘thick description’ of phenomena, he is bril-
liantly lyrical and suggestively transgressive. His roving camera works by
association: body-building contests, street vendors peddling herbs guar-
anteed to embolden the penis, and middle-class boys wildly enthused by
Rambo are drawn, with a considerable degree of conviction, into the
same orbit of masculinity. But when Patwardhan’s camera ceases to do
its walk, he begins to falter. Viewers are led to believe that matriarchy
engulfed the entire world in remote antiquity before men, the hunters,
began to assert their presence and change the rules governing most soci-
eties. This thesis of the matriarchal origins of cultures does not, of
course, originate with Patwardhan, but he seems quite unaware of the
depth and breadth of feminist scholarship and of the difficulties that
some strands of feminist scholarship – not to mention other scholars
who are entirely hostile to what are viewed as ahistorical and romantic
conceptions of the early history of humankind – have with sketchy repre-
sentations of supposed matriarchal pasts.

Father Son and Holy War, 1994, Anand Patwadhan

[Link] Page 184 Thursday, January 6, 2005 7:48 PM

184

War and Peace (Jang aur Aman, 2002), Anand Patwadhan

Patwardhan’s understanding of patriarchy is not more sophisticated,

and the assumption remains that one can write a seamless history of
patriarchy – however much it might be dressed up, disguised, deformed,
or diluted. Patwardhan finds nearly every aspect of Indian culture deeply
implicated in the workings of patriarchy, and at times it appears that the
speeches of the Bal Thackeray, the rantings of a Sadhvi Ritambhara or
Uma Bharati, the sexual fantasies of young Indian men who fill the
country’s cinema halls, the street culture of many Indian cities with their
roving groups of young men for whom any young or attractive woman is
reasonable prey, the fears of impotence that quacks exploit with colour-
ful public demonstrations of the aphrodisiac effects of Indian herbs, the
sexual molestation and rape of women in communal conflicts, and the
deeply protective culture of Rajput men are all expressions of one single
tale of a conflicted, thwarted, and emasculated male sexuality. One has
the impression that Patwardhan does not always quite think through his
theses, nor is he fully aware of the politics and regimes of representation;
and yet, in his understanding of the sexual politics of resurgent Hindu
communalism, Patwardhan remains India’s most astute and daring
documentary film-maker and one of the country’s most sensitive
commentators. Again, Patwardhan conflates patriarchy with masculin-
ity, but it is remarkable that he should have zoomed in on masculinity,
long before anyone in India (or, for that matter, almost anywhere else)
had appropriated it as a fitting subject of scholarly inquiry and cultural
commentary.
Though no documentary in India has garnered anything remotely
resembling the visibility attendant upon Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/
11, a rare enough phenomenon even in the United States, Indian docu-
mentary film-makers are now poised to take a critical place in the
[Link] Page 185 Thursday, January 6, 2005 7:48 PM

185

debates that have become central to Indian politics and the most press-
ing socioeconomic and cultural issues of the day. Documentaries have
become, as well, the sites for a radical new political aesthetics, as the
films of Amar Kanwar so provocatively suggest. To Remember (2003)
has no soundtrack: shot in New Delhi’s Birla House, where Gandhi was
assassinated on 30 January 1948, this very short film renders homage to
Gandhi and the people who, in visiting this national shrine, remember
his spirit. It is no accident that Kanwar deploys silence to enter into
Gandhi’s spirit: silence was one of the many idioms through which
Gandhi wrought conversations with himself, stilled his anger, and tested
his commitment to ahimsa (non-violence), and subtly compelled the
British to parley on his terms.18 By contrast, the voice-over occupies a
commanding place in A Season Outside (1998), an exploration, through
the border at Wagah, of the divide between India and Pakistan. That
‘mythical line’, which the two countries fear to transgress, is only twelve
inches wide but, speculates Kanwar, ‘perhaps several miles deep’. What
healing powers, asks Kanwar, can non-violence bring to our pain, and
how can non-violence aid in making possible retreat without loss of
dignity? A Night of Prophecy (2002) creates its own distinct space but is
dialectically engaged with similar themes. Gandhi had often stated that
the litmus test of a democracy is how it treats its minorities and its
dispossessed, and Kanwar travels to Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh,
Nagaland, and Kashmir to film the voices of protest of those who,
whether on account of their caste, religion, or political sensibilities have
found the Indian nation-state to be cruelly inhospitable. Their sadness,
anger, dignity, and spirit of resistance are compelling, and their collec-
tive tale has enough music and noise in it that the soundtrack requires
no narrator at all. Kanwar’s use of the soundtrack is in itself a study in
politics.
Indian documentary film-making has evidently come a long way
from the time, merely a decade or two ago, when the Films Division of
the Government of India monopolised the production and distribution
of Indian documentaries. It is true that no Indian political documentary
can expect a commercial release, and that even screenings on the state-
owned Doordarshan or privately owned television channels are rare. In
this respect, whatever the censorship codes, the absence of a viable
distribution network for documentaries, particularly those that are resis-
tant to the political culture of the Indian state and the free-market agen-
das of India’s corporate and modernising elites, itself constitutes a form
of censorship. Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that a future
awaits Indian documentary film-makers. When, early this year, the orga-
18. See Vinay Lal, ‘Too Deep nisers of the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) sought to
for Deep Ecology: Gandhi
and the Ecological Vision
subject Indian documentaries to the guidelines of an archaic and repres-
of Life’, in Hinduism and sive censorship code, 300 film-makers originated a ‘Campaign Against
Ecology: The Intersection Censorship’ and conducted a six-day film festival that ran concurrently
of Earth, Sky, and Water,
eds C K Chapple and M E with MIFF. This campaign has now been reconstituted into a more
Tucker, Center for the permanent forum, ‘Films for Freedom’ [[Link]],
Study of World Religions, and one can consequently indulge oneself in the belief that documentary
Harvard Divinity School,
Cambridge, MA, 2000, film-makers will no longer exist at the margins of political and artistic
pp 183–212. activity in India.