The legendary Indian film director Shyam Benegal breathed his last on Monday and the country has lost a giant of cinematic caliber. The qualities of the global, the uncritically compassionate, the intellectually serious, the… human will remain with us in his written work. Using the tools of the craft Benegal contributed to the parallel cinema movement as a filmmaker who provided films that projected the India that emerged during the years of its independence. He was a passionate fighter for minorities, who stood up for oppressed in court, describing their experience, which was sincere, wise, and sensitive. As such for Benegal, cinema was also a purposive platform—there was always reality involved and it was given a poignant cinematic handling.
Benegal was born in 1934 in Trimulgherry a cantonment in Secunderabad to Sham Lal and Rukmini Bai, a couple firmly rooted in politics from Benegal’s early age. His relatives were the members of CPS, communists, Netaji’s Forward Bloc, as well as the supporters of RSS, so he met all sorts of intense, and more often than not, conflicting sentiments. But cinema was closer to his heart. By be-friending the projectionist in the local Garrison Cinema he managed to watch through the window films and became enamored with the process. In 1910, he chose a profession by endeavouring to become a filmmaker by using pieces of celluloid and a magic lantern. By the time he was 12, he acted and wrote his first movie: Chuttiyon Mein Mauz Maza shooting on his father’s 16mm camera.
Benegal grew up during some of the more turbulent political times. He was a student of reading habit, done theatre and editor of college magazine whilst at the Nizam College. He also saw the bloody riots that erupted in Hyderabad when the state did not accept its place in India after the end of colonial rule. For the Same, these tumultuous years shaped his outlook and made cinema a very serious business, for Benegal. though he was offered the chance to begin his career with his cousin, Guru Dutt, he declined to embrace the commercial filmic genres instead he aimed to make them like Elia Kazan and Vittorio De Sica.
Benegal starting his career as working in an advertisement industry. Girish Karnad recalled him as a brilliant cricketer who was also a whiz kid with a photographic memory. He was working at the National Advertising Agency there and it was there that he got married to Nira Mukherji. Working with people like Vijay Tendulkar and Satyadev Dubey Benegal was also inspired by Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali which forced Benegal to make films on his own terms was what he wanted.
In the course of making Ankur (1974) Benegal had stepped out of the expectations of commercial cinema. Introducing quite unknown artistes, it started a predawn in his movies where new comers from National School of Drama which include Naseeruddin Shah, Smita Patil, Om Puri and Shabana Azmi acted for the first time and rose to fame. Even at the sets which were a diametrical opposite of the star-oriented world of typical Bollywood, Benegal maintained the production design as a team effort. His style of working set up a positive environment that when everyone on the filmmaking team performed to the optimum.
Many directors including Anurag Kashyap have attributed the making of a new, serious genre of Indian films to Benegal. He inspired a generation of filmmakers, Govind Nihalani and Sudhir Mishra were students of him. He made a similar impact on television too; the 53 part series Bharat Ek Khoj provided a dramatic history and possible future of India.
While often hailed as a pioneer of ‘second/parallel cinema’, Benegal never quite appreciated this moniker because it resembled a subcategory to ‘commercial cinema’. He says that cinema is a progressive medium; he made movies like Satya by Ram Gopal Varma that blends his type of narration with economic potentialities. To that extent, Benegal’s intellectual and artistic ethos was evolutionary. His arrival trillogy Ankur,Nishant and Manthan brought him much praise for the realistic depiction of his characters. However, he never limited himself to the one particular style. Kalyug portrayed Mahabharata as a screenplay against Capitalism while Mandi portrayed the society using farce. It was absolutely historical with films like Junoon and The Making of the Mahatma; it tried to narrate stories beyond conventional techniques Trikaal and even tried some new modes of telling a story through Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda. Many years later, Welcome to Sajjanpur and Well Done Abba provided critically hilarious caricatures of the emergent India of the post liberalization era.
Benegal’s films had a particular focus on this area and often ventured an endeavour to empower women. Bhumika rejected gender stereotype and his trilogy: Mammo, Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa addresses identity inside the framework of minority. Inn forall his films, Benegal shed light on oppression and injustice from the woman’s point of view.
To his skilled storytelling, he was able to work with scriptwriters Shama Zaidi and Atul Tiwari, and composer Vanraj Bhatia for a long time. In terms of subject matter, Benegal was everywhere in India thereby making him a rare product that has a nation as its screen. From a small office in Mumbai, Benegal led and lived a life which was perched on cinema’s reconnaissance that can illuminate, inspire and transform. The monumental complex of films that he shot before his death can confidently be considered as his vision that will be left for the future generations.
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