The first international wave of activist documentary cinema began around the late 1960s and the early 1970s, including in India. This was a time when filmmakers leaned towards more personal arguments about political and social issues, when documentaries moved away from observation and favoured intervention in society and when a new documentary practice and style developed, determined by low budgets and striking content. Later, in the 1990s to 2000s, the digital revolution brought further developments to this mode of filmmaking worldwide. In India, along with the market-driven satellite TV boom and privatisation of the sector of the early 1990s, it has allowed a wider range of politically committed documentarists to make and circulate their films. This new context has broadened documentary production, distribution and exhibition strategies, and thus complicated the meaning of the ‘activist’ documentary endeavour.

In general, film scholars tend to define the activist documentary film in loose terms. Bill Nichols describes it as a way to ‘engage aesthetically and transform politically’ (2001: 225), while the Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film designates the activist film and video as ‘one of the sets of tactics and strategies developed by social movements … to prompt social change … using all the available means of persuasion and coercion at their disposal’ (2006: 7–9). Academics also agree that the digital and web revolutions have allowed more user-generated and participatory content to be produced, and thus have enabled, in theory at least, ‘average citizens to circumvent the gatekeeping of commercial media and traditional channels of political discourses’ (Aguayo 2011: 362–3). In today's satellite TV and digital eras, do Indian activist documentaries develop similar characteristics to those emerging in other countries around the world? Or if one assumes that the definition and function of the activist documentary film vary according to specific contexts, how did historical events and national policies influence the evolution and role of the activist documentary film in India?

This chapter will look into the definition and legacy of the early activist mode of documentary filmmaking in 1970s India and will show how current filmmakers reinvent its meaning by shifting its initial boundaries of total independence to more subtle and moving grounds.