>> Transcending testimony: an interview with filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj
Deepa Dhanraj is a filmmaker and feminist whose extensive filmography spans issues of gender, labour, education and women’s position in Indian society. In 1980, she founded the Bangalore-based filmmaking collective Yugantar, an organisation that produced films about women’s labour and domestic conditions in Southern India. With searing imagery, Dhanraj’s highly influential 1991 film, Something Like a War, presented the gender and class violence of the population-control policy of the Indian government. In this interview, I talk with Dhanraj about the historic relationship between activism and documentary film and the ways in which she addresses contemporary industrial as well as aesthetic shifts in this cinema.
Deepa, you were closely associated with the Indian women’s movement during the 1970s and the 1980s. How did your involvement with this movement lead you towards documentary cinema?
I became a documentary filmmaker because of my association with the women’s movement.
When we started our collective Yugantar in 1980, the intention was to make films on various struggles, agitations and issues that were being raised by the women’s movement at that time, particularly the shifts in consciousness, politics and the kind of contributions that both the activists and the academy were making in public discourse. A lot of theory was being generated and one of the things we asked as a collective was: how do you communicate this back to the audiences and particularly women audiences so that there is a continuous loop? How do you tell these stories and talk about this politics at all levels from the grassroots to the academy?
Personally, the intention of the collective was to document the struggles and then return these stories to the constituency, which could be women’s groups of all classes and as many institutions as we could tap into – trade unions, universities, high schools and film clubs.
Coming to the documentary medium from activism, how did you conceptualise the documentary form? What could the documentary film accomplish in the social collective?
We did not come to a ready-made understanding of documentary practice; we were creating a process as we worked. When we started this collective, our intention was to be collaborative and to stand with the women, not only to transmit their story.
With Something Like a War, we spoke about issues that were important to many women’s groups. I am often surprised at how much of my work is used for teaching in universities – but, at that time, it wasn’t our intention. With Something Like a War, we wanted to stop the government of India’s coercive targeting of poor women to achieve state sterilisation targets.
But we also wanted to address the structural consensual belief that the poor were responsible for their poverty because of excessive breeding. So in the film we also talked about why poor women made the reproductive choices that they did – they were not foolish, but various social factors influenced their decisions. So we not only had to address the state agenda but also this political consensus that made it acceptable to have a eugenics notion about the poor. The films produced with this political understanding acted as a medium between the activists and the academy and brought these issues into a space for discussion. So I see documentary films as building a bridge between these two worlds.
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