No matter how progressive and clear she is about who she is, nine out of 10 leading women characters in Bollywood changes trajectory when she meets a man. She transforms and adjusts – from wilful to pliant. The multitasker in her gets to work. The happy ending is happy in ways that Indians love it: chasing a passion must never mean not wanting to master the paratha.
Shyam Benegal, who died on December 23 at the age of 90, would be proud of today’s celebrated outliers – the women-centric globe-trotters such as Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (after all, which other director knows women bonding and rallying around each other better than Benegal) or Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies. Few Indian directors have tackled the interiority – and the burden and bliss – of the average Indian woman with as much curiosity and depth as Benegal.
Rewind to the year 1977. India’s only woman prime minister Indira Gandhi is on her way out after subjecting the country to three tumultuous years of civil liberty pillage. The word “Bollywood” begins to make it to gossip columns and film reviews. Manmohan Desai’s socialist epic Amar Akbar Anthony is this newly-christened film industry’s antidote to the simmering anger that defined most of 1970s’ Bombay cinema.
Benegal’s Bhumika is released in the same year.
Smita Patil plays the protagonist Usha. After what is considered Benegal’s rural trilogy – Ankur (1974), Nishant (1975) and Manthan (1976) – Benegal cast Patil in one of her most memorable roles. Usha is based on the life of Marathi stage and screen actress Hansa Wadkar.
In the film, Usha’s life unfolds from her teenage years to middle age. Throughout the biopic, we see Usha juggling the needs of others along with her own. She hardly shouts but never lets her oppressors rest or look away. Her sexuality and life choices propel the script, and Usha takes responsibility for her own mistakes and frailties.
This a woman encumbered by regressive traditions. She searches for reprieves from them, but never are her choices either easy or out of her own grasp.
Benegal is India’s cinema’s Renaissance Man – including in his staunchness about engaging with a larger social reality even in films we least remember him by, including his last, Mujib; The Making of a Nation (2023). Benegal’s Nehruvian, Westernised vision of the world meets Dakhni Urdu-speaking milieus of Hyderabad as well as the nuances of courtesan manners in Chandni Chowk. It is a vision of India that looks inward without losing sight of its malaises.
Books and art of that era suggest that to be Nehruvian was considered an asset in the 1970s. If that was a credo Benegal lived by at the time he came to Mumbai to make films, he couldn’t have ignored stories that were waiting to be written about women.
Feminism made concrete strides around the world at that time, and the decade of 1975-1985 was declared the United Nations Decade for Women. A handful of Indian feminists recognised the inequalities not just between men and women, but also within power structures such as caste, tribe, language and religion for the first time in independent India.
Like his idol Satyajit Ray, Benegal was in advertising for several years. In the social milieu to which he belonged, feminism wasn’t perhaps an alien concept.
Benegal made stars out of actresses. The two who burst into the scene and, with his help, shaped the realist acting idioms necessary for Benegal’s cinema, were Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi.
In 2002, during a retrospective of Benegal’s films at the National Film Theatre in London, playwright and actor Girish Karnad – who was also Benegal’s close friend – had a conversation with Benegal.
An audio recording has Karnad observing: “Shyam was more than a director—he was also a friend, a very good host (you got very good food anytime you turned up at his house). Then, apart from that, in those days when actors were impoverished, he was a banker for his actors...and most of all, a father figure...Even though Smita and Shabana have been compared in various ways, I always thought their rivalry was for your affections, actually, as a director.”
Karnad couldn’t have been entirely wrong. Azmi and Patil got their most memorable roles, of women whose strengths didn’t emerge from being overt rebels or male-bashing or trying to be like powerful men. Despite their past and the cruelties and injustices of their present, Lakshmi (Ankur), Rukmani and Sushila (Nishant), and Usha (Bhumika) had enough agency to make choices and stick by whatever or whoever those choices invited.
Azmi’s debut in Ankur (1974) as Lakshmi, a domestic help who falls in love with the man of the house where she works and gets pregnant, won her such accolades rivalled only by Patil’s equally potent reserves for realist roles. Big forces of feudal power structures and gender oppression play out in Ankur, in which Lakshmi makes her husband believe she is pregnant with his baby.
Nishant (1975) had two fierce women as protagonists: Rukmani, played by Patil, and Sushila played by Azmi. In Manthan (1976), Patil is Bindu, a woman involved with a rural dairy revolution based on Verghese Kurien’s involvement with the Amul cooperative movement in Gujarat.
Mandi (1983) is about sex workers and how politics and a red light district meet in apocryphal ways. Trikal (1985), set in 1960s Goa when Portuguese rule was on its way out, is about three generations of women in a rambling Goa household. Benegal cast Leela Naidu in a comeback role as the wounded matriarch.
Later, Benegal directed the trilogy written by journalist Khalid Mohamed, Mammo (1994), Sardari Begum (1996), and Zubeida (2001). The storytelling styles embraced some of the tropes of mainstream Bollywood films, but the films were also about middle-class Muslim women whose personal ambitions clash with expectations from society and their families.
Like his guru Satyajit Ray, Benegal chose density of character and storytelling over form and style. His gentle gaze never couched or diluted what his most memorable characters grappled with.
Should religion or caste determine marriage or citizenship? Can we negotiate both personal ambition and nurturing family without being ill at ease? Is living on the fringes always an inconvenient choice?
Benegal’s women showed the way, with quiet courage and a refusal to look away from difficult choices.
Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and critic.
Also read:
Shyam Benegal (1934-2024): The conscience keeper of Indian cinema
