Cannes Classics: Why Shyam Benegal’s 'Manthan', India’s first crowdfunded film, produced by 5 lakh farmers, was also an Emergency movie

Smita Patil, Girish Karnad, Naseeruddin Shah in stills from the restored prints of Shyam Benegal's 'Manthan' (1976), which will be showcased at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. (Photo: Film Heritage Foundation via X)

In what is, perhaps, the grandest event in the Hindu mythology, the Samudra Manthan, or the churning of the ocean of milk or Ksheera Sagara, produced amrit (elixir of immortality) – which the devas (gods) and asuras (demons) fought to consume – and poison, which Shiva is said to have consumed to protect the three worlds (heaven, Earth, underworld) rendering him with a deep-blue throat and the moniker Neelakantha. In the year 1976, the pioneer of India’s parallel cinema movement, Shyam Benegal, decided to make his third film, and the final in his rural trilogy, Manthan (The Churning) on another kind of churning which would make oceans of milk flow in India. A restored 4K version of Manthan (1976) had its world premiere at Cannes Classics segment of the 77th Cannes Film Festival on May 17 at Buñuel Theatre, in the attendance of veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah, who was attending the Cannes Film Festival for the very first time in his five-decade film career, his actor-wife Ratna Pathak Shah, the late Smita Patil's son Prateik Babbar and Dungarpur. It will come to Indian theatres on June 1, the bookings for which begins on Monday.

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What became India’s first ever crowdfunded film, Manthan, directed by Shyam Benegal, written by renowned playwright Vijay Tendulkar and shot by Govind Nihalani, was the story of India’s White Revolution that started in a village in Gujarat and of the man behind it all, Dr Verghese Kurien.

How 500,000 farmers funded Manthan, India’s first crowdsourced film on White Revolution

Benegal, now 89, while speaking to Karwan Cine Archives last month, reminisced about the film’s making. Benegal, working in an ad agency in early ’70s, made ad films and documentaries for Amul, for the cooperative unions of Gujarat, particularly Anand. The late Dr Verghese Kurien was, says Benegal, “one of the greatest pioneers of the cooperative movement in India, particularly related to milk production, who ran the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation”. The GCMMF is India’s largest food product marketing organisation, whose annual turnover in 2022-23 was $7.2 billion. “The Milk Man of India was the head of Amul and he transformed a milk-scarce country into a milk-surplus one. Amul was growing and the GCMMF was spreading out to create federations across India,” adds Benegal, who was keen on telling “that story” through a feature film, because most Indians didn’t watch or couldn’t access documentary films.

The documentary film, in the ’70s, was also “a statist device in the Nehruvian socialist agenda of empowerment through education”. Benegal efficiently weaves that as a cinematic device as a film-within-the-film in a scene in Manthan, when a documentary about the benefits of a milk cooperative is shown to the villagers.

When Benegal mentioned that he didn’t have money to make the film, Dr Kurien told him that the dairy farmers bringing their milk to the co-operative could be offered to become producers on the film by letting go of their day’s share (Rs 2) to make a film about their experience. And like that, half a million farmers in Gujarat paid Rs 2 each towards the making of Manthan, India’s first crowdsourced feature film. The profits the film made went back to those farmers and federations. The UN took copies of the film to show in different parts of the world, to help farming communities set up cooperatives. But unfortunately, the village of Sanganva didn’t see the kind of popularity that Ramgadh received courtesy Sholay (1975).

The making of Manthan: The final film in Benegal’s rural trilogy

Manthan can be distinguished from Benegal’s first two films Ankur (The Seedling, 1974) and Nishant (1975; selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival), as a film with an “activist agenda”. All three films, based on real-life events, the first two in rural Hyderabad and the third in rural Gujarat, were revolutionary in thought, layered with the power of the rural elite, caste politics, sexual exploitation of women, and more. Manthan also evinces the clash of Centre’s socialist idealism and local caste-based feudal politics.

For many, the earworm song, heard on Doordarshan until the ’90s, Mero gaam katha paarey, sung by Preeti Sagar and composed by Vanraj Bhatia, has been the entry point to Benegal’s film.

Naseeruddin Shah, who plays the village rabble-rouser Bhola, a Dalit (Harijan), in the film, has said in interviews, how he “lived in a hut, learnt to make cow dung cakes and milk a buffalo…to get the physicality of the character.” Benegal directed his cast to wear the same clothes for the shoot, over 45 days, because the Sangava village, in reality, received scarce water and so the villagers couldn’t afford daily baths. Nihalani, Benegal’s long-time cinematographer, has talked about the challenge of shooting on location with “a patchwork of different film tock: Eastman and Gevacolor besides Kodak, 35 mm for the film and 16 mm for the film within the film”.

Manthan: An Emergency film, a critique of class, caste and gender

The film-within-the-film, or a documentary shown to the villagers in Manthan, presents the socialist government’s development lesson while subjecting it to meditation and even interrogation, observes Anuradha Dingwaney Needham in her book New Indian Cinema in Post-Independence India: The Cultural Work of Shyam Benegal’s Films (2013).

Prof. Ruta Dharmadhikari, in her paper “Statist Documentary or Postcolonial Realist Film? Looking at Shyam Benegal’s Manthan Through the Lens Of Development Politics”, writes, Benegal’s Manthan, much like Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969), “showed the effect of state intervention through a bureaucracy to create a social contract that would link the growth of the people to the growth of the nation…The film problematises the nation’s transition from a feudal world order into a modernist and socialist state, where the post-independence government rationalised governmentality in the course of its decolonisation of the nation. Decolonising the Indian mind of its feudal past as well as its colonial hangover was a tough challenge for the post-Nehruvian times that the film is set in.”

Manthan’s primary female subject — the luminous Smita Patil as the ballsy Bindu, whose drunkard husband left her and their child with a buffalo to fend for themselves, only to return to ruin her hopes of financial independence — is also critical of family planning.

A still from 'Manthan' (1976). (Photo: Film Heritage Foundation)

Manthan’s protagonist, the veterinary doctor Dr Manohar Rao (Girish Karnad), “foreign-educated, urban-oriented intellectual” – loosely modelled on Dr V Kurien – is representative of the “neocolonial bureaucracy”, the functionary of the nation’s “developmentalist agenda”. Prof. Dharmadhikari calls Manthan an “Emergency film, a film about the transformative power of a mobilised bureaucracy”, which “during the Emergency, intensified the Congress programme of ‘socialist transformation’.” The film begins with a scene of a nation in transition. The timely arrival of the train, bearing Dr Rao, juxtaposed with the government officials who are always late “shows up the tardiness of the old ruling order’s workings and the new order eager to create drastic changes” with “scientific methods of development and progress.”

Karnad’s Rao and his team’s (Mohan Agashe and Anant Nag) idea of the milk cooperative – a new social discourse, to empower farmers, irrespective of caste, and remove profit-siphoning middlemen – faces challenges from local milk-trade monopolist Mishra (Amrish Puri) and upper-caste Sarpanch (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), who refuses to join any cooperative which gives equal powers to Dalit (Harijan) members. “What Benegal shows in Manthan,” writes Prof. Dharmadhikari, “is the conflict of two modes of power in the Indian rural community: the proactive, state-controlled, Centre-operated milk cooperative scheme and the reactive, localised feudal setup…Rao is considered an idealist by the elite and an interloper by the Dalits.”

A poster of 'Manthan'. (Photo: Film Heritage Foundation)

The socialist-realist film represents “the fractious politics of the postcolonial nation. It highlights the many ways in which the government’s development agenda often, despite its professed social welfare purposes, clash with the ground reality of a rural community in India. The deeply entrenched hierarchies of caste, class, and gender continue to divide people and become insurmountable bottlenecks to the nation’s development project. Films such as Benegal’s Manthan creatively combine the narrative elements of good storytelling with the documentary realism of postcolonial modernity.” Much like how local moneylenders opposed the nationalisation of banks, the local milk traders opposed milk federations and cooperatives.

While the film shows the defeat of the idea of “casteless governance in cooperative societies...Benegal ends the film on a positive note”. It is not the city-bred Rao but Bhola, the low-caste firebrand Dalit leader, who exhorts the villagers to continue operating the cooperative without government support.

The Restoration of Manthan and Cannes Showcase

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Cannes has previously screened two Film Heritage Foundation projects: Aravindan Govindan’s Thamp (1978) and Aribam Syam Sarma’s Ishanou (1990), in 2022 and 2023, respectively. “The restoration of a Shyam Benegal film has been on Film Heritage Foundation’s wish list for years as he is one of India’s most venerated filmmakers whose early films were iconic in India’s parallel cinema movement,” the foundation’s director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur said in a press statement. Dungarpur’s first foray in the Cannes Classics section was with Uday Shankar-directed dance film Kalpana (1948) in 2012.

After a year-long restoration of the Manthan print, the film will be screened under the Cannes Classics selection, which was created 20 years ago to showcase classics, restored prints and documentaries. Other films in the category this year include Charles Vidor-directed Gilda (1946); Wim Wenders’s Palme d’or winner Paris, Texas (1984); Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954); Tsui Hark’s Shanghai Blues (1984); and Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971).

At Prasad Corporation’s studios in Chennai, and L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory, in association with GCMMF, FHF restored Manthan using the best surviving elements: the 35 mm original camera negative preserved at the NFDC-National Film Archive of India, while the sound was digitised from the 35 mm release print, preserved at FHF.