I want to start on a personal note by talking about my media-viewing habits, which changed drastically after November 9th, 2016. On that day, you may remember, a man who boasted about grabbing pussies, and co-founded the now-defunct Trump University, an unaccredited for-profit institution selling bogus high-priced courses on wealth creation was elected the 45th President of the United States. It had been hard enough to read news and analysis from India, where Narendra Modi, former Chief Minister of Gujrat and member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS, a right-wing paramilitary organization dedicated to making India a Hindu nation, had been elected Prime Minister in 2014.

I found myself turning to slow-moving Pakistani melodramas, ideally with Fawad Khan in starring roles, or binging on screwball comedies, especially if they had Cary Grant and leopards in them. It was about all the media I could handle for a while. And yet, in this present that was proving hard to accept or fathom, a few voices from the past cut through with clarity. One of them was the voice of Primo Levi, the Jewish Italian writer and chemist, who survived (in a manner of speaking) the Monowitz-Buna camp at Aushwitz. In an essay from 1976 called “A Past We Thought Would Not Return,” he says this: “Every age has its own Fascism, and we see the warnings signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own will. There are many ways of reaching this point, not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralysing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of the privileged few depended in the forced labor and the forced silence of the many.” We know this. We have witnessed it time and again. And yet why does the arc of history often bend and twist every which way except towards justice? When I left India in 1991, the nation’s banks, economy and media were at the brink of privatization. Modi was a background RSS preacher or pracharak aboard a Toyota truck, gussied up to look like a chariot. This was part of a procession led by the then-Prime Minister, L. K. Advani. The Ram Rath Yatra, as it was called, was meant to restore a temple to the Hindu God Rama at the site of Babri Masjid, by demolishing the 16th century mosque. Could we have foreseen then, that a violent Muslim-baiting politics of spectacle would combine with a neoliberalizing marketplace of glitz, to birth an authoritarian crony-capitalist regime, distracting a nation with shouty infotainers by 2022? Today, the Ambanis and the Adanis, two industrialists who have Prime Minister Modi’s favor, monopolize India’s big retail industries, infrastructures, media enterprises, ports, natural resources, energy, power and more. Did and could anyone see this coming? Anand Patwardhan, the public figure and documentary filmmaker sitting with us today, teaches us that the answer to this question–Could and did anyone see this coming?–is both yes and no. Yes, we should have seen it coming. Anand has literally been telling us as much since the 1970s, with his documentaries and activism. And no, we should not have seen it coming. Because our present is NOT the only inevitable conclusion of all that has gone before it. It is merely one trajectory of an endless series of possibilities opened up by the past.

Anand’s films brim with this hope, as he shows us people debating, organizing, reasoning, singing, writing, and fighting for equality and justice, as they struggle to realize other possible futures. At any point, including right now, we can move in different directions. We can be much better. Equally, we can be much worse, depending on what we are willing to see, and how we are willing to act. It is in this context that Anand’s documentaries are essential viewing. Anand is a visual historian who chronicles the minutiae of people’s lives and beliefs, while making macro-arguments about India and democracy relevant to any modern society. I find his films simultaneously unbearable for the realities they reveal, and unforgettable for the images and words they sear into my mind. One such image is that of the Mandakini dolls from Anand’s 1994 documentary Father, Son and the Holy War. Anand shows us a Shivaji Jayanti, which an event celebrating the Maratha king Shivaji, who has acquired mythic proportions in today’s anti-minoritarian India for battling the Islamic Bijapur Sultanate in the 1600s. Father, Son and the Holy War takes us to Shivaji Jayanti celebrations that are not unlike Disneyland displays, full of life-sized mechanized dolls. Mechanized dolls of the elephant God Ganesh, of a potbellied Brahman, and most disturbingly, of Mandakini. Mandakini was a movie star of the 1990s, who acted in Raj Kapoor’s blockbuster Ram Teri Ganga Mailia (Ram, Your Ganges is Polluted). In a controversial bathing scene in the film, the actress’s white sari is drenched by a waterfall so that we see her breasts. Here at a Shivaji Jayanti, a multitude of men gape at plastic replicas of wet Mandakinis in all sizes. Anand asks one of the attendees: Why are these dolls here? What do they have to do with Shivaji Maharaj? The man has ready response: Well, these dolls show us how women in Shivaji’s time felt safe enough to bathe naked in public. The men around him nod and smile in approval. Nearly three decades later, this exchange and my horrified laughter still haunt me. When I saw it in the 1990s, I fervently hoped that the incoherent jumble of machismo and misogyny, violence and voyeurism, nativist and Manuvadi. Hindutva sentiments spouted by these doll apologists would not migrate into the mainstream, and poison the heart of India. But they did. In Anand’s documentaries, we witness the concatenation of forces that can turn any democracy into a dystopian nightmare. He shows us how dangers are palpable in any deeply

unequal society, where disparities are entrenched by rules of endogamy such as caste and race laws; by extreme labor exploitation; no consciousness of worker’s rights; underfunded public education; unaffordable private schools; corrupt governance; dangerous religious cults and domestic terrorists courted for political expediency; compromised press and judiciary; attenuated truth; an undefended Constitution; and the persecution of dissenters through a deadly triumvirate

of “gaali, goli and jail. ” Gali is trolling, death threats and intimidation. Goli is the assassinating bullet. And jail is incarceration without demonstrable cause, evidence, or possibility of bail. Anand and Sidharth have been at the received end of such threats, increasingly I imagine since 2019, when Modi’s re-election was accepted as an endorsement of Hindutva politics.

To Anand and Sidharth, I leave the elaboration of recent and ongoing events in India. In Reason (Vivek in Hindi) we learn about Dhabolkar, Pansare, Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh’s life work and their brutal assassinations for being outspoken defenders of rationality, equality and intellectual freedom; we learn of the Sanathan Sanstha cult in Goa; the RSS/Bajrang Dal plot in the 2008 Bombay Terror Attacks; the events at HCU and JNU; the imposition of UAPA, CAA and NRC; and about figures such as Rohit Vemula, Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid.

Watching Reason is your best introduction to all of this, as the film joins the dots between these people, events and institutions in a sprawling account of the mainstreaming of RSS extremism in Indian politics, media, and society today. What I would like to raise are brief observations about Anand’s filmmaking style across his documentaries.- Anand is a long duree researcher, visual ethnographer, and relationship builder. Dedicating decades to recording events, stories and key interviews allows him assemble the everyday, granular details and beliefs of Indians into a sweeping history of the nation. We get history with a capital and a small “h.” – Anand’s films give us the deep contexts for India’s present, alongside the immediacy of hearing people speak in their own voices, outside of media sound-bytes. So in Reason, we hear from the survivors of those killed by extremist Hindu assassins and lynch mobs, such as Sheila Dhabolkar, Uma Pansare, and Mohammad Akhlaq’s son. They speak to Anand with trust and courage, serving not only as the moral centers of the film, but also revealing the filmmaker’s ability to draw them out, and give them a platform when India’s media reneges on that promise. In other words, the veils come down. Men of the Hindu Rashtra Sena proudly claim that they are a “fascist organization.” VHP men rail about love jihad, which refers to a twisted fantasy that Muslim men court and marry Hindu women only as a pretext to Islamic conversion. – Anand gives everyone enough rope to hang themselves with, or enough space to elevate audiences to their levels of idealism. He makes his arguments through an arrangement of many voices, with Eisenstienian tonal and intellectual montages combined with his own voice overs. For instance, we hear the VHP account of love jihad right after Dhabolkar refutes caste and religious discrimination, as he asks girls to defy their Hindutva fathers by telling them that “every human has a 99.9% identical genome pattern.” Despite being silenced by vigilantes, Dhabolkar’s ideas reach us resoundingly through Anand’s documentary. – As a filmmaker, I think Anand embodies multiple dialectics: he is a patient listener and a showman; a serious historian and a sensationalist; an outraged citizen and a humorous absurdist;a rousing lyricist and a reflective academic (Reason is after all a thesis with many chapters and offshoot arguments, ending with a conclusion that alludes to the film’s many parts in ways that will be familiar to academics, and to fans of Jean Luc Godard films). Like Dhabolkar and Pansare, like the Bhakti poet Tuka and the farmer poet Nikam, like the Dalit singer-activist Vilas Dogre, whose unforgettable songs in Anand’s 1985 documentary Bombay Our City haunt his 2011 documentary Jai Bhim Comrade, Anand has faith in the power of art to effect social and political change. In the words of poet Nikam from Reason, “only cultural activists can spread our real history.” – Why? Because to echo Latin America’s revolutionary or third cinema filmmakers of the 1970s, the first step to social transformation is the development of a new consciousness about one’s reality. When mass culture becomes an echo-chamber of dangerous establishment ideas, then you fight it with art that sides with evidence and truth using every aesthetic device in your arsenal.

In Solanas and Getino’s words, “Pamphlet films, didactic films, report films, essay films, witness bearing films-any [militant] form of expression is valid…as Che put it, respect the people by giving them quality” (p. 9). Anand is not above using some Bollywood techniques either, despite his justified distrust of films that glorify violent patriotism and blind faith, such as Border. His films grab our attention to serve as pretexts for debate. They make audiences think of themselves as protagonists shaping the future, the present, the success, and the failure of a society. This makes his films a threat to the Indian state, and a lesson for all of us living in threadbare democracies.

Priya Jaikumar

Professor and Chair

Cinema and Media Studies

University of Southern California