Interview: Shyam Benegal

By: Neha Sarin-Malhotra

Bollywood writer-director extraordinaire Shyam Benegal has been one of Hindi cinema’s most prolific and influential filmmakers of all-time. Just how influential is he? Well, for starters, he is a recipient of the Padma Shri (in 1976) and the Padma Bushan (1991), which are two of the highest honors an Indian civilian may earn. Even more, not only did he claim India’s highest award for cinematic achievement (the Dadasaheb Phalke Award), but he also earned a National Film Award for Best Film a whopping seven times. Of course, when he is not busy winning awards, Benegal is creating new genres of film. Indeed, Bollywood had to come up with a whole new genre of cinema to describe his work. Known as “Middle Cinema,” Benegal’s work is part of the Indian New Wave, which is basically arthouse, or parallel, film. Among the films credited with founding this new genre of cinema were Benegal’s first four projects – Ankur (1973), Nishant (1975), Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977). Since, Benegal has come through with memorable films, such as Well Done Abba and The Making of Mahatma.

Buzzine Bollywood‘s contributing writer Neha Sarin-Malhotra caught up with Shyam Benegal and talked to him about his career and vision as a filmmaker

Neha Sarin-Malhotra: You have been in the industry for nearly four decades and you have seen Indian cinema evolve over the years. What, according to you, has been the most remarkable change?

Shyam Benegal: If you look at cinema since it began, it has grown at an average of six percent annually…but the base is always very small…the growth has been much greater now because of greater urbanization. India is becoming urbanized at a very rapid pace, and therefore the number of cinemas are growing. So what has happened is that the audiences are of a much more varied kind than they used to be. Also, because we have a very large number of languages in India, and each language has its own cinema among them, we have regional cinema, but the most significant of them are the ones of South India — Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. Telugu makes more films than Hindi cinema, and Andhra is a state which has the largest number of cinema in the country where cinema has gone down to its roots, to the most rural places.

NSM: Do you think its different for filmmakers today?

SB: Young filmmakers today under 40 have the kind of opportunity to make films that my generation never had. Ours was always an uphill battle to make the kinds of films that we wanted to make.

NSM: Who were your favorite filmmakers in the era that has gone by?

SB: Let me begin with the mid-1950s, which was a very interesting period for India itself like today is. Back then, India had recently become independent and there was a whole new nation created. There were tons of ideas emerging, and suddenly, in Bengal, there was Ray who had the same kind of arrogance that I had [grins], who, one-and-a-half decades later, felt that there was nothing believable in what was being produced, no human relations, and the content was all meaningless. He was one of the individuals who had decided to do something different from what everyone else was doing. His models were not films as much as they were literary. Then there was Ritwik Ghatak who was a distinct filmmaker who reacted very strongly to the partition of India. There was also Mrinal Sen, and these three guys’ work had a ripple effect across cinema. Then you had some wonderful filmmakers who emerged in the late ’60s and early ’70s, like John Abraham and Adoor Gopalakrishnan who began to emerge with their own new original voices. Then, of course, in Hindi cinema, I was there. There was this whole kind of scene that one might call alternate cinema in India. Not all filmmakers were successful, as the audiences were not always receptive to this form of cinema. Then came television, where there was an opportunity for the alternate cinema to work in the marketplace. Television came in a huge way in the early ’80s and late ’90s. There were many channels available to watch. You had new concepts, new ideas, and relations that develop with the media and a new way of mass culture. Television breeds a certain kind of mass culture which gets supported by all dominant forms of cinema. There is a certain kind of counter that starts to work. I cannot have just one dominant voice telling me what is good cinema and what I should be seeing, because that’s what mass media tends to do.

NSM: You started a wave in cinema when your movies became the face of parallel or new cinema. How did the idea of introducing realism in cinema strike you? Why didn’t you just stick to the tried and tested commercial cinema?

SB: It’s a very simple answer: Because I didn’t want to. The kinds of films that were being made were not only predictable, they were formulaic and, in my youthful eyes, they were also very dumb. When you are young, you are also a bit arrogant — you feel you have all the answers. You require a great deal of dissatisfaction to want to change things. That dissatisfaction was a very important thing because I felt that the kind of cinema that India was producing generally felt like the story was set in some sort of a cuckoo land — they did make them morality tales, but only when you are too serious to study that form do you realize that there are so many different types of moralities in that form of cinema. Why does an entire national audience go completely crazy over films that you would see and say, “This is such mindless stuff”? Why are people going gaga over these films? And then you analyze and realize that they are not going gaga over this stupidity — they are getting what they want out of them. They were morality tales — a manner of communication that gets the audience immediately. The audiences are as mindful and understanding as you and I are. It’s like if you were not cultivated into western operas and you were suddenly taken to watch an opera, what would you think? “Those women sopranos are screeching. Why are they screeching? What’s wrong with them?” This is what would happen to cinema audiences who are not attuned to seeing the more traditional forms of Indian cinema. To answer your question, younger people today have more opportunity to express themselves the way they want to, as opposed to three or four decades earlier where you would have to be fit into the form of what was being done. Today it’s easier for a young person to find their own voice in the cinema and not go into a magnetic type of situation and copy everybody else.

NSM: You didn’t contemplate giving up?

SB: That’s the thing — one should never give up. I remember I was shooting in an army area once, and there a regiment whose motto was “Bash on regardless,” and I said, ‘That’s it, my friends. Don’t think anymore. Bash on regardless!!”

NSM: You have received many awards throughout your career in cinema. Which, according to you, has been the most deserving one?

SB: All of them, in their own time, mattered most. You always have to relate them to the time when they were given because no recognition is for all-time. Each recognition is for a specific time in your life, and that’s when it matters. It’s not to be worn as a medal, as I’m not the person I was when I got the recognition. I have to keep striving to get better with the times. I can’t say that I have received the highest award from my nation and that’s why I should stop working. I’m not done. I have to keep earning my spurs all the time. The audience is not the same, and making a film is a process of learning, which is an ongoing process.

NSM: In the current lot of filmmakers, whose work do you admire?

SB: There are quite a number of filmmakers I like, all of whom have a strong individual voice. Look at Anurag Kashyap (Dev D, Black Friday) and Dibankar Banerjee (Khosla Ka Ghosla), for instance — both of whom are accomplished filmmakers. Both are individuals whose voices you recognize as being original. Vishal Bhardwaj (Omkara, Kaminey) and Abhishek Chaubey (Ishqiya), his chela, also fall under the same category. Neeraj Pandey (A Wednesday) is also a very fine and direct filmmaker. Also, Shimit Amin (Chak de!), the American filmmaker working in India, is good.