While We Watched
Vinay Shukla’s study of the Indian journalist Ravish Kumar is a tribute that underscores the world’s need for freedom of speech.
The subject matter of this new documentary from India is striking. It portrays the efforts of the journalist Ravish Kumar to speak truth to power through his regular appearances on New Delhi Television (NDTV) and the impact of the film is due both to what it shows us of press repression in India and to the extent to which viewers can draw parallels with what is happening in other countries. The filmmaker, Vinay Shukla, is clearly committed and the theme of media manipulation and the threat that it carries to true democracy certainly earns a strong response. Even so, I found that for me While We Watched offered a less than fully satisfactory experience.
Audiences in India and those elsewhere already well versed in that country's current situation will have an advantage here because they will need no background information to clarify what Shukla shows us. For others some preliminary written statements or a commentary would have been helpful. But, instead of that, Shukla plunges us straight into the world of Ravish Kumar showing him on air and referencing attacks made on him for his critical stance as to the state of India under the government of Narendra Modi. Kumar claims to be a nationalist but is accused of being an anti-nationalist and a Communist. He joined the Hindi news channel NDTV in 1996 and is seen here as a target of those other news networks that bend to government control and tell lies. A veritable bombardment is involved and it feels like that, but presented in that way it makes it difficult for viewers to get their bearings. The use of the phrase ‘urban naxal’ comes up without any immediate clarification that the term refers to anti-establishment protesters and that is just one example of the film lacking clarity for the uninitiated.
The picture of Indian life revealed in While We Watched does become clearer as the film goes on including major concerns on Kumar’s part over unemployment and inadequate electricity supplies. There are also powerful passages concerned with specific events. One such is the death by suicide of a student driven into depression by his failure to be appointed to a job. There is though often little indication of exact dates even though filming covered at least two years and the focus is so intently on Kumar at work that this comes to seem an approach that is too narrow. We do see Kumar’s wife, Nayana Dasgupta, a history professor, but we learn all too little about her and similarly the impact of Kumar’s notoriety on his two children in the light of the deadly threats it induced is hardly investigated. Instead, the film is keen to show us the pleasure that their younger daughter, a mere child, finds in singing.
While We Watched certainly makes strong points about the proper role of journalism underlining too the inhumanity inherent in political extremism. But in doing this the film seems almost too preoccupied with Kumar himself. Admittedly we do get a clear indication of how growing governmental pressure leads in time to Kumar’s staff at NDTV deciding that there is no future for them there. Nevertheless, despite scenes involving a number of these employees, we hardly get to know them as individuals (the film never gives them a platform to confide directly their thoughts about their situation). If there is an exception to that it is the producer Swarolipi Sengupta who after eleven years with NDTV felt obliged to move on, but even here the film simply records her situation without going deeper and making us feel what it means for her. In the same way little emerges about the history of NDTV and when, late on, we hear that its founders Radhika and Prannoy Roy have been detained under charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating and corruption, this is news about people of whom we have previously heard nothing and whose subsequent fate is never indicated. Indeed, when it comes to the wider issue of what fate has in store, one realises that the film was completed too soon to incorporate a key development, namely Kumar’s retirement from NDTV in December 2022 when he chose to resign following the takeover of its ownership by one of Modi’s friends, the billionaire Gautam Adani.
While We Watched is certainly partisan, but Ravish Kumar emerges as a principled journalist whose courageous history certainly warrants that kind of approach. Nevertheless, I regretted the film’s willingness to rush in without providing more detailed background information. That feeling may be down to my being less aware of Indian politics than I should be, but even so I can't help comparing this film to the 2021 documentary Writing with Fire which told the story of Dalit women running a newspaper in India. That film was not only clearer in its detail but was far more adroit in the way that it made one identify with all of the women concerned thereby creating a personal and emotional impact that is lacking here.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Ravish Kumar, Sushil Bahuguna, Deepak Chaubey, Sushil Mohapatra, Swarolipi Sengupta, Saurabh Shukla, Nayana Dasgupta, Suparna Singh.
Dir Vinay Shukla, Pro Vinay Shukla, Khushboo Ranka and Luke W. Moody, Screenplay Reshma Ramachandran, Amaan Shaikh, Abhinav Tyagi and Vinay Shukla, Ph Amaan Shaikh and Vinay Shukla, Ed Abhinav Tyagi, Music Joaquin Garcia.
Britdoc Films/LONO Studios-Met Film.
94 mins. UK/USA/Qatar/India. 2022. UK Rel: 14 July 2023. Cert. 15.
