Shyam Babu’s reply always came. Even in between hospital trips for dialysis sessions. The legend named Shyam Benegal had turned a nonagenarian a week ago, sharing his birthday with the great showman Raj Kapoor (this is his centenary year) on December 14. Benegal, however, hadn’t been keeping too well for a while now.
We had never met. And I am a nobody but it didn’t matter to him. The respect he accorded to this nobody is a lesson I will keep close and exercise. His emails and telephonic messages were prompt and his voice on the other end of the phone, always deep and kind. When I reached out to Guru Dutt’s cousin for a special piece on the maverick filmmaker who stepped into his 100th this July, Benegal replied: “I am not keeping too well these days. It is out of question to write a piece on Guru Dutt. My memories are not very reliable. He passed away half a century ago.” The man, ailing himself, ended his emails with a wish: for good health.
In a world where celebrities and their managers weigh in your popularity before doling you 10 minutes with them, Shyam Babu was made of a different earth. The values that made the man and his craft is lost to the world today. Empathy is lived, not bought. His cinema reflected the humanity he breathed and the rigour he practised.
He said in a recent interview: “The more one lives, the less one knows.” What a way of reflecting on life. For a whole lot of us, before we even heard of the Tarkovskys, Kiarostamis, Godards and Fellinis of the world, or even Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal entered our lives with the television in the ’90s. Thanks to the erstwhile Films Division, NFDC, and Doordarshan (Prasar Bharati). For those of us who could not go to a film school, each of his films was a text to be studied to understand India, ourselves and others, and the darkness/greyness of humans.
In an interview, Benegal, who made a documentary on Satyajit Ray, said: “Indian films are pre-Satyajit or post-Satyajit,” “a towering filmmaker, whose status in the Indian cinema was much like the status of Rabindranath Tagore in literature”. Hindi cinema, then, in the same vein, can be divided into pre- and post-Shyam Benegal. Too many have stood on the shoulders of this fearless and trailblazing filmmaker.
A lot of filmmakers, increasingly, are distanced from reality — their craft then is from heard or borrowed sources and maybe, if we are in the luck, imagined but rarely experiential.
Benegal ushered in the New Wave of Indian cinema. The torchbearer pioneered the parallel film movement in Hindi cinema. Benegal initiated the possibilities of thinking of an alternative universe, for the movies and for us. In the heydays of rehashed template films (Yaadon Ki Baaraat, 1973) and a rising Angry Young Man, unidimensional, macho and brooding, belting out mass potboilers Zanjeer (1973) and Sholay (1975), 50 years ago came a cinema, which eventually became a movement, that questioned the melodrama in the mainstream and limited ways of seeing life on screen. With Ankur (1974), a seedling took birth. Benegal introduced actors and technicians who went on to become big names in their own right. Too many to name: Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah, Rajit Kapoor, Anant Nag’s debut Hindi film. If not for Benegal, yet others’ ability to reinvent themselves for their craft would have remained unknown to the world: Sadhu Meher, Amrish Puri, Om Puri, Karishma Kapoor, even an Everyman Manoj Bajpayee as a royal, among so many others. Lensman Govind Nihalani, music wizard Vanraj Bhatia, writer Shama Zaidi.
Few admen make good filmmakers. Benegal is right at the top. He brought economy and impact into storytelling. Silences, pauses, verbal brevity, snipping away purple prose, making the world surrounding the individual speak more. No dance numbers, he showed that Hindi and Indian cinema can thrive without them — something that is still unthinkable for the Western audiences to imagine Indian cinema as, a Naatu Naatu is what they seek. So be it. But songs and music are of essence when he used it— not as cut-aways or enforced-ins but to give the lay of the land and of the human mind, build the mood of the film, drive its plot.
Shyam Benegal was a Movement. He leaves behind a sprawling body of work: shorts, documentaries, features, telefilms, series. His cinema wasn’t niche and opaque arthouse, but very much accessible and spoke of and for Everyman, for the provincial lives, telling stories of the Others who rarely got screentime previously. His social cinema showed how cinema is not just entertainment or an isolated art, but can be a tool for social change. Cinema doesn’t need to offer solutions as much as throw light on the problems. “It would be ridiculously dogmatic and simplistic to think in terms of simple solutions. There are no simple solutions to complex problems,” Benegal once said.
Caste met class in his cinema, to reflect the horrors of a feudal system, most pointedly in his Rural Trilogy (Ankur, Nishant, Manthan), each founts from a real-life episode. In Ankur (1974), driven by a sexual pull towards Lakshmi (Shabana Azmi), a Dalit married woman, the self-proclaimed progressive Brahmin landlord Surya (Anant Nag) willingly eats the food she prepares. In Manthan (1976), Bhola (Naseeruddin Shah), the low-caste firebrand Dalit/Harijan leader faces the upper-caste Sarpanch (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) to exhort the villagers to continue operating the milk cooperative without government support. Benegal was the conscience keeper of Indian cinema, a harbinger of winds of change. He’d said in an interview: “Caste plays such an integral part in everything, from the manner you choose your political representative to the manner in which you choose to live or not live in a neighbourhood. Caste and class and economic circumstance have a tendency to go together.”
His films showed us a glimpse of Nehruvian socialism. Most directly with the directorial magnum opus, Bharat Ek Khoj (1988), a televised series adapting India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s book The Discovery of India (1946) into a play/natak/drama format on a low budget. Benegal showed the subtle but important distinction between patriotism and nationalism. “We are hugely fortunate that we had Nehru. He assured us our place in the contemporary world,” Benegal told this writer earlier.
My last interview with Benegal was when his swansong released last year, Mujib: The Making of a Nation (2023), a hallmark of the once-have-been friendship between two neighbours, between a mother and its child. Two daughters (Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Hasina) commissioned films on their respective father to Benegal. After Ritwik Ghatak (Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, 1973), Benegal was the only other Indian auteur to make an India-Bangladesh government co-production. Ghatak was Bengali and an eternal refugee who longed for his lost home: East Pakistan. Benegal, in his swansong, made a film in an alien language. When this writer asked him whether language and culture weigh above religion in imagining a nation, given the times now, his short reply was “Most definitely”.
Films of Benegal, like Ray’s, travelled to global festivals, including his recently restored Manthan (crowdfunded by 500,000 farmers) at Cannes Film festival last year, where he took Nishant (nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1976), along with his two protégés Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil and their regular sarees for the red carpet. Renowned film critic Derek Malcolm has said of the guiding light that Benegal was, “it can be said with some accuracy that no director since Satyajit Ray has done for Indian film than Shyam Benegal.” While I might beg to differ, that Benegal was a movement than a singular filmmaker, that he was a prolific filmmaker till the very end remains uncontested.
Benegal, by his own admission, “chooses to not live in the past”, not “get caught in the past” but “think about what’s happening today and what will happen tomorrow.” “I’m working on two to three projects; they are all different from one another. It’s difficult to say which one I will make. They are all for the big screen,” said the indefatigable director on his 90th birthday, December 14, 2024. Well-organised and prolific, Benegal went to work every day at his Tardeo (Bombay) office, in a ritualistic manner, he was always working on scripts. His work ethic and commitment to cinema is deeply admirable.
In all his work, what has stood the test of time is the way he imagined and sketched women for the screen. Few male filmmakers have been able to do that, consistently. By wrenching them out of the trappings of history and binaries of the goddess or the whore and making them front and centre in his films; not as sexualised arm-candies or hapless mothers propelling the hero’s story, but as breathing and desiring, flawed beings who can overreach and make mistakes.
It is crucial to note the birth of Ankur at a time when the Angry Young Man (Amitabh Bachchan), created by two possibly angry young men (Salim and Javed), eschewed the possibility of the existence of other kinds of characterisation and emotions. Jaya Bachchan (née Bhaduri), a top actress at the time, has famously said how she was unwilling to be cast in Zanjeer, a “male-centric film”. And here came Ankur, which made a Dalit married woman Lakshmi its protagonist, and because she was an adulteress, Azmi was dissuaded by many to take up the role. In his book Our Films, Their Films (1976), Satyajit Ray had words of praise for debutante Azmi: “Shabana Azmi in her very first film, ‘ANKUR’, firmly establishes herself as the finest dramatic actress of the country.”
Benegal’s use of long shots is striking, both in daylight and at dusk, making Nishant (1975) more excruciating by directing our attention to the self-imposed powerlessness of the oppressed (Sushila, played by Azmi). The abduction then is a modern adaptation of the (Ramayana) mythological Ravana-Sita first encounter. Benegal would later do a modern adaptation of the Mahabharata, too, in Kalyug (1981), and its iconic scene Kunti-Karna mother-son revelation scene enacted by Shashi Kapoor’s Karan and Sushma Seth’s Savitri.
Bhumika (1977) “was a departure from his first trilogy (rural trilogy). Ankur, Nishant and Manthan entailed documentary research, however, with Bhumika, historical reconstruction was required for a period film,” writes Sangeeta Datta in her book Shyam Benegal (2008). The autobiography of Marathi actress Hansa Wadkar, Sangtye Aika (1970), was read out to partners-in-crime Benegal and his lensman and production partner Govind Nihalani. A difficult script to write, it won him, along with Girish Karnad and Satyadev Dubey the National Award for best screenplay and won Smita Patil the National Award for best actress. With the film-within-a-film Bhumika — the first Indian film based on a woman’s autobiography — Benegal turns to the urban world of Bombay for the first time in his cinema and to the duality and double lives that working women lead. Pushed into the world of films by her poverty and inconsiderate family demands, Usha (Patil) — strong-willed, family’s sole breadwinner — whose screen name is Urvashi, a famous Marathi actress and singer, seeks happiness and validation in her profession as much as she is isolated at home, alienated from her parasitic family. Shanta (Sulabha Deshpande) is “reduced to a silent spectator in her daughter Usha’s home, trying to shield her granddaughter from Usha and Keshav’s rage and violence.” Bhumika is a good study on the circularity of generational trauma as much as on the price a woman has to pay for public ambition/success.
“Benegal’s continued concern with the female perspective, and in this case the private and public worlds inhabited by his protagonist were worked out with great sensitivity,” writes Datta, “In every film, Benegal was deconstructing the stereotype of a glamorised heroine, working against the accepted models of devoted wives and idealised mothers found in Bombay films.” Here were real-life women posited in “specific cultures and histories”, “the first trilogy showed how gender is implicated in caste and institutionalised power struggles.” Each Benegal screen woman is a deep psychological character study. Benegal found his heroines in housemaids, milkmaids, teachers, brothel madams, widows.
With Mandi (1983), Benegal returned to the ensemble film. The drama unfurling in a small-town brothel. This “burlesque on politics and middle-class morals through the motif of prostitution was partly inspired by The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982),” writes Datta. Female sexuality meets commerce and its ‘othering’ by bourgeois society in this Molière-like bawdy comedy. Mandi’s world is contemporary, with a loving matriarch Rukmini Bai (Shabana Azmi) at its helm, it goes against the grain of nostalgia/romance-inducing brothel films in Hindi cinema (Utsav, Umrao Jaan, Pakeezah), notes Datta. Benegal builds an interior world of sorority inside a brothel, something that Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ornate Heeramandi failed to do. Film critic Iqbal Masud observes Benegal’s ambivalence towards the kotha (brothel) as both “an instrument of satire and repository of high/pop culture.” The prostitute, an indictment of social hypocrisy and exploitation.
Thumri, a Hindustani classical music style that originated in the courtesan tradition, finds centre stage in Sardari Begum (1996), which is based on the life of the real-life thumri singer Zubeida Begum. It also questions motherhood — is Sardari (Kirron Kher) a good mother or a bad mother? Unlike marriage, sexuality, self-actualisation, et al, feminism doesn’t address the question of motherhood as well. Sardari will find an akin soul in Sarojini (Aparna Sen) in Rituparno Ghosh’s film Unishe April (1994) where, too, the lens is on questioning motherhood as one has been fed: selfless and sacrificial. Sardari Begum’s prequel Zubeidaa (2001), starring Karisma Kapoor, is a tragic tale of a free-spirited woman. Completing Benegal’s Muslim women’s identity trilogy is Mammo (1994), the first Benegal film I ever watched, starring the inimitable Surekha Sikri and Farida Jalal as the titular Mehmooda Begum. The tale of an unassuming, displaced Muslim woman in post-Partition Bombay, as a victim of ravages of history, stripped of her rights and agency, remains a relevant film today. The film was made just two years after the Babri Masjid demolition and ensuing Bombay riots.
Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda (1992), adapted from Dharamvir Bharati’s book. In it, the Kashmiri Pandit narrator Manik Mulla (Rajit Kapur) incorporates the age-old technique of oral storytelling to narrate to his friends, stories of three women — reflective of different human qualities and economic divisions — he met at three stages in his life.
While there are more women characters in Bengal’s films worthy of study, from Junoon (1979) to Trikal (1985), none quite left a lasting impact on my young mind like Mammo, and its hemmed-in, helpless world, did and, yet, the childlike Mehmooda (Jalal), her moments of fun and hope, keeps the film from descending into bleakness. A year later, Benegal’s peer Saeed Akhtar Mirza would make his most politically vocal film, Naseem (1995), in response to the epoch-defining event of modern Indian history in Ayodhya. Filmmakers of reckoning of a certain era could make films responding to their contemporary histories. With the prolific Benegal’s passing, who has walked into the arms of time, it is the end of an era.
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