

Filmmaker Shyam Benegal opens up about his films on social issues, crowd-funded projects, and the challenges of making biographical films in a Masterclass anchored by Ratnottama Sengupta
Shyam Benegal with Ratnottama Sengupta at the Masterclass at the 43rd IFFI-2012, in Panaji, Goa
Even before the Masterclass in the Satyajit Ray auditorium at Indywood 2016 held in Ramoji City of Hyderabad, I had the privilege of conducting a Masterclass with Shyam Benegal at IFFI 2012 in Goa. Benegal is the legend who had bridged the narrative school of filmmaking we identify with the likes of Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt, with the hallmark of the alternative cinema, depicting raw reality and the rising against exploitation in the remotest corners of India. This stretched from Bengal to Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh to Jodhpur, Mumbai to Madhya Pradesh, Ghalib’s Delhi to Nizam’s Hyderabad.
I had also hosted a conversation with him aside from the many Q&As, debates and opinion pieces in The Times of India that drew out the forever smiling yet outspoken Padma awardee. His life with moving images had started with ad films, gone on to features, taken up documentaries, and left its mark for generations to come with stories about lives in the annals of the land he outlined as Bharat.
Any wonder that I always pressed the ‘Record’ button whenever Shyam Benegal was on the scene? What’s more, I find that every conversation with him bears rewinding to – just as every single creation of his calls for repeat viewing. Let’s rewind to the Indywood Interactions 2016 Masterclass:
Shyam Benegal in conversation with Ratnottama Sengupta at the Masterclass at Indywood Film Carnival 2016
Ratnottama Sengupta: Ankur was among the first films – of course Pratidwandi precedes it – in showing protest against an existing system through a dramatic narrative. That sapling grows into a full-fledged tree in Nishant. But Shyam, you were coming in from advertisement films, which are made by corporates, with a totally different perspective. How did you think of the story from the perspective of the subaltern? And why did you opt for advocating violent protest?
Shyam Benegal: You know I grew up in Telangana, a quiet town, Alwal, not far from Secunderabad. It was a halfway house between rural and urban place, so obviously one experienced both. And saw both sides. Also don’t forget, Hyderabad then was Nizam’s Hyderabad – the Indian Army walked in only in 1948 – where a lot of the old feudal system was still continuing. So, as a child, one had experienced a bit of that feudal life, and it had a certain impact on one’s social relations and political relationships.
At the same time, soon after India’s Independence, an anti-landlord movement started, which eventually became the Telangana movement led by the Communists of that time. And obviously it had a great impact on us.
As a child you saw life around you was changing, and that played some part in the process of one’s development. All the social, economic and political changes were dramatic and that impacted the way one’s worldview developed. So when I decided to become a filmmaker – which was early, even when I was in school – the one subject that was going around in my mind turned out to be my first feature film – Ankur – set in Telangana. Following that was Nishant which was again set in Telangana.
After that my vision opened up to other parts of India and I made Manthan. I did it for Dr Kurien, looking at the Milk Cooperative movement. That was a huge success, not just in Gujarat but all over the country…
Anant Nag and Shabana Azmi in Ankur, Shyam Benegal’s first feature film
RS: Creating the White Revolution…
SB: The subject came out of two documentaries that I’d done for the Gujarat Milk Federation before I made Manthan. While making those documentaries – one of them was called White Revolution – I had mentioned to Dr Kurien, ‘Look, there are enough stories here to make a feature film.’ And he’d said, ‘Go ahead and do it.’ But where’s the money going to come from? He asked, ‘How much money will you require?’ ‘About 10-12 lakhs,’ I said. He said, ‘I can ask all the members of the milk cooperatives of Gujarat if they would contribute to the making of such a film.’ And because they were so well organized, he could send message to every farmer – they used to collect milk twice everyday – not to take two rupees going to them, just once. And that’s why the film starts by saying, ‘500,000 farmers of Gujarat present…’
RS: The first instance of crowdfunding in contemporary Indian cinema?
SB: Yes, the first instance of crowdfunding. Later I made two more films where people similarly put together the money. For Antarnad the Swadhyay raised money through subscription. The third, Susman was about the handloom weavers of Pochampally, also a part of Telangana. Again, the handloom weavers’ associations put together the funds. So it became a series of crowd-funded films. There were no individual producers. The organisations about whom the films were, raised the money and eventually the film belongs to them.
RS: This ownership – was a hugely successful way of doing films!
SB: It doesn’t work in all conditions. You need to have a subject like Manthan, where you are dealing with a whole community. Or the handloom weavers, whose problems are more or less the whole community’s. A community where all the people are facing similar problem, going in the same direction. When the ambition is not individual but of the community itself, this system works very well.
Mero gaam kaatha (Manthan, 1976) Vanraj Bhatia / Niti Sagar / Preeti Sagar
RS: Manthan touches upon another theme: Untouchability. And there’s an undercurrent of commenting on our democratic system of voting, to elect a leader. Later you’ve gone into both these themes in a big way, in Samar and Welcome to Sajjanpur…
SB: There are several instances. I made Susman, on the weavers, and Antarnad, calling for a whole social change. Swadhyay was a social movement calling for the removal of caste inequities through community programmes. Later I made Samar from a real incident that took place in a village in MP. I picked up that incident because of Harsh Mandar. He’s an extraordinary IAS officer – a social activist who did a lot of work dealing with inequalities of caste. In Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten Lives he’d written about a particular incident of caste atrocity – and I took that story and went to the same village to make the film.
I also cast the original people there – the landlord and Dalit on whom the atrocity had been heaped. They came in crowd scenes as I had actors playing the characters. But it worked extremely well as the entire village was participating in the process of filmmaking.
Shyam Benegal making a point
RS: They contributed to the texture of the script?
SB: Oh yes! It was quite funny because the same people who’d committed the atrocities were now suffering them. It was a way of transcending the problem in some measure. It worked well for me – and it won the National Award (for Best Feature Film in 1999).
RS: Of course untouchability recurs but the theme that repeatedly returns in your oeuvre is the hold of patriarchy and women rebelling against it. In Bhumika, Zubeida, Hari Bhari…It is most pronounced in Bhumika – the biopic of Hansa Wadkar though the character of the actress is somewhat fictionalized. Here Amol Palekar says, “Maine usey keh diya hai that we will do the film.” In other words, ‘I have decided that you will do the film.’ Then Kulbhushan Kharbanda says, “Don’t do this, he doesn’t like it.” And Amrish Puri says, “You have not asked but I am saying, this is the reality. You have the choice to live with it or…”
SB: Hansa Wadkar has written very honestly, she didn’t hide anything. Nor did she project herself as a tragic heroine. Because it was such an honest writing, you saw how the relationship between the genders actually works. It is so difficult for our society to accept a woman who is not a daughter, wife or mother. Obviously this works against the woman. She cannot assume an identity the way a man can. That was the whole point of the film which was fairly complex but was appreciated in many different ways when it released.
But I must tell you about the release. When it opened in Metro, which played American releases at that time, it collapsed in exactly three days. The second release was in Ahmedabad and for some strange reason it ran there for three months. Then it was re-released in Bombay, and it ran for 25 weeks!
Smita Patil in Bhumika
RS: Extraordinary!
SB: Clearly, the audience needed a certain preparation to know what they were going in to see.
RS: We have many students here, so will you also tell us how you used technical modes to depict the different time periods in her life?
SB: Yes, I used technique – the way cinema evolved technologically. Until colour came in, cinema was B&W. But very rarely was cinema actually black and white. They were shown with a tint, either sepia or blue – and then came B&W and finally colour. Then again, Eastman Colour was monopac colour before Technicolour came in. Because it was the story of an actress I wanted to deal with the different periods by bringing in the quality of cinema. So the film starts in sepia, then goes into a blue tint, then B&W, then finally the two different colours – monopac and technicolor.
That series of technical change tells you of the period in which the story is unfolding. It actually begins in 1930s, and ends in 1950s. So, I was using the transition of time at many levels – even on the soundtrack. At times, I used News in the soundtrack. The year 1953 was very important for our character, and that year Stalin died. So you had the radio announcement somewhere going on about it.
I was enjoying using multiple levels of reference to tell the story. Afterwards, I was not quite sure how much was going across. Fortunately, the audience did not get confused. Maybe some people got it all, and some didn’t, but everyone got the narrative. Which is why the film worked. Some critics wrote brilliantly about the film. They analysed the manner in which these multiple levels had been dealt with. One of the best reviews came out not in any film magazine or daily newspaper but in Economic and Political Weekly!
Ratnottama Sengupta asks a question to Shyam Benegal
RS: Oh! Years later you made Hari Bhari – a different background, UP now, and middle class Muslim households, not the upper crust. And we hear the womenfolk say, ‘It’s only the food and clothes that the men consider their duty to give to women.’ With Zubeida we’re into royalty but again the women protest, ‘So many Do’s and Don’ts! I will not accept.’
With Junoon and Kalyug you move to another crust of society. But again primarily you dissect relationship. Kalyug is Mahabharat in a corporate set up. We see power play of the kind that is happening in UP even today. And Junoon again focuses on the conflict between the colonized and the colonizer, the oppressed and the oppressor…
SB: The reason for making Junoon was very interesting for me. We had an odd kind of power relationship with our colonial masters when the British ruled India. Normally the hatred of the colonized for the colonizer is unambiguous. But that was not true for Indians. There was a great deal of ambiguity in their relationship because, in many ways, the West was represented to us via the British. They created a bridge between the West and us. Partially that damaged us but in a way it also helped us.
RS: In education, modernization, languages…
SB: Also the communication system, the railways, the telegraph. All these led to the ambiguity in our relationship. Even when the Nationalist movement was on, led by Gandhiji it was non-violent and working on the conscience of the colonizer. This wouldn’t work anywhere else in the world. Not that it worked 100 percent in India, there were many other movements on, but largely it did. So our relationship was always ambiguous – and that ambiguity came out very well in the Ruskin Bond story, A Flight of Pigeons. It was set in 1857-58 when the First War of Independence was on. It is expressed in the tragic love story between this Anglo-Indian girl and her abductor, played by Shashi Kapoor. That worked well, also in the market.
RS: And also internationally!
SB: In fact it has just been restored and going to open in London.
Victor Banerjee in Kalyug
RS: Kalyug updates the Mahabharat theme of warring kins.
SB: It’s also a war between cousins. It is all a war for power. Political power, temporal power, industrial power. Kalyug talks of cousins going to war to take charge of an industrial empire.
RS: Also economic power, for that is how you rule today. You don’t go out and win geographical landmass.
SB: Absolutely. And at that time a couple of wars of this kind were going on, so it lends itself very well. Also the person who managed to transfer the story of warring cousins to industry was himself an industrialist – Vinod Doshi.
RS: Okay!
SB: It happened in his own family. I won’t name the group but he would take out examples of experience which became part of the story. Vinod gets credit for that also, as one of the scriptwriters along with Girish Karnad and myself. That whole film worked because the audiences also recognized it. What’s fascinating is that it was successful in parts where Indian industry is strong.
RS: Like Bombay?
SB: Yes, and in places like Kanpur. I think the performances helped. Shashi Kapoor gave the best performance he ever gave in a film.
Shyam Benegal with posters of Susmanand Trikaal behind him
RS: Susman resonates with us because today’s craftsperson does not want his son to continue as a weaver, the identity of his ancestors. He sees no future for a weaver. Has the story changed for our textile tradition since you made Susman?
SB: Susman was set in the Pochampally area not far from here, and you’ll see how the whole business of handlooms was conducted. The middleman took away the cream. A lot of that has changed since the cooperatives have taken over. But the handlooms have always had a bigger challenge: the mills.
RS: Technology versus human skill.
SB: Right. They have to fight technology through their craft. That works when, whatever the mills do, human ability can do better.
RS: Yes, their creativity is greater, and they are not repetitive. But with lifestyle changes how many people use the textile tradition that is such a strong heritage of India?
SB: These changes can be worrisome because we lose a lot of our culture since technology replaces what humans are capable of. That is inevitable – and that is also the tragedy.
RS: I have already touched upon the feminist aspect of Zubeida and Hari Bhari. I will now ask you about funding. Hari Bhari was funded by the Ministry of Social Welfare; Susman partly by the Ministry of Handlooms and Handicrafts. Did the ministries, and DD, support filmmaking because NFDC narrowed down its support for non-mainstream cinema in 1980s?
SB: Yes, the ministry supported the making of Hari Bhari. It was the first film I shot here, in Ramoji.
RS: You recreated UP in AP!
SB: This Film City had just started, and we rebuilt the mohalla here. Because the ministry had put money in making the film, they managed to release it in cinemas. We had already found distributors. But the ministry itself took 16 mm prints to the interiors…
RS: That’s where it mattered!
SB: …where it mattered, and it was successfully received.
RS: So these two films were promoting government programmes.
SB: Yes, one was social welfare and the other was family welfare.
RS: Tell me Shyam, when a film is funded by the government, does it stop you from critiquing the government?
SB: Not at all! If that is a condition then I don’t make the film. I don’t have a super censor sitting on top and telling me I should do this and I shouldn’t do that. That’s a given. If I’m doing a film I’ll do it my way and nobody will interfere. Otherwise I won’t make it. That has been my condition and that’s how these films were made. But I was fortunate that the bureaucrats I had on the other side – or the ministers – were willing to accept the film that was given to them.
RS: So it is not like an ad film that is made to give out a corporate’s view.
SB: These were not.
Karishma Kapoor and Rekha in Zubeida
RS: You made a series of films – Mammo, Sardari Begum, Zubeida, Hari Bhari – that look at Muslim women in post-Independence, contemporary India. In that they were unlike the Muslim socials like Mere Mehboob or Benazir or Najma. What prompted these?
SB: See, in India, when we talk about a ‘social’, in the old days, it really meant Contemporary. We had ‘Family Socials’ as against ‘Historical’ or ‘Mythological’. So the Muslim socials were contemporary family drama.
In my case these films were essentially about women – from different social strata. We normally make films about the majority community. We feel that if you make films about any of our minorities you may not get the kind of mass audience you want for a film to succeed. So 90 percent of the films made in India are about no community except the Hindus.
RS: True.
SB: I consciously decided not to do that. If you are a religious minority, it does not mean that your problems are any different.
RS: That is what comes through in the series.
SB: Yes, the problems are the same. That is why I made these films about Muslim men and women in domestic circumstances and I made Trikaal, set in Goa, similarly about Catholics. Because in any community, the problems are no different. Yet the deep-rooted belief is that if you make a film that you want the masses to watch, it has to be about the Hindu community.
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero
RS: Long before you made the political satires, Welcome to Sajjanpur and Well Done Abba, you made the documentaries – Nehru (1984) and Satyajit Ray (1985). You’ve also made The Making of Mahatma (1996), and Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2004). These were before biopics became trendy – Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013), Mary Kom (2014), Dhoni (2013). What led you to biographical narratives?
SB: All the biographical films I made are of people I greatly admire. Who had a great impact on me. I made the 3-hour documentary on Jawaharlal Nehru because I had been greatly impacted by him in my learning years by two books of his, Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India. Although these were a series of letters he had written to his daughter during his incarceration in Ahmednagar jail between 1943 and 1945, these were about world history. These are probably the best books on Indian history, although they are not written by a professional historian but by a politician who became the first Prime Minister of India soon after! And when I did Bharat Ek Khoj (1988) I took a great deal from The Discovery of India. and so Nehru – played by Roshan Seth – became the anchor for the 52-episode series encapsulating 5000 years of Indian history.
Later I made The Making of Mahatma from a book written by South African writer Fatima Meer. She wrote The Apprenticeship of a Mahatma because the whole political vision of young Gandhi had developed when he was in South Africa. He became what he became – Mahatma Gandhi – after he came to India but his entire learning, his university was South Africa. I made this film to understand how Gandhi became the Mahatma.
RS: Bose: The Forgotten Hero takes people through a journey that is so difficult to grasp. As someone who had made films on Nehru and Gandhi, why did you make a film on a person who is seen as their anti-thesis?
SB: They were different approaches towards the same goal – India’s Freedom. Each of the three personalities approached it differently but the goal was the same. I found it fascinating to study them because each one of them – whether Gandhi, Nehru or Bose – had an absolutely logical way of looking at it. But the logic differed from one another’s.
I was fascinated by Bose even as a child, because of an uncle of mine. He happened to be in Burma and was sent to Japan in 1943-44, because Bose decided there should be not only the Indian National Army to fight the British, there should also be an Air Force wing. My uncle was among the nine sent to Japan where he joined the Imperial Academy to learn how to fly Zero – the fighter aircraft manufactured by Mitsubishi between 1940 and 1945. After the British took over and WWII ended, he was released from a jail in Hong Kong. My father sent for him, and he stayed with us.
Subhas Chandra Bose and Rashbehari Bose in Singapore (Pic: Facebook)
RS: So you heard a lot of stories from him…
SB: … about Bose, which stayed in my mind for the next 45 years, all the way until I made Bose. Because, for me, he was remarkable in his bid to free his country from colonial rule. He was an extraordinary person. While Gandhi was a vegetarian, Bose had no food problem. On an occasion, he would love to have a drink. My uncle told me another story. The nine boys sent to Japan were having a drink at the send-off dinner when Bose, along with the others, was served meat. He asked, ‘Do you know what meat this is? This is beef. If you don’t want to, don’t eat it. But remember one thing: You will be in a war, and there’ll be no question of what you’ll eat and what not.’
When I recount this story some people get shocked. ‘My god! Bose actually said something like that?’ But he did!
RS: This was a soldier, the supreme commander of an army speaking…
SB: Absolutely! When you’re fighting a war you don’t think of these. Bose was a person with a lot of pragmatism. That made him so very different from the other leaders we had. A fascinating leader as far as I am concerned.
Shyam Benegal in a thoughtful mood
RS: Now I’ll go on to another area of filmmaking – Funding. Since you started cinema has gone through different ways of making. Today we’re back to private funding. Back to the old, ‘studio’ system where one director makes it big, then he supports younger entrants. Himanshu Rai did that. We’ve seen Yashraj Films do that. Now Anurag Kashyap…
But in Europe the story is different. There, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, cinemas like in Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland have declined. Again French cinema, which was never state supported, has declined, as has German cinema. On the other hand cinemas in Iran and China, which have seen state restrictions, have flourished.
So what makes for the rise of cinema in a particular country, a particular political climate?
SB: It depends on what the original traditions are. If you look at India – Indian cinema developed entirely in the private sector. There was no state support at all in the early years. That came only in 1960s when we were already the largest filmmaking country in the world. We were making more films than the US – totally unaided by the state. If anything, the state was earning a great deal by way of Entertainment Tax.
In such a situation state support may not work too well. With NFDC funding some directors did emerge. But the funny thing is, those filmmakers had to give up the apron strings of NFDC to succeed with the audiences. So you have different filmmakers making different kind of films. Anurag Kashyap is making films that a lot of people would not consider commercially viable, but they are a big draw. Ritesh Batra is making wonderful films, and he has no state support, and they are running well too.
So the whole approach in India has been very different. In France, when the Nouvelle Vague started, there was a lot of state support. Then there was a dip, and then American finance came. But French cinema never reached the quality of the Nouvelle Vague filmmaking.
And Poland-Czechoslovakia and so on were particularly helped by state funding.
RS: … in spite of the state control over the subject.
SB: After the fall they suffered. Today you don’t hear about Polish films in international forums as you did 15-16 years ago. The same goes for Czech cinema. So, ultimately, it is not how much money you get to make a film – what counts is how many outlets you have to reach the audience. That’s where the real problem lies.
Benegal’s Telangana roots: Shyam Benegal, B Narsing Rao and actor Shankar Melkote at Begumpet Airport. Narsing and Benegal went to the same school and college – Nizam’s College, Osmania University.
RS: Since this is a Masterclass, let’s hear the questions the students are seeking answers to.
Audience 1 – Ashwyn from Hyderabad: With respect to Susman you talked about technology versus culture. Today we are witnessing a similar situation in cinema. The use of labs – the traditional mode of making films – has come down and digital filmmaking is taking over. What’s your take on this?
RS: In other words, how has the development of technology impacted the art of cinema?
SB: Oh enormously! Don’t forget that cinema is a child of technology. If technology changes, cinema changes automatically. Unlike the art of painting cinema did not come with human beings, it is the first technological art, an invention of human beings. Drawing, painting, singing, dancing came with man while cinema was born with the creation of camera by man. Therefore every time technology changes, cinema itself changes. Its language, its grammar, so much else changes.
Look at silent cinema. Its vocabulary changed the moment sound came in. If you watch a silent film today, its manner of telling the story was through what later came to be described as Montage. And one of the greatest masters of using this principle was a Russian filmmaker called Eisenstein. His concept was this: you have two completely unrelated – disparate – shots. You put them together and a third meaning emerges. That kind of use of visuals disappeared when sound came in. You could no longer use Montage in that manner. The same thing happened when you got 3D images. Or wide angle. Or…
RS: Surround sound…
SB: Yes, Surround sound. The manner of storytelling itself starts to change. So a child of technology is always affected when technology changes.
Audience 2: Sir you have bravely shown Bose as an ally of Hitler?
RS: Sorry to intervene, but Bose was never an ‘ally’ of Hitler, and later he also says why Hitler will not come to his aid.
SB: You see, there are two ways in a conflict. One way is to say, ‘My enemy’s enemy can be my friend. Because the target is common.’ That was the approach Bose took. It wasn’t as though they were natural allies. Bose was not a Fascist or a Nazi but he took their support since they had the same common enemy.
Let me recount something Bose said to Tojo, the Prime Minister of Japan. When the Japanese wanted to march into India, Bose told him, “I will march into India, not you. I am asking you to help me but you will not march into India, I will.” There’s a difference in that, and that clears the misunderstanding about Bose.
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō in Tokyo, June 10, 1943
Audience 3 – Karthik: How important or unimportant is it to provide a closure to a narrative?
SB: If you think you are a teacher through cinema, then you can give whatever solution you want. But I believe filmmaker should refrain from thinking of themselves as teachers. There’s a difference in the two roles of a teacher and an artist. Filmmakers should think of themselves as people who express themselves through the art of cinema.
RS: That’s how they can help people understand a situation, draw their conclusion and find a way forward.
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