Shyam Benegal Photo: Sangeeta Datta Shyam Benegal Photo: Sangeeta Datta Shyam Benegal is considered the pioneer of New Cinema or Parallel Cinema in India. Spawning from the efforts by Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen in Bengal, there was a new cinema developing beyond studio walls, in real locations and exteriors. There was an exciting combination of actors and non-actors, and the narratives were of social realism, of the intersections of class, caste and gender in historically grounded contexts. Moreover, the National Film Institute had trained a breed of new actors and technicians with exposure to the best international cinema. In this fertile ground stepped in a forty-year-old ad man, who planned a feature script written in his college days. Benegal’s Ankur (1974) told a little story about a crumbling feudal world and a peasant revolt, in which the landlord has an affair with the low caste servant girl and she falls pregnant. It was a story in which class, caste and gender identity were sharply implicated.The prolific storyteller made a series of films— Ankur, Nishant (1975), Manthan (1976), Mandi (1983)—giving voice to the subaltern, pulling focus on the shifting fabric of society, exploring the very dynamics of national change.
I met Shyambabu in the Film Society circuit in Bombay, while I was teaching Film Studies and English at St. Xavier’s College. He would readily agree to do guest lectures with my students on cinema history and sometimes on his forthcoming films. When Suraj ka Satwan Ghoda (1992) released, I was fascinated with the film, and I made a presentation at the Prabhat Chitra Mandal (Film Society). Shyambabu was present and we had a long chat about the film that evening. Anil Dharker had liked my presentation and he carried an edited version of the paper in the Sunday Times the next week. I wrote several long essays on Shaymbabu’s films in Cinema in India edited by Khalid Mohamed. Within a few years, I was at the University of Sussex on a post-doctoral fellowship. I curated the India 50 conference and programmed Bhumika (1977) as one of the films to be screened. We invited Shyam Benegal to deliver a keynote, which was the highlight of the conference. He stayed with us in our London home and we binged on films as much as we could with frequent Chinese lunches in Chinatown, Soho.
When the British Film Institute commissioned two films on Indian directors as part of their World Directors series, I was asked to write on Shyam Benegal while Rachel Dwyer wrote on Yash Chopra. The books were written within a short window. I had to fly out to Bombay, find all his films in the archives and then have long conversations with him. So for three weeks, we had morning and afternoon sessions in Shyambabu’s Tardeo office, punctuated with local lunch boxes or meals in his home hosted by his wife Nira Benegal. The Sahyadri Films office was meticulously organised and most of Shyambabu’s films—including his shorts and documentaries—were sourced from his own office. The book launch in London was at the Nehru Centre hosted by Girish Karnad, who was its director at that time.
Shyambabu’s incisive understanding and analysis of history and socio-economic contexts allowed him to tell a layered and humane micro story, flanked by the macro canvas of larger forces of crucial socio-political changes. In a sense, he was a chronicler of our times, of post-colonial India, of promises delivered and failed. The first trilogy with Ankur, Nishant and Manthan were rural stories where the players were on the brink of change or instrumental in triggering change. The crop of film institute graduates quickly became part of the Benegal stable, a veritable gallery of dramatic actors, whose names had become synonymous with parallel cinema—Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Anant Nag, Pankaj Kapoor. There was Girish Karnad freshly returned from Oxford, who lived in Shyambabu’s home while he wrote his scripts. And Smita Patil, who was spotted by the director as a newreader on Doordarshan. These actors appear and reappear in his repertoire, exhibiting unique strengths and talents from film to film. While watching a restored version of Mandi during the recently concluded Festival of Three Continents in Nantes, one could see how Benegal was a conductor of an orchestra, drawing out a collective performance with an invisible baton. One of his strongest points was his ability to gather people and keep them in a repertory of films, while maintaining a democratic spirit in the unit. When Zubeidaa (2001) was being shot in Jaipur at Deegi Palace, the entire cast and crew had their meals together on a large table laid out in the palace garden. During the shoot for Mandi, the director set up volleyball courts, where everyone played till they were called in for their respective scenes.
free casino online Author Sangeeta Datta with Shyam Benegal Photo: Sangeeta Datta Author Sangeeta Datta with Shyam Benegal Photo: Sangeeta DattaShyambabu’s ouvre reveals an interesting alternation between narrative experimentation and social concern. His style of filmmaking placed him in the parallel cinema style, although he was impatient with such categorising of cinema. His restlessness with a linear narrative and his familiarity with literature has often led to delightful experiments in narrative style and craftsmanship as in Kondura (The Boon, 1977) or the masterful Suraj ka Satwan Ghoda. Greatly inspired by the life of Subhas Bose, his biopic on the controversial nationalist leader Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005) or The Making of Mahatma (1996) were linear and structurally less interesting.
Bhumika (1977), based on the autobiography of the Marathi actress Hansa Wadkar, significantly gave voice to an early woman performer, powered by a passionate Smita Patil in the best performance of her lifetime. Made during the rising women’s movement in India and the cultural reclaiming of women’s writings, this will remain as one of the director’s best works. The later trilogy of Mammo (1994), Sardari Begum (1995) and Zubeidaa (2001) were centred around Muslim women and the choices they make, all produced significantly after the Babri Masjid demolition and the Bombay riots. A firm believer in egalitarianism, Shyambabu’s socialist vision of post-colonial India is hugely influenced by Nehru, as evident in Bharat Ek Khoj (1988) for Doordarshan. Much later, when he served as nominated Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha, he made the television series Samvidhaan (The Constitution, 2014). Constantly drawing upon voices from the margins, Benegal’s films articulate concerns about national identity, life on the periphery, gender/caste/class issues—from the peasant movement of the 1970s to the rural development drive and its conflicts to the untold stories of the handloom weaver, the low caste farmer and the performing woman.
Benegal famously turned down his cousin Guru Dutt’s offer to assist him in his productions. He was convinced those were not the films he wanted to make. “People make films according to their own sensibility. The existing formal style was not suitable for me—I had no wish to work on design made films. Eventually though, all work is part of the same river.”
Over the past two decades, every trip to the city of Bombay had involved a visit to Shyambabu’s office. During the 2021 pandemic, we witnessed the master helming a 200-strong unit shooting for the biopic Mujib: The Making of a Nation (2023) in Film City, where a large set had been designed for the Indo-Bangladesh co-production. Donning a cap in the hot sun, he would pace up and down the set and call the shots even as the sun set in the evening sky. After a tiring day’s shoot, he would still remember to call and ask if I had reached the airport in time, and whether I had dinner. Earlier this year, we were at his office sipping chai as he gave instructions to his assistant to play Mujib on the desktop. He was frail and he had to head home for lunch. Sure enough, he was back in an hour and got busy trying to arrange our lunch in the office. He was excited about screening Mujib in London.
Last summer, we hosted a 50-year digital tribute session for Shyambabu with the London Indian Film Festival and my cultural outfit 'BaithakUK'. Several of his cast and colleagues joined us including Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Bina Paul, Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, Ila Arun, Nandita Puri, Atul Tiwari, Shantanu Moitra and his Mujib actor from Bangladesh, Arifin Shuvoo. Shyambabu was delightedly chatting with everybody and he happily announced “This calls for a party!” Finally there was a party on his 90th birthday, when he was once again surrounded by his cast and crew members. He was on dialysis thrice a week but in office for regular hours, working on two different script ideas till the last day, wondering which one to start on first.
"This series is not just about the two teams playing; it's about reviving the spirit of hockey in Delhi. We hope this will inspire more young players from the region to take up the game," Harmanpreet stated in a press release issued by Hockey India.
We will miss Shyambabu, his energy, affection, empathy and humour. We will celebrate him, his boundless passion, dignity and never say die attitude. The biggest tribute to this giant filmmaker, knowledge sharer, philosopher, mentor will be for younger filmmakers to study his films and learn his language, enter his mind. He said to me, “I don’t know if cinema can actually bring about change in society. But cinema can certainly be a vehicle for creating social awareness. I believe in egalitarianism and every person’s awareness of human rights. Through my films I can say, here is the world, and here are the possibilities we have. It is difficult to define the purpose of my art…eventually it is to offer an insight into life, into experience, into a certain kind of emotive or cerebral area.”
Sangeeta Datta is a writer-director-cultural commentator, who works between India and the UK. She is founder director of the London-based cultural organisation BaithakUK.
The Legacy of Untethered Women in Shyam Benegal’s Mandi