The most important Indian title to be screened at the ongoing Toronto International Film Festival isn’t a feature from Bollywood, but a searing independent documentary by one of the most celebrated practitioners of the form.

Anand Patwardhan’s Reason (the Hindi title is Vivek) was premiered at Toronto on Saturday. Divided into eight chapters and clocking in at four hours and 20 minutes, Reason is easily one of the most important documentaries to emerge in the Age of Modi. The film dives fearlessly into the debates that hit the headlines with troubling regularity: the murders of rationalists and attacks on activists critical of government policy; the emergence of shadowy Hindutva organisations such as Sanathan Sanstha and Abhinav Bharat; hyper-nationalism; the attacks on Muslims and Dalits in the guise of cow protection; the attempts to rewrite history; the mainstreaming of radical Hindu beliefs and the attempts within the government and outside it to transform India into a Hindu state; the attacks on protesting students in universities.

Reason presents “empirical evidence of what is happening to India today”, says the official synopsis. “The overall argument of the film is made more gradually as we understand the ideological forces that have been at play for centuries.”

The film’s premiere in Toronto comes in the wake of the raids on and arrests of activists and intellectuals on the dubious charges of supporting a Maoist conspiracy to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi and overthrow the Indian state. Although the raids on dissidents such as Dalit scholar Anand Teltumbde and the arrests of civil rights activist and lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj and others took place after Patwardhan had completed his film, this has been foreshadowed by the events that he captures in Reason.

There is a sense of raw immediacy in the braiding of numerous interviews, television clips and internet videos and footage of rallies, protests marches and lectures and public meetings by proponents of both sides of the debate.

Right here, right now

A recurring motif in Reason is a dramatised depiction of an unseen murderer on a motorcycle, prowling for fresh victims in the dead of the night. The first of the eight chapters lays out the raison d’etre for the film: the murder of anti-superstition activist and rationalist Narendra Dabholkar on August 20, 2013, which was followed by the killing of Communist Party of India leader Govind Pansare on November 20, 2015. Dabholkar and Pansare were, in different ways, thorns in the side of the Hindutva establishment, pricking claims of upper-caste supremacy and exposing anti-minority sentiment, the appropriation of historical figures and the advocacy of divine solutions to problems with economic and social roots. Both men wrote and lectured extensively, and tirelessly worked with local communities. Both paid with their lives, but their messages continue to resonate, as moving interviews with family members and followers prove.

Why did Dabholkar and Pansare – and academic MM Kalburgi and journalist Gauri Lankesh – have to die? Patwardhan argues that rampaging Hindutva, which has spread its tentacles to all corners of society and the upper levels of the government in its mission to convert our secular republic into a narrowly-defined Hindu nation, poses the biggest threat to Indian values. “That such an ideology should come to power today is a clear and present danger to all who believe in democracy, social justice and equality,” Patwardhan says in his director’s note.

Rampaging Hinduvta

Through the sections on the concept of “Sanatan dharma”, or eternal faith, the refashioning of Maratha warrior Shivaji as a Hindu icon, and the activities of the extremist Sanathan Sanshta, whose members have been linked to the Dabholkar, Pansare and Kalburgi killings, Patwardhan rings alarm bells about the rise of militant Hindutva.

“More than a monolithic religion, Hinduism is a dynamic composite of indigenous cultural practices combined with those borrowed over the ages from passing streams,” Patwardhan says in his director’s note. “Sanatan, Aryan, Vedic, Hindutva on the other hand is a Brahminical (originally emanating from a powerful priest caste) project of supremacy, which recruits the powerless in an endless war against imaginary demons. Invoking such a war gives its instigators absolute control and total impunity.”

This deadly dance between what Patwardhan terms “divinity and reason” plays out in a variety of ways. Dalits and Muslims are attacked by cow fanatics in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat even as the Dalit movement for land rights gathers steam. The suicide of PhD student Rohith Vemula at Hyderabad Central University reveals the demonisation of Dalit assertion and the gameplan of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. On other campuses, including Film and Television Institute of India and Jawaharlal Nehru University, ABVP leaders attempt to divide students into patriots and traitors.