Resistance in Indian Documentary Film

Shweta Kishore lectures in Screen and Media at RMIT University, Australia. She is the author of Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers: Independence in Practice and has published widely on Indian documentary, documentary ethics, feminist film, and activist film festivals. Shweta is a documentary practitioner and has curated documentary and artist cinema programmes for the Kochi Muziris Biennale (India), The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre (Vietnam), and the Melbourne International Film Festival (Australia). Kunal Ray teaches literary and cultural studies at FLAME University, Pune, India. His writings on art and culture regularly appear in The Hindu, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times amongst other publications. He co-edited Shabd aur Sangeet- Unraveling Song-Texts in India. He is also the co-founder and co-editor of On Eating – A Multilingual Journal of Food & Eating.

Indian documentary films have served as ventriloquists for state reason, and then as tribunes defending the people. Increasingly, over the past three decades, they have grown to include a rich repertoire of ways of linking the personal and the political, unpacking and rethinking assumptions of majority and minority, of secular realism and its critiques, and of technique and exhibition. Shweta Kishore and Kunal Ray have assembled an expansive and deeply nuanced set of essays on these issues and more, from scholars, filmmakers, and curators, reflecting the state of the art on Indian documentary film. This book is a necessary addition to any library.

• Contributor BiosList of AbbreviationsIntroduction: Resistance in the digitised present - Shweta Kishore and Kunal RayPart 1. Critical perspectives on documentary aesthetics and formChapter 1. The corporeality of homelessness in Cities of Sleep: social aesthetics and an unreliable narrator - Shweta KishoreChapter 2: "Canine Spaces": Kolkata’s Slum Dogs - Veena HariharanChapter 3: "Threadbearing": Journeys with our Subjects and our Documentary Narratives - K P Jayasankar and Anjali MonteiroPart II. Representation of lived experienceChapter 4: Personal is Political: Documentary and Intimacy - Shabnam SukhdevChapter 5: Making films from and about the Margins - Lipika Singh DaraiChapter 6: Against all odds – a filmmaker’s quest to make films in North-East India - Haobam Paban KumarChapter 7: Experiencing and Representing Conflict: Encounters of a Kashmiri Filmmaker - Raja Shabir KhanChapter 8: Documentary & Oppositional Bahujan Agency - Jyoti NishaPart III. Resistance in practiceChapter 9: Curating Documentary Film and Video Art in a Museum: Reflections from Loss and Transience - Rashmi Devi Sawhney & Lucía Imaz KingChapter 10: Working with Time: Editing the Documentary - Sameera JainChapter 11: Cultural Documentary: Dialogues Between Aesthetics and Society - Ein LallChapter 12: The Politics of Image Making - R V RamaniChapter 13: Two Starting Points: The Sonic in my Films -YashaswiniChapter 14: Conversations, Confusions, Confessions: Living with and Working in Cinema - Anupama SrinivasanChapter 15: About Critique: Indian Media & Documentary Cinema - Kunal Ray & Mochish KSEpilogue: On Building Documentary Cultures of Resistance, An interview with K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro