Table Of ContentIndia Retold
ii
India Retold
Dialogues with Independent Documentary
Filmmakers in India
Edited by
Rajesh James and Sathyaraj Venkatesan
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Cover image: Still from Tales from Our Childhood (2018), Director: Mukul Haloi
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: James, Rajesh, author. | Venkatesan, Sathyaraj, author.
Title: India retold: dialogues with independent documentary filmmakers in India /
Rajesh James and Sathyaraj Venkatesan.
Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021004872 (print) | LCCN 2021004873 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501352676 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501352683 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501352690 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films–India–History and criticism. | Documentary films–
Production and direction–India. | Independent films–India–History and criticism. |
Motion picture producers and directors–India–Interviews.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 J36 2021 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.D6 (ebook) |
DDC 070.1/80954–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004872
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004873
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5267-6
ePDF: 978-1-5013-5269-0
eBook: 978-1-5013-5268-3
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Dedicated to tiny tots
Naythan James
~~~~
Taran Sathyaraj
vi
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Foreword xii
Introduction 1
1 Decoding Ideology: Nationalism, Communalism, and Its Critiques 19
Anand Patwardhan 20
Tapan Bose 30
Amar Kanwar 37
Rakesh Sharma 46
Gopal Menon 55
Nakul Singh Sawhney 64
Kasturi Basu 71
2 The Subversive Eye: Gender and Sexual Identities 81
Deepa Dhanraj 83
Madhusree Dutta 91
Saba Dewan 98
Paromita Vohra 105
Rahul Roy 115
Surabhi Sharma 122
Nishtha Jain 129
Sridhar Rangayan 138
3 Documenting Inequality: Casting the Caste 147
Amudhan R. P. 149
Divya Bharathi 156
4 “Remain True to the Earth”: Mapping the Post-Natural India 163
Sanjay Kak 165
Meghnath 173
Shriprakash 181
Biju Toppo 188
viii Contents
5 Thinking through Regions: Nation and Its Discontents 195
Iffat Fatima 197
R. V. Ramani 204
Pankaj Rishi Kumar 212
Anjali Monteiro | K. P. Jayasankar 219
Haobam Paban Kumar 226
Bilal A. Jan 233
Stanzin Dorjai Gya 240
Raja Shabir Khan 247
Mukul Haloi 253
Bibliography 261
Index 264
Acknowledgments
A project of this magnitude would not have been possible without the care of
many near and dear ones. First, we would like to express our deepest appreciation
to all the interviewed documentary filmmakers who responded to our requests,
emails, and long phone calls with patience and thoughtfulness. They have been
generous with their time and ideas without which the book would have been
impossible. Our special thanks to Gopal Menon, who helped us to network with
many filmmakers interviewed in this project. He has been a pillar of support
since the beginning of this massive and urgent project. We owe a deep sense of
gratitude to Anand Patwardhan, Deepa Dhanraj, Amar Kanwar, Sanjay Kak, and
Nishtha Jain, whose keen interest in the project has been a source of immense
inspiration. Sincere thanks to Aparna Sharma, Department of World Arts and
Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles, for her unstinting support and
for readily accepting to write a foreword for the book. Her insightful foreword
has made this book richer. Thanks also to Laura Mulvey of Birkbeck, University
of London, and Ravi Vasudevan of CSDS, Delhi, for their keen interest in the
project and for being generous interlocutors. We are profoundly grateful to the
reviewers for their thoughtful critiques and valuable suggestions: Giulia Battaglia
of Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram
of Queens Mary, University of London, and Gurumurthy Neelakantan of IIT
Kanpur. Thanks to Shweta Kishore of RMIT University for readily sharing her
book on independent documentary filmmakers and for generously commenting
on an early draft of the book. Thanks are also due to K. P. Jayasankar and Anjali
Monteiro, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, for their incisive feedback
and expertise. The book, no doubt, is much better with their constructive
comments. Big thanks to Katie Gallof and Erin Duffy, the editorial team at
Bloomsbury, New York, for professional guidance and for sensing the relevance
of our project. Without them, the manuscript would never see the light of the day.
Rajesh James
Sathyaraj Venkatesan
This book is a result of collaborative thinking. As an experiment in coauthorship,
this book wouldn’t have been possible without Sathyaraj Venkatesan, the “Il
