Amrit Gangar

Film Scholar · Historian · Curator · Theorist of Cinema Prayoga · Consultant Curator, National Museum of Indian Cinema

Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India

National Museum of Indian Cinema (Consultant Curator)

Screen Unit (Co-Founder)

Datakino (Founder Director)

Osian's Cinema Archive (Director, 2003–04)

MIFF (Retrospective Curator)

Goethe Institut Mumbai (Programme Consultant)

Biography

Amrit Gangar (born 29 April 1949) is one of India's most distinctive and wide-ranging film scholars — a Mumbai-based independent writer, theorist, curator, historian, and former journalist who has spent more than four decades working at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, literature, and cultural history. He is best known internationally as the originator of the theoretical concept Cinema of Prayoga, an alternative framework to the Euro-American category of "experimental film" that locates avant-garde cinematographic practice within the deep philosophical and aesthetic traditions of the Indian subcontinent. He served as Consultant Curator of the National Museum of Indian Cinema, India's first museum dedicated to the art and history of Indian film, set up by the National Council of Science Museums in Mumbai. He co-founded Screen Unit, one of Mumbai's most influential film societies, in 1977, and has been Founder Director of Datakino, which built the comprehensive digital database for the Films Division's collection of more than 9,000 documentaries and short films produced between 1948 and 1993. As a production professional, he was a key creative and logistics partner on the India-based production of Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth's landmark film essay The Five Obstructions (2003). He has written, lectured, and curated internationally in venues including the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, Yale University, Chelsea College of Art and Design, the National Film School in Łódź, and the Danish Film Institute.

Early Life and the Film Society Movement

Gangar grew up in Mumbai, encountering serious cinema through the Sunday morning Bengali film screenings at Chitra Talkies, where he first saw the work of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Tapan Sinha, and Mrinal Sen as a young hostel resident. The experience was formative: he has described it as the foundation of his belief that sustained engagement with great films — whether Ray, Ghatak, Bergman, or Godard — produces not just aesthetic education but a better human being and a better citizen. Around 1977, he co-founded Screen Unit with a friend who had been denied admission to the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and wanted to stay close to cinema. What began as a film club became, over two decades of continuous operation, one of Mumbai's most important spaces for cinema education — a meeting ground for young filmmakers, artists, journalists, students, poets, and architects who gathered to watch, debate, and think seriously about film. The title of an interview about those years — "When Godard Rode the 17:05 Borivli Local" — captures the spirit of the project exactly. Screen Unit published significant books in those years, including the first major English-language study of Ritwik Ghatak by Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1982) and a co-edited volume with Rajadhyaksha on Ghatak's arguments and stories (1984). In 1989, the International Federation of Film Clubs honoured Gangar in Berlin for his contribution to the Indian film society movement.

Cinema of Prayoga

The concept for which Amrit Gangar is most widely known internationally is Cinema of Prayoga, which he first publicly articulated and presented at Experimenta, Mumbai in 2005. The concept arose from a long discomfort with the term "experimental film" — a Euro-American coinage, rooted in military vocabulary (the French word avant-garde means "advance guard"), that he felt was inadequate to describe the practice of Indian filmmakers working outside mainstream narrative cinema. The word prayoga — drawn from Sanskrit — denotes experiment, application, and an attempt or trial, but carries within Indian philosophical and aesthetic traditions connotations of practice, ritual enactment, and the creative act as a form of contemplation. Cinema of Prayoga, as Gangar developed it, aims to substitute and expand the experimental film category by celebrating the cinematographic idiom "deeply located in the polyphony of Indian philosophy and cultural imagination, including the perception of 'time' and 'space'." It is not a severance from the Western tradition but an enlargement and decentring of it — an effort to find, as Gangar has put it, "our own root" while simultaneously de-confining the Euro-American concept and making it more inclusive of cinematographic practices from outside that tradition. The concept has been presented and curated at the Tate Modern in London (2006), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2011), Chelsea College of Art and Design and the University of the Arts London (2011), Yale University, Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan (2011), the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen (2012), the National Film School in Łódź, and the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, among many other venues. It has been applied most richly to the Indian filmmakers Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, as well as to the pioneering work of Ritwik Ghatak.

Institutional Work

National Museum of Indian Cinema (NMIC)

Appointed by the Government of India as Consultant Curator and Content Developer for India's first museum of cinema, set up by the National Council of Science Museums in Mumbai. Responsible for the conceptual and curatorial development of the museum's collections, narratives, and interpretive frameworks documenting the full history and art of Indian cinema.

Screen Unit

Co-founded c. 1977

A Mumbai-based film society that operated for over twenty years as a major educational and cultural institution for serious cinema in Bombay. Published important early books on Indian cinema, organised screenings, workshops, and seminars. Honoured by the International Federation of Film Clubs, Berlin, 1989.

Datakino

As Founder Director, built a comprehensive database for the Films Division's collection of more than 9,000 government-produced documentaries and short films made between 1948 and 1993 — a landmark preservation and access project for one of the world's largest documentary archives.

Osian's Cinema Archive

Director, 2003–04

Served as Director of the archive attached to Osian's, the Delhi-based cinema culture organisation founded by Arjun Sawhney, which maintained major collections on Indian and Asian cinema and operated the annual Osian's Cine-Fan Film Festival in New Delhi.

Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF)

Edited the main and retrospective catalogues of the Mumbai International Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films over multiple editions, and curated retrospective film programmes for the festival — India's most important showcase for non-fiction cinema.

The Five Obstructions (2003)

Production executive on the India-based sequences of the landmark film essay directed by Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier, in which von Trier challenges Leth to remake his 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times under five different sets of constraints. Also served in production roles on Susanne Bier's After the Wedding (2006) and numerous other European and Scandinavian documentary and installation projects in India.

Writing, Editing, and Publications

Gangar has authored, co-authored, and edited publications in English, Gujarati, Kachchhi, Marathi, Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, and French, among other languages. His critical essays and poems have appeared in the journals Cinemaya, Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ, London), Art India, Lensight, the FTII journal, the Danish Film Institute Journal, and numerous dailies and literary journals in Indian languages. His contributions to film scholarship include some of the earliest serious English-language writing on Ritwik Ghatak, Robert Bresson, and Andrei Tarkovsky in the Indian context. He has contributed to the Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinema (2013) and written on subjects ranging from Sufism and cinema to the chawls of Mumbai and the cultural history of Jainism. He is a Programme Consultant to the Cultural Centre of Russia (Mumbai) and to the Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, and has been regularly invited to serve as a juror at film festivals in India and internationally.

Among his most significant edited volumes: Ritwik Ghatak: Arguments / Stories (co-edited with Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Screen Unit, 1984), which contributed to the revaluation of Ghatak's work at a time when he was still underappreciated; Andrei Tarkovsky: A Homage (Screen Unit, 1987); The Rigour of Austerity: Robert Bresson and Luis Buñuel (Federation of Film Societies of India, 1989); Indian Cinema: A Visual Voyage (with Virchand Dharamsey, Publication Division, Government of India, 1998); and Jainism: Walking into Eternity (co-edited, Systime, Aarhus, Denmark, 2001). He edited the NFDC's monthly bulletin in 1995.

Current Activities

Gangar continues as an independent writer, researcher, and curator based in Mumbai. He remains active in developing and presenting the Cinema of Prayoga concept at festivals, institutions, and seminars. He has curated film programmes for the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and other major cultural events. He has made digital documentary and compilation films, and has taught at institutions including IIT Bombay's Industrial Design Centre and the National Film School in Łódź. He contributes tributes, essays, and criticism to film journals, institutional publications, and online platforms, including a recent tribute to Indian film scholar and Asian cinema advocate Aruna Vasudev (1936–2024), whom he described as the "mother of Asian cinema." He continues to work at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, poetry, and cultural history — a practice he describes as being, at its deepest level, about compassion.

Amrit Gangar
Independent Film Scholar, Historian, Curator, and Theorist
Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India

Institutional role: Consultant Curator, National Museum of Indian Cinema (NMIC), Mumbai

Programme Consultant: Cultural Centre of Russia, Mumbai · Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai

Academia.edu: independent.academia.edu/AmritGangar

National Museum of Indian Cinema: nmic.in