Documentary Cinema and Video Installation in India : Archives of Dissonance

Focusing on independent political documentaries and video installations, Documentary Cinema and Video Installation in India is an ambitious, first book-length study that 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 into a rapidly globalizing and radicalizing right-wing nation-state. Set against this turbulent backdrop, she considers how filmmakers and video artists used their work as a site of political intervention, and the forms of resistance they forged. Jain analyses a broad range of political 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), alongside previously unexplored materials such as state news transcripts, right-wing propaganda videos, litigation records, censored media broadcasts, rare video newsmagazines, exhibition histories alongside in-depth original interviews with documentary filmmakers and visual artists. In doing so, Jain argues that by navigating a critical conjuncture of radicalized politics, rapid globalization, and emergent techno-capitalism these texts constitute what she calls “Archives of Dissonance”. They challenge official narratives, and in the process, reconfigure the locus, logic, and materiality of the concept of the archive.

Jain argues for the value of revisiting the 1990s–2000s from the vantage of the present to situate these texts of resistance as “Living Archives”— present, continuing, and unfinished. This book has a timely, global relevance in the present moment marked by authoritarianism, brutal censorship of free speech, and fascist constructions of citizenship across the world. It enunciates imaginaries of resistance located in the Global South.