E-CineIndia/ Jan – Mar 2024 / Manas Ghosh / Page 1
Tribute to Kumar Shahani
Manas Ghosh
Kumar Shahani’s World
“The New Cinema in India represents our aspirations to free ourselves and become a selfdetermining people. The act of self-determination is one that has ramifications which go far
beyond those of ethnicity and poverty. It implies, more than anything else, the recognition of
a tradition as a historically vitalising and modernising force. It implies that we internalise the
new technologies which have evolved elsewhere and through other traditions, into our own.”i
(Kumar Shahani)
Kumar Shahani was one of the most published by Mrinal Sen and Arun Kaul. With
prominent film directors of contemporary these two established film directors, a group
India who practiced ‘epic cinema’ of youngsters joined the new cinema
successfully. Shahani started his film career movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
in the early 1970s. His name in the history of One of them was Kumar Shahani. Kumar
Indian cinema is listed with Mani Kaul, Shahani made his first important film, Maya
Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and G. Aravindan as Darpan, in 1972, and Maya Darpan became
a successful film director of the New Cinema a landmark film of New Cinema in India.
movement in India, which started in late
Kumar Shahani was born on December
1969. For reference, the New Cinema 7, 1940, in Larkana, Sindh, which is now a
movement in India started with a manifesto province of Pakistan. His family, during the
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time of partition, migrated from Larkana to
independent India. Shahani studied political
science and history at the University of
Bombay. He also studied screenplay writing
and was a student of Ritwik Ghatak at FTII,
Pune. Later, he received a grant from the
French government and went to Paris to study
cinema at IDHEC. He was taught there by the
famous French master, Robert Bresson.
Historian D. D. Kosambi’s writings also
inspired Shahani. In many interviews and
writings by Shahani, we find that he
acknowledges Ghatak, Bresson, and Kosambi
as his mentors. Shahani realized the
importance of myths and epics in interpreting
the contemporary Indian life from both
Ghatak and Koshambi. Laleen Jayamanne
explicates,
“One of Shahani’s mentors, the
Marxist historian of ancient India D. D.
Kosambi, has made him attuned to the
sedimentations of time and human praxis in
myth and the epics as well as in
archaeological artifacts, even the most
humble and mundane, such as microliths
readily found beneath the earth in Pune.
Shahani tells me that Kosambi’s decoding of
myth and metaphysical expressions have had
a lasting influence on him. Shahani’s
cinematic project entails a modern
reformulation of the ancient oral tradition of
epic narration and performance in order to
address the contemporary, and he says that his
task is made easier by the fact that epic forms
are still performed and therefore alive in
India.” ii
In Kumar Shahani’s film, the influence
of Ghatak and Robert Bresson was immense.
But still, Kumar Shahani could make his own
path in filmmaking. Particularly, his films
were oriented towards a political end, which,
according to Shahani, is a process of
decolonization of film form and content in
Indian cinema. Kumar Shahani borrowed a
lesson; to be precise, he learnt a style from
Ritwik Ghatak, which was known as epic
style, and from Bresson he learnt the
treatment of examining subjects before the
camera in an introspective way. Kumar
Shahani’s first film, Maya Darpan, shows
these features. Maya Darpan is a film that
tells the narrative of a young girl named
Taron, who belongs to an upper-middle-class
wealthy family in a small town. The film
adapts a short story by the famous writer
Nirmal Verma who belonged to the Nayi
Kahani movement of Hindi literature.
Verma’s narrative mainly concentrated on the
loneliness of young Taran in a semi-feudal
social set up.
Khayal Gatha
In Kumar Shahani’s filmmaking style,
like his contemporary Mani Kaul’s, it is
observed that he slows down the temporal
movement of a narrative. The space and time
exposed in Kumar Shahani’s films are slowly
moving, where Kumar Shahani tries to avoid
and deny the Western style of making
perspectives and continuity editing. Kumar
Shahani, from the very beginning, tried to
distance himself from the conventional style
of filmmaking, and he introduces a kind of
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Indian aesthetic in his cinema, where the films
to him were never narrative equivalents to
novels, but a film to him was a medium to
expose Indian societies in an epic style.
The epic style of filmmaking of Kumar
Shahani could be best explored if we discuss
Khayal Gatha. Khayal Gatha was made in
1989. The film shows the history of khayal in
Indian classical music. The origin and
evolution of khayal and the development and
modernization of khayal as a form of Indian
classical music were explored and examined
by Kumar Shahani in this film. Kumar
Shahani’s style, approach, and ways of
thinking could be best understood with this
film, Khayal Gatha, which is not really a plotbased film in the conventional sense but a film
that in every sense explores the Indian
narrative tradition, Indian visual tradition, and
Indian musical tradition. Shahani says, “Our
epic theatre not only used music as part of its
narration but linked itself to what we clearly
find as a correspondence with music in the
gesture and the use of verbal imagery.” He
notices his own epic style of filmmaking
through the prism of music. He made many
short films and documentaries, but the
number of feature-length fiction films he
directed is limited in number. Apart from
Maya Darpan (1972), in 1984 Kumar
Shahani made another film, Tarang; in 1989
Khayal Gatha came into being; in 1991
Kumar Shahani made one of the best parallel
cinemas in Indian history, Kasba; and in 1997
Kumar Shahani made a very thoughtful
adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel
Char Adhyay.
Tarang tells the story of a modern
industrial family in India. A strange dynamic
of greed for property, kinship complex,
entrepreneurship, individual ego, and selfcenteredness among Sethji, his nephew, and
his son-in-law is explored in the film, which
ends in guilt, mistrust, and calamity. Shahani,
being a Marxist, in Tarang analyses, a typical
Tarang
Indian bourgeois family, and its internal
dynamics from the core. Film critic Aparna
Frank explains,
“In Tarang, we are confronted, not
only with an unusual narrative structure, but
more importantly, with a story told through a
discourse that makes the spectator aware all
the time of a significant mediation going on
between the filmmaker and his material.”iii
Kumar Shahani’s Kasba is another
very appealing film which reflects Kumar
Shahani’s political ideology in a clear way.
Shahani, as a political filmmaker, is more
interested in liberal Marxism. In Kasba,
Kumar Shahani shows a family — a family of
a wealthy businessman named Maniram —
and other members of the family, his two
sons, his wife and the daughter-in-law named
Tejo. Tejo is always placed in a milieu where
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the space, particularly the landscape, the
house, and the surroundings of Tejo, as
Kumar Shahani depicts, are indifferent. The
indifferent landscape is very striking. The
film slowly unfolds many crosscurrents
developing in Tejo’s mind. A narrative space
is developed in the haveli of Mani Ram, but
outside it, there is another way of living.
Kasba
There is a landscape that is indifferent
but contains a normal flow of life. There is a
social life which is captivated in narrow
spheres of small businesses. Shahani actually
makes a parallel in this film between the two
ends. On one end, there is Maniram’s family
and the haveli, and on the other, there are the
surroundings and the village society. Kumar
Shahani’s films very earnestly investigate the
formation of subjects in terms of their
relationship with surrounding objects. There
is a strange interaction shown between the
subject and the material world in which the
subject is immersed. Sometimes matter exists
in its own right irrespective of the mind. Both
Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani unfold the
filmic space in such a way that the space and
the subject enjoy their relative autonomy, and
as the narratives advance a complex
relationship between the two is established.
Usually, in India, the political
filmmakers who want to make political
cinema follow a structure of strikes, industrial
settings, and factory workers, which, at the
end of the day, according to Kumar Shahani,
becomes an imitation of the Western
cinematic model of investigating capitalism.
But in Kumar Shahani’s cinema, the
filmmaker emphasizes a family, which is the
family of a seth, for example. Seths in India,
as we know, develop capital and circulate it in
trade and commerce. They are small holders,
yet they are a very important part of the Indian
capitalist system.
Kumar Shahani emphasizes equally the
structure of a Hindu family in an Indian
society. It’s patriarchal modes of operation,
the semi-feudal framework of morality, and
the deprivation of women as far as their
desires are concerned. It’s conservativeness,
it’s ways of operation, and the monetary
system that dominates an avarage rural Indian
society – all come together in a complicated
way in Kasba. Kasba is a very interesting and
introspective kind of cinema that exposes the
system of Indian society with respect to
capital and the political economy of morality.
It should be emphasized that not only the
political economy of capital, but the political
economy of morality and family structure are
also explored by Kumar Shahani in this film.
Kumar Shahani’s another major film is
Char Adhyay, which he made in 1997. Char
Adhyay is a novel by Rabindranath Tagore.
Tagore’s novel criticizes the violence and
dogma in the independence movement in
India during the colonial period. Kumar
Shahani is interested in this novel because the
novel is not only a narrative of few characters,
but the novel itself is a critical treatise on the
freedom struggle in India. In this film, Kumar
Shahani, following his epic style, examines
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two important characters of the film, Antu and
Ela, who are involved with a secret society
that organizes violent movements against
British colonial rule in Bengal. Antu and Ela
gradually understand the problem of
‘unconditional loyalty’ and ‘dogmatic
regimentation’ in the name of patriotism.
They try to dissociate themselves from the
secret society. The secret society declares
them renegades and wishes to perish them.
Kumar Shahani takes a Bressonian
style here. Bresson’s style was to observe
minutely the characters in
a milieu. Bresson’s camera
tries to find something that
surpasses the narrative in
terms of a relationship
between the object and the
subject. This very style
was followed by Kumar
Shahani in this film.
Though Kumar Shahani
developed his own way of
looking at the problem, the
Bressonian style here helps
him a lot.
Char Adhyay, the
film, is primarily based on
the dialogues between
Antu and Ela, where Kumar Shahani tried to
follow the Tagore’s lines meticulously. But
the way his camera constructs spaces become
very interesting. And this is very much a
Kumar Shahani style to overcome the
dominance of dramaturgy in the narrative. He
establishes a relationship between the
objective world and the character in order to
penetrate the outer shell of the narrative and
finally to enter the discursivity.
Another very important aspect in
Shahani’s film is his method of designing
sound. Kumar Shahani never designs sound
merely to follow the demands of the narrative.
On the other hand, in Kumar Shahani’s film,
sound follows a parallel development with the
visual. Sometimes silence plays a role in his
sound planning. Shahani keeps in mind the
role of sound in Indian culture. He
emphasizes the fact that 'seeing is believing’
is not the central reasoning in Indian life. As
a process of decolonizing Indian cinema,
Shahani shifts the focus
from visual to aural
perception, which helps the
viewer discover a new
method of reasoning — a
philosophical take on
cinema. Char Adhyay,
Khayal Gatha, Maya
Darpan,
Kasba,
and
Tarang show Shahani’s
unique understanding of
the role of sound in cinema.
Music
plays
a
central role in Shahani’s
soundtracks. He says,
“Music is perhaps the most
highly developed sensate
function of human understanding. One can
begin to speak of the aesthetics of sound only
in relation to music because it is this that
provides the most fundamental expression of
the states of being and of acting in a
continuously impinging disorder.” There are
several instances that Kumar Shahani mixes
up the classical musical tradition of India with
the folk tradition. Particularly, we can again
go back to Kasba, where, at the last sequence,
or probably in the penultimate sequence,
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Kumar Shahani’s camera shows a landscape;
and then comes a song. The music actually
holds a sense of movement, whereas the
camera very interestingly shows an immobile
landscape.
Conventionally,
in
those
sequences, filmmakers prefer to pan or tilt on
nature to add some visual movement. But
Shahani did the reverse in order to create a
room for the sound, and the autonomy of
sound is felt by the audience. The sound
designing becomes an out of the ordinary part
of his style of filmmaking.
In the history of Indian cinema,
therefore, Kumar Shahani is remembered as
an unique filmmaker who tries to observe,
examine, and investigate Indian modernity of
the 19th and 20th- centuries with the help of
some aesthetic, political, and ideological
imports from the Indian tradition. He is a
politically conscious filmmaker who never
entertained slogan-mongering but threw light
on some under-illuminated areas of Indian
modernity. Ashish Rajadhyaksha explained,
“Shahani has framed his resistance
through a curious strategy that must be
described as political, if not always
conventionally so. Focusing on the symbolic
significance of individual action, it has linked
such action and its capacity to perform inside
a specific site – an agglomeration of speaker,
author/filmmaker and spectator – within an
ethical universe. The ethics would be defined
by the transactions taking place between these
figures: transactions that derive from
commodity exchange, but which also signify
a new historical as well as performative
practice for understanding such exchange as
natural, gratuitous and commodified – which
he described as the epic.” iv
i
Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2015) Kumar Shahani: The Shock of Desire and Other Essays, New
Delhi: Tulika Books
ii
Laleen Jayamanne (2014) The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani, Bloomington & Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press
iii
Aparna Frank (2014) ‘Critical Review: Kumar Shahani’s Maya Darpan (1972)’, Synoptique,
3(1),
iv
Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2015) Kumar Shahani: The Shock of Desire and Other Essays, New
Delhi: Tulika Books
Dr. Manas Ghosh is a film scholar. He teaches at the Department of Film Studies,
Jadavpur University, Kolkata.