A Fly in the Curry : Independent Documentary Film in India – K.P. Jayasankar, Anjali Monteiro

This is an extraordinary book. It will set new standards for bringing together place, form and context in cinema studies. It accomplishes what few studies of a modern visual genre even attempt, much less achieve. This book looks at how independent Indian documentary film reworks the relationship between film-makers, their narratives, their subjects and their audience, challenging the dominant idea of documentary as a discourse of the real. Based on close textual analysis, conversations with film-makers and drawing on Breitrose’s cinema-verite film-maker as a ‘fly in the soup’, this work explores the place of documentary within the Indian public sphere.