Structuring the Counter-Discourses in Anand Patwardhan’s Documentary Oeuvre

Anand Patwardhan’s documentary oeuvre has established itself as a resistance cinema of the Third-World, drawing influences from the Latin-American cinematic practices as against the agit-prop of 1907 Russian revolutionary tradition as well as the American and Grierson tradition of filmmaking. In India, while the revisionary historiography fills in these lacunas of providing multiple narratives and voices to the disparate growth story of the nation, independent political documentaries (IDP) and especially Patwardhan’s work provide an inevitable visual-dimension to such narratives of growth and development, functioning as crucial sources of intervention to history and cinema both. His documentary projects have well-spoken against the indigenous fundamentalism, sectarian and communal antagonism, casteism and religious riots and has been touted as a critical whistleblower to the miscellaneous malpractices in government institutions. Despite being rejected, censored and having being faced other obstacles form the monopolized CBFC and Film Division, apart from the independent wrath of belligerent forces and cultural diktats, Patwardhan has been an unstoppable and controversial filmmaker.


Introduction
In the political documentarist tradition of India, Anand Patwardhan is one of those eminent voices whose activism and agency sends an astonishing flurry across the documentary clique of the world. His works rise above the din of cacophonous mainstream motion pictures for his magnanimous commitment for the amelioration of the Indian society, making him a major-league among other documentarists. His documentary oeuvre has establish itself as a resistance cinema of the Third-World, drawing influences from the Latin-American cinematic practices as against the agit-prop of 1907 Russian revolutionary tradition as well as the American and Grierson tradition of filmmaking. Despite being rejected, censored and having faced other obstacles from the monopolized CBFC and Film Division, apart from the independent wrath of belligerent forces and cultural diktats, Patwardhan has been an unstoppable and controversial filmmaker.
. In India, while the revisionary historiography of the past events fills the lacunae by providing multiple narratives and voices to the disparate growth story of the nation, Despite following a visible ideological apparatus, none of the research-based works on Patwardhan's oeuvre have explored these "familiar efficacies", which the present paper attempts to explore through a content analysis of three of his cinematic renditions. Dissecting the images, shots, dialogues, filler footages and confrontations with the subjects; the process could lead to the overthrow of also concluded that the working class in India (and by implication, the working class in other colonies) should not be limited by political program of the nationalist movement but had to place its own class demands on the agenda. The working class should, even if circumstances allowed, actively work towards the overthrow of its "own" bourgeoisie and the establishment of a workers' state" (Sherlock68).
By creating an alternative cinematic space of interrogation, Ram ke Naam functioned at the level of intervention, to intercede the 1992 status-quo of oppressive networks of majority communalism and the entire movement built around evangelizing to break-down the age-old medieval structure, emanating almost as a resistance counter-discourse to the Hindutva propaganda constituted of the half-truths and manipulated facts. That the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, officially a "faith" movement to restore the birthplace of Lord Ram, but essentially communal and anti-Muslim, was also a coveted backlash and resentment  The film, ergo, does not just limit itself to the veracity issue and the stubbornness of exactly where lord Ram was born, of the Mandir-Masjid original existence; rather it also puts a spotlight on the amount of "hurt" and "pain" of the upper and middle-educated classes, created by the Mandal action in 1989 which had put danger to their "official sinecures of the bureaucratic rent-seeking" (Chaitanya) bourgeoisie which, by then and even now, "controlled the huge politico-bureaucratic structure (Chaitanya)." It exhibited, in the words of K Balagopal, "a fascist concentration of negative traits, of resentment and frustration born in reaction to the space conquered by the oppressed and the underprivileged in India's political universe." (792) Exploring this subterranean quagmire, the documentary offers a number of streetlevel guerrilla confrontations and recordings of the firebrands' speeches, who shamefully question the need to constitutionally offer any such kind of benefits to the lower classes, maliciously dismissing a popular politician as belonging to the "pichardijaati" (backward class). The high points of the documentary, however, are those forlorn and virtually unnoticed and unheard voices who express and record their actual class struggles vis-à-vis from being forbidden to enter temples, to poor farming wages to better houses or slums and getting sold as 1.5kg in Rs.4. Only the grain we grow and sell is cheap and all rest is inflated.
There was no fighting here. We didn't have any tensions it's the outsiders . . The next work We Are Not Your Monkeys 1 is a short five minutes musical protest song and the video, which is anti-caste in its tone and diction, written and composed by the It is not often that a five minute film subverts a conceptual framework passed on through the centuries with such clarity. …Patwardhan's film is an unsettling but liberating and moving experience. It is unsettling because it calls into question ideas passed on through the ages that we have internalized as "truth". It is liberating because its relentless logic exposes the contradictions of a self-serving ideology. And it is moving because it is the clear voice of people we rarely hear.
The Marxist, class-based analysis of race propounds that in order for the working class to be not able to wage a battle against bourgeoisie, it must be kept fragmented and racially divided materially as well as ideologically. English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.
In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same as that of the "poor whites" to the "niggers" in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it. (222) Although it has received its share of criticism of excessive reliance on economic determinism and class reductionism, but when enforced on the '

II
The two documentaries, despite being unparalleled and exceptionally remarkable, have their own reservations addressed against Patwardhan and his instrumentality. Both, the counter-communalistic activist domain, but a voice or two from the ultraconservative Muslim remarks could have made it uniformed.

Ram ke Naam and Father Son and Holy
In the entire scenario of mosque controversy, it was expected of the investigative reporting or vigilant press to expose the 'violations of laws and regulations', of "how and why individuals and institutions fail, when things go wrong, who is responsible, how the wrongdoing was done, and its consequences" (Coronel 5) exposing not just an individual or the system rather the failures of collective psychean objective which Ram ke Naam capably achieves. Therefore, once the electronic and print journalism coverage was no longer a potent tool, a deficient one rather, alternative media forms and discourses did become potentially concerned/ proactive, due to which the rise of autonomous societies, voluntary organizations, and formal collaborations and even private/freelancing performed the watchdog reporting to combat the political vendetta.
The larger scenario is observed by Rustom Bharucha, as he contends that: The non-reflexive limitations of Patwardhan's perspective of 'men' are evident in his mode of filmmaking, which is driven by political necessities rather than shaped through the processes of introspection. (1614) Therefore, it is not as such men who are circumvented due to excessive emphasize on Patwardhan ends his work with an icon of mother goddess, which appears mainly and "merely as a utopian point of reference, a politically correct insertion, but not part of the lived or imagined relationship (Bharucha 1615)." The capacities of these three works certainly lie in emerging as potent tools of counter-discourses again the fundamentalist discourse of Hindutva. Also, the desire to call for an ideological shift or initiate a re-modelling of one's religious, political, or social beliefs of the readers, entangled and hegemonized, is the essence of all counter-discourses. Although, this kind of counter product in literature and art, does not always receive a very cordial reception, as is accepted only with an prime aesthetic value, as "propaganda too often ignores man as a totality, concentrating on him 'aspectively'-in terms of politics or sectarian religion" ( Britannica). Patwardhan has been under a regular indictment, to which he retorts: The fact that these films, which were considered propaganda, are to be screened in the mecca of art gives me a perverse sense of joy. The joy is not that I now consider myself an artist. I do not believe in any art that is self-consciously created. I see art as a by-product of the attempt to communicate. When this act of communication transcends time and geography, it transcends its immediate purpose. In the same way that indigenous Warli painters never self-consciously created art but once their work was framed in a gallery it changed perceptions, I believe that what the world considers "art" is mainly about framing. (Korossi) However, as Richard Terdiman says, "counter-discourses are unable to affect a revolution since they are destined to remain marginal to the dominant" (Thomas 215), newer methods and regulations could be adopted to initiate, unfold and divulge the bastion of powerful and real oppressive systems and practices. Chaitanya, in the context of Ram ke Naam insist that: Ram ke Naam is a powerful tool to conscientize the public about the perils of religious fascism. Pity, it is very much underutilized by the left and democratic forces in their campaigns. In contrast, the communal right is systematically going about its job using both the audio-visual and the print media. Groups of professionals are organized inrebuttinganycriticismoftheHindutvaplatformonaday-to-daybasis.It is imperative that mass organizations of the centrist and left parties utilized well-made documentaries like this in their programs of mass-communication. (2647) The very fissures and apertures of a liberal republican mode of democracy has fed and crystallized the ideology of Hindutva, which is, in-turn, unrelentingly breaking its very foundations. The role of political documentaries as a weapon to address these social regression and religious atavism can be successfully addressed, if encouraged through a supportive system of dissemination and viewership. The traditions of IDP in India have consistently faced obstructions in its screenings from the Film Division of India and CBFC: from the lack of funds, television programming, promotions and sponsorship to censorship.
Being independently made and organized, "these documentaries provided an alternative perspective to the typically jingoistic projects produced by the state; "instead of exotic people, hungry and tortured humans came up as protagonists; instead of ritualistic song and dance, minority peoples from the lands beyond central India voiced their anger, fear and frustration common to minorities in any totalitarian country; instead of the plastic gloss of national pride, the basic formation of the modern State were questioned" (Dutta). Lack of funding and other censorship mechanisms have resulted in distinctive ways to offering the warned, be warned you purveyors of self-serving religion we will be monkeys no more. We will sing songs of humanity and we will make you human as well.