Shweta Kishore lectures in Screen and Media at RMIT University, Australia. She is the author of Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers: Independence in Practice and has published widely on Indian documentary, documentary ethics, feminist film, and activist film festivals. Shweta is a documentary practitioner and has curated documentary and artist cinema programmes for the Kochi Muziris Biennale (India), The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre (Vietnam), and the Melbourne International Film Festival (Australia). Kunal Ray teaches literary and cultural studies at FLAME University, Pune, India. His writings on art and culture regularly appear in The Hindu, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times amongst other publications. He co-edited Shabd aur Sangeet- Unraveling Song-Texts in India. He is also the co-founder and co-editor of On Eating - A Multilingual Journal of Food & Eating.
Indian documentary films have served as ventriloquists for state reason, and then as tribunes defending the people. Increasingly, over the past three decades, they have grown to include a rich repertoire of ways of linking the personal and the political, unpacking and rethinking assumptions of majority and minority, of secular realism and its critiques, and of technique and exhibition. Shweta Kishore and Kunal Ray have assembled an expansive and deeply nuanced set of essays on these issues and more, from scholars, filmmakers, and curators, reflecting the state of the art on Indian documentary film. This book is a necessary addition to any library. --Arvind Rajagopal, Media Studies, NYU