For fifty years, Shyam Benegal bestrode Hindi cinema as its foremost lustrous lodestar. He made his first fiction film when he was 40, back in 1974. He quickly emerged as the foremost inheritor of the first post-Independence generation of towering filmmakers of the 1950s and 60s. These film-makers, like Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, Mehboob Khan, even Raj Kapoor, were integral to the great Nehruvian project of nation-building.
Taking the baton from them, Benegal’s sensibilities were humanist, his politics Nehruvian. For incisive social commentary, social conscience, social rage against injustice, meditations about the human condition and celebrations of strong and rebellious women, there were few who could match him.
The range of his filmography is stunning, by any standards. Rural oppression, organising milk and weaving cooperatives, chronicles of assertive and unconventional women, satirical yarns of everyday corruption, a 52-episode television series that captured the sweep of Indian history seen from Nehru’s eyes, a love story during the 1857 first war of Indian independence, adapting the Mahabharata to a modern corporate family, biographies of Gandhi, Subhash Bose and Mujibur Rehman, and the account of the making of India’s constitution, all of these are but a fraction of the staggering breadth, scale and originality of the array of his cinematic creations.
If someone asks me which is my favourite Benegal film, I would be hard pressed to choose from such a diverse and rousing range. Perhaps, I would choose one of his smaller, lesser-known films, Mammo, made in 1994.
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Based on a story by film-critic Khalid Mohammad, it centres the predicament of a feisty woman who returns from Pakistan after her husband dies. Left alone in Pakistan, she returns to live with her widowed sister in Mumbai. The film traces how the bureaucracy sees her only as an alien, coercing her to return to Pakistan. She stubbornly insists that she chooses India, and finally fakes her own death to remain in the country.
I could maybe choose the 1976 classic Manthan, too, a riveting tale of how India’s largest milk cooperative Amul took birth. Today some 2.6 million milk producers are its members. Or then, maybe, the television mini-series Samvidhan. Stringing together actual speeches and debates from the constituent assembly, this is a fascinating and inspiring account of how free India was imagined by India’s founding mothers and fathers.
For one film we even worked together. Benegal unexpectedly reached out to me one day that he wanted to make a film on the Dalit predicament, based on two real-life stories that I had written in Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten Lives (Penguin India, 2001). One story was about a Dalit man in Chhattisgarh who was beaten almost to death because he worshipped an idol of Hanuman in a village temple in gratitude for his wife’s recovery from a deathly illness. The second was the tale of sustained violence and atrocities against Dalits in a village in Sagar district in Madhya Pradesh for the “crime” of demanding that at least one hand pump be sunk also in the Dalit hamlet of the village.
I was delighted. Dalit oppression, such a pervasive and disgraceful part of everyday life in India, was almost brushed out from Hindi cinema. I proposed to Shyam that he locate the film in the village in Sagar where the violence targeting Dalits actually transpired. He agreed.
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The film writer made this idea the centre of his screenplay. The film became the story of a film troupe that travels to the village where this Dalit atrocity occurred, and the tensions of caste discrimination that emerge within the film troupe itself. It was a clever point of departure, but I felt that it enabled some emotional distancing in the audience from a reality that should have hit home harder. I wished instead that he had stayed with a direct depiction of the two stories, and tried to enter deeper into the hearts and minds of the Dalit protagonists.
Maybe this is just my bias for straight unadorned neo-realist narratives.
The film was called Samar, or ‘Conflict’. Its first opening screening was proudly at the Rashtrapati Bhawan, hosted by KR Narayanan (who I rate as one of the finest presidents of free India). The film was powerful and path-breaking, but I felt it was not one of Benegal’s best films. Yet it was the only one that got him India’s highest film award, the national award for the country’s best film. Many other Benegal’s films got awarded for the best Hindi film at other award shows, but not this apex award. However, the history of Indian cinema will recognise many of his films as landmarks in India’s journey of cinema and the arts.
I also had the fortune to count Shyam Benegal among my friends. I have memories of a few evenings over the years when Shyam and another iconic filmmaker, Saeed Mirza, sat around a bottle of rum or whiskey with me, reflecting on changing India, on broken dreams and promises of free India, and of films, our common love.
Just months before he left the world, I was in Mumbai and went to his office to meet him. His office of many decades is like a museum, with posters of all his films and the master at his desk.
I told him I teach a course in Heidelberg University on Inda Through Cinema, and this year I wished to launch the course with his first film Ankur, the radical story of a landlord who lives with and impregnates the wife of his hearing and speech impaired bonded landless worker. It ends with a young boy throwing a stone at the house of the landlord, a symbol of incipient revolt.
Exactly 50 years earlier, Ankur had broken out over Hindi cinema like an unexpected shower in times of drought. Shyam was delighted. In class in Heidelberg, there were students from many countries, but Benegal’s film spoke to all their minds and hearts.
I treasure memories of this last meeting with the master of Hindi cinema, Shyam Benegal.
