Shyam Benegal's India

This book examines Shyam Benegal’s films and alternative image(s) of India in his cinema, and traces the trajectory of changing aesthetics of his cinema in the post-liberalisation era. The book engages with the challenges faced by India as a nation-state in post-colonial times. Looking at hybrid and complex narratives of films like Manthan, Junoon, Kalyug, Charandas Chor, Sooraj Ka Satvaan Ghoda, Zubeidaa and Well Done Abba , among others, it analyses how these stories and characters, adapted and derived from mythology, folk- tales, historical fiction and novels, are rooted in the socio-political contexts of modern India. The author explores diverse themes in Benegal’s cinema such as the loss of home and identity, women’s sexuality, and the status of dalits and Muslims in India. He also focuses on how the filmmaker expertly weaves history with myth, culture, and contemporary politics and discusses the debate around the interpretive value of film adaptations, adaptation of history and the representations of marginalised communities and liminal spaces. The book will be useful for students and researchers of film studies, cultural studies, and the humanities. It will also interest readers of Indian cinema and the social and cultural history of India.

Vivek Sachdeva is a professor at the University School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi, India. As well as being a translator, he is the author of Fiction to Film: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s The Householder and Heat and Dust; he also co-edited Identities in South Asia: Conflicts and Assertions . Vivek Sachdeva, in this comprehensive study, maps the narrative of Benegal’s cinema onto the shifting narrative of the nation, as he traces its engagement with issues of tradition and modernity and history and its adaptation, among others. Theoretically rich, engaging with questions of cinema aesthetics, as also raising political questions, this work will be relished by academics and cinema lovers alike – Simi Malhotra, Director, Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research & Professor, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. SHYAM BENEGAL’S INDIA

Alternative Images

Vivek Sachdeva First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Vivek Sachdeva The right of Vivek Sachdeva to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction 1

1 Assertion to empowerment: narratives of social change 28

2 Women and the nation 47

3 Political commentaries through adaptations 78

4 Adapting history 102

5 Contestations with Indian modernity 126

6 Changing mofussil spaces and new (middle) cinema 155

Bibliography 170 Filmography 178 Index 180

vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It was my long-cherished desire to work on Shyam Benegal’s cinema. I have been thinking and reflecting on this project for many years. My ideas started to take shape more clearly after many discussions with my teachers, fellow academicians and my students in the course of my class lectures on film studies. An intellectual journey, which began alone with my grappling with ideas, acquired rich inputs from such discussions. Whatever limitations remain are solely mine. I feel that no work of any kind can ever be complete without one’s friends’ and well-wishers’ help. There were quite a few people who helped me in the present project. I take this opportunity to thank all those who were directly or indirectly part of this journey. First of all, I would like to thank my teacher and mentor Professor Rana Nayar, under whose guidance my academic journey began. He has always been a source of encouragement and a constant support, irrespective of circumstances and his busy schedule. I would like to thank Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University (G.G.S.I.P.) for giving me the financial grant under the Faculty Research Grant Scheme (F.R.G.S). for the project. I also thank Professor Anup Beniwal, the Dean at the time (2016), University School of Humanities and Social Sciences, GGSIP University for his support. I take this opportunity to thank Professor Simi Malhotra, Jamia Millia Islamia for her unquestioning faith in my work. There are a few friends who helped me in different ways. In the course of the project, I attended various conferences during which my fellow academics gave me critical inputs which provided clarity about my arguments. I take this opportunity to place on record the kindness shown by Dr. Vijay Devdas, who was at the University of Otago when I visited to present a paper on Shyam Benegal’s films at a conference. I would like to thank Dr. Svetlana Kurtes, University of Portsmouth, and Dr. Monika Kopytowska, University of Lodz, for giving me opportunities to share my work on Shyam Benegal at different conferences held in Poland and the U.S.A. I am extremely grateful to Dr. Romita Ray, University of Syracuse and Dr. Navtej Purewal, S.O.A.S., London, for their unstinted help. Both of them were extremely prompt and kind to send me articles and other study material whenever I required.

viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would also like to acknowledge the editorial teams of The Journal of Popular Culture, Brukenthalia: Romanian Cultural History Review and Refocus: The Films of Shyam Benegal, Edinburgh University Press for their co-operation in giving me the permission to reuse articles/chapters published in their journals and anthologies in this book. I thank my students as their inquisitive queries during lectures and discussions gave me a fresh perspective and on occasion prompted me to revisit my arguments. My sincere thanks to the entire editorial team of Routledge for improving my manuscript. My special thanks to Shyam Benegal for sparing some time to meet me. Interacting with him gave me an insight into the way he understands and defines his medium. He was gracious and kind to give me personal copies of two of his films which I had been unable to procure elsewhere. I express my deep sense of gratitude to Pt. Ritesh Mishra and Pts. Rajan- Sajan Mishra for anchoring my life through rough waters. I am extremely indebted to them for not only teaching me nuances of music, which has shaped my sensibility and approach towards other art forms as well, but also many lessons of life. I am grateful to them for being there for me, irrespective of my other commitments. My special thanks to my wife, Queeny Pradhan, who has been a tremen- dous support throughout the project. There were moments when I felt low or extremely challenged. She has always been there to extend her support unflinchingly and show faith in my work. My special thanks to her for the critical comments and also her contribution in improving the quality of this work. Last but not least, I thank our son, Amartya, for giving us a reason to smile with his pranks and mischievous behaviour during this journey. I also thank my parents-in-law for their blessings and best wishes. Vivek Sachdeva

INTRODUCTION

Since the rise of Hindutava ideology in the late 1980s, the idea of India has become a much-debated and contested category. India has undergone major social, economic and political changes. The rise of Hindutava ideology in the country gave Indians a new imagination of the nation. Such an imagination was also prompted by the economic policies of liberalisation adopted in the early 1990s, taking India away from previous socialist ideals. Since the 2000s, the state has also made attempts to become extra powerful and implement its ideology, making the ideals of democracy a contentious issue. In such times, it is crucial to engage with questions like – What is a nation? How has the idea of India as a nation changed over the period of time? What is the position of marginalised communities vis-à-vis the idea of nation? How are the ideologies of nation and nationalism contested in various forms of media from different ideological positions? What role is played by media, cinema and literature in narrating the nation? Do film narratives propagate the state ideology or give a counter discourse to state nationalist ideologies? What challenges does India have as a nation-state? How have the aesthetics and concerns of cinema changed over the period of time? With these questions in mind, this book engages with the study of representation of India and its myriad images in the cinema of Shyam Benegal. Benegal is one of the most prominent filmmakers of his time dealing with the multi-perspectives and challenges of a young nation-state. The primary reason to work on Benegal’s cinema is that he is one filmmaker whose career began in the 1970s, during the peak years of Indian New Wave, and made his last feature film in 2010. During his career, he engaged with the issues of India, narrated the narratives of a changing India and also adapted his art to reflect the changing socio- cultural times. His body of cinematic works is a cultural space through which the idea of India as a nation-state is critiqued from the margins. In addition, the book also engages with the evolving aesthetics of Benegal’s cinema over time.

1 INTRODUCTION

I The idea of the nation is born through cultural narratives (including literary as well as cinematic narratives in contemporary times), which draws attention towards narrative strategies as well as the patterns of these narratives. According to Homi Bhabha, any idea of nation is marked with ambiva- lence, is akin to narratives of cultural significance and is like a “continuous narrative of national progress” (Bhabha 2000a: 1). In the nineteenth century, myths, poetry, realist fiction and travel writings facilitated imagining the nation. Based on the categories of self and other, the grand project of narrating the nation defines its cultural boundaries.1 Narratives as ideological enuncia- tions also push and extend such boundaries, which makes the idea of a nation not a fixed entity, exhaustible through mythological, historical or cultural narratives. Narratives help in defining, redefining and re-imagining the idea of a nation. Nation, thus, becomes the eternal signified of cultural narratives. Through these narratives, the idea of nation evolves into a state of flux; it is ever-changing and ever-growing. The politics of inclusion and exclusion, representation and narrative discourse make narratives the sites where national identities are asserted, ideologies of nationalism are contested and the idea of nation and nationalism is either celebrated or questioned. On the one hand, cinema reflects the inherent patterns of the society which determine the patterns of narratives; on the other, cinema also influences the mind of the masses and structures their thinking pattern. In this dialectical relationship, cinema, therefore, becomes a space where filmmaker and audience(s)/citizens interact and enter into a dialogue through narratives. Indian cinema(s) is/are such a cultural space where interactions of national ideologies take place. Regional cinema(s), parallel cinema(s) 2 and Hindi cinema(s)3 are replete with various cultural narratives which project different images of India. These narratives become the sites where nationalist ideologies are circulated and contested. Each cinema (read mainstream and parallel cinema), with its distinct thematic, formalistic and aesthetic quali- ties, propagates an image of India. Filmmakers from different schools of cinema enunciate from their individual ideological positions. While studying films in relation to questions of the nation, this study engages with negotiations between nationalist ideologies, different ideas of India and aesthetics of cinema(s). Instead of working on popular Hindi cinema (which has attained much critical attention of film scholars in India and abroad) to understand the nationalist discourse as present in Hindi films, this book focuses on the questions of India in post-colonial times through the lens of Benegal, an iconic figure of Hindi New Wave cinema. The idea of nation was born in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Treaty of Westphalia, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and wars in Europe during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are some of the important historical events that gave

2 INTRODUCTION people national consciousness, although each historical event contributed to the spirit of nationalism in its unique way. Furthermore, since the invention of the printing press, publishing literature in the vernacular gave people a fulcrum to formulate their respective linguistic identity in Europe and to imagine themselves as a community. Reading newspapers and literature in the vernacular became a mass activity to bind people by means of a common thread. 4 Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities suggests that capitalist interest of printing press owners encouraged them to publish literature in the vernacular, which made people conscious of their linguistic identities. The role of cinema in modern times is akin to what the printing press did in Europe in former times. The cinema also facilitates imagining a nation among the viewers. As nation and nationalism are not merely political ideologies – rather these ideas are born “in the cultural system that preceded it” (Anderson 2006: 19) – the cinema of a country gives people narratives into which their nationalistic imagination can be articulated. The images circulated on the screens of cinema halls, where people converge from different parts and layers of society, have always been larger than life, both in the literal and figurative sense of the word, to capture their imaginations. In the dark cinema halls, the image of cinema influences the imagination of the masses. The narrative patterns of cinematic imagination began to foster the nationalist imagination of the masses. Watching cinema as a collective activity gave the masses a common image and imagination. A nation’s imagination flows within the undercurrents of cinematic imagery. D.W. Griffith’s film titled The Birth of a Nation made in 1915 is one of the early films through which connections between cinema and nationalistic imagery have been understood. 5 Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , a German expressionist film of 1920, reflects the unuttered anxiety of the German nation after the First World War.6 The power of cinema was understood and exploited by both Hitler and Mussolini, who used cinema to propagate their ideology by giving glorified images of their respective nations. Fascist Mussolini, in his authoritative regime, controlled the people’s imagination by giving them an image of either glorious Roman history or the lifestyle of a contemporary bourgeoisie. The censor board was modifying films so as to cater to the Fascist agenda. 7 Reaction against the control exercised by Mussolini is seen in the Italian neo-realist cinema. These filmmakers were more interested in narrating stories of the poor and the working class, their strife and challenges in the wake of a dwindling economy after the Second World War. The formalistic aspects such as the use of real-life non-professional actors and natural lighting was adding to the realism in neo-realist films. Thus, the cinematic apparatus and its narrative strategies contribute to “the agenda of writing the nation ” (Bhabha 2000a: 297). Either by being subservient to the state ideology or by resisting it, cinema as a cultural institution is in a state of constant contestation with the (nation-)state. The cinematic space of representation intersects with the

3 INTRODUCTION nation-space by disseminating an “image” of its people, their narratives and histories. The cultural and ideological signified of cinema operates within varied social, cultural and national identities making the nation a fluid, dis- jointed and heterogenous terrain, a space of contestation. This book studies Benegal’s negotiations with the idea of nation through his medium. Two central questions to be engaged with in this book are –1) What idea of India emerges in his cinema? and 2) How has he evolved the aesthetics of cinema while narrating the narratives of India? Cinema first appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century with the Lumière brothers inventing a movie camera.8 Born to parents who owned a small photographic studio and a factory producing photographic plates, they became the first filmmakers in the history of cinema. The first screening of their film was held at an industrial meeting before the first public screening was given on December 28, 1895. Soon they opened their own theatres to show films, known as Cinéma. In 1911, Riccitto Canudo9 referred to cinema as the “seventh art form”.10 In India, cinema was introduced during the British rule. The Lumière brothers showcased their films in Bombay (now Mumbai) at the Watson’s Hotel, also known as Esplanade Mansion, on July 7, 1896. 11 “These films were accompanied by an orchestra and attracted house-full shows. Men and women were seated separately in the audience and tickets were priced to suit all income groups” (Thoraval 2007: 1). These screenings were followed by James B. Stewart’s Vitagraph and Moto- photoshop created by Ted Hughes, which were held in theatres and also in open grounds (Thoraval 2007). Soon films were introduced in Madras (now Chennai) and Calcutta (now Kolkatta). Professor Stevenson staged a screening of their films in Calcutta. It was Stevenson’s camera that Hiralal Sen12 used to shoot a movie. Hiralal Sen made Dancing Scenes from the Flowers of Persia in 1898. The spirit of nationalism echoed in silent cinema when Save Dada made the Indian newsreel called The Return of Wrangler Paranjpye to India in 1901.13 Dadasaheb Phalke released the first full-length Indian feature film titled Raja Harishchandra14 in 1913 and first talkie film, Alam Ara , was made by Ardeshir Irani in 1931. After the sound was introduced in Indian cinema, Indian films not only became talkies but also Hindi cinema and Urdu cinema and regional cinemas of India began to appear. Introduc- ing sound to Indian cinema also imparted a distinct linguistic identity to Indian cinema. Indian cinema began to grow during the British rule in India. Developing on the ideas of Andrew Higson and Homi Bhabha, it is understood that a nation is produced by its cultural narratives. It has been argued by various scholars that cinema in India – especially Hindi cinema, by acquiring the status of pan-Indian cinema – has propagated images which have structured peoples’ imagination. The subject of the films made in the first three decades brought the cultural memory of the Indian masses to life on screen by making films on Hindu mythology, Puranic Tales, Hindu epics, history and tales rooted in Islamicate culture and Muslim history. A brief

4 INTRODUCTION list of films is as follows: Krishan Sudma (Vishnupant Divekar 1920), Sati Tulsi Vrinda (G.V. Sane 1920), Mahabharata (Rustamji Dhotiwala 1920), Ram Janma (G.V. Sane 1920), Shakuntala (Suchet Singh 1920), Bajirao Mas- tani (Bhalji Pendharkar, Nanubhai Desai 1925), Alladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (B.P. Mishra 1927), Bulbule Pristan (Fatma Begum 1926), Noojehan (J.J. Madan 1923), Hatim Tai (Prafful Ghosh 1929). Watching mythological, cultural and historical narratives on screen fostered identities in the colonial Indian masses and also facilitated the process of them imagining themselves as (sub-)nation groups before India’s independence and the Partition. In addition, catering to the nationalist imagination, cinema also “provided a kind of ‘natural protection’ against the foreign film domination of the Indian market before India gained independence in 1947” (Binford 1987: 145). Going back to mythology and legends determined to a very large extent the aesthetics of early Indian cinema. The influence of Indian classical drama, Parsi theatre and, “in certain respects, [. . .] Hollywood” ( Binford 1987 : 146) can be seen on Hindi cinema. The young film industry fascinated and attracted the Indian masses. Along with giving narratives of nationalistic imagination, social issues were also raised in mainstream Indian cinema. Consequently, from mythological and historical narratives, the imagination was placed in the contemporary lives of ordinary people. The voice against the social evils, rising since the nineteenth century through reformists like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and others, and the progressive thought in the twentieth century, was heard in the cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. Among various films made during that period, films such as Alam Ara (Ardeshir Irani 1931), Devdas (Barua 1935), Achhut Kanya (Franz Osten 1936), Aadmi (V. Shantaram 1939), Achhut (Chandulal Shah 1939), Aurat (Mehboob Khan 1940), Neecha Nagar (Chetan Anand 1946), Najma (Mehboob Khan 1943), Bandhan (N.R. Acharya 1940) and Aag (Raj Kapoor 1948) are narratives on caste, class and love. Hindi cinema of the 1950s captured the temper of the nation during the first decade after India’s independence. The spirit of nation-building influenced the form and content of films made in thatdecade. This includes Hamara Ghar (Nanubhai Bhatt 1950), Boot Polish (Prakash Arora 1954), Jagriti (Satyen Bose 1954), Do Aankhen Barah Haath (V. Shantaram 1957), Mother India (Mehboob Khan 1957), Naya Daur (B.R. Chopra 1957), and Dhool Ka Phool (Yash Chopra 1959), and famous songs 15 in some of these films set the tone of Hindi cinema, capturing the various issues being con- fronted by young India. The argument is that filmmakers like V. Shantaram, Chetan Anand, Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt laid down the foundation of using cinema to perform “a social function”.16 Immediately after independence, a binary between rural and urban India was discernible in Indian cinema. The division between rural and urban spaces was not merely for the sake of segregation of two kinds of spaces per se. Their representation served thematic and ideological purposes for different filmmakers. Both the

5 INTRODUCTION spaces became imagined spaces of one or the other facet of India. Rural India became the imaginary agrarian oases of tranquillity, peace, and calm. In the hands of nationalists, opines Ranjani Mazumdar, the rural space became a metaphor for “anti-colonial nationalism” central to the idyllic and ideal nation imagined by those who shared Gandhi’s vision of India (Majumdar xx). Contributing to the agenda of nation-building after independence, rural spaces in Indian cinema were the metaphor to project India as an agrarian country. Long shots showing billowing fields and running streams with mountains as the backdrop presented a romanticised image of Indian villages. It was a place of faith, trust, loyalty, commitment, innocence, and high moral values. Films like Naya Daur (B.R. Chopra 1957) and Mother India (Mehboob Khan 1957) portray villages as mythic spaces representing India as an agrarian nation. While some filmmakers were celebrating the young nation filled with the spirit of nation-building, there were three important filmmakers who were focusing on the challenges confronting young India. Their focus was on poverty, corruption, unemployment and social and political evils. Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor were raising social issues through their films which also reached the masses. Their films were mainly set in cities. In contrast, cities were mired in organised crime, unemployment and declining moral values. These films were equally well received by viewers. Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen, Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa and Raj Kapoor’s Awara are all-time classics of Hindi cinema. Their films, along with the films made by Meh- boob, V. Shantaram, Chetan Anand et al, can be “identified as forerunners to both the art cinema of India and the Hindi commercial cinema” (Hood 2009: 3). In the 1960s, mainstream Hindi cinema gradually began to drift towards new narrative patterns and plots were centred around romance, musical numbers and dance. While commenting on the success of popular Indian (read Hindi) cinema in giving national consciousness to the people of India, Jyotika Virdi says:

Hindi cinema is unique in using the family as the primary trope to negotiate caste, class, community, and gender divisions, making for complex but decipherable hieroglyphics through which it config- ures the nation and constructs a nationalist imagery. Deploying an affective mode of address, Hindi cinema is an emotional register and therefore a virtual teleprompter for reading the script called ‘nation’. (7)

But, over a period of time, the popular cinema got stuck with fixed narrative tropes and masala ingredients. However, the difference between mainstream cinema and parallel cinema can be understood at another level. Although there were films on social issues in mainstream cinema, narratives sometimes

6 INTRODUCTION failed to capture the complexities of the issue and offered simplistic solu- tions. This trend led to the artistic decline of mainstream cinema to the extent that it began to be criticised for lack of aesthetic value. This created a huge aesthetic and ideological vacuum in Indian cinema which was subse- quently filled by the New Indian Cinema. In the wake of cultural dominance of popular Hindi cinema and the nationalist imagery propagated by it, there was another kind of cinema that not only resisted the capital-centred culture of popular cinema but shied away from stereotypical images of India as represented in the popular cinema. This cinema associated with the period of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is associated with the Indian New Wave or Indian New Cinema. In the 1970s, filmmakers like Mani Kaul, Ritwik Ghatak, Pattabhi Rama Reddy, Rajinder Singh Bedi, M.S. Sathyu and Basu Chatterjee produced their films. These filmmakers did not make a formal “cohesive movement with a clearly articulated” (Binford 1987: 146) agenda, but they all focused on “the ills of Indian society: poverty, social injustice; the inherent violence of social structure” ( Bhaskar 2013 : 19). Binford opines that these filmmakers did not come together under a common political or ideological banner, but their undeclared ideological agreement and silent consensus on the function of film-art can be seen in their common rejection of cinema as a commercial enterprise. In parallel with mainstream Hindi cinema, Indian New Wave was presenting another image of India which was not meant for mass consumption. The main target audience/viewers of this cinema were educated and politically left-oriented citizens of India. These filmmakers engaged with a “progressive leftist perspective of social issues through realist representations” (Lutgendrof as cited by Devasundaram 2016: 19). They have signifi- cantly contributed to establishing Indian cinema as artistic cinema in India and overseas through their common understanding of form, aesthetics and function of cinema in Indian society. Many of these filmmakers were influenced by the aesthetics of Italian neo-realism and French New Wave. Instead of presenting the romanticised image of (rural) India, the glorification of the golden past of the country, highly sexualised female bodies, Indian New Wave filmmakers were focusing on the challenges facing young India after independence. Their narratives were not structured along the lines of popular cinema. They exploited the communicative potential of cinema and shied away from a stereotypical portrayal of gender roles in their films. It is rather the narratives of the oppressed and marginalised which are portrayed. These films negotiated with Indian modernity and contemplated on social change through the medium of cinema. They have not exploited cinema to propagate the populist imagination of India; rather, from their respective ideological positions, their narratives are enunciated to question and critique India as a nation-state and present an alternative image of India. The purpose here is not to draw sharp binary between art cinema and commercial cinema, as that would be essentialist and reductive in nature. 17 Both the cinemas

7 INTRODUCTION articulated narratives of India within their own ideological frames and aesthetics. Indian cinema in its totality is a cultural institution in which nation is narrated and its images are disseminated vacillating in ideologies and “slid- ing from one enunciatory position to another” (Bhabha 2000a: 298). Before the emergence of this wave in the 1970s, it was in the 1950s and 1960s that Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak had prepared the ground for the rise of Indian New Wave. Ray made his famous Apu trilogy in the 1950s; Mrinal Sen (whose Bhuvan Shome made in 1969 is often credited with starting the movement of parallel cinema in India) made his first film, Raat Bhore, in 1955; and Ritwik Ghatak made Ajantrik in 1958. Ritwik Ghatak is still remembered for the films he made in the 1960s such as Meghe Dhake Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961) and Subarnarekha (1962). In the 1950s, he moved to the Film and Television Institute of India (F.T.I.I.), Pune, where he taught. Two of his famous students were Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, two important names of Indian New Wave. There were various factors responsible for the emergence of this movement in India. Through international film festivals organised in Calcutta (now Kolkata), the Indian audience was exposed to the best of European cinema, which laid the foundation for realist aesthetics in Indian cinema. There were about 150 film societies in India by the 1970s. Members of these societies could watch the best of cinema produced in Poland, Italy, Hungry, Russia, France and Japan. 18 In 1971, the Indian government, due to certain diplomatic and political reasons, did not renew the five-year contract for the importation of Hollywood films (Prasad 1998: 190). The exposure that Indian audiences achieved helped to change the “tastes” of Indian audiences as they watched aesthetically different cinema from that being produced in India itself. In addition to the various film societies established since 1943 in Bombay and Satyajit Ray’s film society established in Calcutta in 1947, the Film Training Institute of India was established in Pune in 1961. Its purpose was to train the young talent of India in various departments of filmmaking including direction and acting which started introducing Indian audiences to the best in world cinema. Realising its responsibility towards supporting national cinema, the Government of India established the Film Finance Corporation in 1960 with the objective of giving loans to filmmakers who did not want to make commercial films. Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome , made in 1969 and funded by the Film Finance Corporation (F.F.C.), was a successful film. In the same year, Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti and Basu Chatterjee’s Sara Akash were also made. It was therefore 1969 which marked the beginning of the New Wave in India when three films “considered the emblematic triad of the budding Indian ‘New Wave’” ( Thoraval 2007 : 143) were made. The foundation for the policy was laid down in 1964 by Indira Gandhi as the Minister of Information and Broadcasting. Aruna Vasudev opines that even though the government policies were giving loans to filmmakers like Satya- jit Ray, who wanted to work outside the institution of commercial cinema,

8 INTRODUCTION such initiatives could not result in an aesthetic revolution in India. “The conditions for such a momentum emerged in the late sixties, mainly in the form of small, politicized audience, the arrival of new directors and actors from the Film Institute, and the rise of re-invigorated Congress socialism” ( Prasad 1998 : 188). Another important factor and an agreeable coincidence was the availability of foreign film theatres. The industry had been exerting pressure and demanding that foreign film theatres should be made available for screenings of Indian films. Consequently, the ground was almost set by the early 1970s for the new cinema to flourish. In addition to the above-mentioned factors, the political atmosphere of the country in the early 1970s also prepared Indian audiences, which had been exposed to world cinema as well as the cinema of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak, to accept the Indian New Wave. The emergence of Naxalism 19 and the rising voice of the Dalit in the early 1970s prepared Indian audiences to appreciate cinema which served a strong ideological function and worked towards social change. “The excitement that Satyajit Ray had created in 1956 had spread far and wide. The rise of Benegal had its symbolic meaning. Dissent had reached firm commercial footing” (Bar- nouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 267). The practitioners of the Indian New Wave looked away from melodramatic narrative style and representation of the female body for male consumption in cinema and focused on the social and political issues of the country. Whether these films were set in rural India or in urban India, the intention of the filmmaker was to represent the social reality of India through cinema. The “developmental aesthetics” 20 of the New Wave in India has blended politics with aesthetics without much melodrama or even propaganda. Unlike mainstream cinema, which main- tains the status quo, filmmakers of the New Wave believed in disturbing the silence, questioning the existing social and political order, and raising questions about the nation by giving narratives about the Dalit, women and other marginalised groups of India. In the late 1960s and 1970s, it became a wave and earned a niche for itself, which is known by various names such as the aforementioned Indian New Wave, Parallel Cinema or Alternate Cinema or New Cinema. Each term signifies one or other aspect of the movement. This school of cinema is the “mainspring of a renewal of aesthetics and vital- ity of themes in Indian cinema” ( Thoraval 2007 : 138). Alternate cinema signifies two critical phenomena. The first is that this school of cinema is an alternate to Hindi mainstream cinema which has been generally understood to mean popular “Indian” cinema. The point is that the aesthetics of this cinema give the audience of India an alternative image of India in regional languages. Although Hindi commercial cinema is one of the largest film industries in the world, qualifying Hindi cinema as pan-Indian cinema in such a country, with its vast linguistic and cultural diversity, is problematic. As it was in world cinema, so in the history of “Indian cinema” too, when Indian cinema graduated from the silent era to that of the talkies,

9 INTRODUCTION the question of the language of cinema became a crucial point. The introduction of “talkies” “has to divide nation from nations as well as conquer individual hearts,” says Walter Murch in the Foreword of Michel Chion’s book titled Audio-Vision . The use of language (verbal language) changed the nature of cinema. From a purely visual medium, it became an audio- visual medium. The first and foremost impact of the use of verbal language through sound in cinema was that people started perceiving the image of cinema through the language used in the film. In the wake of the linguistic diversity of India, the choice of language became a highly critical issue. The use of Hindi language further facilitated imagining Hindi as the national language. In the history of India, misconstrued polarisation and communali- sation of languages had already resulted in simplistic connections between language and religious communities. Even though throughout the 1960s, the early years of “Indian” cinema, both Hindi and Urdu films were made (as their scripts were also written in Urdu) and there is a good number of films showing the Islamicate culture in mainstream cinema, Hindi attained centre stage status in the popular imagination. In such a context, alternate cinema(s) opened up in India to various regional languages of India. Prac- titioners of this cinematic movement belonged to different regions of India, which resulted in the growth of “Indian” cinema in regional languages. Buddhadeb Dasgupta and Goutam Ghose were from Bengal; Addor Gopal- akrishnan, G. Aravindan and John Abraham were from Kerala; M.S. Sathyu, Girish Karnad and B.V. Karanth were from Karnaka; B. Mahendra and K. Hariharan were from Andhra Pradesh. This school of cinema resulted in the birth of another stream of films in India in the respective regional language of the filmmaker. Since these filmmakers were more interested in portray- ing social issues specific to their regions or states, the use of the regional language was a critical, judicious decision on their part, designed to reflect the local/regional social reality through the medium of film. The second con- notation of “alternate” cinema is rooted in the simplistic binary view of crass mainstream commercial Hindi cinema in contrast to artistic cinema made in regional languages. As the nature of mainstream cinema was changing, song and dance were no longer serving a function in the narrative as they had in the preceding decade. Song contributed principally in the promotion of regional locations. The beauty and landscape of tourist locations such as Kashmir and Darjeeling in India and overseas cities such as Paris and Tokyo were used as spectacle rather than for exploration of those locations’ social reality.21 Song used to be part of the narrative in the films of Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor (the forerunners of art cinema of India, as described by Hood) in the 1950s, which “appealed to the popular tastes and values, yet at the same time were intelligent in substance and representation” (Hood 2009: 3). The alternative Indian cinema, “whose films have a much greater respect for the intelligence of an audience and whose directors have a more widely developed aesthetic sense” (Hood 2009: 4), reflects a strong bias

10 INTRODUCTION against the commercial Hindi cinema. Yves Thoraval is of the opinion that in the commercial Hindi cinema of the 1960s and 1970s there is “total absence of ‘roots’- not to speak of aesthetic vacuum” (Thoraval 2007: 138), which also resulted in the formation of the binary views of commercial and artistic cinema in people’s and film scholars’ imaginations. He is of the opinion that it was because of the lack of aesthetic substance in commercial cinema that Girish Karnad and M.S. Sathyu decided to return to Karnatka. They might otherwise have had a brilliant career in Bombay (now Mumbai). Parallel Cinema, on the other hand, does not suggest a sharp binary view between mainstream cinema and “artistic” cinema. It rather suggests a simultaneous existence of two different schools of filmmaking, without judging one against the other. Parallel cinema signifies a school of filmmaking focused on social issues with different aesthetic treatments but existing in parallel to mainstream cinema. If commercial cinema was thriving on film stars, big budgets, box office success and masala ingredients; the other school of filmmaking existing alongside it offered people another cinematic experience. Most of the films of parallel cinema were sponsored by the National Film Development Corporation (N.F.D.C.). Due to state intervention and support, the filmmakers did not have to raise funds from private sources which saved them from the pressures of making commercially successful films. They had the freedom to express their artistic vision through cinema. This kind of cinema in the 1970s existed in parallel to mainstream cinema, which was, at that time, dominated by the stardom of Amitabh Bachchan. The third important title used for the movement is Indian New Wave. The term is rooted in the New Wave movement in world cinema. 22 The term was used by filmmakers and film theorists in the 1950s and cinephiles who were contributing to Cahier du Cinéma23 . They wanted to move away from the influence of literature and the dominance of verbal language in cinema. Exploring creative potentialities of cinema, filmmakers of the New Wave experimented with the form and language of cinema. Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol were the famous names associated with the magazine and the movement. Cinema for these filmmakers was a medium to express the individuality of the filmmaker and their ideas, however vague or abstract they may be. This movement contributed to ascribing authorship to films, which is known as Auteur Theory. French New Wave, as a movement of cinema, was influenced by Italian neo-realism. Both cinematic movements were major influences on Indian New Cinema or Indian New Wave. The aesthetics of these films were not purely formalistic. This cinema targeted the “educated, middle-class, urban viewership. The parallel wave was decidedly not monolithic and was textured with varying gradations” (Sundaram 2010: 19). By moving away from the narrative patterns of mainstream cinema, these filmmakers exploited the symbiotic relationship between form and content, aesthetics and politics, and art and ideology to

11 INTRODUCTION its utmost. These filmmakers did not believe in the Kantian cult of “purposiveness without purpose”; rather their cinema was serving a purpose. The last scene of Benegal’s Ankur in which a boy picks up a stone and throws it at the window of the feudal lord’s house became a metaphor of protest and revolution. The mobilisation of women in Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala (1987) is inspiring women from all levels of society to stand together against the sexual exploitation of women in a male-dominated society. Not all filmmakers were making overtly political statements via their films. M.S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (1973) raised the question of “home” for the Muslim in post-independence India, who has witnessed Hindu-Muslim riots at the time of the Partition. P. Reddy’s Samskara (1970), an adaptation of U.R. Ananthmurthy’s novel, is a part of the new cinema. The “New Wave films were extremely diverse, and ranged from realist portrayals of contemporary Indian reality, especially the reality of small town and village to experimental and modernist work that foregrounded abstraction and stylization” (Bhas- kar 2013: 20). Indian New Wave gave the audience an alternative “image” of India through aesthetically and ideologically charged cinema. Through its counter narratives of nation, Indian New Wave continually challenged the dominating imagination of mainstream cinema to “disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities” (Bhabha 2000a: 300). The ideological moorings and aesthetic conceptualisation of these filmmakers gave alternative narratives of the nation, thus highlighting the need to understand the relationship between aesthetics and ideology.

II The term ‘aesthetics’ was coined by Alexander Baumgarten in the eighteenth century and “means more precisely the science of sensation or feeling” (Hegel 2004: 3), but the discourse of art did not start with Baumgarten. Philosophi- cal questions about art and life, through their ideas about art and the function they ascribed to art, the realm of aesthetics also includes within its horizons the debate between “things and thoughts, sensation and ideas, that which is bound up with our creaturely life as opposed to that which conducts some shadowy existence in the recesses of the mind” (Eagleton 1990: 13). In the journey of the aesthetic from being “autonomous” serving “purpose without purposiveness” in Kantian terms to Adorno’s “social function” and becoming a commodity in a post-liberalisation consumerist society, the definition of aesthetics has undergone various stages and crossed numerous milestones. Benegal began his career with realism and has reinvented his art in the age of liberalisation. Throughout his career, his cinema has been serving a social function even while he was experimenting with different modes of storytelling, which makes it relevant to discuss the debate between Lukács and Brecht around realism.

12 INTRODUCTION

Realism as a movement in art emerged in the nineteenth century. Realism in the nineteenth century laid more emphasis on “the ‘real’ world as against the characteristic presentation of the world in romance and myth” (Williams 1978: 2) with an emphasis against theatricality and more emphasis on man and the social world. In France, especially in painting, realism meant rejection of romanticism. If the French Revolution of 1789 is one of the important factors that gave birth to Romanticism in Europe, the Revolution of 1848 did so for Realism. As an aesthetic movement, it strongly rejected the portrayal of heightened emotionalism in art, and represented contemporary situations focusing on people and their circumstances. Changes in the social structure, problems of different classes with an emphasis on the working class and honest portrayals of people’s situations were the main tenets of the art movement. From Gustav Courbet’s or Jean-François’s paintings to novels and drama, realism manifested itself in different art forms in the nineteenth century. Realism in paintings and literature took art away from the domain of fantasy and romance. The realist work portrays the ordinary and the everyday experiences of people. It focuses more on the day-to-day lifestyle and challenges of the working class, peasantry and the poor. As proposed by the famous painter Gustave Courbet, realism propounds objectivity. In the twentieth century, realism “exhibits a protean stylistic and ideological approach” ( Malpas 1997 : 7) as in the U.S.S.R. it manifests itself as “socialist realism”. 24 A much-discussed and debated category, realism in cinema is generally understood in relation to a particular style of filmmaking mastered by Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, de Sicca, and Roberto Rossellini. Use of deep-focus, long shots, non-theatrical styles of acting and composition, using camera instead of editing to follow the action are some of its important features. Besides, Italian neo-realists preferred to use real-life actors over professional actors to add authenticity. The use of natural light over artificial lighting was another important aspect of the movement. French New Wave filmmakers, who were influenced by Italian neo-realism, intended to explore potentialities of cinema as a medium to take cinema away from the influence of literature. Realism in cinema has been theorised through the ontological study of the photographic image too. Bazin’s understanding was that the photographic image “puts us directly into the presence of the object” (Thomson- Jones 2008: 31). The cinematic image may not be suffering from what Bazin calls the “mummy complex” (Bazin 1999: 195)25 which, according to Bazin, painting and photography suffers from. Technology freed painting from the burden of creating likeness of reality. The movement flourished in France in the 1950s. Most of the ideas about the aesthetics of the movement were expressed by filmmakers and theorists in the form of their contributions to cahiers du cinema. Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol were among the main exponents of the movement. These filmmakers made films on their immediate social and political themes while experimenting

13 INTRODUCTION with visual compositions, editing, long shots and other aspects of film language. Having said that, it is important to understand that merely by vir- tue of recording real objects and actors, cinema does not become realistic. Realism in cinema cannot be reduced only to its form, which becomes the case of “aesthetic realism”. MacCabe, while discussing realism, is aware of the challenges while discussing realism cinema as the “notion of the real is, however, I wish to suggest, a notion which I tied to a particular type of literary production – the nineteenth-century realist novel” (MacCabe 1985: 34), in which MacCabe finds a hierarchy of knowledge. Realism is not understood as linear or a literal representation of reality, but in terms of hierarchy between discourse of the text and an empirical truth, stated with the help of a meta-language.26 “That narrative of events – the knowledge which the film provides of how things really are – is the metalanguage in which we talk of the various characteristics in the film” ( MacCabe 1985 : 38). Madhav Prasad discusses two modes of realism in cinema – namely, Ital- ian neo-realism, which he calls nationalist realism and Hollywood realism, which according to Prasad, “arises in the context of a desacralized social order where the free individual is the elementary unit” (Prasad 2010: 62). He places the realism of Indian New Wave in the first category. Using the ideas of MacCabe, Madhav Prasad, however, problematises the narrow definition of realism with one particular style of filmmaking. “Every representation of reality is not a realist representation. Realism is thus not so much a matter of the object of representation but a mode of textual organization of knowledge, a hierarchical layering of discourses” (Prasad 2010: 58). Realism in cinema is neither “simple objectivism” (Aitken 2017: 7), nor is it a mechanical reproduction of reality with the help of a tool. In Lukács’s views, realism in cinema is not constituted by showing the real physical world. The truth- to-nature , according to him, is not realism in cinema. 27 Realism in cinema is not achieved just by showing the contemporary setting or by showing nature coming alive. According to him, realism is about representing the historical situation in which narratives are rooted. In the aesthetics of any art form all fissures of the historical moment are drawn into it. Art becomes a medium to capture the ideologies and conflicts prevailing in the historical moment, not to disguise them. 28 In the trio of man-history-art, the historical truth is not garbed by aestheticisation; rather art represents man’s historical truth of man’s situation and struggle. Lukácsian ideas lay down the foundation of the relationship between form and content of any art form with reference to realism. The Brecht-Lukács debate is central in understanding the nature and scope of realism in general and also in cinema. Brecht, on the other hand, understands the relationship between form (of an art) and realism in a different way. Bertolt Brecht, the renowned playwright, wrote under the influence of Marxism. Contrary to “aesthetic realism”, the “philosophic realism” of Brecht was based on ideas of how society and its people work. For Brecht,

14 INTRODUCTION realism is rooted in being true to one’s social position. It uncovers complex social functions and exposes the point of view of the dominant classes in society. 29 The basis of realism is found not in conforming to the form of realistic representation, but in “historical meaningfulness” within a Marxian frame. To quote Dario Villanueva, Bertolt Brecht’s

originality within the Marxian theory genetic realism consists precisely in what makes him disagree with Lukács: the question of form. The German playwright blames the Hungarian philosopher for his basic lack of interest in the purely artistic aspects of realistic creation, excepting the occasions on which Lukács wants to impose the most conventional and traditional literary forms upon it, at the expense of innovative and experimental one. [. . .] In the wake of the debate around the expressionism of 1938, Brecht vehemently opposes Lukács’s normative and aesthetically conservative rigidity (1997: 34–35).

The question of realism has dominated the early years of film theory and continues to assert itself in the following years “because of the constant development of technologies of mediation which also imply and indicate the mediated aspect of social reality” (Koutsourakis 2017: 123). Ian Aitken distinguishes between naïve realist theories, representational realist theory, conceptual idealism and ontological idealism. 30 Despite their differences, different approaches of realism agree that “both representational realism and conceptual idealism stress that the world exists (both are therefore forms of ontological realism) but cannot be considered independently of any particular representation of it” (Aitken 2017: 8). Through the bond established between the artist and reader/viewer, realism, thus, makes understanding of social reality possible. In the trilectics of reality, representation and aesthetics, realism ceases to be a matter of form or a linear representation of reality. It is a constant negotiation between social reality and the realm of aesthetics. Ian Aitken’s understanding of realism echoes the debate between Lukács and Brecht. Koutsourakis contributes to the theory of realism, as debated by Lukács and Brecht, by citing three different aspects of realism. To quote:

Furthermore, both considered realism as a practice which is: 1. Inex- tricably linked with the dialectical method; 2. In direct opposition to naturalism and psychologically defined characters; 3. and against the orthodoxy of socialist realism. Another crucial matter to point out is that their interpretation of realism predicated on Friedrich Engles’ definition of realism as ‘the reproduction of typical people under typical circumstances.’ (124)

15 INTRODUCTION

Both Lukács and Brecht disapproved of Naturalism but had different views on and understandings of realism in relation to its form of representation. To both the theorists, realism was not a matter of direct, or photographic representation of reality. Understanding realism merely as “the visible, verifi- able details of a reality” ( Tucker 2011 : 3) would be called naïve or simplistic realism. Realism enters into a dialectical relationship with social reality. The dialectical understanding of realism rests on the idea that it should represent social reality with changeability, but without the orthodoxy of socialist realism, which rubs shoulders with being propagandist, as opined by Angelo Koutsourakis. Realism, instead of either becoming the mouthpiece of political ideology or unlike naïve realism, engages with social reality with its complexity. Individuals or characters in narratives negotiate with their circumstances and through their struggle, the possibility of social change is explored. Brecht is more open and free of all rigid structures while defining realism. In his understanding, realism should also resist the habitual understanding of social reality. By moving away from the form of classical realism and experimenting with form, according to Brecht, a work does not cease to be realist as long as it critically engages with social reality. The Brechtian technique of aesthetic distancing, therefore, does not make his work less realist. Formalistic experimentation then explores various artistic possibili- ties and enriches realism. Brecht disagreed with Lukács on his disapproval of modernism as formalism.31 The “purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived not as they are known. The technique is to make objects unfamiliar” (Shklovsky 1917: 2). Shklovsky’s defamiliarisation and Brechtian understanding of realism and form then stand closer to each other. By disturbing the conditioned and automatised perception even at the level of sensation, the artist tries to bring readers’/viewers’ attention to the social reality as perceived by the artist. The technique becomes a handy device to shake people out of their complacency to bring their attention to the issue. It is a “means by which we overcome appearances and arrive at deeper understanding of reality” (Ginzburg 2001: 18). Defamilia- risation, therefore, is not merely a formalistic tool or device of construction of art. It changes human perception of reality by making the perception of art complex. Defamiliarisation is the way the art helps us see the familiar or automatised reality afresh. The crux of the argument is that realism cannot be understood only as a mode of representation. Realism is critical engagement with the “historical moment” (Lukács); realism lies in the “historical thinking” (Koutsourakis) to understand “how things really are” (MacCabe). It is an attribute of the dialectical relationship between art and reality, not merely an attribute of form or mode of representation. Realism is more about engagement with the historical reality of the society through art than its form of representation. In Ginzberg’s understanding, Shklovsky’s ideas about defamiliarisation and Brechtian understanding of formalism do not divest any art form of realism, even if the modes of classical realism are

16 INTRODUCTION not followed in the given work of art. The intention is not to say that all forms of expression can be brought under the umbrella of realism, collaps- ing aesthetic, ideological and formalistic difference between them, but it is to say that realism is more about engaging with the reality of the times than adhering to conventions of expression. The filmmakers of Indian New Wave, by adopting realist modes of narration marked with accentuated absence of melodrama, defamiliarised automated perceptions of audience(s) who became conditioned to a set mode of storytelling in cinema. In Shklovsky’s terms, the purpose of cinematic image is to create “a vision of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it [. . .] the purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception” (Shklovsky 1917: 5–6). The artistic vision and de-automatised perception not only offer an ontologically different cinematic image, but also an ideologically different understanding of reality.

III Shyam Benegal is a name associated with Indian New Wave or New Cin- ema32 and also with the phase of Hindi cinema in which the distinction between parallel and mainstream Bollywood cinema is becoming blurred in the post-liberalisation India. During the 1970s when Indian New Wave was at its peak, Benegal’s films were made in the mode of classical realism. The socio-historical context in which he made his early films was that of realism fulfilling the state agenda of welfare state based on progressive ideas. He gave the Indian audience narratives of the marginalised and oppressed sections of Indian society. The call of the times was to bring the marginalised sections into the mainstream. To achieve this, there was a strong critique of Indian society structured on class, caste and gender principles. His early films echo the battle cries of the Peasants’ Revolt in Andhra and the White Revolution in Gujarat 33 . These narratives are rooted in the phase of turmoil that took place in Indian society in order to achieve progressive goals. In the 1980s and 1990s, even while making films about rural and political subjects, Benegal had started experimenting with narrative techniques. He used self- reflexive, non-linear narrative strategies, but he continued to engage with social reality to convey the narratives of India at that time. Films made during this period, from a non-normative ideological position, question the emerging idea of nation in the wake of industrialisation, privatisation and the emergence of right-wing nationalism in the late 1980s. After 2000, there is a shift in his cinema in terms of aesthetics. Effects of liberalisation can be seen in cultural, social and political spheres in India, to which Benegal as an artist responded. The economic policies of free trade and open markets changed the social and cultural matrix of Indian society. Under the effects of liberalisation, India was “undergoing a tumultu- ous neoliberal restructuring characterized by a commitment to consumer

17 INTRODUCTION capitalism, foreign multinational investments and an inexorable vicissitude in the Indian free market economy” (Devasundaram 2016: 2). A liberal economy increased the paying capacity of the middle class and upward mobility of the lower middle classes, which is linked with the rise in consumerism in India. Similar changes can be seen in Indian cinema as well. A new economy ushered in mega-budget films, which catered to the diaspora population living abroad.34 During this era, multiplexes changed the basic nature of film- viewing experiences in cinema halls. Along with multi-crore (one crore equals 10 million. Multi-crore is a term referring to mega-budget films in India) mega-budget films, Indian cinema has witnessed the emergence of “a new wave of independent cinema” (Devasundaram 2016: 1), the low-budget, off- beat cinema, since 2010. Devasundaram’s usage of “New Wave Indie discourses” (Devasundaram 2016: 5) is likely to create confusion between the Indian New Wave of the 1970s, and new cinema emerging in the twenty-first century. Indian New Wave cinemas of the 1970s was rooted in the aesthetic movement and shared an aesthetic bond with Italian neo-realism and the New Wave. Cinema emerging after India adopted an economic policy of liberalisation is a different category, known as independent cinema. Rooted in a different sociological context and with new aesthetics, these films blurred the boundaries between parallel and commercial cinema. There is no doubt that there is now another new wave in Indian cinema, but a distinction between the earlier “New Wave” and the new wave of independent cinema in the post-liberalisation era should be borne in mind while discussing these two forms of cinema. There are many people including Ashvin I. Devasund Aram and Anuradha D. Nidham who have studied the emergence of new cinema after 2010. 35 Instead of calling them “New Wave Indies” (writing N and W in capitals), I propose to call this new wave of indies “New (Middle) Cinema” with aesthetics of liminality, which I shall discuss in detail in the final chapter. “New (Middle) Cinema” signifies low-budget, off-beat cinema engaging with social reality made in the new socio-political context. My reasons for using this term are that firstly, it invokes the middle cinema of the 1980s (Guner- atne 2003; Devasundaram 2016), which also followed the middle path between the hard-core realism of the 1970s and entertainment, as opined by Devasundaram. Secondly, the term also signifies the middle path followed by modern filmmakers. These films give larger audiences a gripping entertaining narrative and also address social issues across different layers of society. Its ideological engagement with social and political issues may be different from that of Indian New Wave, but it does create a space in contemporary times which resist the hegemony of mega-budget Bollywood films. Its sociological, ideological and aesthetic function is new, it exists parallel to mainstream Bol- lywood cinema and also attracts a middle-class audience. The “New (Middle) Cinema” has new aesthetics, a new approach towards the language of cinema and deals with the new social reality in the post-liberalisation era. Hence my suggestion to call it “New (Middle) Cinema”.

18 INTRODUCTION

Along with Benegal, there were other filmmakers who have made new low-budget cinema which can also be placed in this category. These include Amu (Shonali Bose 2005), Khosla Ka Ghosla (Dibakar Bannerjee 2006) and A Wednesday (Neeraj Pandy 2008). My argument is that Benegal can be seen as the pioneer of the trend. He belongs to the category of those filmmakers such as Govind Nihalani, Ketan Mehta, Sudhir Mishra, 36 and Kumar Shahani,37 who started their careers during the peak of the Indian New Wave and have continued to make films even after the decline of the movement. With his films like Hari-Bhari (2000 ), Zubeidaa (2001 ), Wel- come to Sajjanpur (2008) and Well Done Abba (2009), Benegal paved the way for young filmmakers by reinventing cinema in the changing economic, cultural and political context. Zubeidaa presented Karishma Kapoor, a star of mainstream cinema, in the lead role and A.R. Rahman is credited with the film’s music.38 Two more Benegal films were comedies satirising the failure of the Nehruvian welfare state in post-liberalisation India from the socio-spatial dynamics of mofussil (semi-urban areas) towns. The liminality of these spaces corresponds to the liminality of aesthetics in his new cinema. Politically hard-hitting films with the scalding realism of the 1970s have been replaced with comedies criticising an India emerging from the effects of liberalisation. If the early cinema of the 1970s and 1980s gave open resistance to the hegemony of mainstream commercial cinema, these films subvert the domination of a capitalist consumerist society by giving the post-liberalisation audience films they can enjoy. By means of his newly invented cinema, Benegal was among those filmmakers who made cinema more acceptable among audiences whilst at the same time, engaging with social issues. Through new aesthetics, these films engaged with issues of social and political importance. There is liminality in the space of representation as well as the representation of space.39 But in both categories of cinema, Benegal’s historical thinking through the medium of films is evident. Benegal has been articulating narratives of those people who were marginalised on the basis of caste, gender and religious identities. If the “medium is the message” 40 the changing aesthetics of Benegal’s cinema is an equally potent signifier to understanding the changing social and political dynamics of his cinema. His realist cinema41 of the 1970s has been understood as nationalist realism (Prasad 2010). The question that demands reflection and critical attention is what kind of relationship between film narratives, state ideology and citizen can be made with reference to films made after 1990? Is Benegal continuing with “developmental aesthetics” in the new socio- political context? Or is he inventing his aesthetics afresh42 to critique new ideas of an India emerging in the wake of economic policies of liberalisation and a changing political atmosphere of the country in the 1990s. Through both kinds of cinema, he has given alternative narratives of the nation and also alternative images of India. Earlier, it was through the realist aesthetics of New Wave that he had presented the marginalised India. In his latest

19 INTRODUCTION films made after 2005, it is through the aesthetics of liminality that he has provided narratives of a less-explored India. There have been many studies about mainstream Hindi cinema and Bol- lywood cinema in the 2000s and 2010s by various film scholars. Some of the important works have been produced by Ravi Vasudevan, Ira Bhaskar, Ran- jani Mazumdar, Jyotika Virdi, Rachel Dwyer and Rajinder Dudrah, who have studied mainstream Hindi cinema from a variety of vantage points. Madhav Prasad has produced a seminal work on the ideology of Hindi cinema to better understand its many complexions. Compared to mainstream Hindi cinema, Hindi New Wave cinema is still a less-explored area. No doubt Yves Thoraval and Hood have surveyed Indian New Wave cinema(s) produced in the various languages of India, including Hindi, but their focus is on the entire cultural institution of New Wave cinema(s), covering all major exponents of the movement. There are books on the art of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Buddadeb Dasgupta and other Bengali filmmakers which, given Hindi filmmakers of Indian New Wave cinema have tended to be ignored, creates a gap in film studies in India so far as Hindi New Wave is concerned. This book, however, focuses on an important auteur of Hindi parallel cinema, namely Shyam Benegal. His work has already been the subject of study by Sangeeta Datta and Anuradha D. Needham. Sangeeta Datta’s research focuses on Benegal’s documentaries and TV serials (excluding his latest films made after 2005), and Anuradha D. Needham studies the question of gender and nation in her book. And yet, there would be no disagreement with the statement that a filmmaker such as Benegal invites and deserves more critical attention than he has received. Compared to the amount of work produced on the subject of understanding nation from mainstream Hindi cinema, the issue of nation from Hindi New Wave is still a less-explored area. This book is a contribution to closing the gap by focusing solely on the films of Benegal in their entirety in order to understand the complexities of India as a nation in post-colonial times. Shyam Benegal was born on December 14, 1934 in Tirumulgherry, the Hyderabad State of the British India at that time and Andhra Pradesh of independent India. His familial environment introduced him to cameras and filmmaking. When he was young, he was gifted a camera by his father, Srid- har B. Benegal. Guru Dutt, the eminent director of Hindi films, was one of Shyam’s uncles. His paternal grandmother and Dutt’s maternal grandmother were cousins, both nominally Konkani-speaking from a family of Chitrapur Saraswat. With the camera gifted by his father, Benegal produced his first film. He was awarded an M.A. in Economics from Nizam College, Hyder- abad. It was while studying at this college that he founded the Hyderabad Film Society. The first film he screened there was Pather Panchali by Satya- jit Ray. His adoration and appreciation for Satyajit Ray culminated in the form of a documentary on him. The prolific filmmaker has, since then, made approximately 45 documentaries and more than 900 ad films (commercials),

20 INTRODUCTION

TV serials and feature films. Benegal’s films have won the National Film Awards, Filmfare awards and appreciation from critics. His films have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the Moscow International Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival. In addition, Benegal was awarded the Homi Bhabha Fellowship, the Padma Shree in 1976 and the Padma Bhushan in 1991. This book is a study of Benegal’s feature films. During his career of more than 40 years, he has experimented with various narrative strategies and aesthetics of his cinema. He has witnessed India experiencing various cultural, social and political changes. In the 1970s, India was undergoing a social and political change: India as a nation-state was confronting many questions and challenges. Naxalism was a burning issue; the Dalit movement was rising; Indian feminism was gaining momentum and politically, India witnessed the Emergency in 1975, which resulted in many dramatic developments in the political arena. A decade later in the late 1980s, Indian democracy witnessed a state of crisis with democracy reduced to a game of numbers with much party switching taking place. The birth of coalition governments resulted in political instability. Rajiv Gandhi’s interference in the Shah Bano case, his opening of the lock of the controversial Ram Temple, the issue of construct- ing a grand temple at Ayodhya, along with the broadcast of Ramayana, Mahabharata and Buniyad – TV serials on Hindu mythology and the Parti- tion which revived the memory of that period of communal violence and migration– combined to inflate the sails of Hindutava ideology. 43 In 1991, India also adopted the economic policy of liberalisation, which led to a number of changes in India’s social matrix. Rising Hindutava ideology, free trade economic policy and communal riots in Bombay, raised new questions, including that of Muslims in an India as a nation-state. From state socialism to post-liberalisation India, Benegal’s cinema narrates the complex and changing reality of India through its myriad images. Benegal’s cinema reflects India’s journey. Since the late 1970s, he has been engaging with the social, political and cultural reality of India through aesthetics which moved between different shades of realism, which resonates with Brecht’s understanding of realism (historical meaning) and form. Bene- gal has experimented with different narrative strategies; explored aesthetics of cinema and has not compromised with the basic attribute of his art, namely to serve a social function. From early political realism to realistic comedies in his later films, Benegal has constantly been critically looking at India from various angles. Despite the fact that most of his films were not sponsored by N.F.D.C., his art has not been subservient to market forces, or to the cult of “art for art’s sake”. His cinema can best be understood in relation to the society it represents. His films were not a part of mainstream commercial Hindi cinema, yet most of his films have reached that audience (Shyam Benegal in a personal conversation on November 12, 2018) and he has succeeded in raising social and political issues through his art. By

21 INTRODUCTION challenging the hegemony of mainstream popular cinema, his alternative style of filmmaking also makes cinema as a cultural space more democratic and open in nature. As a filmmaker, he has contributed to Indian cinema by imparting socially relevant cinema. Whilst he did talk about social change, the change was principally conceived within the frames of democracy. Focus- ing only on the achievements of a nation and overlooking its failings would only result in distortions (André Béteille 2006 ). In order to understand India as a nation through cinematic narratives, it is crucial to look at all the different narratives in all kinds of cinemas. The dominance of mainstream popular cinema has propagated certain images of India. Its influence can be seen in the prominence of Bollywood in film studies in India and also abroad. In order to have a larger and more inclusive understanding of India through cinema, it is important to study how India has been perceived, imagined and represented by other schools of cinema. This book will contribute to this understanding. Benegal has tended to reveal the squalors of contemporary India. His cinema is not monolithic. His wide lens with a deep focus has captured the challenges India has faced since independence, August 15 1947. He has explored the different facets of India and explored the multiple dimensions of film aesthetics. In his multidimensional imagery rests myriad realities of India in changing times. Instead of presenting a romanticised image of the nation, he has looked at India as a nation from the point of view of the minorities, downtrodden and the under-privileged. The cultural and historical significance of his work lies in the fact that through his oeuvre one can also peep into issues troubling India at different periods of time. His films are set in villages, cities as well as mofussil towns. His cinema destabilises the stereotype propagated by mainstream commercial cinema. The films set in villages do not offer a romanticised image of rural India; 44 and cities in his films are not represented as spaces for new opportunities, liberal ideas or modernity. Villages are spaces of caste oppression, sexual exploitation and of feudal values; but villages are also becoming spaces of resistance, identity assertions, mass mobilisation, empowerment and social change. Cities, which are popularly understood as spaces of modernity and new ideas, dis- play continuation of patriarchy and regressive ideas in their own way. Cities, as represented in his films, make it difficult for women to survive and grow; dynamics of communal and gender identities in different cities portrayed in his films bring paradoxes in Indian modernity that continue to plague Indian society even today to the surface. At the same time, Benegal does not represent cities as spaces of moral corruption as is generally shown in various mainstream Hindi films. The rural and urban spaces are not shown as two separate reified spaces without connection. On the contrary, there is a constant connection between the rural and the urban in many of his films. The movement of someone from the city to the village is crucial for disturbing the existing order in villages. Benegal moves away from the stereotypes

22 INTRODUCTION and explores different dimensions of rural, urban and mofussil spaces in a nuanced manner in his films. Taking narratives of films as cultural signifiers, this book makes an attempt to understand issues of India as a nation-state from the point of view of the marginalised, oppressed and “otherized” groups in India in post- colonial times. While historicising films, two kinds of “time” are considered. One is the time frame in which the narrative is set, and the other is the time period in which the film is made. Some Benegal films are set in the final colonial years, but the question addressed in those films are equally relevant even in post-colonial India. Historicisation of films in the context in which films are made and the time period in which films are set will be examined to understand the filmmaker’s historical thinking. Using textual analysis of films and placing them in the socio-historical context, this book studies various questions of India such as the Dalit; modernity in changing India; gender and India; the Muslim minority; historical bio-pics and the narrative of the nation; understanding India through literature-cinema relationships and the changing socio-cultural space of mofussil towns in post-colonial times, which demands multidisciplinary approaches. Varied aspects of India and India’s problems, challenges, the changing face of Indian reality and the changing mode of representation become the basis of different chapters. The chapter sequence does not follow film chronology but is more thematic. The first chapter studies – Ankur , Nishant and Manthan – Benegal’s first famous rural trilogy. Rooted in the history of India, these narratives offer a critique of young India from the point of the Dalit and Dalit women in particular. At its core is a critique of the nation which highlights caste-based economic and gender oppression. In the classical and scathing realism, the first two films discussed examine the oppression of the low-caste people in the feudal system, set against their resistance and empowerment. Ankur and Nishant , set in the historical context of the Peasants’ Revolt of Andhra and Manthan studies the empowerment of the low-caste against the backdrop of the White Revolution of Gujarat. Chapter 2 examines India from the point of view of women from different strata and time periods throughout India’s history. It studies the narratives of prostitutes in a small town near Hyderabad after independence; a woman finding her identity in patriarchal Indian society. It also raises the question of “home” for the “Muslim Other” in India in the context of rising Hindutava ideology from the Muslim women viewpoint through its analysis of Mandi , Bhumika , Mammo, Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa . Films discussed in this chapter look at nation from the women’s perspective across different religious identities. Another thread that binds most of these films together is performing femininity in the public sphere of a patriarchal society. Mandi , Bhumika , Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa , besides looking at India from the point of view of women, also examines the question of how a woman performing in the public space is perceived in Indian patriarchal society. By gendering the

23 INTRODUCTION nation, this chapter critiques the ideology of nation and nationalism from the female point of view. Subsequent chapters examine those films within the frame of adaptation studies. Basing my argument on the importance of literary and cultural narratives to understand a nation, one chapter will set out to understand the relationship between literature and cinema. The focus will not be limited to a mere comparative study between them. The objective will be to analyse the Benegal’s political commentary through his adaptations. In Chapter 3 , an attempt is made to understand how Benegal discusses the mythic, historic and cultural facets of India through his adaptations. The focus shall be to understand the issue of India adapted into films by Shyam Benegal. The first chapter in this category studies Charandas Chor (1975), Junoon (1978) and Kalyug (1981) and Suraj Ka Saatvan Ghoda (1992). Although there is a gap of six years between Charandas Chor and Kalyug , these films are discussed in the historical context of the Emergency of 1975–1977, which therefore brings these two films together. History is another important source which formulates national consciousness and national identity. Taking history as a narrative, Chapter 4 studies Indian history within the frame of adaptation studies. Historical films, fictional films linked with a historical event and historical biopics – films narrating the stories of historical personalities are seen as cultural reproductions of history. The chapter shall also engage with the relationship between cinematic imagery and history. Film adaptations are not taken as a primary source to find historical truth but to understand how Benegal has understood and interpreted history in his medium. This chapter studies three films: Trikal (1985), set during the final days of colonialism in and liberation of Goa and depicts the anxiety of Goan identity after liberation; The Making of the Mahatma (1996) which tells the lesser known story of Mahatma Gandhi’s time in South Africa and his journey to become “Mahatma” and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2004), which explores the narrative of the nationalist and marginalised in the his- toriography of India. The final two chapters question the story of modernity with its ruptures, paradoxes and its development within two different time periods, namely before and after liberalisation. Chapter 5 in this category studies five films titled Kondura (1978), offers a critique of superstitions and religiosity; Aaro- han (1983) considers the loopholes of the Land Reforms in West Bengal and tells the story of a poor sharecropper and his rights in modern India. Susman appraises the challenges faced by traditional weavers in the wake of industrialisation and the fashion industry and Antarnaad (1991 ) is based on the Swadhaya Movement in India – whose aim was to be more inclusive to those working in rural areas. The movement redefines some tenets of Bhakti in modern times and has also raised environmental issues; and Samar (1998 ) examines caste-based oppression in Madhya Pradesh. These Benegal

24 INTRODUCTION films move away from the classical-realist mode of storytelling. Benegal has, more precisely, experimented with various narrative techniques such as the alienation effect and self-reflexion. The final chapter studies the changing patterns of mofussil towns and female subjectivity after India adopted the policy of economic liberalisation. Hari-Bhari (2000) is a story of five women of different generations. The film explores family planning and the fertility rights of women. Welcome to Saj- janpur and Well Done Abba are comedies set in post-liberalisation India and satirise the failure of Nehruvian vision at the hands of rising consumerism. In his last two films, Benegal exhibits a major shift in terms of aesthetics. Realising that it was no longer possible to make the political cinema he had made in the 1970s, he reinvents his art. From sharp and virulent political aesthetics, he transforms his art into comedies but continues to make socially relevant statements. He may have changed the form of his art, but has not ceased to engage with the social reality of India.

Notes 1 For details, refer to Homi Bhabha’s ideas on nation and narration. 2 Parallel cinema is a term originally used for a movement that started in West Bengal in the 1950s. 3 It refers to mainstream Bollywood and independent Hindi cinemas. 4 For details, see Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities . 5 The film has been criticised for propagating racial stereotypes as the black community in the film has been shown as unintelligent and as a sexually overactive community, continually harassing white women. 6 Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of Ger- man Film argues that Robert Wiene’s film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari presents the mentality of the German people after World War I and shows how they pre- pare to be governed by a dictator. 7 Steven Ricci has studied censorship of cinema during Mussolini’s era in Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943 , in addition, Roberto Guli. http://cinecensura.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Film-censorship-during- Fascism_Guli.pdf and others have also worked on censorship in Italy during Mussolini’s era. 8 Ever since the invention of the “magic lantern”, Etienne Jules Marey, Thomas Edison, Dickson, George Eastman, Robert W. Paul, and Emil and Max Sklad- nowsky worked separately towards the evolution of camera. Their contribution in this field is crucial for the invention of the movie camera. 9 Ricciotto Canudo (1877–1923) was an Italian film theorist who lived in France. He first included cinema as the Sixth Art, later changing it to the Seventh Art after including Dance. He published the avant-garde journal, Montjoie . 10 Canudo also lobbied to include Dance in the list of five arts: Architecture, Paint- ing, Sculpture, Music and Poetry. 11 Aarefa Johari in the article published in www.Scroll.in dated June 29, 2019 laments the loss as the heritage building has been recommended for demolition. For details, visit < https://scroll.in/article/926082/as-site-of-indias-first-film-screening- faces-demolition-in-mumbai-heritage-experts-are-dismayed?fbclid=IwAR2nDal DqEL3ppyeCcxofEJgcUid1F6Vgc2vSbgFIatGp7FMq1jGHR6_aIQ >.

25 INTRODUCTION

12 Hiralal Sen is considered to be India’s first filmmaker. He also made India’s first political documentary. Unfortunately, a fire in 1917 destroyed all of his films. 13 This has been derived from Yves Thoraval’s book titled The Cinemas of India (1896–2000) . The author also mentions that Sir Raghunath Purushottam Prana- jpye was an Indian mathematician who achieved the highest distinctions at the University of Cambridge. 14 There is a debate within the circle of film historians in India. One school believe Shree Pundalik directed by Dadasheb Torne alias Rama Chandra Gopal to be the first Indian film, released in 1912, a year before Dadasheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra. Those who disagree with this claim argue that the film’s camera- man was a Mr. Johnson, a British national and the film was sent to England for processing and thus, it cannot be claimed that it is a wholly Indian film. 15 The author contemplates songs such as “De di hamen azzadi bina khadag bina dhal”, “tu hindu banega na muslma bange” and “saathi haath barana” through which the spirit of nation-building, India as a young, secular nation and the coming to terms with the trauma of the Partition, are celebrated. 16 The term has been borrowed from Adorno. 17 Madhav Prasad while developing his argument about melodrama and realism destabilises the binaryviews of ascribing political function to art form, such as melodrama or popular forms as escapist, while realism is equated with democracy. For details, see “The Absolutist Gaze” in The Ideology of Hindi Cinema by Madhav Prasad. 18 The information has been borrowed from Yves Thoraval’s book The Cinemas of India . 19 Naxalism or the Naxalite Movement refers to the Maoist-oriented militant movement against poverty and feudal oppression. It came to the forefront in the late 1960s. The term Naxalite is derived from Naksalbari, a village in the West Bengal, which became the centre of uprising against the landlords in 1967. 20 Borrowed from Madhav Prasad’s book The Ideology of Hindi Cinema . 21 It refers to films such as Love in Simla (R.K. Nayyar 1960), Junglee (Subodh Mukherjee 1961), Kashmir Ki Kali (Shakti Samanta 1964), Professor (Lek Tan- don 1962), Jab Jab Phool Khiley (Suraj Prakash 1965), Love in Tokyo (Pramod Chakravorty, 1966), An Evening in Paris (Shakti Samanta 1967), Aradhna (Shakti Samanta 1969). 22 The most popular New Wave movement in cinema is French New Wave but British, Australian, Japanese and German New Wave movements have also been highly influential. 23 Cahier du Cinéma is a famous film magazine founded by André Bazin and others in 1951. 24 Socialist realism and realism are two distinct art movements and should not be confused with each other. 25 For details, refer to From What is Cinema by Andre Bazin in Film Theory and Criticism ed. Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen. 26 Colin MacCabe has discussed George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Pakula’s film Klute to build the argument of the relationship of dominance in discourse and meta-language in prose and film respectively. For details, see Colin MacCabe, Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature , Manchester University Press, 1985. 27 These ideas are based on Lukács’s essay “Towards an Aesthetics of the Cinema”, which is one of his early writings on cinema. 28 The argument is derived from Lukács’s essay “The Epic and the Novel” in The Theory of the Novel .

26 INTRODUCTION

29 Based on Brecht as discussed and cited by Dario Villanueva. For details, see Theo- ries of Literary Realism by Dario Villanueva. 30 The debate is centred around the relationship between reality and its representation in the realm of aesthetics and is focused on two fundamental questions: Does reality exist independently of representation or does it come into being during representation? And is reality an entity in itself or does it exist at the level of mind? 31 Angelo Koutsourakis studies in detail the debate between Brecht and Lukács in the essay titled “Realism is to Think Historically: Overlapping Elements in Lukácsian and Brechtian Theories of Realism.” 32 Although in a personal conversation with the filmmaker, he says that he does not believe in any such categories. What matters more is whether the filmmaker understands the language of their medium and how a filmmaker uses it. 33 The White Revolution of India or the Operation Flood was launched in 1970. It was modelled on Anand Milk Union Limited or Amul, which was formed in 1948. 34 It should not be assumed that before this, Indian cinema had not been shown overseas. In the decade of since the trend to shoot films in foreign countries started with films like An Evening in Paris, Love in Tokyo. There were many films set in India where songshad been filmed in Switzerland toensure the film had a landscape for mass consumption. After the 1990s, a new trend emerged whereby Indian film started to cater to the sensibilities of the Indian diaspora population of the U.K., U.S.A., Australia and Canada. 35 Ashvin I. Devasundaram is not the only one to have categorise this genre as “indies”. Ashvin I. Sundarama builds on the work of Parul Khanna, Rahul Verma and others to articulate the category. 36 Sudhir Mishra had been associated with films such as Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho made in the 1980s. 37 His last film, As the Crow Flies , came out in 2004 and Char Adhyay was made in 1997. 38 A.R. Rahman became the most successful and popular music director with the music he applied to films such as Roja (1992), Bombay (1995) and Rangeela (1995). 39 For details, refer to Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the Production of Space. 40 It invokes Marshal McLuhan. 41 Benegal’s realist cinema comes very close to social realism so far as its association with the poor, marginalised and downtrodden sections of Indian society is concerned, but his style of filmmaking is not that of documentary realism in narrative films. So, while understanding Benegal’s realist aesthetics, a nuanced difference between realism, social realism and socialist realism should be kept in mind. 42 These ideas invoke Madhav Prasad’s argument about realism and the aesthetics of Indian New Wave. For details, see Ideology of Hindi Cinema . 43 Sunil Khilnani gives a detailed account of the changes happening in India and how this period also resulted in the emergence of new ideas in India. 44 There is a long tradition of imagining rural spaces in literature and cinema as a romanticised idyllic spaces. “Back to the village” had almost become a political slogan since nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore had favoured village life without having any direct experience of it in their childhood, as opined by André Béteille. Hindi mainstream cinema has also portrayed an ideal view of villages in many films.

27 ASSERTION TO EMPOWERMENT

India (also in the India of the 1970s), with all the religious sanctions on the Dalit, and with all the economic resources and industry and the institutions of democracy in the hands of the upper-caste, the problems of the Dalit and women remain unsolved. Benegal through his first trilogy of Ankur , Nishant and Manthan calls for social change. He does not suggest a single solution to the problem. In Ankur , he suggests a rebellion starting from the Dalit and in Nishant and Manthan, the change begins via an outsider who raises the locals’ awareness of their oppression. But in all three films, the oppressed learn to assert themselves for their dignity. Benegal traces a trajectory from assertion to empowerment of the Dalit in Indian society with each film. Weaving history into his narratives (Peasants’ Revolt in Andhra and the Operation Flood in Gujarat), these films narrate the changes taking place in the social and political spheres of post-colonial India. Benegal’s cinema cap- tures the historic moment of social change in which the Dalit started their journey from the sidelines towards the centre. The Dalit, who were earlier excluded from the political sphere in India, have gradually begun to create their political constituency. The process of identity assertion by the Dalit as a movement in the social and political sphere of India continues. Although the current socio-political scenarios have changed a lot compared to the context in which Benegal made these films, the problems of the Dalit and women continue to challenge India as a nation-state. Benegal’s early cinema lends a voice to the voiceless. His idea of India is not of a romanticised ideal nation-state, rather through his aesthetics of realism, he has been keen to offer a critique. Through his cinematic frames, he has placed the problems of the oppressed and the marginalised in the popular imagination of the Indian audience. Looking at the prevalent state of affairs in India, his political cinema remains equally relevant in the 2000s.

Notes 1 By Anveshi web editor, Alisamma Women’s Collective.Online published on January 07, 2014. www.anveshi.org.in/alisamma-womens-collective-manifesto Accessed on January 08, 2019. 2 Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies is an organisation committed to researching on minorities, Dalit, women and other various issues from a feminist perspective. 3 Varna system divided Hindu society into four groups of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudra. 4 There have been many reports in different newspapers, online news portals and international news agencies such as the BBC about increasing violence against the Dalit in India in the last decade, for example there have been stories on violence against dalits in The Wire, Frontline, BBC. www.indiatimes.com . 5 A survey of Times of India reveals that crime against Dalit has increased by 245% during the 2010s. For further details, see http://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/india/Crimes-against-dalits-rise-245-in-last-decade/articleshow/39904583. cms .

45 ASSERTION TO EMPOWERMENT

6 There are studies which show that dalits are being co-opted by rightwing politics to bring them back into the Hindu fold and even to make them participate in anti-Muslim activities. 7 Italics original. 8 Brahmins were associated with the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge; Kshatriyas were the ruling class or warriors; Vaishyas were the producers and traders; and Shudras did the menial jobs for other groups of the society. 9 Vedic Age is from 1500 B.C.E. to 1000 B.C.E. and Later Vedic Age is from 1000 B.C.E, to 600 B.C.E. 10 The conspiracy of exclusion is further strengthened by the fact that there were 62 schools of philosophy, to which Buddhists and Jains refer, but are excluded by the Brahmanical sources. For details, see The Penguin History of Early India by Romila Thapar. 11 Historically, two major empires in the Ancient period of the history of India namely Maurya Empire and Gupta Empire, were the empires of non- kshtariyas . The Mauryan Empire was supposedly an empire of a tribe and the Gupta Empire was an empire of the Vaishyas . 12 For details, refer to the book by Dipankar Gupta. 13 Singha Roy and Rohan D. Matthews. 14 The full article can be accessed at http://base.d-p-h.info/fr/fiches/dph/fiche-dph- 8892.html. 15 P. Sudarayya has written a report on the Peasants’ Revolt titled Telengana Peo- ple’s Struggle and its Lessons. 16 Dalit Panthers was a radical organisation. It was founded by Namdeo Dasal, Raja Dhale and Arun Kamble in 1972. It had ideological alignment towards the Black Panthers movement of the U.S.A. and aimed towards filling the vacuum of Dalit politics in free India. 17 http://silhouette-mag.wikidot.com/article-cat:vol5-cover-pg4. 18 It refers to people living in the forest in the Ramayana. Hanuman is the famous Vanar God in Hindu mythology. 19 Zamindaar means the landlord, who is also feudal lord of the village. 20 Dr. Varghese Kurien was the chairman of the milk co-operative. Lal Bahadur Shasstri, the second Prime Minister of India was extremely happy with the way the co-operative was functioning in Gujrat. He wanted the pattern to be followed all over the country. Consequently, the Dairy Development Board was created and Dr. Verghese Kurien was made the director of the co-operative. 21 The information has been borrowed from an article authored by Zia Us Salam published in The Hindu on September 13, 2012. For details visit. www.thehindu. com/features/cinema/manthan-1976/article3892670.ece and an article titled “Nigeria and India: The Use of Film for Development-Whispers in a Crowd” authored by Matthew E. Sauer, published in African Media Review. Vol. 6, (1), 1992.

46 WOMEN AND THE NATION in his book The Idea of India discusses such unresolved political issues facing Indian democracy. Zubeidaa, the woman, is the embodiment of all such issues in Indian history. Made after the Bombay riots of 1992, the trilogy of Mammo , Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa raise the question of the Muslim in India in which the Hindutva ideology was gaining currency. In all three films, the concept of home emerges as a potent metaphor. The female protagonists in all three films are searching for a home for themselves. Every woman’s situation and circumstances are different. Mammo is a direct victim of the Partition and new borders have made her own homeland a foreign country to her; Sardari Begum leaves her father’s home to pursue music. Disowned by the men of the family, she works independently to create space for herself in the society. Shoma Chatterjee opines that these female protagonists are marginalised on three grounds: firstly, they are women and hence marginalised in a male- dominated society; secondly, they are Muslims and thirdly, they are Muslim women. In the films discussed in this chapter, Benegal has not only raised the issue of a marginalised community but also shown their strength of character. Women characters in these narratives have a strong spirit. Usha in Bhumika suffers, but she shows the determination and courage to face her life and loneliness independently; all the females in Mandi meet the challenges of life head-on and look directly into the eyes of adversities; the three Muslim women featured in the trilogy refuse to submit and yield before their difficult circumstances. In a subtle and nuanced manner, Benegal has brought to surface the challenges faced by a changing India from its independence until 2001. Taking account of the time period of these films, as they span over 70 years, from the 1930s to 2001, Benegal has raised issues of women’s status and changing roles in the Indian patriarchal society; the issue of women’s sexuality, their identity, the status of courtesans and thumri singers in post- colonial India and the question of being Muslim in saffron India in order to question the status of women in a male-dominated India.

Notes 1 The idea of Performance of Nation is borrowed from Jisha Menon’s work who has studied various expressions of nationalism through representation in different art forms. Besides studying drama as a literary form, Jisha Menon has studied the “drama” of the retreat ceremony at the Wagha border. For details, see Jisha Menon, The Performance of Partition: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Parti- tion , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 2 Historically speaking, the benefits of various Reform Acts were first extended to men. After the elite, the benefits of various legislative reforms trickled down from the middle-class to the working-class men. Women were accorded the benefits only after every class of man had been. The history of nineteenth-century Europe exemplifies that while deciding the rights and responsibilities of a citizen in what was then considered a modern state, women were not initially considered to

75 WOMEN AND THE NATION

be equal to men. Napoleonic laws were highly oppressive against women. The benefits of the reforms of 1832 in Great Britain were extended to men belong- ing to the middle class; the 1867 Reform Act extended the right to vote to the working-class men in industrial towns and cities, the 1884 Reform Act gave the working-class men and peasant men in rural areas the right to vote. Women were given the right to vote much later in the twentieth century, and as late as 1918 in Norway and Britain. 3 Fareed Kazmi and Sanjeev Kumar in their article entitled “The Politics of Mus- lim Identity and Nature of Public Imagination in India: Media and Films as Potential Determinants” find correlation between privatisation and the revival of Hindutva ideology, with which I do not entirely agree. However, they have made an interesting observation about the nexus between political economy and communal politics as, according to them, the benefits of privatisation were reaped mainly by the Hindu middle class. The point they fail to catch is that the polarisation of Indian society did not start with the privatisation of the Indian economy but during the British colonial period. 4 “Essentials of Hindutva”, the ideological pamphlet of Hindutva, was published in 1923. The pamphlet was retitled as “Hindutva- Who is a Hindu?” It was republished in 1928. 5 The ideology of Hindutva controversially co-opts Sikhism, Buddhism and Jain- ism (religions that originated in India) under the umbrella concept of Hindus, but Islamists and Christians (which originated elsewhere) are perceived as aliens or outsiders. 6 Analepsis (plural form is analepses), as defined by Gerald Prince is a temporal “anachrony going back to the the past with respect to the present moment”. For details, see Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology. 7 C.H. Atma had sung famous songs such as “ Pritam Aan Milo ”, the famous song of 1945. 8 The title of the film also recalls the famous Hindi film, Main Tusli Tere Angan Ki , a Hindi film based on a Marathi novel, Ashi Tujhi Preet by Chandrakant Kakodkar. 9 The cinematic image has two dimensions to it – the visual and the sonic, which are called the Visual-Image and the Sound-Image. Michel Chion, A. Thoma, and Daniel Percheron and Marcia Butzel have worked on sound. 10 Borrowed from Karen Leonard’s article. 11 Arbab in Arabic means Chief or Master and Nishat means Night. Karen Leonard has mentioned it as Department of Enjoyment. 12 Daily practice of Indian classical, semi-classical and light singers. 13 Ruth Vanita says that the word tawaif is Persian, but the practice of courtesans in this land has been there since ancient times. Terms like Devdasis , Ganika , Nagar- vadhu signify the presence of courtesans in ancient India. Chitralekha during the Mauraya Empire, Vasantsena in the fifth century and Vaishali in the sixth century were famous courtesans in ancient India. During the medieval period, courtesans or court-dancers or raqqasa , as they were called, received the patronage of the emperor. After the decline of the Mughal empire in the eighteenth century, as Lucknow emerged the centre of politics and culture, courtesans thrived under the patronage of the Nawab. Courtesans or tawaif of Lucknow were supposed to be the custodians of the culture and finesse of the culture of Awadh. These courtesans were well trained in the art of classical music, dance and poetry. They have made a significant contribution in the development of Hindustani music. 14 As defined by Gerard Genette. 15 All India Radio conceived the policy that all female singers of Indian classical music who had “bai” as a suffix to their names should marry a respectable

76 WOMEN AND THE NATION

man and become “devi”. They were allowed to sing on the radio only after they had undergone this transformation and moral cleansing. Begum Akhtar, the famous ghazal and thumri singer, was transformed from Akhtari Bai Faizabadi to Begum Akhtar only after she married a Lucknow-based barrister, Ishtiqad Ahmed Abbasi.Begum Akhtar and M.S. Subhalakshmi are among the rare real- life examples. But Umrao Jaan Ada’s narrative throws light on the other aspect of the story. She has a strong urge to go back home, but she is not accepted by her brother. She is left with no other hospitable place, but her Kotha . 16 Begum Akhtar is a befitting example to understand this phenomenon. 17 Translation is mine. 18 A narrator who is present in the narrative. 19 The author has published an article titled “Identity Politics and the Muslim Other: A Study of Shyam Benegal’s Mammo” in Brukenthalia, Sibiu. This chapter uses the material published therein. 20 An anachrony in which narrative goes back to the past in relation to the present time in the narrative. It is popularly known as flashback. Extradiegetic analepsis is a kind of analepsis in relation to the first narrative. For details, read Gerard Genette or Gerald Prince. 21 Based on Arvind Unni’s paper presented at a conference. Arvind has studied the representation of the “Muslim Space” in Indian cinema. See details in the references. 22 This refers to the debate if Aryans were indigenous or they were outsiders. The scholars of Hindutva do not subscribe to the thesis in history that Aryans were also outsiders. 23 Burqa is Urdu for the veil that Muslim women wear. 24 There are films made in the 1990s in which simple binary positions of the Muslim terrorist can be seen.

77 POLITICAL COMMENTARIES THROUGH ADAPTATIONS in society. Broken temporal chronology, intertextuality provided by other Hindi novels and Devdas , the novel and the film, Suraj Ka Saatvan Ghoda employs postmodernist narrative techniques to reflect on the questions of art and society in the new socio-economic context of liberalisation.

Notes 1 This is based on the categories of signs given by Charles Sanders Peirce. 2 There are various categories under which arrangement of events in time is studied in narratology. For details, one may refer to the works of Gerard Genette, Gerald Prince, Mieke Bal, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan to understand the tools of narratology. The author has also produced a book studying narratives in adaptation from the perspective of narratology. 3 Christopher Orr builds argument based on the ideas of John Ellis. 4 One film being discussed in this chapter is based on a play but made for children. 5 The author has Junoon in his mind which is based on a novella written by Ruskin Bond in English. 6 Pigeons have a strong presence even in the Quran and are associated with various incidents of Prophet Mohammad’s life. In many parts of the Quran , birds, especially pigeons, become the symbol to describe Allah’s grace and mercy. 7 Satyajit Ray in Shatranj Ke Khiladi, an adaptation of a short story by Munshi Prem Chand suggests the same. 8 The given information is based on the introduction to the play written by Habib Tanvir. 9 Mainstream Hindi cinema has already produced films like Do Aankhen Barah Haath (Shantaram 1957), Jewel Thief (Vijay Anand 1967), Do Chor (Padmanab- ham 1972). 10 The idea is central in the film, Do Aankhen Barah Haath (V. Shantaram 1957). 11 The Satnami cult was originally founded in Punjab in the seventeenth century. In Chhattisgarh, the Satnami cult was founded by Swami Ghasidas in 1820. 12 The government body was founded by the late Pt. JawaharLal Nehru, the former Prime Minister of India. In the 1970s, the Doordarshan was the most important medium of dissemination, besides biennial Children Film Festivals. 13 The author of this book has written a book about adaptation in which he studies films as a combination of mimetic and diegetic art. For details, refer to the bibliography to read the title under the author’s name. 14 https://uiowa.edu/indiancinema/kalyug .

101 ADAPTING HISTORY not constitute the truth in cinema. The image of historical biopics is not the visualisation of an incident of history, it is rather an interactive and creative engagement of “images”. There are certain incidents which are supple- mented to the film narrative which are fictional. Instead of entering into a debate of the purity and impurity of history, it is more important to understand, in Rosestone’s terms “what kind of historical thinking” is taking place in the narrative. In the film, The Making of the Mahatma , there is an inter- action between Fatima Meer’s perception of Mahatma Gandhi and Shyam Benegal’s Mahatma Gandhi. Similarly, there are some incidents in Netaji Subhash C. Bose: The Forgotten Hero which may not be historically true. 23 But historical truism is not the task of a filmmaker. What is required is to understand what particular ideology is being examined in a historical film or historical biopic or what discourse is being played out in the film. There is nothing original or primary and hence, nothing is derivative. As understood by Deleuze, the adaptation of history in films is also “a translation in space” ( Deleuze 1986 : 8). With the change in the duration “also comes a qualitative change in the Whole” ( Deleuze 1986 : 8). The “Whole” is open and owing to its nature, it allows itself to change. Every adaptation of history contributes something to the “Whole”, changing it forever and keeping it in a state of flux. With every adaptation and new telling, the “Whole” also “becomes”. The relationship between narrative, history and image is that of a process. In the larger narrative of history, the movement-image of cinema destabilises the fixed and static nature of history. History rather “becomes”. The “becoming of history” is a never-ending process. It is always in a state of flux and constantly changing, evolving and adding new interpretations to itself. History in a constant dialogue with the past in the light of the present – the unearthing of new facts and the looking at the past from a new perspective.

Notes 1 Parts of Chapter X previously appeared in S.K. Chaudhuri and R. Samaddar, ReFocus: The Films of Shyam Benegal , (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). 2 Hayden White discusses the debate between Anglo-American philosophers and the Annales School. 3 The idea of the historical biopic, while discussing the representation of Mahatma Gandhi, was first presented by the author in a conference organised by the Asso- ciation of Adaptation Studies held at St. Anne’s College, Oxford on September 26 and 27, 2016. 4 The author has contributed an article titled Adapting Gandhi/Kasturba in The Making of the Mahatma to an anthology to The Films of Shyam Benegal to be edited by Sneha Kar Chaudhury and Ramit Samaddar. The anthology is a part of the ReFocus series on international filmmakers. The series editors are Dr. Gary D. Rhodes and Dr. Robert Singer, and the series will be published by Edinburgh University Press. The primary focus of the paper is to study the representation of Kasturba Gandhi in The Making of Mahatma , which is substantially different from the focus of this chapter, but the paper also discusses the relationship

124 ADAPTING HISTORY

between films and history. Some theoretical ideas used in the paper reappear in this chapter. The anthology has not been printed at the time this book went to print. The author has taken care not to repeat the same words in the chapter. 5 Parts of Chapter 4 previously appeared in S.K. Chaudhuri and R. Samaddar, ReFocus: The Films of Shyam Benegal (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh 2020). 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 The phrase “playing the English gentleman” has been borrowed from Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, My Experiments with Truth . 9 For details, see the book by Fatima Meer. The film has also shown some of these laws. 10 Also discussed in the article titled Adapting Gandhi/Kasturba in The Making of the Mahatma to an anthology to The Films of Shyam Benegal to be edited by Sneha Kar Chaudhury and Ramit Samaddar. 11 Ibid. 12 The Movement-Image and the Time-Image are two important works by Deleuze on cinema. 13 Although Kasturba has been given a “voice” in the narrative, the voice is par- adoxical. According to Needham, Kasturba speaks about Gandhi, not herself. Gandhi’s interactions with his wife and son in the personal sphere bring out contradictions in his personality. 14 Also discussed in the article titled Adapting Gandhi/Kasturba in The Making of the Mahatma to an anthology to The Films of Shyam Benegal to be edited by Sneha Kar Chaudhury and Ramit Samaddar. 15 Translation is mine. 16 Paul Ricoeur’s concept of mimesis 1, mimesis 2 and mimesis 3 is also important to understand the temporal relationship between history and its adaptation. 17 Gandhi wrote his autobiography almost ten years after coming back from South Africa entirely from memory. Markovits has questioned the authenticity of memory being the basis of the autobiographical narrative. Despite the unreliability of memory, the image of Gandhi that appeared in his autobiography helped him to project an image of himself in the public domain. With acerbic honesty he narrates certain events from his childhood and adult life in his autobiography. The overwhelming conclusion from this study is the belief in Gandhi’s brutal honesty and sincerity in overcoming his sexual urgesto grow into a Mahatma. Published between the years 1925 to 1929, the image of “Mahatma” helped him to elevate his stature in the eyes of the people and his wider acceptance as a respected leader of India’s nationalist movement. 18 Anita Bose Pfaff’s interview has been published in India Abroad . www.rediff. com/news/2005/may/11inter.htm. 19 For details, go to https://thewire.in/history/netaji-files-family-nehru . 20 Historical documents reveal that he was called a traitor by the British, but not a war criminal. 21 For details, see the full interview by Ruhi Khan. https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes. com/opinion/sunday-read/to-have-an-iconic-dad-is-of-course-difficult-says-anita- bose-pfaff-netaji-Subhashh-chandra-boses-daughter/articleshow/61310936.cms. 22 All those files can be accessed at www.netajipapers.gov.in/. 23 Rudolf Hartog’s The Sign of the Tiger , however, presents a different account of the meeting between Hitler and Subhash C. Bose than that presented in the film.

125 CONTESTATIONS WITH INDIAN MODERNITY

The next chapter studies Hari-Bhari (2000), Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008 ) and Well Done Abba (2009) to discuss new sensibilities, changing aesthetics and changing social spaces in Benegal’s cinema in the era of liberalisation.

Notes 1 Professor Sumit Sarkar in his works has criticised Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Derozio. His argument is that their influence was confined only to the elites of the Bengali society. 2 David Arnold has argued the importance of Science in Nehru’s vision. For details, go to “Nehruvian Science and Postcolonial India” by David Arnold. 3 Ibid. 4 For details, Ravi Kalia’s article “Modernism, modernization, and post-colonial India: a reflective essay”. 5 The phrase has been borrowed from Dipankar Gupta’s book titled Mistaken Modernity: India Between Worlds . 6 For details, read Kondura, Religious power is stronger than man by Rédigé parYves. It is available at. www.letstalkaboutbollywood.com/article-kondura- religious-power-is-stronger-than-men-125530261.html . 7 The technique of the alienation effect was central to theatrical devices used by Brecht. 8 Gamcha is a traditional cotton towel used to wipe the body. 9 Craftsmen. 10 Markandeya is a sage or rishi, who was saved from the clutches of death by Lord Shiva as Markandeya was a worshipper of Shiva. There are two versions. Accord- ing to one version, this episode took place on the banks of river Markanda near Kurukshetra. There is a temple of Shri Markandeshwar Mahadev Shiv temple in Shahbad Markanda, a small town on the banks of the river Markanda between Ambala and Kurushetra. According to the second version, this took place at Thirrukkadaiyur, Tamil Nadu. 11 The song is attributed to the narrator as Ramulu is not singing the song. 12 Om Puri learnt the art of weaving to act in this film. 13 There are many case studies of saree weavers in Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat on the challenges before saree weavers in India. Most of the studies done in recent times focus on the effects of liberalisation on traditional saree weavers. This also includes a survey conducted by S. Niranjan, S. Vinayan for Dastkar, Andhra under the Planning Commission. The report was submitted in 2001. 14 During a personal conversation with Shyam Benegal, the filmmaker gave the author the metaphor of carpet weaving to speak about the relationship between artistic complexity and beauty with reference to films. 15 Saibal Chatterjee, “An Indian Samar.” The Outlook, August 23, 1999. www.out lookindia.com/magazine/story/an-indian-samar/207978 . Accessed on March 29, 2019. 16 Guru Ghasidas was a spiritual leader of the nineteenth century who preached in Chattisgarh. After Guru Ghasidas, his son continued with the preaching. Guru Ghasidas is also credited with establishing the Satnami sect in the region. 17 Fictive-real life means the real life of the actor in the fictional narrative of the film. 18 RajniBakshi, “Working for Change.” The Hindu .Online published May 20, 2001. www.thehindu.com/2001/05/20/stories/1320017c.htm . Accessed on March 28, 2017. 19 Original translation.

154 CHANGING MOFUSSIL SPACES AND NEW CINEMA small towns, these spaces cannot be equated with cities, which are known as spaces of technology and panoramic views, places of anxiety, fear, and also government bodies. Mofussil towns, rather, show the looming shadow of changing spaces taking place in the world outside. Dismantling earlier binary perspective of rural and urban spaces in Hindi cinema, Benegal also deconstructs the stereotypical binary views on Hindi cinema. The mofussil spaces in his films are liminal spaces with markers of both tradition and modernity, which Benegal explores through his in-between new (middle) cinema. The mofussil towns in these films are not merely settings, rather they are metaphorical spaces that break down classic binary perspectives while contextualizing the complexities of post-liberalisation India. In these films, Benegal has softened his style of storytelling, but not his commitment to cinema for social purpose. He has moved from the sharp, pungent, scathing realism of his earlier cinema to the comic mode in his latest films. Humour and satire in these films comment on the evils in post- liberalisation society and its systems.15 Moreover, compared to when Bene- gal started his career in the 1970s, the socio-cultural-political landscape of India in the beginning of the twenty-first century is drastically changed. He is quite aware that it is no longer possible for him to make such dated political films. Benegal seems to be developing a new cultural discourse to explore the emerging socio-economic order, as he generates a space for his art in the context of liberalisation. While negotiating these new environs, Benegal reorients his art to critique government policies and the nature of modernity in mofussil towns. He has transformed his cinema (as a cultural and spatial practice) into a site of negotiation and contestation while working within the new socio-economic order. Benegal’s cinema achieves liminality by blur- ring the boundaries of art cinema and commercial cinema. While experimenting with form and style, Shyam Benegal has rediscovered his aesthetics and also reinvented cinematic space.

Notes 1 As discussed in the Introduction. 2 The author has published an article titled ‘Liminal Cultural and Cinematic Spaces in Shyam Benegal’s Welcome to Sajjanpur and Well Done Abba in The Journal of Popular Culture . This chapter uses the material published in the article. 3 Mofussil is Urdu and Arabic, which means “separate”, “detailed”, “particular” and hence, provincial. The country station and district, as contra-distinguished from “the Presidency”; or, relatively, the rural localities of a district. For details, see Yule and Burnell. 4 An article in the online edition of the Education Times reveals that a private college is being run from a makeshift building in Uttar Pradesh. For details, see Mahajan. 5 The kinds of films ShyamBenegal used to make when Indian New Wave was at its peak. The author here refers to other films like Ankur, Nishant, Manthan, Bhumika , which Benegal made during the 1970s.

168 CHANGING MOFUSSIL SPACES AND NEW CINEMA

6 Hijra is Hindi for “eunuch,” and denotes a third gender category. 7 There are films in mainstream Hindi cinema in which the protagonist either has criminality or evil in his personality. But these dimensions were generally explored in the films set in cities. 8 Gram Panchayat is the unit of local governance, an administrative structure followed in India, Pakistan and Nepal. Panchayat is an assembly of five persons; hence the name, Panchayat. 9 Shabnam Mausi Bano was the first transgender politician in India. The hijra community received the right to vote in 1994. 10 The problem of bride-buying has already been handled in Indian cinema in Sagar Sarhadi’s Bazaar (1982). 11 This idea is rooted in Gyan Prakash’s understanding of conflict between Nehru- vian and Gandhian vision about cities and villages of India. 12 This argument is from “Realism and Fantasy in the Representation of Metro- politan Life in Indian Cinema.” In City Flicks Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience . For details, refer to the bibliography. 13 Thomas J. Vicino, Bernadette Hanlon and John Rennie Short in the article titled “Megalopolis 50 Years On: The Transformation of City Region” studies the changing socio-spatial transformation of a city. 14 The idea and phrase have been borrowed from Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity . 15 He is not the first filmmaker in India to satirise the follies of the Indian political and social system through laughter; Kundan Shah’s JaaneBhi Do Yaaro (1984) is an outstanding satire of corruption in the Indian system.

169 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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177 FILMOGRAPHY

Aarohan (The Ascent, 1982). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Shama Zaidi. Perf: Om Puri, Victor Banerjee, Pankaj Kapoor. Prod. Department of Information and Culture, Govt. of Bengal. Ankur (The Seedling, 1974). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Perf: ShabanaAzmi, Anant Nag, Sadhu Meher, Priya Tendulkar. Prod. Blaze Film Enterprise. Antarnaad (The Inner Voice, 1991). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Shama Zaidi, Shan- baug. Perf: Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Shabana Azmi, Om Puri, K.K. Raina. Prod. Suhetu Films. Bhumika (The Role, 1977). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Shyam Benegal, GirishKarnad, Satyadev Dubey, Perf: Smita Patil, Amol Palekar, Anant Nag, Amrish Puri. Prod. Blaze Film Enterprise, Lalita Bijlani, Freni Variava. Charandas Chor (Charandas, the Thief, 1975). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Perf: Smita Patil, Sadhu Meher, Anjali Paigankar, Habib Tanvir. Prod. Children’s Film Society, Lalita Bijlani, Freni Variava. Hari-Bhari (2000). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Shama Zaidi. Perf: Shabana Azmi, Rajeshwari Sachdev, Nandita Das, Rajit Kapur. Prod. Ministry of Family Welfare. Junoon (Possessed, 1978). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Perf: Shashi Kapoor, Jennifer Ken- dal, Shabana Azmi, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Naseeruddin Shah. Prod. Filmvallas, Shashi Kapoor. Kalyug (The Machine Age, 1981). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Shyam Benegal, Girish Karnad, Satyadev Dubey. Perf: Shashi Kapoor, Rekha, Anant Nag, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Victor Bannerjee. Prod. Filmvalls, Shashi Kapoor. Kondura (The Boon, 1977). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Girish Karnad, Shyam Bene- gal and Arudra. Perf: Anant Nag, Smita Patil, Vanisree, Shekhar Chatterjee. Prod. Raviraj International. The Making of the Mahatma (1995). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Fatima Mir, Shama Zaidi, Shyam Benegal. Perf: Rajit Kapoor, Pallavi Joshi, Keath Stevens. Prod. NFDC, Doordarshan. Mammo (Grandmother, 1994). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Khaled Mohamed, Shama Zaidi. Perf: Farida Jalal, Surekha Sikri, Rajit Kapoor. Prod. NFDC, Doordarshan. Mandi (The Market Place, 1983). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Shyam Benegal, Satyadev Dubey, Shama Zaidi. Perf: Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Kulbhushan Kharbanda. Prod. Blaze Film Enterprise, Lalita Bijlani, Freni Variava.

178 FILMOGRAPHY

Manthan (The Churning, 1976). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Perf: Smita Patil, Girish Kar- nad, Amrish Puri, Naseeruddin Shah. Gujarat Co-Operative Milk Marketing Fed- eration, Sahyadri Films. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2004). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Atul Tiwari, Shama Zaidi. Perf: Sachin Khedekar, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Rajit Kapur, Divya Dutta. Prod. Raj Pius, Barbara von Wrangell. Nishant (Night’s End, 1975). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Perf: Shabana Azmi, Girish Kar- nad, Amrish Puri, Anant Nag, Naseeruddin Shah. Prod. Blaze Film Enterprise. Samar (Conflict, 1998). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Ashok Mishra. Perf: Rajit Kapoor, Rajeshwari Sachdev, Kishore Kadam, Seema Biswas. Prod. Ministry of Social Jus- tice and Empowerment. Sardari Begum (1996). Dir. ShyamBenegal. Writ. Shama Zaidi. Perf: Kiron Kher, Rajit Kapoor, Smriti Mishra, Amrish Puri. Prod. Plus Films. Suraj Ka Saatvan Ghoda (The Seventh Sun of the Horse, 1992). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Shama Zaidi. Perf: Rajit Kapoor, Pallavi Joshi, Neena Gupta, Rajeshwari Sachdev, AmrishPuri. Prod. NFDC, Doordarshan. Susman (The Essence, 1986). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Shyam Benegal, Shama Zaidi. Perf: Shabana Azmi, Om Puri, Neena Gupta, Kulbhushan Kharbanda. Prod. Association of Cooperatives and Apex Society of Handlooms. Trikal (Past, Present and Future, 1985). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Shyam Benegal, Shama Zaidi. Perf: Leela Naidu, Naseeruddin Shah, Neena Gupta, Dilip Tahil. Prod. Blaze Film Enterprise, Lalita Bijlani, Freni Variava. Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Shyam Benegal, Ashok Mishra. Perf: Shyreas Talpade, Amrita Rao, Kunal Kapoor, Ravi Jhankal. Prod. Ronnie Screwvala, Chetan Motivala. Well Done Abba (2009). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Shyam Benegal, Ashok Mishra. Perf: Boman Irani, Minnisha Lamba, Ravi Kishan. Prod. Raj Pius, Mahesh Ram- anathan. Zubeidaa (2001). Dir. Shyam Benegal. Writ. Khaled Mohamed. Perf: Karishma Kapoor, Manoj Bajpai, Rekha, Amrish Puri. Prod. Firoz Rattansi.

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