Description
Focusing on independent political documentaries and video installations, Documentary Cinema and Video Installation in India explores the forms of artistic resistance that emerged in response to the rise of militant right-wing nationalism in India from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s.
Anuja Jain revisits this era of India's transformation from a young postcolonial democracy to a rapidly globalising and radicalising nation-state, marked by escalating right-wing violence as seen in the Bombay riots of 1992–1993 and the 2002 Gujarat genocide. Set against this turbulent backdrop, she considers how filmmakers and video artists used their work as a site of political intervention. Jain analyses a broad range of political documentaries-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), Unity in Diversity (2003), Lacuna in Testimony (2003), I Love My India (2003), Final Solution (2004), and Hindustan Hamara ('This Country Is Ours', 2014)-alongside previously unexplored materials such as such as state news transcripts, right-wing propaganda videos, government files, litigation records, censored media broadcasts, and rare video newsmagazines. In doing so, she argues that these filmmakers produced an 'archive of dissonance' that challenged official narratives and resisted state censorship.
Jain argues for the urgency of revisiting this turn of the century period from the vantage point of the present, reframing these resistant texts as 'living archives'-unfinished, ongoing, and globally resonant in an era marked by authoritarianism, brutal censorship, and contested notions of citizenship and belonging.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
- Purposes of all links are made clear
Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
1. Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags: Documenting Propaganda
2. Chronicle of a Tragedy Foretold: Anand Patwardhan and Political Documentary
3. Representing the “Unrepresentable”: Documentary Tellings
4. A Retake on Representational Modes: Amar Kanwar and Video Installation in India
5. Feminist Forms and Lexicons of Urgency: Women Artists at Work
Conclusion: Living Archives
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 07 Jan 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 272 |
| ISBN | 9781350602847 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 30 colour illus |
| Series | South Asian Screen Studies |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Reviews
Related Titles
