The Digital Turn? Technological transformations in the history of documentary cinema in India

Abstract

This article highlights the potential and the limitation of digital technology in Indian cultural industries, including the field of documentary cinema. While paying attention to the process of digitisation of state archival images (such as those of the Films Division in Mumbai and those of the Anthropological Survey of India in Kolkata) vis-à-vis more contemporary new forms of participatory and interactive archives such as those of Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive), this account investigates the complexities and possibilities of the moment of 'archivisation' of digital images. The goal here is not to celebrate the 'digital turn' for the creation and diffusion of documentary images in India -or, to see the 'digital turn' in a 'positivist' way. Rather, it is to contextualise and historicise the 'digital turn' by placing it in relation to the 'video turn', which occurred in India in the 1980s, and the 'telecommunication turn' (such as the arrival of portable telephones and the first emailing practices), which occurred in the subcontinent in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through such historical reflections, this article shall finally underline the sociotechnological complexities that exist today around the 'digital' in (as well as outside) the subcontinent and the possibilities that more contemporary interactive participatory archives bring to forms of representation and communication between different cultures and societies.