When I was growing up, cinema wasn’t just a pastime; it was our lifeline as it was the only form of entertainment that existed in pre-television days.

The cinema houses that we frequented in Amritsar were fairly grotty spaces, with rats having a free run, along with frequent electricity cuts and fans whirring furiously.

Yet all this didn’t matter once the lights dimmed.Before the film started, we had to stoically endure the mandatory Films Division documentary on topics such as family planning and the effectiveness of fertilisers and water conservation.

At that age, we felt that it was a necessary tax to pay before we were finally able to escape into the vibrant world of masala films.While its primary mandate was to produce newsreels and documentaries that promoted state policy, it inadvertently provided the financial backbone for the Parallel Cinema movement.

This era proved that state support and creative genius could coexist, even when the resulting work was deeply critical or complex.The Films Division of India occupies a unique space in cinematic history because it functioned as a government body that somehow fostered a revolutionary artistic movement.

A prime example of this is Shyam Benegal’s ‘Bharat Ek Khoj’.

Though it was commissioned to celebrate Indian heritage based on Jawaharlal Nehru’s writings, Benegal transformed it into an epic narrative that bypassed the dry tone of official history.

Similarly, Govind Nihalani’s ‘Tamas’ tackled the harrowing reality of Partition with a level of honesty that was unprecedented for a state-funded project.

Instead of sanitising the past, Nihalani held up a mirror to the communal tensions of the subcontinent.Beyond the monumental works of Benegal and Nihalani, Films Division and Doordarshan served as a vital sanctuary for an entire generation of filmmakers who sought to redefine Indian cinema.

Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani were perhaps the most radical beneficiaries of this system, using state resources to move away from conventional storytelling toward a formalist, avant garde style.Kaul’s work on documentaries like ‘Siddheshwari’ allowed him to experiment with non-linear structures and minimalist aesthetics that would never have survived the pressures of the commercial box office.

Similarly, Kumar Shahani utilised government grants to produce deeply intellectual films like ‘Fire in the Belly’, which examined social crises through a lens of classical art and rigorous theory.Since these directors were not tethered to the commercial pressures of the box office, they were free to experiment.

In the end, the institution that was meant to be a mere mouthpiece ended up documenting the soul of a nation through some of its most enduring cinematic masterpieces.Kamal Swaroop’s ‘The Battle for Banaras’ captured the 2014 electoral spectacle.

It treated the political landscape not as a series of facts, but as a grand, chaotic theatre.Anand Patwardhan acts as the definitive moral compass of documentary films, using his lens as a scalpel to dissect the anatomy of national identity and dissent.

He became the radical conscience of Indian non-fiction, stripping away the polite veneer of state policies with films like ‘Bombay: Our City’, ‘Jai Bhim Comrade’, ‘In The Name of God’, with content that was jagged and unashamedly political, proving that the camera could be used for social justice rather than just being an extension for institutional progress.

While Patwardhan turned the camera into a political weapon for social justice, Kamal Swaroop became its most enigmatic shapeshifter.

Best known for the cult masterpiece ‘Om-Dar-B-Dar’, Swaroop brought a Dadaist sensibility to non-fiction.

His visual language intersects with a hallucinatory world, dissolving the boundaries between ethnographic reality and surrealist dreams.

His work, such as ‘The Battle for Banaras’ — a documentary that captured the 2014 electoral spectacle, treated the political landscape not as....