Anand Patwardhan’s latest film, Vivek (“Reason”), captures the frightening ways that the continual rise of Hindu nationalism is threatening Indian democracy. Over a course of four hours and eight different chapters, Patwardhan’s film documents the systematic violence carried out by individuals associated with Hindu nationalist organizations against Dalits, Muslims, university students, journalists, and those who critique the current administration’s politics.

In this interview (which has been edited and condensed for clarity), NYU PhD student Leela Khanna speaks with Patwardhan about his film and the current state of politics in India.

Leela Khanna: What led you to make this commentary on the Hindu Right? Was there a specific incident or set of events that served as an impetus to start this exhaustive project?

Anand Patwardhan: It was the murder of Indian rationalists[1] that triggered the film. First Dr. Dabholkar, a well-known anti-superstition activist, was gunned down by radical Hindutva groups in 2013, and then the left-wing politician of the Communist Party of India, Comrade Govind Pansare, was shot and killed in February 2015.

LK: Why have you named this film Vivek?

AP: Vivek can be translated as “reason” or “rationality,” but actually there is no perfect equivalent in English. It means more than rationality. Reason is often interpreted simply as scientific thought. But scientists made the atom bomb! You could be both rational and a ruthless fascist like Hitler and not believe in religion, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a good human being. Vivek has a component of wisdom or humanism in it that sees all human beings as connected and all living creatures as interdependent.

LK: Could you tell us more about how you organized the film into eight chapters. Had you already thought about dividing it into these segments before the filming?

AP: None of my films are scripted in any sense. Basically I have a vague idea of what I’m doing. I keep gathering material and it’s only at the editing table when I’m looking at all the material I shot that I get ideas of where the film can go. I begin to see what the patterns are and what more needs to be shot to make sense of it all. In this film, as I shot what was happening in India in the 21^st century, I realized that I had to go back in time to explain where the religious divide came from and how it was engineered during British rule. The chapters that followed describe the slow unfolding of this process.

LK: You’ve made other films on Hindu nationalism and communalism in India, including the 1992 film, Ram Ke Naam (In the Name of God). How has Hindu nationalism changed since the 1990s when the Hindu Right first gained electoral power?

AP: It has become much more aggressive. In the 1990s they were almost apologetic in comparison to today. Apologetic in the sense that they knew they had latched onto a good thing because they came to power using the Ram Temple issue[2], which effectively rallied Hindus against Muslims over the issue of a religious site. Back then they came to power in one state using communalism, but today they are in power everywhere. The Hindu nationalist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] is the fastest growing NGO in the world, and actually calling it an NGO is not a good way to describe the RSS, because they are not just a non-governmental organization, they are, today, the government itself.

LK: What is at stake now? Is there something more at stake than there was in the 1990s?

AP: In the 1990s they were containable, they were not all powerful and not the dominant force in the country. The government of that day, The Congress Party, which was a so-called secular government could have nipped it in the bud. They could have actually taken counter measures, they knew that Hindutva was using cultural mobilization as a weapon but instead of fighting it by promoting secular culture, they abetted it by running a primetime Ramayana serial on national television! They could have promoted alternative narratives but they didn’t even show the films that many of us had made on the rise of fundamentalism. I had to fight in court cases to get Ram Ke Naam[3] shown on Doordarshan TV and by the time we won our case the Babri Mosque had long been demolished and Hindu-Muslim violence unleashed in its wake.

LK: Who is your intended audience for this work?

AP: I never have a single target, but I definitely want this work to be very easy to access in India. I think even internationally it needs to be seen not only because there are many parallels between what is happening in India and what is happening in the United States for instance. Although I don’t draw all of these parallels out, as in I don’t talk about Trump, but you can see the obvious connections. This apart, another reason for showing Reason abroad is that the Indian diaspora plays a big and often ugly role in promoting both majoritarian hatred and corporate greed, so reaching the diaspora may heal some people merely by supplying information that is missing from their usual ambit.

LK: What sort of reactions or conversations do you hope to generate through this film?

AP: I hope to wake people up from their slumber and their ideas about how the Indian Congress Party had so many years in power, and how they were so corrupt, and we should give somebody else a chance. That kind of uninformed wishy-washy thinking will disappear when people see what this current BJP government is actually up to.

LK: What kind of reactions has your film elicited?

AP: As of now, the film has been shown very little in India. So it’s been mostly reactions from abroad at festivals and a few universities. Some people haven’t been to India much, and even though they might be of South Asian origin, they didn’t know anything about this. And there are others who do know something about it. But almost all of them have been positive.

LK: In the epilogue you begin with the murder of rationalist journalist Gauri Lankesh in 2017, showing that journalists critical of the Hindu Right are still being targeted and killed. However, you end this film with a quote by the left-wing rationalist, Comrade Govind Pansare, who you mentioned before and who seemed quite hopeful about where the world is heading. Could you explain your reasoning for that?

AP: Pansare is saying that inequity in the world has become so great that people will rise and fight back. This is not just a dream, but even if it were, dreaming is no sin. So it’s a bitter sweet ending because you don’t know if he means that a more just world is inevitable, or he’s saying that this is his dream. It is my dream too, so I thought it was a perfect place to end.

LK: So are you feeling hopeful?

AP: Yes, I’m hopeful in that I’m not stupidly hopeful, but realistically hopeful. This current trajectory that we’re going towards fascism is not going to last and it’s not sustainable. People will wake up and they are waking up.

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[1] The rationalist movement in India refers to activists who advocate for scientific skepticism and who question the supernatural claims made by charismatic gurus, or so-called ‘god men,’ who claim to have paranormal powers.

[2] In the late 1980s, Hindu nationalist groups began campaigning for the construction of a temple for the Hindu deity, Rama, at the site of a 16^th century mosque. Hindu groups claimed that a Muslim ruler had demolished a Hindu temple and built the mosque on the temple’s ruins. The campaign resulted in the destruction of the mosque in 1992 and led to widespread Hindu-Muslim violence around India and the electoral victory of the Hindu majoritarian party, the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP].

[3] Patwardhan’s 1992 documentary examines the campaign led by Hindu nationalist forces to build the Ram temple at the site of the famous mosque, the Babri Masjid.