Re-framing documentary’s victims: documentary and collective victimhood at Indian media collective Chalchitra Abhiyan

ABSTRACT What do we learn about documentary forms, practices and relations when marginalised communities adapt documentary filmmaking to revise their historical conditions? The use of documentary filmmaking by Indian media collective Chalchitra Abhiyan responds to three historical circumstances: socially marginalised groups’ under-representation in media industries, their misrepresentation in mainstream media products and the systematic deployment of mainstream traditional and new media forms to promote religion-based constructions of Indian national identity. In this media ecology, community use of documentary functions for social transformation, through representation and the relationships, methods and practices defined by the needs and goals of otherwise marginalised communities (such as Dalits and Muslims) who use media for functions of visibility and counter-representation. Examining media production and circulation together with the arena of social relations, I contend that ‘embedded aesthetics’ of documentary in this setting involves a representational focus on the collective in agentive processes that use documentary to recognise, deconstruct and reinterpret an accepted victimhood into a form of resistance (Ginsburg, Faye. 1994. ‘Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media.’ Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 365–82). Critiquing individualist social relations of mainstream media, concrete documentary practices re-organise digital and physical modes of media production and circulation by reference social and cultural functions, connecting filmmaking to lived histories of discrimination and possibilities of collective resistance.