Jyoti Nisha's debut film, BR Ambedkar, Now and Then, fills a gaping void in Indian documentary filmmaking. Through the narrative strategy, it recounts and contextualises the history of India’s anticaste movement pioneered by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, the architect of the country’s constitution. Nisha places herself in front of the camera in a gesture that can, at first glance, seem innocent, but is loaded with the ammunition of an oppositional form of ‘looking back’ or ‘talking back’. Embodying a Bahujan gaze, she dwells on her lived experience, relating it to the continuum of anticaste resistance and the trauma felt by the community when it is punished for speaking out against injustices and atrocities committed against its members. The film’s most powerful moments are those that depict en masse renunciations of Hinduism through conversions to Buddhism. It attests to what it means to commit to a sense of pride in oneself and the larger community and to repudiate dehumanising hierarchical structures premised on the oppression of the majority to enable the privilege of the few.

Nisha directs the audience’s gaze by positioning herself within these larger trajectories. The wealth of research and reportage serves to bolster the discursive nature of the intersectional film, making it a must-watch for anyone hoping to navigate the systemic minefield that is caste. I reached out to Nisha to learn more about her process and journey. Edited transcripts follow: 

Rosalyn D’Mello: Could you talk us through the film’s methodology?

Jyoti Nisha: At the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, I did my thesis on the appropriation of Dr Ambedkar by academicians and politicians. I used this methodology of critical discourse analysis, which helped me throughout the film in talking about how discourses are formed. Bahujan spectatorship, funding, gaze, caste, atrocity…all of it is connected and are shared histories. I wanted to figure out a way to have it flow and to depict what it is like to have the state be against you because you are from the margins. When someone from the margins resists, the state punishes them, whether it is Rohith Vemula, the Sarvaiya brothers, Radhika Amma, or institutional murders.

For me, the film essentially started with questions about death. My mother had passed away, I was going through a lot of grief. I connected with Radhika Amma’s pain in that sense. She had lost a son. She was from the community. I was from the community. Film and Television Institute of India was under attack. For me, again, the thrust of making this film was that the problem is so grave, I don’t have any rage anymore. I completely understand why it is happening, for what reason, and what is the imagination of the nation. I understood it back in 2014—they wanted to bring in a Hindu rashtra.

So then, how do you rationally, without really provoking people, have a conversation? That’s the kind of person I am, I am ready to have the most difficult conversations in the way a respectful, educated person should be able to communicate. My question and intention were to communicate, educate, and make the invisible seen. Ultimately it was about truth telling. Our truth is that when you are in the margins, your truth is completely different from anyone sitting at the top.

The film's temperament is educational, but ultimately, it will make you feel, and think. Human beings are loyal to something. Whatever you are loyal to is what forms your ideology. And everybody is a product of some kind of ideology. We are all part of the ideological state apparatus. But at least you choose your truth. If you are not questioning, let’s not call you educated.

Rosalyn: You mention, as the credits roll, that you felt you had to re-edit the film. Can you talk us through those decisions?

Jyoti: I started working on it in 2016. I wrapped the film in August 2023. This was my third edit. I did one entire post-production of the film, the first cut, but I did not like it.

Rosalyn: What did you not like about it?

Jyoti: The pace. I didn’t want it to be sensational in any way. I felt like I hit a creative block. The flow was very much there, but it also had to do with my personal journey. I defined Bahujan Spectatorship in 2020. By then, I had already shot quite a lot of the film. The term met with a phenomenal response, it connected with students and academics. I needed to distance myself from the film project because I had been working on it for many years. It was ‘the’ most important project I had been working on, besides doing my job and thesis. The first edit was an initial rough cut, then we did a full-fledged cut in 2021. But I felt like the film was not ‘there’, which was frustrating. The documentary filmmaking form was also new to me. I studied screenwriting and understand writing well, but direction and filmmaking are a different ballgame. It requires a lot of planning. You have to find your voice. I had, in between, started teaching at Whistling Woods International, as a visiting faculty. That gave me the required distance to re-edit the film.

Rosalyn: What gave you the feeling that it was done?

Jyoti: The film was there earlier as well, but the pacing of the film and 70 per cent of the music was redone. I wanted the gravity of the issue to be felt. I didn’t want ‘shock’ value. I wanted the audience to live with that feeling and start questioning. Also, I was not in the first cut. That earlier version had a voice-over. But it made sense to be in the film and take the space. That clarity came over a period of time. I had to be there for it to really become about representation. It was always about agency. I was always saying all the things I was saying. But when I sat down [in front of the camera] and said it, it became a lot more powerful. I also felt it would help the audience connect with me at a more intimate level.

Rosalyn: Could you summarise for us the concept of Bahujan Spectatorship?

Jyoti: Bahujan Spectatorship came out of an anecdote. In 2019, I was asked to moderate a session with Newslaundry about the politics of cinema. I was critical, and it became uncomfortable for the participants—Anubhav Sinha, Sabrina Dawan, Vinod Kapri and Shubhra Gupta. I was asking logical questions, but they all got defensive, which made it very tense, and the conversation couldn’t happen in a fruitful way. The conversation moved in the direction of 'Oh, so you’re saying white people shouldn’t write about Black people’… that same argument. I said that was not the point, the point is the gaze is very different, the way you are looking and representing people, giving them dignity, and history. It’s a different history so the nuance and experience will be obviously different. I realised they simply do not know our side of the story and how we feel and why I am being so critical. I thought that was Bahujan Spectatorship. When I watch cinema by upper caste filmmakers or anybody who is being tokenistic instead of representational, or appropriating and distorting the representation of a community, then I have a problem, because they are not doing the work, and are also hijacking the very real possibilities of representation and opportunities for truth-telling. No wonder we watch cinema that comes from a Brahmin saviour and patriarchal complex. Obviously, I’d read John Berger and bell hooks. I understood spectatorship, I understood this oppositional gaze that bell hooks talks about, which is a traumatic relationship with the gaze itself.

Bahujan comes from Buddha’s Bahujan Hitay, Bahujan Sukhay. Bahujan translates to the majority of people, and Hitay and Sukhay translate to wellness and goodness. So Bahujan is the majority, 85 per cent. It also comes from Saheb Kanshi Ram’s concept of a pen, where he says that 15 per cent of a pen is the privileged community, Brahmins and Baniyas, and the lower bottom of the pen is the 85 per cent which is Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes, Other Backward Castes, minorities, women.

Bahujan Spectatorship is an oppositional gaze and a political strategy of Bahujans to reject the Brahminical representation of caste and marginalised communities in cinema. It doesn’t agree with the aesthetics of the Natyashastra, which only focuses on the rasa and sutra, the scientific method of arriving at art. What is the point of social sciences and cultural studies if culture is only Hindu, and if only this particular aesthetic and gaze which typecasts and brands you in a certain way, give you only certain occupations? That’s what gaze implies… the way you see people is the way you treat people, both on-screen and off-screen.

Rosalyn: You centre yourself in the film, you use your eyes, your reflection in the mirror. You render the oppositional gaze quite literally when you sit down and begin talking directly to the audience. Tell me more about this move.

Jyoti: Bahujan Spectatorship as a theory was a hit. I was invited to many places to talk about it, which was a very new experience for me. It is my lens, the way I see the world, and I felt it made sense to theorise about it to prepare the audience. Bahujan Spectatorship was new knowledge. People talked about authorship, but I hadn’t read about spectatorship. People were talking about Dalit cinema and kinds of heroes and ruptures, but setting that aside, my personal experience was of utmost importance. I wondered why I was feeling it so hard. I understood that personal and intimate questions become political questions. So, I was talking a lot about Bahujan Spectatorship in different spaces. People seemed amazed that someone was talking about the experience of the Bahujan community through their spectatorship.

That’s why the panellists had been so defensive. Perhaps they had not heard a woman being this assertive, articulate, rational and critical, talking about things in their own language and telling you about this history, this shared experience, telling you about caste as systematic, the gaze as systematic. The whole concept of caste is ideology. Look at the [inauguration of the] Ayodhya temple…. How can a mass go this crazy? Because ideology and myth go together. It is what drives the masses. You are able to convince them. You have put enough symbols. It’s like a whole production and set design. It’s like filmmaking, basically, a story that you have told well, which sits well, which is socially and religiously sanctioned, which intelligent people defend and call culture.

I felt like I needed to be there in the film. You need to be invested in why you should watch Jyoti Nisha’s film. It’s true, authentic. I’m a very shy person. For work, I’ll do it, but I’m not interested in being in front of the camera. After the first edit, so many people talked about reflexive filmmaking and all of that, but I was sure I didn’t want to be in the film. Then it became about agency. I thought, I am asking the same questions theoretically, why should I not ask that while being in the film? So, it became about agency, representation and being very certain about what I’m saying.