Documentary Cinema and Video Installation in India

Documentary Cinema and Video Installation in India explores the forms of artistic resistance that emerged against the backdrop of India’s rapid transformation from a young postcolonial democracy into a rapidly globalizing and radicalizing right-wing nation-state.Set against the politically turbulent period of the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, Anuja Jain considers how filmmakers and video artists used their work as a site of political intervention. She analyses a broad range of documentaries and video works, including Ram Ke Naam (In the Name of God, 1992), The Boy in the Branch (1993), I Live in Behrampada (1993), The Men in the Tree (2002), Final Solution (2004), Unity in Diversity (2003), I Love My India (2003) and The Lightning Testimonies (2007). She also examines previously unexplored materials, including state news transcripts, right-wing propaganda videos, litigation records, censored media broadcasts, rare video news magazines, exhibition histories, and in-depth original interviews with documentary filmmakers and visual artists. In doing so, Jain reconceptualizes these texts as what she terms ‘archives of dissonance’, suggesting that, by navigating the critical conjuncture of radicalized politics, rapid globalization, and emergent techno-capitalism, they challenge official narratives and, in the process, reconfigure the locus, logic, and materiality of the archive itself.In the present moment marked by a global rise in authoritarianism, brutal censorship, and fascist constructions of citizenship, Jain highlights the value of revisiting these ‘living archives’, arguing that they enunciate imaginaries of resistance rooted in the Global South.