Introduction

Summary

Shyam Benegal is universally perceived as one of the most influential filmmakers from modern India. Yet his voluminous body of work remains relatively understudied in contemporary film scholarship. To help fill this critical lacuna, The Films of Shyam Benegal undertakes a closer look at the oeuvre of Benegal, a trailblazing auteur who has successfully redefined the contours of non-commercial Hindi-language cinema. This addition to the ReFocus series on international directors considers how Benegal, in the course of a scintillating career spanning over forty years, has made use of cinema as a powerful medium to faithfully narrate the story of a nation in a state of perennial transition. While Benegal’s peers, the makers of masala potboilers, have created rosy images of India, air-brushing the not-so-pleasant realities of post-Independence life, Benegal has unflinchingly drawn attention to the same with the aim of raising the moral consciousness of the viewer. In fact, it would not be wrong to assert that always looming over Benegal’s mind has been the inescapable presence of popular cinema, against which his alternative cinema could be said to have presented itself. For instance, as his debut feature Ankur (The Seedling) was being filmed in 1973, the lush romance Bobby, helmed by Raj Kapoor, widely regarded as the greatest showman in the annals of the Indian entertainment industry, appeared on celluloid and took the country by storm. In 1973 India also witnessed the release of Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer (Shackles), a crme-action drama that marked the introduction of the iconic Amitabh Bachchan as the angry young man and which turned out to be a blockbuster. Both Bobby and Zanjeer offer striking contrasts to Ankur and work as apt examples of the kind of cinema in opposition to which Benegal envisioned his own. As he himself candidly declares, ‘[t]he existing formal style of [movie making] was not suitable – I had no wish to work on design made films.’ According to Benegal, these ‘design-made films’ were:

A kind of Procrustean bed that shaped its content to fit its form. On the one hand it had the magpie-like ability to accumulate a great deal of variety to the entertainment it offered, but on the other hand the compulsion to picturize songs and dances in every film tended to circumscribe the subject matter of the films themselves. Often this form was a hindrance to cinematic self-expression.