Bapsi Sidhwa, Shyam Benegal, Manmohan Singh and the Death of a Century

There is nothing like death to make you aware of your own mortality. When parents die, they take your childhood and youth with you. When historical figures leave, they take epochs. In their wake, young nations lose their childhood and youth. Citizens are touched by large intimations of mortality. 

“’End of an era’ is a tired cliché,” the political scientist Gilles Vernier posted on X soon after Manmohan Singh’s passing, “but it is an apt expression today.” The comment laughs in loquacious silence. The end of an era of a certain political principles if one takes 2014 as the watershed. But the conclusion of a different era if the year is 1991, the end of the beginning of a way of life at the close of the millennium.

Either way, the aura of historical impact is different from its reality. They don’t overlap much in public memory. Even the keen reader and novelist in me remembers the pointed violence embodied in the Aamir Khan character in Deepa Mehta’s film 1947: Earth as the most devastating moment from Bapsi Sidhwa’s powerful novel of ruthless truth-telling. The fact that I saw this film in the US added a stranger patina of mourning for the loss and violence enshrined in Sidhwa’s novel, The Ice-Candy Man that was the basis of Mehta’s film. The involuntary betrayal of a loved one, the Hindu ayah to a Parsee girl in Amritsar to a frantic Muslim mob has been for me the most visceral sensation of the private impact of the public trauma of the Partition of 1947. 

Sidhwa lived in the new-born Pakistan before moving to the US. Her novel and Deepa Mehta’s film revived for us the traumatic childhood of a nation that our generation only knew from the stories of our grandparents. Born on 13th August, 1947, my mother was the subject of mellow mockery from her older cousins. “Couldn’t you wait a bit longer to be born in a free India?” 

Nevertheless, my mother’s generation became the midnight’s children. Made by Nehruvian socialism, the aesthetic contours of their lives were shaped by the films of Mrinal Sen and Shyam Benegal. Ma, who died in her fifties, remains most startlingly alive for me in the clips I catch of the films and TV serials in which she’d acted, becoming herself most intensely in the brief scene in Buddhadev Dasgupta’s film Grihajuddha as the widow of a slain Naxalite leader interviewed by a journalist played by Goutam Ghose. Shyam Benegal’s films brought this generation’s artistic and political aspiration alive. In the Calcutta of my parents’ time, Benegal was no less popular than the homegrown Mrinal Sen, and a happy coincidence it is that his name is just one letter away from “Bengal”. 

Also read: My Friend Shyam Benegal

It was also the time when that now-dated expression of impoverished elitism, the “art film”, made its sharp distinction from the “commercial film” that was breaking into new territories of violence and revenge with the energy of its angry young men. Is there indeed a socialist aesthetic? The question is as rich and as troubling as the explosive relation between art and activism, aesthetics and politics. Bertolt Brecht and György Lukács warred over this question in 1930’s Germany. And this is a question that has seen sharp noise and music in Indian theatre and cinema, be it through the polarisation of the Communist-shaped IPTA and commercial theatre or the sharp split between Bollywood and the parallel film culture that owed so much of its life to the New Indian Cinema embodied by works such as Benegal’s Nishant and Manthan. 

A bleak, austere aesthetic to go with bleak, austere lives? Radical cinematography to go with radical politics? While the social conscience of Benegal’s films never failed, the spare sparred with the lyrical between the bourgeoise and the proletariat, between Ray, Benegal, and Sen – just the way they sparred between Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad, Habib Tanvir, and Badal Sircar in the flesh-and-blood incarnation of theatre. The child of an actress caught between commercial and group theatre in Calcutta, between “art” films and TV serials, my childhood was scarred by the beauty and the trauma of these conflicts, making me the person I am today.

Is that why I remain plagued by a restless interest in coming-of-age chronicles? The making of selves, of individuals and nations? The dark disruptions of education that make dangerous anti-bildungsromans? The 1980s were a strange time to come of age, certainly in Communist-ruled Calcutta, particularly if you take your Class 10 boards in 1991, the magical year of the appearance of Ray-Ban sunglasses and KFC chicken on billboards, if not on real-life streets. The socialist aesthetics of theatre and films were soon to be muddled by multi-channel TV soaps and the Karan Johar blockbuster. Before we knew it, parents who dated amidst Naxalite turbulence and came of age through Sen and Benegal became the sepia dream of archived “art” films. And while we all know Narasimha Rao was the prime minister when policies changed in the economic base, it was the economist who is and will be remembered as a architect for the change that brought to a kind of an end the defining period of Nehruvian socialism. 1991 belonged to Dr Manmohan Singh.

Also read: The Manmohan Generation Needs to Give the Man His Due

Who can deny that the 21st century has brought more sweeping changes? The digitisation of reality, the Insta-reelification of lives, and the looming cloud of Artificial Intelligence? The stranglehold of religion on politics? But these three phases of independent India in the twentieth century built on, fought with and parted from each other with a passion that brought this nation to age. They defined the lives and livelihoods of the parents of many of us living and working now. A violent birth, a bohemian youth of socialist politics and artistic experimentation, and an economic coming of age that embraced the world. Bapsi Sidhwa, Shyam Benegal, Manmohan Singh. A still-young independent nation enters the quarter century of the new millennium with the loss of three parent figures. Having lost both my parents in my twenties, I know something like this feeling. Happily, nations live much longer than individuals, and are far more resilient. 

Saikat Majumdar’s most recent books are The Amateur and The Remains of the Body.