Screening + Reading event
Part of the Media + Development Seminar Series
//February 19th, 2025
//5:15 PM
//GEM Lab, FB 630.15
//1250 rue Guy
Newton (2017, dir. Amit Masurkar, 1hr44m) Hindi with English subtitles
Watch the trailer here.
Newton, an idealistic government clerk, takes an unwanted job to be the election officer deputed to a tribal-inhabited area of Central India which has only recently been wrested from Maoist control by Indian paramilitaries. Almost no one—most of all, the paramilitary officers assigned as Newton’s security detail—thinks that polling there makes sense given the danger of Maoist attacks and how disconnected the tribal electorate is from formal democratic processes. Newton however persists against all odds. In this deft satire from director Amit Masurkar, the discontents of development in Central India’s mining belts—tribal dispossession and neglect, revolution and counterinsurgency, an atmosphere of everyday violence—shine through the farce of performing democracy.
Optional reading: Arundhati Roy, “Walking With the Comrades,” Outlook, 29 March 2010.
Roy’s (in)famous essay illuminates the Maoist insurgency from a sympathizer’s viewpoint, laying down its political-economic context, and the violences of Operation Green Hunt. If Newton is a bureaucratic journeyman discovering the contradictions of tribal Central India from the state’s perspective, Roy’s rich ethnography attempts to show its obverse from the perspective of tribal militants.
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