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ABSTRACT
The Vikalp Film Festival of 2004 (Vikalp, meaning ‘alternative’ in Hindi) has been celebrated as a seminal event in Indian documentary history, an unprecedented, collective mobilization against censorship that also marked a distinct historical rupture in documentary film history in postcolonial India. In this article, I build on recent accounts of the festival by participants and scholars to explore (a) the nature of the interventions that ‘Vikalp’ sought to stage in the history of cinema censorship and (b) the shifts in political documentary film-making that it engendered vis-à vis histories of grassroots political activism in India, as well as emerging networked social movements globally. While Vikalp did not ultimately succeed in changing the colonial-era censorship regulations that continue to govern film exhibition in India, I argue that it changed the terms on which censorship debates had played out by reimagining the role that documentary film could play in protests. Enacting a shift from viewing individual films as ‘tools’ in political struggle, Vikalp focused on the affective encounter between documentary narratives and diverse new audiences in the new millennium. The documentary film screenings and festivals that Vikalp helped mobilize became one node for a documentary ‘counter public’ that called on a reimagining of the form and aesthetics of political documentary film-making, as well as new relationships between artistic practice and activism that continue to circulate across material and physical spaces of film production and circulation in contemporary India.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Vikalp (which means alternative in Hindi) was set into motion by a ‘core group’ that called itself the Campaign against Censorship (CAC). The CAC core group included filmmakers Saba Dewan, Rahul Roy, Amar Kanwar, Sanjay Kak, Pankaj Butalia and Sameera Dewan.
2. Dewan, interview, 30/1/2008; Roy, interview, 30/1/2008.
3. Sharma, Facebook post, 27/7/2018.
4. Kapur, “Secular Citizen, Secular Artist.”
5. Monteiro and Jayasankar, ‘Fly in the Curry’. In contrast with Indian popular cinema, documentary film remains vastly undertheorized, as Vohra and Rajagopal argued in 2012. Since then, an emerging body of scholarship has started to piece together Indian documentary history. See for example Sharma, Documentary Films in India; Battaglia, ‘Documentary Film in India’; and Kishore, ‘Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers’.
6. These instances have now become too numerous to catalogue in this paper. However, to note a few: protests against the film Padmavaat (2017–18) because it featured a relationship between a (possibly mythical) Hindu queen and a Muslim invader; a ‘ban’ on Pakistani actors in Bollywood films, under pressure from Hindu nationalist groups (2016); the lynching of a young Muslim boy, Junaid Khan, on the suspicion of eating beef (2017); the murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh for her supposedly ‘anti-Hindu’ writing and politics. Censorship has not just intensified; it has become increasingly deadly.
7. Roy cited in Bagchi, ‘More Serious than Emergency’. This was in the wake of the arrests of several human rights activists and lawyers in August 2018.
8. Anjali Monteiro, Facebook post, 23/5/2019.
9. Patwardhan, Facebook post, 23/5/2019.
10. For example, filmmaker Saba Dewan wrote, as Amit Shah was appointed Home Minister, ‘Be afraid, be very afraid India. Remember Gujarat and the “encounter killings”: The last five years might pale in comparison to the horrors awaiting us.’ Facebook post, 31/5/2019.
11. Virdi, ‘Experiments in state incarceration’.
12. Noronha, interview, 28/4/2008, as one example.
13. The terms ‘Campaign against Censorship (CAC)’ ‘Vikalp’ and ‘Films for Freedom’ are sometimes interchangeably used to describe the anti-censorship campaigns waged by documentary filmmakers between 2003 and 2006. They refer to somewhat different locations/events. The CAC was based in Delhi and mobilized the initial campaign against censorship at MIFF. This campaign eventually led to the protest festival, called ‘Vikalp: Films for Freedom’, in Mumbai. While the movement and campaign unified filmmakers and volunteers from around the country, it remained centred in Delhi and Mumbai for the most part.
14. Rajagopal, ‘A Split Public’, 244–50. Rajagopal argues that the mediated public sphere in postcolonial India has been characterized by a ‘split’ between elite/English-speaking/print publics and vernacular/mass publics.
15. Corbridge and Harris, ‘Reinventing India’.
16. Ghosh, interview, 14/1/2008; Dewan, interview,30/1/2008; Kanwar, interview, 24/1/2008.
17. See Garga, Indian Documentary Film. Pramod Pati’s Explorer, for example, used a mix of animation and a rich variety of music along with images from the time. Through the use of reflexive voiceovers, creative montage, direct interviews with ordinary Indians, irony and humour, Pati along with Sukhdev, Chari & Abraham, and Sastry initiated a so-called ‘golden age’ for FD.
18. For more on Indian documentary film’s statist history, see Garga, ‘Indian Documentary Film’, Narwekar, ‘Films Division’, Monteiro and Jayasankar, ‘A Fly in the Curry’, Sutoris ‘Visions of Development’. Kishore’s, ‘Indian Documentary Film’, and Battaglia’s, ‘Documentary Film in India’ provides a detailed account of independent documentary film practice in India.
19. Patwardhan, interview, 5/9/2009; Ghose, interview, 1/1/2008. Gautam Ghose’s Hungry Autumn (1974) was chronologically the first independent film that emerged in the 1970s. Utpalendu Chakrabarty’s Mukti Chai (We Want Freedom, 1977), and Tapan Bose’s An Indian Story became key independent films of this period. Patwardhan’s Prisoners of Conscience became among the best-known documents of the Emergency. These were ‘underground’ films, made under the radar on borrowed equipment, often using personal funds.
20. Ghosh, interview, 23/1/2008; Gadihoke, interview, 23/1/2008.
21. Needham and Rajan, “The Crisis of Secularism.”
22. Dewan, interview, 30/1/2008.
23. Kak, interview, 26/1/2008; Sengupta, interview, 1/24/2008; and Butalia, email communication, 12/2/2012 were among several film-makers who mentioned attempts to create an alternative forum. The Forum for Independent Film and Video was one such early iteration. Parallel discussions took shape in other major cities, especially Mumbai and Delhi.
24. Dewan, interview, 30/1/2008; Ghosh, interview, 23/1/2008; Butalia, email, 12/3/2012.
25. Kelty, ‘Recursive Publics’.
26. Kelty, ‘Recursive Publics’, 186.
27. Thanks to Allen Feldman for this observation.
28. Warner, ‘Publics and counterpublics’.
29. These included: Aakrosh (2003, Ramesh Pimple), Passengers: a video journey in Gujarat (2003, Nooh Nizami and Akanksha Joshi); Gujarat: a laboratory for Hindu Rashtra (2003, Suma Josson), Hey Ram! Genocide in the Land of Gandhi (2002, Gopal Menon), and Godhra Tak: The Terror Trail (2003, Shubradeep Chakravarty).
30. Sundaram, ‘Pirate Modernities’, and Chadha, Moskowitz and Prakash, ‘Online Video Environment’.
31. Rajagopal, ‘The Gujarat Experiment’, 210.
32. Hindu nationalist cultural strategies have worked both through ‘brute power’, including direct coercion and censorship, as well as a powerful process of ‘world-making’ in which it ‘seeks to shape the forms of knowledge emerging along with it’ (Rajagopal, ‘The Gujarat Experiment’, 210).
33. Butalia, interview, 12/3/2012; Sen, interview, 15/2/2012. Through the 1980s, documentary showcases organized as part of the government-run International Film Festival of India (IFFI) had drawn packed audiences, leading many filmmakers to argue that a distinct space for documentary films was necessary. The Ministry of Information & Broadcasting finally initiated a documentary film festival in 1990 – but it also handed the festival over to the Films Division, which was floundering in the 1980s as its monopoly over documentary production disintegrated. This created a break between the government-run space and the independent film-makers who had pushed for the festival, marking MIFF as a space of conflict from its inception.
34. The concern over documentary films like Final Solution and War and Peace were clear indications of the hyper-vigilance the NDA government generally displayed towards any negative media representations. While the circulation of these films among more restricted audiences was less of a concern, its validation by the government’s own space, MIFF, was something the government was intent on avoiding. But it would soon become clear that it was not just overtly political or ‘controversial’ films like Final Solution that were seen as problematic. The wide range of films that were eventually censored at the official festival raised questions about the drives behind state censorship.
35. See Shanbag, Vikalp email, 7/8/2003. There had already been a series of attempts to monitor private screenings of documentary films in Mumbai in 2002–03. Censor Board officials had informed some film-makers that they considered all such activities, including the screening of films at documentary workshops, illegal unless the films in question had been certified.
36. CAC email, 29 July 2003.
37. CAC email, 28 December 2003.
38. Liang, ‘The Public is Watching’. See also Dhawan, ‘Publish and Be Damned’, Mehta, ‘Censorship and Sexuality’, and Mazzarella, ‘Censorium’.
39. Mazzarella, ‘Censorium’, 37. Mazzarella points out that cinema made particularly visible the ‘open edge of mass publicity,’ marking ‘the coming of age of a kind of public communication in the sense that it addresses me and by the same token, addresses unknown others.’ This form of communication enabled, as Susan Buck-Morss ‘Cinema Screen as Prosthesis’ has argued, the new prosthetic organ of cinema enabled the formation of a mass subject: through the simulated version of reality on the screen, the mass was able to see itself as such, and so visualize its own power.
40. Mazzarella and Kaur, ‘Censorship in South Asia’.
41. Mehta, ‘Censorship and Sexuality’. Mehta writes that ‘Kuhn’s and Cronin’s studies show that within Britain as a nation, discussions on film censorship imagined the film spectator as a vulnerable child, an immature adolescent, or a prurient, uneducated lower-class adult…In the colonies, while anxieties about the effects of cinema on children and adolescents continued to be voiced, the native spectator was conflated with these viewers and similarly deemed puerile and volatile…The postcolonial Indian state adopted a similar view of its citizens, showing continuity in colonial and postcolonial practices.’
42. The Cinematograph Act set out the basic principles that would govern censorship: (1) A film shall not be certified for public exhibition if, in the opinion of the authority competent to grant the certificate, the film, or any part of it is against the interests of (Ins. By Act 49 of 1981 (w.e.f. 1-6-1983) the sovereignty and integrity of India) the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality, or involves defamation or contempt of court or is likely to incite the commission of any offence. (2) Subject to the provisions contained in sub-section (1), the Central Government may issue such directions as it may think fit setting out the principles which shall guide the authority competent to grant certificates under this act in sanctioning films for public exhibition. The 1952 Act was amended in 1981 and 1984, with the addition of two new certification categories (UA) and S (for specialized audiences). The Central Board of Censors was renamed the Central Board of Film Certification, in order to emphasize its ‘positive’ rather than negative function. But the basic guiding principles remained the same, with the substitution of ‘sovereignty and integrity of India’ for ‘the security of the state’. See Ganti, ‘The Limits of Decency’.
43. For example, the Filmfare Forum on Censorship set up in 1955 drew a number of critical voices that questioned the rationale behind censorship. Many asked why the censors themselves were considered ‘beings apart’ – supposedly untainted and uncorrupted by the films that could damage weaker and more susceptible minds. Mehta, ‘Censorship and Sexuality’, 14–15.
44. K.A. Abbas v Union of India 1970. This is the official position that the Central Board of Film Certification continues to cite as the rationale for its existence. Its website states, for instance, that film censorship is necessary ‘because of the effect that the audio-visual medium can have on the people which can be far stronger than the influence of the printed word, particularly on the impressionable minds of children…The combination of act and speech, sight and sound in semi-darkness of the theatre with elimination of all distracting ideas will have a strong impact on the minds of viewers and can affect emotions. Therefore, it has as much potential for evil as it has for good and has an equal potential to instill or cultivate violent or good behavior. It cannot be equated with other modes of communication. Certification by prior restraint is, therefore, not only desirable but also necessary.’
45. Mazzarella, ‘Censorium’.
46. Rajagopal, ‘Politics After Television’.
47. Chakrabarty, ‘Provincializing Europe’. This division was central also to the ways in which cinema viewing was imagined, as S.V. Srinivas notes in ‘Cinema Hall Publics’.
48. Kumar, ‘Gandhi meets Primetime’, Punathambekar, From Bombay to Bollywood’.
49. Dhawan, ‘Publish and be Damned’.
50. Mazzarella and Kaur, ‘Censorship and Cultural Regulation’.
51. Liang, ‘The Public is Watching’.
52. Sundaram, ‘Pirate Modernity’. This ‘grey area’ includes the rapid growth of a ‘digital’ market for VCDs, CDs, software, and computer games that spans South Asia and the entire Asia Pacific region. Despite industry and state attempts to impose copyright laws and criminalize piracy, the pirated market remains large and vibrant. In addition, the growth of digital content across platforms has been an even newer phenomenon that official practices of regulation are still trying to make sense of.
53. Chadha, Moskowitz and Prakash, ‘Online Video Environment’. The IT Rules 2011 directs websites to block user content that might be deemed ‘blasphemous, would incite hatred, is ethically objectionable, would infringe on patents, or threaten India’s unity or public order.’ In effect, websites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and others that depend on user-generated content are expected to practice a form of ‘self-censorship.’ In 2012, the Government of India has made further attempts to clamp down, blocking access to various video streaming/file-sharing sites such as Vimeo, Pirate Bay and Torrentz. The usual suspects: pornography, piracy and communal sensitivities have been cited in defence of such measures. These are deeply controversial measures and have led to protests, notably by the hacker collective Anonymous. See Vaidyanathan, ‘India Internet Censorship’.
54. Liang, ‘The public is watching’, Mehta, ‘Censorship and Sexuality’, and Mazzarella, ‘Censorium’.
55. K.A. Abbas’ influential position in the Bombay film industry helped make this censorship battle visible, even pivotal. Abbas (1914–87) was a journalist, screenwriter and director reputed for films such as Dharti Ke Lal (1946), among the first ‘socially realist’ Hindi films, as well as Pardesi (1957) and Shehar Aur Sapna (1963). He was also the screenwriter for many prominent films, such as Raj Kapoor’s Awaara, Mera Naam Joker, and Shri 420. His column, Last Page, remains one of the longest running columns in Indian journalism history.
56. Ibid.
57. Patwardhan, interview, 24/5/2008.
58. ibid.
59. Patwardhan, interview, 28/8/2009. In the case of Patwardhan’s films (as for most ‘political documentaries’), the CBFC asked for cuts or denied a ‘U’ certification on the grounds that the films posed a threat to ‘law and order’. While fiction films usually faced cuts on grounds of obscenity and immorality (and the censor’s attention is focused on representations of sexuality more than anything else), threats posed to ‘law and order’ seemed to be the most common grounds for censoring a ‘political’ documentary film.
60. Butalia, interview, 28/1/2014.
61. Liang, ‘The Public is Watching’, and Dhavan, ‘Censor and Be Damned’.
62. Avikunthak, phone interview, 31/5/2019.
63. See for example Joshua, ‘Maker of Documentary Dead’.
64. See note 45 above.
65. Kak, interview, 26/1/2008; Kanwar, interview, 28/1/2008; Sen, phone interview, 12/2/2014 (among others).
66. Underlying these debates was a complicated duality in the relationship between state funding, support, recognition and the work of independent documentary filmmakers that emerged from a history in which the state had been, for long, the only source of support for documentary filmmaking. Even though that had now changed, the state remained an important source for recognition, honours, and awards that could lead to larger audiences and more prominence.
67. CAC email digest, 6 February 2004.
68. See Monteiro and Jayasankar, ‘Fly in the Curry’, Battaglia, ‘Documentary Film in India’, and Sharma ‘Vikalp’ for parallel accounts about this.
69. Mukherjee, interview, 14/2/2008.
70. The premises of a major political party also offered some protection against ‘mob’ censorship, which might well have stopped the festival in its tracks. In fact, later on, as the Vikalp films travelled to other cities, screenings were often disrupted by Hindu nationalist mobs (Mukherjee, interview, 14/2/2008; Shanbag, interview, 4/4/2008).
71. Merchant, interview, 4/15/2008.
72. Sharma, email interview, 3/16/2012.
73. Vikalp digest 7/2/2004.
74. Dutta, interview, 21/3/2008.
75. Sassatelli, ‘Urban festivals’ Giorgi ‘Festivals.’ In festivals, Sassatelli writes, ‘Durkheim saw a form of “collective effervescence,” in which the solidarity of collective consciousness found both expression and consolidation…This is because festivals can be seen as a space and time separated from the profane dimension of daily life and actualizing the sacred. Durkheim’s approach was then taken up and accorded long-lasting impact through the work of Marcel Mauss and others (see also Caillois 1958) (13)’. Though contemporary arts festivals have lost the close association with religion/the sacred that were central to this conception of traditional festivals, they retain, as Sassatelli argues, the crucial function of sociability in their experiential form.
76. Sharma, ‘Filmmakers became a community’.
77. The Forum for Independent Film and Video was Vikalp’s most immediate precursor, an initiative that involved many key Vikalp members. FIFV had created a ‘vision statement’ for independent documentary filmmaking, defining independent practice against the growing commercial television sector. But both Vikalp and FIFV built on earlier film collectives such as Odessa, Yugantar, Mediastorm, Prakrit, Media Collective, Drishti, and Raqs Media Collective. A notable influence was also that of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, or Sahmat, a powerful artistic intervention created in the wake of the murder of activist and theatre director Safdar Hashmi in 1989 (Sengupta, interview, 2008; Kishore, Indian Documentary Filmmakers). It should be noted that most arts and media collectives in postcolonial India had worked as part of or in close alignment with left political parties such as the Communist Party of India (CPI) or the Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist) (CPI-ML). The influence of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), the cultural wing of the CPI, had been formative for later cultural interventions. However, Sahmat, Raqs, Khoj and a few others had moved towards more diffuse and diverse artistic practices not strictly defined by a party line (Dutta, interview, 21/3/2008; Kishore, ‘Indian Documentary Filmmakers’).
78. CAC email, 1/1/2005.
79. See Tufecki, ‘Twitter and Teargas’, Castells, ‘Networks of Outrage’, and Coleman, ‘Coding Freedom’.
80. Hardt and Negri, ‘Multitude’, xiv. Hardt & Negri also argue that a key aspect of the multitude is its ‘political organization’, that we ‘get a first hint of this democratic tendency when we look at the organization’, that ‘we get a first hint of this democratic tendency when we look at the genealogy of modern resistances, revolts, and revolution, which demonstrates a tendency towards increasingly democratic organization, from centralized forms of revolutionary dictatorship and command to network organizations that displace authority in collaborative relationships.’
81. CAC email, 6/7/2006.
82. Sharma, CAC email, 6/7/2006; Kak Vikalp email, 6/8/2006. The split over the NFA case emerged over genuine strategic differences among the group, centring on a split between ‘court’ v ‘collective action’. However, the creative possibilities embedded within this divide often devolved into personal differences over ‘ownership’ of the CAC/Vikalp and accusations of careerism. Ultimately, were filmmakers who chose to submit their films to the NFA despite the censorship requirements choosing state awards and recognition over collective action? Had the group succeeded in uniting to boycott the NFA, would their demands have been successful? These questions circulated within the group as feuding intensified.
83. The divisions and hierarchies that split the group were fairly common among media collectives and organizations, especially those that aim to be ‘self-managed’, as Downing describes in ‘Radical Media’. Downing describes the ways in which class, gender, and other differences often play out destructively in such organizations, even as they claimed to be non-hierarchical and transparent.
84. Roy interview, 31/1/2008.
85. CAC email, 8 July 2006. Similarly, Amar Kanwar insisted that ‘This important but reasonably insignificant (campaign)…has always been about processes, not only about awards and fighting governments but about freely expressing and doing things that give each other hope and space…if we don’t create as we go along we die. But even if that happens as a larger collective, I am sure enough interests and processes have been set in motion for several smaller groups and initiatives to last for a long time.’
86. Maharishi, Vikalp email, 9 May 2004.
87. Cecic, 3/2/2008; Patwardhan 28/5/2008.While the expansion of the television landscape expanded distribution possibilities, independent documentary filmmakers were often wary of the influences of mainstream television, and attendant pressures towards personal, easily ‘translatable’ films.
88. Kak, ‘Every picture’, 29.
89. Basu and Banerjee, ‘Towards a People’s Cinema’.