Colour correction: The Supreme Court has ruled against an FTII decision to bar film students with colour blindness. Now what?

Ever wondered why the great Christopher Nolan, director of Memento, Inception, Dunkirk and the Batman trilogy, which exceeded all expectations of the Batman experience on screen, is not big on vivid, saturated colours? Why his colour templates veer mostly between a tight range of contrasts in cold and opalescent greys and beiges? Besides the fact that his visual language enriches his ability to transfigure reality on the big screen through temporal shifts and elliptical cutting, he suffers from red-green colour blindness. Red-green colour blindness impairs one’s ability to see colour or differences in colour. Most people with red-green colour blindness can adapt to any profession or life situation—besides, perhaps, not being able to select ripe fruit or read traffic signals.

That’s the condition that a routine Ishihara Test showed up for 23-year-old Patna resident Ashutosh Kumar on his third day at his dream institute—the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where he had cleared a written test and a seven-day-long, rigorous in-campus interview test to be enrolled in the editing department. The year was 2016. The FTII, the grand bastion of film education in India set up in 1960 under the prime ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru, was in the throes of its most tumultuous years of student unrest, protests against a bureaucratic, top-down administration. Ashutosh was in his hostel room when the institute’s newly-appointed director Bhupendra Kainthola, a Indian Information Service (IIS) officer, informed him that he was disqualified from continuing his education because the year before, an expert committee within the FTII, comprising mostly bureaucrats, had decided that students with colour blindness would no longer qualify for the cinematography, editing and art direction courses. His disqualifications became the buzz of the institute among protesting senior students, but Ashutosh had to leave the campus. He stayed with a friend for a few days, and tried to appeal to the administration several times, but in vain. He returned home to Patna, where his parents, who ran a shop, anyway never gave him whole-hearted support for an education in something related to filmmaking. “I could manage to convince my father to pay this fees for me because not only was the fees between Rs20,000 to Rs30,000, it was the country’s premier filmmaking institute with a history, and many legends shaping its culture of appreciating, learning and living with cinema. For a lower middle class person aspiring to make films one days, this was a dream. Because of this one technicality, my dream was shattered,” Ashutosh, now a freelance editor in Delhi, told me over phone the day the Supreme Court’s verdict came out. Ashutosh described his and his younger sister’s interest in cinema. In his government school in Patna, Ashutosh acted in and directed plays—it was a passion chiselled over years.

After returning home in 2016, Ashutosh filed a couple of RTIs (right to information) and got in touch with the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) in Delhi, which took up his case. In October 2016, they filed a case at the Bombay High Court; in February 2017, Ashutosh lost the case. The High Court said in its judgment that it couldn’t challenge an expert committee. Ashutosh did not give up. The HRLN reopened the case and in the middle of 2017, lawyers Aditi Saxena and Collin Gonsalves filed the case in the Supreme Court. Ashutosh moved to Delhi that year and started working in a TV news channel. The case’s proceedings were affected by the pandemic and in December 2021, the Supreme Court decided to form a committee of experts to review Ashutosh’s case. This committee was slightly different from the one that had decided that colour blindness was an impediment to the process of film editing. Its members knew the art form and his condition well—it had cinematographer and director Ravi K. Chandran, colourist Swapnil Patole, script supervisor Shubha Ramachandra, film editor Akkineni Sreekar Prasad, course creator Rajasekharan, ophthalmologist Jignesh Taswala and advocate Shoeb Alam. Ashutosh’s lawyers received support from director Rajkumar Hirani, who, in a letter outlining his reasons for believing Ashutosh should be readmitted to the course he qualified for, emphasised that colour blindness does not interfere with the process of editing and colour correction is the job of the DI colourist. Hirani is himself a graduate of the editing course at FTII.

Accepting all the recommendations of the committee, on April 12, 2022, a Bench led by Justices S.K. Kaul and M.M Sundresh said a premier institute such as the FTII should change its perceptions. Colour-blindness is merely a deficiency and not blindness. “Art is non-conformist” and a “liberal thought process should not be put in a conformist box”, the judgement said. It is meant to be a directive for all other film institutions in the country.