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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Writing with Fire and the Problems of Savarna Gaze -Komal Mohite

Writing with Fire and the Problems of Savarna Gaze -Komal Mohite

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published Published on Apr 2, 2022   modified Modified on Apr 3, 2022

-TheWire.in

The documentary serves as an uncomfortable reminder of how ill-equipped we are to deal with the complex material realities of oppressed communities, especially when they implicate us at a fundamental level.

Writing with Fire by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh is another addition to the bourgeoning mainstream media engagement with caste in India. The documentary has garnered accolades  – including an (ultimately unsuccessful) Oscar nomination – for its depiction of the journey of the women journalists who run the Khabar Lahariya newspaper in rural Uttar Pradesh.

While the documentary is a worthy endeavour that explores the lives of women journalists in a country that ranks embarrassingly low in world indices on press freedom, gender and minority rights, it has come under intense criticism from the subjects of the documentary themselves for misrepresenting their realities. The statement issued by Khabar Lahariya underscores the many problems with the documentary, one of which is the misleading claim that it is a news organisation run exclusively by Dalit women. 

The documentary does not explicitly mention the caste backgrounds of the journalists, for instance by leaving out their last names – which are a sure giveaway of caste background in India. However, even a cursory survey of the film’s reviews, along with the ‘buzz’ that has been created around it, indicates that the filmmakers gave the distinct impression that the documentary is about Dalit women journalists.

The Khabar Lahariya statement refutes this claim; instead, the collective asserts that they are  ‘Dalit-led, but also Muslim, also OBC, also upper-caste women’. The heterogeneity of the news room is not explicitly clear in the documentary, but the filmmakers do extensively cover Dalit families in UP, and their approach to the Dalit life-world raises many questions that require closer scrutiny.

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TheWire.in, 2 April, 2022, https://thewire.in/film/writing-with-fire-savarna-caste-khabar-lahariya


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