Chalchitra Abhiyaan

Chalchitra Abhiyaan is a film and media collective based in Shamli district in Uttar Pradesh, India. It covers five districts of Western Uttar Pradesh, Shamli, Muzaffarnagar, Baghpat, Meerut, Saharanpur.

Filmmaker Nakul Singh Sawhney founded it after working on his acclaimed documentary Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai on the 2013 riots in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli district of North India that led to the displacement of over 100,000 people from the sugarcane belt.

Since 2016, the collective has trained people from these areas-both urban and rural-to bring their issues into the public domain through news reports, documentaries and films. Their core team includes riot survivors and former brick kiln workers and farmers among others.

They have actively reported on the agrarian crisis, landlessness among the Dalit community, sectarian violence, livelihood, labour rights, politics, and breakdown of the rural economy. These issues are often not reported in corporate mainstream media that focuses on target audience-generated profits.

Sawhney views the team’s work as a “cultural intervention in the Gramscian sense” and feels that these everyday spaces and day-to-day recreational activities can be an effective means to break the hegemony of dominant ideological formations.