I see the flaws in my films too easily: Benegal

CINEMASCOPE: Benegal says a filmmaker must invite viewers, not scare them away.

          

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Shyam Benegal is one of India’s most prolific filmmakers. This August, his 24th feature film, Mahadev Ka Sajjanpur will be released. It will join a diverse and vast body of work spanning ad films, documentaries and feature films. Rooted in reality, his films explore complex themes and send out strong messages. Benegal has also introduced to us some of the most talented actors of our times. But getting started was tough, he told Anuradha SenGupta in an interview.

Shyam Benegal: I had been to every single film producer I knew and I would always hear things that were very disheartening like saying, 'how do you expect this story to work in the market place?'.

Anuradha SenGupta: Between the time, you articulated the desire and the time you made your first film, you were 39, what kept you going?

Shyam Benegal: I articulated my desire to be a filmmaker much before I was 20. I knew that I would make films since I was 6-yearold. But the fact is that I actually made a film when I was 12 and it then stuck in my mind that I would make films on vocation. Whether it will be a profession or not, I did not know. I wanted to make my first film and I said let me be the youngest. For me, the youngest filmmaker was my cousin Guru Dutt. He made his first film when he was 25. This is one of the adolescent notions that I had.

Anuradha SenGupta: And then you confront reality?

Shyam Benegal: Reality is of many kind. It is very complex reality. But I was writing my script, rewriting it again and again which became my first film called Ankur.

Acclaimed as one of his finest films, Ankur is a powerful portrayal of changing rural landscape. It almost instinctively puts the peasant woman played by Shabana Azmi who made her debut, at the centre. And while she is affected by circumstances, she makes her choices that change her life. The landlord’s son, who wants to break from tradition, yet succumbs to its privileges. The story is still fresh in most people’s memories. It went on to win several national and international awards.

Shyam Benegal: It was a short story that emerged out of something I saw. And suddenly, things fell into place because of that one incident. It suddenly became what feudalism was all about and what change was all about. You see the world in an event and that is what happened and I said that this is the film I want to make. It then means that you have to create characters, you have to breathe life into them, allow them to function, and they have to grow organically with the story. You cannot have contrivances. Most films are like that.

Anuradha SenGupta: Were you taken aback by the accolade and the formal recognition that you got in terms of award?

Shyam Benegal: Yes, when you get many awards and the film does well in the market place, you are on top of the world, I don’t think I have the personality to suffer from any kind of hubris. I don’t feel invincible because of momentary success or even consistent success. I am one of those people who think anything can go wrong.

Anuradha SenGupta: How do you manage to remain so rooted?

Shyam Benegal: It’s a good question but I don’t know how to answer that question. But the most important thing is once you’ve done something, it’s behind you, you know. That’s not the boat on which you ride, so you have to give that up. The moment you made your film, you cut the umbilical cord, you get on with something else.

Anuradha SenGupta: Is it also because it has been – while you have always found funding for your films, it’s not always and regularly been easy to do so…

Shyam Benegal: Oh yes, absolutely. That was one of the major reasons, I should imagine. Once you’ve made certain kind of choices, it’s not easy because; it’s easy if you go with the main flow, you know? Then you don’t have to worry about things. But then, I don’t have the sensibility to go with the main flow because I would always question that.

Anuradha SenGupta: In fact, you said you would like to have made a film by 25. One of the reasons was because your cousin Guru Dutt did that, but you didn’t make his kind of films at all.

Shyam Benegal: Not at all. The important thing is that you always have an impossible dream which you want to make possible. Otherwise, what’s the point of that dream?

Anuradha SenGupta: Satyajit Ray is a film-maker you have held in great esteem, whom you documented for us. Tell us why he inspired you so much.

Shyam Benegal: This uncle of mine who lived in Calcutta said, “Have you seen – because I know your interest in cinema – have you seen this young man’s film called Pather Panchali?” So, I said no, and he said, “Why don’t you go and take a look at it?” I went and I was absolutely floored by this incredible film, and during that one trip – I was in Calcutta – I saw it a dozen times. It was like an explosion that had taken place in my mind. I said, “This man is doing something that is so different from everything that I have ever seen.” So when I saw Satyajit Ray’s films, I said, “My God! Here’s this man” –

Anuradha SenGupta: - this is what I want to make?

Shyam Benegal: No, this is not what I want to make. I can make my own way – that’s what I learnt from him, because he made his own way.

Benegal’s next release will be a comic satire about a letter-writer who’s unique vocation gives him power over the people whose letters he reads and writes. The film shifts Benegal’s gaze back to a setting which has always interested him – the village.

Shyam Benegal: It was fairly accidental that my first three films happened to be rural, so everybody thought I was only making films about rural India, which is not true. I did all kinds of films – I did urban films, I did contemporary urban films, I did historical films. I mean, all sorts of things.

Anuradha SenGupta: And yet, with your next film, you’re going right back there.

Shyam Benegal: That’s because I do believe that we should look at–that these things should not get off our sight-lens. Not only are they part of our world, it’s a huge part of our world. And when we talk about tradition and modernity and movement from tradition to modernity, and how to reconcile our traditions that we do not wish to lose with the kind modernity we are going ahead with–all these questions that constantly people worry about, and our cinemas, our cinemas, our saas-bahu serials and soap operas always lauding traditions but nobody being really traditional out there. Somehow, we have relegated the village to a penumbral darkness.

Anuradha SenGupta: In your new film–it’s a sort of comic satire–so you are not looking at the kind of conflicts, the kind of –

Shyam Benegal: I am! I am looking at everything.

Anuradha SenGupta: But with a different brush?

Shyam Benegal: But with a different brush. 30 years ago, 35 years ago, when I was making films, audiences, young audiences would be willing to look at something serious and take it home with them. Now you reject everything like that. Suddenly, you say I don’t want to see anything that is grim, I don’t want to see anything that is going to give me a bad night. Then you have to find strategies to bring that back into your consciousness, but you have to use different strategies. You can’t use the same strategies that you may have used 35-30 years ago. Because today if you use that, there’s a blank wall.

And yet, Shyam Benegal is certain that cinema is not just a fun thing, not just time-pass. His movies reflect his deep intellectual engagement with the world and his eclectic upbringing. He remembers a childhood where his father, a still photographer, would make home films with a Bolex camera. And passionate dinner-table discussions with siblings and visiting relatives.

Shyam Benegal: Cousins and folks who would come and with different political viewpoints, which was also very important because I had my oldest brother sitting in Calcutta, who was being vastly influenced by Left politics. Then, I had a brother in my own home, my older brother, with RSS leanings. So our dinner-table was one of great scintillating and often fairly acrimonious arguments. You never felt that you were living in a little pond – the outside world was always a part of where you were. Although we lived in a very small place, in a little cantonment town, but the world was never far.

Right from the start women have played a central role in Benegal’s movies but the highlight would be Bhoomika based on Marathi film actor Hansa Wadekar’s life.

In 1983, with a fantastic ensemble cast of Mandi, Benegal turned spotlight on one of the society's most exploited roles for women, prostitution. Passionate and funny, Mandi is one of Shyam Benegal’s sharpest films.

Anuradha SenGupta: What made you treat women like normal human beings?

Shyam Benegal: Because they are normal human beings.

Anuradha SenGupta: But it was so easy for you to have grown up believing something else.

Shyam Benegal: Yes maybe. But it’s also because of my own background. I had six sisters, three brothers...

Anuradha SenGupta: And I believe that your father actually discriminated against the boys even in investing in education.

Shyam Benegal: Yes that did matter. Independence for women is a very important thing for me. Society will always see women as victims. And the moment you see a woman as a victim, you already weakened her.

Anuradha SenGupta: Talking about women, two wonderful actors that you introduced us to, Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil. How are they such brilliant and wonderful actors?

Shyam Benegal: Many things. Firstly because the kind of people they are. Also their background and the kind of experiences they brought to people...

Anuradha SenGupta: Similar to yours in that sense?

Shyam Benegal: To some extent, yes but even much more. Take Shabana for instance, her parents were Communists, she lived in a commune, the experiences she had even as a child are those which very few children would have. She can internalise so many different things, which can emerge in a performance. Smita did the same. Although she was not a trained actress, she came from a politically active family. So the concerns went beyond themselves and beyond their own lives and the betterment of their own lives. It went beyond that.

Anuradha SenGupta: Girish Karnad has said that this famous rivalry that the whole world even today keeps eluding to is rivalry that stems from the fact that both of them were rivals for your affection, or to be number one with you. Do you agree with that?

Shyam Benegal: Oh no. I think that Girish tends to exaggerate these things. I don’t really believe in all that. Although I think Girish himself, his contribution to my work has been great. I have a great admiration for him.

Anuradha SenGupta: But you don’t agree with the statements of his?

Shyam Benegal: No I don’t agree with them.

In 1993, itching to experiment with form, Benegal made Suraj Ka Saatva Ghoda based on Dharamveer Bharati’s novel. He is quick to say that if the audience doesn't get it, then filmmaker needs to go back to the drawing board.

Shyam Benegal: I don’t believe that a filmmaker should intimidate the audience. It's easy to intimidate an audience because of the position that you are in. But what is the point? Because you actually then drive them away. You should invite them into your world. Invite them with every strategic device you can put together.

Anuradha SenGupta: What do you do when they reject you?

Shyam Benegal: You try again. It is a very simple thing.

Anuradha SenGupta: You see it as your failure as a craftsperson or you see it as their inability to match up?

Shyam Benegal: I have never thought that the audience was incapable of understanding anything.

At 73, Benegal has won every accolade that the country has to offer. He was nominated into the Rajya Sabha in 2006 and is in a hurry to make his next film, the one that will have his trademark style and characters. This filmmaker wants his audience to find their own morality.

Anuradha SenGupta: Are you ambivalent then?

Shyam Benegal: I am not ambivalent. I do want people to realise that you know when some does something wrong or falls foul in the society’s accepted norms.

Anuradha SenGupta: The brothers in Nishant?

Shyam Benegal: They are the kind of people. They enjoy power because it is sanctified by tradition. But they are villains in terms of social norms. But I am not painting them myself. There is a human aspect to everybody.

Anuradha SenGupta: What stops you from playing God?

Shyam Benegal: Because I am not good. Most filmmakers can because you are in a position to play God. But in life, you cannot be so judgmental about everybody and everything. Sometimes justice and law are not always on the same side. And you will not be able to look at all that if you were to be totally judgmental.

Anuradha SenGupta: Out of the body of work which you have for us, which films do you think are more emotional in their appeal?

Shyam Benegal: For audience, Ankur continues to have that kind of a charge.

Anuradha SenGupta: No, I am saying for Shyam Benegal.

Shyam Benegal: I see the flaws in my films too easily but I can tell you that there are some films that I can see and some films I cannot see in their entirety. Like I can see a film like Bhoomika, Mandi and enjoy it. I can also see films like Mammo but there are some films which I cant sit through. I won’t name them. I have made them and I have made many mistakes in them.

Anuradha SenGupta: There is a strong intellectual base to everything that you are doing. What is the emotion that gets you personally?

Shyam Benegal: Most important thing is compassion for me. Because there is no other greater binding force than compassion. And if I can get in the right situation and get my audience involved in a compassionate way. I see that as an achievement.

Anuradha SenGupta: Thank you. We look forward to your next film.