Human Rights, Journalism, and the Politics of Representation

Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s critically acclaimed documentary Writing with Fire (2021) follows the story of three Dalit women journalists of rural reporting collective Khabar Lahariya in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The film attempts to document their painstaking reporting of human rights abuses across the state and also massive threats to their work under a repressive regime. However, the urban-outsider, film-festival gaze of the directors significantly pigeonholes the filmic portrayal of marginalized castes. After the release of the film, Khabar Lahariya issued a statement accusing the filmmakers for misrepresenting the collective’s work. Further, several Dalit scholars and journalists highlighted the dominant caste imagination of the directors which often fails to capture intricate realties. Through detailed textual analysis and mapping conversations around the film, Agnitra Ghosh highlights the politics of representation of Writing with Fire to decode the circumscribed cinematic imagination around questions of human rights and marginalized identities.