Files Beget Films: Experimentation and Emergency in Sarkari Film in India

ConTrust Research seminar „India as Method: Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Media and Politics in Contemporary South Asia“

Looking into the conceptual and methodological stakes of examining state-sponsored documentary filmmaking from India, this talk will show how the bureaucratic state mechanisms and the technical, intellectual, and artistic forces of filmmaking synthesized into a recognizable, heterogeneous, and enduring form of state-sponsored filmmaking that I term sarkari film. By focusing on India’s prime institution of documentary and short film production, Films Division of India (FD), I track the shifts in the temper of the times over two decades that saw experimentation in the official documentary films (1965-1967), as well as several periods of national crises when the same institution was mobilized to make films for government publicity, as during the Indian Emergency (1975-77), a period of 21 months that saw restrictions on constitutional rights and civil liberties, suspension of elections, and the arrests of opposition leaders. In conceptualizing FD’s film practice as sarkari—a Hindi-Urdu term that connotes practices having to do with the government and bureaucracy—I show how the bureaucratic paperwork appears as a key life-giving and life-taking force field in relation to filmmaking. Combining the close analyses of filmswith extensive primary archival research, I show the interlacing of creativity and officialdom in state-sponsored filmmaking.

Ritika Kaushik is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Research Training Group „Configurations of Film“ at Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her academic and videographic research focuses on the history, aesthetics, infrastructures, archives, and afterlives of state sponsored documentaries in India.