Anand Patwardhan



Anand Patwardhan (born 18 February 1950) is an Indian documentary filmmaker.

Quotes

 * I do not wish to neutralize the horror I feel at the destruction of Buddhist monuments with the thought that my national leaders did the same thing a decade ago. But I do believe that if this act sparks in us the desire to fight intolerance of all kinds, then surely the Buddha will not have lived and taught in vain.
 * Destruction of Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan and the Babri Masjid (2001)


 * You have to be a filmmaker, and then you have to be a lawyer as well.
 * New York Times article, 24 December 2002


 * It does not need much imagination to see that even in so-called advanced nations like the UK and the US, a great deal of racism and deep-seated religious prejudice fuels the propensity towards righteous war and the belief that one's own nation is always right and that "terrorism" resides only in the other.
 * BBC Interview, 2003


 * In India, the early documentary scene was dominated by government propaganda made by the Films Division of India, which produced newsreels and documentaries that were compulsorily shown before every commercial film. People either arrived deliberately late or walked out for a smoke during these films, and the tag of "boring" became inescapably attached to the documentary. It has taken several decades of sustained independent work to break this tag.
 * Anand Patwardhan, the Michael Moore of India -Interview UC Berkeley News (October 13, 2004)


 * One problem with our democracy is that a rigid class and caste hierarchy coupled with gross gender inequality has kept large sections of our population traditionally without a voice. But having no voice does not mean having no brain! On the contrary the voiceless have much to say and we can learn so much from their ways of seeing and thinking. Feelings of humanity seem to survive much better amongst the powerless than among the affluent and powerful.
 * Filmmaker as activist - The Hindu (May 16, 2004)


 * My entry into the world of the documentary began as a means of political, social intervention and thirty odd years later this is still a primary motive. If I am not satisfied with the results, it is not because of a failure of the medium, but because of the limits that our system puts on the distribution of such films. All my films are badly under-utilized and hence did not have the impact on the real world that they could have had.
 * Tehelka Interview - November 2009


 * The real issues of the information gathering and disseminating systems have more to do with what kinds of programs are made, who makes and airs them and what impact they have. The role of the developed world as consumer and the role of the developing world as the consumed may now be complicated as the latter yields its own voracious elite, but the former continues to determine taste.
 * Anand Patwardhan and The Messengers of Bad News - SOC American University


 * Hindutva ranked their enemies in order – Muslims, Christians and Communists. It applauded Hitler’s “national” pride and invoked the Nazi model of dealing with minorities. Like Hitler, Hindutva believed in race superiority and dreamt of world dominance. Yesterday it collaborated with the British. Today it flaunts the tricolor it had openly denigrated, pretends to uphold a Constitution it wanted replaced with the Laws of Manu, a misogynist, Brahminical text, and is busy selling every available public asset to the nearest foreign or Indian crony. Without stating it in words, their murder of Gandhi in 1948 added a new enemy to the list – Hindus who stood against the project of Hindutva.
 * "Anand Patwardhan: If Hindutva is Hinduism then the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity" (Sep 12, 2021), Scroll.in.

Quotes about Anand Patwardhan

 * I have an observation to make. Why is it that the Leftist crusader of truth, Shri Anand Patwardhan, while speaking only looks down, never looking in the eyes? You are a genius scriptwriter who studies characters. Is this how men with convictions address the most sensitive issue which can shatter the secular foundations of Hindustan?
 * Vivek Agnihotri - Urban Naxals The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2018, Garuda Prakashan)


 * When I reached the venue, Anand Patwardhan was already there. I said hello with a smile to which he gave a very cold response. He asked me why I had opposed the petition. I gave him my reasons but he wasn’t willing to listen and instead kept telling me how bad the Gujarat model was. He was confident that Modi could never win. Every pore of his body was oozing hatred for Modi and his supporters... In his tone, manner, and content, there was so much authoritarianism, entitlement, arrogance, hatred and contempt for these common supporters of Modi that he did not realize that he was professing exactly what he condemned – fascism. ... I kept looking at him and wondered how his frail body could contain so much hatred and anger. His aura was dark and negative.
 * Vivek Agnihotri - Urban Naxals The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2018, Garuda Prakashan)