School of Hard Knocks

Among the first educational institutions to come under attack from the Narendra Modi government, after it first came to power in 2014, were those that taught film. Filmmakers, film students and film institutions in India were quickly made aware of the ways that the state can impose surveillance and censorship. In 2015, the television actor Gajendra Chauhan, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, was appointed the president of Pune’s prestigious Film and Television Institute of India. Chauhan’s appointment was met with strong resistance by the students, who boycotted their classes and went on an indefinite strike. The FTII student body called Chauhan’s appointment “political” and questioned his credibility to lead their institute. It was soon clear that his appointment was only a taste of what might lie ahead.

Screening films, otherwise an ordinary activity, was to be met with bans and violent disruptions. That same year, members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad violently interrupted a scheduled screening of the filmmaker Nakul Singh Sawhney’s documentary Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai, which showed the complicity of BJP leaders in the communal violence in the titular region in Uttar Pradesh. The ABVP, the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, featured in many such shutdowns over the coming years. In 2018, the FTII administration cancelled the screening of a student film on Kabir Kala Manch, a cultural group popular for using music and poetry to spread anti-caste messages. One of the makers of the film had been the leader of the student body during the 2015 protests. The FTII administration claimed the students had not obtained permission for the screening, but the students accused it of having succumbed to pressure from the ABVP. The student body said the ABVP had termed the film’s content as “Maovadi”—Maoist.