The Radical

The recent MAMI Mumbai Film Festival organised a special tribute to Kumar Shahani who died in February this year, at the age of 83, in Kolkata where he had settled over the last phase of his life. When I watched his first short film Var Var Vairi (1986), I did not understand the film. It is mainly about a young woman working at a weather station, which records the sounds of the waves and then tries to control it through the machines in the room where she works. She (Mita Vashisht) talks dietetically into the camera telling the audience about her work.

When I watched the film again recently, I still did not understand what exactly the film was trying to say but towards the end, I felt it was the story of two women caught between their love for the same man who, probably, has betrayed them both. I may be right or wrong but what I understood about Shahani’s cinema is that he wanted the audience to come and meet him halfway through the film and draw its own conclusions. His films were extremely lyrical, soft, subdued and understated and the contextual details were open to responses from the audience.

I told him this after I watched the screening of his moving, out-of-the box feature film Khayal Gatha (1989). The film is a beautiful, period visualisation of the Khayal genre of Hindustani classical music through fictionalised love stories drawn from classics like Heer-Ranjha, Roopmati-Baj Bahadur and so on expressed almost entirely through music, and sometimes, dance. The film also traces the relationship of Khayal with Indian classical dance. It is Shahani’s unique way of expressing the school of music through rivers, forests, birds, animals, love stories etc. From another point of view, the film explores the genesis and development of Khayal, which developed in the 18th century from earlier musical and poetic traditions.

Actor Mita Vashisht who made her debut in Kumar Shahani’s Var Var Vairi says, “I walked out of my final viva at the National School of Drama when my dean said can you do the makeup for a play for Kumar Shahani. Alakananada Samarth, an actor from Bombay who was his leading lady, was keen that an actor should do her makeup…. I did it of course. What better way to get a front-row view into the process of a director with whom there was already some talk of acting in his film? I listened to everything he told Alaknanda Samarth. Once, Alaknanda said she was walking a curve he wanted on stage, but he said, ‘What I want is an ellipsoid.’” Mita goes on to add, “To be an actor in Kumar’s or Mani’s [Kaul] films, you had to have an understanding of the spectrum of all the arts to be able to enter their worlds.”

Kumar Shahani trained at Film and Television Institute of India (FTII, Pune) when Ritwik Ghatak was the director at the institute and Mani Kaul was a contemporary. He is best known for his parallel cinema films, Maya Darpan (1972), Khayal Gatha (1989) and Kasba (1991). Maya Darpan is considered among Indian cinema’s first formalist films.

Shahani’s Bhavantarana (1991) is one of the most outstanding documentaries exploring the life of the Odissi dancer and scholar the late Kelucharan Mohapatra. Shahani went to Paris on a French government scholarship and assisted Robert Bresson on Une Femme Douce (1969). When asked what the experience was like, Shahani said to this critic, “I was inspired by the minimalism of European masters but did not shun decorative metaphors that defined the Indian tradition altogether. The foundation was laid by our director, Ritwik Ghatak who was the director of the FTII when I and Mani Kaul were students. He taught us never to imitate the filmmaking craft, technique and language from anyone, not our mentors, nor our teachers. Roberto Rossellini and Robert Bresson have been major influences in my work. It was difficult to shrug off the deep influence of their cinema on my work, but I fought against it to create my own language.”

Veteran film critic Khalid Mohamed who knew him closely, says, “One of Kumar’s cherished dreams was to make a movie with Dilip Kumar someday. On graduating from FTII, Pune, circa 1966, he did meet Dilip Kumar on and off. Their conversations flowed, sadly no project ever transpired.” He adds, “In a curious way, Shahani towards the autumn years of his life would suddenly pop up with impractical ideas, like a feature film with Michael Jackson and another one with Julia Roberts.”

Satyajit Ray however, did not quite like Shahani’s films with special reference to Maya Darpan. In his book, Our Films, Their Films, he writes: “Does Shahani seriously believe that the major outward manifestation of such suffering is a slow, rigid ambulation up and down verandas repeated every five minutes or so throughout the film? Film language would be threatened with extinction if this were really so. To me Maya Darpan seems a combination of poor psychology and poorer stylisation. Even the sophisticated response to colour goes for nothing in a film that is so gauche in its handling of the human element.”

MAMI’s tribute to Kumar Shahani includes the screening of his feature film Tarang (1984) which, even after so many years, is striking in its narrative style, it veers away from the style and perspective one witnessed in Maya Darpan. The story goes that it took Shahani twelve long years to raise funding for this film.

The movie tells of a very rich widower, Sethji (Sreeram Lagu) who lives with his beautiful daughter Hansa and her husband Rahul (Amol Palekar), a disguised parasite waiting for the death of the old man to control his wealth.

Rahul, a negative character throughout the film, commits adultery with his child’s ayah, Janki (Smita Patil) and with time, is indifferent to his wife’s reactions to the affair. But when the wife dies, afraid of kicking up a social scandal, he throws Janki out, making her walk all the way down from Lonavala (a hill-station mid-way between Mumbai and Pune) to Mumbai. Rahul does casually offer her a lift, but she declines the offer.

Though at times the narrative appears to undercut Rahul’s heinous act of adultery by suggesting his wife Hansa’s frigidity, in the end, in an epic-like climax, we discover him trapped in his loneliness and in his immorality. When he meets Janki in a dream-like sequence on a bridge, she finally tells him that she is not Janki, that she is as elusive as the ray of the sun at dawn, enigmatic, evasive and mysterious. She is no longer the self-effacing, supportive Janki she was within the narrative and cinematic space of the main film. The epilogue finds her gliding away ethereally, dressed like Urvashi, independent and liberated from the world of Rahul.

In the film, the capitalist boss Rahul, makes love to the wife of a deceased worker of the factory which he is manager of. He then offers her money, reducing her to a common prostitute.  Initially, she rebels against this humiliation. But, on subsequent occasions, she insists on being paid and uses the money to further the workers’ struggle for better wages and living conditions.

Shahani depicted a slow, languorous, almost romantic suicide in his epic film Tarang. Hansa, in love with her dead father, finds life meaningless in the unreal world she has created for herself. Within this space, her husband’s adulterous affair with the baby’s ayah, or even the baby born out of her own womb are neatly edited out. The camera moves across the screen almost caressingly, as Hansa wanders through the chambers of her palatial but loveless home on the verge of taking her own life. At one point, the camera leaves Hansa at a window and moves to settle on a nameless woman also wandering on a distant beach, barely visible to the eye. Both these moments open out the narrative space of the film to bring us face to face with a larger reality. Hansa’s suicide is visually arresting and its aesthetics is shocking. Her body is found in the bathtub of her bathroom, rose petals floating on the water surface, as if to simulate the rose petals she had dotted her dead father’s empty bed with.

Tarang is Shahani’s first, and perhaps, only film which follows a conventional narrative with a recognisable story where every scene flows like the waves of a river, endlessly, without raising a storm because there is a storm simmering under the surface, in the minds of the main characters each of whom has a story of his/her own.

About The Author

Shoma A Chatterji