Marching in the Dark: a Quest for Allyship

The practice-based PhD thesis of Kinshuk Surjan arises from a personal dissonance with cinematic portrayals of India’s prolonged agrarian crisis. In the past three decades, more than 400.000 farmers have committed suicide. The thesis argues that a subconsciously inherited, neocolonial gaze on rural India has shaped how Indian farmers have been represented/ignored. This gaze fosters urban indifference and affects policy, enabling the crisis. The PhD therefore asks how a filmmaker can counter the continuation of this gaze?

The research is a critical self-reflection that traces a path of stumbling and learning as an outsider through ethical and practical challenges. This journey led to the Friendship Circle, a collaborative space created with widowed women farmers in Maharashtra, the soil from which the film Marching in the Dark sprouted. This research has put together an imperfect but hopeful model for first-time filmmakers to adapt/weave into their own practices; to not wait for (possibly) positively affecting the lives of people until a film is completed, but to make the creation process itself be as supportive as possible.