Everything you’ve read this far, from the train, the pull of women’s stories, the act of collaboration, is one current of my story. But identity has other currents and undercurrents, ones you don’t always name until much later. “We’re all in process,” says Maya Angelou about the act of becoming.
Growing up in a hyper-Punjabi pocket of West Delhi, I longed to dissolve into its dominant identity. My darker skin made me Madrasi, a word that made me an outsider before I even understood what it meant to belong. So I rebelled against putting coconut oil on my hair and consumed Bollywood songs to perfect my pronunciation of Hindi words. Being told “You don’t look like a South Indian” was the ultimate affirmation. In my 20s, working on commissioned projects with Delhi’s development sector, where power is tightly held by the upper-class, upper-caste elite, I became acutely aware of my class, too.
It was only in my 30s that I began to see beauty in what I had erased. Documentary filmmaking and engaging with the world through a critical lens became a quiet act of reclamation—a way to return to myself, whole in my contradictions.
In the patchwork of my current identity, I am one version with my mother, another among strangers, another alone. Even within each of these exist a procession of multiple selves. The moment the camera intervenes, a choice is made: which version is fixed into permanence? This is the conundrum of documentary filmmaking—to exist within someone else’s arrangement of reality. This is the ethical anxiety of documentary: no matter how expansive its intent, it is always an act of narrowing. To be seen in a film is to be frozen in time. And perhaps that is the real tussle—not just to be watched, but watched in one way, forever.
And yet, I return to something Meera once said in the Documentary magazine interview:
We have been given these preconceived ideas about ourselves and our castes that we keep bearing as a burden. We have to change that, and we can change that when we interact and collaborate with other people. …Watching Rintu and Sushmit, each belonging to a different religion, work together and create art together, was an inspiration to me.
Stories are messy. Relationships are messy. Filmmaking, especially the kind that seeks to frame truth and courage, is the messiest of all.
As a global industry, we are finally speaking—haltingly, urgently—about participant care. A conversation long overdue, a reckoning with the extractive nature of documentary filmmaking, the ways in which filmmakers have, for decades, turned people into narratives, flattened complexities into consumable arcs, and walked away with accolades while those whose lives formed the raw material of these stories were left to contend with the aftermath. Accountability must be asked of us. But any reckoning that ignores the instability of the world we document is, at best, incomplete. People change. Institutions shift. Perceptions distort. Politics reshape lives. Reality resists coherence, and to ignore this is to miss the point entirely.
***
We emerged from our long pause by bringing Writing With Fire home. In October 2022, the film premiered to packed audiences at the beloved Dharamshala International Film Festival. The premiere was electric and built great momentum as the film moved through the country. All of it curated by its audience—India’s civil society, women’s rights groups, Ambedkarite and anticaste activists who continue to screen it in film festivals, classrooms, journalism schools, villages, newsrooms, museums, biennales, film clubs, and bookshops.
(And yet, before the film could screen in India, it spent nearly a year navigating the opaque machinery of global distribution, where logic still holds that an Indian story must first be validated abroad before it can truly return home. Learnings for next time.)
For decades, in a country where truth-telling has never been easy and where support systems remain scarce, Indian documentary filmmakers have persisted. Our generation inherits that defiance, but we’ve also been able to access flawed, yet vital international financing structures. We’re part of a moment where nonfiction is being reimagined by filmmakers, both seasoned and emerging, in urgent and inventive ways.
In our own work, we have been playfully interrogating the documentary form. How much performance can nonfiction hold before it fractures? When do the porous edges of framing reveal more than they conceal? These questions, stretching the seams of the form and reassembling its conventions, are animating our process. To work in this space—to push, pull, and play with possibilities—is more than a creative pursuit. It is an exciting provocation.
And then there’s always the fundamental question: What does it mean to see? To frame a world, to rub up against its surface, hoping to grasp what lies beyond? Many years ago, on a train journey through the Western Ghats, I watched a little girl press her face against the window, her breath fogging up the glass. She wasn’t just looking, she was tracing the outline of trees with her fingers, following the arc of a bird in flight, the blur of a passing village. Again and again, she wiped the glass clean, as if sharpening the image, as if trying to be sure of what she was seeing.
I think about her often—about the impulse to look, to frame, to understand. The camera, like that train window, offers a vantage point but never the full picture. That is the true labor of filmmaking—to embrace the beautiful mess that is seeing the world.