Opinion Express view on Shyam Benegal: He leaves behind a cinema with a conscience

If there’s one thing today’s filmmakers can learn from Shyam Benegal’s cinema it’s that social and political issues are not at variance with meaningful movies. His films have stayed firmly on our radar for half a century — his debut feature Ankur released in 1974 — because they were a reflection of their times, and are as resonant today.

Indian cinema has had a vexed relationship with sociopolitical themes, even though there were always filmmakers who worked with such issues. Filmmakers in the post-Independence era were confronted with Partition and a fractured polity. A broad consensus-building nationalism was seen to be the need of the hour, and that’s what popular cinema placed front and centre. Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953) employed melodrama to give us a moving portrait of agrarian distress. V Shantaram’s Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957) used song-and-dance effectively in its story of prison reform, the strong messaging cushioned by familiar tropes. In the same year, B R Chopra’s Naya Daur told us that man and machine could exist. Benegal’s brand of cinema borrowed its bent, and moral conscience, from these filmmakers, as well as several others who highlighted uncomfortable truths. But his choices — a sparse style which was never austere, buoyed by a crop of excellent actors, and the use of wonderful music by his constant collaborator Vanraj Bhatia — did something significant. It made his movies cross over, and deepened the definition of “mainstream”, without any pandering — creating an audience base, and widening it, in a way his contemporaries of parallel cinema like Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani could not.

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Apart from Bhatia, it was his cinematographer Govind Nihalani who could read his mind, and helped create the striking imagery of some of Benegal’s most memorable films including Nishant, Manthan, Bhumika, Junoon and Kalyug. Benegal was amongst the first to establish, without really meaning to, what might be called a repertory, with many actors becoming fixtures in his work. His band included, among others, Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Om Puri, Amrish Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Anant Nag, K K Raina, Sadhu Meher, and Rajit Kapur. There was no didacticism. Benegal’s warm humanism, laced with humour, set his cinema apart and made it timeless.