Oscars 2022: Writing With Fire's nomination is just the first step in a long road to recognition of the Indian documentary

On 8 February, Twitter in India celebrated an intimate but historic moment. Writing With Fire, a documentary about the Dalit-led, all-woman newspaper Khabar Lahariya, became the first Indian documentary to be nominated at the Oscars.

The directing duo of Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh shared a video of them and their family elated, jumping in disbelief after the announcement. It was a humbling, almost improbable moment considering the political backdrop the film has been made against. But while Writing with Fire may go where no film in India ever has, it also inadvertently illuminates the sobering reality about the documentary genre in India. Because neither is the format considered an asset, nor is it even considered cinema.

A couple of months ago, I contacted a young filmmaker to commission a piece. During our conversations, he asked for help to get his film, an admirable feat of traversing difficult geographies and complicated subjects, secure a release. In layman’s terms, he wanted to recover some money, let alone make some by putting his film on a screen somewhere – even in the OTT age. No distributor or theatre will obviously take that bet, because like good literature, documentaries are considered cerebral investments that mainstream cinema, most Indians believe, ought to be an antidote to. Because everyday life itself involves navigating chaos and oppression of some sort, why would anyone want to witness the revelatory quality of anguish greater than ours?  

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Documentaries themselves are not new to India, but they have become state-sanctioned formats, often seen interchangeable with the national network, since the era of SNS Shastry and Doordarshan. Automatically, the format comes bearing the weight of austerity that has been lazily earned by government institutions because they have frankly failed to build on the genre. Writing with Fire might still clinch a distributor, and a release like Rima Das’ Village Rockstars did with Netflix India, but it is unlikely it will be identified for its radicalism, unlike a Jhund or a Pa Ranjith film. Its journalistic language itself would be alienating.

Writing with Fire has had to drag its own two feet across the tarmac of indifference, and it is still compared to a _Lagaan_, an almost moment for Indian cinema. Consider the fact that unlike the former, it is a real-world story, and it seems preposterous that the notional value of fiction, backed by make-believe heroes, trumps at least in hype the frankly overwhelming aura of women doing heroic things with every breath they take.

The story of Khabar Lahariya is not a story of scripted greatness, but of actual, breathtaking grit and determination. But what cinema often gains in stories, it can lose in the culture it must address.

Maybe that is where the problem lies: the socio-political circumstances that would reluctantly allow the story of a Khabar Lahariya to be an understated, brooding documentary rather than a Jhund-like pop culture moment that overstates its own importance at times. It perhaps explains the rather muted reaction to the film’s nomination for it exposes us as a culture and a country as much as it propels a stirring against-all-odds story. It is a story incendiary by definition, and regardless of tone and template, carries the potential to provoke.

Traditionally, anything that invites controversy would have been as a risk worth the reward, but in the case of narratives that unpeel layers of protective silence, it is more of the former compared to the latter. It is probably the reason why documentarians, who wish to scratch the underbelly of our cultural and political zeitgeist, must do at the expense of their own social interests. The likes of Anand Patwardhan and Nakul Singh Sawhney, for example, are names many identify with scandal rather than their pursuit of a lonesome format.

The Indian documentary has, in the last two years, seen a rather welcome shift. Netflix India’s creepy and unsettling House of Secrets:  The Burari Deaths has opened the door to a whirlwind of possibilities that could either lead to behavioural change or the rushed production of scandalous, but ultimately ineffectual, films that are as quickly forgotten as they are wildly amplified. The documentary is a robust medium. It does not have to follow the rules of conventional cinema, and can therefore investigate better than everyday news, dive deeper than even the most comprehensive recreations of history, and present factualism as the true genetic ancestor of everything we consume as drama.

The best characters, they say, are built on real people. And yet for some reason, our appetite for using the lens of reality is shockingly, almost embarrassingly low. In fact, one must wonder if the film industry would have the stomach, the wherewithal to platform or adapt the story of a Khabar Lahariya for the big screen. It will still be the lesser film, but it would amount to the screaming cultural shift that our cinema could use. Writing with Fire, as a film, may still be somewhat reservedly celebrated come the day, come the glory. But stories, that inspire films like it, will have to continue the good fight to get noticed.  

Oscars 2022 will take place on 28 March.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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