Research

Re-viewing Yugantar’s films more than 30 years after they were made ignited a quest in the NOW. An extended research process into the political context the films stemmed from and the pioneering transformative processes the collective embarked on, was followed by inspired and inquisitive reactions to screenings by diverse audiences and a continuous demand from different places to have access to Yugantar’s films.

Between 1980 and 1985 Yugantar’s films travelled across India and fostered many platforms for debate and further organising. After their extensive use they continued to exist through the memories of many and through vivid narrations of their collective processes of making and sharing, while their material copies were either lost or too scratched and fragile to be screened. Members of the collective continued their feminist work through other contexts. In 2011 Yugantar’s films started on another journey: Resources to restore, digitise and recirculate the films became available through the project “Living Archive. Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice”.

This journey started as a collaboration between Deepa Dhanraj and Nicole Wolf, a collaboration, exchange, thinking and working together that extended to other members of the collective and to Arsenal. Institute for Film and Video art (Berlin) and their staff members. A collaboration that is embedded in conversations since 1999 and ongoing, including conversations about how to different geographic locations, generations, professions, institutional affiliations and differently located political engagements and desires. A collaboration that connected to the many questions raised through Yugantar’s work itself. A collaboration where friendship developed, but does not eliminate our different geopolitical situatedness and the structural and institutional conditions that support and restrain us in dissimilar ways. A collaboration that continuously brings into presence the complex making of solidarity and feminist friendship, across space and time.

Many questions arose that informed the restoration and research process that took place between 2011 and 2022 and that includes the making of this online platform: What could be the significance of Yugantar’s films today? Would Yugantar’s collective film practice resonate with filmmakers working now and how might their past political ambitions connect to currently urgent debates? Was restoring the films about recreating authentic historical documents to preserve women’s active making of political structures for radical struggles or would their renewed screen presence surpass being documents ‘only’ and take part in ongoing and new struggles now? Would the films create new screen presences that would touch contemporary viewers in different ways, and who would be the films’ audiences?

What is the Nowness of this specific feminist archive? Also: Where and for whom would the films be a potent legacy? Could their legacy be extended by circulating in the context of international feminist film and activist practice? Who and which films would be their political and cinematic friends now? Who could and should be involved in a process of reviving Yugantar films materially and discursively? How is the constellation of feminist films collectively produced in India in the early 1980s, now entering a film archive in Germany for restoration work, accompanied by a white German researcher based in a UK academic institution, critically reflected and actively addressed?

How should Yugantar’s films be distributed in order to follow the pedagogical activist spirit through which they were made and shown during the early 80s? Creating free online access to the films is only one way to make Yugantar’s films and the struggles they represent accessible again. Active sharing of the films where online access is limited is necessary. Providing historical context and research materials and sharing how the films have so far inspired further research is meant to support the films travelling further and to invite further responses.

Walking with Yugantar – A research journey

Yugantars’ films sparked reflections on political friendship, solidarity, organising, mobilizing, going on strike, demanding labour rights and defying violence against women, making films collectively and creating synergies between film and political practices for platforms to think, debate and organise towards radical change. They take part in arguing for a distinct feminist Third Cinema, in redressing colonial histories of feminist cinema and male dominated histories of documentary cinema. They also ignited speculations on past and future alliances through cinematic friendships that might take place in cinema halls, open air screens, on the shelves of film archives or personal collections of crucial film/political moments on desktops.

Nicole Wolf

Nicole’s learning from and thinking with feminist documentary practice in India started in 1999. First meetings with filmmakers and attending the Kathmandu Film South Asia Film Festival led to a sustained interest in documentary poetics of many kinds, in activist and artistic contexts and in the South Asian region more broadly. Her interest in what constituted feminist documentary practice and form and what the crucial contributions by women filmmakers were to the shaping of political and visual vocabularies, to organising and to constituting political struggles and movements, led her to attend to diverse histories of filmmaking and activist practices encountering Deepa Dhanraj’s work early on. Working through feminist politics always included attention to state violence, power, governance, the constrution of minorities and conflict zones and later on the politics of land holding, military occupations, environmental disasters and agricultural politics including agri-cultural knowledges as resistance and anti-colonial practices.

Nicole’s pedagogical, writing and curatorial practice also led her to becoming an accidental archivist through two archive projects of Arsenal. Institute for Film (Berlin) and her ongoing research was then closely connected to film restoration processes from 2011.

Nicole’s participation in “Living Archive: Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice” (2011-2013) included concept, research and production for a new DVD edition of Deepa Dhanraj’s KYA HUA IS SHAHAR KO (What has happened to this city?) (1986). The DVD edition includes video interviews and a booklet with documents and one essay by Nicole (released in June 2013).
Her participation in “Archive ausser sich” (2017-2021) included the research and writing for the restoration of all four film works by the Yugantar film collective and collaborating with Deepa Dhanraj on the concept of the Yugantar website. In addition Nicole developed “Soil – City- Solidarity”, an interdisciplinary urban permaculture design course, and the symposium “’Tell me what matter was the ground’ – Repair beyond redemption”, in the context of the working group ‘Stoffwechsel’ and taking place at Silent Green, Berlin (in 2019).

Nicole started training in Permaculture in 2014 (at Ecodharma, Spain), followed by two Permaculture teacher trainings, including Rosemary Morrow’s course in Srinagar, Kashmir (organised by Green Kashmir). Together with Mojisola Adebayo Nicole has developed workshop and research models that experiment with bringing together anti-colonial agricultural practices, anti-racism and theatre for social change. Explorations of collective learning and making processes which draw on diverse knowledges are part of this and link back to Nicole’s interests in political cinema (what might a cinematics of the soil be?), how to think-with and through pluriverse worlds and organising towards non-exclusive social and political movements.
“Agri/cultural practices: a workshop on anti-racism, arts and the environment” will also be developed into a co-authored book.

Nicole lives in Berlin and London; she is Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and works as a freelancer.

Selected Publications and Curatorial Projects

Ongoing Research and Publications on Yugantar films

• The Radical Power of Feminist Friendships: the Yugantar Collective at the Essay Film Festival, by Jenna Dobinson, March 2021
• Radical Potential, by Devika Girish, December 2020
• Yugantar – Reflecting on Bangalore’s Radical Film Collective of the 80s
• Transcending testimony: an interview with filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj, by Shweta Kishore, August 13, 2014
• Interview in The Hindu with Deepa Dhanraj, Reality in close up, by Deepa Ganesh (from 2016) Further selection of resources including writing on Yugantar:
• Activism and Art. A dialogue with Deepa Dhanraj, by Madhu Bhushan, in: Deep Focus, A Film Quarterly. Vol 1, No 3. November 1988.
• “Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers”, by Shweta Kishore, Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
• “Documentary Film in India. An anthropological History”, by Guilia Battaglia, London: Routledge, 2017.
• “A fly in the curry. Independent Documentary Film in India”, by K. P. Jayasankar, Anjali Monteiro, SAGE Publications India, 2015.