Taking it to the Streets: A Public Talk by Ashish Rajadhyaksha

As a part of ASAP | art’s ongoing public programming, we hosted an online talk by film historian and cultural theorist Ashish Rajadhyaksha on 16 September 2023. Moderated by Arundhati Chauhan, the talk is premised upon Rajadhyaksha’s latest book, John–Ghatak–Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers (2023), published by Tulika Books. Rajadhyaksha situates the 2015 protests at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) as a jumping-off point to examine the new forms that documentary films and filmmakers have envisioned in its aftermath. 

In this edited recording of the talk, Rajadhyaksha discusses the concept of expanded cinema. He unpacks how it is understood in legal and juridical terms in India, as well as the legislative and censorial language that often tries to contend with cinema’s remnants beyond the screen. Situating the viewing public as a crucial force to understand cinema, Rajadhyaksha traces how the State’s anxieties around cinema. He addresses how the increasing efforts to curtail its effects are directly tied to anxieties around cinema's ability to endanger public order, from its early forms to the present day. With the advent of the internet and new modes of creation and dissemination, the State’s anxieties further spread to the “boundless” possibilities of the internet, which it considered beyond regulation. In the context of such increased regulations around the very idea of cinema and the increasing control exerted over public higher educational institutions, Rajadhyaksha proposes that a filmmaker has taken on the fugitive form of a “hacker”, a shadow figure that contends with the state’s expansive curtailment of cinema itself.  

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian and cultural theorist. He has written extensively on and widely curated film, video, visual art, performance works, archival histories and retrospectives. His work has traversed critical film histories, internet cultures, digital technologies, and their constant tensions with and co-option in governance, legislation and surveillance of the public sphere by the State. His books include Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (1982), Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009), The Last Cultural Mile: An Inquiry into Technology and Governance in India (2011) and his most recent work, John–Ghatak–Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers (2023).  

John–Ghatak–Tarkovsky tells a longer story of the events of the 2015 student protests at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). It speaks of the technologies of digitisation that altered governance, redefined the public domain and transformed citizenship through new modes of surveillance alongside a “targeted” delivery of services to “beneficiaries.” The book speaks of the transfiguration of the filmmaker into an increasingly invisible hacker, of cinema turning into low-resolution moving images, and of how all of this redefined student protest. 

(Featured image: From Ashish Rajadhyaksha's John–Ghatak–Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers, New Delhi: SSAF–Tulika Books, 2023, page no. 117. Reproduced with permission from the publisher.)

Recorded on 16 September 2023.

To read more about films that have documented the 2015 FTII Students’ Protests, revisit Najrin Islam’s essay on Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing and Ankan Kazi reflection on Kshama Padalkar’s The Strike and I.