Lalit Vachani

Curriculum Vitae

Lalit Vachani is a research fellow affiliated with the MPI and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in 2011-2012, and worked on his project entitled, Maidan Histories, a visual ethnography and archive of the Shivaji Park in Mumbai. Vachani is a documentary filmmaker and director of the New Delhi based Wide Eye Film. He studied at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University and at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in the US.

His documentary films include The Academy (1995; Business India Television) and The Starmaker (1997) on the star system and social worlds of the Bollywood film industry; The Boy in the Branch (1993; Channel 4 TV) and The Men in the Tree (2002) on the ideology and politics propagated by the Hindu fundamentalist organization, the RSS; and Natak Jari Hai/The Play Goes On (2005) on socialist street theater in India.

In 2007 and 2008 he directed The Salt Stories and In Search of Gandhi, road movie documentaries that retraced the path of Mahatma Gandhi’s salt march in the context of modern, globalizing Gujarat in India. His most recent work has been produced for India’s Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT). Tales from Napa (2010), is the remarkable story of a little village that resisted the forces of Hindu fundamentalism during the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, India.

Vachani’s films have received support from the Soros and Sundance Documentary Foundations, the Jan Vrijman Fund, and the India Foundation for the Arts. Vachani has taught courses on various topics related to film and documentary (theory and production) at the Mass Communication Research Centre in Delhi, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Amherst College in the USA.


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