Shyam Benegal, one of India’s greatest directors, died on Monday, leaving behind a body of work that will be remembered for its breadth of vision, compassion for the marginalised, intellectual acuity, and a deep humanity. Benegal was the pioneer of the movement known as parallel cinema, and his work is a thoughtful and nuanced examination of the nation in the decades following Independence. He was a champion of the dispossessed, giving the voiceless a voice and telling their story with intelligence, honesty and kindness. Cinema, for Benegal, had a purpose – not a didactic one, but one that engaged with the real in profoundly moving ways.
Born in 1934 in Trimulgherry, a cantonment in Secunderabad, Benegal grew up in a family with strong political leanings. There were cousins who were communists, who belonged to Netaji’s Forward Bloc, or to the RSS. He was exposed to a lot of contrarian and passionate views. Yet, his great love was cinema. He made friends with the projectionist of the local Garrison Cinema, and watched all the new releases from the projectionist’s window. He recalled cinema as a deeply immersive medium, and at 10 decided that he would be a filmmaker. So, he would scratch little figures on the celluloid he got from the projectionist and played them on the magic lantern. At 12, he made his first film with his father’s 16mm camera, Chuttiyon Mein Mauz Maza.
Benegal grew up in a time of tremendous political turmoil. As a student at Nizam’s College, he read voraciously, took active part in theatre, and was the editor of the college magazine. He was also in the middle of the violent altercations that broke out during the fraught issue of Hyderabad’s relationship with India immediately after Independence. For a man like Benegal in a time of social, political, and cultural upheaval, cinema was always going to be serious business. He could have started under his cousin Guru Dutt, but he had a young man’s idealistic disapproval of commercial cinema. If he couldn’t make films such as Elia Kazan and Vittorio De Sica, he wouldn’t make films at all.
Consequently, Benegal became an ad man. Girish Karnad referred to him as a whiz kid with a photographic memory. He worked for the National Advertising Agency, where he met his future wife, Nira Mukherji. His boss there was Alyque Padamsee, who was also part of the theatre scene in Bombay. There Shyam worked extensively with Vijay Tendulkar and Satyadev Dubey. It was when he saw Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali that he understood how he can make films his way.
Ankur came out in 1974. It was a landmark film for its uncompromising refusal to pander to the demands of commercial cinema. It cast relatively unknown actors, thus starting a trend in his films where fresh graduates from National School of Drama would get their break and later become household names. Naseeruddin Shah, Smita Patil, Om Puri, and Shabana Azmi, among others, began their careers under him. The cast of Mandi is a veritable who’s who of the most important actors of the last 50 years. With a finished script, Benegal took his team out on location. Far away from the star-centric system of the commercial film industry, everyone developed a sense of camaraderie under his paternal stewardship. This was a whole new way of filmmaking, an ecosystem where everyone gave their best for the project.
Anurag Kashyap says that Benegal made it possible for people like him to make films. He inspired an entire generation of filmmakers such as Govind Nihalini and Sudhir Mishra to create a different, more serious cinema in the 1980s. Benegal’s work in television is path-breaking. He was responsible for the monumental 53-episode history of India, Bharat Ek Khoj, as much a bravura achievement in storytelling as it is a demonstration of his views on the nation’s past and its future.
Benegal never liked the term “parallel cinema”. He thought it was understood in opposition to commercial cinema, which meant that serious cinema must also be boring cinema. For him, cinema is an evolving form, and he said that in a film like Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya, one can see how the lessons learnt from his kind of films could be merged with more commercially viable storytelling. The need to evolve was central to his intellectual and artistic ethos. His first trilogy of films (Ankur, Nishant, Manthan) were powerful, realistic, bare expressions of discontent. They established his reputation almost immediately. Yet he refused to stay in that comfort zone. For those who thought that he only worked with rural subjects, Kalyug was a devastating critique of rampant capitalism framed as a retelling of the Mahabharata. He made a loud farce like Mandi, offered nuanced studies of history in Junoon and The Making of the Mahatma, experimented with storytelling and narrative in Trikaal and Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda, and in his later career made sparkling allegories of post-liberal modernity in Welcome to Sajjanpur, and Well Done Abba.
Benegal will probably be remembered most for his vociferous support of women’s rights. Bhumika is a scathing indictment of traditional gender roles that fixes a woman’s identity in subservient positions. His concern for the marginalised and women’s rights led to a remarkable trilogy of films – Mammo, Sardari Begum, and Zubeidaa – in which he explored the troubled question of identity in the larger context of the lived experience of minorities in India. Whatever his broader themes, Benegal always used a woman’s perspective as a focalizing device to throw a harsh light on systemic oppression and subjugation.
Benegal had a long and deeply rewarding association with scriptwriters Shama Zaidi and Atul Tiwari, and with composer Vanraj Bhatia, whose soundscapes play a major role in establishing tonality, atmosphere and themes in his films. Benegal was unique in not being tied to a particular region. He chose subjects from all over the country for his films. That is perhaps why he is the only filmmaker whose subject was India as a whole. Benegal was an extremely unassuming man who worked from his small office in Mumbai surrounded by his books. He dedicated his life to using cinema as a medium for showing us truths and making us feel the joys, terrors, pains, and miseries of those who are either silenced, erased, or fall through the cracks. His work, monumental and enduring, remains a testament to the man and a gift for generations to come.
The writer is the author of ‘Shyam Benegal: Filmmaker of the real India’.
