Witness to revolution: Anand Patwardhan's documentaries on the Emergency

While 'Waves of Revolution' focused on Jayaprakash Narayan's Bihar movement, 'Prisoners of Conscience' documented voices of political prisoners

On the morning of 25 September 1975, Prabir Purkayastha, a PhD researcher in computer science at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, was detained by the police from the university’s verdant campus in the southern part of the capital. He was taking part in a protest organized by the Leftist student organization, the Students Federation of India (SFI), against the expulsion of his fellow student and fiancée, Ashoka Lata Jain. The police team that forcibly picked him up was led by then Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Delhi Police, P.S. Bhinder, who took Purkayastha to the Hauz Khas police station, with the intention of arresting him under the dreaded Maintenance of Internal Security Act, 1971.

 

 

However, Bhinder had not intended to arrest Purkayastha at all; the police officer, in fact, did not even know about the engineer-turned-researcher. Describing the Kafkaesque incident in painstaking detail in his book Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (2019), historian Gyan Prakash reveals that Bhinder’s real target was another SFI activist and JNU student, Devi Prasad Tripathi. DPT, as he was known, had that morning urged another student, Maneka Gandhi, to join the protests. Then 19 years old, Maneka Gandhi was married to Sanjay Gandhi, the son of prime minister Indira Gandhi, who had, three months previously, declared a state of emergency in the country.

 

Despite the case of misrecognition, Purkayastha was sent to the dreaded Tihar Jail in Delhi; DPT would also be arrested soon after and held without trial. The documentary film, ‘Prisoners of Conscience’ (1978), directed by Anand Patwardhan, includes a short interview with DPT, in which he recollects an incident when prison guards attacked Iranian students who had been imprisoned for protesting the Shah’s regime. However, DPT also strikes an optimistic note: “Jail life was a source of strength as well, because we thought that despite our political differences, we were struggling for a society where the rights of the people would not be crushed.”

 

‘Prisoners of Conscience’ was one of the two documentary films made by Patwardhan on the Emergency, a period of 21 months from 26 June 1975 to 21 March 1977, provocatively described by political scientists Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil as “India's first dictatorship”, during which Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution, muzzled the press, imprisoned political opponents and ruled by decree. Patwardhan’s previous documentary, ‘Waves of Revolution’, captured the student movement against corruption in Gujarat and Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti movement in Bihar in 1974, which seriously destabilized the legitimacy of Indira Gandhi’s government, and eventually led, along with other reasons, to the declaration of the Emergency.

 

In his 1981 MA thesis, submitted to McGill University in Montreal, Patwardhan described the process of making both films. “In October 1974 I had gone to Patna… as a volunteer in the Bihar movement,” he writes. “When the November 4 rally was planned, police violence was widely apprehended [sic].” The government had brought in a large number of police and paramilitary personnel, cancelled all buses and trains, and barricaded the banks of the Ganga to prevent people from coming in boats. “The camera was thus both a weapon of self-defence against the atrocities of the State as well as eyewitness of the courage of the people,” writes Patwardhan. “It was felt that the presence of cameras might inhibit the repression that would otherwise certainly be unleashed by the police.”

 

With very little equipment (two 8 mm cameras and some cassettes for recording), Patwardhan and his inexperienced team filmed the protests on 4 November 1974 in Patna. The grainy footage included in the film shows large crowds, people clashing with police at the barricades, police personnel charging at the crowds with batons and firing tear gas, and a student picking up a tear gas shell and throwing it towards the police lines. The images are juxtaposed with a media report on the state-controlled All India Radio, which claims that the event had been a failure. A little later, Jayaprakash Narayan tells Patwardhan in an interview that he considers the movement to be a success because “the government had to make such huge preparations — I don’t think this has ever happened in any democratic country.”          

 

The post-production of the film was also full of challenges, as much of the material could not be used, and facilities for editing were not readily available. A voice-over in the film states this for the audience. “Finally in June (1975), the first print was ready,” Patwardhan writes in his thesis, but as the Emergency was declared, “the film went underground. Screenings became even more clandestine.” The film was cut up into pieces and smuggled out of India, “where it could raise international opinion against the Emergency”. And Patwardhan, too, followed his film out of the country, enrolling in a postgraduate course at McGill University. Despite being rejected by almost all TV networks, the film was screened by various diaspora groups campaigning against the Emergency.

 

Journalist Sugata Srinivasaraju, in his book The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship (2025), writes that the film “became an effective audio-visual medium to spread the word against the Emergency. The images of the film offered relief amidst the grey world in journals and newspapers.” Srinivasaraju also notes how Patwardhan had been arrested twice in the US for participating in anti-Vietnam protests. A promotional leaflet for the film, the journalist writes, later found its way to the files of Indian ambassador to the US, T.N. Kaul.

 

Prabir Purkayastha’s arrest during the Emergency, and subsequent imprisonment, illustrates the arbitrary nature of repression, but it is also part of a wider history of political dissent. In October 2023, Purkayastha was arrested under the dreaded Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for allegations linking NewsClick, a news website he founded in 2009, to Neville Roy Singham, an Indian-origin businessman with alleged links to the Chinese Community Party. He remained in custody till May 2024, when the Supreme Court ordered his release; the Delhi High Court quashed the cases against him earlier this year. Patwardhan’s documentaries challenged official narratives of the Emergency and preserved evidence of democratic resistance, revealing how documentary cinema can become a vital means to struggle against authoritarianism.

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Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist