"In the specific case of cinema — the art of the masses par excellence — its transformation from mere entertainment into an active means of de-alienation becomes imperative. Its role in the battle for the complete liberation of man is of primary importance. The camera, then, becomes a gun, and the cinema must be a guerilla cinema" – Anand Patwardhan, 1981.
The wide-angle shot of busy streets with people crossing roads, the noisy sound of passing cars and taxis, the cacophony of various street sounds, with the diegetic theme music of Ramanand Sagar's popular television serial "Ramayana" and a loud voice on speaker preaching about 'Ram' and 'people awakening to religion', marks the beginning of Anand Patwardhan's 1992 documentary film In the Name of God. In the same shot, the camera zooms in to a banner in the middle of the streets that has a BJP senior leader, Lal Krishna Advani, in the right bottom, the image of a lotus in the middle and an enormous picture of Ram as a warrior with an arrow and bow in his hands; as if marching forward to build his own place on October 30. The camera soon shifts to people wearing bhagva (saffron) coloured turbans and truckloads of people chanting "Hum saugandh Ram ki khate hai, mandir wahi banayenge, bacha bacha ram ka, janmbhoomi ke kaam ka". As the chaos on the streets amplifies, the diegetic voice of Advani's pre-recorded speech, claiming the importance of 'Ram' and 'Ram-Mandir' for the betterment of life and survival, is montaged with people in torn clothes standing in a dirty, unclean area — a hall-mark of Patwardhan's documentary style.
Born in an upper-class family in 1970, Anand Patwardhan is considered the pioneer of independent documentary film practices that emerged in the 1970s, distinctive from earlier ones; the pre-colonial documentaries and documentaries by Films Division of India (FD). Though the term 'being independent' suggests film practices that were out of state control and against state powers, sometimes even independent from funding bodies and mainstream cinema, the political intention of independent filmmakers at that time to a great extent, aligned with FD (a government body). Patwardhan's style was different in its approach and questioned the state power. He adapted the 16mm sync-sound technologies associated with the 'cinema verite' method of documentary filmmaking in which the filmmaker can actively participate and is a subjective observer. In his films, he asks questions from behind the camera; and sometimes even occupies a few frames in the filming process. Therefore, there is a continuous engagement of the filmmaker, unlike 'direct cinema' or 'fly-on-the-wall documentary', where the filmmaker is an objective observer of an uninterrupted truth.
In Independent India, the Griersonian tradition of documentary filmmaking was named after John Grierson, the Scottish-born filmmaker and administrator. He became a leading figure in the British documentary movement of the 1930s. The style prevailed for decades to promote state propaganda. It presented a problem/solution format to the audiences, insisting that the state had resources and means to solve problems, thereby deterring any direct political participation on the part of the people. Soon Griersonian-styled Films Divisions' documentaries with false state propaganda started seeming irrelevant to political enthusiasts and filmmakers like Patwardhan. They rejected it and turned toward "New Latin American Cinema" — a revolutionary vanguard of political cinema both in content and aesthetics. Patwardhan disdained FD films for their use of realism to sell government propaganda. In his film A Narmada Dairy, he juxtaposes contemporary news footage with a sound bite of the narrator from an FD film Village of Smiles, quoting Nehru, "Dams are temples of modern India," to comment ironically on FD/Griersonian tradition.
New Latin American Cinema is a term given by scholars to a continent-wide emergence of a new style that incorporated fiction, documentary, and an amalgamation of both in South America. It adopted a technique that sought revolutionary action against the US neo-imperialism and its repressive regime on the continent, exposing the reality of the existing social conditions. It was an uncoordinated movement devoid of any national identity, with different modes of expression and diversity, lacking any institutional or aesthetic principles, with the chief aim of combating oppressive regimes fostered by the US. The film Toss Me a Dime (1957) by Fernando Birri, an Argentine sociologist-turned-filmmaker, is considered a seminal work.
According to Patwardhan, the two proclamations from New Latin American Cinema – Towards a Third Cinema by Fernando E. Solanas and Octavio Getino and For an Imperfect Cinema by Julio García Espinosa, have the clearest written pronouncements of guerilla cinema. Guerilla cinema's primary purpose is a social reorganisation and exposing the system's injustice by highlighting class structures.
In his film Waves of Revolution, Patwardhan synthesises the radical ideas of Third Cinema and Imperfect cinema. The film covers the Emergency period when the rising poverty, increasing gender divide, and state corruption had led to student protests in all the parts of the country, mainly in Gujarat, with students demanding the dissolution of Congress from the state government. Soon, the protests inspired students of Bihar, who struggled against their own state's misgovernance. The protest gained momentum when Jayaprakash Narayan, a Gandhian reformer and hero of the anti-colonial struggle, joined it as their leader. Patwardhan shot the film using an 8mm hand-held camera without proper microphone equipment to document and capture this historic event. Most of the shots in the film are roughly edited and have scratched images.
Due to the unavailability of an optical printer and the poor quality of the footage, Patwardhan had to project the film on a sheet to obtain 16mm footage. The aesthetics in Patwardhan's film includes experimental sounds, montage and archival footage. Patwardhan's use of diegetic sound: songs at rallies, protests and ceremonies — indigenous in their origin — becomes the centre of his unique documentary style. He uses local folk music, poetry and theatre to produce rich performative and literary expressions of resistance in response to socio-historic conditions; a powerful medium for an artist in a democratic State. The film concludes with a Bihari folk song — a cinematic signature of Patwardhan. He describes himself as a militant practitioner of 'imperfect cinema'. Patwardhan's influence on India's independent documentary film practices and his own inspiration from Latin Cinema is conspicuous in his film screenings. His films are often screened impromptu and are clandestinely held at different places. Aswani Pankaj, a documentary filmmaker, once confessed: "I found inspiration in what he said about screening films and bringing them to people. I was inspired by his screening ideology and not by his filmmaking!" (Aswani Pankaj in conversation with Giulia Battaglia, July 2008).
Many Latin American filmmakers believed that the camera could not do justice in representing the reality of an inherently unjust and oppressive social formation. It could only capture a portion of the political and economic dynamics behind it. Therefore, they later incorporated the "Brechtian approach" in filmmaking as they believed the simple reproduction of reality conveys less than the actual reality. They argued that cinema can construct new meaning through the juxtaposition of images and sound and could reveal forces that operate beneath, which are inaccessible to the audience via a direct experience or consciousness of reality. Similarly, Anand Patwardhan deliberately incorporates Brecht's 'alienation effect' in his films to prevent the audience from going into a state of passive consumption and be aware of what's happening, both politically and socially. The following scenes from his films explain his use of the Brechtian approach to make the spectator aware of the cinematic apparatus:
In the film Bombay Our City, Patwardhan contrasts the scenes of slum clearances with a montage of high-rise buildings of affluent people of Bombay, with officials who criminalise the poor as trespassers on the property. Patwardhan presents such contrast to detach the audience from the emotional engagement and push reasoning over emotions.
In his other film Vivek (Reason), he shows two different worlds in subsequent shots: one based on religion and superstition, the other based on science and fact. At an ashram, a round gold object appears through the magical powers of Sathya Sai Baba, while at a construction site, buildings get constructed through manual labour. The baba fools and manipulates people into blind faith through religion and myths propounded in the ashram. At the same time, a woman at the construction site educates and teaches people to question practices through reasons and science. To show the distinction, the devotional song playing in a temple abruptly gets dissolved by the street noise at the construction site. The transition is not smooth and is Brechtian rhetoric to make the audience critically aware of the film. Anand Patwardhan deliberately wants his audience to remain critical observers and make a rational judgement about the political aspects of his work. His adaptation of New Latin Cinema ideas, primarily the 'For an Imperfect Cinema', accentuates here.
The recurrent motif of a motorcycle revving up and the sound of gunshots in the film Vivek is one of Patwardhan's poetic ways to present reality linked within a larger historical context. He urges the audience to decipher the pattern themselves and take sides accordingly. He asks them to recognise the actual demons, to rise against the escalating communal violence, alert them to the seeds of hatred that are being sown by the right-wing fundamentalists on the pretext of restoring a glorified lost identity and safeguarding their religion from external threat. The film centres around the assassination of four intellectuals who questioned the rising intolerance and violence in the country and challenged the ideology of Sangh Parivar: Narendra Achyut Dabholkar, Gobind Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi, and Gauri Lankesh. They were brutally murdered in the same way — by an unknown group of people on a motorcycle at strange hours with a pistol. Patwardhan supplements the film with archival footage and newspaper clippings. Many sections in the film keep referring to past historical events and historical figures like Mahatma Gandhi, B. R. Ambedkar, Savitribai Phule, and Gautam Buddha to present the idea of a secular, Independent India. The repeated use of gunshots and motorcycle disconcerts the spectators but forces their attention toward the 'hit and run' culture of terror and violence. It brings to mind another assassination in public memory — the gunshots that killed Gandhi on January 30, 1948. In its narrative and historical reflection, the film traces the 'ideology and hatred' that killed Gandhi: an ideology of false Hindutva that slaughters humankind to thrive and present its supremacy.
Similarly, In the last segment of his film In the Name of God, Patwardhan asks a few people from an angry crowd marching forward to demolish the long-standing Babri masjid, "Who killed Gandhi?" One of them, while speaking, unconsciously strokes his moustache to assert his manliness, and what seemed to be the general masculinity of self-claimed Hindus and nationalists, and says, "Godse, and he did the right thing. Whoever betrays the nation will meet the same fate." The scene presents a dystopic view of the future, it shows that the faces have changed over the years and the tactics have shifted, but the ideology remains the same.
The film also shows the remarkable calmness and boldness with which the filmmaker posits his question to people, without any bias on the political front. At one point in Vivek, a lawyer in a press conference angrily asks, "Why didn't the police break Anand Patwardhan's bones for disrupting social order?" while Patwardhan calmly stands and says, "I am here. Take whatever action you want to take." To present the honest viewpoint and facts, he goes to a considerably large extent and at times lands himself in a dangerous predicament, setting him apart from other documentary practitioners.
In another sequence, when Patwardhan goes to the police commissioner's office and confronts him, "Why no arrest has been made three months after Pansare was killed?" the camera becomes the witness of sweeping history. It registers and follows the symbols of liberal democracy by focusing on portraits of Gandhi and Ambedkar and the four lion heads on Ashoka Pillar outside the commissioner's office. It symbolically conveys the idea of peace and non-violence imagined for an Independent India and the promise of justice, which now remains silent in this democratic state whose fabrics, under the oppressive ruling regime, are persistently getting ripped.
At the beginning of Vivek, Patwardhan interviews Shaila Dabholkar, wife of Narendra Dabholkar. The camera registers a poignant moment between the filmmaker and his subject, filled with tenderness and respect for human dignity. Mrs Dabholkar stops as Patwardhan interrupts her and later asks for forgiveness for the intrusion. She calmly asserts, "It's all right," and continues to speak but abruptly stops while trying to recollect her thoughts. The moment shows a deep reflection of loss and recovery on a human face; a moment when pain and grief rise to the surface and disappear once again, a moment where investigation and confrontation rise above political intentions and turn into an intimate human bond. In a time when it seems as though humanity has stooped to its lowest level and debauchment of human morals and dignity has become common, such a moment is restorative.
The films of Anand Patwardhan have always faced censorship, be it within the nation or outside of it. Patwardhan mentions, "It's not enough to make the films. The real battle has been to show them." One of his films, War and Peace, faced the strongest suppression by the government, and the Censor Board demanded six cuts, which later rose to twenty-one after Patwardhan lodged a formal protest. Patwardhan managed to screen it at the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) in 2002. After the film's screening, the government added a clause of compulsory censor certification for all films being screened at MIFF, something that was unnecessary before. Patwardhan criticised the International Leipzig Festival and its jury at the screening of his film, In Memory of Friends, in 1991, for showing his earlier film Bombay: Our City, without competition and without subtitles. The probable reasons for the unfair treatment of his film could be the German Democratic Republic's diplomatic relations with India, given that the film severely criticised the government.
Patwardhan remains a tall-standing figure questioning the regime and their abuse of powers, while simultaneously focusing on human rights through his unique style of documentary filmmaking. He hasn't surrendered to threats or led himself and his work to moral decadence. He continues to make people aware of their rights to question what's happening around them.