Shyam Benegal, Indian cinema’s Renaissance man

Filmmaker Shyam Benegal died today in Mumbai at the age of 90. He was a filmmaker, storyteller, parliamentarian (Rajya Sabha MP from 2006 to 2012), gay rights advocate and more. He was not just a filmmaker; he engaged with the world and the arts in many different ways. 

Like his idol Satyajit Ray, Benegal was interested in the density of story, milieu, character and imagery. As Ray replied to his question about the importance of form in filmmaking in Benegal's documentary Satyajit Ray (1981): “I  would say that I am not interested in form to begin with. I’m interested in the subject, and density. How telling can you make your images and how much can you pack into a film without using gimmicks.” Benegal’s filmmaking oeuvre—24 films over a period of 50 years, beginning with Ankur (1974)—can be viewed purely as sophisticated, politically and socially engaged meditations of matter over form, density, realism and humour over gimmicks. 

With his passing, Indian cinema has lost a kind of talent that could contain multitudes of history, politics, entertainment, culture and artistry. His entire film oeuvre, and his pioneering work in television (which includes Bharat Ek Khoj, a staggering work of cinematic history, based on Nehru’s Discovery of India), rest almost entirely on two things: his engagement with the socially oppressed; and characters—often dark and comic at the same time—that populate this milieu. Even in his commercially most successful work, Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008), which marks an entirely new phase in his narrative style, Benegal does not desert these two qualities that characterize his cinema.

Benegal was never a confrontationist or a rabble-rouser. In 2010, he joined the Naz Foundation, in support of gay rights in the Supreme Court. In 2009, when government authorities in Tehran denied Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi permission to travel to the Mumbai International Film Festival, where he was part of the jury, Bengal wrote to the Iranian government and human rights organizations to help lift the ban. Most of Benegal’s films—from the darkly serious and self-consciously activist works of the late 1970s and early 1980s to those of recent years—have the same controlled way of speaking against the establishment, and for the marginalized.

Benegal’s childhood had a celluloid accent. While growing up in Hyderabad as a school-going boy, he regularly visited a small cinema hall meant for screenings for the Indian Army. He befriended the theatre projectionist and watched English and Indian films every week. And then his father, a photographer, acquired a movie camera and made films on him and his nine siblings. At an interview in 2012, Benegal told me, “We used to make our guests suffer with these films that my father made.”

In the 1950s, when he met Ray in Kolkata while staying with his uncle to participate in a swimming competition, the desire to make films turned into a commitment. At 39, after several years of making advertising films, Benegal found a producer for a film he wrote in his early 20s. That was Ankur, his first film.

Benegal’s transition from the parallel cinema days of the late 1970s and 1980s to that of a practitioner of what can be termed “middle cinema” was choppy. Many of the films made between 1973 and 1983 were supported by the government’s film-funding organization, National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). The idealism was contagious. On the one side were the multiple-star films that were feeding the masses and then there was the parallel movement spearheaded by the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) with Ritwik Ghatak at the helm and film-makers like Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul emerging. For most film-makers of this era, including Benegal, socially engaged cinema was a badge of identity. But progressively, as Benegal worked with actors such as Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Om Puri, Anant Nag, Naseeruddin Shah, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and many others, he became a master of the multiple-character film set in middle-class and lower-middle-class milieus. 

By the end of the 1980s, as the Amitabh Bachchan-driven wave of star worship and blockbusters was at its peak, parallel cinema directors jumped ship. The idealism and heavily issue-based film-making suddenly ended. The NFDC, which funded many of these films, pulled back, there was no distribution system in place and none of the filmmakers really carried on in the same vein.

But unlike most of his peers, Benegal immersed himself full-time in television—besides Bharat Ek Khoj, he made Yatra, a series about the chaotic and heartwarming confluence of community, caste, religion and humanity in the two longest train journeys across the length and breadth of India. These are some of the finest works ever made for Indian television. 

In the 1990s, Benegal made Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda, based on a novella by Dharamvir Bharati, Samar, a lesser-known, stylish film where he used the film-within-a-film format to explore caste prejudices, and then Mammo and Sardari Begum, the first two parts of a trilogy on journalist-filmmaker Khalid Mohammed’s maternal lineage. The women in all of Benegal’s films are industrious women capable of surprises and splendid nuances.

Benegal’s real change in idiom appears in the 2001 film Zubeidaa, which is his most commercial Hindi film ever—it had love songs picturized in lush, undulating landscapes, a prince, a mistress and a queen, and a surprising dose of schlocky emotions. The biopic on Subhas Chandra Bose, Netaji Subash Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005), Benegal’s next ambitious project, was not only a box-office disaster, but a film in which he failed to project the historical and personal nuances of Bose’s character. Less a human story than a pastiche of a documentary based on available research material on the Bengali hero, the failure of this film can be seen as another turning point in his career.

During the three years that followed the Bose biopic, Benegal prepared for Welcome to Sajjanpur, and learnt and unlearned things about the film industry. “I was never a pro- or anti-star person. The thing I am concerned most with is performance, no matter who the actor is. That may not work very well for a star,” Benegal told me the last time I met him, at the premiere of his last film, Mujib: The Making of A Hero.

Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and critic.