Bhaskar Parichha
Some days back when the release of a documentary on Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen was stalled by the film censor board, the filmmaker had to, rather unenthusiastically, upload the trailer on YouTube. The film ‘Argumentative Indian’ by Suman Ghosh couldn’t pass the test because of certain words/ phrases used by the renowned economist: “Gujarat”, “Hindu” and “Hindutva view of India”. Also, as the censor board felt, Sen couldn’t have said the word “Cow” in the film. Ghosh was asked to beep out these words. The documentary had been filmed over the past 15 years and the conversation is between Sen and his student Kaushisk Basu, another economist of fame.
Has the Indian documentary come of age? What is the current status of documentary filmmaking? Does it still weird the influence as it had once? What are the curves and shapes of documentary film making in the age of mobile phones and Facebook? These and more such crucial questions come to mind with regular intensity. Then of course the problem of money. Has this exacting predicament eased with crowd -funding?
Marg has answers to some of these nagging questions The September-December issue is entirely devoted to documentary film making in India. Guest-edited by Ravi Vasudevan(CSDS,New Delhi), the debate is wide-ranging and thematically big and strong. Besides an overview of documentary filmmaking by Vasudevan, the other contributions are fairly varied and go deep into the theoretical and practical aspects of the subject.
Avijit Mukul Kishore(Mumbai-based filmmaker) has dealt with the imaging technology as it has evolved over a hundred years with a specific note on the digital technology. He is of the view that with ever -changing technology, film-makers should bring in more ‘visual diversity to cinema’ – whether it is fiction or non-fiction.Priya Jaikumar’s(University of South California) piece on Films Division’s tourism -linked documentaries unveils its loaded history besides chronicling the ‘Brand India ‘and ‘Incredible India’ slogans that have evolved over the years.
Veena Hariharan(School of Arts and Aesthetics,JNU) has dealt with a rather important area –environmental documentaries. Beginning with the tour de force Narmada Bachao Andolan to the documentaries by NGOs to ‘address micro and macro issues related to water’, she draws round this genre of film making that has become so crucial to our lives. Nicole Wolf’s (Univeristy of London) article on the journey of Yugantar and its feminist orientation, Ruchir Joshi’s (Kolkata-based filmmaker) piece on the difficult path that independent film makers had to tread make for an exciting read.
Amar Kanwar,who has won several international awards for his documentaries, has hit upon an important subject in documentary filmmaking – vagueness, irresolution and repugnance to certain ideas and subjects and how as a filmmaker he has tackled it. While Rahul Roy’s(specializing in South Asian documentaries) article deals with magical realism in documentary films , Sameera Jain(Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communications, New Delhi) has tried to sort out the issue of pedagogy and practice in relation to community films.
Ishita Tiwari (PhD student ,JNU)has traced the history of video magazine and how ‘Kalachakra’ became the prototype of video investigative journalism in India.Shaunak Sen’s(Delhi) article on sting videos,Anuja Jain’s(University of St Andrews) article on the pitfalls of curating film images in India,Pallavi Paul’s(PhD student,JNU) piece on Ravi Agarwal’s photographic images make for compelling and spacious understanding of the subject.
A free-wheeling conversation between Vasudevan by Shohini Ghosh(Professor Jamia Millia Islamia) puts a large number of issues in the proper perspective. Given Vasudevan’s long stint in documentary film teaching, his responses are as chronological as they are inspiring. His remark that the ‘documentary practitioners – as opposed to journalists – have the tendency to be more alive to ethical issues’ is succinctly true.
Latika Gupta in her editorial note believes that the issue of Marg will ‘interrogate the changing modes of image-making and the power that the audio-visual medium still wields in societies across the world.’
Revisiting the subject of documentary filmmaking after a gap of almost six decades (Marg had done an issue in 1960) makes lot of sense because the whole connotation of documentary film making in India has changed and it has undergone profound transformation since the time of Mohan Bhavnani,A Bhaskar Rao,BD Garga, Homi Sethna and Paul Zils et al – who were the early pioneers in the field.
(The writer is a senior journalist and currently associated with OdishaLIVE as Consulting Editor)
