Sometimes people ask me what’s new. I say I’ve just finished a film, eliciting pleased exclamations. I add, “It’s about this incident in Meerut….” Deflated, they say “Oh, you made a new documentary. I thought you’d made a film.”

A documentary filmmaker is never short of reasons for self-pity. Money, distribution, visibility come with the territory. Glamour is of course a laughable dream – unless you are a boy with a beard and an air of revolution. But the hardest on my list: no one takes documentaries seriously in filmmaking terms – sometimes not even filmmakers. Documentaries are missing from film reviews – despite their increasing audiences now. Sometimes they feature in drab and dutiful articles, for their subject matter. Bloggers haven’t given them a second thought. At screenings, critiques of the filmmaking are lonely in the crowd of questions about ‘the topic’ – and, for complicated historical reasons, even some filmmakers look suspiciously on discussions about form as a dilution of politics.

Academics and critics develop increasingly sophisticated ways of talking about mainstream culture but a language and framework to assess the contemporary alternative culture seems not to coalesce – there isn’t one comprehensive history of Indian documentary (or the Indian music video) available. In the absence of that critical engagement it becomes hard, especially for younger filmmakers who have not yet formed a community, to clarify one’s own craft and thinking, for it to grow stronger.

As a young person, when I started to work ‘in documentary’, filmmakers were few and generally speaking, came from a broadly common political and filmic tradition (despite disagreement and dissimilarities). As the feminist documentarian Deepa Dhanraj said in her interview in the film journal Deep Focus:

“We saw films as a way of documenting and expressing a certain thinking… We did feel the need to reach out and generate images that never existed and could counter the negative portrayals and manipulations of women in the media. India having such a strong audience tradition, films seemed to be a good medium to enable us to go into community and draw people together. That we were not going to screen these films to a neutral audience was very clear, so our audience was fixed. The whole process was an alliance with the people who helped us to make the film. So both in production and conception, the themes and concerns of these films originated with the activists of that area.”

Given that many filmmakers began from this or allied contexts, i.e., a relationship with the peoples’ movements of the 70s and 80s, there was an implicit understanding which defined what was political – and appropriately political. It is hard to describe how uncertain and ignorant I was starting out, because like any middle-class (and self-taught) kid in the 80s I had only a wispy sense of these histories. I felt an instinctive relationship with the political impulse and ideas in all the documentaries I watched. But because I had not had access to the historical record from which they sprang, I felt nervous – as someone who didn’t know any of this for certain although in my heart I knew it for sure.

This resulted in a hectic political anxiety. I felt “political” – but how to express this? Would I have to join the Naxalites, the Narmada Bachao Andolan or Aawaz-e-Niswan? But I didn’t think I could, or that I even should. I basically wanted to make documentaries because I loved the stories I could hear in non-fiction, in people’s experiences. But there was a nagging sense that this wasn’t sufficient. It was as if I could only be a serious or political documentary filmmaker if I was connected to a movement of some kind or my films were somehow illustrative of these issues.

At the time it was hard for me to understand that I was actually functioning in a different political context from an earlier generation of filmmakers -one in which the urban middle class had shifted far from political engagement, or even information which would ask them to reflect on their choices. And that some of my confusion was in itself a critique from which a new understanding would grow for me and define how I would eventually make films. There were already filmmakers who were using different approaches – Reena Mohan with Kamlabai, Madhusree Dutta with Memories of Fear, Jill Misquitta with The Clap Trap – and they allowed me to glimpse other possibilities of how the formal and political were entwined.

My confusions asked me to think about three things: the nature of politics, the nature of film as a medium of political activity and the nature of art. Do we make films that faithfully illustrate our political position? Or do we use our political position to arrive at an understanding of the nature of life in this moment, the catalyst for a creative act?

I should disclose that, barring a few exceptions, I am particularly un-interested in the language of evidence and expose that many political documentaries favor because while pretending the filmmaker is invisible – the “objective” approach – these films often serve only to reaffirm the nobility of the filmmaker and to define good and bad, rather than open up a genuine discussion.

We know that reality is more complex, the truth subjective. For instance I’ve often encountered this contradiction during research – people whose ideas I agree with might behave very hierarchically or unkindly while people whose ideologies were anathema to me were the soul of human reasonableness and courtesy. How was I to be true to this experience in a film? How could I, while making my position or subjectivity on a particular issue absolutely clear, not, within the narrative of a film, take absolute positions vis-à-vis a person or event? What could I do with stereotypical situations of which I was critical? How, basically, could I include the idea that I might both agree and disagree with something and emphasize a culture of difference? These are inescapable questions for any documentary filmmaker working in these times.

One of the things I decided to do is not include people in a film based on their acknowledged achievements – therefore, not represent them canonically – but based on how conversation with them answered my personal questions about the ideas a film was exploring. I became interested in that which was not quite being discussed in public statements – the interior, the quotidian, the emotional. So for instance in interviews even with notable people, I would not underline why they were notable, but, although I did not know them personally, try to find a way to have a personal conversation while talking of political things.

I thought also, that the re-stating or re-proving of positions in political films came from an anxiety about how unfamiliar or marginal some of our ideas were in the mainstream. This anxiety meant film as a medium was employed more for its amplificatory properties, than its performative or expressive ones. But so much of art is a trick of performance. I decided to begin a film from a place where I assumed only what matters to me and what doesn’t; assume my position need not be justified – by proving someone wrong or explaining what is right. And create a work that provides an experience of what it’s like to have that perspective – rather than explain it. This was how I began to tell some of my film via a persona, sometimes identifiably fictional (as the goddess Annnapurna in Cosmopolis or Fearless in Unlimited Girls), at other times assumed identities (as in the unseen narrators of Where’s Sandra? or Morality TV aur Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahani). The persona often has a query or quest (or complaint in the case of Cosmopolis) that the film emerges from. This allows for a structure with multiple windows – not providing different viewpoints as much as evoking a mischievous experience of jumping in from one window, jumping out and then coming in from the door or dropping in from a skylight. Thus I hope to create a film experience where strong lines are not constantly being drawn, but a variegated landscape unfolding for the viewer to inhabit, a sensual journey of possibilities.

To do this, freely, but with the sense of making a political intervention one needs to trust the way films work. Film is a medium of sense experience; its message is experienced analogously, not directly. That pleasure draws people in, not so they are lulled, but awakened and excited, sensuously and cerebrally. As filmmakers we need to believe in the risk that by connecting to the aesthetic logic and subjectivity of a film, an audience will intuitively sense its meaning – they will know it for sure, without knowing it for certain. And in trying to express what they have sensed, they will come to new articulations, newer ways of being – and create the large public conversation which is change.