23rd annual Emanuel Levine Lecture features award-winning Indian filmmaker

This year marks the 23rd annual Emanuel Levine Lecture at Rider University with the screening of Textures of Loss by award-winning Indian filmmaker Pankaj Butalia. This controversial documentary examines the war-torn region of Kashmir, an area on the northern borders of India and Pakistan and the southwestern border of China, and the impact of violence on the people of Kashmir. The film also focuses on the human cost of state efforts to fight what it identifies as terrorism within the region.

Butalia is a former Delhi University professor, where he taught economics before he began making films. Most of his documentaries have been screened extensively throughout the world; one of them, Moksha, won four major international awards in 1993-94. His feature film Karvaan won a special award at Amiens in 1999 and has been screened at film festivals in Venice, Toronto, Rotterdam, Belgium, Hong Kong, Turkey, New Delhi and Calcutta, among other major locations.

Textures of Loss was nearly banned from release, as the Central Board of Film Certification and the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal in India urged Butalia to make considerable alterations regarding the documentary's violence, in order to be approved for public exhibition. A landmark judgment from the Delhi High Court allowed the controversial film to be debuted without censorship, stating "the response [to unwelcome ideas] cannot be to ban, mutilate or destroy the work of another, with whom one stridently disagrees." 

In the documentary, Butalia shifts the focus away from certain nationalist perspectives on understanding the Kashmir insurgency toward showing how the loss of loved ones manifests itself in the radicalization of different areas of the population.

This thought-provoking work encourages a complex and nuanced analysis of the costs and benefits of state interventions, not only in Kashmir, but in other contexts around the world. "Understanding the experience and perspective of other people and cultures is more important than ever in our interconnected world," says Anne Osborne, professor and chair of Rider's history department. "For all members of the Rider community, engagement with these ideas will help to make us more knowledgeable global citizens." 

Butalia will introduce the documentary and lead a discussion of the film at the event, held in the Cavalla Room of the Bart Luedeke Center on Monday, Feb. 29, at 7 p.m. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served at the reception following the screening. 

The lecture series is named in honor of the late Dr. Emanuel Levine, a history professor at the University for more than 30 years before he died in 1980. This event is sponsored by the history and political science departments and supported by the Provost’s Student Centered Initiative.  

For further information, please contact Shahla Hussain at [email protected] or Anne Osborne at [email protected] in the History Department.