For many of us, Shyam Benegal has moulded the way we ought to look at the world, at society. He has given us that framework through the corpus he has crafted over half a century and more. Sometimes he entertained us, sometimes he filled us with information — but more often than that he has equipped us with perspective. A pair of transparent glasses through which to reassess the society we inhabit.
Now when he is no more in our midst, when we look back to understand his work once more, one of the things that stand out is how he derived his characters from terra firma.
It’s a fact that Shyam Benegal was a Konkan, born in Mangalore, but having gone to school and college in Hyderabad. He repeatedly returned to Andhra Pradesh to root his characters in its social clime: Ankur, Nishant, Susman, Mandi bear witness to this. His Bengal connection is not negligible though: a simple scan of his life and art reveals that the City of Joy — the land, the language, the look, and the people — permeated his life with the scent of the soil.
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The images we piece together whenever we talk of Shyam Benegal are multifarious. Manthan is at the top of most minds since its restored version was recently released to a new generation of viewers. Someone might think of Bharat Ek Khoj. Some might think of his documentaries and others might think biopics. But whenever I think Benegal, I remember his determined thoughts when, decades ago, Geetakrishnan Committee wanted to snap the National Film Development Corporation and Films Division, among other bodies, under the ministry of Information and Broadcasting. “A development corporation can never be expected to make a profit," he had unambiguously stated.
Now let me focus on his links with Bengal. There's a difference of just one letter of the alphabet — E — in the spelling of the two proper nouns, Bengal and Benegal. I always addressed him as Shyam — not even Shyam Babu — although he was easily older by 20 years — and had always held the place of an elder brother.
When Ankur released, I was in the second year of college. I had of course already seen Bhuvan Shome, that had signalled the dawn of the other stream of cinema. What’s more, I was born and raised in a family which earned every one of its square meals from cinema. Indeed, I have cinema flowing through my veins. Yet, Ankur was a whiff of fresh air for me.
But my first interaction with Shyam happened almost seven years later, in 1980. By then I had married and moved to Kolkata and interviewed Ray and Uttam Kumar and interacted with Soumitra da and Madhabi di — and also Peter Ustinov. What hit me — and stayed on in my head — was a single sentence Shyam had spoken: “And then Satyajit Ray happened to us.”
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Many of us would be unaware that Shyam’s eldest brother, Som Benegal, was an ‘Honorary Bong’. His son, Vivek Benegal, used to write and review for The Telegraph in its early days. His involvement and interest in the arts was amazing. Som Benegal not only spoke Bengali, he spoke it accent free, colloquial. His thoughts too were very Bengal oriented.
But Shyam never lived any stretch of his life in Kolkata, so his statement had startled me. Already graduates of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) — like Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani — had convinced a section of cinegoers that Ray was nobody to be excited about, Sen too was nobody (I’m mentioning these names because they were all regulars at FTII for years). And Ritwik Ghatak was the one and only director worth acknowledging as Guru. But for Shyam, Satyajit Ray was a happening that opened a new world to him.
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Shyam’s father, Shridhar Benegal, owned a photo studio that was the source of livelihood for the family, which also owned a 16-mm camera. And much like Steven Spielberg, who had made a home movie at age fourteen, Shyam had made a film with his siblings when he was only twelve. “Fun in Holidays” was the theme. Here on he was drawn to the medium and he had decided that film was the stream for him. So after Hyderabad he headed for Bombay and took to making ad films. But the fascination for cinema and movies never took a backseat.
Shyam had another link with Bengal: Guru Dutt. This renowned second cousin of his — whose advise he sought when he moved to Bombay — and all his siblings studied in a Bengali-medium school and were as fluent in Bengali as if it were their first language — rather, their mother language. I know this because I’ve heard Guru Dutt’s brother, Atmaram, speak with my father, Nabendu Ghosh, during the making of Chanda Aur Bijli. But for Shyam, his soul connect with the tall man from Gorpar Road was a stronger kinship than for the cousin whom he “envied”, as he said in an interview. And he did a documentary on his icon in 1985, for which he had followed Satyajit Ray for two years, with Govind Nihalani and his camera.
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Prior to that Shyam had made Arohan (1982). This was a Hindi language film, but funded by the West Bengal government. This is a less discussed film, as is Charandas Chor, made for the Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI). Whenever the clever thief is mentioned we normally think of Habib Tanvir, but all of India got to know of Charandas Chor through Shyam.
Aarohan did not enjoy critical acclaim to any extent, perhaps because it tells the story of a farmer in a remote village of Birbhum district in West Bengal. After the Left Front government came to power, they initiated ‘Operation Barga’, the land reform program that was launched in 1978 to improve the economic status of sharecroppers.
The film starts way before that, in the late 1960s, when the Naxalite movement had started shedding its shell. The exploitation by the Jotedar — the wealthy farmers who were appointed as the landlords during British rule, and how a share cropper, essayed by Om Puri, stood up to him is the crux of the story. The film ends when he gets a Bargadar certificate and returns to the land he was thrown out of.
Shyam set the story in Bengal and got the support of the WB government — but it is similar stories of exploitation by the zamindars of Telengana — of women primarily, and of the lower castes — that he had recounted in Ankur and Nishant. Women’s exploitation and their efforts to withstand patriarchy — or societal power — was a strain that spun many of his scripts: Bhumika, Zubeida, Sardari Begum, all threw the spotlight on the struggle of the second sex in their quest of empowerment. And talking of quests, it reminds me of Bharat Ek Khoj: it captured India as a nation when Doordarshan was knitting the land through layered narratives — contemporary, epic, and historical. Bharat Ek Khoj, though inspired by The Discovery of India, was a retelling from the perspective of Shyam Benegal, a contemporary Indian who had grown up with Nehruvian dreams, lived through the Chinese aggression, the Pakistan Wars, the birth of Bangladesh, the Emergency, and was coming to grips with the consciousness of a New Age — the technology driven Kalyug, the Age of the Machines.
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Shyam Benegal did not fix his gaze only on our collective todays and tomorrows. He brought our yesterdays into our days and nights repeatedly. If Bharat Ek Khoj was a foray into our history, so was Aarohan, which many considered to be an account from the Communist perspective — or rather, I would say, socialist viewpoint. Equally, Junoon too was a peep into our imperial past.
When Shyam was growing up, Nehru was a magical presence. A dazzling personality, as he tried to portray in his documentary, Nehru. But Aarohan could have been set only in West Bengal, and it brought to screen the international actor from Bengal, Victor Banerjee, as the Jotedar. It also cast Sreela Majumdar as Panchi, and Gita Sen, the wife of Mrinal Sen. “She was perfect as Sreela’s mother, the widowed Aunt of the protagonist,” Shyam had gushed when she passed away. As a member of the IPTA, Gita Sen was trained in political theatre. So, though she was cast for a film when she met and married Mrinal Sen, she had kept acting on hold. Not one to bank on glamour, she brought depth of realism to the character of Mamata Shankar’s mother when Mrinal Sen cast her again, after Arohan, in Ekdin Pratidin, because Tripti Mitra had bowed out. Subsequently, she garnered accolades internationally for Akaler Sandhaney, Khandahar, and Chalchitra, all directed by Mrinal da.
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Shyam’s wife Nira is a Mukherjee. That makes her a Bengali — if only by her maiden name, since she was a prabashi - born away from ‘home’ — to a military family. They met when she worked at India Book House and he, for an advertising company. The two have a daughter, Pia, who designs costumes.
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His another link with Bengal is Netaji: The Forgotten Hero. Before that he had made another biopic, The Making of a Mahatma. He was much criticised by Bengalis for using the word “Forgotten”, but the expanse he captured, the journey he followed Subhas Chandra Bose on, was simply dazzling. Earlier we have seen such an expanse only in Attenborough’s Gandhi.
Shyam was drawn to the life of Netaji through an uncle of his who had been sent from Burma to Japan, to train in piloting the Zero fighter planes in 1943. After Netaji died and the war ended, Shyam’s father got his uncle to come and stay with them. Because of him, and through his stories, Netaji had become young Shyam’s hero — even as he admired Nehru.
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In 1985 when he made Satyajit Ray, he was a mature person of 50, and also mature as a filmmaker too, having started in the other cinema a decade ago. He always portrayed an alternative, an other India. Why is the word ‘parallel’ not applicable to him? Because ‘parallel’ or ‘new wave’ implied the trend of non-narrative unfolding of the script, as we had seen in Bhuvan Shome, in Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti, in Kumar Shahani’s Maya Darpan.
Shyam Benegal followed the narrative style of Satyajit Ray, or Bimal Roy before him, or his own cousin Guru Dutt, where the main storyline was not interrupted for stylistic reasons. That perhaps explains why Ray — who was rather critical of Parallel Cinema — was always keen to know “What next?” of Shyam”s oeuvre. Not unnatural, then, that Shyam was a speaker at one of the earliest Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture in Kolkata.
Satyajit Ray and Bimal Roy did not disown narrative-based drama — or is it drama-based narrative? Their cinema spotlighted the reality of Indians in various corners of India — sometimes the subject was a lady who went away from Bombay’s glamour world into the conservative household of Rajasthan Royals. Sometimes it was Sardari Begum who left a conservative household for her music. Sometimes it was the women in a middle class Muslim household of UP who want to opt out of being merely birthing machines. Sometimes it is an actress who strives to reject the stranglehold of men in her life. (Bhumika, incidentally, could also be counted as a biopic.)
Shyam was deeply interested in the social condition, the position of his protagonists. That is why he refused to be strait-jacketed by any definition like nouvelle vague or New Wave or Parallel Cinema.
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Mujib’s rise to power, The Making of a Nation, is a textbook re-telling of the story of Bangladesh. Anyone in a faraway continent, or perhaps twice removed generation-wise, will also understand that. It is another face of Benegal’s link with Bengal.
Mujib, unlike The Making of a Mahatma, is The Making of a Nation. When it released in October 2023 I was going to watch it at South City. Shyam said, “You won’t watch it in Bengali?”
“What's the difference?” I asked him. “Haven't you used subtitles in English?”
“Yes,” he responded, “I have used English subtitles. But I have cast people who speak different dialects of Bangladesh. I don’t know them but I believe that every dialect identifies a particular region. And Bangla, spoken in two different intonation, identifies two different nations! You won’t get this difference unless you watch it in Bengali. And Mujib’s journey unfolds the history of both Bengals. So please watch it in Bengali.”
This was an eye opener for me. We, the world over, celebrate Mother Language Day on the day some people gave their lives for their Matri Bhasha, their mother tongue. That same badge of identity became the seed that grew into the nation that is Bangladesh. I realised how Shyam underscored that it was not just another language we are talking about when we talk about Mujibur Rahman.
Born and brought up in Mumbai, I simultaneously go from Gujarati–Marathi–Hindi to English and Bengali. I have an entry into Assamese, Oriya, and Punjabi, too. Yet, Bengali has a different standing, an appeal. Because even the pronunciation of words, the cadences, and intonation of the language, is the identity of a people, of a nation. This is what Shyam underscored. His swan song is his signature in a certain manner. Whether Mujib ranks amongst his topmost creations by cinematic norms, whether or not it garnered acclaim and awards are debatable matters. But it speaks volumes on his love — his love for history, a people’s love for language, the love of a populace for its land. This respect he shows for the struggle that led to birth of a twice-born nation is unique.
And worthy of our salute.