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How Shyam Benegal’s social realism opened wide the eyes of a 13 year-old, Joy Sengupta

Shyam Benegal’s passing, days after he turned 90 at a hospital in Mumbai have evoked strong emotive tributes, rich with the cadence that he brought to the screen

I was in Primary school on Delhi, in the mid-1970s, but already exposed to cinema– feel good Bengali cinema shown in Delhi’s Pujo pandals on make shift screens and commercial Hindi cinema in cinemascope single screen theatres. Oscillating from simple bhadralok Bengali culture to flamboyant, garishly colourful song and dance, lots of fights and melodramatic romps in the hybrid world of Hindi mass cinema, completely dominated by the very Big B.

My father was very fond of catching some strange kind of films shown on Doordarshan on Sundays, which didn’t fall into any of these categories We didn’t have television set at home in those days, not till my senior school days. My father used to go to friendly drawing rooms with TV sets (a rarity those days) to watch along with a neighbourhood, (quite common) these out of the box kind of films.

One day, he took me along. An obscure black and white film , with the kind of village I had not seen in commercial Hindi cinema (the real kind), with characters who looked too ordinary and too normal (my reference points were very glamorous and very large in attitude, declamation and action) going around, doing day to day things, exchanging glances and expressions. There seemed to be no recognisable plot, no formulaic occurrences, no set pieces of music and melodrama and no fist fights at all. Just some guy, who happened to be a young zamindar but looked nothing like Pran or Premnath in those palaces, some rural woman, who looked coy and silent and laboured away in a manner a Hema or Zeenat did not and another character, her husband, who was both deaf and mute, looked funny but far from behaving like a Mehmood or Jagdeep, just reacted to life with those large expressive eyes.

Some relationships seemed to be forming. The arrival of the Zamindar boy’s wife, seemed to add some tension. The rural woman gets pregnant, the deaf and mute husband of hers, goes to seek work from the Zamindar boy, who was busy flying kites with an enthusiastic kid, but seeing the approaching character, abandons the activity, gets a whip and starts lashing the deaf and mute mercilessly, while the pregnant rural labourer runs across the field to fall on her battered husband in protection, weeping, screaming, ” all he wanted was a little work, not any revenge for exploiting me…”.

The Zamindar rushes inside, bolts the door and pants and whimpers in a mix of guilt and rage. The kid who was so invested in flying kites with the young Zamindar, takes off from the plot, suddenly turning around, picking up a stone and throwing it at the house….the film ends…huhhhh.

I was puzzled, my pre-mature brain riddled with the images of that of angry young man Vijay jumping from six floors down to bash up a dozen goondas and avenging his family, while the police and heroine arrive at the fag end, with the theme song, announcing ‘The End’, on the faces of the happy escapist multitudes. That was my understanding of a climax and a resolution …but this throwing of a pebble by a kid?

What kind of resolution was that? I still remember what my father explained to me, then. The gist of it was, “this is the precursor to a revolution, the beginning with a stone, thrown by a kid, now awakened to existing class exploitation and hinting at a larger class conflict ” Huhhhh? Too heavy, too complex as compared to a simple individual heroic retribution?

But I understood this much. That it was a film about social churning, about an India which existed beyond the screens of mainstream Hindi cinema. The film was ANKUR, the director was debutant SHYAM BENEGAL and the theme was feudal class conflict and social injustice and the result was the eyes of a standard three student, opening wide.

That was the beginning of my tryst with Shyam babu’s didactic social realism, mirroring the resilience and resistance of the toiling masses: MANTHAN, the helplessness of the idealistic middle class in the face of a dominant feudal diktat. NISHANT, the emancipation of feminine expression in the face of patriarchy. BHUMIKA, the coming together of the masses across religion and region against colonialism, while the feudal lords remained blissfully immersed in debauchery. JUNOON, the politics of capitalism mirroring the Mahabharata, KALYUG and many, many more.

The peak being a television series unmatched anywhere in the in the world in its nuanced scope—THE DISCOVERY OF INDIA (Bharat Ek Khoj), an almost impossible narrative, to capture the long, complex and diverse history and myth representing spirit and soul of INDIA….which only a Man of unparalleled vision, profound sensitivity, titular intellect and tremendous understanding of the craft of images and words could wield and conjure….yes, SHYAM BENGAL epitomised the finest spirit and world view of our freedom struggle and subsequent nation building, otherwise understood as the NEHRUVIAN spirit, where tradition and modernism, the secular and spiritual, co-existed with an all-encompassing humanist outlook in seeking justice in a society riddled with the merciless bondages of feudalism and the shackles of capitalist greed.

Shyam babu’s passing away pulls the curtains on 20th century Indian modernism in art and aesthetics, flagged off by the likes of a Habib Tanvir and Ebrahim Alkazi in theatre, a Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain in music, a Sahir Ludhianwi and Amrita Pritam in literature, etc etc etc

Shyam Benegal the pioneer of parallel Indian cinema, advertising, documentation and above all, a guiding light for hundreds of apprentices across mediums, performed his final service to the nation with his series on the making of the Indian Constitution– SAMVIDHAN, an epic creative archive like no other.

Thank you, Sir. May our emotions on your passing, not end with penning obituaries but actually manifest the spirit of our Constitution which you so eloquently espoused.

Joy Sengupta

(The author, Joy Sengupta, is a well-acclaimed actor in theatre and cinema. Apart from awards won for performances in Hazar Chaurasi ki Ma directed by Govind Nihalani and for the portrayal of Gandhi in the ipic play, Samy  and the Bengali film, Bilu Rakhosh,  Sengupta has worked with legendary directors  Habib Tanveer and Safdar Hashmi. He is a teacher of Theatre in Education and used theatre for projects on literacy and social work)

 

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