Tying these vignettes together, Patwardhan ends the isolation of the victim, mounting instead a thorough critique of the conditions that produce this unbearable sorrow and those who benefit from it.

We can now understand the profound threat that intellectuals like Kalburgi, Dabholkar, Pansare, and Lankesh had posed—and their courage in opposing the current regime. Patwardhan analyzes the attacks on universities as

• economic (through privatization and declining state funding),
• cultural (installing extremist right wing administrators, changing curriculum along Hindutva ideology, and flouting democratic processes of academic life), and
• existential (students and professors harassed, roughed up, sometimes in the presence of the police, and an entire university, like JNU, declared anti-national).

In the memory of Rohith Vemula.

The film traces the suicide of the Dalit student activist, Rohith Vemula and the continuing resistance of his mother and brother. Patwardhan links the bid to crush the university and education system to Brahmanical domination. After all, it was a crime for a Dalit to read, a crime punishable by death.

The extent to which the Hindu Right has armed itself and has penetrated into State institutions, including government and police, comes into sharp relief with Patwardhan’s investigations into the suspicious death of Hemant Karkare, Commissioner of Police, Maharashtra, during the terrorist attacks in Bombay in November 2008. Through interviews and archival footage, Patwardhan uncovers that Karkare had traced the bomb attacks in Bombay between 2002-2008 to the Hindu Right. Coming as it does, two-thirds into the film, this part brings together what we have seen so far—the assassinations and lynchings, the assaults on public institutions like universities and the justice system, and the complicity of the media machine—to the unmistakable conclusion that India is descending into fascism.

We are taken to spectacular rallies of the Hindu right and their rewriting of India’s history as a myth of ancient Hindu greatness that was crushed by “foreign invasions” by Muslim (not British) rulers. The BJP’s promises to restore India to this former glory, a new militarized India on the offensive—a global power. In an astounding range of shots, from wide angles of crowds, to the spectacles on stage, to interviews with the attendees, Patwardhan reveals the mix of docility and virulent aggression that characterizes the men and women aligned with Hindutva.

 A saffron parade.

These fantastic displays of power are shown seeping into everyday life. We return from the RSS rally to a Mumbai suburb where the Shiv Sena has changed the name of a local train station from Oshiwara to the Hindutva obsession, Ram Mandir (Ram temple). Benign, smiling middle-class, middle-aged men tell Patwardhan,

“Now, whether they like it or not everyone will have to say the name of Ram.”

Attentive to small detail, Patwardhan shows the unfolding of this totalitarian vision. We see Muslim men under the Ram Mandir sign, waiting for the train.

The Shiv Sena government changes the name of the Oshiwara station in Bombay to Ram Mandir.	"Even those who don't want to will utter Ram's name."

Documentary and poetry

Vivek/Reason has a liveness that makes it gripping; it stands in the midst of a sweeping change whose outcome is a matter of life and death. Literally, anything can happen and the camera is a witness and provocateur. This is also classic Patwardhan. We see him, camera in hand, going into the Kolhapur Police Commissioner’s office, asking why no arrests have been made, three months after Pansare was killed. As is to be expected, the officer replies that they are looking into it, etc., etc…

However, the camera does not fixate on the officer. It meanders over the symbols of liberal democracy that line the commissioner’s office, indicating both the coldly impersonal, ritualistic nature of these displays and their ironic historical importance. Thus, the scene lifts us above a literal presentation of what is in front of the camera. Instead, the camera becomes a tool of discovery. Patwardhan shows us, not just another “bad” police officer caught on camera, but rather a state of democracy in which another history is silenced.

There is a profoundly poignant moment on camera, which I think holds the overall tenor of the film—blending the pain and hope of these times. Patwardhan is interviewing Shaila Dabholkar after her husband has been killed. Shaila Dabholkar is describing her first meeting with her husband and for some reason Patwardhan has to stop and restart the interview. We hear him apologize off screen:

“Sorry tai (elder sister), but could you please repeat your last sentence again? Sorry! Sorry!”

What follows is a moment of such deep reflection of loss and recovery on a human face that time stops—before it picks up again.

Shaila Dabholkar first gently laughs off the interruption. She reassures Patwardhan that it is ok. Then, in what is perhaps a reminder to herself as well as recognition of the importance of what Patwardhan is doing, she remarks that these days everything is for her husband. But then, she cannot just go on—and in the quietest possible way asks for a minute to compose herself.

Here is a moment that a painter might not be able to depict in one still image, but a poet could. For a poet takes a concrete experience and then distills it, immersing it back into the river of time. How do you show the passing of a moment in which grief rises to the surface and is then made private again? How do you show the moment in which the personal yields to the political? There is affection and regard here between the filmmaker and his subject—and solidarity. This tender moment is as clear an indication of where Patwardhan stands as are the instances of confrontation or investigation we see him engage in. It is also an instance of profound beauty—of human dignity and love in its many forms. What a contrast to the smashing of human dignity we see in the language and imagery of the ultra-right.

It's ok.	You know how it is now...anything for Doctor.
	Give me a minute.

The film’s title Vivek is only loosely translated as reason. Derived from Sanskrit, with versions in different languages, for example bibek in Bengali, vivek means the wisdom to discern between right and wrong—to seek the truth. Thus, Sikhs pray for vivek daan, i.e., the gift of wisdom, in the ardaas, the prayer which accompanies the start or end of a task. It is vivek, the wisdom of the heart and intellect, that Patwardhan brings to us through his interviews with those who struggle against the gathering storm and are paying the price for its cruel desires.

We see vivek in the resolute gentleness of Mohammed Akhlaq’s son, Sartaj. With his father dead and younger brother brutally beaten and fighting for his life in hospital, Sartaj says, “I am fortunate to be born in this country. There is love among the people” and “only a handful of people” are destroying its fabric. Interviewed in the bare home of a metalsmith who had educated his son to join the Air Force, Sartaj recounts how he had wanted to pull his father out of this hard life. His sister, who had witnessed the horror looks on, her eyes still seared by shock.

In the face of such needless cruelty and sorrow, Vivek/Reason gives us some achingly quiet moments to grieve. We have been told of the brutal lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq in Dadri. But before his son Sartaj begins to speak of his father, the screen holds the image of a metalsmith’s tongs holding a red-hot piece of iron over fire. These quiet shots prepare us to listen to Sartaj’s testimony and are also a metaphor—of the fire of poverty and honest labor through which Akhlaq, a metalsmith, had molded his children and the fire they have now been thrust into. Shaped by a hard life and a father’s love, they will, we hope, withstand this attack. It is also a fire that we, the viewers, must face. We have come to this scene after we have just witnessed young Dalit men, beaten up laying in hospital beds, as they return from a large protest rally.

Before Sartaj recounts his childhood, we see a metalsmith’s firing kiln.

This is how the documentary becomes poetic. It takes something from the world itself and grants it meaning and significance, both as a metaphor and analysis. In another instance, walking along in Hemant Karkare’s funeral procession, the camera notes not only the hypocrisy of the State honors but also the flowers that fall on the wayside. Humbly the flowers pay their homage to a brave and honest police officer who had upheld his duty to the Constitution, i.e., to pursue justice equally for all citizens. The flowers are also a metaphor for memory, gathered by the camera for the resistance that has to continue after Karkare’s death.

The fire and the flowers remind me of the great Marxist poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s lines:

“Yuhin hamesha ulajhati rahi hai zulm se khalq
Na unki rasm nai hai, na apni reet nai
Yuhin hamesha khilaye hain humne aag mein phool
Na unki haar nai hai na apni jeet nai”

“Always like this, the people have struggled with the tyrants
Neither have they changed their rituals and nor have we
Always like this, we have blossomed flowers in fire
Neither is their defeat new and nor is our victory”

Vivek/Reason gathers and repeats—like people’s protest songs do—lessons from history that build hope for the future. Against the short-term grandiose predictions of Hindutva and their apocalyptic visions, Vivek/Reason presents the continuity of memory, remembered in songs and poetry. If we are shown Sanatan Sansthan’s declaration that India will become a Hindu Rashtra (nation) in 2023 (the prediction is made in 2013), we also hear Sheetal Sathe and Nikam sing of the struggle for equality and justice. We hear Uttam Kamble recite Baburao Bagul at Gobind Pansare’s memorial:

“You existed before the vedas
You existed even before the god of the vedas
You named the sun, so it Sun it became
You named the moon, so Moon it became
You named everything in the universe
And it was you who named the gods.”

He then asks, “Who is this person the poem speaks of?” His face glowing with love and admiration for the beauty of these lines, Kambale gives the answe: the human.

Ultimately, the film’s quietness comes from the unyielding courage of the people it portrays. The courage also comes from memory of previous struggles and sacrifices and the conviction, in Pansare’s words, which also end the film, that as long as inequality exists people will rise up. As the end credits roll, we are at a rally commemorating Gauri Lankesh. At the center are drummers beating a fierce rhythm; a call to unite, to stay true to the memory of Gauri. The drummers wear headbands, carrying the words, “I am Gauri.”

The film could have ended at the drumbeats, but Patwardhan does not leave us there. He surprises with another ending. With the drums still beating, the scene changes to a street with Pansare coming up on it. Then, the drums fade out and the last words are Pansare’s:

“In the philosophy I follow, a basic aspect is the inevitability of success. It has little to do with our desires. At no stage in world history was disparity as great as it is today. This inequity will not allow humans to rest. People will rise up to fight it. And, step by step, step by step humans will progress. It will happen. It is no dream. And, dreaming is no sin.”

It is difficult to put into words the effect of this last sequence. We know that Pansare is dead, yet we have an image of him as alive—and he lives on in our struggles. Here, in cinema, Patwardhan echoes Sheetal Sathe revolutionary singing, invoking the power of memory and hope in struggles for justice. She sings,

“Even if they destroy the body, they cannot destroy the thought
Oh religious mercenaries, can you stop the wheel of progress?”

An epic documentary

Through the course of this film, we meet many people—some whose lives are personally interconnected and others connected by their principles and the times they live in. Patwardhan takes us into the homes of some, interviews others in public places, and pieces life narratives as well as the context by assembling existing footage. We meet Gobind and Uma Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi, Narendra and Shaila Dabholkar, Gauri Lankesh, Rohith Vemula, Radhika Vemula, Raja Vemula, Mohammad Sartaj, Mohammed Sadiq, Hemant Karkare, S.M Mushrif, Sheela Sathe, Nikam, Sharmila and Saurabh Lotlikar, and many others in what is best described as an epic documentary.

Here, Patwardhan taps into a South Asian genre born, perhaps, out of the trauma of Partition, which tore apart families and neighborhoods and forced the migration of fifteen million people with more than one million estimated dead. This is the epic historical narrative. Abdullah Hussein’s Urdu novel, The Weary Generations, first published in 1963 attempted such an epic narrative, covering the three decades leading up to the Partition. This is before Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). The sense of the individual as historical, with outcomes inextricably tied to the times, and the interconnection between people runs through these epic narratives. Like epics, these stories are never-ending, because they are stories of a society, not only individuals. If we understand all history as class struggle, then this form comes closest to representing history as never finished, until humanity itself is. History in this conception is always being made and we can never fully predict the outcomes of our actions—future transformations change our understanding of the past. However, to narrate such a story in fiction is one thing, to bring it to life on the screen in documentary form is an extraordinary achievement. I cannot think of another film that approaches this one in its attention to both the macro and the individual; that is so present in everyday struggle and aware of history; and that portrays the democratic spirit as an intense desire for a dignified life for all.

On February 18, 1943, as the Germans were losing the war, Goebels gave what is known as the “total war speech,” where he asked,

“Do you want the war to be still more total, more radical than we can imagine it today?”

This is a call for war for its own sake—without limits as an end in itself. The role of media in such a total war is no longer to distort reality, to create fake news, but rather to destroy the notion of reality itself. It rides on the delusion of complete power where anything in its way must be destroyed. Such a mind is trapped in the immediate; it is addicted to the thrill of murder; and stoked by ever more destruction. It is no wonder that it is drawn to cinema—now easily carried in the palm of one’s hand—to create and circulate images of obliteration of the world we know. There is, perhaps, nothing more real for a species than itself. That the annihilation of the other that has become ordinary is a sign that we are losing grip over reality.

The antidote to this imaginary also lies with cinema but one where reality can be pulled out of this immediate state of terror and given meaning by a sense of justice and solidarity amongst people. Clearly, Reason/Vivek is the result of a sustained lifetime of commitment, of living a life in solidarity with the subjects of the film. Each of Patwardhan’s films have been politically committed, he has seen them as means of organizing, and himself as part of a movement. Music and poetry have run through them all. But, perhaps, this is the most poetic of all. Maybe, the times call for it. As India enters Modi’s second term, the grip of frenzied devotion to authoritarian spectacles has tightened.  It continues in lumpen sadistic violence against others and in masochistic displays of craven self-humiliation by “intellectuals” in front of Modi.  We will need Vivek/Reason to keep democracy alive; and we will need revolutionary poetry to remind us that change is both necessary and inevitable.  The evidence that Reason/Vivek is working is that the establishment has tried to stop the film from being screened and failed. It was screened at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Kerala in June 2019; the court over-riding the delaying tactics of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry against its screening.  Patwardhan’s 1992 film, In the name of Ram has become a protest event and rally in universities, with screenings in Delhi, Kolkatta, and Hyderabad.  The documentary filmmaker as a maker and keeper of history has never been so necessary.

Sheetal Sathe’s revolutionary singing: "Even if they destroy the body ...	... they cannot destroy the thought.
O religious mercenaries ...	... can you stop the wheel of progress?"