Alternating Currents: On Writing with Fire

Kahabar Lahariya is a news organisation that started its print run in 2002. Published in Hindi out of the state of Uttar Pradesh, its newsroom is run entirely by women (most importantly, Dalit women) who set the agenda for reporting about the rural world of the most populated and deeply socially-stratified state in India. Filmmakers Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s documentary Writing with Fire, focuses on a crucial moment of transition as the organisation prepares to “go digital” after 2016. Harnessing technological change requires a complex negotiation between social capital, access and educational privilege—and these rural reporters are occasionally taught by city-based feminists about such crucial changes—all of which is on powerful display in the film’s narrative. Its adoption of digital technology for a more efficient dissemination of their stories is part of a large-scale transformation of the media landscape in India. Currently, mainstream news channels on television are often superseded in critical and compassionate registers by organised, alternative media outfits such as Maktoob Media and Dalit Camera, even as the imagination of an “alternative” digital media remains confined to a niche within urban-based offshoots of identifiable media conglomerates, usually operating in English.

Writing with Fire emphasises the socially inclusive role that most journalists merely adopt for themselves. They are insiders to the world of caste and gender exclusion, and their stories are naturally tinged with the awareness of their own experiences in the field as well as at home. The perilousness of their position is repeatedly highlighted by members of their own family as well, many of whom do not expect Khabar Lahariya to survive another year. Technological change represents another form of precariousness, constantly pushing them to draw on the limited educational resources at their disposal.  

The active task of gathering information, following up with police stations and interviewing powerful local or state leaders, are fraught with danger that these journalists navigate without many safety nets. Journalists have increasingly come under attack in Uttar Pradesh for their reporting, with many being murdered over the last few years.

On the other hand, the documentary’s foregrounding of such stark statistical truths about Uttar Pradesh, in an effort to set the stage for the social and political conditions within which the Khabar Lahariya journalists operate, has been criticised by the journalists of the organisation since the film’s garnered popularity with its nomination at the Academy Awards for Best Documentary (Feature) Film in 2021. They issued a statement detailing that their reality is a “much more complex story than the one going to the Oscars” and that “(it) is a story which captures a part of ours, and part stories have a way of distorting the whole sometimes.” They went on to claim that the film’s singular focus on their critical reporting of BJP’s majoritarian politics could “risk the reputation and survival of a credible local news organisation, as well as our team who take care to be perceived as objective, principled reporters.” There is no doubt that the film trains a bright focus on how vulnerable the lives of many of the women journalists of Khabar Lahariya are. However, in its emphasis on following them around during work, it creates the impression that these physical activities are all that the journalists engage in, aside from educating themselves about technology and politics. In fact, much of their work is actually made possible due to the support of figures within such complex state and local machineries. In several cases, this is what allows for the quick turnaround of justice cases—as documented by the film—and their own protection from violence and reprisal. The film chooses to not show these more invisible threads that empower their practice as insider-journalists. This does not mean that the film is misguided in its attempt to pigeonhole their politics; it does not quite do that either. Not only does the film’s narrative painstakingly establishes the journalists’ freedom from party political biases but also highlights their personal concerns with the hegemonic power exercised by the BJP; the party came to power both nationally (for the second time in 2019) as well as at the state level in Uttar Pradesh, during the filming of the documentary. The BJP’s tacit acceptance of the murder of journalists like Gauri Lankesh, and imprisonment of others, also provoked a reaction from the reporters of Khabar Lahariya, as they decided to hold a Facebook livestream to share their concerns about the incident.

The problem perhaps lies in the separation between two different ways of looking at the politics of contemporary India. Despite its size, Uttar Pradesh remains a largely impoverished state, with a literacy rate that is lower than the national average. Along with similar kinds of extreme data about crime, corruption and caste violence, Uttar Pradesh translates into the urban, middle-class vocabulary of Indian politics as a domain of lawlessness and terror, without any consideration for historical contingencies or struggles of resistance against such formations. Distance breeds this violent disjuncture between the social realities of Uttar Pradesh and liberal-democratic orthodoxies that encourage categorical thinking, instead of human motivation, for such dark places on the map. Unfortunately, the documentary easily slips into the urban narrative of what we can expect Uttar Pradesh to be like, even as it attempts to challenge these knee-jerk biases with a more involved view of the journalists’ lives and the contradictory emotions they inspire in many of their subjects (one of them, a victim of a local mining syndicate, even attempts to touch the journalist’s feet in gratitude). On the other hand, as part of their move towards digital technology, the journalists have also begun to host “shows” by themselves—modelled after anchored news shows dominant on television—in an effort to better explain the context of their news production as the condition for their holistic political commentary on the state of Uttar Pradesh. It is possible, therefore, to accept both methods, as long as one is capable of peeling the layers connecting the two mediascapes. It would be a fulfilment of the most cynical consequence, for contexts are diluted in the act of translating from one media ecology to another, for each viewing constituent to find their own distorted image reflected through the mirror of the film.

All images from Writing with Fire. 2021. Directed by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh. Images courtesy of the directors.