The Shyam Benegal I Knew

His cinema of compassion inspired me, gave me tools to develop empathy for others.
But it also made me understand that serious, socially committed cinema with deeply engaging narratives and great performances is an art form to admire, appreciate and explore.

Aseem Chhabra remembers Shyam Benegal, who passed into the ages on Monday evening.

IMAGE: A portrait of Shyam Benegal at the Telluride Film Festival. Photograph: Aseem Chhabra

“You must give Shyam a hug,” Aroon Shivdasani, my then boss at the New York Indian Film Festival, said to me.

It was late August 2007 and I was heading on my annual pilgrimage to the Rocky Mountains for the Telluride Film Festival. That year, Benegal was supposed to receive a special medal for his contribution to cinema.

The first morning of the festival I went to see Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine at the Sheridan Opera House. Earlier that summer, the film had received the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival and there was a lot of buzz for it.

I saw Benegal enter the theatre.

“Good morning sir,” I said to him.

“I work with Aroon Shivdasani and she asked me to give you a big hug.”

He smiled and asked about Shivdasani. We ended up sitting together on the main floor of the theatre.

After the screening, I stepped out with to him to a coffee shop on the Main Street when we ran into an Indian actress. She said hello to Benegal. After she left he told me that was Tannishtha Chatterjee. He had cast her in his film Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero but she left the project for a German-Indian film Shadows of Time.

During that Labour Day weekend, I saw Benegal a few times and even ran into his wife Nira as we stood in the line to watch Persepolis.

When I told her my name, she recognised me from my Mumbai Mirror columns.

“Let me shake your hand,” Niraji said.

“You are Shyam Babu’s wife and you want to shake hand with me,” I responded with a smile, and thinking that perhaps I had finally made it.

Also that weekend, as I watched Ankur, as part of the tribute to Benegal, I thought about my life in the last four decades and how I had fallen in love with films discovering his works.

IMAGE: Shyam Benegal with Shabana Azmi. Photograph: Kind courtesy Film History Pics/X

I was in school when I discovered Benegal’s films.

In 1974, a school friend told me about a film that was playing in theatres in Bombay.

The film was Ankur, starring a young Shabana Azmi, who knew my friend’s cousin. The director of the film was a man named Shyam Benegal.

Decades before social media and the Internet, we would hear about films from word-of-mouth, articles in publications or advertisements on All India Radio. Even then, there was little written about Ankur and I had not heard of Shabana Azmi or Shyam Benegal.

Eventually, Ankur did play in a theatre in Delhi.

In those days, Hindi films would often open first in Bombay and then slowly roll out in the rest of the country. I watched Ankur at the Regal Cinema, a prime single screen theatre located in Connaught Place.

IMAGE: Shabana Azmi in Ankur.

Ankur blew my mind.

The teenager in me had never imagined a world in pre-independence rural Telangana, where class and caste politics played out in the story of lust, a liaison between a young landlord (Anant Nag) and the wife (Azmi) of a farm-hire (a superb Sadhu Meher) and the consequences — the beating of the deaf-mute farm-hire.

I had never seen an actor like Azmi — beautiful, seductive, vulnerable and gosh, her outburst at the end.

It shocked me out on my privileged comfort zone. This was the ras of a Shyam Benegal film.

There was a specific authenticity in world of Benegal and his co-writer Satyadev Dubey created that impressed me — the colours of Azmi’s saris, the way Govind Nihalani’s camera captures her tying her hair as she wakes up from the landlord’s bed, the dialogues spoken in Dakhni Urdu, the background sounds and the random characters populating the village.

One could smell, feel the texture of this world, believable, with flawed characters who were no heroes.

IMAGE: Shabana Azmi and Girish Karnad in Nishant.

A year later, Benegal was back with an even more powerful film, Nishant, a bleak portrayal of a repressive feudal system which leaves no room for hope for humanity.

Again set in the mid-1940s, Nishant was a tale of a village in Telangana terrorised by four landlord brothers, the kidnapping of a school-teacher’s wife and his desperation since no government agency was willing to help him, by challenging the landlord brothers.

Based on a script by Dubey and Vijay Tendulkar, Nishant was populated with a large ensemble cast of actors, many from the Film and Television Institute of India and the National School of Drama.

This would become his repertory company of parallel cinema actors.

These actors would appear again and again in his films and also of other film-makers working within the same framework of socially relevant new-wave films.

In addition to Azmi and Nag, Nishant‘s cast also included Girish Karnad (his first Hindi film role), Amrish Puri, Mohan Agashe, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and two actors Naseeruddin Shah and Smita Patil, who would change my life, how I would view cinema and my perception of what talented performers were capable of doing in front of the camera.

Ankur and Nishant were funded by Blaze Film Enterprises, India’s biggest advertising film company at that time.

IMAGE: Girish Karnad and Smita Patil in Manthan.

But for his third film in three years, Manthan, also referred to as part of his trilogy, Benegal found a unique way to raise finances.

For a story inspired by Verghese Kurien, the pioneer of the milk cooperative movement in India, Benegal crowdfunded the film.

Half a million farmers donated Rs 2 each to finance a film.

Manthan opens with the title card that reads ‘500,000 FARMERS OF GUJARAT present’.

Manthan was a dramatic story written by Kurien and Benegal, and based on Tendulkar’s screenplay.

A well-meaning group of people, including a veterinary doctor and his team, arrive in a village to develop a milk cooperative society. But their plans are hampered with caste politics and other rural complexities that city dwellers would never fully understand.

The film was book ended with the lovely song Mero Gaam Katha Parey sung by Preeti Sagar and composed by Vanraj Bhatia.

Manthan also won the National Film Awards for Best Hindi film and for Tendulkar’s screenplay. All National Film Award winners would be assured at least one screening at Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan and that is where I saw the film.

I still remember the sense of exhilaration when I went to Vigyan Bhavan for what was becoming an annual event of the year, a new Benegal film with same collection of actors Karnad, Nag, Shah, Patil, Meher, Kharbanda among others.

IMAGE: Shyam Benegal with Shabana Azmi. Photograph: Kind courtesy Film History Pics/X

With Benegal’s cinema the viewer was assured of films, laced with intense performances, rural settings far removed from the worlds of Amitabh Bachchan and the popular Hindi cinema of that time.

His films had a strong dose of caste and class politics that would make me sit up.

All my political and social education in the 1970s came from Benegal’s films.

This was until Saeed Akhtar Mirza also began to explore the idea of class warfare in films such as Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastan (1978) and Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Ata Hai (1980).

IMAGE: Smita Patil in Bhumika.

For his fourth feature film, in same number of years (in between he had also made a children’s film called Charandas Chor), Benegal changed the pace and the mood of his film-making.

Inspired by the autobiography of the Marathi stage and film actress Hansa Wadkar, he directed Bhumika and cast Patil in the lead, giving her the best role of her short career.

Once again, he dipped into the pool of his regular actors, Shah, Nag, Puri, Agashe, Kharbanda.

To the mix, Benegal added two new faces: The renowned Marathi actress Sulabha Deshpande and Amol Palekar, who until recently was playing the charming boy-next-door kind of roles in Basu Chatterjee’s films.

In Bhumika, Palekar played a negative role of Usha’s (Hansa’s name is changed for the film) husband.

One Sunday afternoon a friend called to inform me about a small private screening of Bhumika at Delhi’s Lady Shri Ram College. This was long before I became a film journalist and would be invited to press screenings and film festivals. An invitation to the latest Shyam Benegal film was the best gift someone would give me.

Bhumika stunned me.

By now, I had seen enough social dramas exploring marital challenges but mostly within the popular cinema framework.

The level of reality, the period details in Bhumika was of another standard, with a very different aesthetic sensibility.

The details of Usha’s childhood home, the costumes, the furniture in the home of Vinayak Kale (Puri), where Usha is brought after she walks out of her marriage to Keshav Dalvi (Palekar) opened up another world, another India for me.

Having grown up in Delhi, it was a world I knew very little about since I had not been exposed to Marathi cinema or theatre.

Since it covered the career of a movie actress, Bhumika was the first Benegal film to feature a number of songs, all set to Vanraj Bhatia’s music. He would not use so many songs in another film until 2001 when he made his most Bollywood film Zubeidaa with compositions by A R Rahman. For the title role of Zubeidaa, Benegal cast the leading actress of the Hindi film industry, Karisma Kapoor, along with Rekha, who had already appeared in one more of his films, Kalyug (1981).

Bhumika was a solid star-making vehicle for Smita Patil, much like what Ankur had done for Azmi. The challenging role covered Usha’s life from childhood to a middle-aged woman.

Patil was only 22 when the film was released.

For Bhumika, Patil won the first of her two National Film Awards in the Best Actress category.

In March 2023, Patil’s older sister Anita told me during a panel discussion that until Bhumika, Patil had been a reluctant actress. That film finally convinced her to pursue acting as a career.

IMAGE: Shashi Kapoor with Jennifer Kapoor and Nafisa Ali in Junoon.

After what is considered a minor film Kondura (1978), also shot simultaneously in Telugu as Anugraham, Benegal was back in 1979 with a bang. Junoon, his most expensive film to date was produced by Shashi Kapoor’s Film-Valas production house.

Kapoor had never intended to become a film star.

But as his star status grew in the late 1960s and 1970s, he decided to give back to the industry by producing quality art-house films.

To pursue this goal, Kapoor produced six films. But baring Junoon, the other films lost money, putting Kapoor and his family in a dire financial situation.

That Kapoor chose to work first with Benegal, was an indication of how well the director had established his credentials as the leader of the parallel film movement.

Junoon was based on a novella by Ruskin Bond, Flight of Pigeons. Bond’s story about the romance between a young Anglo-Indian woman and an older married Muslim man, in the midst of the 1857 Mutiny was set in Shahjahanpur, UP.

Junoon again turned out to be a project where Benegal brought together his group of actors like Azmi, Shah and Kharbanda. But this time, it was a larger team including Shashi and Jennifer Kapoor, Nafisa Ali, Sushma Seth, Benjamin Gilani, Deepti Naval, Jalal Agha, Tom Alter, Pearl Padamsee and novelist Ismat Chughtai, in her only film role, while she also wrote the dialogues of the film.

Junoon holds a special place in my heart.

The performances, especially some key scenes between Shashi and Jennifer, were among the best I had seen in my adult life, where I was beginning to understand the idea of good art in cinema.

In Junoon, they argued fiercely over the young Anglo-Indian woman Ruth Labadoor (Ali).

Shashi’s Javed Khan wanted to marry Ruth, while Jennifer’s Mariam (Ruth’s mother) stood between them, placing one condition after another. Meanwhile, Javed’s frustrated first wife Firdaus (a terrific Azmi) helplessly watched the drama unfold in her house. Outside, the world was burning as Indian soldiers were giving up their lives fighting the British.

Junoon was a wonderful marriage, a perfect example of different strands of Hindi film industry coming together, with a director committed to pursuing cinema as an art form, getting the backing of a producer who had the vision to finance projects that on paper appeared risky.

Kapoor and Benegal would work together again in Kalyug (1981), a modern-day retelling of the Mahabharat where instead of the Pandavas and Kauravas, we had two related business families in Bombay at war with each other.

Benegal kept busy through the next three decades and more, continuing with his quest to bring to screen stories of empowered women (Mandi, 1983 and Hari-Bhari, 2000), less fortunate citizens of India (Susman, 1987 and Samar, 1998).

He also transitioned to biopics of leaders of modern India (Mahatma Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose) and a trilogy based on the life of film critic Khalid Mohamed (Mammo, 1994, Sardari Begum, 1996 and Zubeidaa, 2001).

IMAGE: Karisma Kapoor, Rekha and Manoj Bajpayee in Zubeidaa.

When the parallel film movement started to slow down and eventually died due to lack of financing and distribution options, Benegal turned to television and undertook a massive project Bharat Ek Khoj (1988-1989), the retelling of the history of India based on Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India.

But Benegal never gave up or retired despite his ill health.

His last film was Mujib (2023), a biopic based on the life of the late Bangladesh leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

The film was co-produced by the National Film Development Corporation of India and the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation.

I was fortunate to moderate a post-screening discussion after the film’s market screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. Due to his health, Benegal was not able to travel to Toronto. Instead his screenplay writer Atul Tiwari and the lead actor, Arifin Shuvoo, were present at the screening.

My memories also take me back to the number of times I met Benegal after 2007, in Mumbai, Goa and also New York City where he was a guest at our festival a couple of times.

In the 1970s and 1980s, he was the angry young man of India’s parallel cinema. But by the time I got to know him, there was a warm grandfatherly touch to him.

He was always smiling, laughing and would often ask me about New York and the festival I programmed.

When I look back at my life, why I chose to become a film writer, Benegal’s influence is immense. His cinema of compassion inspired me, gave me tools to develop empathy for others. But it also made me understand that serious, socially committed cinema with deeply engaging narratives and great performances is an art form to admire, appreciate and explore.