Peter Sutoris's Visions of Development offers a superbly researched picture of the history of the workings of the Films Division, India's state-run documentary films unit. Sutoris draws on official correspondence, memoirs, and interviews with veteran and contemporary filmmakers as well as civil servants who worked in the Films Division. A fascinating picture emerges of the “production pipeline” within the Films Division that reliably delivered state-produced documentary films (as compulsory screening, no less) to commercial theaters across the country for nearly four decades after India's independence. This valuable institutional history comprises the first part of this three-part book.

The topics of these films showcased the agendas of the elitist, top-down, Nehruvian developmental policies on subjects such as family planning, industrial modernization, and the “upliftment” of Adivasis, as well as, significantly, “acceptable behavior” (p. 99) or the “blueprints for ethical citizenship” (p. 102), including such topics as honesty, selfishness, and thrift. These films were didactic in tone, frequently Orientalizing, and incapable of creating space for criticisms of statist policies. Both live action and animation (useful for its presumed universalism in a country with vast regional and linguistic differences), the films made “the state visible to its citizens,” observes Sutoris (p. 8). Exemplarity was the point and goal of these films (also in evidence in the frequent use of reenactments and dramatizations). All these features were legacies of the output of the pre-independence Information Films of India, established by the British in India for documentary films.

Despite these highly codified features, Sutoris's research shows that three distinct groups of actors (political elites, civil servants, and filmmakers) with increasingly competing agendas, created the spaces for less programmatic filmmaking to emerge. The Films Division's documentary filmmakers—both the conventional ones and the “outliers” who rode the experimental wave of the 1960s—were familiar with other iconic tendencies in cinematic modernism: Dziga Vertov, the French New Wave, cinema vérité. Their global interests open a window to a transnational lens through which to view not just statist modernisms but also cinematic ones. By the 1960s, changes in personnel, as well as changes in technology and the entry of independent filmmakers, resulted in the refreshingly polemical and experimental approaches to documentary film by the likes of Pramod Pati, S. N. S. Sastry, S. Sukhdev, and others, all producing films commissioned by the Films Division. Their films employed time-lapse photography, montages of images sans the “voice of god” commentary of the didactic documentary, and the ironic use of advertising imagery and techniques for social critique, among other innovations in style. Pramod Pati's experimental film Explorer (1998) used, in Pati's own words, “a psychedelic technique of presentation and perception at [a] subliminal level” and incorporated several frames laced with four-letter invectives against censorship (p. 190). The style effectuated a sharp questioning of the priorities of development. Interviews allowed skeptical voices to emerge. Polemical juxtapositions of imagery foregrounded the filmmakers’ perspectives. Given the numerous stultifying layers of political authority and civil bureaucracy within the institution, one gets a picture of a brief window in the 1960s when iconoclastic filmmakers were able to treat the form to their very personal and yet very political visions of modern India.

There were, however, limits to these films’ critiques, argues Sutoris, for the films’ middle-class perspectives (a reflection of the filmmaker as well as the civil servant's background) ultimately critiqued only the failure of the state to deliver on its promises, not the ideology of developmentalism itself, and the very idea of a new documentary form predicated on cinematic experimentation could only emerge from the middle-class sensibilities of its filmmakers. That said, Sutoris avoids painting a relation of correspondence between political agendas and filmic ones. For instance, the most creative period of the Films Division's films occurred during the tenure of Indira Gandhi's increasingly authoritarian rule, due to “the significant agency on part of the middle-layer of the state bureaucracy and the filmmakers in shaping the films” (p. 222). The transformations these filmmakers engendered lost steam by the 1970s but nevertheless left their mark on contemporary documentary film practice in India. The book concludes with a valuable reflection on the Films Division's legacy by drawing on interviews with well-known documentarians in India, including Paromita Vohra, Anand Patwardhan, Avijit Mukul Kishore, and others.

With close analyses, Sutoris vividly illustrates how the Films Division's films envisioned, and did not simply translate, imaginations of progress and development from the state. Sutoris's book finds a meeting ground for scholars of postcolonial development politics in India, and film and media studies. It invites and now enables a corresponding history of the reception of these films. Visions of Development is a very welcome addition to the limited work on the history of the Indian documentary film.