When I spoke with Ship of Theseus director, Anand Gandhi in Austin last month, he spoke briefly about his maiden venture as a producer and the need for films to provoke necessary conversation and change. Proposition for a Revolution directed by Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla has started generating much excitement especially with India under the grip of election fever.

Intrigued by what they saw as the beginnings of an anti-corruption movement in India, the directors made the journey to Delhi, in 2012, to see first hand what was brewing with the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). With a fly-on-the-wall presence, the fledgling filmmaking team started to document the beginnings of the movement and in this interview, talk about its genesis and their vision.

n Spontaneous people protests around the world over the past few years have shaken regimes. When was the idea for Prop4Rev first conceived?

Khushboo: I have no direct access to politics, like most people I suppose. But like most people, we were getting interested in the transition of a peoples’ movement into a political party. So we came to Delhi to see what was happening, started shooting and before we knew it, we were making a documentary about a sprouting political party.

As first time documentary filmmakers, we had to be quick on our feet, anticipating currents in the story and allowing them to carry the narrative forward.

I think what happened in West Asia, Europe, America, Bangladesh, Pakistan and even India; wherein people came out in large numbers on the streets is a remarkable thing. Also remarkable because these disparate groups did not have obvious connections with each other, they were not planning these events at a hyper-connected level, so the similarities are all serendipitous at best. One way to look at this is to say that people wanted to be heard by governments that were getting increasingly insular. So mobilisation was going to happen, and the internet was a major facilitator in that sense. But a lot of people who came out in India, and even in West Asia did not have access to the internet. Therefore, a lot of mobilisation happened at the ground level. In this film, our lens is almost anthropological. In fact, AAP is just a vehicle to explore deeper questions such as the of the citizen’s role in a democracy. At present, there is actually a global narrative of documentaries on peoples’ movements around the world.

Vinay: We didn’t quite know what we were getting into when we started documenting the party in late 2012. We were following the party on an impulse. We were curious. Slowly, it became evident that the story playing out in Delhi was much bigger than what we had initially anticipated. Our friend Vinay Rohira came down from Mumbai and began to work with us. The party was expanding and growing in every direction and it was hard to keep up with the limited resources we had. We couldn’t hire professionals since we couldn’t afford them so all of us learnt to use the camera and sound equipment.

n What were the challenges that you encountered?

Vinay: Much changes over the course of a year. It is great to see that people have become more politically involved and more engaged.

The specific challenges that we had to face were of different kinds. We relocated to another city, so we had to build everything ground up. Including a crew. There were some very rough days on shoot as well, at times we found ourselves in the middle of hostile crowds. I once escaped a media stampede.

Khushboo: Our personal journey has been transformative through the course of this film. We were extremely disconnected from the on ground political before. So being thrust into the heart of “doing politics” took a while to get oriented to. I remember the first AAP rally we attended, it was a sensory overload. We couldn’t make sense of what to capture, where to place our lens. An example of how we wanted to remain as neutral as possible was also to constantly be aware of the composition. It needed to be self-aware. When it comes to AAP, it was very interesting to see how they mobilised people. When Arvind Kejriwal would go to these jansabhas in the beginning, he would be listening to very specific concerns of the people. We realised that people needed someone to listen to them. When we hear the word politics, it evokes something that is grand. Change, which is large-scale and scams that are colossal. But the concerns of most people were very banal, very small.

n Tell us about the crowd funding process to ensure the integrity of the film's voice.

Vinay: Our film is a documentary set in contemporary politics and investors didn’t find that as an interesting proposition. Those who were interested in investing wanted to know if we are supporting AAP or are against it. We didn’t want to take money from people who had these concerns because it would compromise our position.

Khushboo: Documentaries have traditionally found it difficult to reach out to bigger audiences. But the crowdfunding campaign has received unprecedented support. We raised 50 per cent of our goal in less than 10 days! The campaign has already demonstrated that there are people out there who would like to watch documentaries like ours. Some people are pledging money towards our campaign, some are pledging their skills while many are simply sharing it amongst their friends. So on the one hand, we wanted to use crowdfunding to raise money, but on the other we also wanted it to be a community owned film. This would ensure that the film releases, is seen widely and the contributors become ambassadors and owners of the film in an organic way.

n There is a need for Indians to see behind the veil of propaganda and own their voice

Khushboo: The idea of owning our voice is important. And it is an extremely powerful idea. Narratives need to be broken down from the grand and national to the small and local. We need more personal stories, more first person stories, which build a picture that is complex; as opposed to an epic falsetto which is dramatic and impersonal. One often hears of people who keep asking the ‘media’ to bring their story forward. There is a reason. Stories have the power to engender compassion and change. And today it is possible to speak up without depending on the voice of god that is news media. There are wonderful examples of community video channels on YouTube, which empower disenfranchised groups. So I believe that technology today has made things much more democratic. A film like Ship of Theseus could not have been possible before that.

With our film, we have already built a critical mass. We are seeing a slew of interesting conversations taking off on our pages on Facebook and YouTube. This also ties in with our plan of eventual release. We want to organise discussions around the screenings, possibly document the reactions and continue the engagement.

(Shaku Selvakumar is a US-based marketing and digital communications

expert; and founder of Coeuredge, a digital experience company)