While shooting Manthan on location in the tiny Gujarat village Sanganva, Shyam Benegal directed his cast to wear the same clothes for the 40-45 days duration. “You see, people in that very dry area went for days without bathing because they had so little water, so I told Naseer (Naseeruddin Shah), Smita (Patil), Girish (Karnad), Amrish (Puri), and the others to not change,” says Benegal, “If they stank, they would stink jointly!”
There’s something poetically apt about a film shot in blistering heat being showcased at this 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival (May 14-25), which has come as close to an Indian summer as can be, with a record number of Indian films showcased in different sections. Shah, whose first Cannes foray this was, did the mandatory red carpet walk, along with his wife, Ratna Pathak. But what was truly special was the long standing ovation after the screening. “I was very moved,” he tells me.
The Benegal classic was India’s first crowd-funded film: each farmer of Gujarat’s Kheda district contributed Rs 2, and the opening credit read, ‘Produced by 500,000 farmers’. Manthan, Benegal’s third film (fourth if you count Charandas Chor), after the ground-breaking Ankur and Nishant, is a lightly-fictionalised account of India’s most successful co-operative movement which revolutionised the collection and production of milk.
The feature was commissioned by Verghese Kurien, the pioneer who set up Amul, the nodal agency which connected dairy farmers directly with consumers: so massive was the impact of this radical move, with its illustrious linkages going back to Sardar Patel and his close associate Tribhuvandas Patel, that it facilitated what became known as Operation Flood and the ‘White Revolution’, fulfilling India’s founding fathers’ dream of making potable milk easily available in every home.
The 1976 film, written by Benegal and Vijay Tendulkar, came after two documentaries on the same subject. “Kurien felt that the story of Amul and the tremendous work done on the ground by the farmers’ co-operative needed a feature film to spread the good word, and that’s how Manthan was made,” says Benegal, 89. It won National Awards for the Best Feature Film, and Best Screenplay (for Vijay Tendulkar) in 1977, and was India’s Oscar submission that year.
The film acquired a post-release life, and its landmark nation-building status, by becoming a visual handbook to popularise the idea behind the milk co-operative movement, by far the most successful in the country. With last week’s screening in the Classics Section of the festival, in a sparkling restored version, Manthan got the grand revival it deserved. The restored print in 4K is a beauty, the vibrant colours of Gujarat gleam, and everything — the faces, the landscape — is crystal clear.
Benegal tells me over the phone from Mumbai how “absolutely delighted” he was at Manthan’s second coming. “This restored version looks like the film I wanted to shoot,” he said.
The film’s cinematographer Govind Nihalani, Benegal’s constant collaborator, is equally satisfied. “The negative was in a terrible condition when we got it in 2014 from Shyam Babu asking if we could do something with it,” says Shivendra Dungarpur, who has restored the 35 mm print beset by green mould and fading flicker problems.
He explains that the print was grainy and not complete, and there was no sound negative. “We had to do a lot of searching and matching to synch everything. It has been one and a half years of a crazy journey, and we are very proud of what we have managed. The film was shot in different stock, and Govind was very unhappy when he saw the original print; now both of them (Benegal and Nihalani) are ecstatic.”
Dungarpur, whose Film Heritage Foundation works tirelessly to discover and preserve forgotten prints of old classics, may safely be dubbed as India’s Cannes darling. Manthan was his third outing on the Croisette the third year running (Thamp and Ishanou were screened respectively 2022 and 2023 in the Classics section; his first foray was with Kalpana in 2012).
Health reasons prevented Benegal from being in Cannes. But present at the screening, radiating a quiet pride, was Prateik Babbar, the late Smita Patil’s son, as well as her sisters Anita and Manya. As was Nirmala Kurien, Kurien’s daughter, who has very clear memories of “watching the film’s first cut” as a little girl.
“My father was such a stickler for discipline, so he couldn’t understand the lax ways of these film folks,” laughs the Chennai-based Nirmala, 66. She remembers a “shy, unassuming, dusky” young woman in “torn jeans” standing quietly by herself on the day of that first cut, and then discovering what a powerhouse performer Smita Patil was, unforgettable as the feisty village woman Bindu, who persuades the other womenfolk to become part of the collective. Nirmala was resplendent in her silk sari at the Cannes premiere, “basking in the reflected glory of my father, who really was the man who saw tomorrow”, she says.
For someone who claims he doesn’t remember much — the film was made nearly 50 years back — Benegal has great memories of the shoot. The cast stayed in the only circuit house, “whitewashed the walls, cleaned up the place, and created toilet blocks (the villagers went into the fields in the morning)”. The cooks they had brought along from Bombay didn’t last long, so “it all was a bit rough, but I loved it,” laughs Benegal. “Amrish Puri would wake up at 5.30 and make everyone do PT. So we stayed in good health. And everyone became part of the village. And now I can sit back as an old man, and say we did that.”
Over the next weekend ( June 1 and 2), the Film Heritage Foundation and the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd are getting together to release the film in 50 cities in 100 PVR Inox cinemas. Mark your calendar.
A still from Shyam Benegal's Manthan. (Image source: Film Heritage Foundation) 
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