Anand Patwardhan

Anand Patwardhan
Master Classes
Visiting Lecturer and Adviser (2013)

Anand Patwardhan is one of India’s best known and most outspoken documentary film makers. For over four decades ee has been making documentaries pursuing diverse and controversial issues that are the crux of social and political life in India. He epitomises the activist filmmaker and has inspired a generation of socially sensitive film makers.

From his first film in 1974, Waves of Revolution on the JP movement that started in Bihar to his latest Jai Bhim Comrade in 2012, Patwardhan’s films have sometimes spent years, chronicling and collating evidence towards a position. Always from a fiercely independent point of view that questions the established socio-political narrative, many of his films were at one time or another banned by state television channels in India and became the subject of litigation by Anand, who successfully challenged the censorship rulings in court. 

Anand received a BA in English Literature from Bombay University in 1970, won a scholarship to get another BA in Sociology from Brandels University in 1972, and earned a Master’s degree in Communications from McGill University in 1982.