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In the aftermath of Shyam Benegal’s passing, much will be said about the social relevance of his work, and about his role as torchbearer for Parallel Cinema, bringing new content and themes, overt seriousness – and eventually even an alternate “star system” – to Hindi films in the 1970s. And yes, it is important to discuss his major work – Ankur, Bhumika, Mandi, so much else – in those terms. But when I think of Benegal now – the films, as well as a short meeting with the man himself in Kolkata a decade ago – what comes to mind is playfulness and lightness of touch. And a keen curiosity, even at an age when many people retire this ability.
Here is one moment from our conversation. Pushing eighty at the time, Benegal was talking about his work on an educational series for UNICEF before he began making feature films. One short film was about rainwater harvesting, about water bodies that disappear in summer, and he explained it by enacting it with childlike gestures, staccato sentences, pauses and emphases. “We did a story about a water-body in love with the sky. Burns with love. Evaporates into a cloud. Goes looking for the sky. Does not find the sky. Weeps, becomes rain. Wonderful things like this, combining science and fun.” I could scarcely believe this was the same person who made those “solemn” films I found daunting as a child.
At a celebration of his work in Bombay this year, when moderator Raja Sen asked the panellists about their favourite Benegal film, I could have gushed about a dozen of them, but picked the little-seen 1975 Charandas Chor, adapted from Habib Tanvir’s satirical play. Here is a film that – beginning with the opening-credit sequence where a donkey seems to wag its tail in tune to folk music – brings together elements of theatre and cinema with great brio. But though produced by the Children’s Film Society – and sometimes not treated as one of Benegal’s “mature” works – Charandas Chor isn’t alone in its formal inventiveness or sense of humour. There is much quirkiness in his other films too, which doesn’t take away from their basic seriousness.
Consider Mammo, which touches on Partition and those who were scarred by it – but also, being filtered through a child’s gaze, has moments like the one where the boy Riyaz gives his great-aunt Mammo a synopsis of Hitchcock’s Psycho, pretending it was a play called “Panipat ki Budhiya”. (Later, Mammo will get to tell her own horror story, from the Partition riots.) In a delightful touch, as Riyaz relates the plot, we hear Bernard Herrmann’s legendary Psycho score playing in the background. Even if this semi-autobiographical detail comes from writer Khalid Mohammed, the way in which the scene unfolds is typical of the playfulness that Benegal’s cinema doesn’t get enough credit for. Or take Manthan, which has some pedantry and message-mongering built into it – being a celebration of the milk cooperative movement, and crowd-funded by lakhs of farmers. Yet the small moments are as telling as the big ones: a scene where a city slicker played by Anant Nag arrives at the village for the first time and looks for a spot to use as a toilet, while locals giggle as they watch him stumbling about, is a form of slapstick humour but also a depiction of the many ways of life that co-exist (or clash) in a complex, plural country. Which is what this film – and perhaps most of Benegal’s work – is also about.
Countless other whimsical moments and wry touches come to mind. The Bharat ek Khoj scene where Roshan Seth’s Nehru primly steps over broken weapons and other debris on the Kurukshetra battlefield before settling down to talk to us about the Mahabharata. The cleverly sinuous narrative of Suraj ka Satwaan Ghoda. It is also worth remembering – if you think Benegal neglected form for content – how carefully he worked with his cinematographers, to get the right look for a mood or setting. When he and Govind Nihalani were forced to use poor-quality Orwo film for Bhumika due to import restrictions (“There was a shortage of Kodak just as I was about to start,” he told me, “and I couldn’t buy more than a certain amount of Eastman Colour”), they made a virtue of necessity by creating a varying set of looks – one type of faded black and white for the protagonist’s childhood (which they also designed as a subtle homage to Ray’s Pather Panchali), another more vivid tone for the later scenes, colour for another time period. For Trikaal, set in an old Goan house before the state became part of India, Benegal and Ashok Mehta worked almost exclusively with candle-light, bringing alive not just the realistic segments of the film but also the unnerving inner world of the matriarch Dona Maria, who is visited by spirits and ghosts from a distant past. “Little islands of light in the darkness – that quality is what I wanted. We sat with different candle-makers to get different sizes and thickness of wicks, to suit the tone of a scene. We also re-watched European films with stories about Catholic orthodoxies, set in a similar period.”Filmmakers of Benegal’s generation – especially the ones who lived relatively privileged lives in cities while telling stories about exploited people – have often been accused of being disconnected from their subjects. Setting aside broader debates about representation, it is important to note that Benegal was aware of this disparity and worked it into some of his films, as a Fourth Wall-breaker. Samar uses a complex, nestling-doll structure to comment on hierarchies of privilege within the lower echelons of the caste system. (“I used the device of a film-within-the-film to look at the sensibilities of both Dalits who are deracinated in cities and those who are part of the original tradition. I couldn’t have done this as a straight narrative.”) Or here is Arohan, which begins with Om Puri, as himself, introducing the cast and crew, drawing attention to the artifice of what they are doing, before sliding into the story. Such moments show Benegal’s ability to hold a mirror up to himself – but equally, they suggest a dynamism that allowed him to move beyond plain realism into other realms. This makes his best work vibrant, alive and questioning in ways that transcend the staid term “art movie”.
(Related posts: Charandas Chor; Trikaal; Bharat ek Khoj; being underwhelmed by Kalyug)
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