Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar are leading documentary filmmakers, thinkers and writers based in Mumbai, India. Professional and life partners, they have made forty films together since 1987; films that question hegemonic concepts surrounding identity, modernity, nationalism, gender and development. They are actively involved in movements against censorship and founder-members of Vikalp, a collective of documentary filmmakers campaigning for freedom of expression. Together, they have mentored more than a hundred student and fellowship documentary film projects.

Monteiro and Jayasankar’s professional location as former Professors of Media and Cultural Studies within a prominent institution of the social sciences (the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai) opens a standpoint to reflectively evaluate the fundamental effects of institutional categories on documentary concepts, culture and practice. Neither generalising documentary as a discourse of sobriety, nor as a specific formal artefact, their approach is cognizant of the multiplicities of people, vocabularies and functions that inhabit documentary, and integral to its capacities for resistance. Drawing on their practice grounded in ethics and reflection, they offer vital considerations and methods for bringing together documentary scholarship, practice and education.