The significance of Shyam Benegal in the making of India

Artists like Benegal seemed lost in this neon-lit electric world that can jangle anyone’s nerves

If modernity in Indian cinema is defined by that epochal image of Apu and Durga watching intently through fields of kash as a train rolls in billowing clouds of dark smoke, the victorious march of the subalterns can be explained visually by images in Manthan, Shyam Benegal’s crowdsourced film that narrates the full Indian embrace of the co-operative movement.

A steam-engine modernity is a far cry from a bunch of raggedy farmers banding together to kickstart a white revolution, but any kind of freedom—whether it comes on rails through your hardscrabble village or via human bonds across many back-of-the-beyond places—is liberating.

Search for freedom

That Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal started their cinematic journeys two decades apart is not the point here, but it is the nebulous idea of freedom they chased is what connects them to the humanistic thought in the realm of Indian ideas. In the case of Benegal, it was his searing look on the tribulations that persistently ruining feudalism causes and how its unfortunate sufferers cope with it and, in the end, don’t lose hope. In that small hope, which his debut film Ankur carried, is the seed—rather seedling—of freedom.

When human beings shed off their bestiality, slough off their animal natures, it is where true freedom actually begins. Human freedom emerges, says American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence, and to create a new self for himself. The chugging train in Pather Panchali and the stone the little boy throws at the window of the feudal lord’s house in Benegal’s first film are connected in a way.

Raj Kapoor’s vagrant tramp and Guru Dutt’s bereft and battered poet are also men looking for some hope and substance, making strenuous efforts to throw away chains that keep them fettered to old ideas of convention and cliches and class. This craving for protest and, then, freedom became first evident in Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar, a film that had so impressed Ray that he wrote a fan letter to its director asking if he could assist him in his future endeavours.

Benegal and his mentees followed Ray’s path and eschewed melodrama and the song-and-dance routine that were common to Bollywood masters such as Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt. Kapoor’s initial films and Guru Dutt’s two classics—Pyaasa and Kaagaz ke Phool—share a very strong bond with what came to be known as the “parallel cinema” movement in Indian cinema. Of course there were outsiders—not enfants terribles—here too in Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, both filmmakers of exceptional rigour and, at times, boring and mind-numbing complexity.

Ankur of new cinema

If, as Hegel observed, newspapers served modern man as a substitute for morning prayers, cinema for the Indian man took the form of evening prayers. Those, of course, were the days when post-industrial life was yet to take root and India was far away from even post-materialist life. Nation-building took the centre stage and Indian filmmakers, like most artists in confused and disoriented postcolonial societies, embraced it with gusto.

Benegal, who was Guru Dutt’s distant cousin, grew up in Hyderabad, where feudalism under Nizam’s suzerainty was rampant. He witnessed closely the ravages the pernicious system could wrought and the human toll it could exact. And that’s the reason why his Ankur and Nishant, where he takes a hard look at feudalism’s societal fractures and frictions, created a sensation. If Amitabh Bachchan emerged as the angry young man when India was roiling with inner turmoil just before the imposition of Emergency, Benegal’s small kid, who smashes the kulak’s window, was the angry young kid of Indian cinema. Bachchan was bugged with endless corruption and unmatched greed; Benegal’s kid was pissed with frustration at his freedom being curtailed. It was his attempt, by breaking the window, to peer through the glass at hope and freedom, albeit darkly.

Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips, as Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said. That action on the boy’s part—the casting of the stone—was the whisper before he turns into an angry young kid and then, in continuity as his dreams remain unfulfilled, angry young man.

‘Men don’t change’

The liberating idea of freedom stayed with Benegal when he branched off into nascent feminism when he made Bhumika, a biographical film on the Marathi actor Hansa Wadkar, whose portrayal by Smita Patil is one of the most finely etched performances in Indian cinema. That film, which came in late 1977, the year when Indira Gandhi, who had assumed dictatorial powers after her proclamation of Emergency, met her Waterloo at the hustings. At the end, when patriarchy still wins crushing the streak of female independence, a character utters these prophetic words: The beds change, the kitchens change. Men's masks change, but men don't change.

French writer Simone de Beauvoir said Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male. Many years on, many women in this country would still agree with that powerful line in Bhumika. A testament to Benegal’s vision and acuity. In a way it was telling, that in the same year Bhumika came out, a female leader, whose passion for power bordered on megalomania and who had smashed patriarchy to become the biggest patriarch, also lost to a bunch of geriatric men and, in the process, became a meek woman.

Benegal then made a slew of films with big stars like Shashi Kapoor and Rekha. Junoon, based on a Ruskin Bond story set around the 1857 mutiny, and Kalyug, based on the Mahabharata, on a fractious and fratricidal business family. By the time Kalyug came, the angry-young-man momentum had begun to peter out and Bachchan was rolling out chiffon romances like Silsila.

One problem with Indian cinema is its lack of interiority. We do a lot of exteriority but there is hardly anything that delves deep into the interior. The best of European cinema, steered by greats like Bergman, Antonioni and Fellini, dove deep into the dark pools of psyche, but Indian cinema didn’t. Ray tried a bit in the Calcutta trilogy, but others (his cinematic offspring) failed miserably. Anything dealing with existential angst turned totally vacuous and now, more than forty years on, sounds silly and looks almost like a farce. Perhaps the reason could be the Europeans, who were many years ahead of us in revolutions in industrial and material, were already leading post-material lives and Indians were still grappling with material shortages and the crippling problems that ensue with large-scale deprivation. Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise, said Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Indians were hardly prepared and most of them eked out dull existences of unmitigated drudgery. So the improvisation never reached a substantial level and in some cases flopped miserably.

The Benegal imprint on TV

In the mid-eighties, Benegal moved into TV, which was enjoying a Peak TV moment in India. Much before Sopranos and The Wire, which heralded the Peak TV moment in America, the land of Hollywood, Indian TV had bloomed in the eighties with dramas like Buniyaad and Hum Log. Benegal added his heft to it with Yatra and Bharat Ek Khoj, a scintillating television adaptation of Nehru’s Discovery of India. With cinematic props and Vanraj Bhatia’s excellent music, Benegal made Nehru’s prose come alive on the small screen. But all this came just before India went in for widescale economic reforms and changed its tack to what is now known as neoliberalism.

Of course, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US had taken to the new economic philosophy in the late 1970s. India, where the first burst of nation-building was over in the 1970s, was slowly inching towards neoliberalism because its wobbly policies of autarky and import substitution had failed to deliver. Thatcher would go on to privatise railways, but Benegal got a train for himself and his crew, actors in tow, to shoot Yatra, which showed a diverse India and its many facets through train stories. And then 1991 and neoliberal embrace happened and TV became the Gulf War, a grim reality that was beamed directly into homes and captivated everyone. Indians bid goodbye to Peak TV and voted with their bums-on-sofas for reality TV. Benegal’s TV time was over. And he went back to the cinema.

Floundering in ‘liberalized’ India

But 1991 reforms gave second wind to Bollywood and it spawned a new breed of young filmmakers who had towering ambition and aspired for a global reach. After an insipid decade of hollow cinema in the eighties, Indians went full Gucci in the nineties with the likes of Karan Johar making saccharine romances, which plotwise were dull but visualwise exhilarating because they captured the neoliberal ethos of greed is good and ambition the national axiom.

From occasional visuals of unbridled materialism to a surfeit of material goods, India had left its postcolonial birth pangs way behind. The discourse changed and so did the narrative. Parallel cinema lost its moorings as India opened up its economy and then it collapsed. The collapse was gradual and then sudden, reminding one of Hemingway’s famous lines on how a character goes bankrupt in The Sun Also Rises, his first novel.

Trade unions went kaput and many parallel narratives could not think up anything that could interest the new India that was emerging. Benegal and others floundered. In his last phase, Ray too had become shaky, making three films that were many levels below his earlier work like Charulata and Aranyer Din Ratri, luminous films of remarkable intelligence. It is richly ironic that Ray’s last film was called Agantuk and was about a stranger who comes and knocks on the door of his host. Around the same time, a new and strange (for this country at least) economic philosophy quietly knocked on the doors of India and was granted access . And then everything changed. It was all hurly-burly from slow-and-steady.

Around the same time India had a new economic horse in its midst, Benegal made Sooraj ka Saatva Ghoda, a multilayered story based on Dharamvir Bharti’s novel of the same name. Bharti had written the book in the flush of youth in 1952 and in that decade, before he took the editorship of Dharmyug, he wrote two more masterpieces of Hindi literature: a play called Andha Yug and a novel Gunahon ka Devta. That cinema, after Independence, took almost 40 years to catch up to literature is a story that explains itself.

Artist without parallel

When French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard said a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order, he obviously wasn’t referring to India, where most filmmakers followed the idiom of linearity and still do though our literature and epics play fast and loose with time. Why then we haven’t produced a filmmaker of Andrei Tarkovsky’s stature is a question we need to ask ourselves. Especially now when most of our middle-class in the cities lives in a post-material world. Tarkovsky sculpted in time; we don’t. Tarkovsky’s films were poetry in motion; ours are still long-winded prose. He was mystical; we aren't even material. What we are is formulaic.

Bollywood shamelessly hews to the same formula and now regurgitates old songs with new music with a stunning and stupefying alacrity. It is like fitting Ferrari wheels to the old yellow Ambassadors of Calcutta roads and making them drive helter-skelter.

Artists like Benegal seemed lost in this neon-lit electric world that can jangle anyone’s nerves. You can embrace nation-building; you can embrace postcolonial angst; you can embrace TV; you can even embrace fast-paced and mentally challenging change, but can you embrace hollowness? Which is sadly what our cinema seems to be these days. Full of franchises and rehashes.

All profound changes in consciousness, said the political scientist Benedict Anderson, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives. Perhaps there is still hope. When these amnesias fade away and consciousness comes back to its complete senses, more Benegals will emerge to tell the stories of India. Slight adjustments are all you need. A Manthan here and an Ankur there. That’s all. After all, as German writer WG Sebald said, we take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious. And create, in the process, more Benegals and more Rays.