Art, auteur and the missing angry men

An enduring memory I have of Shyam Benegal is an unhappy footnote. In late 2009 and early 2010, it was a tiny news item. That institution of a man, easily one of the greatest filmmakers in the world, in his usual quiet manner, disclosed he was finding it hard to release the Boman Irani starrer Well Done, Abba! To me that moment itself proved what was so wrong with Indian society, culture, and perhaps the world: A legend as Benegal, who made most films on modest budgets, stayed lifelong at an arm’s length from the ‘mainstream’, was struggling to continue in the evening of his vocation (yes, there was a time he and Shashi Kapoor did higher budget classics as Junoon or Kalyug in the early 1980s, but those were exceptions). What hurt was there was hardly any discourse over how there was little support for a director like him. All that while, Bollywood doled out its usual expensive midden.

Even today, in cinema cultures and industries across many parts of the world notwithstanding all the opportunities that independent filmmakers have, how is it that so many non-commercial greats and auteurs struggle to find funds for their films? It’s a confounding question. Which is why we have to examine the profound achievements of filmmakers like Benegal against the obstacles they surmounted or precious support they received. In so many of Benegal’s stories, there’s a consistent deep observation on the relations between the poor and the better-off in India, an ongoing theme in his oeuvre. I felt that same theme extends to the means through which Benegal achieved his artistic ends.

Somewhere here that question of the relationship that the rich, the poor and the middle class share, needs reckoning. In the Hindi cinema of the 1970s, there was a time when the mainstream urban hero was an angry man, and his anger was political. Alongside were the ‘parallel’ filmmakers like Benegal, whose protagonists were enraged rural and urban subalterns. So to some extent, you could confront the Indian elite and rich in both types of cinema. Later, it vanished. Why?

Lyricist and scriptwriter Javed Akhtar often quips a little simplistically but insightfully on how popular cinema mirrors social aspiration. In one recent clip, he said mainstream filmmakers of today have a huge problem. ‘What makes a mainstream film hero?’ he queried. In the mainstream, he said, it’s nothing but a combination of the values and the ambitions of the times. So in the past, the line between good and evil and rich and poor, and good as poor and rich as evil, could be relatively clearly drawn and stories written to that outline, and found acceptability. But now everyone wants to be rich, so you can’t be critical of the rich. That’s the challenge for today’s filmmakers, he explained.

In Benegal’s world, and that of the parallel storytellers, studying social relations became a lifelong leitmotif. And yet many of them were too learned and sophisticated artists to fall for binaries. Still, it’s a pity why their films couldn’t bust the charts. If at a time when a subversive mainstream Deewar could be iconic, why couldn’t Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh?

Another puzzling feature of Benegal’s career and of his peers, was the role of the National Film Development Corporation that produced numerous films of the ‘parallel’ filmmakers: A government institution that encouraged, produced cinemas of India that were so critical and almost scathing about Indian society. It appears so perplexing in these uber conservative, hyper censorious times where one is exposed globally but closed up nationally, that films of the kind Benegal created, were even made, and funded by the government.