Can there be another Vikalp? Documentary film, censorship histories, and film festival publics in India

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Vikalp Film Festival of 2004 (Vikalp, meaning ‘alternative’ in Hindi) has been celebrated as a seminal event in Indian documentary history, an unprecedented, collective mobilization against censorship that also marked a distinct historical rupture in documentary film history in postcolonial India. In this article, I build on recent accounts of the festival by participants and scholars to explore (a) the nature of the interventions that ‘Vikalp’ sought to stage in the history of cinema censorship and (b) the shifts in political documentary film-making that it engendered vis-à vis histories of grassroots political activism in India, as well as emerging networked social movements globally. While Vikalp did not ultimately succeed in changing the colonial-era censorship regulations that continue to govern film exhibition in India, I argue that it changed the terms on which censorship debates had played out by reimagining the role that documentary film could play in protests. Enacting a shift from viewing individual films as ‘tools’ in political struggle, Vikalp focused on the affective encounter between documentary narratives and diverse new audiences in the new millennium. The documentary film screenings and festivals that Vikalp helped mobilize became one node for a documentary ‘counter public’ that called on a reimagining of the form and aesthetics of political documentary film-making, as well as new relationships between artistic practice and activism that continue to circulate across material and physical spaces of film production and circulation in contemporary India.