Chapter 3 - Churning Out Change: A Moment of Reading Manthan

Summary

This chapter animates the concerns of caste as they are being churned out in the film Manthan (The Churning, 1976). In the film, the caste politics, operating around a milk-producing village of Gujarat called Sema, are traversed by the dilemmas of nation-building. The film also takes up some issues concerning gender and in certain ways subsumes them within the wider questions it addresses. Manthan provokes change. It opens the seemingly idyllic village up to the statist project of development. Calling upon an initiative of setting up a dairy co-operative society, it eventually stirs up the whole village. Beginning with an effort to confront the deceitful business terms between the local milk-producers and the profiteering middle-men (selling the low-priced milk in urban markets at an inflated rate) the ‘society’ eventually goads the feudal caste-class edifice of the village. This chapter is an attempt to posit the film and its dealing with the caste processes within three specific discourses on the ‘village’ initiated by M. K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr B. R. Ambedkar. As a self-declared Nehruvian, Benegal upholds a socialistic pattern of nation-building. Socialist development absorbs the village into the wider project of planned economy and industrialisation, electoral democracy and secularism. More than an analysis of the cinematic structure of the film, the point here is to ponder on the thematic nuances through which Benegal’s ideological engagement with liberal democracy is being depicted. In tandem with its content, the film also bears the mark of a change in the genre called Hindi cinema.

Shyam Benegal, one of the pioneers of parallel cinema, a pan-Indian event of the rise of realist film in the 1970s and 1980s, comes up with a rural trilogy early in his career. His debut film Ankur (The Seedling, 1974) is followed by Nishant (Night’s End, 1975) and Manthan. All three films address the transformative processes of feudal India in terms of ownership and power. Going beyond the Bollywood formulae, parallel cinema adapted realist aesthetics, psychological depth and regionalism to represent people striving against post-colonial predicaments. Financed by the members of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation, each of whom contributed two Indian rupees, the film upholds the incredible power of cinema.