“Suniye, Dekhiye, Samajhiye! (Listen closely, Watch carefully, Understand!)”
Ritika Kaushik (Goethe University Frankfort)
When we first meet the Indian journalist and broadcaster Ravish Kumar in While We Watched, he is flashing a light from his cellphone to look at a dark dilapidated room, later revealed to be the 6th floor of NDTV’s office, now decommissioned. For a seasoned viewer of Kumar’s show, the film’s opening is a reminder of his path-breaking episode on February 19, 2016, when he broadcast his poetic lamentation over the afflictions of Indian news media. His focus was on the representation of the sedition-row at Jawaharlal Nehru University campus that saw the arrest of student leaders protesting the hanging of 2001 parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. The screen, usually dense with the network’s new tickers and logo, was notably bare: just Kumar at the anchor desk, addressing the viewer with his critical monologue (Figure 1). But even that austere image would be further reduced: as he evoked the darkness swallowing Indian media, the screen slowly faded away to black—an incomprehensible visual for live television—whose blankness was relieved only by text in white and red accompanying the oft-repeated voice-over reassurance that “this is not a technical problem (Figure 2).” He went on to play audio clips of news anchors pouring out vitriolic hate towards the student leaders, with the explicit instruction that the viewer listen to what media people say and how they say it and to realize what they feel or how it changes them when they hear it (“Aap sun sake hum kya bolte hain, kaise bolte hain, aur sunne se aapke bheetar kya lagta hai”).
While We Watched continues this pedagogical media project and presents it as a counter to the mainstream news media that fuels communal divide through a Hindu-nationalist agenda, attacks educational institutions, and creates a paradigm within which any dissent against the government invites abuse or even violence. Through the person of Kumar, the film offers a microhistory of contemporary India, revealing the environment of fear and restrictions, the crumbling of Indian journalism and of democracy to its last vestiges, as well as the stress and loneliness in the face of receding hopes and the struggle to maintain a good-humored disposition in the face of totalitarianism.
Shaped like a newsroom drama, the film repeatedly shows the painstaking process of breaking a story and the behind-the-scenes production that leads up to its airing on TV. Using montages of competing news anchors like Arnab Goswami of Republic TV, whose smooth English accent and shrill screams are a stark contrast to the stern-yet-soft reprimanding voice of Kumar in Hindi, the film makes us wonder how these ideological and affective oppositions co-exist. But behind this drama is another layer: there is a solemn motif of cake-cutting ceremonies marking each time an employee quits NDTV, which keeps us wondering if and when Kumar will quit too. In an environment where Indian journalists who dare to go against the ruling regimes are faced with death threats, While We Watched works as a dramatic requiem for freedom of expression.
The film seems to direct us using Kumar’s own words, albeit through the observational mode, to “listen closely,” “watch carefully,” and “understand.” There are two Indias, we gather from the film. One is drowning in a loud din—the blood-thirsty cries of “maro maro, pakdo pakdo,” (Hit them! Catch them!), which saturate all of 24/7 Hindi news media, or the catchy labels of “Anti Nationals” or “Urban Naxals” for anyone who questions the government on English news media. The other is silently watching their own and their compatriots’ psyches being molded and assaulted by the above cries on Indian news media. This India looks forward to hearing the soft yet firm reproach of Kumar, scathingly criticizing the degeneration of the news media landscape and warning against the dangers of nationalism, all with a thoughtful smile, a raised index finger, and a sober introduction by way of “Namaskar, main [I am] Ravish Kumar.” These words bring light into their living rooms otherwise darkened by the “Godi Media (Modi’s lapdog)” constantly barking Hindutva agendas and the blinding flurry of communally-charged messages forwarded on WhatsApp. Kumar’s words are not only a synecdoche of a personality associated with “truth-telling,” but they affirm the hope that resistance against rising totalitarianism is possible. While We Watched speaks directly to this viewership who is familiar with this pedagogical project and feels positively towards it.
But how does this pedagogical project actually work? How does it affect the viewers, and how does it transform society, if it ever does, are questions that While We Watched leaves unanswered. The aesthetics of the observational form puts the focus on Kumar, on and off the TV screen, but not in the living rooms this media reaches, oversimplifying the connection between news media and society. The film takes for granted the power of this brand of journalism (perhaps the only remaining journalism), leaving us clueless about when, where, and how change happens in a society.
Filmmaker Vinay Shukla has said that he made While We Watched because none of his friends watch the news anymore. He wanted to make this film about the members of the orchestra who keep playing the violin while the ship sinks. Who is listening to those who play, what happens if they listen, and how this affects or moves them, are not the questions that the film pursues. More than loneliness, there is an inevitable pessimism to this entire project that haunts the film.
Haunted by the same specter of loneliness, Kumar’s journalistic pursuit, however, is unique in that he does not merely address pre-ordained thinking in his viewers but has built that viewership from scratch through a very specific blend of accessibility, reprimand, and a constant questioning of authorities in power with an unparalleled grace and humility. It is due to this transformative pursuit that he appears as a source of hope for bridging gaps that fissure Indian democracy. While this faint optimism defines Kumar’s voice and his work, While We Watched is, in effect, an elegy. The film ultimately leaves us wondering if there was a cake that marked the occasion when Kumar resigned from NDTV in 2022 on moral grounds – and if anyone was there to eat it.
“Precarity and Possibilities of Dissent”
Anuja Jain (Wesleyan University)
The documentary While We Watched (2022) opens with protagonist, Ramon Magsaysay Award-winning journalist, Ravish Kumar, walking through a dark, decrepit building that we later learn is one of the closed studios of NDTV, the influential national broadcast and digital news channel where Kumar worked from 1994-2022. As his flashlight surveys the remains, his voiceover muses, “When you find yourself all alone, who do you listen to?” (Fig. 1 and 2). Kumar’s question is as much an articulation of the forlornness of a journalist who has become one of the lone voices of dissent on primetime television as a question about the possibilities of claiming and performing citizenship in the present moment in India. Shot over a period of two years, from 2018 to 2020 the film premiered at Toronto International Film Festival to much critical praise, winning the Amplify Voices Award. It follows Kumar during his time at NDTV where he anchored his daily Hindi language show Prime Time with Ravish Kumar. It chronicles, with urgency, the ideological as well as professional challenges that he faces in finding his relevance in the mainstream media ecosystem that feeds into and off of India’s slide towards rightwing populism. In an interview, filmmaker Vinay Shukla elaborates that the film is a reflection on this moment in both Kumar’s journey as well as that of Indian television.
Among other shifts within the Indian nation-state, the economic liberalization of the 1990s augmented the rapid and widespread expansion of the news media landscape. As of 2021, India is estimated to have about “100,000 registered periodicals and newspapers, with 17,000 dailies that report a combined circulation of over 240 million copies according to government data, as well as an estimated 400 news and current affairs channels and numerous news-related websites.” However, there have been widespread concerns about the independence of the Fourth Estate in the world’s largest democracy. According to the annual World Press Freedom Index, compiled by the media watchdog group Reporters without Borders, India has experienced a steady decline in press freedom since 2015, slipping from a position of 135/180 in 2015 to 161/180 in 2023. The rise of authoritarianism in the Indian state, attributed to the political rise and entrenchment of Hindu nationalist ideology, facilitated by the electoral dominance of the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi since 2014, has contributed in dangerous ways to the shrinking of the press’s voice of critique. Beyond the centralization of state power, the evolution and current proliferation of the Hindu right-wing is characterized by a range of disturbing and insidious developments such as vigilantism, stifling of dissenting voices, use of “anti-terror” laws regarding sedition and defamation against activists, oppressing human rights groups, targeting political opponents and journalists, normalizing Islamophobia, and rising anti-Dalit violence.
It is within these shifts and crises that While We Watched is situated. The documentary is an argument for the stakes of its protagonist’s fight for his voice and a documentation of this uphill battle. Though the film draws on the biographical approach and Shukla clearly reveres his protagonist, it neither aims to construct a hagiography of Kumar nor to position itself within documentary connotations of ‘facts.’ It is informed by storytelling that aims to provoke and affect. The film places us in close intimacy with Kumar while eschewing the exposition, illustration, and substantiation structure. Instead of talking heads and testimonies underscoring Kumar’s idealism and bravery, the film situates Kumar, his prime-time show, and NDTV in the context of the larger media ecosystem in India. We witness with horror the news channels furthering Modi and ruling party BJP’s political agenda across the board by spreading misinformation, normalizing rightwing Hindu majoritarianism, and labelling voices of dissent as “anti-national” (Fig. 3 and 4). Hand-held observational footage often frames Kumar’s hands running anxiously through hair and his worried face in extreme close-up. The film gradually divulges the contours of his despair. Through fast-paced editing, tightly framed sequences with no moments of release, skillful selection of key events and encounters, and suspenseful score, the film effectively employs documentary tropes of immediacy, iterating the high stakes of the transformations inside NDTV and outside. As we watch Kumar’s colleagues leave, farewell cakes cut, finances crumble, right-wing jingoism rise, and viewership shrink, the film moves us from being awestruck by Kumar’s idealism and perseverance to poignancy as we intimately witness his loneliness, struggles, and vulnerability amidst the collapse of journalism and freedom of speech in India (Figure 5 and 6).
While the film has remarkable access to Kumar, as well as to classified administrative workings of NDTV, Shukla also gives us glimpses into Kumar’s life outside the newsroom. The vignettes with his young daughter and wife act as a reminder both of his ordinary, middle-class bearings and of the impact that his refusal to cower to right-wing jingoism has on his family. This strategy of blending the professional and personal, back and forth movement between the immediacy of the newsroom and the intimacy of the home, consolidates our alignment with him. If we weren’t initially invested in the question Kumar asked at the opening – “when you find yourself all alone, who do you listen to?” – we are by the end of the film.
As the film calls upon us, the viewers, to reflect on our own complicity and participation in India’s dangerous spiral towards the right-wing ideology of majoritarian nationalism, Shukla doesn’t merely set out to uncover the ‘truth’ of the current state of broadcast journalism and position us as witnesses to its tragic state. In relation to the political transformations and deep contestation over the ideas and rights of citizenship in contemporary India, the larger argument that While We Watched frames is about its own act of documenting as a mode of performing citizenship. Documentary filmmaking in India has long been associated with participating in citizenship formations, interrogating shifting relationships between the Indian state and citizenship, and mobilizing new speculative forms of belonging. By documenting Kumar’s battle for relevance in ‘new India’, While We Watched highlights the significance of cinematically creating spaces of solidarity and critique. While production through international funding and international circuits of exhibition add to this global visibility, the long road to its release in India also reminds us of the fast-shrinking spaces and forms through which citizenship rights to free speech and dissent can be mediated and claimed.
DOCALOGUE 
When is the film due to be released in zaystralua?
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