Watching Through The Silence: Ravish Kumar, Kunal Kamra And The Fight To Speak

Someone on Twitter said that “the greatest loss to the country after 2014 was honest journalism." Not institutions, not courts, not opposition—journalism. The specificity of that grief is worth sitting with. Because when you watch While We Watched, Vinay Shukla's 2022 documentary on veteran journalist Ravish Kumar, you understand exactly what that sentence meant.

While We Watched begins with Kumar walking through an abandoned floor of what used to be a working newsroom. Walls being pulled apart. Ceilings stripped. He holds a flashlight, moves slowly, says nothing. It's not a metaphor the film announces. It doesn't need to.

What follows is two years from 2018 to 2020 of Kumar going to work. Home to studio, studio to home, eight to nine hours a day. No script, no narration guiding you through what to feel. Just a man doing his job in the middle of a media landscape that has largely stopped doing its own. The term godi media—lapdog journalism, coined by Kumar himself—had become the only honest description for what most of Indian television had turned into: channels that traded governance failures for Islamophobic fearmongering, made screaming their only tone and found that manufactured nationalist fury was easier to sell than facts. Kumar's show was different—slow, sardonic and fact-checked. It treated viewers as intelligent people. By 2018, that was rare.

The film doesn't let you look away from what is happening outside while Kumar is inside trying to hold a broadcast together. Early on, it cuts to images that have become, for a certain generation of Indians, the visual grammar of the post-2014 years: journalists, activists, poets, lawyers being taken away. Kumar narrates in his primetime voice something that doesn't leave you: when your government labels you a communist and comes after you, it is time to understand that you are losing your rights.

He is not speaking abstractly. A turning point in the film is the 2018 attack on Umar Khalid, shot in broad daylight outside the Constitution Club in Delhi. Kumar registers it the way he registers everything: precisely, without flinching. He says, "It is symptomatic of a media that has been telling people it is okay to kill somebody." Khalid was a JNU scholar who had spent years organising against lynching and Hindutva violence. He was rearrested in September 2020 under UAPA (after his first arrest in 2016 on allegations of sedition), accused of a conspiracy leading to the Delhi riots and has been in Tihar Jail ever since. Bail has been consistently denied and the trial is yet to begin. Khalid is one name. The Supreme Court says bail is the rule and jail is the exception. The question is for whom.

This is the landscape the film is set in. Not a story happening elsewhere, to other people. The daily context of Kumar's own newsroom—colleagues leaving, one farewell cake at a time, budgets cut, signals disrupted, while outside the studio, the people he reports on are being sent to jails they cannot get out of. There is a scene in the film where he takes a call from a small newspaper editor asking, essentially, whether to give up. Kumar pauses for a moment and says he has been having the same dilemma for 26 years. And then says something that quietly holds the whole documentary together: the fight for journalism ultimately becomes the journalist's personal fight. Not professional; not institutional; personal.

The film premiered at TIFF in September 2022, where it won the Amplify Voices Award. Then Busan. Then DocPoint Helsinki. Then, in 2024, the Peabody. The world, in other words, watched.

India did not, or rather, India's platforms did not. No theatrical distributor would touch it. No streaming service would take it in. It was screened in journalism schools, in small private gatherings, in targeted settings for people who already knew what they were coming to see. It found a brief window on MUBI India, but even that closed. A film about the capture of Indian media could find no home in the Indian media. The irony has become so familiar that it no longer feels ironic.

And so now, it lives on Kunal Kamra's YouTube channel.

Kamra is not an obvious custodian for a documentary about press freedom. He is a stand-up comedian who does political material, is openly confrontational and does not soften his jokes for an easier reception. But the last five years have made the parallel between what he does and what Kumar has been doing difficult to ignore.

In January 2020, on an IndiGo aircraft, Kamra confronted Arnab Goswami, the founder of Republic TV, whose brand of high-volume, jingoist news had made him one of the most watched and most contested figures in Indian media. On camera, Kamra asks a man he considers a propagandist the questions he believes a journalist should be asking. The video went viral, and within days, multiple airlines banned him from flying. The message was clear.

That same year, he tweeted criticising the Supreme Court after it granted bail to Goswami, which led to a contempt case against him. But Kamra refused to apologise. He stood by what he had said. What follows over the next five years is less a career than a siege. Show cancellations, legal complaints, petitions, court cases. And then, early 2025, the moment that made the pattern impossible to miss.

In his special Naya Bharat, Kamra called Eknath Shinde, the Shiv Sena leader and Maharashtra's former Chief Minister, a "traitor." Later, Shiv Sena workers vandalised the venue. FIRs were filed against Kamra, not the vandals. He has since been summoned before a Maharashtra Legislative Council Privileges Committee to answer whether a comedian's words about a politician constitute a breach of legislative privilege.

The pressure lands directly on him, with no institutional buffer. The copyright strikes, the FIRs, the privilege committee summons. For Kamra, the fight has become personal in the most literal sense.

This is where Samay Raina enters. Raina built his name on a different kind of comedy: fast, chaotic and largely apolitical. He became one of the most-watched stand-up comedians in India through YouTube and later through India's Got Latent—a show that made him a mainstream name. Over time, the show and his broader brand of humour began drawing a different kind of attention for the kind of comedy he was platforming. In February 2025, India's Got Latent was pulled down after an episode featuring Ranveer Allahbadia drew widespread outrage over a joke. FIRs were filed, the episode was deleted and Raina found himself at the centre of a controversy that quickly became larger than the joke itself.

In Still Alive, his recent special, Raina talks about the India's Got Latent fallout, the aftermath of it all and at one point, reaches for something he heard growing up as a Kashmiri Pandit from his own family's history of the 1990 exodus: you only fight when the fight is fair; when it isn't, you leave. For Raina, this is not cowardice. It is survival. The logic of a community that understood, in 1990, that martyrdom was not on offer—only annihilation.

But Raina's take puts a question into the air that hangs over Kumar's past story and Kamra's present: what do you do when the fight isn't fair? When the courts are slow, the platforms comply, the institutional doors close and the audience that loves your work cannot protect you from the machinery that wants you to stop?

Kumar kept going. And then, when NDTV was taken over by Adani, he resigned rather than stay and become something he wasn't. Kamra has refused to apologise every single time, to everyone who has asked. Not as performance; just actually refused, each time, to say he was wrong when he believed he was right.

These are not the answers of people who think the fight is fair. They are the answers of people who have decided that unfairness is not, by itself, enough reason to stop. That is a different thing from staying safe. It is, in fact, the harder choice.

Kamra putting While We Watched on his YouTube channel is not incidental. It makes visible the infrastructure that remains when every institution has either been captured or made too fragile to hold—no distributor, no platform, no media house. Just whatever audience still shows up. It is, in its way, the same infrastructure Kumar now operates from. The same post-institutional space that honest expression in India has been slowly compressed into.

The fourth pillar didn't fall. It was made uninhabitable, slowly, for everyone except the people who had nowhere else to go and couldn't bring themselves to leave.

Kumar used to ask his audience, on air, reversing the demand of “the nation wants to know”, made popular by Goswami: is this the nation you want? It was a question for viewers who had been told, by every channel around him, that what they were watching was normal. That the cakes were just cakes. That the signal disruptions were just technical issues. That the departures were just career moves.

While We Watched is the answer to that question.

"Not all battles are fought for victory. Some are fought simply to tell the world that someone was there on the battlefield." Kumar said this on a stage, accepting the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2019. He couldn't have known then that the film made about those years would eventually be released by a comedian who was, at that same moment, living his own version of the same fight and losing access to the same platforms, the same venues, the same protections—one FIR at a time. But here it is. The film exists. Watch it while it still is.