It is night, and a group of students have shut themselves in a library, blockading the doors with furniture. Mysterious intruders rattle the doors and then break in, like a flood. They are cops in riot gear, swinging their batons mercilessly at limbs and furniture alike while the students try to escape, pleading for mercy with folded hands. The scene continues uninterrupted for five minutes before a policeman smashes the camera, and the screen cuts to black.
I first encountered this scene on Indian news channels in February 2020, weeks after the incident had taken place at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi — one of the campuses most active in the student protests that swept through India in the winter of 2019 against a slew of right-wing policies to gut public education, crack down on dissent, and institutionalize Islamophobia. Police later denied entering the library and attacking unarmed students, despite dozens of eyewitnesses. This video was a piece of undeniable truth — proof against the state’s lies, in ruthless color.
But when I saw this video a second time, in black-and-white, in Payal Kapadia’s 2021 film, A Night of Knowing Nothing, it seemed to me like a mythical scene. The clip plays toward the end of the film, one among a string of nighttime scenes from Indian campuses that range from dorm-room revelry to rallies lit by blazing torches. I thought, while watching the movie, of Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children, in which those born “at the stroke of midnight” on August 15, 1947 — the very instant when, per Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech, India would “awake to life and freedom” — are endowed with special powers.
But they are also born in the midst of a waking nightmare: the months-long ordeal of the cleaving of the country into India and Pakistan on religious grounds. The carnage that accompanied the Partition prompted the great poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz to write, just days after Nehru’s declaration of nocturnal optimism, a lament titled “The Dawn of Freedom.” “Did the morning breeze ever come? Where has it gone? / Night weighs us down, it still weighs us down. / Friends, come away from this false light. / Come, we must / search for that promised Dawn.”
Who are today’s midnight’s children, angels of history born on that cusp between Nehru’s hopeful night and Faiz’s blood-streaked dawn? Watching A Night of Knowing Nothing, I wondered if they were those students, cowering in that library at 10:30 p.m. on December 15, 2019. In the film, the video plays with no sound. In voiceover, the movie’s narrator, a college student, recalls a terrible dream about police beating up her friends at a protest. “I am scared,” she whispers tearfully. Instead of superhuman powers, these children of the night are endowed with fear.
Kapadia is herself one of these children (and not only because her mother, the renowned Indian artist Nalini Malani, experienced the Partition firsthand, fleeing from Karachi to Kolkata in 1947 with her family). A Night of Knowing Nothing stitches together footage shot between 2015 and 2019 by the director and her friends at colleges across the country, as protests raged during the first term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing party with roots in the Hindu nationalist or “Hindutva” movement. Kapadia was part of a strike in 2015 at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) against the politically motivated appointment of a TV actor-turned-BJP politician, Gajendra Chauhan, as the university’s chairperson. One of the actions by the striking students led to 35 of them — including Kapadia — being arrested, charged with a litany of offenses including “unlawful assembly,” and stripped of their scholarships.
Two years later, in 2017, Kapadia debuted at the Cannes Film Festival with a short film, Afternoon Clouds. In 2021, she made history by winning the Golden Eye prize for Best Documentary at Cannes for A Night of Knowing Nothing, her first feature-length movie. In May 2024, she broke yet another record: Her second feature, a rapturous work of fiction titled All We Imagine as Light, became the first Indian film to win the Grand Prix, the second-highest honor at Cannes. Accolades poured in, including from her alma mater and from Prime Minister Modi himself, who tweeted that “India is proud” of her feat. This was on May 26. The next hearing in the case against Kapadia — which has continued to drag on in court for nearly a decade — was exactly a month later, on June 26. On the chargesheet, she is listed as “Accused No. 25.”
The irony of the government claiming Kapadia’s tremendous success — and touting her as an FTII alum — is pungent. A Night of Knowing Nothing is a plaintive shriek against India’s slide into fascism under the rule of the BJP, which grew in the 1950s out of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu supremacist paramilitary organization. Over the years, the RSS and its allies have been involved in several religious riots and pogroms — including in 2002 in Gujarat, when thousands — mostly Muslims — were killed in a brutal mob rampage. Modi, who joined the RSS as a child and rose through its ranks, was chief minister of Gujarat at the time. His government was accused of stoking and condoning the massacre, though he was cleared by a probe led by the Supreme Court of India, a controversial decision.
The BJP’s historic election victory in 2014 has meant that the once somewhat fringe politics of Hindu nationalism have become frighteningly mainstream and institutionalized in India, as has a new era of aggressive neoliberalism. In A Night of Knowing Nothing, we see students protesting the BJP’s government’s New Education Policy (NEP), which encourages the privatization of public universities; brutal arrests and crackdowns on activists and journalists; and the notorious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which specifically excludes Muslims from a law aiming to fast-track Indian citizenship for undocumented South Asian refugees fleeing persecution. But unlike many documentaries produced about the Modi regime that offer exposition, Night captures what it feels like to live in today’s India.
The movie is assembled like a palimpsest, overlapping events and blurring specific timelines, with a fictionalized, first-person narration tying together its disparate scenes. In voiceover, a lower-caste student at FTII named “L” reads letters to her upper-caste partner, who has become estranged from her due to pressures from family. Grief pulses throughout the film as “L” grieves the loss of the utopian promises of both love and democracy. Memory is a refuge and an inhospitable home for the heartbroken. In one sequence, “L” laments how quickly — how helplessly — we move on from ruptures that seem impossible to forget, as news clippings flash by on screen: headlines announcing the lynching of a dairy farmer by Hindu “cow” vigilantes, the rape of a Muslim girl, the arrest of two student leaders on charges of sedition, the suicide of a Dalit student.
What does it mean to be a student at a public university while these political shifts take place in the nation? This is the question posed by the film, as students, in glimpses of night-time meetings, reckon with the utopian promise of taxpayer-funded education. “What is the need for this place to exist today?” a student asks in a late gathering on the FTII campus. The question is especially stark for film students: As many political commentators have noted, the BJP’s NEP prioritizes “productive” and market-lucrative fields of study, implicitly marginalizing the arts and humanities. In the movie, students grapple with the privilege of receiving a subsidized education in the arts and the public responsibility that comes with it — a question that also played out this year on campuses in America as students protested universities’ complicity in the occupation and genocide in Palestine.
A Night of Knowing Nothing contends with yet another chapter in a saga of privatization that began in the 1990s, when the Indian economy was liberalized under pressure from the IMF and the World Bank. In All We Imagine As Light, with the after-effects of that same historic juncture, Kapadia shifts her focus from cosmopolitan students to the workers of Mumbai. The film unfolds in the Dadar and Lower Parel areas of Mumbai, where, for decades, cotton mills employed local labor and manufacturing drove the city’s economy. In the 1990s, the government relaxed laws that had prevented builders from redeveloping the lands. Strikes and protests notwithstanding, the mills were eventually shut down and replaced with glitzy malls and residential high-rises. In that same decade, as class inequity intensified, Mumbai also saw one of the worst communal pogroms in its history: In 1992, protests against the demolition of the historic Babri Mosque in Uttar Pradesh by Hindu mobs turned into ghastly riots, where at least 2,000 people were killed.
These events loom like dark clouds over the contemporary Mumbai traversed by the three women at the heart of All We Imagine as Light. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse at a public hospital, yearns for her husband, who left to work in a factory in Germany soon after their arranged marriage and now barely stays in touch. Anu (Divya Prabha), her younger colleague, is in love with a handsome young Muslim man — an affair they have to conduct in secret. And Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam) is fighting eviction from the small apartment that was assigned to her late husband years ago, when the cotton mill he worked at was shut down. The dramas of the three protagonists’ lives are sutured by stints on Mumbai’s famous commuter trains and buses, and some of their most intimate conversations unfold in the anonymity of crowded public spaces: on the thronged street; in the women’s compartment of the train; in the mess hall of the hospital. When the film eventually moves into the spacious and airy coastal countryside — following Parvathy, who decides to abandon her fight against real-estate dirtbags and retire to her ancestral home — you might catch yourself exhaling with relief.
The everyday beauty of All We Imagine as Light is overwhelming. Rain-soaked surfaces glisten under the city’s fluorescent light; woozy close-ups isolate the smallest stirrings of desire on faces. Three times in the film, the narrative pauses for interstices of documentary. We see Dadar’s famous predawn flower markets in roving scenes shot from a moving vehicle, the pulsating masses outside a train station, and crowds dancing in the street at a religious festival. In voiceover, we hear testimonies from various unseen residents of Mumbai in different Indian languages, exemplifying the city’s melting-pot draw for strivers from all over the country. These are iconic images of Mumbai that recur across cinema and literature: It is the city that never sleeps, the urban paradox where slums jut up against skyscrapers, the dream factory where the impossible seems possible. But the voices we hear shatter the romanticism peddled by such clichés. One of them says: “There’s something mad about this city. You can be in the gutter, but you’re not allowed to feel bad.” All We Imagine as Light allows its characters to be enraged at this city of gross inequalities. Parvathy attends a tenants’ union meeting with Prabha, and then the two of them furtively, mischievously hurl stones at a billboard advertising a gated community of luxury apartments with the tagline, “Class is a privilege — reserved for the privileged.”
Yet, even as All We Imagine as Light de-romanticizes Mumbai, it is a deeply romantic film, as is A Night of Knowing Nothing. Both have forbidden love stories as their spines, romances that cross lines of caste and religion. In an India where 11 states have passed laws against “love jihad” — a conspiracy popularized by the Hindu right-wing accusing Muslim men of luring Hindu women into marriages to convert them to Islam — even the sight of Anu and her lover, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), together in public in All We Imagine as Light fills me with anticipatory terror. They steal pockets of time and space under cover of the bustling, always-lit city, making out on a shaded bench outside a field, embracing in the dark garage of a building, pressing up against each other on a bus or a train, their erotic thrills going unnoticed in coaches packed with bodies. When Shiaz’s family plans to take a trip for a wedding, they have a rare chance to spend the night together. Anu buys a hijab so she can move discreetly through his neighborhood.
Watching her take the train, her eyes peering eagerly out of the slit of her veil, it’s hard not to think of Hadiya, the 24-year-old medical student in Kerala, who converted to Islam of her own volition and fled her parents’ home to wed a Muslim man — only to have the marriage annulled by the Kerala High Court, who declared that she had been brainwashed, and placed her under her father’s custody. The Supreme Court of India restored their marriage a year later, but it also ordered a probe into possible cases of “love jihad.” Not a single case was found. Yet anti-conversion laws remain active in many states, and politicians continue to peddle this myth, allowing authorities to halt weddings, nullify marriages, and violently harass couples — all in the name of protecting Hindu women. In this context, Anu’s unabashed, onscreen desire for Shiaz in All We Imagine as Light, her courting of risk, feels nothing less than radical. But it’s not easy. Later in the film, when the two share a clandestine tryst in a beachside cave, she whispers to him, “I am scared.” In her words, I hear an echo of the narrator of A Night of Knowing Nothing, whispering the same words over CCTV footage of police brutality.
The source of Anu’s fear is not the Muslim man ready to entrap her, but a state — and a society, including her own family — that may unleash harm upon her and her lover for their consensual desires. “Apparently there is as much shame in choosing the wrong kind of man as there is in being violated against one’s will,” writes Shilpa Phadke in her classic 2011 book Why Loiter?, noting how “women’s safety” is frequently used as a pretext for increased protectionism and surveillance. The erosion of public life in Mumbai, especially one accessible to diverse and working-class communities, is justified on the basis of protecting (primarily middle-class) women from communities framed as threatening to them: poor, Muslim, Dalit, immigrant, etc.. The result is reduced, rather than expanded, access for women. Phadke’s points were starkly illustrated in 2021 when the chief justice of India, during his comments on the farmers’ protests that had unfurled during the pandemic, asked, “Why are women and elders kept in the protest?”
Phadke argues that the feminist movement cannot only pursue safety — it must also fight proactively for women’s right to pleasure, including the pleasure of risk: “It is only by claiming the right to risk that women can truly claim citizenship.” For the women who fight landlords and pursue verboten romance in All We Imagine As Light and those who weather the batons and tear-gas cannons of the police in A Night of Knowing Nothing, taking risks is indeed a matter of pleasure and power, life and death. But neither film ends with false closures or promises of happy endings in a fascist world. A Night of Knowing Nothing culminates with students dancing at night on campus grounds, a brief, cathartic moment of freedom after the stark violence we have just witnessed. In All We Imagine as Light, Prabha, Anu, and Parvathy hang out at a beachside cafe decked in neon lights. Prabha, who has so far been disapproving of Anu’s dalliance, gently tells her friend to invite Shiaz to join them. They sit idly and chat; when Parvathy asks the boy running the cafe if it’s closing soon, he says, “No no! Sit as long as you like.” What a luxury for three working-class women — time and space, dark and light, and for one night, nothing to flee and nothing to hide.
Devika Girish is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn. She is the editor of Film Comment Magazine and a Talks programmer at the New York Film Festival.
Photographs courtesy of Petit Chaos.
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