In recent years, documentaries from India have made significant headway in attracting attention for their storytelling craft on the global stage. Films like The Elephant Whisperers (2022), All That Breathes (2022), Writing With Fire (2021), While We Watched (2022), and A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) have bagged honours at prestigious international film festivals, including the Academy Awards. However, the domestic distribution of documentaries in India remains severely restricted due to a combination of factors: the absence of a viable theatrical market, the requirement of censorship certification even for limited theatrical exhibition, and the near-total collapse of domestic institutional platforms dedicated to documentary financing. Filmmakers often struggle to secure a theatrical release for their documentaries, both domestically and internationally. Nevertheless, the films do manage to tour the world and also become available in India through film festivals, streaming platforms, and a thriving underground market for pirated films. Even these types of distribution are dependent on the acclaim garnered by the documentary on the world stage, powered through the emerging phenomenon of films being mounted as international co-productions, primarily with European countries.

Popular imagination sees Indian documentaries with political or activist themes as being closely linked to the cinéma vérité school of filmmaking, but it is rather difficult to define what qualities define this genre in India. The form has constantly evolved in response to technological, political, and aesthetic changes. It is even more difficult to map the collective trajectory of such documentaries, given that they are the work of independent filmmakers operating outside mainstream funding and production frameworks. Nevertheless, a closer look at the Indian documentary landscape reveals significant changes in filmmaking practices — an evolution closely linked to institutional mechanisms at play, along with technological developments, and the larger socio-political discourses around the world and in India.

Documentary production in the Indian subcontinent has its roots in initiatives launched during British rule. Foremost among them was the formation of the Film Advisory Board in 1940. Previously, there was little that differentiated fiction and non-fiction films, as both were exhibited commercially in cinema halls. After the creation of the Board, the colonial government began exercising full control over all kinds of film screenings. It became mandatory for theatre owners to screen government-approved short documentaries with educational or propaganda themes before the start of any film. This practice continued post-independence with the creation of the John Grierson-influenced Films Division (FD) in 1948. The Griersonian documentary genre dictated that filmmaking’s imaginative work must fit within the framework of the government’s duty to serve the nation’s populace. By the late 1950s and 1960s, movements such as cinéma vérité in France and Direct Cinema in the United States were questioning the ethics of authorial certainty, replacing explanation with observation and presence. Indian documentary, in contrast, retained a strong rhetorical address well into the post-Independence period as the form demanded clarity over ambiguity. Thus, FD films responded to this unique position of the Indian audience.

In its early years, FD’s use of documentary films centred around disseminating information about State-sponsored welfare programmes, and civic messaging oriented towards nation-building and inculcating ideas of patriotism and nationhood. Even though filmmakers began incorporating experimental techniques, political themes, and even critical standpoints from the mid-1960s  to the mid-1970s, they were well within FD’s “public service” mandate. In these years, under the supervision of Jehangir Bhownagary, filmmakers and artists like Pramod Pati, SNS Sastry, and S Sukhdev increased the scope of experimentation of what could be done through documentaries and the filmic form. Film scholar Ritika Kaushik notes that in doing so, these makers found ways to creatively raise dissident voices against the State while continuing to be under the aegis of that very State’s institutional framework. Films like Pati’s Explorer (1968) and Abid (1972), Sastry’s I am 20 (1967), and Sukhdev’s India ‘67 (1967) all replace the didacticism of documentary with ambiguous montages and people speaking out openly about their problems. This is also the period when FD invited renowned painter MF Husain to direct a film, Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967), that went on to win the National Award for Best Experimental Film that year.

Film still from I am 20 (1967), directed by SNS Sastry. Courtesy: Films Division

By the 1970s, the hegemony of FD in documentary filmmaking was challenged by filmmakers like Anand Patwardhan and Deepa Dhanraj, in part because of the increased accessibility to film equipment and technological innovations like smaller video camera models that were easier to film with. Patwardhan took the Super 8 camera to film the student protests in Bihar, prior to the Emergency in 1975. Inspired by the New Latin American Cinema........

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