Tribute to Shyam Benegal: Looking back at his Cinematic Milestones

Shyam Benegal, basically a filmmaker who will be remembered as a milestone in Indian cinema, taught me through many interviews how to create in-depth articles on film personalities. He had said, “When you are writing about a filmmaker, you need to contextualize his background, the influences during his growth and then his graduation to filmmaking.” I didn't quite understand what he meant. But when I recalled the several interviews I had done with the filmmaker, I remembered that each time, he remembered how his boyhood with a camera and his close association with an uncle who was directly under the leadership of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose had decided for him the course of his life.

His greatest contribution to Indian cinema is his discovery of some of the most outstanding actors of the century. Among them are – Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Smita Patil, Rajeshwari Sachdev and brought out the latent talents of Shabana Azmi, Amrish Puri, Girish Karnad, Mohan Agashe, and many more, thus vesting them with the immortality in performance they dreamt of.

His feature film in Hindi, Ankur (The Seedling, 1973), tells the story of an arrogant urban village zamindar’s son (Anant Nag) who returns to his ancestral home in feudal Andhra Pradesh. His subsequent affair with the wife (Shabana Azmi) of one of his labourers and her final resistance against the feudal system when her deaf-mute husband is beaten black-and-blue, brought him criticism for using a purportedly "un-Indian" approach and for "victimizing" women. The film brought the problem of feudal and patriarchal structures to the fore.

Nishant (Night's End, 1975), starring Shabhana Azmi, is in some sense a continuation of Ankur. Again sexual exploitation of women is used to bring out the evils of feudal oppression. Manthan (The Churning, 1976), was financed in the most unusual manner. 500,000 members of the milk co-operatives in Gujarat each donated Rs. 2 towards the production of the film. This was a people's enterprise. Shyam Benegal introduces a westernized doctor to a village who sparks off an uprising of the local untouchables. The doctor is also attracted to a local woman, and consequently explores the nexus of sex and power. In Bhumika (The Role, 1976), he reveals the ambivalent attitudes of Indian society when a woman tries to live life on her own terms. The film is based on the autobiography of the Marathi actress Hansa Wadkar, essayed brilliantly by Smita Patil.

In Manthan, Benegal’s interest in power relations comes to the fore. The four-cornered struggle – between the untouchables, the traditional middle-class, the rising rural capitalists and the new cooperatives led by middle-class agents of change – is traced with a degree of political consciousness evident in later films like Aarohan and Mandi.

Samar is a scathing attack on filmmaking pointing how filmmaking can become a pretentious exercise even when it seemingly begins with a cause. It offers interesting insights into how the caste conflict that forms the base of the storyline, unwittingly infiltrates and influences the cast and crew of the film unit that has come to make a film on the oppression of Dalits in the village. Over time, the caste schisms have widened rather than narrowed down. Benegal shows how the film unit is as prejudiced about caste as the rural people are. We discover that we are hardly as caste-neutral as we think we are. Benegal makes a perceptive statement through a dialogue by a member of the film unit. “Nobody will see the film anyway, except for some highbrow critics. It will win a few prizes at film festivals abroad. That’s all.” And that is precisely what happened to Samar,. It won some prestigious awards but the film did not reach a mass audience.

The film that most critics consider to be Benegal’s masterpiece is Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda. Based on a novel by the Hindi littérateur Dharamvir Bharati, the complex structure which revolves around oral story-telling, it was felt, would not lend itself to the film medium. Benegal disproved this as if with a vengeance and delivered a film that still brings a lump to one’s throat. He beautifully weaves the literary qualities of a novel in print and the art of oral story-telling through word-pictures to place them aesthetically forming a cohesive and harmonized whole in another medium and another language – film. He went on picking awards left, right and centre but he took them in his stride quite naturally in his usual, grounded manner. Asked to react when he won the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, he said, “"Winning an award is one aspect of film-making. But you don't make films only to win awards. Rather, you want it to be seen and enjoyed by the people. And the sense you can provide them through your films.”

(The author is a film scholar. Views personal.)