Tribute: The Shyam Benegal I Knew

[Left] Veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal gave us over five decades of socially impactful films that have left a lasting impression amongst connoisseurs of parallel cinema. (Photo: X/@FilmHistoryPics)
His cinema of compassion inspired me and gave me tools to develop empathy for others. It also made me understand that serious, socially committed cinema with deeply engaging narratives and great performances is an art form to admire, appreciate, and explore.
“You must give Shyam a hug,” Aroon Shivdasani, my then-boss at the New York Indian Film Festival, told me in late August 2007. I was on my annual pilgrimage to the Rocky Mountains for the Telluride Film Festival, and that year, Benegal was supposed to receive a special medal for his contribution to cinema.
On the first morning of the festival, I went to see Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine at the Sheridan Opera House. Earlier that summer, the film had received the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and there was a lot of buzz about it. I saw Benegal enter the theatre. “Good morning, sir,” I said to him. “I work with Aroon Shivdasani, and she asked me to give you a big hug.” He smiled and asked about Shivdasani. We ended up sitting together on the main floor of the theatre. After the screening, I stepped out with him to a nearby coffee shop.
That weekend, as I watched Ankur as part of the tribute to Benegal, I thought about my life in the last four decades and how I had fallen in love with films after discovering his works.
[Right] Actress Shabana Azmi with Shyam Benegal (Photo: Public Domain)
A teenage mind blown by an auteur
I was in school when I discovered Benegal’s films. In 1974, a school friend told me about a film that was playing in theatres in Bombay. The film was Ankur, starring a young Shabana Azmi who knew my friend’s cousin. The director of the film was a man named Shyam Benegal.
Decades before social media and the Internet, we heard about films through word-of-mouth, articles in publications, or advertisements on All India Radio. Even then, little was written about Ankur, and I had not heard of Shabana Azmi or Shyam Benegal.
Eventually, Ankur did play in a theatre in Delhi. In those days, Hindi films would often open first in Bombay and then slowly roll out in the rest of the country. I watched it at the Regal Cinema, a prime single-screen theater located in Connaught Place.
Ankur blew my mind. The teenager in me had never imagined a world in pre-independence rural Telangana, where class and caste politics played out in a story of lust, a liaison between a young landlord (Anant Nag) and the wife (Azmi) of a farm-hire (a superb Sadhu Meher) and the consequences—the beating of the deaf-mute farm-hire. I had never seen an actor like Azmi—beautiful, seductive, vulnerable, and, gosh, her outburst at the end. It shocked me out of my privileged comfort zone. This was the power of a Shyam Benegal film.
[Left] Receiving the Rajat Kamal Award from Pratibha Devisingh Patil, former President of India, for the Best Film on Social Issues (2010). It was for his film Well Done Abba. (Photo: President’s Secretariat, GODL, India)
Authenticity of art cinema that was a world apart
There was a certain authenticity in the works of Benegal and his co-writer Satyadev Dubey that impressed me—the colors of Azmi’s saris, the way Govind Nihalani’s camera captures her tying her hair as she wakes up from the landlord’s bed, the dialogs spoken in Dakhni Urdu, the background sounds, and the random characters populating the village. One could smell and feel the texture of this world—believable, with flawed characters who were no heroes.
A year later, Benegal was back with an even more powerful film, Nishant, a bleak portrayal of a repressive feudal system that left no room for hope for humanity. Again, set in the mid-1940s, Nishant was the tale of a village in Telangana terrorized by four landlord brothers, the kidnapping of a schoolteacher’s wife, and the schoolteacher’s desperation at the fact that no government agency was willing to help him in his fight against the landlord brothers.
[Right] Shabana Azmi and Ananth Nag in a film still from Ankur.
Based on a script by Dubey and Vijay Tendulkar, Nishant featured a large ensemble cast of actors, many from the Film and Television Institute of India and the National School of Drama. This would become his repertory company of parallel cinema actors. These actors would appear again and again in his films and those of other filmmakers working within the same framework of socially-relevant, new-wave films.
In addition to Azmi and Nag, Nishant’s cast also included Girish Karnad (his first Hindi film role), Amrish Puri, Mohan Agashe, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, and the two actors—Naseeruddin Shah and Smita Patil—who would change how I view cinema and my perception of what talented performers were capable of doing in front of the camera.
When 500,000 farmers crowdfunded
Manthan Ankur and Nishant were funded by Blaze Film Enterprises, India’s biggest advertising film company at that time. But for his third film in three years, Manthan, which was also referred to as part of his trilogy, Benegal found a unique way to raise funds. For a story inspired by Verghese Kurien, the pioneer of the milk cooperative movement in India, Benegal crowdfunded the film. Half a million farmers donated two rupees each to finance the film. Manthan opens with the title card that reads, “500,000 FARMERS OF GUJARAT present.”
The film tells a dramatic story written by Kurien and Benegal, and a screenplay by Tendulkar. A well-meaning group of people, including a veterinary doctor and his team, arrive in a village to develop a milk cooperative society. But their plans are hampered by caste politics and other rural complexities that city dwellers would never fully understand.
Manthan also won the National Film Award for Best Hindi Film as well as for Tendulkar’s screenplay. All National Film Award winners were assured at least one screening at Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan, and that is where I saw the film. I still remember the sense of exhilaration when I went to Vigyan Bhavan for what was becoming an annual event of the year—a new Benegal film with the same collection of actors from the pool of Karnad, Nag, Shah, Patil, Meher, and Kharbanda, among others.
With Benegal’s cinema, the viewer was assured of films laced with intense performances and rural settings far removed from the world of Amitabh Bachchan and the popular Hindi cinema of that time. His movies had a strong dose of caste and class politics that would make me sit up. All my political and social education in the 1970s came from Benegal’s films. [This was until Saeed Akhtar Mirza also began to explore the idea of class warfare in films such as Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastan (1978) and Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Ata Hai (1980).]
[Top] With Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, promoting Nishant. (Photo: X/@FilmHistoryPics)
[Middle] With the cast of Nishant: Anant Nag, Mohan Agashe, Amrish Puri, Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi. (Photo: Facebook/@bollywooddirect)
[Bottom] Directing Smita Patil: on the sets of Mandi. (Photo: X/@FilmHistoryPics)
The level of reality and the period details were stunning
Benegal changed the pace and mood of his filmmaking for his fourth feature film, Bhumika. Inspired by the autobiography of the Marathi stage and film actress Hansa Wadkar, he cast Patil in the lead, giving her the best role of her career that was cut short due to her untimely death at the young age of 31.
Once again, Benegal dipped into the pool of his regular actors, Shah, Nag, Puri, Agashe, and Kharbanda. To the mix, Benegal added two new faces: the renowned Marathi actress, Sulabha Deshpande, and Amol Palekar, who until then had been playing the charming boy-next-door kind of roles in Basu Chatterjee’s films. In Bhumika, Palekar played a negative role as Hansa’s husband (In the film, her name has been changed to Usha).
One Sunday afternoon, a friend called to inform me about a small private screening of Bhumika at Delhi’s Lady Shri Ram College. This was long before I became a film journalist and would be frequently invited to press screenings and film festivals. An invitation to the latest Shyam Benegal film was the best gift someone could give me.
[Right] Shashi Kapoor and Naseeruddin Shan in Junoon, the ambitious, multistarrer that blurred the lines between art cinema and commercial movies.
Bhumika stunned me. By now, I had seen enough social dramas exploring marital challenges, but mostly within the popular cinema framework. The level of reality and the period details in Bhumika were of another standard, and with a very different aesthetic sensibility. The details of Usha’s childhood home, the costumes, and the furniture in the home of Vinayak Kale (Puri), where Usha is brought after she walks out of her marriage to Keshav Dalvi (Palekar), opened up another India for me. Having grown up in Delhi, it was a world I knew very little about since I had not been exposed to Marathi cinema or theater.
Since it covered the career of a movie actress, Bhumika was the first Benegal film to feature a number of songs, all set to Vanraj Bhatia’s music. He would not use so many songs in another film until 2001 when he made his most “Bollywood” film Zubeidaa with compositions by A. R. Rahman. For the title role of Zubeidaa, Benegal cast the leading actress of the Hindi film industry, Karisma Kapoor, along with Rekha, who had already appeared in Kalyug (1981), another of Benegal’s films.
Bhumika was a solid star-making vehicle for Smita Patil, much like Ankur had been for Azmi. The challenging role covered Usha’s life from childhood to a middle-aged woman. Patil was only 22 when the film was released. She won the first of her two National Film Awards in the Best Actress category or this movie. In March 2023, Patil’s older sister Anita told me during a panel discussion that until Bhumika, Patil had been a reluctant actress. That film finally convinced her to pursue acting as a career.
Junoon, with an all-star cast, pushed the boundaries of parallel cinema
Benegal was back in 1979 with a bang. Junoon, his most expensive film to date, was produced by Shashi Kapoor’s Film-Valas production house. As his star status grew in the late 1960s and 1970s, Kapoor decided to give back to the industry by producing quality art-house films. To pursue this goal, he produced six films. But barring Junoon, other films lost money, putting Kapoor and his family in a dire financial situation.
That Kapoor chose to work first with Benegal was an indication of how well the director had established his credentials as the leader of the parallel film movement. Junoon was based on a novella by Ruskin Bond, Flight of Pigeons. Bond’s story about the romance between a young Anglo-Indian woman and an older married Muslim man in the midst of the 1857 Mutiny was set in Shahjahanpur, UP.
Junoon again turned out to be a project where Benegal brought together his group of actors like Azmi, Shah, and Kharbanda. But this time, it was a larger team including Shashi and Jennifer Kapoor, Nafisa Ali, Sushma Seth, Benjamin Gilani, Deepti Naval, Jalal Agha, Tom Alter, Pearl Padamsee, and novelist Ismat Chughtai, in her only film role, while she also wrote the dialogues for the film.
[Left] With Karisma Kapoor and Manoj Bajpayee on the sets of Zubeidaa. (Photo: X/@BajpayeeManoj)
Junoon holds a special place in my heart. The performances, especially some key scenes between Shashi and Jennifer, were among the best I had seen in my adult life, where I was beginning to understand the idea of good art in cinema. In Junoon, they argued fiercely over the young Anglo-Indian woman Ruth Labadoor (Ali). Shashi’s Javed Khan wanted to marry Ruth, while Jennifer’s Mariam (Ruth’s mother) stood between them, placing one condition after another. Meanwhile, Javed’s frustrated first wife, Firdaus (a terrific Azmi), helplessly watched the drama unfold in her house. Outside, the world was burning as Indian soldiers were giving up their lives fighting the British.
Junoon was a perfect example of different strands of the Hindi film industry coming together with a director, committed to pursuing cinema as an art form, getting the backing of a producer who had the vision to finance projects that, on paper, appeared risky.
Kapoor and Benegal would work together again in Kalyug (1981), a modern-day retelling of the Mahabharat in which, instead of the Pandavas and Kauravas, two related business families in Bombay are at war with each other.
A lifetime of impact: from social commentaries to biopics and more
Benegal kept busy throughout the next three decades and more, continuing with his quest to bring to screen stories of empowered women (Mandi, 1983, and Hari-Bhari, 2000), less fortunate citizens of India (Susman, 1987 and Samar, 1998). He also transitioned to biopics of leaders of modern India (Mahatma Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose) and a trilogy based on the life of film critic Khalid Mohamed (Mammo, Sardari Begum, and Zubeidaa).
When the parallel film movement started to slow down and eventually died due to lack of financing and distribution options, Benegal turned to television and undertook a massive project, Bharat Ek Khoj (1988-1989), the retelling of the history of India based on Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India.
But Benegal never gave up or retired despite his ill health. His last film was Mujib (2023), a biopic based on the life of the late Bangladesh leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The film was co-produced by the National Film Development Corporation of India and the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation.
The consummate filmmaker: Benegal was in his late 80s at the time of Mujib: The Making of a Nation, his last film, released in 2023. (Photo: X/@mubiindia).
I was fortunate to moderate a post-screening discussion after the film’s market screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. Due to his health, Benegal was not able to travel to Toronto. Instead, his screenplay writer, Atul Tiwari, and the lead actor, Arifin Shuvoo, were present at the screening. My memories also take me back to the number of times I met Benegal after 2007, in Mumbai, Goa, and also New York City where he was a guest at our festival a couple of times.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he was the angry young man of India’s parallel cinema. But by the time I got to know him, there was a warm grandfatherly touch to him. He was always smiling and laughing, and often asked me about New York and the festival I programmed.
When I look back at my life, and why I chose to become a film writer, Benegal’s influence is immense. His cinema of compassion inspired me and gave me tools to develop empathy for others. But it also made me understand that serious, socially committed cinema with deeply engaging narratives and great performances is an art form to admire, appreciate, and explore.
A veteran film journalist and a festival director at the New York Indian Film Festival, Aseem Chhabra is also the author of biographies of Irrfan Khan, Shashi Kapoor, and Priyanka Chopra. A version of this article was first published in Rediff.com.
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