His quest for the truth and obsessive interrogation of social realities through the story of the individual have at times been dominant over his artistic skill and craft. The emphasis has always been so much on what he has to say that it is easy to neglect how he constructs his films. In his early films, one is struck by the extreme economy of his storytelling. He is spartan in his camera movements and editing, his scenes constructed through as few details as possible.
Benegal had made hundreds of advertisement films before his first feature film. He had learnt the virtue of getting his point across in the shortest period of time, and this shows in his early work. He rarely draws attention to his craft, avoids any kind of flourish, and concentrates on layering each scene with levels of significant information in the most succinct manner possible. This gave an unusual intensity to these films, where the stories gained in effect due to the stark simplicity of their design.
He began to experiment with greater freedom in his later films. He started playing with the traditional ways of telling a story. There are sudden irruptions of the supernatural in Trikaal, which otherwise maintains a realistic approach. The resolution of the protagonist’s arc is a vision suffused with oriental symbolism, signalling a bolder approach to his craft.
He masterfully explores the art of storytelling itself through a complicated multi-layered narrative technique in Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda. Benegal is a restless film-maker, never fully satisfied with simply replicating the bare realism that had brought him success right from the beginning of his career.
He has by and large stayed away from the lure of commercial cinema. He had learnt to make films in his own way, and over the years he managed to build an ecosystem that functioned very differently from the way in which commercial Hindi cinema is usually made. Yet, he did make Zubeidaa, which had a prominent star (Karishma Kapoor) in the lead and music by A.R. Rahman.
Zubeidaa was the culmination of a trilogy that had begun with the exquisitely made Mammo and continued with Sardari Begum. Zubeidaa, with its more opulent design and presence of Karishma Kapoor saw a profound tonal shift, and Benegal tried (not entirely successfully) to ground the glamorous aspects of his film in his usual character-centric approach.
Benegal looks back upon his long career as a journey of growing maturity, of evolving understanding. He grew up with firmly ingrained social and political beliefs, and he is convinced that these foundational principles never changed. He has continued to champion women’s rights and sympathize with the victims of social evils like the caste system, but he believes that his approach has developed over the years.
In his youth, he was passionate and quick to judgement. It was easier to look at everything in black and white terms. As he has grown older, his perspective has widened, allowing for a more nuanced and complex view of his subjects
. He learnt to not categorize everything as either right or wrong. This has led him to make films that deal with their themes not in a simplistic manner, but which are much more alive to the multitudes of meanings that can emerge from them. He thinks that one is much too subjective when one is young.
An artist should develop the ability to walk the fine line between being too involved in one’s subject and being too aloof from it. A film-maker, he says, should both be in his world and out of it. He speaks of exiling oneself from the world one is trying to create.
Benegal has always been a philosopher-observer who sees life through the lens of a humanist reformer. His subjects span the length and breadth of the country, but over the years, he has handled them with the same deep compassion and understanding. His humility masks a strong crusading zeal to ferret out injustice and unfairness wherever he can and put them up for scrutiny and display. His art may have evolved but his desire to expose inequality and discrimination has remained the same all through his life.
He remains committed to the idea of change. He is determined to not repeat himself because he fears that staying within one’s comfort zone can do little other than harm the artist. He thinks that if one succeeds with a particular kind of film, it is tempting to repeat that formula. He has tried to evade that temptation all through his career.
Shyam Benegal is usually feted as the founder of a more serious, socially conscious form of cinema. This has led most people to think that his films occupy a niche meant only for a particular kind of viewer. For someone who has spent his entire life meticulously documenting in cinema the staggering complexity and diversity of this country, this is an unfair assessment.
There is no doubt that cinema was serious business for him. It could be used to bring hidden realities to light, to demonstrate that the powerful prey upon the weak and oppressed, no matter where they may be. His characters demonstrate in the most tragic of circumstances dignity and strength, demanding that their voices be heard. His cinema travelled all over the country, highlighting many differences but also showing a profound underlying sameness that is perhaps the most affecting testament to what binds our country together in spite of all its apparent disparities.
In a career spanning 50 years, Shyam Benegal has preserved for us a deeply reflective and insightful record of a nation finding its feet after Independence. His cinema looks at the history of our country from the perspective of the dispossessed and the forgotten – how in its struggle to reconcile the need for modernity with centuries-old tradition, it has dealt with those at the margins. He has looked at how we have dealt with the scars of history, and how we have created fresh wounds that we will have to heal in the future.
Ultimately, his body of work shows his deepest conviction that all human beings deserve equal rights and dignity, no matter what a society with deeply entrenched hierarchies would have us believe. His breadth of vision and sympathy make him a film-maker whose greatest subject is India itself.
Excerpted with permission from Shyam Benegal – Film-maker of the Real India, Arjun Sengupta, Niyogy Books.
