ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how historical methodologies allow new filmmakers to critically interrogate the relationship between the individual and the state, problems of social alienation and exclusion, inequalities in resource allocation, and violence. Using the activist organisation the Denotified Tribes Rights Action Group and its associated theatre/film group Budhan as its case study, the chapter traces the history of organisational collaborations with academic researchers, the key historical contexts for exploring the histories of marginal communities defined as ‘Denotified and Nomadic Tribes’ and the role of colonialism (and the regimes of independent India) in defining forms of ‘criminality’. The chapter examines how forms of historical work by community organisations have been both innovative and internally critical. It argues that community engagement with history has become a means for changing the way in which such community histories might be done. In this, new ideas about the nature of archives and the process of historical representation suggest that the formal archive for ‘Criminal Tribe’ history needs to be critiqued in new ways, and that memory and orality have specific roles in this endeavour.
