Accepted Panels

The field of documentary filmmaking was largely under the control of Films Division of India during 1948 to 1975. The prominent shift in Indian documentary films came with the independent documentary films, Waves of Revolution (1974) and Prisoners of Conscience (1978) by Anand Patwardhan covering the issues of 1975 national emergency. The period followed by emergency witnessed number of independent documentaries made by independent filmmakers like Gautam Ghose, Utpalendu Chakrabarty, Tapan Bose Deepa Dhanraj and others. However, many of the documentary film practices of the current moment – look different now than it did in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The elements that we are used to seeing in documentary films as a mode of representation: talking heads, archive footage and verité are being reconfigured into new, often fractured and fragmentary forms in these online documentary practices which can be described as documentary digitalities. The platforms like Dalit Camera or YouTube channels on student protests can be seen under the purview of documentary digitalities documenting the resistance of the contemporary times. It is on this backdrop that the study explores how these documentary film practices of different periods since 1975 have performed the archival role in documenting and producing public records of the subaltern voices of the time. The ‘talking heads’ of documentary forming the audio-visual testimonies not only perform the evidential function in the documentary but also becomes the repository of visual anthropology of and political and cultural resistances of the time. The documentary digitalities like PARI collate the everyday life of people living at margins and therefore can we see them as archives of the present which contribute to the visual anthropology of subalterns? The paper raises this query and analyses the documentary practices of India in the context of visual anthropology of the subalterns.