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What does it mean to be “present” when the State has made you disappear from public life? Lalit Vachani’s documentary Prisoner No. 626710 is Present explores that question through Umar Khalid, a charismatic student leader arrested on 13 September 2020 in connection with the alleged larger conspiracy behind the 2020 Delhi riots.
Its title holds two descriptions of him together: one, a prison number assigned by the State; and two, an insistence that Khalid remains “present”—in his words, in the lives of those who continue to visit him, and in the hearts of many of us who stand in solidarity with him and other political prisoners.
Since the film premiered on 29 July 2024 at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala, it has screened across India and the world. I watched it at Birkbeck, University of London.
Much of the case it recounts was familiar to me and has been widely documented. Yet, cinema can make even familiar facts register differently: scholars like Walter Benjamin, for instance, have written of film’s ability to produce a more immediate, sensory and collective mode of reception.
What stayed with me, then, was the way Vachani moves between examining the allegations against Khalid and showing what his imprisonment has done to his friendships.
The film challenges the State’s account of Khalid as a conspirator, but it also resists the temptation among his supporters to see him only as a symbol of dissent. Instead, it asks us to recognise the humanity of the person who must live inside both narrow descriptions.