Film critic Iqbal Masud narrates an amusing story of how he was once a guest of a District Collector in a small-town movie theatre. The feature film to be screened was Guru Dutt's Saheb Bibi aur Ghulam. Impatient to see the film, the Collector yelled at the projectionist: "Sala documentary hatao, picture lagao" (Get rid of the damn documentary, project the feature film). The Collector's diktat prevailed, to the relief of the audience.

Also, thanks to the glut of documentaries from other nations, many of them propaganda, that were telecast on state-run TV channel Doordarshan, the documentary form was considered limiting and dull. Young filmmakers did not want to explore the medium. But in 1990, by a strange irony of fate, the same Films Division organised an International film festival called the Bombay International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films (BIFF). It was an enormous success. The festival, held every alternate year after that and later christened MIFF (Bombay becoming Mumbai), showcased extraordinary films from every country in the world and exploded the one-dimensional image the short film had acquired in India.

Simultaneously, cable TV arrived, bringing high-quality documentaries to the BBC and National Geographic channels. Anand Patwardhan, who had been making explicitly political films from the early-1980s, finally started to get his films telecast on Doordarshan, after huge and well-publicised battles with the Censor Board and with the channel itself. He got High Court judgments in his favour, ordering Doordarshan to telecast films like Ram Ke Naam. The political activist as documentary filmmaker had arrived.

Meanwhile the economy had been liberalised and NGOs started to mushroom. They all need the documentary film to advocate their causes, be it public health or the issue of child labour. What they wanted was not propaganda but creative treatments with interesting and artistic narratives. Above all, they wanted young, trained filmmakers to use all the possibilities of the medium to express ideas and issues.

But the one development that truly liberated the documentary from the shackles of its propaganda past was technological. It was the arrival of the digital, handheld camera. No longer did a filmmaker have to shoot on grainy 16mm film that would then be transferred to magnetic tape and lose a few generations of visual quality on the way to telecast. No longer did a documentary filmmaker have to acquire raw stock, deal with an expensive laboratory and submit his film to paperwork, including the Censor Board. He or she could shoot, edit and send the finished film for selection to film festivals abroad. It was relatively inexpensive, a far greater number of people had access to it, and it could be updated and re-edited at any point in time. It was as if a writer had suddenly discovered that he did not need a publisher to be in print. The documentary film movement in India received a major thrust with the digital revolution.

As with the French New Wave, Italian Neo-realism and the brilliant Iranian filmmakers of today, a movement in cinema is all-inclusive and not restricted to filmmakers alone. Godard, Truffaut, Resnais and Chabrol were all writing for Andre Bazin's film magazine Cahiers du Cinema before they became filmmakers. They had access to movies from around the world, they had critical thinking to support them and they arrived at a time when colour film was being extensively used. In other words, a movement in film is a happy coming together of media, technology and individual talent.

Today, when one teaches a course in documentary and non-fiction cinema, one has access to extensive material on DVD. Propaganda films from the 1930s, like Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Olympia (her masterpiece on the 1936 Berlin Olympics), can be screened, analysed and discussed. The great British documentary tradition of John Grierson and others is available at the National Film Archives. The films of the Dutch master, Bert Haanstra, are in pristine condition on DVD. Students can have an intelligent perspective on the grand sweep of the documentary tradition around the world. And then they can place the Indian documentary in that global context.

The activist filmmaking of Patwardhan and others was a platform. Filmmakers like Paromita Vohra (Unlimited Girls), Rahul Roy (City Beautiful) and Rina Mohan (Skin Deep) have taken the movement forward to a fascinating level of non-fiction aesthetics. In Unlimited Girls, for example, filmmaker Vohra takes a complex subject like feminism in India and uses the device of an Internet chat room to anchor it. Women discuss their feelings, responses and confusion about feminism in the privacy of the 'chat room'. The filmmaker then illustrates the debate with interviews, clever animation to spoof the conventional Indian response to women's issues, and a vast amount of data very attractively and entertainingly presented. It is clear that the animation would have been very difficult to do in a pre-digital age, the assembly of data would have looked laborious and appeared boring and the budget would have been astronomical and out of reach of conventional documentary funding.

But the camera work in Rahul Roy's City Beautiful really reveals the digital revolution as it shapes aesthetics. This is a film about a community of unemployed weavers in New Delhi. Roy goes into their homes, gets the weaver families so used to the camera that they don't notice it at all after a while, then talks to them heart-to-heart. Remarkably, the final film is edited just like a feature film. The camera is so easily and beautiful positioned that the post-production work has the visual continuity of a well-scripted piece of fiction. You can hardly believe that the film is a documentary. There is no way this could have been done with a 16mm film camera. The lighting inside the weaver's chawl itself would have been next to impossible. But with digital, the camera is like the pen or the laptop of a journalist or non-fiction writer.

Today, one can confidently state that the Indian documentary is more interesting and exciting than the Indian fiction film. Much of popular Hindi cinema today is presented either in a social and political vacuum or in a context that has little relationship with Indian reality. But the documentary is beautifully connected. Moreover, the medium is now in the hands of young graduates of film and communication institutes, trained in digital technology and with a sense of the history of major film movements around the world. In other words, a visually literate elite in India has taken to the form. The future looks bright.

Ajit Duara is a film critic, scriptwriter and teacher of film studies