kumar shahani

the shock of desire

and other essays

edited & introduced by

Ashish Rajadhyaksha
 1

‘The word no longer speaks for itself. It constructs an image. It does not describe.
An aspiration turns into an object impeding its own progress.’ – Kumar Shahani
fig. 1 Khayal Gatha (1988): Alaknanda Samarth as the Oedipal sphinx.
fig. 2 Char Adhyay (1997): shots of weavers, a village woman getting up in a hurry,
a policeman exiting a hut, a bloody knife thrown on muslin – the montage sequence
that presages Ela’s death.
 kumar shahani
the shock of desire
and other essays

edited & introduced by

Ashish Rajadhyaksha
2

Tulika Books
Published by Ashish Rajadhyaksha has shown a determination to overcome fashionable and therefore hegemonic terms of discourse
Tulika Books ever since I have known him. It takes a lot of courage to do so, in a world hell-bent on bringing back slavery – ironically, a
35 A/1 Shahpur Jat, New Delhi 110 049, India
slavery based on monetization!
in association with I remember one morning long ago when he had come over to share with me his aspirations to deepen his study
The Raza Foundation of culture and society. It implied that he would have to give up a lot that cushioned his life. Instead, he wanted to step
out and challenge the state. He wanted to do that even as he sought to be a true citizen, defending the imaginary of a
‘nation’, of the individual subject that constituted it. Inevitably it led him to walk to and fro, to relocate in thought, word
and deed, and yet remain steadfast in the sustaining of value in the image, the sign, the word.
I want to thank him for being himself through all these years. Had it not been for the likes of him, my family, my
friends, his colleagues, writers and artists, my students from distant parts of the world, my children too (like my beloved)
© Kumar Shahani 2015
who sustained me every day, I would not have survived the hurricanes of the last century that have accelerated into
speed beyond conjecture.
‘Kumar Shahani Now’ © Ashish Rajadhyaksha 2015
First edition 2015 Delhi, February 2015 kumar shahani
ISBN: 978-93-82381-61-7

Design: Alpana Khare
Image correction of film stills for print: Sherna Dastur
Printed at Lustra Press, New Delhi
This long-delayed compilation of writings by Kumar Shahani includes several texts that are either out of print or are
being published for the first time. Putting these together and annotating them was a task that could not have happened
without Shahani’s own unstinting participation. I have relied over decades now on his generosity in making available
time and energy when both have been in short supply for him, and that is a debt for which I cannot find words. This
project is as much about him as it is about several key collaborators, colleagues and students. Alaknanda Samarth, Rajat
Kapoor, Anup Singh, Sandeep Chatterjee, Paresh Kamdar and Vikram Joglekar extended various and diverse kinds of help,
including practical assistance, guidance, advice and feedback. To Amrit Gangar, Ashish Avikuntak, Behroze Gandhy, Laleen
Jayamanne, M. Madhava Prasad, Moinak Biswas, Nasreen Munni Kabir, Parag Amladi, Paul Willemen, Rachel Dwyer, Sibaji
Bandyopadhyay, Tejaswini Niranjana and Virchand Dharamsey: much gratitude. A special thanks to Ira Bhaskar and the
School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharal Nehru University, to Kiran Diwar and the staff of the National Film Archive of
India, Neeraj Sahay, and Datta Berde. Above all, this book would not have been possible without the unstinted support of
Indira Chandrasekhar, Roshan Shahani, Geeta Kapur and Rimli Bhattacharya. And finally, thank you Ashok Vajpeyi and Vivan
Sundaram, for making the book happen.

Bengaluru, March 2015 ashish rajadhyaksha

 10 KUMAR SHAHANI NOW 204 Film as a Contemporary Art (1985)
Ashish Rajadhyaksha 222 The Passion of a Resurrected Spring (1986)
226 In the Forest of the Night (1987)
99 THE SHOCK OF DESIRE AND OTHER ESSAYS 229 Genial Blasphemies of Luis Buñuel (1987)
Kumar Shahani 233 Angel Who Gathered the Flowers of Evil (1993)
236 Holocausts and Love Poems (1994)
100 Bazaar Realism: The Emergency Essays 243 Dance and Film (1995)
101 Myths for Sale (1974) 250 Ritwik (1995)
110 The Necessity of a Code (1975) 258 The Centenary (1995)
117 Invocation (1976) 261 The Shock of Desire (1998)
120 Ideological Ironies (1976) 271 Cinema in Exchange (2000)
125 Cinema/The Life Sciences (1977)
131 The Media Police (1978) 276 Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Film
134 The Relevance of Montage Today (1978) 277 The Self as an Objective Entity (1988)
139 International Trends and the Authenticity of Art (1978) 284 Figures of Film (1988)
146 Word and Image (1980) 290 Narrativity (1988)
151 Politics and Ideology: The Foundation of Bazaar Realism (1982) 296 The Image in Time (1988)
155 Cinema and Politics (1986) 305 Modes of Representation (1987)
312 Reflections (1990)
158 Film as a Contemporary Art 319 Interrogating Internationalism (1990)
159 Violence and Responsibility (1975) 336 The Cotton Project: Proposal for a Cinematic Exploration (1992)
163 ‘I am Burning, Everyone is Burning . . . The Universe Is Burning’ (1977) 344 Modern India: Terms of Discourse (1994)
167 Capra’s Films as Social Commentaries (1978) 350 Challenges (1994)
172 Charles Chaplin (1977) 355 Other Narratives (1995)
174 A Meeting with Miklós Jancsó (1978) 358 Desire (1998)
179 Notes for an Aesthetic of Cinema Sound (1978) 362 Re-mantling Forms (2000)
185 A Homage to Tarkovsky (1979) 367 ‘First Person Bahuvachan: You Must Become the Change You Seek’ –
188 The Saint-Poets of Prabhat (1980) A Film on the Constitution of India (2000)
192 Meet Julia (1980) 374 Introduction to Film & Philosophy (2003)
195 Pornography (1980) 383 Giving, in Cinema (2010)
199 Cinema and Technology (1985) 387 From Stone Age. . . (2013)
201 There’s Always Hope for Cinema with Marguerite Duras (1985)
kumar shahani now The basic contradiction of the cinematographic form arises from its capacity of replacing the
object of its ‘contemplation’ by its image.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha – Kumar Shahani, ‘Myths for Sale’

The Interruptions of Countermodernity

In November 1994, art critic Geeta Kapur was speaking, at the ‘Globalization and Culture’ conference at Duke University,1
to an audience that seemed to see her ‘third world’ presence as an implicit reminder of both a postcolonial identity and a
postcolonial text, and it was making her uneasy. She was not unmindful of the need to remember these histories, but she
was unconvinced by the kind of cultural discourse she was being invited to join.
For her, with an ongoing investment in a legacy of sovereignty, there was still some ground for debate about the
nation-state. While it was perhaps no more than a straight personal preference, she felt that there was still a need to
see the historical commitment to national selfhood and collective cultural praxis as conflictual rather than negotiated –
and included in this was also her commitment to the symbolic, even performative, aspect of that praxis.2 She came out
frontally against the negotiations she could see going on all around her: the ‘semisurreal terrain with interstitial spaces
from within which the colonials/subalterns work out sly strategies of complicity and subversion’, creating ‘tactical
manoeuvres of postcoloniality’ that ‘tend to become serviceable for ethnographic investigation, extravagant fiction, or,
in a less friendly register, for ideological manoeuvres by vested interests in a globalization project’ (Kapur 1998: 199). All
this even as a ‘rooted intelligentsia was being replaced by a floating one, continents and nations receding into floating
habitations’, and ‘interpreters and translators [were] decoding cultures across the globe’ (ibid.).
The problem for Geeta Kapur was how to speak for what she described as a postcolonial countermodernity. Such
a countermodernity could only be feasibly discussed if it was, first, properly represented, which meant charged with the
memory of ‘native’ transgressions, giving full weight to the ‘secular cultures of the postcolonial era’ and their potential
to disperse the Euro-American avant-garde into multiple and globally differentiated radical interventions. However, the
interruptions to that possibility often came from the artists themselves. These artists, from the ‘third world’, appeared –
in some cases consciously, in others despite their apparent desire to do so – either unwilling or unable to globalize. Their
inability stemmed, curiously, from their own utopian sense of the international. It both barred them from the pragmatics
of the negotiation, and presented their own cultural tradition and its hermeneutic potential as incapable of fitting into
the conventions of internationalism. She had in mind, Kapur said, Kumar Shahani: an artist, she declared in an extempore
aside, her audience would not have heard of. As she presented Shahani’s work and her presumption of the audience’s
ignorance of his name, she added that they were free to assume that she had invented him as a rhetorical device.

11
kumar shahani now
Kumar Shahani very much exists, of course; and it is unlikely that in the mid-1990s, his name would have been
unfamiliar to an American conference of cultural historians. In any case, this was not the issue; rather, it had to do with
invoking a name that appeared to force an interruption to the smooth path of globalization, risking thereby even its own
erasure from that process. Shahani is of course known as a difficult filmmaker; more significantly, he is an intellectual who
has refused to be slotted. But was this countermodernity? It could only be that if we place his refusal, emblematically,
within an expanded conception of modernity’s own history of globalization, interrogating the further role of Europe in
that history (as Enrique Dussel so eloquently did in the anthology published after the Duke University conference3).
How, this book asks as it sets out to present a key and largely unknown aspect of Shahani’s work, might that refusal
be properly represented here? Forty-odd years on from his controversial and still well-remembered debut feature, Maya
Darpan (1972), the space that Shahani occupies has become special within modern India’s cultural history as a whole. This
has had consequences for him personally, for he has not been able to make the films he might have, forsaking support
both from the Indian state and from what was once the state’s showpiece, a national market – both of which today are
clearly implicated in the shift of the international into the global as India readies itself to offer the world its new frontier
of the consumers’ marketplace. And it has also determined the kinds of films Shahani has made. These now stand at five
full-length features: Maya Darpan, Tarang (1984), Khayal Gatha (1988), Kasba (1990) and Char Adhyay (1997); and two hour-
long films: Bhavantarana (1991), on the Odissi dancer Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, and Viraha Bharyo Har Aangan Kone
(more commonly known as Bamboo Flute, 2000).
While several of the completed films, especially the later ones, are suffused with local thematic and performative
content, those that remain incomplete or unmade are, as it happens, precisely the ones with global ambition. These
include A Memoir of the Future, a fantasy on British psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion, which was partly shot; screenplays
that were never filmed – The Cotton Project, which was meant to have been set in England, the USA, Africa and several
countries in Central and South Asia (see ‘The Cotton Project: Proposal for a Cinematic Exploration’, pp. 336–42 in this
book4), an adaptation of Anna Karenina, and the Amrita Sher-Gil biography; and some astonishing ideas that were never
eventually developed – to film Rossellini’s screenplay of a biography of Karl Marx, and a proposal to a British producer
to make Hamlet with Michael Jackson.
Between the completed cinema on the one side and the ambitious but unmade films on the other, lies an intermediate
body of work. There are the pedagogic ‘workshop’ films (Var Var Vari, 1987; A Ship Aground, 1989), as well as the student
exercises at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII, Pune) and Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI,
Kolkata) with his cinematographer K.K. Mahajan – one series exploring the relationship between mise-en-scène and ritual,
on the kanyadaan and on baptism, which unfortunately have not been preserved. There are his talks; his classes with film
12
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
students in Pune and Kolkata and elsewhere; occasional forays into other forms like television – the Montage series on
world cinema that he anchored on Bombay Doordarshan in the 1970s; and theatre with actor Alaknanda Samarth – Kunti
and The Human Voice, both in 1987. And then there are the written texts.
It is this latter body of Shahani’s work that this compilation presents. While the diverse, open-ended and incomplete
form of writing itself often refers to a loss – of unmade films, unrealized ideas – these texts have allowed Shahani to
signify his condition in a way that has been meaningful for several: for young filmmakers and former students as well as
friends, including artists, historians, cultural activists and those involved with the development of the discipline of film
studies in this country, many of whom have intervened with official agencies and made it possible for him to make films.
They have done this as much for Shahani personally as to be able to see this as an intervention into a larger question
of artistic and speech freedom: where the difficulties of making, discussing and showing work relentlessly points to –
and I believe it is worth invoking such a large canvas – the specifically postcolonial limits of India’s official status as an
independent country. Such interventions have pointed, thus, to the role that postcolonial states like India might have
played in producing a proper modernist practice, and thereby to the way Shahani’s work as artist–thinker–teacher posits
a stark reminder of what might have been: of histories unwritten, roads not taken.
Still, the question remains: does all this make up countermodernity? Let us at the very least agree that this is
a symbolic space; it plays, as Geeta Kapur correctly proposes, a performative function. It is a battle being fought on
modernist ground, and as such has fundamental implications for a state structure. This is not a personal struggle alone;
it is not, simply put, an artist’s ego at stake. It involves at its best a new form of speech, which brings narrative modes of
address together with personal example. Later in this essay, we will trace its connection to music and film, and eventually
link it to a particular kind of cultural praxis that Shahani framed within the epic structure.
Such a means of staging resistance through narrativizing it was an issue of some significance in the same 1998
‘Globalization’ conference at which Kapur spoke about Shahani, and would almost certainly have provided a window
of intelligibility for his kind of work. Several participants in that event had worried greatly about the status of both
interruptive and resistive speech in the light of global collusions that were even then appearing on the postmodern
horizon. Frederic Jameson’s presentation argued for seeing a coincidence between global processes that have brought
culture into a new domain of economic importance at the same time as several old modernist oppositions were being
erased: between westernizers and traditionalists in the non-west, for example (Jameson 1998: 74–75). Neo-traditional
ideologies being born here, whether neo-Confucian, Islamic or Hindu, were themselves postmodern inventions, he
asserted. Where, then, could the resistance come from? Jameson, personally committed to the continued relevance of
third world states as potential bastions of opposition to first world dominance, asked, somewhat nervously, whether
13
kumar shahani now
a defence of national autonomy inevitably also forces us into a traditional modernism, a ‘defence of the powers of art
and high culture [and thus] the political power of the collectivity itself, now . . . conceived as a unified political power
or collective project rather than a dispersal into democratic multiplicities and identity positions’. He admitted that
situations could arise where a ‘malign and standardizing or despotic identity is . . . to be found in the state itself’, in which
event, of course, both markets and culture could be seen as forming a radical opposition. More likely, however, was the
reassuring scenario where it would be the transnational system that forced (Americanized) standardization, in which case
nation-states and national cultures could still provide a genuinely ‘national–modernist’ defence. It was, Jameson said in
the end, unambiguously, ‘the only way . . . that the encroachments of the world market, of transnational capitalism along
with the great capital-lending power centres of the so-called first world, can be opposed’ (ibid.).
Politically, Kumar Shahani has had little faith in India’s ability to provide what Jameson wants. Although he has
repeatedly taken the Indian state to task for having failed in its responsibility towards artists – and here, when we speak
of despotic state identities, we must specifically speak of the period in India on which he has made his most elaborate
political comments in writing and through film: the years sandwiched between the radical possibilities of the early 1970s
and the crackdown of the Emergency – his overall commitment to Indian nationalism, even to nationalism as such,
has been ambiguous (as we will see explicitly in the discussion on Char Adhyay, later in this essay). Nationalism always
‘destroys its validity at the point of its realization’, given that its cultural function works only in opposition – against
an intruding and dominating force which seeks to control the articulation and the tensions of changing life patterns.
Once you achieve your independence, nationalism inevitably turns upon itself; its primary representation becomes like
a ‘Republic Day parade honouring our different tribes while denying access to them to a control over nature and social
organization’ (‘International Trends and the Authenticity of Art’, p. 140).
Over the years, then, Shahani has framed his resistance through a curious strategy that must be described as political,
if not always conventionally so. Focusing on the symbolic significance of individual action, it has linked such action and
its capacity to perform inside a specific site – an agglomeration of speaker, author/filmmaker and spectator – within
an ethical universe. The ethics would be defined by the transactions taking place between these figures: transactions
that derive from commodity exchange, but which also signify a new historical as well as performative practice for
understanding such exchange as natural, gratuitous and commodified – which he described as the epic.
As I viewed it, the epic always has to find its expression through the dominant mode of
exchange. I had to place it in the present, in a historical situation where it had to articulate
itself with the positive aspects of commodification. I had to realize the languages that revealed
the material states of oppression as formulated in the ideologies that emerged, and a universe
14
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
of experience, contained by mythology, that was equally shaped by those material states. . . .
What I was trying to militate against was that tendency, in realism and in modernism, to stultify
the object before its transformative relations. . . . I saw, in the form I was using, the ability to divide
and counterpose actions and objects into those that were natural, those worked on with gratuitous
purpose and those wrought for exchange. (Shahani 1986: 103)
Such a strategy, drilling down to the level of the individual who functions as an individuated ethical practitioner,
has been an influential but largely under-researched area – although some work has been done (on Gandhi, for example),
specifically with respect to decolonization, but also including countermodernist experiences of capitalism.5 Later, we will
address the several and disparate influences that defined Shahani’s concept of the epic: his teacher Ritwik Ghatak’s and
his own commentary on the Bengal partition; the narrative structures of the khayal; Eisenstein, Brecht and Bresson; the
Mahabharata; and the Indian polymath D.D. Kosambi.
I begin my exploration of this authorial strategy with a mid-1980s essay titled, somewhat mundanely, ‘Cinema and
Politics’ – a title inherited from an equally mundane conference at Bhopal’s Bharat Bhavan to which, eventually, Shahani
could not go, and therefore an unlikely location for what became a foundational re-framing of the constitutional right to
freedom of speech. In the previous decade, as a ‘political’ filmmaker of Marxist persuasion who was occasionally seen as
sympathetic to the extreme left, Shahani had framed his concerns about free speech within constitutional freedoms, which
were relevant to the Emergency and the crisis of state censorship that India faced then.6 Soon, however, he abandoned
all established political affiliations in favour of a more abstracted poetics of individuated speech-freedom, modifying for
the cinematic spectator a tradition of Indian music that explicitly defined as an ideal its ability to approximate to speech.
How . . . can we restore the voice to our speech, when it is not our speech alone but the
voice, its caress, that is being stolen? Earlier in this century, it was the word that was being
stolen, not only of the colonized groups of people, but also of the colonial metropolitan
individual himself. Sooner than our own political independence, they lost their individual
voices to mass communication. Until then the poet was our priest and healer. The painter, the
sculptor, the dancer, the architect contained our directionless energy, giving its ambivalence a
greater richness. The musician preserves our voice. Until then. Until now. (‘Cinema and Politics’,
pp. 156–57)
Restoring voice to speech took on a larger aesthetic agenda as Shahani proposed a further qualification: the gift of
the emblematic voice is a gift from the cinema; he is a filmmaker, the voice emerges from a cinematic silence. The note
on ‘Cinema and Politics’ becomes a near-primal cry . . .
15
kumar shahani now

Raise your voice then, raise it now.

Raise my voice? I can’t. My throat is choked with pollution. The air is thick with rumour. People
who cannot speak to each other kill each other.
The spectacle replaces the voice. (Ibid., p. 157)
. . . that rapidly transforms into a filmmaker’s speech . . .
The acoustics reflect and startle them by their representation.
Raise their voices.
Startle them by their representation.
Theirs is the general will.
Let the will triumph.
In images.
Over there. Make political films.
Not where you are.
Not where you can still hear something: the bubble of being.
Not where you can look for a home, explore: (Ibid.)
. . . even as the cinema, with its own possibilities, slips away: ‘Photosynthesis sensitized tissue to the formation of an
eye when life which remained connected to other organic tissue in earth floated away in water to catch the light’ (ibid.).

The 1970s Subject

In the late 1960s, Shahani went to France on an IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques) fellowship that 3
gave him the opportunity to assist on a French film production. His choice, of some significance as we will see, was to
work with either Luis Buñuel or Robert Bresson. Buñuel, who had returned to France only shortly before to make Belle de
Jour (1967), conveyed his regrets (see ‘Genial Blasphemies of Luis Buñuel’, pp. 229–32), and so Shahani ended up as third
assistant to Bresson for Une Femme Douce (1969). Following that stint, he always described Bresson as his teacher: ‘Both
Ghatak and Bresson, my two cinema teachers, accepted the existence of the thingness of things. Both felt that to know
anything, it was not enough to represent it’ (‘Introduction to Film & Philosophy’, p. 378).
He returned to India from the politically charged France of the late 1960s to plan his first feature film, Maya Darpan.
This was a good time to make a film such as he wanted to, with the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) having launched
what many hoped would be an Indian equivalent of the nouvelle vague, through loans ‘for modest but off-beat films of

‘Banal surfaces that electrify everything within.’ figs 3, 4 Maya Darpan (1972): Taran (Aditi)
caught between various worlds; her aimless walks through corridors. Shahani has used
mirrors extensively to see through (in the double sense of the phrase) the intermediary of
a ‘machine that does not see what you see’, one that can ‘transform into a space–time axis
16 that includes the visual, the auditory and the historical’.
 Ashish Rajadhyaksha

talented people’ in order to ‘develop the film in India into an effective instrument for the promotion of national culture’.7
This was also a time when India was seeing something of a renaissance in theatre, literature, painting and dance, among
other forms, and Maya Darpan opened up a definite vanguard front for this fledgling and eventually shortlived New Wave
in cinema.
The film, an adaptation of a Hindi short story by Nai Kahani author Nirmal Verma,8 is set in a small, dusty town in
the Rajasthan desert caught in the throes of new industrial development. There, in a feudal haveli, lives a retired Diwan
with his unmarried daughter, Taran, and an elderly aunt. Taran is single, enveloped by her feudal condition, and sexless:
her introduction in the film underlines this by a richly textured lullaby evoking wealth and comfort in red-and-gold, in
contrast to which we see her gaunt figure sleeping alone on her bed. Harsh cawing of crows plays on the soundtrack as
she washes her face and hands at a tap that will also run dry, and wanders through the corridors of the haveli performing
sundry chores.
She says little. Her sheer indifference reflects a condition that Shahani had expressed some interest in since
his student days, occasionally referred to as an anomie. He had made primarily psychological explorations of such a
condition in his post-Diploma film at the FTII (Manmad Passenger, 1967), as well as indirectly in the first experimental
work he attempted upon returning from France, the short Object (1971), showing protagonists who could, as he once put
it in conversation, ‘neither consume nor act’. In Maya Darpan, he took its representation to another level.
Taran is caught between various worlds; upon her own barren desertscape are overlapped other phantasy lands.
Among these is one evoked by letters from her brother that transport her to the lush green hills of Assam. Her aimless
walks through the desert and factories are overlaid by an incantation on the soundtrack: ‘I walk, I walk on both sides of
the heat and dust / I knock on doors, one, two, three / I return to where I was from, where nothing exists now / I hold,
4 and then let go’ (‘Main chalti hoon, chalti hoon dhoop aur dhool ke aar-paar / Main darwaze khatkhatati hoon, ek, do,
teen / Lautkar wahin jaati hoon jahan koi nahin hai / Main pakadti hoon, phir chhod deti hoon’).9 Returning home from
one such walk, she throws herself on the bed and starts weeping uncontrollably; this is followed by black-and-white
footage of bombs being let loose from the belly of an aircraft, projectiles released as though they were her bizarre,
internal, psychotic objects.10
As the film moves on, Taran’s internal condition envelops our spectatorial view. She does little, and indeed little
happens in the film, but her inner world is action-packed: her projectiles literally explode upon the landscape. The
landscape changes: uniformed guards beat up workers in a factory beyond the haze; she vaguely hears that there is much
violence going on. She watches as the Diwan and his visitors have tea in the courtyard, members of a former landed elite
bemoaning the changes they see all around, cynically dismissing them as a passing phenomenon (‘the only warmth we

19
kumar shahani now
can be permanently sure of is the weather’), and complaining about the disrespect shown to them by even lower-class
employees of the government. As she looks on, their voices are enveloped and drowned out by the screeching of birds.
Such projection of an inner condition upon a desolate outside environment further defines many of the formal devices
Shahani used: the soundtrack, the performance (sometimes attributed to Bresson’s legacy), and, most complicatedly,
the colour schema. Maya Darpan works with the red–yellow–blue oppositions of the colour cycle: the warm colours
(orange, red, magenta) represent Taran’s world, into and from which erupt the yellows and blues. These come either in
the form of interruptive external images – the yellow truck that enters, disrupting the black-and-white documentary; or,
more spectacularly, constitute externally directed interior eruptions – most famously where Taran becomes a nude icon
anointed with blue (fig. 33, p. 210), and then the purple sari she wears as she strides across the desert, having made up her
mind to go to the engineer’s house. The finale of the film, Taran’s assertion of a revitalized selfhood, is also the final and
major phantasy: she is led into a hallucinatory performance space of muscular Chhau dancers who perform their dance
in red-and-black to a camera that keeps panning down into black (fig. 25, p. 141). There is then a sudden inversion as we,
the viewers, find ourselves as it were in Taran’s place: trapped in the narrow confines of a boat through which she had
once realized her own imaginary world but where we now only see green hills and blue water.
Into this desert-town, and into Taran’s world, arrives an engineer, full of the idealism of new construction, having set
up a literacy centre for the locals, and quoting Engels’ line, ‘Freedom is the recognition of necessity.’ Taran is inevitably
drawn to him, which also means that she includes him into her world. Their first encounter appears to further perpetuate
the phantasy I have described above. Documentary montage of bombs and footage of aircraft being shot down, of men
shouting Inquilab zindabad! even as they are being caned by a colonial police force, are followed by Taran – having
been rudely told by her aunt not to sleep in the afternoon but go for a walk instead – peering directly into the camera
(her mirror) and applying a red bindi on her forehead. She then comes into the courtyard in mid-close up to address –
offscreen – the engineer who has apparently just arrived. We cannot see him: for several seconds, as she speaks, we do
not know who (if anyone) she is addressing, or whether she is still in her reverie.11 Taran’s attraction to the engineer grows
even as she walks through the dunes with him and he speaks of his ambitions for the place. This leads to her single major
act of transgressive self-assertion: she walks to his house and they have a somewhat distracted sexual encounter in his
bachelor room amid his work materials.
Is the landscape into which the engineer enters – the bombed-out desert landscape upon which he will build his
industrial ambitions for the area – a historically definable city in semi-urban India or, more likely, is it Taran’s inner
condition? Or, more challengingly, is this now no longer an either/or? Is Taran’s damaged selfhood being offered up as
the space upon which independent India, caned and bombed, will sprout green leaves and fertility?
20
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Making such a film in the India of the early 1970s was surely a strange political choice – at least within the dominant
perception of the purpose of radical cinema among filmmakers apparently on the left arguing for historical change. While
there would have been little opposition to Shahani’s criticism of the kind of ‘heroic characters’ that have been the ‘basis
from which almost all of our films work’ (‘The Necessity of a Code’, p. 111), surely, many felt, a figure as markedly un-heroic
as Taran takes us to the opposite extreme. The film caused an explosion of debate on just this point: partly because of its
experimental modes of representation, its mind-numbing slowness, but principally because the performative modes used
to portray Taran had no easily available framework of intelligibility for India in that time. A fierce essay by Satyajit Ray
(1974: 106) accusing Shahani of ‘threatening film language with extinction’ inaugurated a debate that went on to implicate
India’s emerging state policy on film production (see ‘The Necessity of a Code’, pp. 110–15 and ‘Ideological Ironies’, pp.
120–24).12
It is worth asserting the politics of that era, not least because Shahani’s writings extensively comment on the
period (in the entire series of essays of the 1970s and 80s collected here), but also because his films comment on the
time – although, as far as Taran’s condition is concerned, the commentary is at best oblique. Shahani tends to direct his
ire mainly at the conventions of cinematic realism, dismissing these as a ‘mask for eluding the real problems of society,
its class relations’. ‘Nature is not presented as it is known to the cineaste, as something with which he can deal, in spite
of the great unknown areas in it’ (‘The Necessity of a Code’, p. 112). Of relevance to the form we have been describing,
however, is one particular problem that all realist representation poses: its default divide of subjective and objective,
which it enforces under the mistaken belief that
there exists a Cartesian polarity between arbitrary (aesthetic) signs and total realism. [This
has] necessarily led to quantitative conclusions and meaningless oppositions; the proliferation
of detail as against the metaphysical truth (where quality cannot be seized), the fluidity of
mise-en-scène against the metre of montage, the existential tension of suspense (Hitchcock) as
against the tragic release from pity and fear. (‘Myths for Sale’, p. 103)
Challenging such a theory in the European heartlands of total realism, as Bresson would do, was however a very
different proposition from challenging it under conditions of underdevelopment: conditions that possessed neither
objective truths nor any given objective order capable of providing a credible state apparatus – such as what we would
encounter in that dismal Rajasthan desert. Indeed Shahani – who often has been seen as ‘European’ in his aesthetic
choices, e.g. the common attribution of the influence of Bresson and Antonioni (Red Desert, 1964) – has taken some
pains to outline the Indian antecedents of his aesthetic choices. For example, the principle of suppression, which he
uses for his colour strategy, is one that he says he got less from the visual arts and more from a theory of chromaticism
21
kumar shahani now
derived from music. ‘I have believed for a long time’, he writes, ‘that the development of any mode in art begins with the
suppression of some of its own elements.’ The example is that of the development of a continuous scale in Indian music
with its infinitesimally articulated melodic line, which can only happen through suppressing the possible explorations of
harmony. On the other hand,
Western music developed its architectural, perspectival dimensions through harmony at the
expense of articulated shrutis. This is not to say that Indian music either lacks concepts of
harmony or that Western music has to give up the melodic. In Indian music the harmonic exists
in sequence, in such magical proportions that have dared our understanding of fifths, fourths
and thirds. The resonance of a note may pervade the whole range from as far apart as the fifth
to as near as the one touching it. Raga Shree is said to have perplexed many musicologists.
In fact, the practice of any raga should demonstrate the same principle. (‘The Image in Time’,
p. 298)
And yet it is arguable that the way he defines the strategy of suppression is through arriving at certain principles
through subterfuge; and that it is therefore resistive rather than normative, essentially postcolonial in its oppositions.
There must surely be more to the aesthetic choice if we are to properly get to the countermodernity question. What, for
instance, of the performance – of Taran herself, and now of the cinema, wilfully extending her performance and in the
process literally turning herself inside-out? As a figure of suppression, Taran evokes both Ghatak’s tragic Nita in Meghe
Dhaka Tara (1960; directly quoted at least once in Maya Darpan) as well as other characters defined more explicitly
through their sexuality: Hansa in Tarang, Ela in Char Adhyay and perhaps, if more controversially, Bresson’s protagonist in
his Mouchette (1967).13 (Ghatak too had been excoriated for so sentimental and so negative a protagonist as Nita to signal
his idea of what revolutionary futures held.)
Surely a form such as this – in addition to its European legacy (and we will see mention of Eisenstein, Bresson
and Brecht along with Ghatak in the essays) – must also stand as a commentary on other traditions in which female
protagonists perform exemplary individuated acts of transgression, both in conditions of third world underdevelopment
and in protonationalist conditions of decolonization. I believe that we really get to the point of Taran, and thus also
of Shahani’s take on this entire legacy of female transgression, only when we read him on a somewhat differently
historicized idea: that of the historically wounded self. In what I read as being as close to veiled self-criticism as Shahani
will ever get, he writes:
The fictional form [when used like this] may then appear as a long drawn-out algebraic equation
in descriptive language, to describe a state of events that had neither the blood nor the sweat
22
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
of things past. It seems to approach the symmetry of verse while poetry itself withdraws
into collage, asymmetries that yield meaning only in and through their disproportion. Films,
likewise, that thus break away from the dead and arid mainstream are unable to water the
banks that meander about them. (‘Narrativity’, p. 293)
(Surely, this is a reference to Maya Darpan. The ‘symmetry of verse’ is certainly in this film, where Shahani has contended
that he worked with the rhythmic metre of lyric poetry, rescuing the lyric from the ‘lyrical’ – usually considered in
conditions of bourgeois modernity as the highest form of art. This is also a background to his turn to the epic, to which
we shall turn later.)
Shahani goes on to say: ‘There is obviously a crying need for restoration. The cannibalization that has taken place
will have nothing more left for it to feed on, not even its own body which it construes as its own image.’ He then
proposes that working in the cinema, he has to see through (in the double sense of the phrase) the intermediary of a
‘machine that does not see what you see’. To not do that with so deadening an intermediary as this, is to make impossible
the numerous ways by which the cinema and its maker can extend a ‘caress, at once intimate and distant’, that will ‘hold
together the flaying limbs’.
The groping hand, the exasperated breath, legs that strike air instead of water or earth, all
contained by the look. The voice comes later, filling up her absence.
The words fill up the sounds; the images, the words. The body, the images. Invocations of
breath in the body, of life which returns it to life, music, enchantment. . . .
Narrativity in film obviously has to transform this enchantment of musical elements into a
space–time axis that includes the visual, the auditory and the historical. (Ibid.)
I continue to read this as a comment on Maya Darpan, and as we take forward the axis of body–image–word–
sound–emptiness, I shall re-introduce the idea of anomie: now as a force-field of the social. As defined famously by
Durkheim’s landmark study on suicide, anomie is a condition when ‘common values and common meanings are no longer
understood or accepted, and new values and meanings have not developed’ – when ‘traditional sources of societal
regulation – religion, government, and occupational groups – have all failed to exercise moral constraints on an
increasingly unregulated capitalist economy’.14 Although individuated experience as a site for massive phenomena, such
as decolonization, has been discussed in India, anomie as such – and anomie as produced by historical circumstance – has
certainly not been explored, and would certainly not have been seen as the conventional lens for defining the everyday in
the radicalized 1970s that saw major battles over state domination. Indeed, as a political description of a moment in Indian
history, the concept – if reflected as an incapacity to act – is perhaps most appropriately applied for the mid-1990s, in
23
kumar shahani now
the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition of 1992 and the ensuing 1992–93 anti-Muslim riots, when, for the first time since
independence, indeed since the radical movements leading up to independence that saw both Gandhi and Tagore despair
over the future of the nation, neither could India’s national development be uncritically accepted nor its presumed
energy for change; when India’s very capacity to be a secular state came under increasing fire, not just politically but also
conceptually, from those who saw key values of the European Enlightenment as untranslatable into Indian conditions. An
ensuing Indian variant of the end-of-history paradigm saw social scientists address, perhaps for the first time ever, what
Vivek Dhareshwar, following Partha Chatterjee, describes as a ‘suspension of history’, the ‘inability of the history that
has constituted our present to “go forward”, as it were’, but which also then opens up ‘political possibilities contained in
different historicities and agencies that have a chance, a future, precisely because of that impasse’.15
In his only use of the word (anomie) in this collection, Shahani too refers to this very period. It is 1995, and the
Mumbai riots of 1992–93 have taken place a year earlier. He is writing a very personal autobiographical tribute to Ritwik
Ghatak, and it contains a gut-wrenching series of references to Ghatak. Shahani is in Calcutta when Ghatak dies, but is
told not to go to the funeral because people are shouting slogans over his dead body – he escalates the scale from the
intensely personal to something much larger:
Traders strike coins which are ratified by kings, the oligarchies, the democracies, where demos
suddenly refer to mobs, temporarily coming together to impose sectarian concepts of truth as
cover-ups for their anomie. The world splinters into discrete fragments, of the nation, of the
classes, of the genders, of the body and the mind, while the economy globalizes. . . . Ritwik’s
metaphors for the self-liberation that ended up in schizophrenic self-annihilation now seem to
tear through the cultures of all lands simultaneously with the takeover by a unipolar economy.
(‘Ritwik’, p. 253)
Tragic Forms, Epic Modes, 1980s Politics
Maya Darpan’s exposure of Taran’s barren inner landscape literally turns its female protagonist inside-out, and with it,
our spectatorial gaze. Such a splintering of the world into discrete fragments of nation, class, gender, body and mind
cannot be, whatever its actual experience, solely a subjective condition: it is at least potentially a condition of history.
Two additional concepts will attach themselves to that condition as we take it forward into Shahani’s next film, Tarang:
the condition of myth as a closed and often self-contained narrative structure, and, perhaps its opposite, the open-ended
epic. Both concepts, it will appear, have some relevance to that historical stasis: to make history move forward. And both
would be deployed to provide a commentative link to the film’s immediate present: Bombay of the 1970s.16
24
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Tarang, completed a decade after Maya Darpan, is of course a fundamentally different kind of film. If the first was
a miniature with four principal characters and minutely detailed narrative modes, the second would be Shahani’s biggest
film ever: an expansive, three-hour-long cinemascope saga with at least fifteen key characters. Launched soon after Maya
Darpan was completed, it made direct political reference to its immediate present: the years between the 1974 railway
strike, Jayaprakash Narayan’s Bihar movement of that year, and the Emergency in 1975. (The film had in fact been begun in
these very years, but legal and financial delays forced it to be completed only in 1984, and so it was really addressing its
immediate present.)
Its plot features a Bombay-based industrial family riven by internal conflict and placed within the situation of
extreme industrial unrest at that time. Bombay’s own history of working-class agitations goes back almost to its origins as
an industrial centre, to the late nineteenth century. The intensity of the 1970s agitations also opened up larger questions
about the city’s industrial bourgeoisie. One was its perception of its responsibility to its vast work force. Another,
arising from the first, its commitment to the very idea of industrial capitalism,17 given its compromised relationship
with the city’s powerful indigenous traders and financiers. And in this, most importantly perhaps, the big question of
history: did India’s national bourgeoisie support, or did it effectively choose to undermine, independent India’s nation-
state and its post-independence programmes of planned development?18 On the side of Bombay’s industrial work force,
questions have been raised as to how much of a working-class consciousness it really had, given the workers’ strong
roots in a peasant economy, and thus in regional, linguistic and caste-based identities that often caused a tremendous
fragmentation among the trade unions – especially between the unions of the established left, the pro-Congress unions
usually representing the ruling elites, and other independent entities on both the far-left and the far-right.
On one level, Tarang provides a didactic, near-Brechtian lesson on the class character of the Bombay society of its
time. The industrial house the film describes is headed by a feudal patriarch (played by Shreeram Lagoo) who made his
money – as did several new industrial families of independent India – in the Second World War’s black market. The Sethji is
a trader and profiteer at heart, and despite pious, bleeding-heart evocations of the poor and the needy, he has no interest
other than to make money and to ensure that the money stays within the joint family; he would just as soon hoard gold
as invest in industry. In the family are his beautiful daughter Hansa (fig. 7, pp. 30–31); his ruthless and ambitious son-in-
law Rahul (played by Amol Palekar, fig. 6, p. 29), committed to indigenous self-reliance and autonomy from ‘comprador’
transnational control; and his nephew Dinesh (Girish Karnad) who works for just such global transnational interests,
mingling with financiers conducting illegal transactions for criminal agencies and rogue-states. The family business is
seeing a bitter fight for control between Rahul and Dinesh. The patriarch’s only interest is to ensure that the bloodline is
maintained and his daughter Hansa produces a male heir – which, to him, is her only real purpose in the family.
25
 Ashish Rajadhyaksha

Set against this fractious household is the work force of the business house, living in slums outside its factory gates,
which holds out its own history lesson. The workers are deeply split between a corrupt trade union that exists at the
bidding of the management and a once-radical left union which has largely lost its radical zeal. And then there is a looser
group of idealist activists, represented by Abdul (M.K. Raina) and Namdev (Om Puri), attached to diverse extreme-radical
struggles. The key figure here is that of Janaki (Smita Patil, fig. 8, p. 32), widow of a major activist who had been killed in
a violent inter-union battle.
The pivot of the film is a transgression: the relationship between Rahul and Janaki. Janaki, idolized (literally so, as
we will see) by the progressive work force, first encounters Rahul, son-in-law of the industrial house, when she is hired
(as compensation for her husband’s death) as a housemaid to look after Rahul and Hansa’s infant son. She thus gets
access to the family’s interior space – and also to the intrigues going on there. Even as Hansa sinks into self-absorbed
indifference with no desire to have sexual relations with her husband, a complicated game of mutual exploitation begins.
Rahul is sexually attracted by Janaki’s vitality, and a relationship between the two is tacitly encouraged by Hansa. Rahul
exploits Janaki, but she too exploits her access to him; she becomes an accomplice in some of his nefarious activities, but
manages to extract money and favours from him which she gives over to her worker-comrades. In a series of manoeuvres
that quote from the gangster movie genre, Rahul manipulates the death of the Sethji. Her father’s death pushes Hansa
into a condition of tragic numbness which she ends by committing suicide, drowning herself in a bathtub. Rahul has now
triumphed over all.
The film concludes at the point of Rahul’s cynical triumph with the enactment of a myth. Although the myth – the
story of Urvashi and Pururavas, framed primarily as a story of transgression – is referred to throughout the film, mainly on
the soundtrack and through visual references, its sudden and full-scale, costumed (in Janaki’s dress at least) performance
is, to say the least, startling. The build-up goes like this: Janaki is thrown out of the house by Rahul, who fears that she may
give away his complicity in his father-in-law’s death. She returns to the workers’ slum where she seeks shelter with the
radical political activist Namdev, who is increasingly finding himself in dangerous company. Rahul blackmails Dinesh into
surrendering his shares in the company, after he produces evidence of Dinesh’s involvement in gun-running, extortion and
sponsoring of communal violence. Rahul has Dinesh’s henchman killed in a shooting. Meanwhile Namdev leaves Janaki
to hand medicines to his activist comrades, fearful of his life and of hers. Some men, presumably after Namdev, throw a
bomb into her hut. The hut explodes in a ball of fire.
The camera’s zoom into the ball of fire, and the slow-motion shot of Janaki walking out of the fire and rising as she
runs up a bridge, allows her final transformation. A near-silhouette of Rahul is faced by the celestial, goddess-like figure
of Janaki. The dialogue goes as follows:

fig. 5 Signature campaign (July 1984) by several leading film journalists and scholars
protesting a plan by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) to cut the
running time of Tarang, in order to make it commercially viable. 27
kumar shahani now

Rahul: Where had you disappeared? Stay, Janaki, for there is much to say. The barriers between
us have finally been overcome. Do not now leave with this matter unresolved. Let us speak out
all that is unsaid.
Janaki: Speak the unsaid? How? You kept searching for Hansa in the folds of my sari. You could
see nothing, neither Hansa nor my true form. Your own false nature renders everything untrue.
I too can see a little bit into the truth. How can I be tied down by your lies?
Rahul: Why do you speak of it as tying you down? All that you wish will happen – wealth,
status, happiness will all be yours. And my son too wants you. Just return one last time.
Janaki: (Laughs.)
Rahul: Why do you laugh? Do you not know me?
Janaki: And why would I not know you? I have seen within you, your true form. Even as you
played out your farce, I could see the light that your presence so forcibly hid. Without knowing
you, how could I have seen beyond you?
Rahul: I’ve made such a small mistake, and that too not intentionally. Don’t go, Janaki. I don’t
want to lose you now, having found you once.
Janaki: That which you have lost was beyond you to comprehend. And that which you believed
you had found, you were impatient to suck its life out. Leave me, for I will be ruthless. Leave 6
me to myself. I speak to no one. Go, for I am not Janaki.
Rahul: Then who are you? Tell me, how can I know you?
Janaki: You will not be able to. To stay on your path alone – that is your fate. We are the first
rays of the sun. To know us is as if to catch the flowing breeze in your fist.
Rahul: Kahan gum ho gayi thi tum? Thehro Janaki, bahut kuch kehna hai tumse. Tal chuki hain
sari rukawatein hamari. Mat jao is bar, baat adhuri chhod kar. Kyun na hum keh dein sub kuch?
Sub kuch, ankaha?
Janaki: Sub kuch ankaha? Kaise? Tum to mere pallu mein Hansa dhoondte rahe. Kuch nahin dekh
sake tum. Na Hansa, na mera apna roop. Tum khud ke jhooth se har baat jhutlate ho. Thoda sach
to hum bhi dekh sakte hain. Bhala jhooth se kaise baandha ja sakta hai hamein.
Rahul: Bandhan kyun kehti ho ise? Jaisa chahogi milega tumhe – dhan, maan, sukh. Aur phir
Munna bhi tarasta hai tumhare liye. Aa sakti ho uske liye tum. Woh tumhari baatein tutlata hai.

Tarang (1984). fig. 6 Rahul (Amol Palekar), the avaricious son-in-law. As with the mythic
character of Pururavas, it is his fate that he must ‘pass from the sight of men’. ‘Cursed by the
angered sages, he was at once destroyed, he, the king, who had been overcome by greed’
(D.D. Kosambi). fig. 7 Hansa (Kawal Gandhiok) in her self-absorbed indifference. ‘Women are
like rivers’. fig. 8 Janaki after she has been sexually ravaged by Rahul. ‘Janaki . . . half-woman,
28 half-goddess, in origin a landless labourer in famine-stricken rural Maharashtra’.
7
 Ashish Rajadhyaksha

Sach Janaki, sirf ek baar laut aao.

Janaki: (Laughs.)
Rahul: Hansti kyun ho tum? Mujhe nahin pehchanti?
Janaki: Tumhe kyon na pehchanoongi? Tumhe to maine bheetar se dekha hai. Tumhara asli roop,
dara hua. Jub tum apna swaang na nibha pa rahe the, tabhi to dekh payi thi us ujale ko jise tum
dhak-kar khade the. Tumhe jaane bina tumse pare dekha hi kaise ja sakta hai bhala?
Rahul: Itni si bhool meri. Aur phir jaan-boojh kar to kuch nahin kiya maine. Mat jao, Janaki,
paakar ab tumhe khona nahin chahta.
Janaki: Jo tumne khoya, woh tumhare samajh ke pare tha. Aur jo samajhke paya, uske to tum
pran lene ko utare the. Hamara man bada nishthur hota hai. Hame apne mein hi rehne do. Hum
kisise kuch na kehte. Tum jao, main Janaki nahin.
Rahul: Phir kaun ho tum? Tumhi batao, kaise jaana ja sakta hai tumhe?
Janaki: Tum na boojh paaoge. Apne disha mein akele reh jaana hi tumhari niyati hai. Hum, Usha
ki pehli kiranein hain. Hame paana behti hawa ko haathon mein bharna hai.
Using mythic material for modernist purposes is of course not unusual:19 in India alone, numerous modernist texts
have enacted episodes from the Puranas, the Mahabharata as well as local legend to draw allegories with the historical
present (for example, Dharamvir Bharati’s famous Andha Yug, 1961; and several of Girish Karnad’s plays, most famously
8
Nagamandala, 1988 and Agni Mattu Male, 1995). We also have an extensive melodramatic tradition of creating characters
as mythic condensations (or ‘archetypes’), using both visual and sound overlays.20 Then there is India’s famous tradition
of the twentieth-century mythological, both in period costume and in contemporary dress, which has often erased its
distinction – important to Tarang – from contemporary melodrama.
What is unusual about Tarang is its unexpected generic crossover, from a film using mythic overlay (in the diverse
traditions of Ghatak and Rocha, or Bresson and Pasolini) into the domain of the mythological proper. Even more unusually,
in doing so its textual source was a theoretical essay by D.D. Kosambi, in his famous Myth and Reality: Studies in the
Formation of Indian Culture (1962). That essay on the Urvashi–Pururavas legend, which excavated various versions of
the legend from its first rendition in the Satapatha Brahmana and the Rig Veda, through the Mahabharata to its best
known version, Kalidasa’s fourth-century Sanskrit play, Vikramorvasiyam, is often seen as a landmark of textual-historical
analysis of pre-historic traditions.
The legend itself can be briefly outlined as follows. King Pururavas rescues the apsara Urvashi from a demon, and
they fall in love. She is a celestial deity while he is human, a married man whose wife cannot bear him children. The two

33
kumar shahani now
are attracted to each other partly because of their mutual fascination with transgressing the divide between human
and celestial, each exotic to the other, and they finally find – after many hurdles – a way to live together. They do
so first covertly and then openly, as the wife accepts their relationship. Urvashi, however, sets some key conditions,
the relevant one being that Pururavas shall never commit a particular transgression: he shall never – except during
lovemaking – appear naked before her. Various circumstances lead to him violating this condition and also terminating
their relationship, ending the story as a tragedy.
In his essay, Kosambi begins his inquiry with the tragic end. This finale, where the hero ‘pleads with the heroine and she
refuses his request’, appears in the very earliest versions of the legend, but was done away with by Kalidasa (for interesting
reasons, says Kosambi, to do with the rise of brahmanism, which also resulted in the nakedness taboo being absent in this
version).21 However, despite Kalidasa’s definitive intervention with Vikramorvasiyam, Kosambi considers it significant that the
earlier tragic interpretation survived. He elicits further key details about Pururavas from the Mahabharata. Born of Ila (who was,
importantly, both his father and his mother), Pururavas would rule over thirteen islands of the sea and would be ‘surrounded by
superhuman powers, though himself human’. All of these circumstances – his origin and his perceived lack of power – would
generate within him an insatiable greed. This greed would cause him to take on and ravage the brahman elite, and eventually
lead to his being sacrificed by that very elite. Pururavas, for all his singleminded devotion to both power and love, now
becomes somewhat of a lost spirit, one connected with a sacrifice. From him, his confused inability to understand his loss and
Urvashi’s need to explain to him why he lost what he did, Kosambi returns to the original hymn from the Rig Veda:
Pururavas: Alas, o wife, desist from your intentions, o dreadful one, let us discourse together. If
our chants remain un-uttered, they will bear no fruit for distant days.
Urvashi: What shall I do with these discourses of yours? I have gone over like the first of the
Ushas. O Pururavas, go back to your destiny; I am as hard to get as the wind . . .
Thrice a day didst thou ram me with thy member, and impregnated me unwilling (as I was).
Pururavas, I yielded to thy desires. O hero, then wert thou king of my body.
Thou wert surely born for protection; this power didst thou hand over to me. I, the initiate,
warned you on that very day. Thou didst not listen to me, why dost thou (now) speak like an
innocent? (Kosambi 1962: 50–51)
Going by this version, Tarang uses the legend to also establish, in literal terms, the destiny of both Rahul and Janaki.
Janaki, as Kosambi says of Urvashi (and as Abdul says of her when she tries to save the life of even the criminal Patel),
is fated to become a saviour: being a ‘mother goddess’ is as much her destiny as being sacrificed is her lover’s.22 Rahul’s
condition is more complex, for his tragic sacrifice appears only in the myth; it is not implicit in the film’s fiction where
34
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
he has apparently triumphed over all opposition. However, like Pururavas, Rahul too is ‘human’ among the gods – which
here means a commoner, an outsider, married into a feudal family. Required by them for no purpose other than to father
a male heir, Rahul can never belong. As the myth has it, it is his own unremitting greed in the face of such injustice that
will lead him to his fate: his fate being not merely that he must die but that he must ‘pass from the sight of men’. He is
‘mrityubandhuh, not an ordinary mortal, but one literally bound to death at the sacrifice’ (ibid.: 56). ‘Intoxicated by prowess,
he crossed the Brahmans, tore their treasures . . . in spite of their outcries. . . . Then, cursed by the angered sages, he was at
once destroyed, he, the king, who had been overcome by greed and lost his reason by force of pride’ (ibid.: 46–47).
As mentioned, the film’s fiction shows Rahul as supposedly having triumphed over all, but there are two major
occasions when his tragic fate is directly signalled. One, when he ‘reveals’ his inner self (his nakedness) to Janaki by
revealing his fear of being caught for his misdeeds (fig. 24, p. 136). This is also politically important because, between the
different positions of the ruling elite represented in the film, his is the most progressive: he comes closest to representing
what we might call the enlightened bourgeoisie. Even more crucial is an earlier act that signals the consequences of
his greedy conquest: the self-destruction of his wife Hansa. Strangely, and despite obvious differences of social status,
there are resemblances between Taran of Maya Darpan and Hansa of Tarang. Both function in, and serve, an overtly
feudal patriarchy. Both realize their sexuality through their respective sexual phantasies. Taran’s is an epiphany, the
final encounter with the engineer escalates into the Chhau performance; Hansa’s is more extreme, tragic, and will lead
to her death. Neither woman has a role other than purely ornamental in the feudal order, but in Hansa’s instance the
perpetuation of that order has a further requirement: that she produce a male heir in the image of her own father.
When the Sethji dies, killed through Rahul’s machinations, her own male fixation pushes her into self-absorbed insanity,
bedecking herself with flowers and incense. The specific textual reference is to Shakuntala, daughter of Menaka (the
pre-Aryan word for woman), born out of Menaka’s seduction of sage Vishwamitra. Kosambi points out that both Menaka
and Urvashi are apsaras, water-goddesses, who typically occupy a prominent place at the beginning of royal genealogies
since their marriage is constantly threatened by illegitimacy – given that it was conventional both by ‘actual matriarchal
custom and later tradition that the apsaras could not submit to a husband as permanent lord and master’. Shakuntala’s
name is derived from birds that ‘fed her as an exposed infant; these birds were carrion-eaters, presumably vultures’, birds
of ill omen, sakunta (ibid.: 57–58).
Hansa’s death is, on one level, an anomic suicide. However, it is preceded by one last sexual encounter with Rahul:
an encounter of love and death that merits a detailed description. Hansa feels that in their vicious rivalry, both the
men in her life – her husband Rahul and her cousin Dinesh – have abandoned her. She now has only her infant son. And
when Rahul tells her that he has sent the son away and will bring him back only when Hansa is well again, she reads in
35
kumar shahani now Ashish Rajadhyaksha

his face the sign of her death. But it is more complicated than that: her husband will be her death, her lover. She is now
obsessively attracted to him. A dialogue extending just such a meaning follows:
Hansa: I will surely be well, Rahul / I will give you every pleasure
Once again my body wants to bathe itself with your breath
My body trembles / I have desire, Rahul
And you too, do you not?
Main achhi ho jaoongi Rahul, zaroor ho jaoongi / Main tumhe sab sukh doongi
Ek baar phir se meri deh tumhari saanson mein nahana chahti hai
Badan sihar sihar uthta hai / Mujhe chaah hai, Rahul
Aur tumhe bhi, hai na?
These lines also anticipate Hansa’s ‘call into the night’ song. They presumably have sex, he wraps her in the black-
and-white chequered bedsheet. They are then seen driving and the car is hit by shards of yellow flowers.
Rahul: Hansa, once again I have begun to feel / I feel like I have wings / That I can fly
What kind of a feeling is this.
Hansa, ek baar phir main apne aap ko mehsoos kar raha hoon / Lagta hai baahon mein pankh
lag gaye hain / Ud sakta hoon
Kaisa ehsaas hai yeh.
The flowers keep falling. She turns to him and with full realization of what this means, says:
I now know how I can deliver myself and acquire you.
Ab samjhi ki kaise apne ko saumpkar tumhe pa sakti hoon.
The full-throated call to her now goes thus on the soundtrack:
The clouds burst all night long / All night
Come, sleep with me / Come, my love / Bathe me with your breaths
Barse ghan saari raat / Saari raat
Sangh so jaao / Aao, priyatama aao / Nehlaao saason-se tan mera
and ends with:
The light is now gloomy
In my mind / Darkness surrounds
In the mirror / Why does my body shiver / Why does my reflection sway
Have you come / Opening your arms
I sleep / In sweet surrender / I sleep
My last breath / With your kiss / Silence me
Come my love / Sleep with me
Dhundhalaya ujhiyala
Mere man mein, man mein / Andhiyara ghir aaya
Darpan mein / Kyon tan sihare / Chhaya dole
Kya tum aaye / Baahein khole
Neend aayi / Madhur samarpan mein / Neend aayi
Antim sisaki / Chumban se / Chup kar jaao
Priyatama aao / Sangh so jaao
Both Hansa’s death and, even more, the manner in which she is drawn into it, escalate the film’s generic
ambitions. As her suicide sets the stage for its inevitable sequel, the downfall of the hero at the very pinnacle of
his own soaring ambition, the film too expands into a properly tragic mode. Hansa’s death removes the last major
obstacle in Rahul’s quest for absolute power over the family’s industrial empire. There is nothing left to keep his
unremitting greed in check. And it is this that shall be his downfall, as the hymn says in its ending (in Kosambi’s
translation):
Pururavas: When will the son that is born yearn after his father? He will have shed flooding
tears, knowing (what happened). Who dares separate the wedded pair in accord as long as the
(ancestral) fire burns at the house of the fathers-in-law?
Urvashi: I answer you, let him shed ample tears, he will not cry, heedful of (my) sacred office;
I shall send you that or thine that thou hast with us. Go to thy destiny; thou fool, thou canst
not reach me.
Pururavas: Let (your) lover . . . today drop (dead) uncovered, let him go to the very farthest
distance never to return; let him lie down in the lap of Nirrti (the death-goddess), let him be
eaten by raging wolves. (Kosambi 1962: 51–52)
The film makes one further, and more explicit, reference to tragedy: this time from Hamlet, where it gestures
towards a resemblance between Hansa’s relationship with her father in her eventual flower-bedecked madness, and that
of Polonius and Ophelia. Rahul, standing by the dead body of his wife and quarrelling with her brother Dinesh over the
legalities of how she met with her death, directly alludes to Hamlet’s ‘I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers / Could
not, with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum / What wilt thou do for her?’

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kumar shahani now
I had truly desired her. Could anyone see this? Neither her murderous brother nor the father.
Nobody could have desired her more than I. Today I can speak out. Hansa, was it to hear this
that you have shut your eyes?
Maine use sachmuch mein chaha tha. Koi dekh saka tha ise? Na woh hatyara bhai aur na woh
pita. Mere jaisa use koi nahi chah sakta tha. Aaj main woh sab keh sakta hoon. Hansa, kya yeh
sab sunne ke liye tumne aankhein band kar lee?
Such narrative devices – whether in the turn to myth or to the tragic – are clearly unusual choices for a film that
set out to be a political commentary about its immediate present. Specifically, Shahani refers in his writing to two
developments in Indian politics that he considered epochal, and to which the film also made overt reference. These were
the rise of an extreme-left Naxalism (represented by the character Namdev), which could see no role to play within the
social order as it stood at present unless that order was foundationally uprooted; and its equally violent mirror-opposite,
the Emergency of 1975–77. The Emergency is directly quoted at least once by Rahul, in his public address to the work
force when he promises them a good wage on condition that they ‘work hard’ (from Emergency propaganda), and when
he ends his speech by raising his palm, the Congress Party’s election symbol, to the camera with a Satyameva Jayate. Both
political phenomena – the Naxalite movement and the Emergency – so fundamentally challenged Indian nationalism’s
most cherished ideological self-portraits as to pose a destabilizing threat to the entire edifice of the nation.
Those were tumultuous years. The cold war was at its height. The schisms within the radicals
funded directly by activist research through various Defence Departments, espionage agencies,
paranoid political parties that had already begun to undermine the precarious freedom that we
had enjoyed since 1947. To throw us into the fires of indigenous finance capital, the Emergency,
in preparation for an India, the ancient land of ideological non-violence, becoming an area for
refuelling war planes. (‘The Shock of Desire’, p. 268)
Tarang clearly evokes the growing momentum of a historical investigation into that time. It stages a fairly direct class
conflict, in industrial conditions, within Bombay, and so within the dominant terms of its time (religious fundamentalism
was not as much of an issue then as it became in the 1990s and is only mentioned in passing: in the relations between Janaki
and Abdul, via Khala, and in the allegations of Dinesh funding right-wing politicians and their acts of political violence),
but then it shows each side in the conflict as riven by internal contradictions: contradictions that moreover uncannily
resemble each other. In the process, the film shifts the grounds of the debate, suggesting that the real problem lay
elsewhere than who would win in that particular class conflict, but existed in a disorder, the symptoms of which included
an atrophying of available modes of representation and an insufficient engagement with the global phenomenon of
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commodification. There is some resemblance between what Shahani refers to and what Raymond Williams (1966: 64–66)
had proposed as a basic condition of modern tragedy: a ‘stultification of the object before its transformative relations’.
The rottenness is in the state, and it is one that the language of politics cannot apprehend. Shahani’s need for
a contemporary idiom of tragedy to understand it in Tarang echoes Williams’ perception of modern tragedy, that its
‘essential point’ is that ‘violence and disorder are institutions as well as acts’, and that ‘old institutions, now dead, take
on their real quality as systematic violence and disorder; in that quality, the source of the revolutionary action is seen’
(ibid.). As Shahani writes on the tragic mode:
As the mother contains the penis, the image contains the mother. Its insubstantiality is filled with
codes that have more than the memory of the primal scene. The need for separation, individuation,
splitting – joy in that sorrow, organic events that become determinants of psychosomatic
generation of experience which in turn generate thoughts and their linkages. The way to knowledge
is opened out here. The prohibition on incest brings with it a frenzy that transfers the psychosomatic
tumescence to other areas of the body and mind. Oedipus will not heed the warnings of the Oracle.
What the Sphinx yields to Oedipus – power, money, tyrannical control over the world – is that of a
usurper, although he himself is the legitimate heir to all. Man, who is the measure of all things, is the
victim of that very condition. Oedipus’ epistemological instinct leads us to violation. For too long
is the demand left unsatisfied. Reason then takes him back to sacrifice, self-immolation. He tries to
put out the image because his cogito has failed him. That is when Oedipus knows himself for what
he is. He is not the measurer but the thing measured, not the equator but the thing equated. He is
the answer to the problem that he tried to solve. (‘The Self as an Objective Entity’, p. 279)
Disorder, Capitalism, Reification: Legacies of the Realism–Modernism Divide
How to understand such a disorder? Kumar Shahani’s next move is of significance: he speaks of it, startlingly, as a global
phenomenon. It is one whose crises of representation must be seen to have historical ties with the conflicted legacy of
realism and modernism, and that history must take us back to where it all began: to the Second World War and to Europe:
I think those specific conflicts . . . were definitely part of a world-historical crisis.
Commodification, that had so completely become the basis of human relations everywhere
. . . had begun throwing up extreme contradictions – as the drought situation in Maharashtra,
which was the subject of my documentary Fire in the Belly, and from where I initially got my
character, Janaki (played by Smita Patil), in Tarang. But then, evidently, this conflict also went
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back into the post-WW2 situation, with all its formal aspects in art, like Bazin’s theories on
realism, and modernism itself. (Shahani 1986: 102–03)
Shahani had in fact researched this connection as a project on the cinematic epic in the mid-1970s.23 That study,
which led him to filmmakers as diverse as D.W. Griffith, John Ford and Eisenstein, Miklós Jancsó, Andrei Tarkovsky and
Marguerite Duras, alongside a detailed textual study of the Mahabharata, had been a direct inspiration for Tarang
– which was itself made virtually as a research outcome of that project. Very generally, the project had sought to
identify historical contexts for the rise of epic storytelling in the cinema, contending that the epic typically emerged
as the key cinematic form at the origins of film when the cinema was still a ‘low’ art (Griffith); that it disappeared when
the cinema was gradually assimilated into both dominant narrative conventions, becoming a major frontier for the
realism–modernism debate, effectively making lyricism the ‘highest’ form of (art-house) cinematic expression; and that it
reappeared only in the 1970s and early 80s with a diverse group of filmmakers, among whom he names Jancsó, Tarkovsky,
Angelopoulos and Coppola.
Continuing this practice, Shahani made Tarang with an additional ambition that was curious: he wanted to make
a big movie with a large star cast drawn from the mainstream cinema, one that could play in your downtown theatre
and even be enjoyed as a lowbrow entertainer. There were two immediate reasons for doing so: one was, of course
that he was making a film, and as such at that time a part of the movie industry and making what had to be seen in the
end as a commodity. Another was more complicated: in making a commodity, he also entered a process of capitalist
commodification that was, at this point, the only mode available for creating universal structures of experience.
Was this possible? I want to take this forward with another figure who has been important to the debate, Frederic
Jameson. Jameson was of course one of the hosts of the ‘Globalization’ conference where Geeta Kapur had spoken of
Shahani, and – as we take the issue of commodification back to the post-World War II situation, and to the debates
between realism and modernism, as Shahani wants us to – we shall see Jameson play a further role in our story.
Jameson may well have criticized this ambition of Shahani’s, as he had once ridiculed the Adorno–Horkheimer-led
solution of introducing a ‘commodity structure into the very form and content of the work of art itself’, saying that
it was not clear ‘how a narrative could be ‘consumed’ for the benefit of its own idea’ in any way that even remotely
resembles how one ‘smokes for the sheer libidinal image of actors, writers, and models with cigarettes in their hands’
(Jameson 1979: 132). And yet it was his work on postmodernism that had given a further twist to both the theory of the
epic and of commodity reification by turning to the Hollywood blockbuster and seeking to turn around the high–low
cultural division to which modernism appears condemned, by proposing that reification could also be arrived at through
understanding consumption differently.
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Ashish Rajadhyaksha
If you are willing to entertain the possibility that ‘reification’ and the emergence of increasingly
materialized signifiers are one and the same phenomenon – both historically and culturally –
then this ideological great debate turns out to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding.
Once again, the confusion stems from the introduction of the false problem of value (which
fatally programs every binary opposition into its good and bad, positive and negative, essential
and inessential terms) into a more properly ambivalent dialectical and historical situation in
which reification or materialization is a key structural feature of both modernism and mass
culture. (Ibid.: 135)
If Lukács’ position on the impossibility of a modern bourgeois epic had been, as some have suggested, nothing but
a covert effort to create a socialist epic – in a new ‘socialist’ reality where the people ‘acquire the characteristics of epic
heroes’ (Pechey 2007: 87) – then, with advanced capitalism and the commodification of narrative, might we have another
kind of epic, the lowbrow bestseller? Such an epic works with a
quasi-material ‘feeling tone’ which floats above the narrative but is only intermittently realized
by it: the sense of destiny in family novels, for instance, or the ‘epic’ rhythms of the earth or of
great movements of ‘history’ in the various sagas can be seen as so many commodities towards
whose consumption the narratives are little more than means, their essential materiality then
being confirmed and embodied in the movie music that accompanies their screen versions.
(Ibid.: 133)
If this too is an epic, then clearly the new mass cultural economy poses fundamentally new challenges to the mode.
This particular juncture gives us perhaps the most optimal location yet for playing out the realism–modernism divide (as
against taking sides in that battle), for it also provides us with a propitious ground for addressing commodification itself.
It also, I believe, allows us to comment on both the process of addressing myth, not only as deconstruction but also as
positive mythologization, and the epic as a site for transacting the meaning of materialized signifiers.
I think we are at the crux of the problem as Shahani sees it. This is not common commodification, or just a means
of making a film market-friendly. The encounter with the commodity process is somewhat specific: it has to do with
the protocols of apprehending objectivity. Such protocols of apprehension directly concern the conditions of material
experience. Consumption is one possible way to experience, but there are potentially other points of access as well.
Whatever they might be, experiences cannot be accessed without the successful completion of a parallel process, namely
their narrativization. Narrative now also becomes a means of wending one’s way through a dense thicket – a thicket we
shall now term myth. This navigation-through-myth includes a subset: navigating with the compass of history, which
41
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often leaves us stranded – like a half-drawn map of a desert that begins well but gives up halfway, leaving the traveller
on his own. The ‘stultification of history’ (Maya Darpan), the inability of history to ‘look beyond’ (Janaki’s quotation at the
end of Tarang), inevitably leaves a part of the story untold, the journey incomplete.
What is of significance, of course, is the fact that Shahani unambiguously located this history, his own and that of the
other ‘epic’ filmmakers, primarily from Europe and the USA, within a tradition of European debate on the disappearance
of the epic: in the cinema’s reprisal of Lukács’ famous contention about the impossibility of an epic structure outside of
‘integrated civilizations’,24 and in Brecht’s opposition to that view. Shahani often specifically mentions Brecht when he
speaks of the cinema’s somewhat unique capacity to at once apprehend and to name the particular in its immediacy, at
the same time as it makes larger connections that would retain the ‘ambivalence of their terms, their poetry, and to place
them alongside history, fact and facts, their relationship, the epic’.
Not the concrete. But its immanence.
Itihasa. Thus it was.
‘Thus’, because the manner often contains the matter, the relationships of fact that change
and call for a new mode of action. ‘It’ includes all that is in the world, including that which may
be its potential. ‘Was’, the past tense, is necessary so that you may actually judge the process
of the event; not get involved in the illusion, the event itself. Narrative theatre, as Brecht saw
it, also breaks off that cathartic process which, instead of making you recognize your condition,
purges you of its consciousness. (‘Film as a Contemporary Art’, p. 208)
Both the repeated references to Brecht and, more generally, to the realism–modernism divide consciously invoke
the storm-centre of that divide: Europe between the wars. Shahani could have, one imagines, ducked this entirely by
claiming non-western or ‘third world’ exception, but he precisely does not do that. Instead, we next see him claiming for
the epic a diversity of aesthetic practices and alternatives, effectively echoing Franco Moretti’s ‘Big Bang Theory’ of the
epic in modern European literature as a ‘multiplicity of mutually disconnected phenomena’.25
It could be that the ‘aesthetics’ – if one may begin to call it that – of the epic form has the
capacity to express, even to generate, such energies in diverse directions because it accepts the
dominant mode of exchange: day-to-day life in praxis, under capitalism, the exchange of word,
gesture, look, tone, colour, line, rhythm, melody and modulation rendered into and through the
form of the commodity. For this one had to separate, isolate, free that which can be retrieved
of the non-commodified, to put it alongside the commodified, or to show it in the process
of becoming so. The relatively socialized modes would suddenly shed their skin and acquire
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Ashish Rajadhyaksha
new ones. Of course, one cannot program it entirely. One has to keep working through many
entries. Taking from Hollywood the trolley, taking from Kutiattam in Kerala the mise-en-scène,
to counter the geometric social horizon with the expanding circles from a spiritual centre, or
the psychological ambivalence of acting with the rationality of the plot: the two together
mediated by the anguished search for immortality, be it that of Prometheus or Pururavas. To
bring together death by water (Urvashi); to see in both, freedom, moksha, Grace, mukti. (‘The
Shock of Desire’, p. 268)
Such a move into conditions of global meaning is surely a requisite for any real claim on countermodernity, but then
it also opens up other difficult terrains and possibilities of collateral damage. This is a complicated, and as yet unsettled,
space in contemporary Indian aesthetic practice, and we will return to it more than once in this essay.
While Shahani’s own seeming dismissal of Lukács and his contrary adoption of Brechtian frames can be relatively
easily accommodated within his pronounced anti-realism, there is much that is not accounted for, to which the theory
now opens itself. Both Shahani and Jameson begin with Lukács. And it becomes rapidly evident that in this debate –
which was of course iconic of the realism–modernism controversy, and one in which one side (as Jameson’s definitive
commentary of 1977 says) was not ‘pre-programmed to win in advance’ – it is nowhere near self-evident that Shahani
would automatically be on Brecht’s side, or that Brecht’s side of the story was necessarily always a settled one.
Both Shahani and Jameson would agree on the centrality of the way a (in Jameson’s words) ‘coherent and quite
systematic ideology – I will call it the ideology of modernism – imposes its conceptual limitations on our aesthetic
thinking’ (Jameson 1988: 117). Both would also accept that exceptionalist arguments, or taking recourse to any ‘remnant
. . . peasant culture from the precapitalist period (or) to the oral storytelling of tribal and primitive societies’ would not
work. Both will establish their claims foundationally within the domain of capitalism, which is the ‘first genuinely global
culture’ that has ‘never renounced its mission to assimilate everything alien into itself’ (Ibid.).
In fact, this is precisely where Shahani, with Tarang, stakes his chips with his biggest and most critical contention: that
epic narrative actually transforms the realism–modernism debate everywhere it appears. It does this primarily through
its ability to re-situate the crisis of realism within its parent crisis: that of capitalist commodification. And it can do this
only because it appears to possess a capacity to assimilate a language by which to represent such commodification – and
Shahani literally means this, as he speaks of the ‘exchange of word, gesture, look, tone, colour, line, rhythm, melody and
modulation rendered into and through the form of the commodity’ (‘The Shock of Desire’, p. 268).
This claim echoes a wider need that many Indian theorists had begun to feel by the late 1970s and early 80s,
driven by the same political crises which Shahani mentions, namely the extreme-left movements and the kind of state
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despotism India had shown itself capable of: a need to define its problems within different, more international terms.
This in turn also needed a description of the aesthetic alternatives apparently available in a language that would neither
claim oriental or ‘nativist’ exceptionalism, nor succumb to the unfortunate errors that Ritwik Ghatak had made in some
of his theoretical expeditions – when he chose to explain his cinema through Jung, Joseph Campbell and the theory of
‘collective unconscious’ (Ghatak 1987: 60–64).
By the 1980s, Shahani was identifying his critical concerns within a larger effort to rather more directly take on the
European legacy of modernism – through referencing European debates both from the inter-war and immediate post-war
periods, as well as their later poststructuralist variations in France and England. This was also at a time when aesthetic
alternatives articulated within Euro-American resistance and Counter Cinema, as well as by non-western (both African
and Latin American) cinematic practices, were gradually becoming known to Indian artists and theorists.26
However, there are some tough questions that Jameson now asks of this strategy, and it is worth seeing where
Shahani, and specifically Tarang, stand on that. Jameson adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus to show how new
realities created by new forms of capitalist rationalization seek to decode what has preceded them. Such rationalization
and decoding leads to strange situations, including a revival of the sacred. It is somehow required that an ‘omnipresent
and decentered primitive coding is somehow ordered and the body of the world (be) territorialized’ for us to arrive in the
next stage of the social (but also literary) order’. ‘It seems to me’, he writes, that ‘each realism constitutes a demystification
of some preceding idea or illusion’, and thus to ‘the very nature of the codes thus cancelled, the older barbaric or savage
signifiers thus dismantled’. This theory Jameson now applies to modernism itself, dramatically contending that
all modernistic works are essentially simply cancelled realistic ones, that they are, in other
words, not apprehended directly, in terms of their own symbolic meanings, in terms of their
own mythic or sacred immediacy, the way an older primitive or overcoded work would be,
but rather indirectly only, by way of the relay of an imaginary realistic narrative of which the
symbolic and modernistic one is then seen as a kind of stylization; and this is a type of reading,
and a literary structure, utterly unlike anything hitherto known in the history of literature, and
one to which we have been insufficiently attentive till now. (Jameson 1988: 129)
‘All modernistic works are essentially simply cancelled realistic ones.’ If this is true, then it certainly gives us one
alarmingly complete way within which to see a film such as Tarang. Jameson further rubs it in by proposing that, under
these circumstances of modernism, Lukács may have proved ‘in the long run to have been right after all’, for modernism,
far from forcing a break with ‘that older overstuffed Victorian bourgeois reality’, in fact simply ‘reinforces all the latter’s
presumptions, only in a world so thoroughly subjectivized that they have been driven underground’ (ibid.: 130–31). And in
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his sequel afterword to the Brecht–Lukács debate, contending that Lukács ‘may well have had the provisional last word
for us today’, Jameson says:
The reification of late capitalism – the transformation of human relations into an appearance of
relationships between things – renders society opaque: by which domination and legitimation
are legitimized. Since the fundamental structure of the social ‘totality’ is a set of class
relationships – an antagonistic structure such that the various social classes define themselves
in terms of that antagonism and by opposition with one another – reification necessarily
obscures the class character of that structure, and is accompanied, not only by anomie, but
also by that increasing confusion as to the nature and even the existence of social classes which
can be abundantly observed in all the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries today. (Ibid.: 146)
Read like this, Tarang may well suffer from becoming a victim of its own critique, so to say. This is also because
Shahani would typically repudiate the usual means by which Jameson might have exceptionalized him, given him an ‘out’:
as a ‘third world’ artist. Shahani’s own examples through this book are profoundly European, including Jancsó, Tarkovsky
and Bresson. Not for him the condition of ‘third world literature’ and the ‘national allegory’, or the
placeless individuality, this structural idealism which . . . condemns our culture to psychologism
and the ‘projections’ of private subjectivity . . . is denied to third-world culture, which must
be situational and materialist despite itself (and where) the telling of the individual story and
the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the
experience of collectivity itself. (Jameson 1986: 85)
Jameson has of course come under considerable fire for the argument (Ahmad 1987), and while in that specific debate one
does take his side, it is nevertheless a route Shahani would not take. We have seen that if both Jameson and he are agreed
on one thing, it is that capitalism’s ever-expanding global ambition will allow no exception.
Simply put, the problem that comes up is this: when history is no longer guiding us, how do we move forward? It
is only our experience that shows us how to proceed, and such experience relies foundationally on commodification-
as-material signifier, since capitalism is the one force we still have which, we can be sure, will refuse to be stopped by
any such historical barrier. This therefore throws up a gap between experience and historical account that can only be
navigated through reification.
As Tarang permits our encounter with such commodification – one that will allow Janaki to be recognized inside
the film as movie star Smita Patil (see cover image), and Rahul to be mistaken for Amol Palekar – what we also get
is a particular cinematic juncture that has sometimes been incompletely named as melodrama. Tarang’s claim to be
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a melodrama has been contested – and when accepted, far too easily so as derived from Ghatak’s legacy. But there
are at least two other contexts within which this claim needs to be anchored, at a specific cinematic juncture when
a formal mechanism of filmic narrative came together with an industrial practice for the cinema. One, explicitly to do
with reification, in the economic role of melodrama in setting up local film industries in several parts of India. I have
elsewhere termed this ‘epic melodrama’ (Rajadhyaksha 1993), linked as an industrial production practice with the allegory
of nationhood itself. Such a tradition also allows us, I have proposed in that argument, to see Tarang as the very last
of a tradition of melodramas that provide a ‘report card’ on the condition of grand nationalism, as a critic once said of
perhaps the leading Indian figure in this history, the filmmaker Guru Dutt. And two, it allows us to revisit, from a slightly
different standpoint, the overheated atmosphere of 1970s–80s New Cinema, when the modernist high–low distinction
was at its fiercest, and where the ‘dilemma of the double standard of high and mass culture . . . (which had become) –
not the subjective problem of our own standards of judgment – but rather an objective contradiction which has its own
social grounding’ (Jameson 1979: 134) was being directly manifested in state policy on Indian film.
We will come back to this later in this essay, specifically with respect to Kasba. Here I conclude by simply mentioning
that, as it happens, Tarang did not get a real commercial release. In the end, and despite its ambitions, it was pushed back
by its circumstances into becoming what it did not necessarily want to be: an art-house film.
The Khayal, and the ‘Sequence’
Some years after Tarang, Kumar Shahani shifted gears yet again with a series of films that may be provisionally described
as about music. We need to qualify that. The music we are primarily, though not exclusively, looking at is the khayal:
broadly known as north Indian classical music (incorrectly so, we will see, since it is neither limited to north India nor
properly classical), and further divided into a number of gharanas, or schools, the most famous being the Gwalior, the
Jaipur, the Agra and the Kirana. Shahani’s specific adherence is to the Gwalior gharana, to the teachings of his own music
teacher Jal Balaporia, to Pandit Sharadchandra Arolkar27 and to a particular kind of musical practice.
Also, the films are not ‘about’ khayal, nor even narrowly about music. Only one of them, Khayal Gatha, explicitly
addresses this specific form. But this film also uses it to set up a narrative template that is furthered in Bhavantarana
and Bamboo Flute: where well-known (and occasionally obscure) myths derived from Puranic and other sources play
out alongside new ones written originally for the film. In Khayal Gatha, several myths attached to the tradition of the
khayal, and yet others of Sufi origin, are held together by the fictional saga of a music student who passes through these
tales, sometimes entering the fiction and embodying one of the characters, at other times observing from outside (see
fig. 42, p. 308). Bhavantarana is about Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, an icon of Odissi dance, and its primary purpose is to
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record the master on film at the very pinnacle of his dancing ability (see fig. 35, pp. 246–47). It does that: especially in
the standout finale when Mahapatra performs the navarasa to the flute soundtrack of another legend, Pandit Hariprasad
Chaurasia. In trying to further explain where the dancer, and his dance, came from, the film reprises several myths
around the Jagannath deity and the Sun temple at Puri. Bamboo Flute is perhaps the most abstract of the three films,
exploring an instrumental music through numerous allusions. All these, indeed all of Shahani’s films, use dance just as
much as they use music, often collaborating with some of India’s leading dancers: in Maya Darpan we see the Mayurbhanj
Chhau (in collaboration with Chandralekha), in Khayal Gatha it is Kathak with Pandit Birju Maharaj (see fig. 36, p. 248), in
Bhavantarana it is Odissi with Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra and Sanjukta Panigrahi, and in Bamboo Flute we have Bharata
Natyam with Alarmel Valli (see fig. 34, p. 245). Even Tarang, which does not use any specific dance form, had its climactic
sequence choreographed by the contemporary dancer Uttara Asha Coorlawala.
Yet the khayal engagement is central to Shahani’s late style. Engaging with a narrative practice derived primarily
from a particular understanding of the musical idiom as a direct continuation of his experiments with the epic, it was
inevitable that such an endeavour would have to address the need to go beyond linear storytelling. Although Shahani’s
desire to do so possibly echoes that of every other avant-garde filmmaker in the world, the solution is specifically his:
contrary to, say, Eisenstein’s emphasis on contradiction and dialectical montage, he emphasizes narrative sequence. This
idea of sequence is crucial for him, and we will explore it in some detail in this section.
Shahani’s use of ‘narrative sequence’ as the primary cinematic method with which to narrativize one’s experience
of a mythicized universe has a very particular definition. It is partially indebted to Eisenstein and to the French idiom
of plan-séquence – at least in the sense that Shahani uses the long take often enough in his films – but appears to go
considerably beyond both. It is taken primarily from music, and its definition may ‘initially appear to idealists as a form
of corruption’.
Sequence, as we have been approaching it through history, frees the myths (consequently our
axioms, scientific or moral) of the spatial rigidity of their terms and meaning. . . . Like music,
the cinema is experienced as a continuous, live process of energies. It is conceived and best
remembered in a flash, a composite whole. Bresson: ‘Your film must resemble what you see
on shutting your eyes. (You must be capable, at any instant, of seeing and hearing it entire).’
Unlike novels, it does not describe, it makes us see and hear (Griffith). Unlike theatre, drama,
it cannot bear the language or space of metaphor. It can precede it, reveal it, mock at it, bring
together the metaphor’s elements that are absent with the present; the word and action; man
and nature; the crafted and the crude. (‘Film as a Contemporary Art’, p. 208; emphasis added)
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Let us stay for a bit with the technical definition of sequence as Shahani understands it. A brief introduction to
the theory of khayal performance may be useful. As Gwalior gharana musician and theorist Neela Bhagwat explains it,
the khayal – a form of primarily vocal singing by an individual to the accompaniment of the tanpura and the tabla –
comprises three elements with which the singer works: the raga or melody, taal or musical beat, and the bandish or the
poetry of the particular composition being rendered (Khopkar 1983). This much is common to all the gharanas, but the
Gwalior style now emphasizes a few further rules. The ‘waves of a raga flow around the word, the word is musically
realized in both its phonetic and semantic values. It is treated in unbroken, complete form.’ Going forward, the taal (or
the mechanical, mathematic beat) ‘tunes itself to the ongoing waves of the raga and the word’, and itself becomes more
than a taal, it becomes a theka. This is hard to translate, but we might broadly speak of it as escalation of rhythm from
mere metric timekeeping into becoming a container of some kind. The performance leads, says Bhagwat, to a ‘significant
interpretation of the bandish (the poetry itself) which in turn depends upon the mood of the . . . dialogue’. The entire
structure implies a ‘dialectical interaction between what we may now term as form, content and technique’, with the
presentation bringing to the bandish an ‘individuality, an identity through the interpretation of the singer depending
upon the here and now of the presentation’ (ibid.: 61–62).
Shahani’s theoretical engagement with the khayal as embodying sequence began with a manifesto-statement he
wrote in 1978, ‘Notes for an Aesthetic of Cinema Sound’ (pp. 179–84 in this book). To him, the properties of sequence are
opened up when the cinema harnesses its full capacity of sound and image, and sets these alongside music: the combination
does something that neither can achieve on its own, which only emerges through that juxtaposition. Replacing music
with sound, both recorded and mixed, we get another entity that neither music nor the cinema intrinsically possesses:
constructed silence. ‘The soundtrack invented silence’, Shahani quotes Robert Bresson, and adds, ‘this is perhaps true in
a far deeper sense than even he meant it’.
On the most obvious level, silence in music relates to space indirectly. In the cinema, on the
other hand, it relates to space in movement. In music it relates to the sustaining of a note, to
reverberation, to absorption, by the spatial enclosures, producing, transmitting, reflecting and
receiving the sound. In the cinema all this and more. In fact, cinema may or may not relate to
the spaces which produce and receive sound. (Ibid., p. 183)
The arbitrariness of such silence happens through a combination of sound, music, speech and visual imagery, and
that combination allows for something newer: sound discontinuity. Shahani’s favourite example for this is the soundtrack
over the sequence in Ghatak’s Subarnarekha where the sister, faced in a brothel by her drunken brother, kills herself
offscreen, over discontinuities of sound that ‘neither the spoken word nor music’ can manage on their own (ibid.).
48
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
For Shahani, this insight has considerable significance. For one, giving such primacy to sound disturbs an established
Eurocentric evolutionary hierarchy: a widespread assumption that just as hearing is the highest of the senses, so verbal
language combining units of the spoken word should be the highest form of meaning-making. Musical notation freezes
this evolutionary hierarchy – one result of which is that all musical and sound practices outside the European (say, the
Chinese or Japanese or Indian) appear to Europeans as atonal and unmusical.
In the development of almost all traditions of music, at any rate, the speech and the recitative
has always been closely related to changes of frequency, if not the motive force. Many of the
classical languages – and some of the modern languages – had developed meters from pitch
and frequency variations rather than stress. In fact the khayal gayaki, a system of music we are
all familiar with, may be recognized as the highest form of the speech–music continuum. (Ibid.)
Now emerges a very specific requirement for such a continuum: a technical requirement that we overcome rigid notations
and arrive at the idea of a continuous musical scale.
The absence of rigid notations, experienced by us today as a near-impossibility, along with the
apparent semantic poverty of its words, has perhaps made it possible for us to come nearer to
what James Jeans conjectures to be the music of the future: ‘a continuous scale in which every
interval can be made perfect’. The simplest example can come from the infinite variations upon
the bhairavi. But closer examination may reveal that we approach it even in pentatonic ragas
like the bhoop. (Ibid.)
(Note: the bhairavi, at one extreme, uses almost all the notes on the scale, while bhoop uses the minimum possible
notes: five.)
Hence, the khayal: the specific capacity to arrive, over and across linear discontinuities, at a kind of discursive
continuity, the continuous scale – one that he can further extend in the cinema into an oscillating movement across
music–sound–speech. This is now, for him, the definition of sequence, and it will have consequences both figural (in the
move from figure to landscape and back) and historical (the move from present to past and back). In his ‘music’ films,
Shahani uses this argument to carve out an aesthetic practice that includes shot-taking, editing, and, crucially, sound
recording and mixing. At one level, in using the khayal like this he is deriving a cinematic language from a traditional form,
similar to what, say, Japanese filmmakers do when they extract cinematic language from the Kabuki (Kurosawa), or Central
Asian filmmakers from Azerbaijani and Armenian visual histories (Parajanov) – and indeed the cinematic similarities have
been pointed out by many.28 What is different, or at least additional, is the further theoretical exploration of sequence
into cinematic grammar, where Shahani comes closest, if at all to anyone, to Eisenstein.
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kumar shahani now

Landscape and Music

A particular example is his use of landscape. Although landscape has been always present in his films beginning with the
harsh desert views of Maya Darpan, it takes on a discursive purpose with Khayal Gatha. Here, the legend of Roopmati
(played by Meeta Vasisth) is inaugurated with two 360-degree pans over a dusky flat plain. On the ramparts of a fort,
where she now leads the student, the camera repeatedly tracks over and tilts down on to the gigantic plain (see fig. 10,
p. 52).
Let us explore all of the above in two opening sequences: a simpler one from Bhavantarana and a much more
complicated one from Khayal Gatha. Bhavantarana begins with an intertitle that, after a brief and eulogistic description
of Kelucharan Mahapatra, claims that it will be made ‘from the energy of sculpture, painting, literature, and its precedent
dance forms’. The emphasis is mine. The intertitle reiterates a claim Shahani has often made: that there is no way we
could have had a sculptural tradition without a performative one preceding it. This cannot of course be substantiated
in any conventional historical way. Although we do have textual references to performance, both in plays that have
survived and in the famous Natyashastra with its origins in the Vedic era, it would be hard to establish any direct
before-and-after links between performance and sculpture. But the point I read into that intertitle is precisely that we
move beyond the conventional to find the answers – or rather, to make the claims – in the present: to look, Kosambi-
like, around us.
Over a soundtrack of a chisel-and-hammer, we first see what appears to be a sheer cliff. The camera closes into
a rock-face as the sounds grow louder. We cut into a person’s lean thigh, bones showing along with contracting and
expanding muscle as he performs his labour, which seems to be to chisel away at a rock. Close-ups of his arms, his torso
and his back, intercut with puffs of dust as he hammers the rock, suddenly give way to the sound of a sitar. The camera 9
now cranes over the hillock, over trees as birds fly, to show a clearing in the evening sun – and as the sitar is joined by
the pakhawaj and then a full-throated song in praise of Jagannath Swami, we see in long shot the dance of Mahapatra’s
leading disciple, Sanjukta Panigrahi, in full flow. We see her in the dusky light in all her regalia as the camera tracks
between two trees in a flat clearing surrounded by hills, performing to full musical accompaniment on the soundtrack.
Let me frame this sequence within the original contention by Shahani (from ‘Film as a Contemporary Art’, p. 208),
that the very concept of sequence ‘as we have been approaching it through history, frees the myths (consequently our
axioms, scientific or moral) of the spatial rigidity of their terms and meaning’. Taking this literally, I now split our inquiry
into three parts. First, that the approach to narrative sequence – such as what I have just described – is necessarily an
approach ‘through history’; that, in other words, the extravagant juxtaposition of a form as evolved as Panigrahi’s full-on
rendition of Odissi with one as primitive as a piece of rock being hewed with a chisel, is not just poetic juxtaposition but

fig. 9 Bhavantarana (1991). ‘Please pardon me for touching you with my toes’: anonymous
sculptor chiselling a female form from rock. fig. 10 Khayal Gatha (1988). The bird/muse/
Roopmati (Meeta Vasisth) figure leading the student into the myth; trolley-forward and
50 tilt-down into the vast landscape.
 Ashish Rajadhyaksha

equally a historical inquiry.29 Second, that such an approach becomes historical in the way it frees the myths and their
meaning (not interpret or open the myths to history, but free them), and in turn frees our axioms, scientific and moral.
Third, that such freedom is a freedom from the spatial rigidity of their meanings; that in the end, this is a matter of space.
And so the trajectory of the sequence is set up: history, myth, space.
Panigrahi’s dance is followed by the next intertitle, quoting from a Puranic sloka:
O Goddess, consort of Vishnu
You with oceans as your garments and mountains your breasts
I bow to you
Please pardon me for touching you with my toes.
We cut back to the rocks and the labourer, who is now revealed to be a sculptor. In a tight close-up, he seems to have
chiselled a female form from the piece of rock. His toes are firmly on her breasts as they hold the stone in place, while he
chisels her face with a hammer. It is a very small figurine apparently, and he is carving it with very primitive tools but with
immense confidence, banging away and making incisions into her face.
History, first, and it is inevitable that we return sooner or later to Kosambi’s method – also because, as it happens,
this specific Bhavantarana sequence was intended as a direct homage to it. The ‘Kosambi method’, most elaborately
outlined in his landmark Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956), has been both immensely influential and, to
say the least, controversial.30 Its critical feature is the relentless emphasis on why any historical inquiry in India has to
begin with the here-and-now, where the inquiry will usually find its most valuable data.31 We need, Kosambi said, a ‘history
without episodes’, so that we can address the sneering dismissal of India as having ‘some episodes, but no history’. We
10 cannot have the same history as the Europeans. ‘We are . . . led inevitably to concentrate upon successive developments,
in chronological order, in the means and relations of production. Only this can tell us how people lived at any period.’32
And so, expanding such an inquiry, to space – as repository of both memory and history. The tracking shot over
which Panigrahi dances – along with other classic Shahani landscapes, like the Maya Darpan desert that the engineer
wants to transform with his quote from Engels (‘Freedom is the recognition of necessity’) – is significantly beholden to
a Kosambi imagination. As Romila Thapar says (of the Western Ghats between Bombay and Pune), Kosambi ‘knew every
hill-top, stone and tree of consequence in terms of ethnographic and historical connections: his familiarity with the
landscape was phenomenal’ (Thapar 2008: 43). Even historian Shereen Ratnagar, who conducts a classic hatchet job on
Kosambi,nevertheless recognizes that ‘Kosambi was able to conceive of landscapes as dynamic rather than backdrops to
human activity. He could transport himself to a prehistoric landscape and people it with a facility that is remarkable and
largely accounts for the fascination of his writing’ (Ratnagar 2008: 72).33

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kumar shahani now
Towards the beginning of his Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Kosambi invites his reader to accompany
him on a walk around his house in Pune, reading off everything he encounters, astonishing civilizational insights not only
about India but the world:
So, let me take the reader on a brief tour beyond my house on the boundary of Poona city. This
region is a little valley bounded by the land of the Law College (which teaches post-British law in
English), the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (whose collection of Sanskrit MSS and edition
of the Mahabharata are known all over the world), the Fergusson College, several country houses
of Bombay millionaires, and a modern state sheep-breeding farm. . . . [It] will be possible to see the
interaction of obsolete with modern forms of society, to see historical processes illustrated, as
well as ethnic groups that have survived the process. Nearest to me in location are a tent-dwelling
nomadic group of Ras Phase Pardhis whose basic costume . . . is a simple loincloth, who never
take a bath, but who retain the natural cleanliness, mobility, superior senses of wild animals. They
have six exogamous clans . . . whose names have become surnames of feudal Maratha families:
Bhonsale, Powar, Cavhan, Jadhav, Sinde, Kale. The last is actually a Citpavan brahmin surname; the
penultimate once denoted ‘son of a slave-girl’ (without acknowledged father) till it was ennobled
by rising to the kingdom of Gwalior. That the names were acquired during the period of Maratha
dominance follows from the speech of the tribe, a Gujarati dialect. Besides begging and petty
stealing, (they) are expert bird snarers. They still worship a mother-goddess. . . . The goddess
became popular all over Maharashtra fairly late in the 16th century: her adoption by the Pardhis
seems comparatively recent, and does not match their ritual. The sudden appearance of a superior
type like the Cro-Magnon man in Europe may have been due to such a fertile cross. It is the
function of the clan chief or head of a band to dance before the goddess on ceremonial occasions,
but to do so, he has to wear a woman’s skirt and shoulder-cloth, of design not known in this part
of the country, and certainly not worn by women of the tribe. ‘Then I am the goddess!’ says he; the
emphatic claim has to be substantiated during the dance. (Kosambi 1956: 27–28)
As Shahani writes,
Walking with D.D. Kosambi on the hills behind the Film and Television Institute of India in
Pune – 50 years after the first feature film was made in India – I learnt to distinguish between
the marks of erosion on stone and the etched evocations of experience in spirals, the goddesses
becoming conscious of their own terrible splendour.
54
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
The microliths that Kosambi wedges out from the rubble would carve patterns out of
rock surfaces later to become the indestructible  aksharas  of tradition, resplendent language,
history,  sangeet, the spectral composite arts of cinema, of installations, of long-distance
signals preserved to come alive in another time, another place with dimensionalities yet to be
discovered within the curves of ornaments illuminating the sky.
Between nature and culture there is an accord in the spaces and temporalities that lie
within emptiness inhabited by light, sound, smell, colour, invisible touch, intangible taste –
like jharokhas of knowledge. (‘From Stone Age. . .’, p. 388)
All of which brings us to myth: the third in the triad after history and space, the hardest to tackle and, in modernist
aesthetics, the most overdone. Interspersed with the dance, Bhavantarana attempts a mythic narrative for which the
template was set up, we have seen, by Khayal Gatha. Several myths, e.g. of Vidyapati (and his search for Vishnu, one of the
founding legends of the Jagannath temple at Puri), are intercut with the ‘realist’ myth of Kelucharan himself and his life-
story. Khayal Gatha had used the legend of Roopmati and Baaz Bahadur alongside diverse sagas of Heer–Raanjha, Nala–
Damayanti, Sohni–Mahiwal and yet others not even necessarily from India (e.g. Orpheus–Eurydice; see fig. 41, p. 307).
It cannot be merely a matter of narrating myths, though, not if our triad of history–space–myth has to be properly
seen through. Indian modernism is filled with interminable renditions of this or that myth to allegorize the present.
Indeed, I hope to show that what we have been describing as a sequence need not necessarily even work as allegory:
polyphony, as we will see later, might be a better description. Nor, I hope to further show, is the process of ‘freeing
the myths’ in the Shahani sense necessarily the conventional one of deciphering their historical content: certainly, a
Bhavantarana or a Khayal Gatha cannot be simply seen as doing history-by-other-means. In any case, by the 1980s, this
unidirectional consequence of the awareness that myths ‘contained’ historical material – and so needed to be mined for
historical data otherwise inaccessible – had been replaced by many other reasons to engage with myth: as narrative form,
within the tradition of structural anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), within the growing interest in a Barthian conception of
modern mythology, as well as the more influential Chicago anthropology tradition of Mircea Eliade and Wendy Doniger.
Are we at all speaking here of textual interpretation? For a while it would have appeared so, but I think we have
by now moved on. We encountered Kosambi’s bravura textual interpretations of mythic sources (the Urvashi–Pururavas
story) and Shahani’s use of these (Tarang). Describing these interpretations as a ‘political philology’ – expanding
narrow textual work into a reading of the social practices that went alongside the texts, making myths available across
astonishingly long epochs on condition that they were properly narrativized – Sheldon Pollock says this could only have
been achieved because of India’s capacity to sustain orality ‘unimpeded by the rise of literacy’, so that
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kumar shahani now
in a work like the Mahabharata a wide spectrum of communicative media came to be sedimented
over the centuries; how regions tended to produce their own recensions of given works, with
their own effective history, among which sometimes none evinces primacy; or how some genres
were completely open to variation or expansion (the epics, for instance) while others remained
almost completely closed (the mahakavyas, or great courtly poems). (Pollock 2008: 54)
By the time we get to Khayal Gatha, however, the much-quoted textual claim in the introduction to Myth and Reality
that Kosambi attempts – mainly a ‘collation of field-work with literary evidence’ (Kosambi 1962: 1), a practice annoying
to many who do not like historians to ‘ignore the beautiful lily of Indian philosophy in order to concentrate upon the
dismal swamp of popular superstition’ (ibid.) – begins to sound facile. We are moving beyond the Kosambi method now,
as we enter an area that his practice largely leaves out: contemporary mythification, or the practice, and the aesthetics
of elaborating available mythic content, and, as a necessary corollary, of creating myths that could re-evaluate the
contemporary. This is the dark underside of modernism – witness the M.F. Husain controversies around Hindu goddesses34
– and inevitably concerns a kind of modernist practice, both on the left and on the right, that contemporary Indian
history has encountered more than once, and has rightly been wary of as playing with fire, as dangerous.
There would be several positions, mutually antagonistic, on this kind of modernism. Is it feasible? Jameson, we have seen,
had said no, and for reasons not too removed from why Lukács had proclaimed the impossibility of a modern epic. Jameson
had even gone on alarmingly to contend that reification as a capitalist process created a kind of hierarchy of realisms where
each reprised its previous version in mythic mode. But let us assume that a kind of mythicized apprehension of the commodity
is possible, offering Picasso (or Jancsó; see Shahani’s ‘A Meeting with Miklós Jancsó’, pp. 174–78) as our example; the next
question would arise, is this desirable? Indian historians worrying about the enduring political salience of myth in events such
as the Ram Janmabhoomi controversy too would have said an emphatic no (see Pandey 1993). But suppose we press our point
and make a further claim, that this too was needed, so to say, on the left – or, more accurately, that as a valid and appropriate
way of engaging with reification, where the artist not only deconstructs, not only historicizes, but constructs – questions
would still remain. How to do it? Is there now an Indian (or generally non-western) way, a variant of magic realism perhaps?35
Myth and Modernism: Restaging History
This is an argument on which Shahani has much to say. As ever, his ground is modernist. He writes:
I should think that the spirit of modernity consists in this – and yet, its origins, as we have seen,
lie in centuries of tradition. . . . The particular fault in man freed his epistemological instinct
from that fate that he considered organic to his being. The swollen foot of fate (Oedipus)
56
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
did not impel him to a destructive knowledge. It was something rotten in the state that he
acted out his tragedy against, man against the disease engendered by him. At the cost of self-
destruction, with the benefit of redeeming that spirit which was until then his fault. (‘Film as a
Contemporary Art’, p. 205)
Let me take all these doubts about engaging with myth to my second example: the densely packed opening
sequence of Khayal Gatha. This is much more properly a sequence in the full Shahani sense: more complicated than the
one we have seen from Bhavantarana, and also particularly provocative. Additionally, it bears similarity to the prelude of
Shahani’s next major work, Char Adhyay.
In both preludes, history itself is engaged with as if through myth. The Khayal Gatha sequence lasts around sixteen
minutes, the Char Adhyay prelude is slightly under that length. In both instances we get a sequence that encapsulates
a massive history, veritably an entire saga, in a series of rapid juxtaposed shots and sound effects. In Khayal Gatha, this
prelude sets out to effectively tell us the entire history of mid-fifteenth-century Gwalior: of Raja Mansingh Tomar (in
whose court the Gwalior gharana first flourished), the wars he fought, the palace intrigues, the relations between the
king and the people, especially those of the low castes and the tribals, his emphasis on public works. In Char Adhyay,
he summarizes a major debate in the nationalist movement: the one interweaving the symbolic role of the female
protagonist within nationalism, as a species of mother-goddess, clashing with her individuated subjective desire.
With Khayal Gatha, too, Shahani defines what would be his signature style of performance: a controversial style that
has had many questioning his ability to handle actors. What he invents in this sequence is literally the performance of
a conflict: between what we may call ‘direct performance’, i.e. the actual rendition of an act as it is caught on film, and
its subsequent cinematization, to coin a word. He has often worked with trained ‘method’ actors, including some very
famous ones – Alaknanda Samarth is a regular presence in his films, and there was the Marathi thespian Shreeram Lagoo
in Tarang – but he then uses their performative ability to get some unusual results. These actors, to start with, are denied
the canonical methodologies of method performance, that of bringing autobiography to flesh out the fiction.36 This
happens by getting them to work with tonal ranges with which they are unfamiliar,37 placing them alongside both animate
and inanimate non-actors, and, most daringly perhaps, alongside performers coming from completely other traditions
of performance – actor Alaknanda Samarth with Kathak legend Birju Maharaj in Khayal Gatha being the pinnacle of that
experiment (fig. 26, p. 142).38 The performance so captured, often minimally rehearsed and captured cinematically in
the raw, is worked over by a second process wherein the entire performance is literally taken apart and reassembled
on the editing table, juxtaposing shots, different motifs, repeated through replaying of actions and montage sequences.
The same strategy is reproduced on the soundtrack. Trained speakers and singers both emote and perform without
57
kumar shahani now

accompaniment,39 and their voices go alongside an entirely crafted soundtrack: Shahani does not use sync sound, he
assembles it entirely through dubbing and mixing, using both synched and non-synched dialogue as well as extensive
voice-overs. Characters are often placed in a certain space and given a dialogue, which can include monosyllabic
utterances, monologue, voice-over proclamations and sometimes simply sounds (of bells, galloping horses).
Below, I have tried to give a provisional description of the opening sequence of Khayal Gatha, along with historical
annotations in parentheses where I could; but I should add that this is, in the best tradition, speculative. The main
burden and eventual purpose of this entire sequence is to produce its two key protagonists. It has to give birth to a
music student, a little prince who has to bear a secret – that of his birth, at the same time as he seeks to uncover its
meaning for him. In the end, he does not succeed, but in his quest he travels through more or less five centuries of
history and several ancient legends, many of them directly attached to the actual practice of the khayal form. The
legend of the prince is more or less that of Oedipus, as he encounters in his quest a woman, a tragic figure, who will
guide him through his journey in mysterious ways with riddles telling him what he should now do, where he should
now go (fig. 1, p. 3).
The sequence begins with the film’s opening shot, of two women in a forest with bows and arrows (see fig. 11, p.
59). One aims her arrow at something offscreen while the other instructs her how to do that: to ‘move your breath in
the direction of the sound: from ear to lips’. ‘Tell me what you really feel’, she then asks her. The other woman replies,
‘Don’t speak of the impossible’, but then says, ‘When the king comes, I will show him the keenness of my aim.’ She seems
undecided about the first woman’s overtures, saying, ‘Would I abandon the Rai river [i.e. would I abandon you] to be
imprisoned in a fortress?’, but follows it up with, ‘I will not be shy. I will move to the city’.
(The two women are Mrignayani and Lakhi, both from low castes, the former a Gujar and the latter an Ahir, but 11
stories of their beauty have reached the king, who is seeking them out. The king, Mansingh Tomar, will eventually marry
Mrignayani, while Lakhi will marry Mrignayani’s brother Atal, with her own story to tell in the Gwalior saga.)
Lakhi (let us now call her that) is suggestively bitten by a snake; Mrignayani, even more suggestively, sucks at and
spits out the poison. They are in an intimate embrace; Lakhi sticks her tongue into Mrignayani’s ear and then bends down
to listen to her womb, from where emanate the sounds of conch-shells. The conches provide a sound bridge for the next
shot: in the distance we see a palace, and in front, two acrobats balancing atop a stretched rope – all born, we must
imagine, from the sexual encounter of the two women.
Beneath the acrobats and their strung-out wire strides a man in regal gear. Presumably this is the king himself,
Mansingh Tomar of Gwalior. The film match-cuts to the king entering a domestic space through a carved entrance. A
voice-over says, ‘It is heard that the king was wounded.’ He replies, ‘Just a few bruises, but some men were undoubtedly

Khayal Gatha (1988). ‘Do you recognize the path you seek?’ ‘You will, when you know the
true way of knowing.’ fig. 11 The two huntresses, Mrignayani and Lakhi, and the beginning
58 of the saga. fig. 12 The acrobat–fortune teller.
 Ashish Rajadhyaksha

hurt.’ Lakhi is attending to a wounded man (presumably Atal), when the king suddenly emerges from the shadows and
walks by. Atal (if that is he) says, ‘But a tradition was formed.’ The king says, ‘I consider life to be a memory, and death is
its peak.’ He walks on; we hear a second voice-over: ‘The canal for the Rai river is now ready. There was some delay, for
it needed to be covered.’ The king walks again through an entrance and says, ‘There is just one regret: the wells are still
impure.’ These are all delivered as staccato sentences, not in conversation.
(Gwalior in the time of Mansingh was under major siege, from Sikandar Lodhi and the Rajput tribal chief Rajsingh
Kachhwaha of Chanderi, as well as Ghiasuddin Khilji of Malwa. The only place where I found mention of the acrobats was
in Vrindavanlal Verma’s novel Mrignayani [1950], which suggests that they are from the Nat community, and were sent by
Ghiasuddin to search for Lakhi after whom he lusts, as well as to spy on Tomar whom he plans to attack. Not all of this
is in the film, I should add, whose main purpose of recalling the history is to show destruction, death, high principle and
the birth of a tradition.)
We return to the Nat troupe, who are conducting some kind of question–answer ritual: a man balancing on a
tightrope asks, ‘Do you recognize the path you seek?’ (‘Raah tareek sabeel pehchan’), to which a woman, also on a rope,
replies, ‘You will, when you know the true way of knowing’ (‘Arath tihu ka maarag jaan’) (see fig. 12, p. 60). We cut back
to the wounded Atal and Lakhi tending to him. He says that they should leave, for the people will never let them live
together. (Although Mrignayani could marry the king despite belonging to a lower caste, the same was not permitted for
Lakhi, whose marriage to Atal has been forbidden.)
We once again cut to the king, who has now gone to his senior queen. (Tomar already had eight wives; Mrignayani
was the ninth.) She says to him sarcastically, ‘Your new marriage has changed you.’ The king is now with Mrignayani, who
12
says: ‘I don’t know the languages of kings, but bring me the Rai river here, that I may drink from it.’ (After their marriage,
Mrignayani had asked for a separate palace with a constant water supply from the river Rai for her personal use. This
palace exists and is known as Gujari Mahal.)
Three more characters enter the rest of this sequence. One is a woman who will appear through several points in
the film, here presumably a member of the Nat troupe. She seems to know about the intrigue and even what it means for
those involved. Then there is the old Sufi saint, standing in admiration of the sculptures on the walls of the fort, seeing
beauty that he thought would be found only in nature. And finally, the little prince who will grow up to become the
music student, and the film’s main protagonist.
The elder queen is scheming to poison Mrignayani, to ensure that she remains infertile and never bears a child. She
will even betray the Gwalior king by returning the city of Narwar to the enemy. The Sufi, meanwhile, rescues Mrignayani
from drinking the poison and guides her towards music instead – represented by a long solo performance on the veena

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by the dhrupad maestro Zia Mohiyuddin Dagar, as we see Mrignayani behind a wall bowing to the master. (Dhrupad was
the form that Tomar patronized at Gwalior; the khayal, if standard histories are right, was still some centuries away.)
Bells toll; the Nat troupe woman says, mysteriously, ‘All will be revealed at daybreak.’ The little prince walks to her;
she laughs and asks him, ‘What do these acrobats convey to us?’
War is declared. Mrignayani supports the king: ‘We have to fight this from both without and within’. Many whispered
voices of women suggest various kinds of intrigue going on inside the palace.
The Sufi, who had announced to the king the need for war, turns to the little prince and sends him to his future with
one instruction and one question, both suggestive: ‘Stay by the river bank to quench your thirst’ (‘Pyaas lage to nadi ka
kinara pakad’); ‘Can you conceal your secret within the earth?’ (‘Is raaz ko tu dharti mein chhupa payega?’).
History literally becomes a riddle to be deciphered. A secret has to be buried, an answer found, a path travelled.
The landscape through which the young protagonist born from such contentious circumstances travels, is enigmatic:
laced with material through which, along with numerous other equally indecipherable signs, history too will weave in
and out – with Mansingh Tomar in the sequence just described, and later with the saga of Baaz Bahadur and his defeat
at the hands of Adam Khan – like a musical coda. In the sequence just described, whatever history there is, is
recapitulated almost synoptically and with great rapidity: narrated thus to permit its thematic content to be far more
elaborately explored through the rest of the film, all the better, I suggest, to reveal what remains in the myth beyond the
historical account.
This is what the film posits in this sequence, as an argument. Myth totalizes: it is, if anything, an experiential
totality, narratable only as such.40 Myth accommodates history but cannot rely on history to complete the storytelling,
since history is almost sure in these conditions to abandon the story midway, leaving both protagonist and reader
stranded. As Sudhir Chandra suggests with a number of Hindi fiction writers of the twentieth century, history is a subset
of the epic structure: the telling includes, even assigns a crucial role to, the historical account, but is not limited to
it.41 For the film, the limit of the historical account will open up an experiential gap: between what history can tell us
and what we otherwise know, or suspect – which gap, I think Shahani is proposing, characterizes our encounter with
reified modernity.
This is the question with which Khayal Gatha ends, as we move from the pristine notes of Zia Mohiyuddin Dagar’s
dhrupad on the veena in the beginning to the Sufi vagrant Allan Fakir’s ‘Allah Hoo’ at the end, over whose voice we first
see the railway train, as our student protagonist enters suburban Mumbai and his scream is drowned by the sound of the
railway tracks. Meanwhile, as a parallel process, we have a relay of the primarily female addressees of the saga, from the
queen Mrignayani to the Nat performer, to Roopmati, to both Sohni and Heer, and eventually to the unnamed woman
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who led the student into and out of these stories but found herself – in the only myth that the film formally constructs,
between a dance teacher (played by Birju Maharaj) and the woman who cared for him – trapped as he took over her
femininity (see fig. 36, p. 248).
‘Phantom Objectivity’: Reification, Commodification, Art from High to Low
Let me escalate this problem to make a proposition, in Shahani vein, about modernism in India as a whole. My formulation
hopes to be provocative, and, for that very reason, is also provisional. I will withdraw it as soon as it has served its limited
purpose. The proposition is this: Indian modernism engages with the present primarily (I am strongly tempted here to
say entirely) through a process of reification. Such reification constitutes the production of an object, but the object
presented is all too often a stand-in for an objective condition.42 This somewhat specific form of reification allows for the
presencing of something as a substitute for something else, a forgetting, the production of another condition – suffused
with the regret of other roads that might have been taken, alternatives that might have been explored but were not.
Whatever is produced before us is in place of what is absent: lost, fallen, missing, unrecovered.
The object of art – conflating a purpose with a physical entity – quintessentially embodying the condition of
modernist reification is well known. Martin Jay speaks of it as a component part of a larger condition of labour producing
the world of objects that serve human needs – in which subset, the ‘knowledge of the true’ is dependent on the ‘making
of the objects of that knowledge’ (Jay 2008: 5, emphasis added). Such a production of the object, as also the production
of a vocabulary for the experience of modernity – to quote from Marshall Berman’s famous description of modernism43 –
allow for a curious double movement. On the one hand, there is the break with history so beloved of modernists: the loss
of something. On the other, it appears that the hiatus does not, whatever its other confusions, place any barriers on other
aspects of the process of reification, including the actual production of the object as well as its further commodification.
The fascinating encounter with capitalist production systems that forms a key part of modernism everywhere – over
a time-span that could roughly cover anything from the mid-to-late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries44
– has direct consequences for a form like the khayal, as indeed it does, we have seen, for Shahani’s work as a filmmaker.
Unlike most modernist practices that attempt realism as the conventional means to address their present, the khayal’s
primary strategy of addressing its present has been to replace it with a ‘something else’ for which the present becomes
a stand-in. This replacement happens as an aesthetic practice and is integral to the khayal’s very mode of address, which
often is literally speaking to an absent other.
But that mode, and its production of absence – which is what makes it so significant for Shahani – has a curious
further consequence: it debars the khayal from being seen as the modernist practice it so clearly is, making it instead the
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par excellence example of a fallen art for an Indian modernism seeking the imaginary heights against which the present
would necessarily be a downfall.45 This has made it nearly impossible to place, say, the first properly documented musician,
Rahmat Khan (1852–1922), as belonging to the same era as his visual art contemporary, Raja Ravi Varma (1846–1906) – or to
see the nationalists Vishnu Digambar Paluskar (1872–1931) and Premchand (1880–1936) as contemporaries – or to recognize
that the khayal was patronized by the same courts that supported Company School visual artists (Lucknow, Gwalior, Miraj,
Mysore) – or even to view the coincidence of its nineteenth and twentieth-century educational structure: the art and
music schools that were set up almost adjacently in the same cities, Lahore, Bombay, Calcutta – or to admit similarities
to the almost simultaneous early twentieth-century arrival in the modern marketplace of painting, literature and music.
Part of the problem is the way modernism writes its history: in at least two registers. One, a relatively straightforward
public history of who did what and when. And a second, more covert and driven by practices, which include diverse secret
knowledges, codes, covert skills. There is some resemblance between these two registers and what Dipesh Chakrabarty
famously termed ‘History 1 and 2’. History 1, he says, is typically an assembly of the ways by which capital posits its
past along with its own life-process. Such a history however becomes a subset of a second and larger History 2, which
even if just as bound by capitalist concepts like the commodity form, nevertheless includes a ‘universe of pasts’ that is
‘larger than the sum of those elements in which are worked out the logical presuppositions of capital’. History 1 has to
‘subjugate or destroy the multiple possibilities that belong to History 2’; there is ‘nothing, however, to guarantee that
the subordination of History 2s to the logic of capital would ever be complete’. Such difference, he says, is not external
to capital. Nor is it something subsumed into capital. ‘It lives in intimate and plural relationships to capital, ranging from
opposition to neutrality’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 63–65).
In the instance at hand, that of fifteenth-century Gwalior and its rapid summary representation in the prelude of
Khayal Gatha, the problem is partly that there is in the first place no credible History 1 for the music in Mansingh Tomar’s
Gwalior. We know little about the music itself or the conditions that prevailed. This effectively means that there is only
a History 2 for the khayal. Such a history is now, curiously, freed up to tell an extraordinary saga about a ‘once-upon-a-
time’ era that at once did two contradictory things: one, to define a pinnacle from where the present was inevitably a fall,
but two, to define the history of music through a series of contests – usually between higher courtly forms, such as the
dhrupad, and the more lowly forms that often ‘defeated’ their more glorious predecessors in courtly and other combat:
the conventional tale of how khayal was officially adopted in the early eighteenth-century Mughal court of Mohammed
Shah ‘Rangila’.46 Neither account adequately addresses key problems such as any History 1 might pose: including why the
khayal’s own rise, like that of several other art forms that would gain prominence with modernism, coincides with the
decline of courtly power. Or what colonialism did to these forms, given that some of the decline precedes colonization,
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some runs concurrently with it, while in yet other instances the decline is directly caused by the colonial process.
All of which leads to further challenges for the modernist recovery. The historical questions only grow. Why did
specific courts across northern and central India privilege specific musical forms at specific moments in time in their
chequered political histories? Could there be a properly political explanation for why certain forms, from the many
available, were so adopted? Where did they all come from before they were so selected, and what social transformations,
after their selection and adoption, were wrought as a result? Were they classicized – or would it be more appropriate
to ask, were they feudalized, commodified as luxury? What happened after the patronage stopped and the cultural
practices that had been favoured had to return, so to say, to the streets in search of new patrons?
Most crucial of all for the modernist inheritance is the following point, on which I will hinge the rest of this
argument: the khayal ’s chronicling of its post-classical ‘low’ or ‘fallen’ status – the point, precisely, at which it enters
the modern – which has less to do with the classicization of formerly ‘folk’ cultures (where modernism has sought its
heights) than with the controversial reverse of this phenomenon, namely, the proletarialization, even re-tribalization, of
forms that may have once been classical: something that had determined a significant part of Shahani’s thinking during
the making of Khayal Gatha. Such a popular is not the more common industrial popular; it is rather an illegitimate popular
of diverse marginal practices that leak through when historically defined forms are unable to ‘move forward’ (as we have
already earlier discussed with both Maya Darpan and Tarang). Shahani himself worries about this, from the time of Tarang,
as a problem that Indian historians have not dealt with adequately, and it certainly provides one context for the film’s
final gesture of forcing a confrontation with what lies ‘beyond’ history.
Let me now further include the role of myth as one that covers that gap: the gap of experience that lies beyond
history. I shall thence take forward a specifically modernist inheritance of this gap and place this problem once more at
the doorstep of our framing context for it, the Brecht–Lukács debate. A new situation has arisen for modernist practice,
it seems to me: an enunciation of an internal condition, of how to experience (or to practise) a culture that has an
insufficiently developed history of capital, or Chakrabarty’s ‘History 1’. This situation finds itself, ironically, less concerned
with the conventional historiographic task of mining a myth for historical content than with the more practical – and
more urgent – problem of how to put such myths to use. Or, as Arjun Appadurai has it, to uncover situations where
the imagination can expand from its ‘special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual’ and into becoming ‘a part of
the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies’ to enter ‘the logic of ordinary life’ (‘Here and Now’,
in Appadurai 1996: 5). The process of such instrumentalization of myth becomes also a means to determine its ‘low’
aesthetic condition. Bringing myth down to its use-value – not answering the impossible question of what it ‘means’ but
taking it to the far easier aspect of inquiring how it ‘works’ – also directly engages with its reification.
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This much we have agreed. The contentious bit has to do with commodification, and with the extraordinary ability
of modernist practice to not only continue in the face of what might appear to be a crippling limitation but indeed to
capitalize on that limitation: to convert crisis into opportunity. This is not the domain of the popular into which Brecht
might have taken the problem, it is not what we mean when we speak of the ‘low’; indeed, on this point, it must be
reiterated that whatever its other confusions, a great deal of twentieth-century Indian modernism has been steadfast in
its opposition to the popular arts.
Closer to our quest perhaps is Lukács’ conception of reification as a ‘phantom objectivity’ (in his History and Class
Consciousness). And with it, his startling contention: that the subjective estrangement of men from the objects of their
creation does not prevent, but indeed encourages, their commodification. This is an estrangement that, ‘subject to the non-
human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article’.47
Experience and Commodification
We may have finally come to the true purpose of Shahani’s conception of ‘sequence’. Given, as he suggests, that we
engage at all times with history-making, since we see at all times ‘history . . . being played out before our eyes’, where the
‘remnants of tribal, agrarian and other stages are still around us’ and we cannot ‘escape this, even if we don’t “know” it’,
the role of commodification in taking us forward is a somewhat particular kind:
The trap of realism/modernism, as all the other oppositions contained in it, arises out of
presenting experience as a ‘thing’: through the transparency of the image in realism and the
opacity of the image in modernism. Both procedures lead to a reduction of relationships,
events, human action and being to lifeless things. In realism, the object/event referred to is a
fetishized commodity. In modernism it is the image itself that has been reduced: the one says,
‘reality is’, the other says, ‘the image is’, both in a static, unmediated way. How does it become
what it is? I think if we structure our work on the basis of the great possibilities of ‘exchange’
that the commodity form has opened up, if we recognize and reveal what has gone into the
making of an image, we can breathe life into it. (Shahani 1986: 103)
One possible way to understand such commodification – and its reified condition of ‘presenting experience as a
“thing’’’, as well as his proposal of the way out being through the ‘great possibilities of exchange’ that the commodity
form generates – is to take forward Appadurai’s suggestion that the ‘commodity context refers to the variety of social
arenas, within or between cultural units’, given that commoditization is ‘processual’ and that ‘objects may be moved into
and out of the commodity state’ (Appadurai 1996: 41). This unstable movement is in turn also linked to knowledge about
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the commodity being produced, which knowledge – if we ‘regard some commodities as having ‘life histories’ or ‘careers’
in a meaningful sense’ – we must see as distributed over various points in the career of the commodity.
Unlike the more standard modernist imaginations of loss that usually afflict the khayal, the form also presents us
with both a specific narrative possibility – that of sequence, a privileged narrative device for unravelling myth – and also
a problem, of a historical kind. In the following section, I shall explore in a short detour, another location for a very similar
narrative/historical crisis, that of the impossible Brecht–Lukács dyad, and another resolution to that issue that appears
to have overtones with Shahani’s work with narrative.
The detour I propose is one I receive from Paul Willemen, Shahani’s good friend and my mentor, and his work on
the Third Cinema, which he too had framed primarily in a post-Brechtian way. Willemen had identified a widespread and
global filmmaking practice that was insistently drawing our attention to a set of formal-aesthetic issues. The practice to
which he referred included
Amos Gitai’s work, Cinema Action’s Rocinante (1986), Angelopoulos’s O Thiasos (1975), the films
of Souleyman Cissé, Haile Gerima and Ousmane Sembene, Kumar Shahani’s Maya Darpan (1972)
and Tarang (1984), Theuring and Engström’s Fluchtweg Nach Marseilles (1977), the work of Safi
Faye, the recent films of Yussif Chahine, Yang De-Chang’s [Edward Yang] Taipei Story (1985),
Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984), the work of Fong Yuk-Ping [Allen Fong], the two black British
films Handsworth Songs (1986) and The Passion of Remembrance (1986), and the Brazilian films
of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade and Carlos Reichenbach. (Willemen 1994: 177)
It is clear, says Willemen, that ‘various non-Euro-American cinematic regimes organize time and space in their
own specific ways’. How to understand this specificity? It is here that Willemen brings in another figure, of the elusive
Mikhail Bahktin, as a means of resolving the otherwise impossible dyad. He proposes that we consider non-Euro-
American cinema as ‘characterized by a different chronotope’, as a ‘set of distinctive features of time and space within
each literary genre’. The question then, for Willemen is, how does, say, the ‘chronotope of Ghatak’s films, with their
intricate interweaving of historical, biographical, natural and emotional temporal rhythms, not to mention musical and
speech rhythms, in spaces disrupted by edges and boundaries themselves condensing historical and symbolic meanings’,
differ from, say, ‘Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s telescoping of historical, allegorical and fantasy times in O Homem do
Pau-Brasil (1982)’, or from the way ‘linear-evential time and cyclical-ritual time’ divide into spaces according to ‘varieties
of sacred-profane oppositions’, in Sembene’s Ceddo (1976) (ibid.: 189–90)? This is the argument I want to take forward
in linking Shahani’s specific use of the word ‘sequence’, which I believe allows us to do that additional work that
Willemen wants.
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Let us stay with Willemen’s invocation of Bakhtin a little longer. Bakhtin too takes on Lukács’ conception of
literature’s ‘fall’ from earlier heights (a condition of lowliness that may have more than passing similarities to the
khayal), but, as Graham Pechey suggests, he ‘neutralizes’ the Lukácsian ‘idea of a punctual and once-for-all fall from epic
plenitude’ with a somewhat different concept: a ‘novelistic memory in which all chronotopes are always potentially
revivable, rather than a history only of departed things’ (Pechey 2007: 88). He achieves this by replacing the Lukácsian
epic with folklore, and thus also replaces his idea of western literature’s ‘pristine epic innocence’ with something else:
something ‘polymorphously perverse’ (ibid.: 92). Antiquity is represented in his narrative of narrativity not by the epic,
but by certain later and ‘lower’ prose genres, a folklore that has become self-conscious. The point of all this is really how
to inquire into the descent – and its consequences for history, objectivity and commodification. Pechey proposes that
the chronotope, as it specifically addresses the juncture of the folk-turned-self-conscious, brings to it an awareness of
the ‘verticality that effects its sublimation, semanticizing all of time and space even as it spatio-temporalizes all meaning,
capable of meeting the high genres of late feudality on their own ground’ (ibid.; 96). It would be fitted for none of these
tasks without the catalytic force of the ‘low’ genres of that epoch.
It is not just the possible resemblance of the khayal to Bakhtin’s idea of folklore that makes for its relevance. Despite
several historical difficulties in paralleling the two arguments,48 the formal similarity of the chronotope to Shahani’s idea
of narrative sequence is too startling to ignore. The latter’s emphasis on a continuous scale – its oscillating movement
across music–sound–speech – speaks directly to the chronotope’s ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial
relationships’ (Bakhtin 1981: 84). There is, says Bakhtin, an ‘inseparability of space and time’, where ‘spatial and temporal
indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole’. Time ‘thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically
visible’; space for its part ‘becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (ibid.). Elsewhere,
‘time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible, the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on
flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins’ (ibid.: 250).
There is a further dimension: chronotopes, Bakhtin goes on to suggest, are ‘mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they
may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex
interrelationships’. These interrelationships exist between chronotopes but do not enter relationships contained within them.
The general characteristic of these interactions is that they are dialogical (in the broadest use
of the word). But this dialogue cannot enter into the world represented in the work . . . it is
outside the world represented, although not outside the work as a whole. It [this dialogue]
enters the world of the author, the performer, and the world of the listeners and readers. And
all these worlds are chronotopic as well. . . . We experience them in the external material being
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of the work and in its purely external composition. But this material of the work is not dead, it
is speaking . . . we not only see and perceive it but in it we can always hear voices . . . we always
arrive, in the final analysis, at the human voice. . . . Out of the actual chronotopes of our world
(which serve as the source of representation) emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of
the world represented in the work (in the text). (Bakhtin 1981: 252–53)
We are now looking at the inner condition of myth, as a specific time–space construct. In a direct sense, the khayal
literally embodies what Bakhtin is saying, about interrelationships between chronotopes that nevertheless keep the
autonomy of individual chronotopes. This is easily, and technically, understood: say, in the way the Gwalior tradition
emphasizes dialogue between the raga, theka and bandish, even as each maintains its intrinsic independence. But I don’t
think this is enough; we need it to cut deeper.
The model that could emerge is like this: we have the experience whose material circumstances are external to
it, but which contain inner worlds (where dead matter now speaks, comes alive) through an engagement with other
autonomous chronotopes. Here is Shahani now on the technical means of arriving at a set of cinematic sequences, as
these deal with multiple space–time categories:
Since Indian classical music embodies all relations, including those of space, into time-relations,
it is of particular significance in the cinema, an art which necessarily converts space into time.
. . . Now, in cinema, we do use sound vertically, taking it from space, using time in space and as
space. Whereas the picture is made either to flow or jump, positions in space become positions
in time. For instance, a film made entirely of the most staccato images will have the most static
rhythm.
Evidently, then, Indian music – itself devoid of spatial construction – can, nevertheless,
become the basis of space construction in cinema. Not that of time, because the cinema
demands the complete transposition of space into time-relations. But where Indian music is
itself used as an element in film, it has to evolve an acoustic which will make up for the absence
of space in its inherent form: silence, reverberations, the simultaneous presence of harmonics
in the tones (timbre). Of course, by the very fact of necessary fragmentation of music when
used in films, it acquires some of these elements. . . .
The cinema, like many other convulsions in contemporary thinking, forces us to give up
colonial modes of thought, based as they are on the Eurocentric idea of development; and
move to one of contact and of generative conflict between systems which have developed
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one or another aspect of forms, of thinking and of action, achieved obviously at some cost.
. . . It is up to us who have internalized number, sequence, to encourage ourselves and then to
overcome these limits of our separate traditions . . . (‘Film as a Contemporary Art’, pp. 213–14)
To which experience of modernity can we apply this specific condition? What kind of cinema uses time–space
structures that force those of us who have ‘internalized number, sequence’ to ‘give up colonial modes of thought’? We
shall once again end this with Shahani’s consistent repudiation of third worldist exceptionalism. Although Willemen
himself emphasized that Third Cinema did not mean Third World cinema, he nevertheless spoke of these filmmakers
as those to whom the ‘familiar realism versus modernism or post-modernism debates’ were ‘simply irrelevant’, at least
in the ‘forms to which Western critics have become accustomed’. In repositioning their relationship to these debates,
Willemen bravely forged the ancestries for the Latin American Third Cinema manifestos with positions that went as far
back as the Soviet avant-gardes.49
Once again, Shahani repudiates this route. Third Cinema filmmakers are not the ones he chooses as examples for his
idea of sequence as a means of tackling both reification and ‘Eurocentric ideas of development’. He prefers a list that is
rather more classical. References to Eisenstein, Bresson, Jancsó, Buñuel and Tarkovsky pepper these texts.50

Experience, Sequence, Narrative: The ‘National’ Chronotope

A spectre – as we move into Shahani’s seminal Char Adhyay (1997) – has been haunting these pages, the spectre of the
national.
The national is of course the dominant spectre of the twentieth century, and it has hovered over my argument here
from the very first paragraph, incessantly asking questions as though in loud stage whispers. How does countermodernity 13
at all deal with this phenomenon? Can ‘countermodernists’ ignore this problem and transit directly on to a global stage? Do
they have the option to retreat into the nation? Do they remain modernist if they do? And if they do, then, on its side, can
a nation advance on such countermodernist shoulders to mount an alternative challenge to western dominance? The very
status of these questions is ambiguous. Are these ‘choices’? Do they have an either–or status or do they appear all at once?
Perhaps the most important of all, as we relocate the Bakhtinian intervention on slightly different ground, is this
question: can we move from nationalism as ideology – as idealism – into nationalism as a chronotope? A chronotope,
let us remind ourselves, allows us to experience time: time here becomes palpable and visible; narrative events become
concrete, take on ‘flesh’ (Bakhtin 1981: 84, 250). A chronotope is effectively determined when internal unities of thought
and art collide with ‘actual reality’.

Kasba (1990). ‘Chekhovian irony, the literary transformed into a continuous imagery of
transient images.’ fig. 13 Tejo (Meeta Vasisth), superimposed on the image of a horned
deer. fig. 14 Nandini (Navjot Hansra) wanders aimlessly carrying her dead child, discovering
Sufi wisdom among the ‘harassed warriors and refugees in Kangra who have brought to its
70 salubrious undulations the fevers and passions of the desert, the whimsicalities of the deltas’.
 Ashish Rajadhyaksha

In what follows, I use two films to explore two different ways into the same area: how we experience the national
and what this experience says to its citizen-protagonist. The first route, explored through Kasba, is via melodrama; and
the second, relevant to the more formidable propositions of Char Adhyay, is a somewhat more complicated set of
discussions that took place around subjectivity within Indian nationalism.
Melodrama first, and we immediately find propitious ground. The ‘weaving of historical and socio-public events
together with the personal and even deeply private side of life’, says Bakhtin, allows for the ‘graphically visible markers
of historical time as well as of biographical and everyday time (to be) concentrated and condensed, at the same time
they are intertwined with each other in the tightest possible fashion, fused into unitary markers of the epoch. The epoch
becomes not only graphically visible (space) but narratively visible (time)’ (Bakhtin 1982: 247).
While conventional melodrama theory – of ‘tales of sound and fury’, of weepies and soaps – has dominated the
discipline of film studies, it also has other, more elusive and precisely national legacies, which have to do with what
Partha Chatterjee once named as ‘heterogeneous time’.51 Elsewhere, I have named such national melodrama – taking as
my example the several classic films produced in many Indian languages between the 1940s and the 1960s in India – as
‘epic melodrama’ (Rajadhyaksha 1993). I have proposed that the narrative strategies of representing modern or ‘clock’
time52 were central to the Indian cinema. That indeed the cinema’s movement as it went beyond mechanical recording
– in Bakhtin’s phrase, the ‘graphically visible’ – and into a cinematic mise-en-scène, the ‘narratively visible’ – coincided
directly with the Swadeshi movement; more, swadeshi provided the overarching logic for a particular understanding
of movement that made narrative visibility itself possible.53 At one level, this mapping of cinematic time upon national
time produced for the cinema a species of ‘homogeneous time’ realism, but it also resulted in something infinitely more
14 interesting on the sidelines: an entirely functional set of second-order realisms – of multiple, ‘heterogeneous’ and, we
can now call them, polyphonic time structures.
Kasba literally enacts the extraordinary temporal diversities – the time of the mountainfolk, of different economies
at work, of region and state, of declining patriarchy – of such ‘epic melodrama’ traditions. The film adapts a Chekhov
short story (‘In the Gully’, 1900, also known as ‘In the Ravine’ and ‘In the Hollow’) and sets it in a village in the Kangra
valley. An old patriarch, Maniram (Manohar Singh), runs a diverse business, which includes occasional state collaboration
(a ration shop), along with various illegal and grey side-businesses including bootlegging. Helping him run these is his
ambitious daughter-in-law Tejo (Meeta Vasisth). Tejo is married to his idiot younger son Bhaktu (Raghubir Yadav). The
elder son, Dhaniram (Shatrughan Sinha), is in Delhi on unnamed ‘government’ work, which turns out to be manufacturing
counterfeit moneyand for which he is eventually jailed. The tragic decline of the family’s fortunes, unable to cope with
a changing economy and caught out by the fake currency Dhani flings around when he comes back to marry a local

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girl, Nandini (Navjot Hansra), coincides with the arrival of new economies. Those who can jump ship – Tejo, crucially,
who finds a new boyfriend, the local fixer Kashinath (M.K. Raina) – do so, while the others are left behind. Among those
left behind is the tragic figure of the second daughter-in-law, Nandini. Married off to the dissolute Dhani only to be
immediately abandoned by him, and thereafter impregnated by Kashinath, she gives birth to a son whom Maniram
immediately declares his heir. The disinherited Tejo, in a fit of rage, kills the infant. Nandini, in a deeply tragic ending,
wanders around the countryside carrying the dead child, and discovers Sufi wisdom among the working folk and truck
drivers of the region.
Kasba is a melodrama – in some ways a more modest, more straightforward one than Tarang. It is often considered
Shahani’s most accessible film. This is in part because of its strongly located nature in the Kangra village; in the success
with which the performative strategy saw trained actors mingle with local populations with significant bit roles, and
where the strong emphasis of fate – jo jiske likhi mein ho, whatever is written in our fate – dominates the changing
landscape. But I believe that Kasba also contributes to an understanding of another, less discussed, history of melodrama:
one that has to do with precisely how to chronicle the arrival of the epoch of unitary time, a time when the national
arrives as a modern state apparatus.54
Even as far back as in the time of silent cinema, and despite attempts to define cinematic realism in the sense
of a ‘visible seeing’ of reality,55 it was a very different tradition of political cinema56 that forged the more effective
means by which to address the contemporary than realist films. Taking the evidence of what we might call the more
effective realisms of the late silent cinema, followed by those of the big inter-war and post-war melodramas in their
relation to nationalism, it appears arguable that there was a coincidence between the effort to provide a dominant
discourse – with its corresponding subjugation of what Susie Tharu has named the ‘other voices’57 – and the rise of
unitary time. That within nationalism, the concentration and condensation of time went alongside the processes of
shedding mythic interiority through signalling the onset of historical time; that although this was by no means the
only way of negotiating myth, it was believed to be an essential requirement for this particular history’s ability to
move forward.
It was, however, readily apparent that any such coalescence of the historical, biographical, the everyday and the
personal into a unitary marker of that epoch was hardly easy; it was often both politically unachievable and, more
importantly, widely considered undesirable. For the polyphonic narratives of the national to produce a legitimate
authoritative subject, then, it was evident that the somewhat commoner modes of recording the saga of Indian
nationalism – of having, let us say, witnessed the freedom struggle first hand – needed to escalate, to collide, with
another chronotope where that experience could become a differently located time–space condition of acting,
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performing, the nation: Balibar’s homo nationalis (Balibar 2003). What is significant about the polyphonic mode of
the epic melodrama, then, is not merely the presence of ‘other voices’ nor indeed their subordination; indeed, one
doubts whether such subordination ever would have entirely occurred, or was even intended to occur, given the lack
of consensus around what the dominant point of view stood for when the great melodramas were at their pinnacle and
where state development had also produced a major cinematic project.58 The real significance of the arrival of unitary
time, as Kasba proposes, is to produce a kind of internal tussle – on formal–technological as well as industrial fronts
– that is less concerned with the mimetic status of realism, whose triumph is what the ‘dominant narrative point of
view’ presumably records, to the extent that anyone cares about this dominance. It has infinitely more to do with the
contested symbolic–representational status of the performance of reality as it becomes realism, amidst controversy
around just what the dominant view was meant to endorse.
Nationalism Debates
This was indeed where narrative work now lay; it was also, then, the gap between the fullness of the experience and the
partiality of its historical account, which we earlier characterized as myth, that narrative work now had to suture. Many
theorists have sought to explain its properties.59 It is within this frame, also profoundly about modernity, that I shall now
explore a second debate, in its own way as foundational as the one between Brecht and Lukács: that between Gandhi and
Tagore.60 This debate too, paraphrasing Jameson, saw antagonists of equal stature with no side ‘pre-programmed to win
in advance’. In fact, keeping the obvious contextual differences aside for a moment, there are some uncanny similarities
between the two debates. Both, in the end, pivot on representation and what it endorses, and thereby have close links
to philosophies of realism; both are largely agreed on the conceptual issues but are fundamentally split on the practice –
and, of course, if we take seriously Tagore’s eventual turn towards expressionism and add to this Lukács’ attack on him,61
the potential connections are even more direct.
The moment we use Gandhi and Tagore to frame our countermodernity question, several things happen. First, the
subject of our discussion no longer stays: we can no longer take sides on the aesthetic/political options available to
the practitioner/citizen. Rather, as we become involved with the experience, we find ourselves involved with a classic
condition of the epic melodrama, the subjective condition of the one making the choice – our ‘protagonist’ in the
quagmire – as against the question of whether s/he is making the ‘right’ choice or not. Second, the experience will now
cover (at least) two interdependent chronotopes: the narrower, more individuated, action (including personal preference,
‘conscience’ and individuated moral principle) that is actually performed; and a wider arena where that performed action
is understood, develops meaning and exemplary significance.
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And so, (i) the action itself and how to perform it; and (ii) the wider symbolic meaning of that action, what it means
and what further consequences it can have: two distinct spaces but producing a dialectic that becomes the essential
topos of modernity, with nationalism as only one specific condition for it. Important as the issue of India’s right to self-
determination was to both Tagore and Gandhi, the larger question was one that confronted the world: an ethical context
that shaped our very present, making India an important but in the end just another site of an experiment that clearly
had transcendental relevance. To both, then, the national was in a very real sense, a chronotope – although this was not
apparently the way Tagore’s literary trilogy (Gora, Ghare Baire, Char Adhyay) was understood, being interpreted for the
most part of the twentieth century mainly as allegories.
To both Gandhi and Tagore, the experience of the act – riven with hard decision and sacrifice – was of immense
significance to the nation-to-be: individual action was, in the end, the privileged site upon which the big questions of the
nation would have to be resolved, and as such, the nation would occupy an actionable, thus also narratable, space with
ever-closer resemblance to what we have explored of myth. Ghare Baire’s Bimala, especially, explores this space with her
actions, as do (in a curious other sense) Gandhi’s satyagrahis; indeed this particular focus on the subjective principle was
seen as relevant to the entire political spectrum and across ideological differences.
It becomes especially significant, then, to see just where the two titans part ways. It has less to do with the action
itself, and infinitely more to do with what that action could be made to stand for. They are less disagreed, it appears, on
what nationalist modernity is, or on how our beleaguered protagonist enmeshed in this modernist topos can or should
navigate through it. Their differences mainly flare up over the second half of the problem, also the key problematic
of epic melodrama: namely, what interpretation may be placed upon the experience; what political or other principle
or ideology it may be asked to endorse; and to what use, if any, continuing our reification argument, it could – or
legitimately should – be put.
Although Gandhi does define experience within a specific time–space situation in which the action happens, and then
defines the larger exemplary–pedagogic–performative arena within which that action becomes further comprehensible
and meaningful, what he does next (as Akeel Bilgrami, whose definitive recent work on Gandhi I use here, outlines it) is
to make a strangely un-Gandhian division between the two that seriously complicates the chronotope. He separates out
the moral value and judgment attached to the performance of the act itself from the larger moral principle and moral
criticism. You can only define your act within a moral frame. You cannot extrapolate from the act, or extract from it
any principle that will allow you to criticize the act of another. ‘Truth for Gandhi is not a cognitive notion at all. It is an
experiential notion. It is not propositions purporting to describe the world of which truth is predicated, it is only our own
moral experience which is capable of being true’ (Bilgrami 2003: 4164)
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This, says Bilgrami, was ‘of the utmost importance’ for Gandhi, for it would eventually underpin his opposition
to the Enlightenment, despite the strong influence of the Enlightenment both on his humanism as well as his concern
that our moral judgments should be relevant to all people (ibid.). At one level, Gandhi is forced to make this division by
political circumstances: he is ‘convinced of the inherent corruptibility of our moral psyches’ and believes that ‘criticism
will descend inevitably into violence’. At a more complicated level, he makes the philosophical distinction between
being within a situation where one experiences nature, and being in an alienated relationship to nature such as when one
converts it into a natural resource, conflating what should have been kept separate and with dire consequences from
which arise the many crises of modern science. The ‘intellectualization of the notion of truth to include a cognitive value’
inevitably descends into making science the ‘paradigmatic intellectual pursuit of our culture’, and thus also forces science
to ‘descend further in turn to our alienation from nature with the wish to conquer and control it without forgiveness and
with the most destructive technologies’ (ibid.: 4165).
This distinction between experience and cognition is at one level a political distinction, but, inevitably, it is more.
Elsewhere, Bilgrami contends that the distinction has an honourable European history of modernity, providing Gandhi’s
attempt to provide an alternative to ‘something as shallow as the political forms that were generated in Europe and
America less than a couple of hundred years ago’, as well as the belief ‘that being good citizens would set us on a path
to being good people’ with a legacy going back to seventeenth-century Europe. His alternative ‘conceptual linking of the
metaphysical transformation of the concept of nature and the political transformation of the concept of humanity’ was,
says Bilgrami, vital to his understanding of the ‘distinctiveness of modernity’ (Bilgrami 2009: 48).
This division on Gandhi’s part throws further light on another condition afflicting modernity: one that Bilgrami
names ‘disenchantment’. Disenchantment is a
result . . . of our having (among other things) over-intellectualized our relations to the world
(including nature) as a result of having come to see it in a certain way: as not containing the
properties that would make normative demands on us. Because of theological changes that led
to viewing the world (including nature) as desacralized, one fundamental source of seeing the
world as containing the value properties (good or bad, hostile or benign) that make normative
demands on us was removed from our conception of the world. And this played a central role in
seeing the world as alien to our sensibilities of practical engagement, something which became
for us something either to be studied in a detached way or, when practically engaged with, to
be engaged with as something alien, to be mastered, conquered, and controlled for our utility
and gain, as in the extractive economies that were systematically generated first in that period.62
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For Gandhi’s protagonist, on the other hand, the unalienated situation – one that enables ‘re-enchantment’ –
requires that he speak only from within a particular situation: he may not, we have seen, criticize another for having
a different experience, a different understanding of that experience, or for performing different acts than his, but can
at best hope that his action is judged to be so exemplary as will permit others to follow. It is, I imagine, a species of a
roadmap: however blurred and confusing its directions may appear at times, it at least allows our protagonist to launch
his quest with some means for navigation through the myth. (Since I keep insisting on calling this the myth, it is relevant
to note Bilgrami’s origins of disenchantment as being the theological condition where the Father, long before his death,
sees himself exiled: where God is deracinated from the world of matter, nature and human community.63)
Tagore differs with Gandhi on both the salience of the action itself and the interpretation that can be placed on it.
For him, Gandhi’s roadmap, far from being a properly moral position, is ‘unrestrained egoism’ whose freedom ‘is licence
and not true freedom’ (Bhattacharya 2001: 60). Tagore’s problems with Gandhi’s positions are numerous, and many of
them astonishingly prescient. He has, for one, straightforward political differences: he refuses to endorse Gandhi’s call to
students to boycott their classes and, even more, refuses to burn imported cloth. While Tagore believes (sometimes with
difficulty) that Gandhi means well, he has foundational intellectual issues with a pragmatic, purely experiential form of
nationalism that loses sight of universal principles of freedom. He fears that Gandhian thought will be distorted by mass
politics based on blind obedience.
It is important, as we turn to Char Adhyay and its own immense focus on authoritarianism, to see that Tagore is
anxious about Gandhi unleashing precisely the kind of forces he ought to above all contain. ‘The command to burn our
foreign clothes has been laid on us. I, for one, am unable to obey it’, he writes. This is not only because it makes no
political meaning – the ‘clothes to be burnt are not mine, but belong to those who most sorely need them’ – but because
such blind following of someone’s diktat is in the first place unacceptable. ‘I conceive it to be my very first duty to put
up a valiant fight against this terrible habit of blindly obeying orders, and this fight can never be carried on by our people
being driven from one injunction to another’. Those for whom ‘authority is needed in place of reason’ will ‘invariably
accept despotism in place of freedom. It is like cutting at the root of a tree while pouring water on the top.’ We have
‘enough of magic in the country – magical revelation, magical healing, and all kinds of divine intervention in mundane
affairs. That is exactly why I am so anxious to reinstate reason on its throne’ (ibid.: 82).
Tagore further differs with Gandhi over the entire representational–symbolic domain, specifically with regard to the
symbolic importance of the charkha; and, most importantly of all, he differs with Gandhi over the idea of a contingent
truth. ‘R, in support of the present movement, has often said to me that passion for rejection is a stronger power in the
beginning than the acceptance of an ideal’, Tagore writes. ‘Though I know it to be a fact, I cannot take it as a truth.’ He
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describes Gandhi’s idea of non-cooperation as ‘political asceticism’ and asks, to what are our students bringing their
offerings of sacrifice?
Not to a fuller education but to non-education. It has at its back a fierce joy of annihilation
which at best is asceticism, and at its worst is that orgy of frightfulness in which the human
nature, losing faith in the basic reality of normal life, finds a disinterested delight in an
unmeaning devastation as has been shown in the late war and on other occasions which came
nearer to us. No in its passive moral form is asceticism and in its active moral form is violence.
The desert is as much a form of a himsa (malignance) as is the raging sea in storms, they both
are against life. (Ibid.: 58)
This is a darker and more fraught Tagore, and this aspect – at least as far as his three novels are concerned – appears
to have only recently come up for widespread discussion, as Tanika Sarkar has suggested (Sarkar 2008: 27).64 Re-reading
Ghare Baire, she admits that she has significantly revised her own earlier interpretation of the novel as a ‘politically
compromised text’, and now sees it as a ‘difficult and serious negotiation with highly fractured times’; she especially
makes it a point to mention her changed response because she feels that hers is perhaps a ‘fairly typical trajectory for a
number of readers’. Ashis Nandy, more controversially, questions the nationalism of both Gandhi and Tagore. He notes
that all three novels – Gora (1909), Ghare Baire (1916) and Char Adhyay (1934) – ‘were seen as direct attacks on hard-
edged, masculine nationalism’, and adds that in Gora, Tagore ‘in effect argues that the idea of nationalism is intrinsically
non-Indian or anti-Indian, an offence against Indian civilization and its principles of religious and cultural plurality’. Char
Adhyay is, for Nandy, ‘an early, perhaps the first, exploration of the roots of industrialized, assembly-line violence as a
particular feature of the modern age [and] anticipates the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert J. Lifton, and Zygmunt Bauman
on the changing nature of organized mass violence and its links with nationalism’ (Nandy 2012: 3–4).
This debate – with Tagore producing the grim, dystopian underside of the symbolic nationalist act, perhaps even
opposing actually practised nationalism for this reason – is what now frames the extraordinary argument between two
iconic figures who are known, strangely perhaps, as we think this further, primarily for their role in India’s freedom
struggle. As we decipher their respective journeys, let me isolate two important strands of Tagore’s concern. The first
strand, which relates to his own protagonist as it does to Gandhi’s satyagrahi, concerns the fact that both are ‘within’
the myth, and thereby fallible to what he sees as its negative and destructive consequences: both Ela’s tragic end and
his excessive awareness that if the entire Indranath phenomenon is not properly investigated, it could turn out to be,
far from the kind of moral inquiry Gandhi thought the freedom struggle should be, precisely its inverse. The second
and potentially even more damaging strand is the symbolic, performative subjectivity the actions of these characters
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incarnate, and what it means to a viewer or follower, the one for whom the quest is produced as an exemplary (and thus
always potentially totalitarian) act.

‘In your eyes I saw my annihilation’: Performing in the National Space

There is a strong element of performativity in the positions being explored by both Gandhi and Tagore; indeed, arguably,
both views are pivoted around performance, and it is also here that their differences arise. Both Gandhi and Tagore
clearly recognize that performativity has a representational impact and, in turn, aesthetic as well as eventually political
consequences. While the politics, as we have seen, has significance in the way it holds each act up for public scrutiny
and judgment, and thus for symbolic interpretation, the aesthetics can take unpredictable turns. Speaking about how the
politics drives him to musical solutions, Tagore writes:
Where am I among the crowd, pushed from behind, pressed from all sides? And what is this
noise about me? If it is a song, then my own sitar can catch the tune and I join in the chorus,
for I am a singer. But if it is a shout, then my voice is wrecked and I am lost in bewilderment.
I have been trying all these days to find in it a melody, straining my ear, but the idea of non-
cooperation with its mighty volume of sound does not sing to me, its congregated menace of
negations shouts. And I say to myself, ‘If you cannot keep step with your countrymen at this
great crisis of their history, never say that you are right and the rest of them wrong; only give
up your role as a soldier, go back to your corner as a poet, be ready to accept popular derision
and disgrace.’65
We have in India rarely discussed the impact of this debate on the history of performance practices, even though 15
both positions have clearly had an overdetermined impact on actual melodramatic practice. Anyone can tell, for example,
what a ‘Gandhian’ performance is, both as aesthetics and as politics: from Anna Hazare to the entire history of saintly
‘Gandhian’ characters performing Gandhian actions, all the way down to the film Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006). With
Tagore, it is more complicated: there is more literature as it pertains to performance, and there are of course his own
substantial views on the subject.66 As for Tagorean characters on the stage and on the screen, it was very clear even
when Shahani announced his plan to film Char Adhyay that he was entering an overdetermined space in Bengal. Tagore
has been hugely filmed from the late silent cinema onwards, to the extent that he came to incarnate a brand of ‘literary’
cinema – including and crucially that of exemplary female performance – which was widely defined, from the time of
Naresh Mitra, Modhu Bose and P.C. Barua until Tapan Sinha, as boi (literally, book). Moinak Biswas had placed against this

Char Adhyay (1997). ‘These impetuous youths offered their lives as the price of their
country’s deliverance’, writes Tagore; ‘to them it meant the loss of their all but alas! the price
offered on behalf of the country was insufficient’. fig. 15 The young radical Atin (Sumandro
Chattopadhyay) in the beginning. fig. 16 Ela’s (Nandini Ghoshal) death at the hands of Atin
80 in the end.
 Ashish Rajadhyaksha

tradition his own interpretation of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964), suggesting that this film proposes a radically different
alignment of the cinema’s involvement with Bengali literary history by replacing the literariness of the boi with a cinema
where the ‘literary sign actually produces the visual’.67
So how, let us ask in conclusion, could Ela have been performed in Char Adhyay? India’s modernist history of
performance, including a theory of performance embedded in both these enormously influential traditions, has to do
with – if I might make a broad generalization – psychological characterization and method acting. But let us now take
the question of performance to a different level and ask how possible it is, and with what method, to perform – as Ela
must perform – the specific condition that was deeply bothering Tagore: the oppressive and even dangerous aspect of
the symbolic act, as a political-textual act capable of being badly misread, either through misinterpretation or through
blind imitation.
As we take this to performance, both conditions – of protagonist–performer and of viewer – would appear to
Tagore to be conditions of extreme potential disorder. ‘The idea of India is against the intense consciousness of the
separateness of one’s own people from others, and . . . inevitably leads to ceaseless conflicts.’ He speaks of the ‘heat
of the enthusiasm of the partition days’ when a ‘band of youths attempted to bring about the millennium through
political revolution’.
Their offer of themselves as the first sacrifice to the fire which they had lighted makes not only
their own country, but other countries as well, bare the head to them in reverence. . . . [I]n the
midst of the supreme travail, they realized at length that the way of bloody revolution is not
the true way; that where there is no politics, a political revolution is like taking a short cut to
16 nothing; that the wrong way may appear shorter, but it does not reach the goal. . . . The refusal
to pay the full price for a thing leads to the loss of the price without the gain of the thing.
These impetuous youths offered their lives as the price of their country’s deliverance; to them
it meant the loss of their all but alas! the price offered on behalf of the country was insufficient.
(Bhattacharya 2001: 74)
Amidst all the euphoria, Tagore discovered an ‘oppressive atmosphere’: a deeply disquieting situation where ‘some outside
compulsion’ seemed to be ‘urging one and all to talk in the same strain, to work at the same mill’. When he asked questions,
his ‘wellwishers clapped their hands over my lips, saying: Not now, not now.’ This is ‘persecution’, he says: it is not the usual
persecution of the ‘armed force, but something still more alarming, because it is invisible’ (ibid.: 78).
This is a treacherous space, the stage on which Ela performs: it is one where the energy and excitement of freedom
must be balanced out against the pain, sacrifice and death within which Tagore locates his trilogy. For Ghatak – who may

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have argued for a similarity with his Nita (Meghe Dhaka Tara), who too exists, like Ela, at the cusp of subjectivity and
exemplary performance – the solution may have been to juxtapose performance with other cinematic devices: such as the
one where the subjective condition of Nita is literally split from its iconic representation, allowing her to move from one
to the other – to find her fulfilment in the iconic at the very moment when it presages her death. This aesthetic resolution
may also echo the language used in Tagore’s paintings in his later life. There have been yet other aesthetic resolutions, in
theatre (Shambhu Mitra, for example, in his landmark 1956 staging of Tagore’s Raktakarabi) and, of course, in film.
These practices do not exhaust the problem, and I will end with gesturing towards other traditions that both
abstract and fundamentally query the representability of such a space. Let me take a further step here and propose that,
although the novel Char Adhyay appears not to have been discussed as extensively as the better known Ghare Baire
(Datta 2002), as far as the problem of the national is worked out both as an egotistical and bodily construct, Veena Das’s
explorations of Bimala’s condition in Ghare Baire apply just as much to Char Adhyay’s Ela. Das, more than any social
scientist, has been able to map what she calls the ‘language of pain’, that comes with large political phenomena, upon
‘textual bodies on which the pain is written’ (Das 1996: 83). In a short essay that, among other things, discusses Ghare Baire
(and acknowledges a debt to conversations with Shahani), she writes:
As distinctions dissolve and the nation becomes a magnified image of beloved worshipped in
the abstract, it becomes possible to inflict all kinds of violence on all those who resist this
or who create counter images, equally enlarged. The desire for icons allows the nation as an
absent object to be made magically visible through an investment in this magnified sexuality. The
potential for violence is written in this construction. The story ends with a communal carnage
that the reader does not gaze at directly but that is happening outside the immediate frame,
waiting as it were, as the double of the nationalist ideology that has been propounded. (Ibid.)
What Tagore is doing therefore is, says Das, to literally prefigure the ‘idea of the magnification of the image of
nation, which draws its energy from the image of magnified sexuality’. This image of ‘sexuality and its intimate connection
with the project of nationalism’ would – Das here makes a startling jump from Tagore, via Manto, to the abducted
women of the partition – go on to see a terrible and bloody interweaving of the two strands of action and example:
First, the idea that women must bear witness to death, which is found in the classical Indian
literature and the everyday life, gets transformed into the notion that the woman’s body must
be made to bear the signs of its possession by the enemy. The second strand seems to come
from a narrative trope established at the time of the mutiny that equates the violation of the
nation with the violation of its women.
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Char Adhyay’s own magnifications of both nationalism and sexuality are clearly connected to the ones in Ghare
Baire that Das has identified. It is a love story that ends gruesomely, told as a set of four episodes in the short life of Ela,
an upper-class woman brought up in a liberal Calcutta household, and Atin, a happy-go-lucky poet. Ela, herself initially a
liberal, comes under the influence of the dark and brooding Indranath, of undefined political persuasion, once a promising
scientist and now enmeshed in shadowy radical activities along with a band of young men who are willing to do anything
for him. When Ela, somewhat besotted by the romance of radicalism, asks Indranath if she can join his ‘cause’, he instantly
recognizes her immense worth and agrees, on condition that she take an oath never to be domesticated, for – he has
decided – she belongs to the ‘nation’ and can belong to no individual.
Ela gets increasingly drawn into the subterranean world of radical terrorism – a male world in which her role is
primarily symbolic – and finds herself being constantly tested by the ruthless Indranath, who runs every single aspect
of the lives of his band of followers with an iron hand. He publishes essays in her name, making her mouth nationalist
platitudes; he has her house burgled to test her skills at self-defence; and he asks her if, should the circumstances so
require, she has it in her to kill the man she loves. Ela’s involvement in the group now also entraps Atin, the man she loves,
into this net of radical activists. As the chapters unfold, the couple’s love for each other starts conflicting directly with
their commitment to the group, itself riven by internal jealousies, betrayal and rivalry. Eventually, as Atin is forced to go
underground, it becomes necessary for the group to sacrifice Ela, for she ‘knows too much’ about its inner functioning.
Her final demand that she die at Atin’s hands becomes both a sacrifice and a summation of her sexual desire.
What performance idiom can be used to speak for Ela? I think Veena Das might well take an extreme view on this
and say that it cannot be represented. When the ‘image of magnified sexuality’, writ large to prefigure the ‘magnification
of the image of nation’, was written directly upon the ‘textual bodies’ of the women who were subject to the ‘disorder of
the Partition’, she found a chilling ‘zone of silence around the event’; the language entirely ‘evaded . . . the particularity of
their experience’ (Das 1996: 84). Such an approach of addressing both silence and evasion could be compared to that of
an artist like Somnath Hore, who may have approached his well-known 1970s series titled Wounds in this precise way (see
fig. 43, p. 323). Wounds use paper pulp that is gouged, scratched and torn, sometimes with gaping craters where objects
were once embedded; and they are white on white. In placing experience as a problem not simply of representation,
important as it is, but of how to represent exemplary action given its bloodied and unrepresentable underside, Hore
figureheads an entire history of abstraction here, and also a problem so beloved of modernist practice: how to represent
the unrepresentable.
Shahani’s own performative idiom has been controversial: we have discussed some aspects of this in Maya Darpan,
through Taran’s performance, and in Khayal Gatha. He has worked with trained theatre actors, movie stars who have
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brought in a very different performance practice, performers from different other traditions (notably dancers), and, Specifically with regard to film, Shahani may well say that barring very special exceptions – such as Maria Falconetti
controversially, he has been unafraid to give significant screen space to complete non-actors, sometimes alongside (Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928) or Vishnupant Pagnis (Fattelal/Damle’s Sant Tukaram, 1934; see ‘The Saint-
venerable figures. He has often literally pulled the different elements of the celluloid-capture of these performances and Poets of Prabhat’, p. 191) – no actor can perform suffering directly. But that condition can be addressed differently if the
recomposed them on his editing table, sometimes with an entirely new soundtrack attached. Disconcertingly perhaps, human figure performs the gap between action and significance so that in both instances her unrepresentable condition
the films are not overtly experimental and can sometimes appear to be plain bad acting – especially since there have can be rendered representable in the only way possible: that of narratively coalescing her bodily self together with
been some great performances within the idiom as well (particularly in the melodramas: in Tarang, notably non-actor the time–space around her that the cinema makes available. Across an ocean of differences, it seems that these works
Kanwal Gadihok as Hansa, and in Kasba). come together with Shahani’s own as they illustrate this particular condition of unrepresentable time–space. In all these
The problem we are speaking of, unrepresentability within a national chronotope, of course directly affects Char instances, the process of bearing witness is one that literally cannot be ‘acted’.
Adhyay: the film is specifically about this problem. What, however, if I make a further connection – between Ela, at least as
Shahani has conceived her, as literally containing the revolution within herself, and several of Shahani’s inwardly-directed
female characters who too cannot speak but only bear witness? In Taran’s internal condition – the interiorization of a
(we can now call it) national space that was assaulted, caned and brutalized by the colonial police, and now hesitantly
offers itself up for renewal, for the green shoots that may sprout on the edges of the desert – we may have a long-term
ancestor to Ela. As also with the tragic figures of Hansa (in Tarang) and Nandini (Kasba), where once again we encounter
the condition of fulfilment in tragedy.
Let me conclude by making a link between Shahani’s style of pulling apart and reconstructing performance with
two examples from the visual arts explicitly referenced in the film Char Adhyay – Somnath Hore’s Wounds and Akbar
Padamsee’s epic Juhu (1962): a monochromatic painting that has obsessed Shahani for several decades now, and which
I believe is fleetingly quoted in the last shot of Char Adhyay with the dead Ela – as well as with the political aspect of
unrepresentability that Veena Das foregrounds. Hore’s are political works, culminating several decades of art unique
to him: beginning with his etchings of the Tebhaga struggle and the Bengal famine, and representing what art historian
Sanjoy Mullick (2007) calls a ‘haunting sight of an anguished struggle’ with a ‘simultaneous possibility of endurance’.
Padamsee’s famous series of grey nudes from the early 1960s are not political works in the Hore sense, but they represent
a similarly gouged-out inner condition. Padamsee’s is a ‘painting of the aftermath’, writes Geeta Kapur,
landscape as the wasted site for a rendezvous, female colossi splayed and propped like effigies of desire. It
is the aftermath of history, if you like. . . . At the same time as there is an end, there is a beginning in Juhu.
On some other planet, rudimentary forms come to life: bleached bushes, basic shelter, ash-embalmed
bodies stretching their limbs. In the sunless chill, nature comes alive through a kind of cold combustion
preceding a resurrection. Padamsee’s Juhu is a stellar beach; it is also a site of survival such as you will find
in surreal narratives of lost time – in art, in film, in literature. (Kapur 2010: 302–03)

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kumar shahani now
Notes
1 This was a conference organized by Ariel Dorfman, Frederic Jame-
son and Masao Miyoshi with others, from which emerged the
anthology, The Cultures of Globalization (Jameson and Miyoshi,
eds 1998).
2 Geeta Kapur constantly emphasizes the literal need to perform
the conflict: ‘the natives’ (by now) multiple passages beyond
(the void of local–global) involves a progressively more precise
signalling procedure on each shore and threshold: a performative
or even properly theatric gesture that marks these as a series of
disjunctures’. (Kapur 1998: 204)
3 Dussel proposes that modernity was a direct product of the
management of the centrality of the first world system in relation
to peripheral social formations. If so, the role of countermodernity
must be described as not a challenge to the model itself but rather
to a relocation of its centre: in terms of how, say, Japan, China
or Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal), at different points in the
twentieth century, historically set up their own countermodernist
ambitions. (Dussel 1998: 13)
4 All quotations from Kumar Shahani’s texts included in this book are
indicated in parentheses with cross-referenced page numbers.
5 See Bakshi (2009) for an influential recent book on a Gandhian
theory of capitalism.
6 Some of Shahani’s texts of this time do refer to some of the political
crises involving the suppression of free speech in these years. For
example, ‘Invocation’ (pp. 117–19), which refers to political activists
Kishta Gowd and Bhoomaiah who were killed in alleged ‘police
encounters’ during the Emergency; or, elsewhere, his disparaging
remarks about ‘filmmakers who parade their clenched fists or
the party hacks that support them’, referring presumably to the
mainstream Left parties, alongside making a forceful argument that
‘the only cultural intervention that is possible is indirect, sporadic,
guerrilla in character’ (‘Politics and Ideology: The Foundation of
Bazaar Realism’, pp. 151–54).
7 Committee on Public Undertakings (1975–76): 79th Report: Film
Finance Corporation, Lok Sabha Secretariat, Delhi.
8 Nirmal Verma (1929–2005) was a novelist and short story writer
associated with the Nai Kahani (New Story) movement of Hindi
literature. Nai Kahani was a staple resource for the New Cinema
of India, with several filmmakers sourcing their plots from its texts:
Mani Kaul worked extensively with Mohan Rakesh’s stories; Basu
Chatterjee used the writings of Rajendra Yadav and Manu Bhandari.
88
9 Emile Durkheim, to whom the concept of anomie is attributed,
speaks of the significance of the metaphor of aimless walking in
a way that appears to be directly relevant to Taran: ‘One does
not advance when one walks towards no goal, or – which is the
same thing – when (the) goal is infinity. Since the distance beween
us and it is always the same, whatever road we take, we might
as well have made the motions without progress from the spot.
Even our glances behind and our feelings of pride at the distance
covered can cause only deceptive satisfaction, since the remaining
distance is not proportionately reduced. To pursue a goal which
is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of
perpetual unhappiness. . . . What more can the future offer him
than the past, since he can never reach a tenable condition nor
even approach the glimpsed ideal?’ (Durkheim 1979: 248)
10 The term  bizarre object  is usually attributed to Wilfred Bion –
on whom Shahani had begun a full film, A Memoir of the Future
(1984–85), which remained incomplete – to denote a distinctive
kind of object existing in the world of the psychotic. A universe
of ‘bizarre objects’ is created by violent projection of unwanted
psychic elements. In ‘The Differentiation of the Psychotic from
the Non-Psychotic Personalities’ (1957), Bion says that ‘the object,
angered by being engulfed, swells up, so to speak, and suffuses
and controls the piece of personality that engulfs it: to that extent
the particle of personality has become a thing’, and concludes that
‘the consequences for the patient are now that he moves, not in a
world of dreams, but in a world of objects which are ordinarily the
furniture of dreams’. (See Grostein 2002: 112–13)
11 Indeed, she has anticipated him. During her walk amid the
incantation, we also get these lines: ‘I have heard him often /
Signals sounding from endless directions / Gleaming from the
dark, calling out to me / But alas, I am not meant for him / I only
end up returning to where I once was / And where there is no
one now’ (‘Maine unko kai baar suna hai / Antaheen dishaon ke
jhanjhanaate signal / Andhere mein chamakte hue, apne paas
bulate hue / Lekin main unke liye nahin hoon / Laut laut kar wahin
jaati hoon, jahan pehle kabhi thi / Aur ab koi nahin hai ’).
12 I have written elsewhere at some length about this period: see ‘The
Indian Emergency: Aesthetics of State Control’, in Rajadhyaksha
(2009).
13 Satyajit Ray had already linked Taran to Mouchette, like whom she
suffers ‘inwardly and wordlessly’ (Ray 1986: 106).
14 Jones further writes: ‘Durkheim used the term anomie to describe
this temporary condition of social deregulation, and anomic
suicide to describe the resulting type of self-inflicted death; but in
one sphere of life, he added, anomie is not a temporary disruption
but rather a chrome state. . . . Religion, which once consoled the
poor and at least partially restricted the material ambitions of the
rich, has simply lost most of its power. Government, which once
restrained and subordinated economic functions, is now their
servant, thus, the orthodox economist would reduce government
to a guarantor of individual contracts, while the extreme socialist
would make it the “collective bookkeeper” – and neither would
grant it the power to subordinate other social agencies and unite
them toward one common aim.’ (Jones 1986)
15 Posing the question, ‘What does it mean to be modern? What is
our time?’ from a postcolonial perspective, Dhareshwar proposes
that the impossible narrative attempts to redeem the past, but
‘generates a politics of despair because it cannot do so, and
because critical history is unable to explain its own implication in
the present’. But, he writes, there might ‘conceivably be another
position which would argue that what needs to be rejected
is perhaps not modernity but the modernist understanding or
interpretation of modernity. This position would start with an
acknowledgement that there is something like a “suspension”
of history – the inability of the history that has constituted
our present to “go forward”, as it were – in order to begin an
interrogation of the different idioms as well as a dialogue between
different historicities. The history that is under suspension – for
various heterogeneous reasons – is the history that has constituted
itself or has been written as the “biography of the nation-state”.
If this history/subject of sovereignty is in crisis now, does it mean
that our present is post-historical and post-political, given over
entirely to the market and its sovereignty? Or can we speak of
other political possibilities contained in different historicities and
agencies that have a chance, a future, precisely because of that
impasse?’ (Dhareshawar 1995: 320)
16 Indeed, Tarang ends precisely on this note, when its protagonist
Janaki, having become the celestial Urvashi, says to her enemy-
lover Rahul, the representative of a new bourgeoisie: ‘Without
knowing you, how can one see beyond [i.e. into a different future]?’
17 See Anikendra Nath Sen (1974) for the kind of analysis of the
character of the Indian bourgeoisie that was being attempted at
the time the film was made.
18 Vivek Chibber’s argument that ‘Indian capitalists in the years imme-
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
diately after Independence refused to countenance a state with
wide-ranging regulatory and interventionist powers’, indeed that
they ‘organized effectively against it’, remains one of the most
contentious aspects of the character of India’s independence. (See
Chibber 2004: 9)
19 As Shahani himself puts it, ‘For good reasons . . . we continue to
congratulate ourselves on our myth-making capacity. Our ancients
often chose to disguise their knowledge in religious myths. Today,
as religion is replaced by other forms of culture, newer myths are
made so palpable that they can replace actuality itself. The basic
contradiction of the cinematographic form arises from its capacity
of replacing the object of its “contemplation” by its image. The
commercial cinema has used it to create not only dreams that
substitute reality, but its commodity gods known as stars. Even
montage has, with the best of intentions, led to the necessary
juxtaposition of icons or signs which totally replace reality instead
of evoking or analysing it, thus creating a structure of myth with
all its falsehood. The avant-garde experiments, borrowing a syntax
from the other arts, have merely been attempts at achieving a kind
of respectability for the cinema.’ (‘Myths for Sale’, p. 102)
20 Which have led to some arguing that all of India’s popular narratives
are in some form or other derived from the Mahabharata (see
Mishra 1985). Geeta Kapur, ‘Revelation and Doubt in Sant Tukaram
and Devi’ (in Kapur 2010: 233–64).
21 Kalidasa, says Kosambi, had no real conception of society beyond
the brahmanized concept of a royal court, and had also therefore
no use for the key aspects of the story that must have existed
mainly outside the royal court (Kosambi 1962: 43–44).
22 Kosambi writes, ‘the explanation I offer is that Urvashi has reached
the status of an Ushas, and that this status is that of a mother
goddess, not of a mere goddess of the dawn. That was HER destiny,
as being sacrificed was her lover’s’ (Kosambi 1962: 61). Shahani later
expressed an almost personal identification with Janaki: ‘Janaki, the
heroine of Tarang, half-woman, half-goddess, in origin a landless
labourer in famine-stricken rural Maharashtra, may be my ideal. For
years, my inner life may be as much of a parody of hers as is, surely,
the peripatetic existence of many of our ilk, suspended between
one homelessness and another. . . . I know that we are all mortal,
but I also sense that we all imagine ourselves as being immortal,
and that, finally, we live by what we imagine and not by what we
know’ (‘The Shock of Desire’, p. 267).
23 Between 1976 and 1978, Shahani held a Homi Bhabha fellowship
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to study the epic tradition of the Mahabharata, Indian classical
music and the Bhakti movement, alongside the epic in the cinema.
His travels for this fellowship took him to Moscow to research
Eisenstein, and to Hungary to meet with Miklós Jancsó, among
other things. Tarang was a direct outcome of this research project.
24 It is worth quoting the famous paragraph from the Theory of
the Novel (1914): ‘Great epic writing gives form to the extensive
totality of life, drama to the intensive totality of essence. That is
why, when essence has lost its spontaneously rounded, sensually
present totality, drama can nevertheless, in its formal a priori
nature, find a world that is perhaps problematic but which still
is all-embracing and closed within itself. But this is impossible for
the great epic. For the epic, the world at any given moment is an
ultimate principle; it is empirical at its deepest, most decisive, all-
determining transcendental base; it can sometimes accelerate the
rhythm of life, can carry something that was hidden or neglected
to a Utopian end which was always immanent within it, but it can
never, while remaining epic, transcend the breadth and depth,
the rounded, sensual, richly ordered nature of life as historically
given. Any attempt . . . must fail because it is bound, subjectively
or objectively, to transcend the empirical and spill over into the
lyrical or dramatic. . . . There have been times, perhaps — certain
fairly-tales still retain fragments of these lost worlds — when what
today can only be reached through a Utopian view was really
present to the visionary eye; epic poets in those times did not have
to leave the empirical in order to represent transcendent reality as
the only existing one, they could be simple narrators of events. . . .
This indestructible bond with reality as it is, the crucial difference
between the epic and the drama, is a necessary consequence of
the object of the epic being life itself.’ (Available at https://www.
marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/theory-novel/ch02.htm,
accessed 29 September 2014)
25 The ‘Big Bang of European literature: a sudden liberation of energies
giving life to the most disparate forms . . . (but) a Big Bang that we
are still far from knowing adequately, because until now we have
been searching for a non-existent unity – modernism – instead of
accepting the idea that in the early twentieth century literature
there exists no common denominator. A difficult admission,
because it forces us to give up the Zeitgeist, and to deal with a
multiplicity of mutually disconnected phenomena.’ (Moretti 1996:
200–01)
26 I refer here especially to the Journal of Arts & Ideas, published
90
between 1983 and 1999. Shahani was one of the editors of this
journal in its initial months. A complete set of issues of the
journal is available online at http://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/
artsandideas/.
27 Pandit Sharadchandra Arolkar (1912–1994) was considered the
leading exponent of the Gwalior gharana. A student of Krishnarao
Shankar Pandit, Arolkar also represented the tradition of the
gharana that Shahani references in Khayal Gatha, including his
teacher, himself, and his students Neela Bhagwat and Sharad Sathe.
Pandit Jal Balaporia (?–2013), also from Gwalior and of nearly equal
stature, had personally taught Shahani music and also features in
Khayal Gatha.
28 The resemblance between Khayal Gatha and some Parajanov films
(e.g., Ashik Kerib, which was made, coincidentally, the same year,
in 1988) was especially striking to many, although it was clear that
both filmmakers were working in almost entirely independent
traditions.
29 This is also a reference to the founding myth of the Jagannath
Temple at Puri. It is said that King Indradyumna summoned the
best sculptors to carve the deity of Jagannath from Daru-brahman.
As soon as they started, however, their chisels broke into pieces.
Then the Supreme Lord came in disguise as an old artist who
called himself Ananta Maharana, and said that if he was able to
work behind closed doors for 21 days the deities could be carved.
After 14 days had passed, when the king could not hear any sounds
of the artist’s tools, he became anxious and opened the door of
the temple. He could not see the sculptor but saw instead the
forms of Jagannath, Subhadra and Balarama, their fingers and toes
unfinished.
30 As Romila Thapar shows, the phenomenal impact of his method
was in part because what had earlier been Indology would now,
with Kosambi, become a proper social science, expanded to
include social and economic history, and the interface of this with
cultural articulation – all driven by postcolonial concerns about
‘what had continued and what had changed from pre-colonial
times’ (Thapar 2008: 44).
31 Romila Thapar recounts how, when she was a Ph.D. student in the
School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and her guide
A.L. Basham had invited Kosambi to speak on Hinduism, Kosambi,
instead of beginning with the Rigveda, had begun his lecture by
showing slides of a domestic ritual associated with the name-
giving ceremony of a child. ‘It involved dressing the pestle of
the household in baby clothes and placing it in the child’s cradle.
Kosambi provided an explanation that touched on many facets:
the bestowing of blessings and imbuing the child with strength,
belief systems in prehistoric societies, theories of mother-right,
and fertility rituals. He argued that the beginnings of Hinduism lay
in these ideas and practices. Religion was and is not just a matter
of belief but also involves, and perhaps even more so, the meaning
of the ritual occasion as social articulation.’ (Thapar 2008: 43)
32 In his preface to An Introduction to the Study of Indian History,
Kosambi wrote that this book does not pretend to be a history
of India. ‘It is merely a modern approach to the study of Indian
history, written in the hope that readers may be impelled to study
that history for themselves, or at least be enabled to look at the
country with greater sympathy and understanding. To this end,
the examples given have been intensive rather than extensive.
. . . They are the simplest examples, such as anyone could derive
from honest field-work, though each of them illustrates some
general point. Better illustrations may undoubtedly be found by
the reader from the lives and manners of his own neighbours, and
the remains of antiquity in his particular locality. Going over to the
common people is not easy work. Psychological barriers raised by
many generations of the grimmest poverty and exploitation are
strengthened by the heat, dust or mud, and unhygienic conditions.
But, properly done, the task can nevertheless be exhilarating even
for one whose patience has worn thin and whose joints have
stiffened painfully with age. Such field-work has to be performed
with critical insight, taking nothing for granted, or on faith, but
without the attitude of superiority, sentimental reformism, or
spurious leadership which prevents most of us from learning
anything except from bad textbooks.’ (Kosambi 1956: xi)
33 Shereen Ratnagar has contended that Kosambi’s ‘site locations were
not precise; he was not interested in the typology of stone tools;
and his correlations of tool occurrences with sacred sites, of the
tribe with an absence of plough agriculture, and of iron technology
with agricultural surpluses, were flawed’ (Ratnagar 2008: 72).
34 Between 2006 and 2010, Husain was relentlessly persecuted by
right-wing Hindu organizations, like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
and the Hindu Jagaran Samiti, for allegedly painting Hindu religious
icons in the nude. The numerous legal cases mounted against him,
alongside death threats and arrest warrants, were a major reason
for him to relocate outside the country and even to surrender his
Indian nationality.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
35 Sumit Sarkar, for example, contends that Hinduism could do certain
things because its concept of time so significantly varied from that
of either Islam or Christianity: ‘The relevant points, in considering
the importance of these varied notions of time for perceptions
of history, are that none of the alternative frameworks hindered
the construction of narratives about the past connected to specific
purposes . . . but neither did they require, or stimulate, a sense of
overall social process or interest in its possible causes. The central
high-Hindu ideal was the individual breaking out of the bondage of
karma. . . . Unlike Christianity or Islam, with their notions of a day
of judgement common to all, the idea of salvation here was not
community-based, and so the conception of universal causality
implicit, in a way, in the doctrine of karma, applied only to
individuals. It did not lead to any interest in the causes of aggregate
phenomena. The yuga framework did involve a sense of a moral
texture common to an era, but then its lineaments and causes
were already known: being fore-ordained, divinely determined, or
related to the quality of kings – i.e. to the lila (game, or play), as it
was said, of time, gods or kings. The purpose of history remained,
therefore, a combination of royal propaganda and the teaching of
dharma with examples, and its place in education, we shall see,
seems to have been negligible or non-existent.’ (Sarkar 1998: 11)
36 Alaknanda Samarth recalls his instruction as being: ‘turn the
body into a song’. This happens when the actor’s body becomes
a place to work out contradictory and paradoxical rhythms: ‘2
opposite rhythmic truths, telescoping the ritual/esoteric with
the anonymous’ for a new register in his feature films; to create
‘a new set of Hieroglyphs’. The effort to ‘break with emotional
stereotyping, dramatic conflict, Expressionism, and the mannered
market  exhibitionism of Star systems’ could happen, she writes,
when the ‘actor has to be emptied of technique, become a “cipher”,
blank screen, turn his body into an abstraction’. This was especially
difficult because ‘the technique of a trained actor can never be
stripped, only made seamless’. Shahani was not always able to
recognize, according to Samarth, that the ‘actor’s paradox  lies
elsewhere, in the linkage between the real and an awareness of the
artful’, that his self-idealizing consciousness of Shahani’s ‘legacy
was ‘not always confident enough to tap into this “play”, and that
without such a resource his acting idiom at times does not take off.
There is ‘a missing link at times. What’s missing is an empathy with
the quotidian, trivial, the non-idealized gest, the dissonant, the ugly
even. Actors need to be allowed to feel ugly, enter dark spaces.’
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kumar shahani now
At its best it comes off when the actor – both professional and
non-professional – can ‘intuit and become one with an underlying
musicality without music within the shot’. ‘One acting register
then underscores, overlaps on another. Juxtapositions, collisions,
dispersals between performers from differing disciplines and
cultural modes, actors, people, dancers – disparate elements – can
be contained, distanced by the “mise-en-scène”. The actor then
becomes part of a whole hieropglyph which is the shot.’ (Personal
correspondence with Ashish Rajadhyaksha, 14 Novermber 2003)
37 I recall an actor like Mangal Dhillon, who plays Baaz Bahadur and
was especially proud of his deep voice, being constantly asked in
the dubbing to produce his voice not just from within his throat
but from within a deeper self.
38 Actors from more conventional theatrical backgrounds were often
dumbfounded by the fact that he apparently had no use for their
skills. One especially tricky problem was when for the film on
psychoanalyst W.R. Bion (which remained unfinished), he hired, of
all people, Sir Nigel Hawthorne, who was flown in to India, to (in
his view) just stand around and do nothing.
39 Especially his use of the voice of Sufi singer Madan Gopal Singh
in Khayal Gatha and the slow bhangra he sings in Kasba, to old
Maniram’s leisurely dance. I am also thinking of Jaya Bachchan’s
dubbing of Ela’s voice in Char Adhyay.
40 Among Sudhir Chandra’s key examples, Rahi Masoom Raza’s Adha
Gaon (1965) is a novel that ‘brings alive a world so effectively that
the reader tends to take it as real and as a whole’, but the novel
‘simultaneously creates and warns against this sense of reality
and wholeness’ (Chandra 2001: 124). Such texts chronicle various
actions in considerable detail, and even open up their dilemmas
– such as the character Hakim Saheb’s dilemma about whether
to move to Pakistan or not – without necessarily conferring any
overall coherence or understanding that could claim historical
status. Indeed, Chandra underscores the novel’s contention that
‘clarity is impossible’, and that he is in ‘complete sympathy’ with
such a position (ibid.: 111, 125). See also Chandra’s reading of the
fiction of Intizar Husain’s ‘An Unwritten Epic’, where he speaks of
the ‘creative act (that) also summons, in addition to consciously
held ideas and beliefs, a world of barely perceived desires,
fantasies, attitudes’, a ‘dissonance’ that is ‘also a reflection of
the unresolved ambiguities and contradictions residing within an
individual author’ (ibid.: 132).
41 Chandra shows how Premchand more or less divides the two
92
responsibilities – the critical (historical) and the idealized
(epic) – into more or less two genres of the short story and the
novel. ‘In his short stories, he was an unabashed propagandist of
nationalism, presenting it as an irresistible force with nothing
shady to soil its beautiful face . . . but in none of his major
novels . . . did he portray nationalism without highlighting its
underlying seaminess’ (Chandra 2001: 84–85). While the need is
easy to understand, the mode of its satisfaction defies explanation,
says Chandra.  ‘How  was it that Premchand could maintain for
so  long  the allocation of the two facets of nationalism to two
different forms of fiction? Was this a conscious process: resorting
to the short  story  when faith  was  dominant,  and to  the novel
when scepticism got the upper hand?  The short story as a literary
form,  it is  possible,  was  ideally  suited for a fractional  experience
impulsively seeking manifestation. The novel, however, by its very
scale, necesitated greater mediation of the mind’ (ibid.: 101).
42 I mean object in the symbolic sense here, of course: while it can, in
certain modernist art forms, be literally the art object, in others it
can be performatively achieved through gestural modes or through
various forms of externalization/objectification.
43 ‘In the first phase, which goes roughly from the start of the
sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, people are just
beginning to experience modern life; they hardly know what has
hit them. They grope, desperately but half blindly, for an adequate
vocabulary; they have little or no sense of a modern public or
community within which their trials and hopes can be shared’
(Berman 1982: 15–16)
44 Perry Anderson writes that although modernism ‘as a specific set of
aesthetic forms, is generally dated precisely from the 20th century,
is indeed typically construed by way of contrast with realist and
other classical forms of the 19th, 18th or earlier centuries’, there
is good reason to have a flexible periodization of modernism: ‘by
more conventional criteria, modernism . . . needs to be framed
within some more differential conception of historical time’, since
it is ‘striking how uneven its distribution actually is, geographically.
Even within the European or Western world generally, there are
major areas that scarcely generated any modernist momentum at
all’ (Anderson 1984: 102).
45 Partha Chatterjee writes: ‘We must remember that in the world
arena of modernity, we are outcasts, untouchables. Modernity for
us is like a supermarket of foreign goods, displayed on the shelves:
pay up and take away what you like. No one there believes that
we could be producers of modernity. The bitter truth about our
present is our subjection, our inability to be subjects in our own
right. And yet, it is because we want to be modern that our desire
to be independent and creative is transposed on to our past. It
is superfluous to call this an imagined past, because pasts are
always imagined. At the opposite end from “these days” marked
by incompleteness and lack of fulfillment, we construct a picture
of “those days” when there was beauty, prosperity and a healthy
sociability, and which was, above all, our own creation. “Those
days” for us is not a historical past; we construct it only to mark
the difference posed by the present. All that needs to be noticed
is that whereas Kant, speaking at the founding moment of Western
modernity, looks at the present as the site of one’s escape from
the past, for us it is precisely the present from which we feel we
must escape.’ (Chatterjee 1997: 20)
46 The conventional history goes that in Mohammed Shah’s court,
there were two beenkars, Sadarang and Adarang, who often won
‘contests’ with their more renowned dhrupad rivals and who
invented the khayal form. Then there was a man named Natthan
Peerbaksh who took that form to Gwalior, migrating there from
Lucknow. This was carried forward by his three grandsons, Haddu,
Hassu and Nathu Khan. It is the first-named’s son Rehmat Khan
from whom the history of khayal properly begins, and we are now
in the mid-nineteenth century.
47 Available on https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/
history/hcc05.htm
48 At one level, Bakhtin’s theories of low cultures seem to contradict
Shahani’s. For Bakhtin, this is a literary genre that has ‘long since
completed its development’, as against the novel that is ‘not
only alive, but still young’, and although the epic can conceive
‘my time’, such a process will inevitably ignore the ‘presentness
of the present and the pastness of the past’ since the epic is
‘infinitely far removed from discourse of a contemporary about a
contemporary addressed to contemporaries’ (‘Epic and Novel’, in
Bakhtin 1981: 3–13). Shahani would not, presumably, agree with this,
and certainly his use of the Mahabharata is, at first glance anyway,
inimical to both Bakhtin’s and Lukács’s conceptions of the epic.
This might of course be partly because the Mahabharata’s multiple
layers of survival distinguish it completely from its European
counterparts, as Sheldon Pollock has shown in quotation earlier
in this essay. But it might also be because Bakhtin’s needs to be
read as polemically driven: as an effort to counter, not reinforce
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Lukács’s conception that the novel is most wholly itself when it is
most ‘epic’. He does this not only by pointedly leaving that oldest
among genres out of the novel’s stock of chronotopic prototypes,
but also by insisting on their chronotopic diversity, which makes
the process of ‘assimilating an actual historical chronotope in
literature . . . complicated and erratic’ (Pechey 2007: 85–86).
49 Willemen writes, ‘Espinosa echoes Bogdanov’s insistence that
art practices must address the “organization of emotion and
thought”. Rocha’s violently emotional work echoes Tretyakov’s
reliance on shock to alter the psyche of the recipient of art. The
Latin Americans’ emphasis on lucidity echoes Brecht’s confidence
in the emancipatory power of reason, something he shared with
many Soviet artists allied to Lunacharsky’s Commissariat of the
Enlightenment and their “goal to forge a new unity of art and
life by creating a new art and a new life” in one and the same
movement. There are, then, clear continuities running from the
Soviet artists via Tretyakov to Rocha, via Brecht to Solanas and via
Benjamin to . . . Edward Said.’ (Willemen 1994: 185–86)
50 Shahani writes: ‘Bresson appauverises the image. Luis Buñuel
enriches it by the unexpected. Remember that the only visual he
could remember of Bresson’s was that of the nun’s foot being kissed
in Les Anges du Peche. Eisenstein constructs it. Even Rossellini, who
was so often quoted as saying, “Things are. Why change them?”,
discovered another gift of the cinema to our culture: Things are,
discover their process of being, give it the name that cinema alone
can give it, teach people with these things what these things are.
This respect for reality ultimately led him to the didactic, not
the formless poetic impressionism that was fashionably thought
of by the Cahiers du Cinema group and later by structuralists
like Christian Metz who denied the possibility of an articulated
discourse to the cinema. I wonder what they would have made of
the didactic in the later Rossellini. Repeated the subtle subterfuges
of Bazin in describing Bresson as a realist, where the “reality” of
literature (the text) is said to have been juxtaposed against the
realism of the image (which we know to have been appauverised)?’
(‘Film as a Contemporary Art’, p. 211)
51 In his well-known polemic with Benedict Anderson, Chatterjee
has suggested that the ‘empty, homogeneous time’ of modernity
is ‘mistaken because it is one-sided’, since it ‘looks at only one
dimension of the time–space of modern life’. People, says
Chatterjee, can only ‘imagine themselves in empty homogeneous
time; they do not live in it. Empty homogeneous time is the utopian
93
kumar shahani now
time of capital. It linearly connects past, present, and future,
creating the possibility for all of those historicist imaginings of
identity, nationhood, progress, and so on.’ Such homogeneous time
is ‘not located anywhere in real space – it is utopian’ (Chatterjee
2004: 6). I think that the equivalence between the utopian nature of
such empty time and the practical fact of people living in multiple
or heterogeneous time registers speak directly to melodramatic
modes and their own construction of idealized, national time.
52 This was with reference to Sumit Sarkar’s work on Ramakrishna
Paramahamsa, where he shows how clock-time, along with other
modern-day habits attacked by Ramakrishna, found its revivalist
Other constructed by the saint’s bhadralok followers themselves,
partly via the metaphor of chakri or the humble government job
whose impersonal sahib was countered by the Bhakti image in
which Ramakrishna was cast (Sarkar 1992: 1543–59, 1561–66).
53 Dadasaheb Phalke, who introduced fictional diegetic space into
Indian film, was also the first to make an equation between ‘Indian
images’ (‘Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian
images on the screen?’) and an Indian industry (‘My films are
Swadeshi in the sense that the capital, ownership, employees and
stories are Swadeshi’) through the process of cinematic movement:
religious icons rendered mobile, so to say, by the way they were
projected, recognized and re-introjected through the convergence
of a collective gaze; where movement was literally double-sided:
mechanical and political. See Rajadhyaksha (1987).
54 Also a possible reason for selecting to work with Chekhov rather
than either Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. This move is not easy, and is
also partly why the process of ‘assimilating an actual historical
chronotope in literature has been complicated and erratic’. ‘Generic
forms, at first productive, (are) then reinforced by tradition, in their
subsequent development they continue stubbornly to exist, up
to and beyond the point at which they (have) lost any meaning
that was productive in actuality or adequate to later historical
situations’ (Bakhtin 1981: 85).
55 For example, Manilal Joshi’s Mojili Mumbai/The Slaves of Luxury
(1925), the early Sulochana films, The Telephone Girl and Typist Girl
(both 1926). In 1928, the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report
valorized two self-conscious ‘works of art’: Naval Gandhi’s Balidan
(1927; based on Tagore’s The Sacrifice) and Harshadrai Mehta’s
Janjirne Jankare/At The Clang of Fetters (1927), as being on a par
with the best in the world, and therefore presumably most useful
for raising nationalist self-awareness.
56 Besides Phalke, a key example was the mythological Bhakta Vidur
94
(1921), a Mahabharata-based story that was banned in Karachi and
Madras on the charge that it was ‘a thinly veiled resume of political
events in India, Vidur appearing as Mr Gandhi clad in Gandhi cap
and khaddar shirt’ (quoted in Indian Cinematographic Committee
Report, 1928), and for a song that was performed live with every
show (the film was, of course, silent) in praise of the charkha.
57 Speaking of the role of realism within the nationalist frame, Susie
Tharu, writing about Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and
the Colonial World (1986), had proposed ‘a structure derived
from film theory that signals a complete and interpreted action
and a dominant narrative point of view . . . with which the reader
[viewer] must identify to make sense of the text. The dominant
discourse, which appears as a transcendent and authoritative
subject, places all other voices within quotation marks, literal or
metaphoric, signalling their subordination and keeping its own
subtly manoeuvred mediation supreme’ (Tharu 1989: 87).
58 To take just one influential example, P.C. Barua worked out a
remarkable combination of narrative and technological styles for
his melodramas Devdas (1934) – which introduced what popular
history has always seen in terms of a sort of nationalist angst, India’s
first truly influential existentialist stereotype: an indigenous Camus
outsider inflicted with and utterly alienated by a dread disease of
the soul – and Mukti/The Liberation of the Soul (1937). In both films,
Barua evolved a performative idiom, of static stories and a mask-like
actorial countenance against which was mounted the most mobile
subjective camera Indian cinema saw in this time. The hyperactive
camera moved through walls, panned over sweeping landscapes,
and, in the penultimate sequence of Devdas, as the dying hero
goes on his famous bullock-cart ride, created a ‘negative’ effect
that turned the blue sky black and the green trees white, using a
green filter and shooting against the sun. (I have not been able to
work out where he would have got this effect from: and the only
other film where I have seen this effect is in Eisenstein’s Que Viva
Mexico. However, after Devdas, it appears that other New Theatres
directors and from generally the Bimal Roy school of filmmaking
also tried it with varying success, e.g., Kidar Sharma’s Banwre Nain,
1950.) In the Barua lineage, we have Nitin Bose whose Desher Mati/
Dharti Mata (1938) deals with collective farming, use of machinery
and fertilizer, and how we can improve our agricultural output, and
whose Dushman/Jiban Maran (1939) addresses the tuberculosis
eradication campaign of Lady Linlithgow. Bose’s Hindi melodrama
Deedar (1951) characterizes science in the role of a benevolent tool
in the hands of an eye surgeon, against which the blind hero Dilip
Kumar fiercely rebels when he puts his eyes out again. And in Anari
(1959) by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, also a New Theatres product, the
pivot of the drama is Motilal’s pharmaceuticals business which sells
poisoned drugs to Raj Kapoor’s foster-mother, Lalita Pawar.
59 Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that ‘colonial Indian history is replete
with instances in which Indians arrogated subjecthood to
themselves precisely by mobilizing, within the context of modern
institutions and sometimes on behalf of the modernizing project
of nationalism, devices of collective memory that were both
antihistorical and nonmodern. This is not to deny the capacity of
Indians to act as subjects endowed with what we in the universities
would recognize as “a sense of history” . . . but to insist that there
were also contrary trends, that in the multifarious struggles that
took place in colonial India, antihistorical constructions of the past
often provided very powerful forms of collective memory. There
is, then, this double bind through which the subject of “Indian”
history articulates itself. On the one hand, it is both the subject
and the object of modernity, because it stands for an assumed
unity called the “Indian people” that is always split into two –
a modernizing elite and a yet-to-be modernized peasantry. As a
split subject, however, it speaks from within a metanarrative that
celebrates the nation-state.’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 40)
60 The Tagore–Gandhi debate took place over more than two
decades; see Bhattacharya (2001). For the most part, the quotations
below are (unless otherwise indicated) from the 1921 exchanges in
The Modern Review (Tagore) and Young India (Gandhi).
61 Lukács’s rather strange review of Tagore’s Ghare Baire, which he
apparently read in German translation and saw as Tagore’s ‘Gandhi
Novel’, saw Tagore’s enormous popularity among Germany’s
intellectual elite as ‘one of the cultural scandals occurring with ever
greater intensity again and again’; he contended that the novel was
‘a petit bourgeois yarn of the shoddiest kind’ and Tagore himself
‘a wholly insignificant figure’ whose creative powers ‘do not even
stretch to a decent pamphlet’. See https://www.marxists.org/
archive/lukacs/works/1922/tagore.htm, accessed 1 October 2014.
62 In Bilgrami’s exchanges with Jane Bennett; http://blogs.ssrc.org/
tif/2010/09/06/disenchantment/, accessed 28 October 2013.
63 Bilgrami argues that it was ‘science itself and nothing less than
science, which, far from registering the Father’s demise, proposed
instead in the late 17th century, a quite different kind of fate for
the Father, a form of migration, an exile into inaccessibility from
the visions of ordinary people to a place outside the universe, from
where, in the now more familiar image of the clockwinder, he first
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
set and then kept an inert universe in motion. And it is the theology
and politics and political economy surrounding this deracination of
God from the world of matter and nature and human community
and perception that is worth expounding in some detail so as to
understand its large and abiding effects.’ He further argues that the
‘intellectual history of the Early Modern period records that there
was a remarkable amount of dissent and very explicit dissent against
the notions that produced the exile, dissent by a remarkable group
of intellectuals, who were most vocal first in England which is my
focus, and the Netherlands, and then elsewhere in Europe. Second,
there was absolutely nothing unscientific about these freethinkers
or their dissent.’ (Bilgrami 2009: 50)
64 Moinak Biswas too recalls that when he heard Shahani had planned
this film and was visiting Kolkata, he re-read the book and also
rather fundamentally changed his mind about it.
65 He adds: ‘And this is why lately I have been playing with inventing
new metres. These are merest nothings that are content to be
borne away by the current of time, dancing in the sun and laughing
as they disappear. But while I play the whole creation is amused,
for are not flowers and leaves never ending experiments in metre?
. . . Man became great when he found out this law for himself, the
law of co-operation. It helped him to move together, to utilize the
rhythm and impetus of the world march. He at once felt that this
moving together was not mechanical, not an external regulation
for the sake of some convenience. It was what the metre is in
poetry, which is not a mere system of enclosure for keeping ideas
from running away in disorder, but for vitalizing them, making
them indivisible in a unity of creation.’ (Bhattacharya 2001: 59)
66 One key text is Tagore’s essay ‘The Stage’ (translated by Surendranath
Tagore and published in Modern Review, Vol. 14, No. 6, 1913: 543–
45). Referring to this essay, Christopher Balme says that Tagore
‘launches a full-scale assault on the scenographic conventions of
realistic Western theatre’, which he ascribes to a ‘European need
to have truth concrete’. On the one hand he argues for the jatra,
which does not have so much of a ‘gulf separating the stage from
the audience’, as the ‘spirit of the play, which is the real thing, is
showered from player to spectator and from spectator to player in
a very carnival of delight’. On the other hand, Tagore parallelly also
seeks to access Sanskrit poetics. Balme says that both positions, for
all their other preoccupations, can see him – with Gordon Craig and
W.B. Yeats – as critiquing western theatre’s ‘excessive fixation on
and desire for perfect iconicity’, and possessing all the attributes of
a typical fin-de-siècle attack on theatrical realism (Balme 1999: 27).
95
kumar shahani now
67 Biswas writes: ‘Not only do these signs do the work that vision is
supposed to be specially equipped to perform, i.e. find a reality-
basis on which the story can stand, they also appear on the visual
plane with a particular luminosity. The letter, the act of writing,
the written page – these weave a pattern of their own. As the film
begins, we see an image of Charu’s hands in close-up embroidering,
the alphabet “B” over the length of the title shot, signalling the
insistence of the written word in the film as well as the fact that it
is a world that is already textually worked upon, embroidered, that
Ray is taking up as his material. The act of writing will be shown
with great emphasis. Amal writing in his new exercise book, Charu
writing. And Bhupati, enchanted by the power of the printed word,
enjoying the smell of the ink on fresh paper in his newly printed
issue of “Sentinel”. On the last image, the name of the original
story is printed – “Nastaneed”. One has come across reactions a
little baffled by this intrusion of the word. But the point is not
about the word coming to explain the image here, it can be easily
read as an indication of the process where the literary sign actually
produces the visual.’ (Biswas 1999)
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97
 the shock of desire
and other essays
kumar shahani

fig. 17 An early, handwritten version of the screenplay of Tarang (1984). Of interest is the
fact that Sharmila Tagore appears to have been considered for the character of Hansa, and
Vinod Khanna for Satish (later renamed Rahul and played by Amol Palekar).
 BAZAAR REALISM: MYTHS FOR SALE
THE EMERGENCY ESSAYS 1974

First published in Seminar, New Delhi, December 1974; reprinted in ‘Dossier on Kumar Shahani’,
Framework, Nos. 30–31, London, 1986.
Shahani wrote this essay shortly after the making of Maya Darpan (1972) for a special issue of
Seminar, a well-known independent journal published from New Delhi by Raj and Romesh Thapar,
its founder-editors (the present editor of the journal is Tejbir Singh), and dedicated to generating
public debate on major issues of contemporary interest. The special issue was on the Indian New
Cinema, then at the centre of a storm of debate following the films by Kumar Shahani and Mani
Kaul, among others, on whether public/state funds should be spent on films that are apparently
inaccessible to the public. This impassioned response by Shahani to the debate figureheads a
series of writings seeking to carve out a legitimate space for the kind of cinema he supported.
His allusions here to ‘plagiarists’, ‘globe-trotting socialites’, finance sharks, amateurs and those
adept at ‘bringing humanism to the box office in outrageous costumes’ provide a flavour of the
kind of atmosphere that surrounded the cinema industry in Bombay at that time.

The cinema for us is the most important of the arts. The mechanical reproduction of physical reality – after centuries
of frustrated tentatives – should have, once and for all, freed us from both its narrow fixed perspective and from the
nebulous other-worldliness of art. Instead, here as elsewhere, it has delivered the twin enemies of the people: a barely
masked elitism and the naked force of an underdeveloped market. Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl discovered that the triumph
of the will could be engineered through the lie of the camera. Here, we have made of photographic verisimilitude the
medium of lumpen fantasy. The logic of ‘mass communication’ and its opposite, ‘elitist withdrawal’, both borrowed from a
country which controls 70 per cent of the world’s resources, is supposed to extend across a nation that has yet to electrify
more than 60 per cent of its villages. We want to communicate with a ‘mass’ after having cut off all contact with the

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people – confirm the audiences in their repressed consciousness, continue to use the language developed by centuries of
oppression, made more powerful by technology.
A local monopolist – and others who envy him, including coffee house militants – asks grandiloquently, for whom
does one make commodities (films)? The answer should be obvious, especially since those who ask the question seem
to amass the fortunes for themselves. A surplus is extracted from the masses with whom they claim to communicate.
Innocently, Left intellectuals join the chorus, demand instant messages – the plan of a struggle without the prolonged
process of arming the people with consciousness and weapons.
On the other hand, artists engaged in a moral pursuit of the ‘finer’ things, with obvious access to the country’s
resources, condemn the committed to heroic suicide. People who did not know that the CPI(ML) existed consistently
hold up the examples of so-called ‘Naxalites’. The distortions of the bourgeois press are unblushingly used by those who
wish to produce objects of mass consumption or objets d’art. We seem to be moving to the mystery of the commodity
form before establishing the relations of production that produce it. When we look at ourselves in the image of the West,
we associate Indianness with products of feudal hands and feudal minds. The Western man’s notion of India is derived
from handloom fabrics, the sitar and ‘transcendence’ in various forms. The objets d’art and the ‘mass movie’ alike alienate
men from themselves – to invest their creativity in a totality outside.
For good reasons, therefore, we continue to congratulate ourselves on our myth-making capacity. Our ancients
often chose to disguise their knowledge in religious myths. Today, as religion is replaced by other forms of culture, newer
myths are made so palpable that they can replace actuality itself.
The basic contradiction of the cinematographic form arises from its capacity of replacing the object of its
‘contemplation’ by its image. The commercial cinema has used this to create not only dreams that substitute reality, but
its commodity gods known as stars. Even montage has, with the best of intentions, led to the necessary juxtaposition of
icons or signs which totally replace reality instead of evoking or analysing it, thus creating a structure of myth with all its
falsehood. The avant-garde experiments, borrowing syntax from the other arts, have merely been attempts at achieving
a kind of respectability for the cinema.
Well-intentioned as these experiments might be, they are a repetition of failures demonstrated earlier on in Europe,
particularly towards the end of the Silent era. But in our country, literariness or painterliness and, surprisingly, even
theatricality, when compared to the normal orgies of the vulgar imagination, still pass for good cinema. The cinema has
indeed incorporated into its language elements from all the parallel arts, but only after having transformed them into its
specific means (of spatialising time and temporalising space). In fact, after neorealism, it has gone through a complete
phase of rejecting all syntax – as a reaction, undoubtedly – to achieve a kind of savage lyricism. Onomatopoeia was not
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a cinematic device for the French New Wave. It was its vocabulary. Its syntax – where it had articulated any – was that
of the American B-film.
The theory that there exists a Cartesian polarity between arbitrary (aesthetic) signs and total realism necessarily led
to quantitative conclusions and meaningless oppositions: the proliferation of detail as against the metaphysical truth
(where quality cannot be seized), the fluidity of mise-en-scène against the metre of montage, the existential tension of
suspense (Hitchcock) as against the tragic release from pity and fear.
The terms of reference were purely idealist: the human being unsocialised and nature untransformed. Or, when
socialised and transformed, superficially so. This attitude necessarily tended either to exclude syntax progressively (realism),
or to impose it as totally arbitrary structures that could yield only transcendental or socially insignificant meaning. If in
practice some of the East European avant-garde adopted the same methods, it may not necessarily be a reflection of their
societies but the apathy into which materialists are driven by the bombardment of questions posed ahistorically.
The ‘dialectic of pure reason’ necessarily led to the belief that in cinema, nature would imitate art (André Bazin).
The intervention of the artist had to be asocial and, therefore, there is the intervention of god (Bresson), or revealed by
minimising the intervention (derived from Rossellini). What started as a healthy reaction against fascism (particularly in
Italy), because it spoke in terms of abstract morality, had to degenerate into a passive acceptance of the evil by proposing
metaphysical solutions. Here is proof of the fact that fascism is but a logical extension of the bourgeois ethic. Morality,
linked to the abstract rights of man rather than the concretisations of specific historical freedoms, has to lead to notions
of natural superiority (of a race, caste or class) and can, at best, be benevolently merciful to lower beings who have,
however, to continue to perform their original functions!
When, however, montage – or the juxtaposition of ‘linguistic’ arbitrary elements – was discovered to be inevitable
at every stage of filmmaking, an attempt was made to reconcile the materialist dialectic of Eisenstein to the anarchic
flux of nature. This resulted in fruitful changes, gradually ripening into a break with passivity. But, so long as it remained
rooted in philosophical speculation, it could at best express impotent moral indignation, and, in the absence of any
concrete solution, offer suicide or undirected violence as an escape from the human condition. Godard’s trolley shots,
as he claimed, were acts of morality as they exposed characters in the process of living, or of tragic lyricism as they
went past landscapes (Vivre sa Vie): to explore essence through existence. It was only after he had stopped ‘clowning for
the bourgeoisie’ (as he said in an interview to Le Monde) that he discovered the significantly commentative use of the
movement – the dehumanisation in a large, impersonal department store (Tout va Bien).
Formal considerations have to be linked not merely to immutable, perennial ideation or subject matter nor to
naturalistic detail, but to specific historical circumstance. Otherwise it will have no content. It will be a narrative of
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events (with some rhetoric thrown in for appearing ‘Left’, if found necessary) or a juxtaposition of empty abstractions,
meaningful in a period gone by. It is not surprising that even directors with predominantly ‘spiritualist’ preoccupations
should abandon them for a more material life. Rossellini moves towards the didactic and shows how the bourgeoisie
collaborated with the monarch to imprison the aristocracy (La prise du pouvoir de Louis XIV ).
Bresson admits sociology not only in human relations (les blousons noirs [the black jackets] in Au Hasard Balthazar)
but into form itself (the scene at the Museum of Modern Art in Une Femme Douce). Godard makes a complete break with
his ‘clowning’ and almost so with the visual image. With his newly found commitment he wants to learn the cinema all
over again and is as awkward as a child taking its first steps.
Have we made our first steps, one wonders, towards a cinema that could lift itself from the morass of
underdevelopment? One can say with some pride that there have been instances where one has glimpsed far, open
horizons. But by and large, the stranglehold of the commercial cinema still has a suffocating grip – even on those of us
for whom ‘economic viability’ is not a primary condition. Those who speak in terms of compromise – or its denial – are
being cynical, or choosing not to recognise the objective situation.
Individualism always requires the support of false idealism and morality. If freedom is the recognition of necessity,
to speak of absolute truths, dialectics reduced to formal principles or a perennial humanism is to fetter oneself with the
same ideology that the ruling classes used in their more savagely naked forms – the artistic objects of mass consumption.
The Dara Singh mythological may be reserved for the rural and semi-urban markets. But the other classes need their own
icons to worship.
We have already observed how a set of cinematographic signs, even in far more developed societies, can degenerate
into mythical constructions in which the container of content takes the place of what it contains (the thing signified).
Thereby it becomes sufficient unto itself, content becomes transcendental, the argument tautological, the action
ritualistic. Such forms are needed for upper-class consumption, the classes that are most at home when they speculate
– at the stockmarket or on the universe.
The less sophisticated myths of sentimental alleviation are designed for the consumption of the working and
lower middle classes. Since they most need the cinema as a substitute for life – their conditions of work being the
most dehumanising – the bulk of investment goes into films that can successfully distort their fantasies of sex and
violence. One is almost certain that, if left alone to their real fantasies, they could be far healthier. Perhaps they would
recognise the actuality of the violence daily practised on them and the constant denial of human contact to which
they are subject – inclusive of the emotional, of the sexual and of the increasing possibility of collective cooperation.
But the fight sequence is as necessary to divert one from the fundamental nature of violence in society as is the
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voyeuristic cabaret to degrade at least half of humanity. Combine this with a rebellion against authority which ends
up in the humanising of the parent-villain or the employer-villain without changing the nature of the exploitative
relationships.
Censorship policies which have tied down the members of the [Censor] Board to seemingly absurd irrationalities
help, in fact, to sustain this obscenely unreal world. An anti-communal film could be easily denied a certificate for fear of
arousing religious passions among the majority. Allusions to the caste system are permitted only if the lower castes are
not mentioned by their generic name. Even if you wish to condemn the orthodox reactionary bigot who can only refer to
the lower castes as ‘Shudras’, you will not be allowed to use the pejorative word. You may, however, use the appellation
Brahmin, taken from the same hierarchical structure! Such contradictions can only exist in a ‘secular democracy’ which
allows you to swear by the Quran, the Bible or the Gita.
That the song divine is sung for the upper classes by the Brahmins and only through them for others, is clear. We
hear from the mouth of Krishna himself (Gita 9.32): ‘For those who take refuge in Me, be they even of the sinful breeds
such as women, Vaisyas and Shudras’. That is, all women and all men of the working and producing classes are defiled by
their very birth though they may in afterlife be freed by their faith in the god who degrades them so casually in this one.
Not only that, the god himself had created such differences (Gita 4.13): ‘The four-caste (-class) division has been created
by Me’ (D.D. Kosambi, Myth and Reality). These texts may indeed be worthy of study. As are Pericles’ Funeral Oration or
Aristotle’s Politics. But to revere them is to suggest deviously that democracy will be achieved through slave labour or
that a modern society could realise its goals through inequality. The children of god (not Shudras) will inherit the earth
so long as their masters inherit its wealth.
Censorship confirms the extension of assigned social roles not only along caste and class lines, but along the lines of
family functions and sex as well. The heights of feminine heroism are still to be found in a bovine version of motherhood
– even as the country starves. It is far removed from the vitality of Kali or the other fertility goddess images. The docile
heroine must look like a whore, but must neither bare her body in its raw splendour nor show her human desire. The
censorship laws allow cabarets which fragment the female body into cut-out objects for male acquisitiveness. The nude
however is dangerous, for she can be a whole person with her own subjectivity. When will we learn, once again, to
take pride in ourselves as human beings? If not like the athletes of the city-states, can we not restore the graceful lines
reserved for our goddesses of Elephanta and Bharhut to the humans in whose image they were made? Before we can do
that, we will have to change our ideology transmitted through myth. Because ideas of masculinity and femininity in these
metonymical constructs are also worked out in irreconciliable opposites. Contradiction without a possibility of actual
synthesis, since it denies change, movement.
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According to the mythical system, the female has to prepare everything for consumption, including food and
herself. And the male has to produce. Men have to project and women withdraw. Right down to the last detail where
masculinity may allow smoking and femininity forbid it. When such details – or, in the more sophisticated films, formal
elements that stand irreversibly for concepts – replace meaning itself, one does not have to wait for ideas to degenerate
into ritual rather than praxis. The language of myth, by its very nature of replacing the symbol for its content, spreads
false consciousness: the more vulgarly sensate form in the commercial cinema and the more abstract ahistorical form in
the ‘art’ cinema.
The dichotomy between commercial and art cinema is as spuriously created by the exploitative system as is the one
between public and private money. One feeds the masses with opium and then one complains that art is inaccesible to
them. One extracts the surplus value of labour, and then divides it arbitrarily into public and private money. Recently,
some ‘socially committed’ critics have called the few worthwhile experiments sponsored by the Film Finance Corporation
(FFC) a waste of public money. Radicals in this country often do not seem to recognise how capital is amassed or profits
made. They seem to be concerned more about the tax payer’s money than how he made his money in the first place.
The government itself has been sufficiently pressurised into believing that the FFC is behaving like Oliver Twist. In
recent times it has dared to ask for more. The FFC and its Board of Directors may not resemble the emaciated Oliver. But
if the present stagnation continues (it has financed one film in the last eleven months and may well be in the process
of rejecting scripts which have potential artistic merit without being ‘safe’, commercial propositions), the hopes that it 18
has raised by its courage may fail. The reasons for its short-lived dynamism may be found in the half-hearted reformism
of our ruling classes. Pushed back from this reformatory, therefore, the cineastes will go back into the underworld of
smuggling Fagins who have built India’s comprador cinema upon its major port towns.
A confirmed plagiarist speaks of some of the FFC’s significant productions as third-rate copies of third-rate foreign
films. A globe-trotting socialite whose sole claim to be a critic is her access to people and places (and who ecstasises
over Manoj Kumar’s Shor) aids the big sharks by her learned associations. A self-confessed amateur, applauded for his
bold themes, speaks of films as ‘formal exercises’ when they are not in his own blundering idiom. Others disguise their
concern for financial return (on both ‘public’ and ‘private’ money!) in terms of mass communication. Yet another old hand
at bringing humanism to the box office in outrageous costumes advises the government to nationalise cinema before it
finances films which make an attempt at speaking a radical language. Utopian ideas always subvert their own declared
purpose. Even in the unlikely event of nationalisation, given the honesty of our bureaucrats and the socialism of our

Tarang (1984): political crises, individual action. fig. 18 Corrupt trade union leaders (from
left, Arun Kakde, Datta Bhat, Jayanti Patel) bemoan the loss of the nationalist ideal.
figs 19, 20 Janaki turns away from the striking workers, to begin her tragic, solitary journey.
Shahani contends that his use of the arm of the crane for this shot allowed him to
overcome an overdetermined Eisensteinian legacy, and also thus to set up the moral frame
106 for the trajectory that Janaki’s life would now take.
 Kumar Shahani

system, one can visualise what new monsters will emerge. Some of these suggestions and comments may, indeed, be
well-intentioned, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to sift out the cinema’s enemies from its friends.
The atmosphere is riddled with opportunism. Gossip and facile opinionating, not analytical criticism, is the order
of the day. Theoretical debate is only possible in organised forums free of fear and personalised mud-slinging. We have
not even begun to come together to solve our practical problems. The state governments have yet to exempt films of
artistic merit or the cinema houses that screen them from entertainment tax. A filmmaker who conceives in colour has to
sign bonds of over a lakh of rupees with the Ministry of Trade and Commerce to be able to make prints. In this regard, I.K.
Gujral has made an encouraging statement of policy. When it will be implemented will be anyone’s guess.
In the meantime, a wage freeze is expected to bring down prices while black money circulates freely. A Marxist
filmmaker speaks of poverty being the same through the ages, and depicts an antagonistic contradiction between the
lumpen proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie! Red is the favourite colour of rhetoric. Nostalgia for rhetoric, albeit
hierarchical in form and matter, is the overriding content. We move from long shot to close-up around stars or other
idols and mandalas. Cézanne may have dreamt of the cinema when he shifted viewpoints or wished that his canvas
could reach humbler folk. Eisenstein may have realised his dream among the Soviets. While we move ahead and up
the Himalayas from our tryst with destiny. Like Yudhishthira, anxious to know and preserve the truth, we may ask why
Arjuna had to suffer so much even after the great battle. Krishna’s answer was as usual evasive and capable of all kinds of
imaginative interpretation: the hero’s cheekbones were too high.
Draupadi resented this slighting reference to the beauty of her loved one. But she, and the other heroes and
heroines, are falling by the wayside out of exhaustion or shot in the back for desperate acts of courage. And we will
continue to pursue the truth with our faithful dogs: mass communication, perennial subjects, medieval Indian aesthetics,
unchanging poverty. Or the more sensate forms of myth: Eurasian rubber dolls in ballets of violence, orgies of fragmented
sexuality, the magical change of heart in the prodigal son or authoritarian father: the change of image in the sex object
into a lactating machine.

19, 20
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THE NECESSITY OF A CODE
1975
Paper presented at a symposium on ‘Parallel Cinema’, International Film Festival of India, New
Delhi, 1975; previously unpublished.
Perhaps Shahani’s most polemical essay of this period, this is also a veiled rebuttal of a savage
attack made by Satyajit Ray (‘Four and a Quarter’, in Ray 1974) on him and Mani Kaul, in its
reference to the ‘charlatan . . . who, after attaining a peak of success, should feel so unsteady as
to condemn anyone that does not follow in his footsteps’. Much of the debate concerned the
policies of the Film Finance Corporation, a government institution that had begun supporting
independent film production from 1969. Here Shahani targets an aesthetic practice of realism
that was even then being sought to be adopted by the Indian government as the ‘official’ style:
a style that could subsume within a seemingly art-house idiom, a mode of mass communication
alongside state propaganda. With little optimism, Shahani hopes that the Film Festival of India
will offer a new way forward with its avowed aim of opening world cinema to us.
The first film festival held in India, a little after Independence, has still not lost its impact. It had brought to us some
examples of neorealism and profoundly shocked those who until then had been used to the big Hollywood films which
emphasised rather more the realism of scale than the reality of day-to-day life. The response of all Indian films to this
revolutionary breakthrough in Italian cinema was characteristic: photographic realism was coupled with obvious drama
and exaggerated individual conflict, even in films that wished to display a broad political commitment. The big commercial
set-ups soon lost interest in this intensification of physical reality and went back to its horrendous illusions.
Realism of detail, however, can be a mask for eluding the real problems of society, its class relations. The problems
of the everyday have to be stated through an articulated structure which draws attention to itself, so that the illusion of
a continuous experience is broken, and the audiences asked to judge events and characters. Unfortunately, identification
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with heroic characters has remained the basis from which almost all of our films work, including the most well-known
around the world. In the absence of a consciously formed aesthetic to replace that of neorealism, some have extensively
used, to selective ends, technologies such as the zoom lens and better colour processing facilities in a manner that has
made serious students of the cinema blush with embarrassment. Being an underdeveloped country, we are so enamoured
of technology that we do not wait to find the aesthetic solutions that it may offer. Some of our most well-known
filmmakers have been quoted as saying that they are ‘intuitive’ in their approach! No wonder that their analysis contains
less analysis and more of facile opinionating. It is preposterous for an artist to claim to be intuitive in this century,
especially if he practises a collective art where his medium, however personalised, can never be as direct an intervention
as the traditional arts. Not only the careful mimicking of reality but the very act of creation is being used as a means of
camouflage for poverty of thought, of conceptualisation, and therefore of content.
As a corollary to the avowed lack of conceptualisation, the narrative in a film is mistaken for its content. It is patent,
of course, that all films have a sequence of events, whether physical or ‘abstract’, and therefore a narrative. The sum of
events represented on the screen was considered to be the film content by the neorealists. But even Cesare Zavattini
had to give up his programme. Rossellini went so far as to progressively suit his new idiom to didactic statement. But
over here, strangely enough, Godard’s work is also invoked to support the thesis that narrative and content are identical.
A refusal to be aware of structuring a film, a refusal in a sense to reveal the ideological terms of reference of a film, is
evident. What can look more innocent than a story well told?
However, those who have burst out into an analytical use of techniques after Godard are equally to blame for
the low level of debate that has taken place around the problem. Innovations are used with no concern for syntax,
and, in the name of purely political intention, aesthetic discipline is considered abstruse and irrelevant. The result is a
hodge-podge of cathartic slogan-mongering, identificatory techniques mixed with the gimmicks of the New Wave. Films
claiming to be revolutionary, therefore, often end up – in Europe and here – by providing an instant release for petty-
bourgeois frustrations through the process of emotional identification with a hero or a heroic gesture tagged on to the
end. Instead of raising their own consciousness and that of the people by a constant interaction, they provide at best
an anarchist escape. The enormous work of Brecht, so close to our own folk traditions, is denied, either by making petty
objets d’art embellished with decorative reality, or by reducing it to the insertion of ugly gimmicks within an overall
sentimentalisation of poverty.
The problem of communication preoccupies every artist, even those whose minds are clouded by metaphysics.
The most convoluted arguments are however presented to make the extent of communication a criterion to judge the
cinema. The logic of their argument should lead them to applaud Hollywood’s Love Story or Bombay’s Bobby as the
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greatest films ever made. A more sophisticated version of the same principle is to define the cinema ‘as the highest of the
commercial arts’. In a capitalist society, all products, certainly not films alone, are commercialised, put into the market
as commodities. The filmmaker is himself treated as a commodity rather more openly than other artists. He faces the
contradiction in its acutest form. The real problem is to break through the demands of the market that dehumanise both
the consumer and the producer. The frescoes at Ajanta or the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican were also commissioned works.
But if the artists had defined their work by their commission, they would have produced the same kind of petty pictures
that other unthinking religious artists did, or what the apostles of mass media have done more recently. Beneath their
attitudes could lie a contempt for the masses shared by the financiers and masquerading as commitment in some form
to moral or political values. Or, perhaps, it is a lack of talent, imagination, discipline, courage. There are, it is true, a great
many charlatans among us, but there is an equally great number of talented, dedicated individuals that one encounters.
The biggest charlatan is surely he who, after attaining a peak of success, should feel so unsteady as to condemn anyone
that does not follow in his footsteps. In underdeveloped countries, it is not uncommon to see insecurity coupled with
authoritarianism that stifles all new changes, all attempts at development. One has heard statements to the effect that
there is no talent in the country, the speaker himself excluded, of course! It is truly astonishing that the ‘gifted’ individuals
should consider themselves fit to create in such an unhealthy environment, and, what is more, to communicate.
It is time to lift the lotus pedestal from under the feet of these gods to let them face the murky waters of their
own prevarication. The evasion of truth is inherent in an art which is practised as mainly representational in its aesthetic,
and which, on the other hand, by the process of intense emotional identification guides you to a release, whether
seemingly fatalist or activist. Such a cinema does not allow you to think, to know, to judge. In fact it deprives you of
the consciousness you possess by offering a self-contained world to replace the world in which you have to struggle. Its
raison d’être, its validity, lies only in its original form, the form of tragedy.
The tragic vision can only be true when it is cut off from realism; the supernatural is essential for it. Religion was the
only possible totalising factor at that stage of history. But today, to complete the cathartic processes of the tragic vision
with a realism born out of the more enlightened vision of the laws of nature can only produce a lie for the people to
whom one wants to communicate. It can only produce grossly sentimental and exploitative art because it evokes one’s
experience which in the end contradicts reality. It destroys the integration of one’s sensibilities with one’s mind. Nature
is not presented as it is known to the cineaste, as something with which he can deal, in spite of the great unknown areas
in it. After all, every cineaste uses technology in his daily life and in his work. Instead of clearly formulating this active
relationship, nature is used as an excuse to perform the pathetic fallacy. It is inevitable that a sentimental realism should
fall into this trap.
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Orson Welles had remarked that the Anglo-Saxons have only produced melodrama, never tragedy. We have, in the
tradition of our own literature and that of the nineteenth-century novel, Griffith and Pudovkin, intensified pathos with
appearances of reality after the initial conquests of neorealism. The Italians’ exuberant plunging into reality was liberation
from an oppressive fascist discipline. That is why Rossellini could dare to show not only the reality he photographed but
the reality of the act of shooting, the fluctuating voltage in Rome as it freed itself from oppression that was both social
and linguistic. Here, as it so often happens in history, an instrument of freedom has been converted into an instrument of
control. In France, as well, for some time it was believed – and may perhaps still be – that as it necessarily tends towards
total realism, the cinema is doomed to be inarticulate, to be devoid of meaning, a code. Since the practitioners of
montage had made some mistakes in the infancy of cinema, all manner of abstraction was to be given up. In other words,
it could not raise one to consciousness and action, but take one through a semi-conscious, somnambulent experience.
Fortunately, even the relatively insignificant Truffaut gave up these phenomenological ideas. Godard, of course,
took the theory to its extreme and promptly destroyed it in film after film. The Parallel Cinema, therefore, especially in an
underdeveloped country, has to stress the significant, not camouflage its code and distract attention to its ‘realism’. It has
to be far more responsible than the cinema of the former metropolitan countries. And it has to build up a self-supporting
culture anew, after the rupture in its history caused by centuries of colonial and feudal plunder. Unfortunately, Indianness
is still linked to that supposedly unchanging past both by intellectuals at home and Indophiles abroad. To move away
from exotica, the nearly pornographic romanticisation of poverty or its natural concomitant of escape, metaphysical
spiritualism, one has to build a new language linked with our history not by a return to a supposed glory but by breaking
the structures of the past in contemporary application.
The example of Ritwik Ghatak, one of our foremost cineastes who has been silenced for almost a decade, comes
to mind. He has secularised the concepts developed at an earlier and lower level of materialist culture in our tradition.
The worship of the mother-goddess, as is well known, arose out of the actual struggle of the cultivators, before it was
brahminised and assimilated into the meaningless abstractions of feudal ideologies. To take an example of a simultaneous
splitting up and construction of a code in Ritwik Ghatak’s films, one sees in Meghe Dhaka Tara the feminine principle
operating in the secularised concepts embodied in the three principal women characters: the mother, fierce; and her two
daughters, the one sensual, the other denying her sensuality. The structure is further strengthened by multiple allusions
on the soundtrack and by the triangular composition, given a new vitality and significance, yet recalling the articulation
of the fertility cults.
For those more familiar with the European cinema, the striking examples of language revealing the content by
revealing its structures could be the work of Jancsó from Hungary or Bresson from France. Jancsó’s treatment of space
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is itself the expression of a deep anguish. He converts the infinite space itself into a finite space by the action and the
rigid horizon, and he gives a sense of unfathomable measure within an enclosed area, say, of a room off an enclosed
courtyard. The ritualised violence of symmetrically opposed groups and the long trolleys on vast expanses of nature
which return upon themselves, are more communicative than any prodding of realistic detail or emoted dialogue can
be. He does not have to wrench emotions by mimicking them on the screen or bastardise tragedy, but to merely reveal
the structure in its purity without any imposed abstraction or arbitrary form. The rich insights he provides through the
specific means of cinematography, including its nominally brutal representative aspects, are akin to the truth presented
in classical music.
In the work of Bresson, the musicalisation of volume or screen size completely overcome the pseudo-problem
raised by Truffaut, among others, of avoiding the champ–contrechamp [field–crossfield] shot division. Bresson’s
acceptance of causation at the purely material level is contained in the action–reaction build-up through this otherwise
much-abused convention. Yet, he transforms it to state his belief in predestination by avoiding the usual ‘motivated’,
dramatic treatment of character and volume. In fact, the old categories of characterisation would completely mislead
the viewer into judging suicide in his films by irrelevant psychological factors. His use of the close shot would wrongly
be interpreted as dramatic. His use of volume demonstrates the futility of dividing form and content, or taking the code
to mean the purely formal-technical aspect of modern art.
Unlike the didactic or prosaic functions of language, which need a rigidly formulated grammar and a vocabulary
defined in a dictionary, the modern arts can break a convention to restructure it into a code, which may even be valid for
just one or two works of art. Chomsky comes close to suggesting this in his lectures on Knowledge and Freedom. Even
poetry, in spite of its use of words, is capable of such formulations. The classical arts, of course, have generally fairly
rigid structures which could be the delight of linguisticians. But the modern arts, practised with growing individualism in
a constantly changing social and technological environment, have to be more open-ended.
Unfortunately, given their ideological predilections, some linguisticians and filmmakers alike have often tended to
drain the cinema of all significant meaning by seeking futile parallels with grammar. Like Picasso, they seem to have found
before they searched. An artist may indeed work in that fashion because he has in any case to lay bare the languages in his
medium. But a theoretician usually has to understand the practice of the medium first. It is heartening to know that some
such work has once again started in India. In Maharashtra, Ashok Kelkar is said to have done some very promising critical
work in the analysis of poetry. But the voices of pioneers are constantly being drowned by the confused cacophony of
people who have attained success without making more than a negative contribution to the cinema or to the other arts.
Their stock arguments are still the market, the mass, the imagined aesthetic limitations of the cinema.
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The Parallel Cinema, which was beginning to build itself for the first time in India around the daring efforts of the Film
Finance Corporation (FFC), is under attack mainly because of the lack of exhibition facilities. If indeed the FFC succumbs
to the dictates of the market or those, venerated or otherwise, for whom the market is the new sacred institution, it will
sooner or later stop performing the function for which it was set up. It may, in fact, like many other banking institutions in
our country, do exactly the opposite – it may end up offering reasonable rates of interest to people whose main concern,
however camouflaged, has been to extract as much capital as possible for their own benefit, not for general cultural
upliftment. It is difficult to create a taste, especially where attitudes have been so fossilised among those who have
practised the art for a decade or more. But a certain extension into screen education at schools, and a greater access to
international cinema and its history will have to be provided to remove our inherited misconceptions. The Film Institute
is already providing a great deal of disciplined talent that would otherwise go to waste. Other agencies, on a larger scale
than the film societies if not the FFC itself, will have to take up the task of giving greater strength to its experiments. The
task is tremendous. One has to restore to our people what has always been attacked and plundered from them: their
sensibilities by the cathartic illusion of reality and their perception of the loud mélange of colour and sound. One may
have to begin like Griffith all over again, by simply making people see; and now, hear as well.
In the fifties, the government, by following an uncompromising policy on music through All India Radio and well-
managed conferences, gave rise to a renaissance in classical music and made it accessible to ever-growing masses of
people. Will it do the same for cinema, at as great an operational level? I hope that this International Film Festival is a
step in that direction.
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 INVOCATION
1976

Written as an introductory presentation, which however was never made, for a conference
at the International Film Festival of India, 1976. First published in ‘Dossier on Kumar Shahani’,
Framework, Nos. 30–31, London, 1986.
Written at the peak of the Emergency (1975–77) in India, this note makes several references to
its excesses, such as the killing of Naxalite activists Kishta Gowd and Bhoomaiah, and the stand
taken on freedom of speech by the Marathi writer Durga Bhagwat. Its cynical tone also signals
the end of the brief period of hope signalled by the Indira Gandhi government’s support for an
independent New Cinema movement.

The cinema is on its death bed.

All its high priests have gathered around to chant its safe passage to heaven.
Death is a ceremonial occasion. In its own way, festive.
The brahmins have to be fed. The relatives forget, for a while, their frivolous preoccupations and wear compassionate
faces.
Once they have all gone the family’s disparate members will seek the dead, each in his own corner.
The cinema will survive, resurrected in the minds of the young and the not-so-young who seek liberty. But will they
be able to act or applaud in freedom?
While violence and sex are more and more expressly forbidden, fantasised fight sequences and cabarets of
dismembered women proliferate. The Film Finance Corporation, denied promised funds, has a recent annual average
of two-and-a-half films. The tyranny of the market is said to provide a natural freedom. At least we learn who cannot
make films here. The workers’ right to strike is compensated by the duty of the nation to them or vice versa. How lucky,
I hear children say echoing the liberals of our generation, for Kishta Gowd and Bhoomaiah to be tried before they were

fig. 21 Early lecture notes on the theory of the ‘epic’. 117

the shock of desire and other essays Kumar Shahani

executed. If children embarrass us, we have only ourselves to blame. Civil liberties were an abstraction for the many, create a colourful form, to entertain people. . . . An author is no longer a thinker or an artist but
gossip columns for the few. Absolutist, ‘total’ revolutionary movements, as unreal as the spectre of a national liberation becomes an entertainer. . .
movement being conducted by mighty foreign powers. The rubble of destabilisation has collected into a pyramid. Social So long as there are voices that ring as true as hers, even the exiles will take heart. Forced to be mute, they will
relevance is measured by the profit and loss entered into account books. The procurer of Roti, Kapda aur Makan for our forge links where once they were voyeurs. Voyeurs of the present, delighting in detail and fragmented visions. Voyeurs
unfed, unclothed, unsheltered masses ushers in Naya Bharat. of an imaginary past, positing order alienated from reality. Voyeurs of the future, rushing towards suicide or spontaneous
In this promised land, what will our filmmakers do? Someone suggests that their fate will be like that of the poets utopia. In a sense, you cannot remain on this side of the lens any longer.
in Plato’s Republic. But we already have ‘traditions’ in our society faithfully reflected for all the distortions of detail, You may not speak, you may know. Not the word or the icon. Nor the immediate sensuous experience. For the
emphatically realistic or outrageously melodramatic, that have banished truth from poetry. The sentimentalisation of observer in his act may soon find himself changed. Like nature in primordial man, suddenly conscious of itself.
poverty, anarchist rebellion or, better still, the majesty of fate transformed into images that deny action. Even if the This, then, is our identity. This, our home. Here is where we work and sleep. Five hundred and fifty million people or
heroic image has changed from that of the self-lacerating Devdas, the newly found, other-directed aggression of the more. Yes, we were among the first to count without the aid of the abacus. You, as delegate or visitor, are most welcome,
middle class turns upon itself. The dynamic still conjures up the criminal. Revolutionary violence is still explained away in especially if we forget to send you an invitation. Bring us the pride and impatience of your youth. At the moment you will
psychological terms or purged through balletic fight sequences. The ultimate aim is collaboration, as in Lang’s Metropolis, find us neither wise nor playful. We are a little preoccupied.
even of those who protest against the dehumanisation of the machine. Political order emerges from progressive social Ganga has washed away her sons. The child, proficient in arms, is yet to be born.
entropy. It is in these conditions that one may seek the supernatural in as many forms as possible.
Metaphysical anguish, at a popular level, expresses itself in miracles. At higher levels, perhaps unable to bear what
a critic-friend has called the grittiness of existence, it looks beyond reality. The imitative realists, because of the poverty
of their structure, make the ugly personify evil and the beautiful, good. One would have thought that by the very quality
with which realism allows processes to reveal nature, such idealisations would automatically be avoided. But perhaps
we are at the end of this Oriental quiescence. We may yet discover amongst us Lenin’s Tolstoy: a utopian ‘with critical
elements capable of providing valuable material for the enlightenment of the advanced classes’.
Or, soon enough, access to an Open City: open from within.
The cinema in our country, and those who shape it, have neither faced a crisis nor fostered the togetherness of
diversity. Instead it has meant to them and their confrères of the other arts, ‘instant recognition, money and popularity’.
Durga Bhagwat has spoken of how even men of letters distort their social role when confronted with a so-called mass
media. A free (and somewhat clumsy) translation of her presidential address to the 51st Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya
Sammelan (All India Marathi Literary Conference) reads:
Those who wanted to enrich the mass media have ultimately become their slaves. . . . They
(the authors) forget their traditional craft of pure writing, do not go deep into the framework
of mass media and accept their limitations of theme and content as extensive. Crisp language,
a little bit of pathos, a little humour, titbits of incomplete information are strung together to

118 119

IDEOLOGICAL IRONIES
1976
Paper presented at a seminar on ‘Arts and the People’, organized by the United States
Educational Foundation in India (USEFI). First published in Film Miscellanea, Film and
Television Institute of India, Pune; reprinted in ‘Dossier on Kumar Shahani’, Framework, Nos.
30–31, London, 1986.
In this essay, Shahani defines his position on the call to induct the cinema into a communications
strategy for India. Linked earlier to radio broadcasting and, from the late 1960s, to satellite
television, such a strategy for film was finding growing acceptance at that time within the
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s policy, in the wake of the Satellite Instructional
Television Experiment (SITE) directly supported by the USA. Shahani here stridently argues that
film is a language and, as such, needs to be distinguished from modes of transmission such as
the radio and television. This is also the first time he outlines his understanding of the ‘epic’
narrative: as one that takes us beyond the closed system of ‘strictly chronological, sequential
narrative’ arising out of a ‘mechanistic and closed system of causation’. Such realism, based on
a ‘mechanical idea of objectivity and from a subjectivity which extends into nature, through
the pathetic fallacy’, can be changed through replacing the imitation of reality with ‘historical
man’s consciousness of nature’. Also see the essay ‘Cinema in Exchange’ (pp. 271–75).
It is ironical, to say the least, that the cinema should continue to find its place along with radio and television among
the so-called mass media. It speaks of a widespread ignorance, if you will pardon my saying so, that a highly developed
language should be confused with media which are primarily means of transmission. Secondly, in India at any rate, only
the radio can claim for itself the appellation of a mass medium. Because of the advantages the radio has in its ready and
cheap availability, specially after transistorisation, it has been the most efficient instrument of information, and a means of
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transmission which has made even classical music, once the preserve of the temple and court culture, available to a larger
audience. Television has had much too short a history in our country and may play a significant role only in the future.
The cinema, on the other hand, has a long tradition in our country, however perverted, and has been beset with
problems which are totally dissimilar to the problems of the so-called mass media. These problems cover the full range,
from the system of finance available, to the possibility of actual and spurious mass participation, and, therefore, of
a sociologically based aesthetic. In fact, unless we wish deliberately to distort matters or to practise an ideology of
confused rhetoric, I propose that we drop terms like ‘mass media’ and ‘mass communication’, much abused as they are
not only in relation to the cinema, but to the radio and TV transmission systems. We would thereby avoid spurious
generalisation and come to terms with problems of aesthetics and sociology which are relevant to the practice of
the arts, and to the active participation in them of individuals and classes. At the centre of a valid socio-aesthetic
investigation would be the qualitative and historical changes brought about by the interaction of language with reality.
By language is meant the juxtaposition of thematic and formal elements, arising out of a society moving towards a higher
stage of organisation.
The cineaste, unlike other artists, is doubly alienated. The direct transformation of nature is now superseded
by technological intervention. His participation in commodity production is of necessity far more complete than a
painter’s or a musician’s. The participation of the audience in his work also takes place through the system of commodity
distribution. With the result that people are forced to consume films as they would consume Coca Cola. It is by
recognising constraints in his work and, in a sense, using them against themselves, that he can recreate the ‘liveliest art’.
His direct contact with society and its means of production accounts for its vitality. However, he is often driven to the
most unabashed compromises, which are then regularly justified in rhetorical terms of ‘mass communication’, ‘economic
viability’, etc. Melodrama, the child of tragedy and opera, and catharsis become in his hands the tools of overwhelming
the audiences with an ideology manufactured by his financiers. Worse still, with the capacity of the cinema to make
life more life-like (what Kracauer calls the ‘redemption of physical reality’), it increases the catharsis by giving a total
illusion of reality. The cinema can lie so ‘truthfully’ because it makes its statements through juxtaposition of formal
elements, of which the audience is largely unaware while it appears to be a continuous succession of ‘realistic images’.
Thus the realism of detail, when combined with catharsis, alienates the people from reality and involves them, instead,
in a readymade dream: the more fantastic its content, the more it is realistic in its detail. David Wark Griffith, the first
great filmmaker of America and the world, perfected the art of illusion through the introduction of the close-up and a
meticulous imitation of reality. He was also the first to make a tentative gesture to break away from it, to make a cinema
capable of higher generalisation (Intolerance).
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The Indian cinema has, by and large, worked without an attempt at that higher generalisation which took the early
cinemas, and specifically the early Soviet cinema of Eisenstein, to discover the great intellectual possibilities of this new
art. But I would like to mention the fact that both Eisenstein in the cinema and Brecht in the theatre drew upon sources
of Oriental theatre to introduce and develop discontinuous, significant elements juxtaposed to make the cinema more
meaningful. These elements, present in our different regional forms of folk theatre, appeared in our cinema in a cruder
fashion and continue to flourish in our song sequences whenever the motif is not purely erotic. There were rare examples,
of course, of partially successful achievements like Sant Tukaram, but usually all attempts at overcoming purely physical
representation of artificial situations were reduced to naive, conventional symbolism, borrowing metaphorical structures
from an underdeveloped box theatre and the overall influence of the ‘analytic–dramatic’ school (as characterised by
Bazin) prevalent in the sound film.
For some time, there seemed to be no way out of this impasse. Not for us, not until we became aware of ourselves.
The liberation of Italy from the fascists had just preceded our own declaration of Independence. The Italians abandoned
syntax. For all order seemed to them, quite rightly at that time, to be imposed, oppressive, fascist. They rejoiced in reality,
were happy to be alive, to pursue the pleasure of just simply being human and flowing into nature’s unbroken continuity.
Unlike the realism of the Renaissance, it was anti-rationalist. It so emphasised the evocative, lyrical qualities of nature
that social institutions, including language, became irrelevant. And that was where it failed. Even in our largely myth-
making commercial cinema. While melodrama was maintained, Bimal Roy intensified physical reality in Do Bigha Zameen,
through comparative photographic verisimilitude, to make a socially relevant film. Even a great showman of Bombay, Raj
Kapoor, took something from neorealism to make films like Boot Polish. The heroes played by glamorous stars like Raj
Kapoor himself, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and others could play unemployed graduates, taxi drivers or the dispossessed
lumpen of our streets.
But the romantic–humanist seed of neorealism found its best soil in Bengal. Its literature had already cross-fertilised
extremely well with the literature of nineteenth-century Europe to produce the realism of detail, along with the necessary
offshoot of romanticism, the pathetic fallacy, the strictly chronological and sequential development of narrative from
the serialised novel. Satyajit Ray, who is our finest exponent of this form, brought to it the related tradition of the
caricature of social types. Ritwik Ghatak was the first to try and integrate neorealism with an operatic, epic structure,
working directly from the folk arts and the theories of Eisenstein and Brecht.
The movement had its support in what was perhaps India’s largest linguistically cohesive middle class. Necessarily
again, as a corollary to romanticism, Calcutta also spawned the now widely accepted theory in India of a regionally
‘rooted’ cinema. While the theory had a healthy contempt for a spurious internationalism which consists in producing
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derivative art (like much of our painting in that period), it had all the possibilities of degenerating into a narrow, medieval
and decorative idea of culture. Fortunately, there are signs that it will be given up by the artists before their apologists.
Fortunately again, we have a classical culture, and it is a classicism which is not totally divorced from our folk traditions,
as Dipali Nag demonstrates in her paper on music.
From all accounts, the Europeans had to destroy some of their cultural achievements to accommodate the more
‘civilised’ Graeco–Roman tradition. It was an attempt to reconcile – and even to discover and enlarge, as in the case of the
Renaissance – through art, a scientific tradition to a society governed by religious thought and hierarchical organisation.
Unless realism in art is founded upon an attitude which grows out of the contemporary scientific relationship between
the subject and the object, it will be used inadvertently against the people. The catharsis that an illusion of reality, linked
to a tragic vision, provides can lead us even more convincingly into fatalism and put nature above men. Such a realism
would be a realism of surface appearances and not even of form. For, form consists of concepts – which could either be
metaphysical or ‘scientific’ in the broadest sense. Instead of reducing realism or our own traditional epic forms to decorate
surfaces, instead of appeasing and exploiting the people, one should be approaching them with an open, free and truthful
discourse. Instead of manipulating their feelings through identification, one can try and understand their logic.
There are many ways in which epic form, rejuvenated through a scientific and not a mythic attitude, can serve this
function. The epic form, in its verbal, visual manifestations, is not a chronology of static events. The strictly chronological,
sequential narrative arose out of a mechanistic and closed system of causation. The intervention of the narrator or the
subject in the transformation of the object in nature is clearly recognised in both the epic form and in the modern
practice of science. To know is to change. This new relationship between the subject and the object, if accepted, can take
us away from both a mechanical idea of objectivity and a subjectivity which extends into nature, through the pathetic
fallacy. The imitation of reality can be replaced by the internal relationship of society or the social, historical man’s
consciousness of nature.
All this can, however, be done if the artist does not calculate social relevance from box-office receipts, cathartic
participation, or the closeness of images to narrow, religious idiosyncracies. Nor can it be achieved through high-pitched
ideological rhetoric with formal, therefore conceptual, untidiness in an attempt to substitute thematic vocabulary for
content and grammar. Such an approach can only lead back to subjectivist anarchism, manipulating the people to revolt
impotently against individual circumstances of poverty and deprivation, rather than against the entire social order with
a code which only organised practice and conscious theory can unravel.
We have so far been shy of revealing the organising logic of the director, as Eisenstein termed it, to our audience. In
other words, we have equipped them with experiences by proxy and not with a system of signs which can convert their
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gestures into meaningful acts. The sensuous reality that surrounds us should be freed from irrational feeling. The myths CINEMA/THE LIFE SCIENCES
can be given back their original vitality by displaying the very process by which they are formed. To decode the myths is
to destroy them as myths and to destroy their falsification of a true human contact with nature. By showing the process 1977
by which myths or other systems of signs are formed, one can move from ritual to significant act.
The cinema may have the unique privilege of doing so, with its dual capacity to record nature in flux
and, simultaneously, to articulate the process of human interaction with it through the organising logic of the
director–spectator.

Paper presented at a seminar in Bombay; previously unpublished.

This informal conversation with scientists in Bombay, while rehearsing several of Shahani’s
concerns of the mid-1970s, is also an effort to define a social science for the cinema, in terms
of what the technology makes possible when mounted upon a language. This is the first of a
series of presentations that culminated in his ‘Modern India: Terms of Discourse’, in 1994 (see
pp. 344–49). Here, the problem addressed is one of reducing certain kinds of oppression as
though these were a natural condition of existence and representation. Shahani argues for why
the cinema, based as it is at once on a camera (and thus a ubiquitous observer), and the ability
to select fragments of reality and place these in a new order of movement in continuous space,
can play a role in altering the significance of what seems to be purely an objective social or
natural phenomenon.

By a curious reversal of a tradition that reached its own dialectical breaking-point, the cinema is said to have actually
brought Nature to a stage where it can imitate art. It is not surprising, therefore, that the cinema, even though belatedly,
finds itself grouped with the life sciences today. And for reasons which transcend its role as a mass medium. In the first
place, mass communications is a much-abused phrase – abused both by its practitioners and those who theorise upon it.
Strictly speaking, the only medium which can lay some claim to being a mass medium is the radio. Not only for reasons
of its easy availability, especially after its transistorisation, but because it has been able to transmit both instrumentation
and art over a more extensive area, liberating education from the confines of the classroom and music from the gurukul.
Moreover, to a small degree, it has allowed for some direct feedback – through requests for programmes, etc. In the
field of television, the experiments conducted by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), if continued along
the lines on which it was started and further refined, if it is not distorted to uses of propaganda, the feedback systems

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might operate more forcefully in the foreseeable future. Already, in the more advanced countries, communities do not
merely receive, but produce and transmit their own programmes at fairly nominal costs. However transmission, not
communication, seems to be the basic feature of these media. Communication implies a code, and neither radio nor
television have established a code independent of what they transmit. For instance, the greatest cultural achievement of
the radio has been the extensive diffusion of classical music, especially in the 1950s, but it has not transformed what it
transmits in any sense. The code, in other words, is that of classical music itself. Television, similarly, has not evolved any
new forms – it has transmitted painting, taped theatre, cinema and, above all, a kind of hodge-podge of other forms. The
cinema, on the other hand, is recognised as a language because of its specific mode of construction. The impetus to the
discovery of cinema was given by, among other things, the need to study movement. And movement remains, to this day,
its strongest compositional factor. From the purely mechanical reproduction of reality and its flux, it has transformed
itself into the liveliest art.
It has found its identity by the specific characteristics it has. First, it is the only art which can capture Nature in
its flux. It can also negate that flux by the movement of the subject (the camera or the microphone) itself, contrarily
or parallelly. The theatre creates a metaphoric universe, bound by its space and human characters and speech. In the
cinema, the growth of a plant, taken by the single-frame technique, becomes significant in itself. In that sense, Nature is
said to imitate art. By formal extension, one sees that the fluttering of trees, without any figure of speech or metaphorical
structuring, becomes significant – almost, as it were, in itself. However, this is only part of the truth. The intervention
of the subject, though not always revealed in naturalistic style, is present everywhere. There is the selection of the
natural event. The camera is a ubiquitous observer – both in fragmented space (you can change the camera position)
and in continuous space. The selection of a fragment and its placement in rhythmic order, or the particular way chosen
by the filmmaker in observing movement in continuous space, the use of different axes, can alter the significance of
what seems to be purely an objective social or natural phenomenon. Moreover, it shares with painting the subject’s
intervention through line, colour and tone. Differing from the tradition by making the movement the first compositional
principle – interpenetrating line rather than a stable distance between two points, using tones for leading the eye in
or out rather than for a balance of weight, or organising colour in a musical sequence instead of evoking a neutral grey
through immediate and synchronic juxtaposition. It may be quite reasonably asserted that the cinema spatialises time
and temporalises space. It uses the secondary properties of the traditional art media more effectively than the primary
modes. Thus the grave tones of the organ are sufficient to create a greater weight and monumentality in the cinema,
while it may have little use – beyond allusion – for the fugues of Bach. The handling of the stringed instrument, like the
sarod or the sitar, and its juxtaposition with other natural, mechanical or electronic sounds, and above all silence from
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which a note appears or into which it disappears, are more important elements than the melody itself. Of course, the
judicious use of primary elements in the traditional arts further enriches this constant play of time as space and space
as time perception. Its most evocative use of architecture is by destroying its stability – by constantly turning structure
into event, by converting three-dimensional enclosures into unending spaces or by treating horizons as two-dimensional
opaque curtains. In this fashion Miklós Jancsó reverses our normal understanding of the finite and the infinite. By
heightening the mobility (and therefore its opposite as well), it can free us of habitual modes of perceiving and thinking.
David Wark Griffith, the great American pioneer of the cinema, had said rather simplistically that one of the functions of
the cinema is to make people see. At that time it was not fully realised by the market-controlled industry that, having
made people see and hear, one could go beyond into explorations of nature and society. In fact, most commercial cinema
and state-controlled cinema have even destroyed this primary capacity of the medium by a bombardment on perception
which blinds and deafens you. It uses the sound and fury to reduce the audience to an unthinking cipher, so that it can
impose its consumerist or authoritarian ideology. Most work done under the label of mass communication is the very
opposite of communication. It hampers access to the direct moulding and integration of sensuous reality, often enough
even outside of its immediate sphere. At least, that is usually the intention.
On the other hand, artists and audiences alike have always struggled against organised attempts at controlling
behavioural and mental patterns, by finding ways and means from within a tradition of art, changing them to integrate it
with the experience of their generation. In Soviet Russia, immediately after the October Revolution, the artists anticipated
the movements of half-a-century. Many of their earlier projects remained unrealised – for lack of funds or technological
availability. Sometimes, like Kuleshov and Pudovkin, they converted the shortage of material, in this case film itself, into
an advantage. They were the first to discover that short strips of film with totally disparate images, when juxtaposed,
could bring about a totally new meaning. While Pudovkin could not go very much further than his American predecessor
Griffith, others like Eisenstein attempted and succeeded in making, evolving through montage, an intellectual syntax.
But the extension of vocabulary has taken place only after a foundation of the syntax was laid, after blunders and
masterly innovations in Russia, Germany, France and the United States. The extension of vocabulary took place after the
War – especially through neorealism, news coverage and instructional films. Anything was considered suitable for the
cinematograph – the neorealists rejected all order and created a new poetic form from the natural and the mundane
elements. News coverage turned civic events into a throbbing reality. The instructional film could, rarely though, bring
cinematic poetry to the dryest of subjects. Out of this situation was born the great Italian filmmaker Rossellini. Starting
from premises of Catholic spiritualism, he achieved the simplicity and directness of the truly materialist philosophies,
like those of the Buddha and Marx. By his compassion and engagement, inspired to a large extent by the Communist
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partisans who fought against the fascists, he extended the content of cinema. His Rome, Open City was shot as the Allies
marched in, and the film has the flickering voltage of those times, affecting its lighting in historic poetry. Later, he went
on to discover the non-verbal dialectic in the image, an innovation not in the cinema alone, but of the cinema in terms of
human language. By the ‘neutrality’ of his shots, he discovers how even historicism could be individuated. A single object,
a single event, in the context of a personal or a society’s history, acquires a definite meaning, individuates and concretises
a theory. In this fashion, he joined the great quest for meaning of the Soviet film pioneer Eisenstein, and the Buddhist Ozu,
a staunch traditionalist. Interestingly, Ozu achieves a similar individualism through a highly structured visual and narrative
grid, against which and in which he gives the object, person or event that which Heraclites and the Buddha attributed to
reality. The lesson to be drawn from this – for artists, at any rate – is that if we start from a rigid code, truth is in finding
the flux, and if you start from an ever-flowing current, significance is in the isolated, defined and unique relationship. I
suppose that is the only way one makes generative mistakes, and the process of the correction of error embraces both
the subject and the object.
For the object itself is a thematic processed by a tradition and inherited species-behaviour, and the human body
and mind subject to natural law. There is no room for non-duality, whether it be that of Shankara, Plato, the romantics or
Plekhanov. Only then can a relationship between the known and the unknown become relevant and genuinely uplifting.
Artists and scientists, overawed by their own tasks, can slip into a metaphysics – either in their lives or in the body of their
work itself. Metaphysics and idealism can take many forms, even those of geometry itself. Thus Copernicus took it ‘as
axiomatic that all celestial motions must be circular and uniform’. Even Newton is said to have accepted the idea of some
medicine by which the force of gravitation was exercised at a distance, thus regressing back into vitalism (Bertrand Russell).
Artists, scientists, mathematicians, often caught by the fancy of their forms, become like Tantricists and Platonicists where
the energy of forms is given a mystical force in themselves, impelled as they are in their well-intentioned pursuit to more
refined articulation, where the relationship between sensuous reality and truth becomes apparently remote. Thus, even
a man like Buckminster Fuller, who militates against scientists talking about sunsets and sunrises four hundred years after
Copernicus, falls prey to the pathetic fallacy and vitalism when he formulates his discoveries by saying, ‘I don’t think
nature uses pi. I think she has other mathematical ways of coordinating her undertakings.’ Moreover, in the search for
universalisation, there is most often its perversion into finding immutable, eternal, absolute principles. This aestheticism
and vitalism in social and political organisation as well has meant authoritarianism, and, when reality impinges itself upon
them, as a solution in crises of sheer experience and irrationality, a futile smoothing out of antagonisms between workers
and employers, the snuffing out of Jews and other heathens.
Absolutism, in practice, finds the most crassly relativist and unprincipled solutions. On the other hand, the vigorous
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materialist–realist schools that have worked from the Renaissance onwards have also shown signs of decay and dogma.
In a sense, artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Dürer anticipated both the philosophers and scientists in
evolving the fixed perspective of nature and mechanical determinism. As did the plays of Shakespeare: the new morality
freed from fate, and constantly striking out in success and frustration from a man’s struggle with determined laws.
But, when empiricism was so firmly established, along with the laws of nature, not the hypotheses of Copernicus but
Newton’s triumphal laws of motion, a mechanistic determinism and its opposite, romanticism, have held a stranglehold
on art and communication. Rarely is the action–reaction pattern of Ibsen questioned even in contemporary commercial
cinema, nor for that matter is the crisis of absence of purpose in Nature resolved in both the populist and esoteric
idioms. As against this, you have the romantic idealists who keep stressing that we dissolve ourselves into Nature in art,
and the general will into politics and sociology, and an organic identification (subsuming) of the self into the other, even
in the sciences of ethnology and anthropology. The only viable system, naturally, for them, is at the beginning. These
methods of working on art and communication have, in the end, been as effective as the metaphysical in alienating men
from themselves. Even the Marxists in India and elsewhere, following the dictates of socialist realism and the divorce of
form and content in pre-socialist articulation, tend to mistake the thematic, the concrete incidents, for content. Just as
in science, belief, even if correct in the final analysis, is not true unless we know the process of establishing it, so also in
art: in art it is the process by which nature or society is transformed into the new object which constitutes content. That
is the only way one can explain the perennial thriving of some art. If we go by what is purely described – the story, the
figuration in the visual, the motif or pakad in a raga, much of ancient or even modern art would become redundant. Or,
on the other hand, if we assert the subjectivist viewpoint, a Tantric mandala by a contemporary artist may carry the same
power. Patently, this is untrue. It is that very tension, the process of interpretation and practice as we meet sensuous and
social reality, however rarefied through tradition, and act upon it, that constitutes art or science. And, each time, it is the
very limits of validity which give it its strength, its truth, its beauty – not an omnipresence of matter or the omnipotence
of the creator (scientist–artist–god).
The cineaste, like other artists and his audience, is subject to the pressures of his society and its superstructural
manifestations. More often than not, he is made to alternate between the purely descriptive–mechanical–motivational
patterns and the vitalism of the formal–metaphysical or ‘organicist’ attitudes. Whereas, like the biologist or the other
life-scientists, he should be able to move away from Goethe’s formal archetypes – I understand that Goethe originated
the concept of morphology – and link form with function. Not in the narrow and arbitrary sense of motivation, which
marketing men and politicians wish to induce. On the contrary, to increase his ability to overcome social and environmental
bondage. The cineaste in particular is concerned with growth and genesis – for that is urgently demanded by his medium.
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Moreover, he has to establish a communication which is direct without being instant, temporary; which goes beyond the
reproductive in the lyrical sense or merely expressive in the dramatic sense, into the epic embracing all life, integrating
yet differentiating at every level of organisation. Only that relationship which can make the audience more creative than
the artist himself – in his relationship to work and leisure – can be of any value. No communication can be measured by
the numbers it successfully and immediately addresses itself to – a mass, treated like a herd. Mass communication can at
best affect only temporarily the outward behaviour of men. The cinema, like any other art, addresses itself to individuals
and groups across continents. It has the advantage of bringing them into a closer interaction because of the relative
faculty of its performance. But, like every other necessary activity in science and art, and certainly along with it, it has
to be able to change the quality of life, not robotise behaviour or attitudes. Therefore his search for new forms, or the
new understanding of the old which ‘masses’ as ‘masses’ might reject but as individuals adopt, as a mode of existence.
Therefore, also, this dialogue.
And since you are, happily enough, life scientists, I expect that you will be as much in tune with efforts at synthesis
as other scientists are with analysis alone.
THE MEDIA POLICE
1978
Paper presented at the International Film Festival of India, January 1978. First published in
‘Dossier on Kumar Shahani’, Framework, Nos. 30–31, London, 1986.
Addressing media censorship, in this presentation made shortly after the lifting of the
Emergency and the promises made by the newly formed Janata Party coalition government
to restore press freedom, Shahani alerts his audience that such freedom cannot be so easily
won. It includes human choices since it involves more than what the state alone prevents –
especially so when such a freedom has to be applied to the cinema.

The most important question facing us today is, surely, the promise of freedom. The autonomisation of all the government
corporations, the reconstitution of the Censor Board and its colonial regulations, should not be mere formal exercises.
But no government, however democratic its manner of coming into power, will cede to its people rights that it has not
learnt to value itself. The promise of freedom is one that we pride ourselves upon, of having given it to ourselves. Or is
it likely that we will forget the torture practised on our friends, our own fearful, muted voices, as easily as the previous
generation forgot the homespun to develop teeth of gold? There are signs that we are on our way to a meek new
world of make-believe. The press has settled back into the comfort of its armchair, furnished by the monopoly houses,
discussing the diet and manners of the new men in power and reserving its investigations for the horrors of the past.
Political prisoners are being asked to abjure violence without any corresponding pledge that the police or para-military
forces would not intervene in strikes or provoke demonstrators and students to violence. The universities are still open
to uniformed men and, worse, to administrators who relay authority. The broadcasting media continue to act as vendors
of cultural opiates. The Films Division is still paralysed by its 20-point paralyses. The feature films divert all social and
political compassion into erotica and criminal heroics. Far more than mere legislative action would be necessary to give
content to the freedom acquired through institutional change.

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In the first place, all forms of censorship have to be aimed at the removal of these very constraints. The position
taken to formulate the guidelines should therefore not be one of abstract moral principles, nor of such primitive
quantification as the amount of blows given per fight sequence or the extent of exposure of the human anatomy. The
main guidelines can make sense only if sufficient discretion is given to the people who constitute the Board in deciding
whether a particular sequence encourages the people to think freely, or leads them to a passive acceptance of social,
political, religious and economic institutions that enslave them. It may, indeed, sound utopian to suggest a policy which
would be difficult to implement, given the extraordinary influence of commercial cinema on those very gentlemen
who are likely to constitute the Board. However, any other formulation would defeat the purpose of any institution
meant to defend the people against the violation of their freedom and their culture. So far, the Censor Board and its
sister institution, the Film Advisory Board (which certifies short films for compulsory exhibition), have played a role in
complete opposition to their original purpose. The Film Advisory Board was meant to protect the viewers from wrong
and misleading information. Instead, it killed the documentary in India by allowing only the tendentious to pass through
its clutches. What is more, it took upon itself an aesthetic burden. In a recent film, they are said to have remarked that
the close-ups showing the corrosive effects of a disease should be eliminated. And the poor filmmaker was meant to
motivate his audience against precisely the causes that produced such disfigurement! They are said to force a change
of pace and rhythm of almost every film that goes to seek their approval. Yet they did not demur when a portion of a
newsreel suddenly burst into colour to cover the rising political star who has now burnt himself out.
The Censors have, over the years, covered themselves with glory from their imperial origins, the British having
first imposed this draconian measure. Thus, the police and the administration remain the most dedicated servants of
our society even in the most ‘realistic’ of our films. National ‘leaders’ are idealised beyond human recognition. Violence
against the evil in one’s own class is balletised through fight sequences, with the kind eye of the Censors allowing
slum-children to fancy themselves as brave and handsome as Amitabh, growing more heroic from one lumpen scrap to
another. But, if you happen to suggest that there exists violence between classes or castes, you would be accused of
conspiracy against the state and society. Here, even the word has turned too violent. You may refer to the upper castes
by their generic names – Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Banias. But even the most orthodox fanatic may not utter the word
Shudra – in the Censors’ version of India.
All authority, religious, political, economic and, above every other, that of kinship, is revealed to have a heart of
gold after it has rid you and itself of the evil force of circumstance. Social destiny, it would seem, has its own logic. If
you have any fight in you, take it out on the evil within yourself or your class. Never direct it at the institutions that
perpetuate exploitation, the violence generated by them. Individuals may be transformed, but let the family, property
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and the state alone. Is it, perhaps, a way of admitting that nothing has changed since we declared ourselves free?
The new Minister of Information and Broadcasting has promised to make the necessary changes in the governmental
organisations. So far, as far as the press is concerned, he has scrupulously kept his word. But the press itself, and the
reading public, remains hesitant, unable to make much of its status. The fear is that the controls of the market will
now form the controls of a state subservient to the dictates of international agencies. Recently, a journalist candidly
admitted that during the Emergency, only those newspapers whose proprietors admitted it, could stand up and speak
freely. Few journals have men like Romesh Thapar of the Seminar at their head. Or a Trust like the one that controls the
Economic and Political Weekly, which would allow policies to be boldly decided by its editors. It is clear that the mode
of ownership and control in journalism must change. This can happen only at the initiative of the intelligentsia and the
journalists themselves. But the question itself is not being raised.
If the leading channels are being controlled by the monopolies, the most effective of all the arts, the cinema, is
in the hands of a bewildering class of ‘operators’. The cinema has become, in our country, an extension of the flesh
trade. The cabaret is only one aspect of this perversion. Just as it degrades women and makes genuine sexual contact
impossible, the proliferation of mother-goddesses after Santoshi Maa alienates people from their own creativity, to wait
upon superstition and miracle. It is not surprising that a population forced into a destitute existence from childhood
should accept such spiritual deprivation. On the other hand, our elite still sticks to several curious versions of Brahminic
non-duality, denying all contradiction through the Perennial and the Static, proclaiming their psychological ‘need’ as the
original Indian metaphysics. Their insecurity makes them take the postures of omnipotence and omnipresence. Born out
of the incapacity to change reality, the culture that they produce reduces truth and beauty to a matter of proportion,
of profit and loss or of technological servitude. From the Hindu revival, we have inherited a moral code which justifies
its own violation at every opportune instant. The basis of all authoritarian societies has been the denial of conflict, of
problems. Here, our Censors, our filmmakers and our textbooks are all in accord: deny the existence of strife and replace
it by the idyllic or empty tautologies of formalist arrangements, claiming philosophical ancestries.
We can make a tradition come alive only by negating it. Not by axial opposites nor by raising standards of different
colours. But by example. By living openly, freely and in simple, everyday confrontation with our hallowed institutions of the
family, the class, the state. After all, we meet their manifestations everywhere – at home, in the street, and in the lecture room
and factory. One can enjoy the fact of not reading a book or seeing a film which makes one into a spiritual, political or sexual
voyeur. From this refusal, we can move into the direct celebration of our faculties. Voyeurs replace the act by a fragmented
image. We could replace the image by the act. At that stage, we will need no censors. There will be neither spectators nor a
spectacle. The precipice between pornography and art could become a runway to a flight of lively imagination.
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 THE RELEVANCE OF
MONTAGE TODAY
1978

Paper presented at a seminar in Calcutta; previously unpublished.

The definition of montage as providing the cinema’s overdetermining grammar has been a vexed
issue for Shahani, which he has addressed both in his films and in his writing. Derived from the
Soviet cinema, montage has been received in India through a tradition of left cinema, primarily
from Bengal. With Ghatak, Shahani admires Eisenstein, but he has also sought to define an
anti- or post-Eisensteinian means of going beyond the contrapuntal mode of editing – using
instead the forms of ritual as a basis for defining the grammar of mise-en-scène, in turn taken
from narrative sequence. In this take on montage theory, he contends that the problem occurs
when we elevate any method into a rule. If breaking a rule leads to ‘mutilation in nature’, on the
other hand, keeping to the law reduces us to seeking mere survival. The problem with imposing
a law on how to apprehend reality is similar to what the law of private property did to us. It
irrevocably increased our social freedoms, but, at the same time, by imposing the same models
of growth on our mental, emotional and spiritual lives, it also limited and warped our capacity
for objectification. See also Shahani’s later essay, ‘Figures of Film’ (pp. 284–89).

The circular trolley. Taking on the Eisensteinian construct, Shahani says that it is ‘not a
matter of putting together in physical neighbourhood two elements which have nothing
but material existence’. For an ‘art which uses duration, albeit for space, before you can
make meaning of its movement you have to hold it together’, and you can do so primarily
through a ‘persistence of emotional resonance, as indeed of sensuous and spiritual
resonance’ proceeding ‘through an internal hunger’. figs 22, 23 Kasba (1990): in an epiphanic 22, 23
representation of Tejo, the trolley moves in semi-circle through the wall from indoors to
outdoors. fig. 24 Tarang (1984): the trolley encircles Rahul (Amol Palekar) and Janaki (Smita
134 Patil) as he evicts her from his house, forcing her back on the street.
 Kumar Shahani

Montage opposed itself to the cumulative, quantitative processes of making and comprehending art. It proposed that
any two elements, when placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that
juxtaposition. When we speak of juxtaposition, we really need to include opposition and superposition. Thus, we must
avoid the rather too literal interpretations of montage that both its protagonists and detractors have tended to give. In
an art which dynamises space, the position of an element at any particular point in time is of course the most important
determining force of its meaning, as it is of its form. One should also see very clearly that it is not a matter of putting
together in physical neighbourhood two elements which have nothing but material existence. For convenience, one
may point out examples to illustrate montage through such an immediate physical disposition. A grave. A woman in
mourning. The two put together make a widow. In fact all manner of positioning is possible, so long as it is seen together.
And for an art which uses duration, albeit for space, before you can make meaning of its movement, you have to hold
it together. The opposition of one element and another may thus be as far removed as that of the first editing unit and
the last. The persistence of emotional resonance, as indeed of sensuous and spiritual resonance, may proceed through an
internal hunger that is satisfied only at such points as are needed by the director. Thus creating superpositions through
simultaneous contrasts (e.g. in colour), suppression of harmonious notes in music, imbalance of form and emotional
energy, displacements that produce metonymies and condensations which give rise to unstated presences, metaphors
filling up that absent and most desired object.
24 The montage theorists had found in the literality of Griffith’s images and their failure, the key to a great opening out
of cinematic art. The hand that rocked the cradle could not rule the world. But the resonances of the hand, the cradle, the
rulers and the world, even in their involuntary being, made for action, the verb. I think that the most valid criticism that can
be made of the montage is the same, curiously, as the montage theorists have made of their predecessors. Montage fails in
the literality of its usage and its interpretation when the verb, the action itself which creates the image, is made void of its
ambivalence. The trick has often been to claim, as a first step, that ambivalence has no form, no direction. And, therefore,
that it simply exists. The second step, then, is either that we must give it shape, construct it (i.e. employ montage), or that
we must retain it and savour it, we should keep it as it is, swim in its formlessness. What we do, of course, inevitably, is to
find and reshape form, not only in the act of being in it, acting with or against it, but also in the very act of perceiving it.
If Eisenstein uplifted the conscious act of intervention to a unity of art with nature, thereby subsuming nature under
art, his detractors have subsumed art in nature, denying paradoxically the momentum to conscious action in nature itself
or, worse still, equating natural consciousness to original sin.
It is true that the instinct to knowledge is born of the desire for appropriation and abandonment. But the act of
appropriation can also kill the very instinct that makes appropriation possible, leaving one with an empty and irritable

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repetition of desire, its object in fragments. The transparent image, placed in a logical sequence of events or, rather,
created in the mind by a consequential sequence of action and reaction, makes it void of substance. It becomes an inert
fragment, offered up in lieu of the whole. It thus renders both desire and its fulfilment – at its highest level – as an
experience of futility. At its more immediate levels, the fragmented surrogate, not the imaginatively created overtone,
satiates an impulse which could have a sensual–social–spiritual realisation if it were allowed to be recognised as self-
generated. In other words: if the impulse to knowledge were allowed to overcome appropriation and abandon itself in
its object, and thus rediscover itself.
In the history of man, the irrational has often stood in the way of appropriation, the rational in the way of
abandonment. On the other hand, breaking of the law has led to mutilation in nature, keeping of the law to mere survival.
For the release from this interlocking of extremities, man invented ritual, at once to rejoice in the act of knowledge, of
being the other.
The developments from the institution of private property have almost irrevocably increased our social freedoms.
But almost simultaneously, by imposing the same models of growth on our mental, emotional and spiritual lives, limited
and warped our objectification. It is true that so long as we have a fear of the manifest, we cannot begin to get access to
the unmanifest. But having overcome the fear, we take the manifest to be what we name, touch, taste, see, hear and smell
passively, what we buy, what we use to worship, in other times. Instead, having overcome the fear, having made ours
what was there, the art that can replace ritual in our times would be such as to move far away from the mise-en-scène
of expiation to a self-discovery as absolute and as non-ideal as the scientist’s delighted belief in the objective world, but
realised individually, meeting its entropy through new energy, freeing the unconscious from its – alas – far too socialised
parabolas to overdeterminations that are advances to mutations, not mere submissions to survival that make ultimate
extinction an inevitable law.
I think that we construct as compulsively as we destroy. If, in the process, we do not discover something that
takes us by surprise, it is hardly worth presenting it back to nature or society. Usually the surprise is painful, the contact
electrifying, the limits of reason stretched and expanded to a tear, if one wants to approach a reality that one lives
through with every gesture, word, movement, hiding and revealing it through composition.
When one speaks of montage today, one is speaking of these principles of composition that exist even in a
photographed still-life as they do in editing units. It is the very breakdown of these principles of composition that one
aspires to, after strict adherence to them, for a work rather than an object of art to emerge.
138
INTERNATIONAL TRENDS
AND THE AUTHENTICITY OF ART
1978
Paper presented at a conference of the IIIrd Triennale, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi; previously
unpublished.
In this essay, presented at a conference organized by the Lalit Kala Akademi, India’s national
arts academy, Shahani was addressing artists many of whom would have been committed to
romantic ideals of authenticity. Taking on the concept of authenticity as arising from ‘national
genius’, the essay also defines Shahani’s extreme distance from all forms of national belonging
and awareness – an unusual position for a filmmaker so committed to working with traditional
indigenous forms. He would raise the question of the ‘national’ in several of his films, most
notably Tarang and Char Adhyay.
Nationalism is a concept which destroys its validity at the point of its realisation. Its cultural function is always in
opposition – to an intruding and dominating force which seeks to control the articulation and the tensions of changing
life patterns. In India, as in the other countries which had to suffer colonial domination, it meant the negation of the
plundering masters, even as it assimilated the technology, some innovations in the form of literature and the other
arts, and, marginally, the scientific revolution which had enabled the control over nature to extend to control over
man. In Europe the scientific revolutions were effected by the needs of impatient merchants – since the Renaissance
– to plunder the wealth of the world, without the constraints of hierarchical order supported by religious sanction.
It was precisely those countries that realised the concept of the nation-state first who dominated and colonised, in
distant lands, other potential nation-states. In Europe, the later nation-states had to exercise a form of colonialism
at home, known after its founders as fascism. In Asia as well, when the nation-states realised themselves in political
independence, those who had mobilised the people in negation of a ruthless economic and cultural power themselves
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seek to dominate the people to whom they had promised bread and freedom. Nationalism then acquires a cultural shell
with no material content. It shapes itself around competitive sport and a revivalist concreteness of tradition, in art as in
the sciences. In other words, the more alienated the concept grows from the reality, the more concrete its appearances
become. First, its historical necessity, out of which it has grown, is replaced by geographical boundaries. Its impulse
of secularisation and, therefore, of generalised human experience is replaced by ideas of Hindu, Islamic and Christian-
specific institutions and traditions. An assertion of other ‘sub-cultures’ within the ‘mainstream’ leads to the domination
of one linguistic group over another, or a disintegration into smaller parts, much to the delight of its ‘observers’ – the
sentimental anthropologists and ethnologists: extensions of colonial cultures. The preservation of ethnic purity in art
and artefacts has also meant the preservation of people in a backward mode of consciousness, and a helpless form of
poverty and degradation.
Surrogates for the decentralisation of power and economy are given in the form of ‘decentralised’ culture. Thus, in
the international sphere, the ‘underdeveloped’ nations are sought to be given dignity by awe at the national decorative
specificity of the products of their culture. In our own country, we hold the Republic Day parade honouring our different
tribes while denying access to them to a control over nature and social organisation. Science, technology, industry, the
political institutions and the legitimised instruments of violence are, of course, centralised. In fact, we have known with
the utmost clarity ever since the Mauryan age that a genuine decentralisation of creative energy can take place only
through a grid where communication and exchange are not regionalised. In Ashoka’s times, the proselytising Buddhist
monks provided the grid. In our own, art could well serve their function if it frees itself from the falsifying motions
generated by domineering groups – of centralisation and decentralisation of nationalism, and forced focal points of
international culture. While decentralised patterns of culture imprison men in superstition and enslave them to their 25
geographically determined natural and social calamities, the focal metropolitan cultures impose irrelevant motions,
often reinforcing the backwardness and snobbish insularity of the sub-urban or rural cultures.
The cinema, working with its illusionistic techniques, has fulfilled these retrograde functions with the utmost
ease. Its capacity to present alienating concepts – through a hidden structure – in the false concreteness of images
is unequalled. Our regional cinemas have revelled in an additive realism of objects and events, structuring them along
the rules of mechanistic psychological drama, in an attempt to reconcile medieval authoritarian social institutions with
imported liberal values in the abstract. Thus, while the action develops in the critical tradition only to bring about a return
to nature or an adjustment to social orthodoxy, the dialogue extols social reform and, often, unashamed revolution

Taking risks with authenticity. fig. 25 In Maya Darpan (1972), the performance of the red-
and-black Chhau dancers is constantly interrupted by a slow tilt-down into black. ‘It had to
be like Ajanta in its sweep. It had to be the simplest of all solutions: a continuous crane shot
that put together allusive narratives in the most ancient presentation of colours – red, black
and white.’ fig. 26 In Khayal Gatha (1988), legendary Kathak dancer Birju Maharaj, playing
140 the guru, finds his feet tied by the female oracle (Alaknanda Samarth).
 Kumar Shahani

(elsewhere), or, such protest values as monogamous love and free thinking and individual action are accepted only if
they stay within the context of a joint family and reverence for the aestheticism of the past. Ever since the sculptures
of Bharhut, our elites seem to have worked towards a realism of detail rather than form. Structural concepts which had
remained hieratic until the advent of the secularisation have given way to representation of detail, serving as a new
hieroglyphic. Even the dialectical formulations of the Tantric sects gave way to a proliferation of matter in the period of
regionalisation and, later, of caricatured detail in the descriptive arts. After all, a realism that links itself with non-duality
is bound to end up in accumulation of objects and events, not in qualitative truth, which seems to them to lie above
and beyond the this-worldliness of early Buddhist art and the recent secular arts. The more crass, centrally based film
of Bombay and Madras reaching out to different linguistic ‘nationalities’ in the north and the south has unashamedly
distorted epic structures from popular forms of theatre to juxtapose science and superstition, progressive rhetoric with
the most degenerate prostitution of the human body, attacking the senses with a nightmare of colours and sounds. Its
only hope lies in its profanity. The metropolitan centres of the cinema, especially London and New York, have become
aware of the enormous influence of this cinema only recently – as a result of the cultural hunger of our large emigrant
population. Both these cinemas, and the Third, on the margin of our ‘political’ genres – which makes capital out of
poverty – satisfy the images of Oriental Man that the West has propagated to the world. Backward and beautiful, when
integrated, prurient and pathetic in its modernity!
That we have come to such a pass is surely the result of a contact being limited in its channelisation through
the market or through state elites, which have systematically restricted authenticity to their idea of the authentic. An
innocent musician who came here from Germany spoke with awe of the ‘mythic’ consciousness of the East, as distinct
26 from the ‘rationalist’ consciousness of the West and the ‘magical’ consciousness of Africa. There are layers and layers
of racialism which express themselves in such pseudo-scientific classifications. I understand that at its origin these
distinctions of civilisations were made by the great social scientist of the West, Weber. I quote from Freud:
I am reminded of the Chinese response to the British attempts at opening up the mainland to
its opium traders. The Chinese had scornfully consented to speak with the ‘barbarian’ invaders
after realising their military strength. Every civilisation imagines itself at the peak of human
development – or deliberately civilises itself through generalised rationalist concepts through
an imagined classical utopia.
Western and Northern Europe did this by a re-identification with Greece, with which it had had rather superficial contact.
India is seeking its glory in the resurgence of Hinduism in the Gupta period – which had little else to recommend itself
apart from a consolidation of the different trends in art and philosophy into a unified tradition. Curiously, the notions of

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authenticity in art had arisen out of the romantic desire to shed the burden of an effete civilisation in Europe; to realise
the nobility of the savage unhampered by the chains of society and convention.
Unlike nationalism, authenticity can be a valid preoccupation of the artist. Linked to nationalism or confused with
its several manifestations, ‘authenticity’ meets with the same fate. It becomes its opposite. Instead of getting to that
brute matter which reveals its internal structure, interpreted by universal laws of perception, action and formation,
which can then respect the particular for what it is, it degenerates into decorativeness. The embroidered particular is
then presented as the ‘essential genius’ of a race, a nation, and eventually, as the highest humanity. The Egyptian practice
of geometry led to a universalisation of art which could then be formalised by the Greeks and introduced into the
practice of science. The Indian exploration of number could be synthesised by the Arabs into algebraic antecedents of
coordinate geometry.
The ‘authentic’ springs from the interaction of systems with practice, not from the national–international
dichotomy. The filmmaker who came close to achieving this universalisation, which could also meet with every
particular, was Roberto Rossellini, and he had made significant films on more than one continent. He achieved a
didacticism from the particular. Starting from spiritualist foundations, he respected the particular in life, forever
searching for its internal logic. While theoreticians went on to a lyrical–evocative naturalism of sound and image,
and a romantic blurring of the subject–object relationship, he evolved his art to the sharpest precision in distinct,
unidealised forms. This too in the simplest possible fashion, using such material events as the imprisoning of the
aristocracy by Louis XIV. I believe his achievement will become a fundamental contribution to the process of acquiring
human knowledge, not merely art. To signify from an unarticulated continuity is certainly a great event in the history
of knowledge.
For, the problem with generalisation in every system has been the rejection of the living for an oversimplified,
comprehensible, unified idea, which seems to precede its manifestation. In contrast, the problem with a structure
of particulars has been to give near-magical power to its terms by an aesthetically perfect dialectic of practical
opposition: such as the myth of the Garuda–Aruna (high) and the Nagas (low); the dual and the multiple; the nectar
and the poison; austerity and greed. While each of these oppositions could have been of practical help – in the
hunt, for example, or in social organisation when knitted together, the concept acquires a power independent of its
function and its totality. Just as a child begins by identifying the mother through the breast and later mistakes the
whole personality for its part. Eventually the breast becomes motherhood and the mother, breasthood. The particular
is not only denied its existence but so also are all the subsequent individuals and events, such as women, the seasons,
as each is understood in a disjointed sequence of voyeurism and static, alienated concepts. Organisations funded by
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Kumar Shahani
the state and the market reinforce this method by their attempts at control, which need the immediacy of concrete
signals for an unquestioning response.
In fact, the challenge of authenticity is the problem of individuation. The collective realisations of culture have
produced systems to enable us to generalise – languages, mathematical systems, musical and visual traditions – and the
inevitability of organisation in the fast-growing network ensures their progressive refinement. It seems to me that what
Trotsky said of the Asiatic societies, constantly refining accepted systems of knowledge in the absence of a qualitative
change, can apply today to the whole world. What has come to be known as Western culture, because we have agreed
to the appropriation of wealth and knowledge by a restricted geographical area, seems to be reproducing itself in
the Communist world as in the Third World itself. We can be certain, however, that while these language systems
refine themselves into collectively understood syntactical patterns, qualitative progress can only take place through a
corresponding individuation: a possibility that Christopher Caudwell had hinted at in Illusion and Reality. Such a possibility
can only arise if we abandon the notions of nationalities and the authenticity of brute matter, represented as such. The
subject, in a dynamic historical role, has to be restored. The object, changing in its relations with other matter, gradually
or with organic suddenness through voluntaristic transformations, has to be recognised in its flux. We will then not need
to speak of Western, Indian, African or Latin American systems, nor of stylistic mannerisms of artist-geniuses, but of
developed systems individuated in a work or a performance. For instance, ‘Hindustani’ music, which has gained from its
exchange with Persia, may come to be known as the most completely explored system of continuous melody – as the
‘Western’ for its harmony and polyphony, the ‘African’ for its rhythmic richness. It will save us the unnecessary pain of
sacrificing rich traditions, and will help individuation in the breaking away from every artifice that encloses language and
prevents people from a total confrontation with their historically particular environment. As the life-sciences themselves
approach the problems of the discontinuous, qualitative growth from simple cell organisations, I believe that we may yet
achieve the knowledge that artists have always dreamt of, in every civilisation: to overthrow the totalitarian authority of
the general and the magical irrationality of the particular.
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 WORD AND IMAGE
1980

Paper presented at a seminar in Pune, organized by the United States Educational Foundation in
India (USEFI); previously unpublished.
In this brief presentation, Shahani emphasizes the human rights aspect of literacy that also
haunts, in non-western contexts, what is otherwise rather comfortably seen as a primarily
aesthetic linkage of visual and aural/written language. If the Renaissance and Cubism
accomplished qualitative leaps in making the subject more mobile, capable of different
interpretations, it must follow that ‘two of every hundred Indians who have seats allocated
to them in cinema houses, have [also] jumped from the “pre-scientific” rigid perspectives of
medieval art into the post-Cubist mobility of the camera’. If this is indeed so – and it is not self-
27
evident that it is so – then, such transposition, superposition and juxtaposition of the written
and spoken word are ‘bound to create tensions, the magnitude of which we can barely imagine,
leave alone evaluate’: another problem for the cinema to uniquely consider.

It will not surprise anyone if we, as participants in a seminar, tend to emphasise verbal communication. To give it an
importance beyond our intention, because the word happens to be our vehicle.
I do not wish to undervalue the word, nor do I believe the word has been so completely devalued that there is no
possibility of exchange with this mode of communication. On the contrary, it has extended its function: from the purely
revelatory, affirming a god-given order of things, to that of informing, questioning, rejecting and transforming that which
was considered given by ‘god’, ‘nature’ or ‘law’. Perhaps, in the process, it has lost that power of evocativeness which

The dependence of an image on its verbalization has been a matter of some concern. If at
all there is a verbal dependence of the image, the word is one ‘contained in and signified
by the act’; moreover an act ‘in which an exchange takes place’. fig. 27 Tarang (1984): the
verbalization of Janaki’s history told through a semi-circular trolley over changing light, as we
see the evening in the window become night. fig. 28 In Char Adhyay (1997), Ela wanders
146 through a uniformed police band of bagpipers holding a garland.
 Kumar Shahani

allowed the poet the pretensions of being both a priest and a prophet. But it is indeed only when Oracles and Kings are
made to abdicate their divine rights that men begin to assert their right to communicate.
Thus, it is not the word that is at the beginning, but that which is contained in and signified by the act – any act
in which an exchange takes place. Indeed, the act may include the word, and the right to communicate only begins to
shed its semi-divine abstraction when not only verbal but also other formalised communication systems bring to light
the growth of invisible relations and arangements that lie within any act. One chooses to emphasise this view, if only to
draw attention to the reality which lies behind the hard and cold, often statistical, facts which, for good reason, will be
enumerated during these discussions.
Thus, there is the fact of illiteracy linked to the problem of poverty and underdevelopment. The social scientist who
analyses this content of communication will certainly provide both the communicator/receiver and the administrator
with the basis upon which we build our network. He may also be called upon to evaluate the kind of communication that
is taking place. It is in this area that conflicts begin to emerge which neither the communicator–receiver nor the social
scientist, nor indeed the administrator, had visualised or intended.
Take, for instance, the problem of illiteracy. It is not only important because of the social distinctions and historical
backwardness that it perpetuates, but because of the distortions of meaning that begin to emerge when those who
communicate are ‘literate’ and those who receive are not. Further, for the communicator himself and, by implication,
for the social scientist and administrator, there is a new tension of meaning and significance created by the choice
of transposition, superposition and juxtaposition of the written word and the spoken word. Most commentaries and
several broadcasts are a transposition of the written into the spoken word. Most modern literature undergoes the
28 reverse process. On film and television, there occurs both superposition and juxtaposition. For those who consider these
questions as purely formal obsessions, I would like to extend this area from verbal to visual signifiers.
It is generally accepted that the painters of the Renaissance brought about a philosophical revolution, changing the
view of nature to that of a fixed human subjectivity, observing nature with fixed and unchangeable laws. From there, we
have proceeded to the view that Cubism accomplished another qualitative change, not only in making the subject more
mobile but the object of observation itself capable of different interpretations, depending on how we, as human agents,
intervene in a given situation. By that token, those two of every hundred Indians who have seats allocated to them in
cinema houses have jumped from the ‘pre-scientific’ rigid perspectives of medieval art into the post-Cubist mobility of
the camera, accompanied – as pointed out earlier – by the transposition, superposition and juxtaposition of the written
and spoken word. This is bound to create tensions, the magnitude of which we can barely imagine, leave alone evaluate.
The twin questions that Dr [V.K. Narayana] Menon has so aptly posed in his keynote paper, of the freedom to express

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and freedom of access to the means of expression, thus acquire a more frightening complexity, viewed in the immediate
social and technological context, than history would have us believe.
For, at no other time in history could man have seen himself both as a hunter, trying to imitate and thereby possess
what he could not have, and as the creator of something that could imitate him (such as the computer – perhaps
cinema and television as well, where Nature is said to imitate art) and thereby possess him in all his privacy. So, while
governments, nations and elite groups wish to control all resources of communication including the electromagnetic
spectrum, individual communicators – whether they are those who receive or those who transmit – seek out ways,
whether as individuals or as groups (who do not accept their status as mass aggregates in the form of nationalities, races
or other imposed ideological entities), that will not lead them to an image of themselves which takes all their life. But to
turn away from technology is to turn away from language and communication itself, however nostalgic we may be about
direct human or animal communication. We have to accept that the love-call has to employ frequencies. Otherwise
someone else will produce the love-call for us, and perhaps end up making love by proxy as well.
For some time now, our colleagues in the West have been trying to convince themselves and us that the creation
of significant codes is impossible through the new media, and therefore, by implication, any attempt at interpretation
of the flux of natural and social reality would be a clumsy impertinence. And as for us, the Asiatics, who have not had as
recent and long a history of realism, to attempt a continuity of tradition between our stylised forms and the immediacy
and transparency of the recorded media would either imply the giving up of our identity or lead to the abject absurdities
of our mass media – controlled as they are not only by a tradition opposed to their origins, but by the crassest of
commercial and political interests who in their turn wish to standardise everything.
But I think that communicators all over the world refuse to babble like beautiful babies. They would rather take
recourse to silence. Or twist the now popular slogan of Abe Lincoln to say that as they will not be masters, they will not
be slaves.
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POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY:
THE FOUNDATION OF
BAZAAR REALISM
1982
First published in Aruna Vasudev and Philippe Lenglet, eds, Indian Cinema Superbazaar, New
Delhi: Vikas, 1983.
With his ‘Myths for Sale’ (pp. 101–09 ) and ‘The Necessity of a Code’ (pp. 110–15), written nearly
a decade earlier, this is among Shahani’s most ‘political’ essays. It is also the closest he has
come to a manifesto-statement. Written originally for an edited anthology, the essay assumed
a life of its own as the term ‘bazaar realism’ caught on to describe a kind of commodified
realism: a transactional narrative structure derived from the same vicious exchanges as oversee
commercial transactions around slum-land in Bombay, the very city whose cinema also gave
birth to this particular brand of realism.
In the city where it is increasingly difficult to find a blue patch of sky, where a square foot of enclosed area may cost
perhaps more than what most Indians earn in a year, in that city is manufactured the ideology that governs our people.
The promise of science, art and philosophy is being constantly subjected to the irrational, disorganised pressure of
the sheer despair of urban living. That despair is no longer felt by the lumpen in isolation but is shared by the ruling class
itself, in the fear created by those very conditions that are born from the acts of a frustrated bourgeoisie.
The louder the cries grow for an undefined, amorphous ‘social change’, the more does the cinema, along with the
traditional arts, give in to the seductive form of fetishism that advertising and a market-controlled style of culture invents.
Intellectuals are drawn into the applause of the new ‘popular’ culture, as if it would help them overcome the
alienated state they are forced into by their very vocation.
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Work and leisure are looked upon as two totally separate entities. Rigid control over work demands rigid control
over leisure. Alienated labour can most perfectly be created if there is no continuous link between what one experiences
and what one produces. In a blindly ruthless fashion, the gulf between ethics and aesthetics grows wider and wider.
At a recent meeting between business tycoons, ‘media men’ and government representatives, the stalwarts of Indian
industry, some of whom profess Gandhian values, promised to sponsor developmental programmes if they had the
format of Chhaya Geet, the television programme that projects song-and-dance numbers that degrade women and build
up the criminal heroes of our screen.
I do not wish to spend more time on a phenomenon that will spend itself by its own logic. But its power, derived
from the connivance of people who claim to stand for a range of totally opposed sets of values, from the far right to the
extreme left, points to the foundations of ideology as false consciousness.
Consensus leads to mediocrity. The genius of mediocrity is to lie by situating itself at a middle point, to speak of
‘social change’ while acting against it in every form.
The denial of experience, of history, of tradition, begins when given ideas and fragmented single events come
together to destroy attempts at understanding and acting upon reality.
The new ‘popular’ culture is beginning to find adherents amongst those who had earlier turned up their noses in
disgust.
Guilt-ridden, anglicised intellectuals, unaware of the internal relations that obtain in the making of films, provide
apologies for the cultural manipulation of the masses.
After all it is true that in the slums of our cities, as in the films made there, to protect one’s sister is to rape someone
else’s.
Moreover, it is claimed that if we wish to understand that psyche and the social aspirations of our people, we must
discover an Indian system of knowledge, of science, while the West alone may have the prerogative to universalise. Can
you imagine, if our colonial reaction had its way, we may indeed land up with Hindu physics, Buddhist psychology and
Muslim sociology, and then try to reconcile it all in a new secular and sovereign way.
In the West, there is an idea of a continuous, uninterrupted culture extending from ancient Greece to the Americas.
The contribution of other cultures is then marginalised. We are encouraged to look upon ourselves as a different race. If,
by their own criteria, we were to suggest that Socrates is specifically Grecian, far removed from their civilisation in space
and time, their whole edifice would fall.
It is in this context that, leaving aside the tyranny of the bazaar, one may ask the old questions of practice against
ideology, of virtue with knowledge of dharma. In the days when high civilisations were being founded, no matter where
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they were located geographically, there was a relatively undisturbed continuity between what was considered to be true
and what was necessary as action. The discontinuities came through a hierarchical division of labour, like our own caste
system. Each caste had a separate dharma. It was a relatively simple world in which Aristotle’s city-states had slaves who
could find their self-realisation in the condition of slavery.
But both the shudra and the slave had to have some guarantee of material subsistence. It is the consistent failure to
provide that material subsistence which has changed societies so drastically.
One may ask oneself if any form of conscious cultural intervention is possible when experience has become so
fragmentary, at least on the surface: with horizontal and vertical splits in the consciousness; with individuals defending
their tiny areas of freedom.
It seems to me that the only cultural intervention that is possible is indirect, sporadic, guerrilla in character. But here
is neither the romance of secrecy nor of stylish violence. The guerrilla tactics are those of Gautama Buddha: ask difficult
questions to arrive at the simplest of answers (if any), qualitatively transformed.
Such tactics will not meet with the approval of those filmmakers who parade their clenched fists or the party hacks
that support them. There is a whole new breed of fellows who have learnt to caress with a clenched fist. Or is it so new
after all? History is repeating itself at an accelerated rate, to support the counsels of despair.
After Telangana, reformism in the arts took over almost completely – it was thought necessary to reach the
masses at any cost. We lost a whole generation of sensitive poets, writers, musicians and directors to a crass film
industry devoted to easy profit. The weapons of vulgarity that our left-wing intellectuals wished to use ultimately
wounded them.
After Naxalbari, the same trend has repeated itself. The supposed inspiration is from different quarters. The
yardsticks of ‘mass communication’, invariably promising immediate and displaced fulfilment, are applied to social
practice and social change. Images manufactured at the dictates of smugglers, adventurers and sycophants are made
to replace our sensuous experience, our history. The ideas of ‘mass media’ have emerged from over-organisation, be it
political or economic, in the interests of a few against the targeted many.
We have forgotten that things need to be administered, not people. The growing need for mass media has arisen
because people are not to be allowed to organise themselves. The spurious sensuality of the mass media is meant to
replace lived experience in which pain and pleasure are both intense and beautiful, sustained.
Such a cinema cannot ask questions. Its images are totalitarian, but the raw materials of those images, those vulgar
weapons, are ones of this earth. What we can use is the vigour, the malleability, of the raw material with which these
weapons are forged.
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the shock of desire and other essays

What we can use are these marvellous obscenities that are the foundation of all art and that continue to ornament CINEMA AND POLITICS
our temples, to ward off the evil spirits, to keep away the new vandals of our feelings.
What we can do is to affirm ourselves by refusing to let pain or pleasure, revolutionary success or defeat, come 1986
to us by proxy. Only then can practice be free of ideology. We might yet discover cinema as an art, not condemned to
redeeming lost contact with the world but in positive affirmation of knowledge and freedom.

Written for a seminar on ‘Cinema and Politics’ at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, but not presented;
previously unpublished.
This essay continues Shahani’s ‘bazaar realism’ tone, to address a kind of consumerist ‘political’
cinema. The opening line, paraphrasing Marx’s ‘A commodity appears at first sight an extremely
trivial thing’, extends to his poetics of commodification and eventually subjugation, as such
politics reduces its addressees into fragmented, consuming subjects.

A film appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing – and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer
thing, abounding in material subtleties and ideological niceties. So far as each unit of the film is concerned, and even more
so that of television programmes, there seems to be an apparent and total transference of meaning. A rose is a rose is a
rose by any other name. But alas, it may not smell as sweet!
The artifices of reality in our age enter our solitude as bits of sensate information that replace thought. It seems,
therefore, that reality does not exist as a continuous whole. It only exists as a debris of fragments, left after the power
and imagination of Anonymity has constructed a world of its own, in the likeness of our Impression. But, distinct and
separate from ours.
I think the present splintering of our identities into visible/audible differences is a direct outcome of the hard-core
realism that replaces the Name by what it stands for, simultaneously cutting up the erotic into precision-made objects
of satisfaction. The ideas of eros displaced are served up for consumption in as many packages as it is possible to contain
displaced, fragmented life. To replace that impulse which joins us to the impulse of nature, we are made to believe that
we should receive with total passivity, give only under pressure and through the right channels.
The erotic impulse, that of life-assertion, is gratuitous. Like art, like giving, not being forced nor seduced to give–
receive. I assume that the act of learning–growing is a manifestation of that same impulse of giving–receiving. But if the

154 155
the shock of desire and other essays Kumar Shahani

social forms that surround us are such as to separate the giving and the receiving, as for instance in areas of work and dancer, the architect contained our directionless energy, giving its ambivalence a greater richness. The musician preserves
leisure, again subdivided into functions – what the hand does, the mind cannot – displacing the orifices, it can bring our voice. Until then. Until now.
about such confused attachments to physical objects that they can replace music, thought, art, all of one’s spiritual being. Raise your voice then, raise it now.
A part of one’s spiritual being or a part of one’s spiritual extension is politics. In times of such stress as between Raise my voice? I can’t. My throat is choked with pollution. The air is thick with rumour. People who cannot speak
the early twentieth century and the plum centre of this century, there was a great and global conjunction of politics and to each other kill each other.
spiritual questions. Later, there were pockets of this conjunction. These pockets of conjunction between the spiritual and The spectacle replaces the voice.
the political, like Vietnam, hold mysteries that inspired knowledge to be reflected in social action. But, contradictorily, The spectacle where the discrete is made exotic to oneself: Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Marathi, Gujarati,
it also began to market social action. Hindi, Tamil, Chamar, Bhangi, Saraswat, Chitpavan, you, me, foot, hand, genitals, stomach, mouth, nose, eye and ear,
In New York, since then, you can hire a demonstration over the phone. Indian spiritualism too was marketed, along signed, sealed and delivered.
with our music, as a replacement for drugs. Transcendental meditation, jogging, Krishna’s cosmic presence, an other- Raise the voice. Raise their voice.
worldly Karl Marx, were considered to be safe addictions. It was in those times that a genre of political cinema emerged, The acoustics reflect and startle them by their representation.
to take its position alongside such other genres as the ‘Western’, the ‘musical’, the ‘mythological’, etc. Raise their voices.
Now, all this time, have we not assumed that there was a political aspect to all such spirituality as had to be Startle them by their representation.
expressed socially? At any rate, those who believed that ‘social change’ was possible and that history existed had always Theirs is the general will.
believed that the ‘Westerns’, the ‘musicals’, the ‘mythologicals’, were rich in political content. What meaning could Let the will triumph.
the genre political have, in that case? All that it demanded was that the brute matter from which the film’s images In images.
were made had to have an explicitly political flavour. Also, what it meant was that it would hide the processing of Over there. Make political films.
that matter by confusing the processing (the manufactured genre) with the brute matter. It was soon evident that we Not where you are.
were confronted with thrillers of political thematics, where gangster-like action was the mise-en-scène of films that Not where you can still hear something: the bubble of being.
ought to have questioned the fact of ideology that ritualised political intervention. The body returned to expulsion of Not where you can look for a home, explore:
unconscious activity, instead of conscious practice. Photosynthesis sensitised tissue to the formation of an eye when life which remained connected to other organic
When attention is/was drawn to these self-subterfuges of political films, as in Godard, the moral anguish, tissue in earth floated away in water to catch the light.
contemptuous of the self and the other, insulting you and stunning you to passivity, prepared for you a metaphysics that
old men today are ashamed, alas, to admit to, for the world will not admit of meaning any more; our world, converting
as it does even injustice to medicinal matter, bitter to the taste, given not to the whole body politic but to that alone
which will be amputated out into unemployment.
How then can we restore the voice to our speech, when it is not our speech alone but the voice, its caress, that is
being stolen? Earlier in this century, it was the word that was being stolen, not only of the colonised groups of people
but also of the colonial metropolitan individual himself. Sooner than our own political independence, they lost their
individual voices to mass communication. Until then the poet was our priest and healer. The painter, the sculptor, the

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film as a contemporary art VIOLENCE AND RESPONSIBILITY
1975

Paper presented at a Ritwik Ghatak Retrospective, New Delhi. First published in ‘Dossier on
Kumar Shahani’, Framework, Nos. 30–31, London, 1986.
This essay, perhaps Shahani’s most extensively cited one, on his mentor Ritwik Ghatak,
inaugurates the section of his essays in this book where he speaks about the cinema. Apart from
his direct teachers Ghatak and Bresson, some other names that repeatedly recur are Eisenstein,
Buñuel, Godard, who helped him define his cinematic context, and Jancsó, Tarkovsky, whose
work he investigated as he developed the theory of the epic cinema. Shahani’s essays on Ghatak
were influential, coming at a time when few outside Bengal had written about him and when
there was no immediate framework within which his work could be comprehended. This essay,
on Meghe Dhaka Tara (1962), is a comment on the use of what Geeta Kapur later called ‘mythic
material’, something important to Shahani’s own cinema: the use of myth, its importance in
creating a symbology for the political and, inevitably, the clash of this approach with the
conventions of cinematic realism.

People often ask what we, his students, have inherited from Ritwik Ghatak. The problem here is that they have not
realised what it means to work in a continuous line of tradition. Our elders prefer imitation to development. They
prefer that learning still be restricted to the feudal mode. The hereditary principle may be removed but the young must
copy what they have picked up from the master-craftsman. It is the most certain method of retaining the status quo; of
endorsing work of opportunistic mediocrity. In an atmosphere where our cultural attitudes and artefacts are identified
with the objectification of effete feudal brahminism and European humanism inflicted on us by the colonials, Ritwikda’s
work is a violent assertion of our identity. It is the cry of the dying girl in Meghe Dhaka Tara which echoes through the
hills, our right to live.

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The division of Bengal that was responsible for her tragedy was only the immediate symptom of a broader division.
The impetus, not only to the obvious narrative content of his films but to their very language, was given by the tremendous
splintering of the social system, of its values, while a facade of a hoary culture was still being maintained. The contradictions
of a society that could have modernised itself after attaining formal independence are the prime cause of a deeper division.
The middle class is seen at the unsteady apex of the inverted triangle, brought about by the three-way division central to
the structure of Meghe Dhaka Tara. The feminine principle, borrowed from our earlier lower level of materialist culture, also
suffers the split into three principal women characters – the cruel mother, the sensual daughter, and the preserving and
nurturing heroine. The triangular compositions and multiple allusions to Durga on the rich soundtrack reinforce the pattern.
To those critics who are indifferent to this method of structuring, Ritwikda’s work may appear melodramatic. It
is true that he combined elements of tragedy such as ‘the chorus’ and the rigorously worked-out inevitability of the
scenario to make his statement. However, he freed the form from the classical supernatural and the later romantic
individualistic concepts by replacing Hamlet’s ‘particular fault’ by socio-historical forces. The pessimism of ‘fatalism’ is
countered by the last shot to restore hope. This could only be done in its powerful manner because class generalisation
is present right through the film.
The hope remains an objective reality precisely because the ‘melodramatic techniques’ are inverted from their basically
petty-bourgeois position to that of a strong, vigorous explosion of life assertion. The ‘melodrama’ is clearly identified as a
form by the expressionist use of the wide-angle lens in close-ups at important points of transition, or through the clearly
obvious division of dramatic and visual planes. There is no tendency either to render the physical reality itself as ‘pathetic’,
as our school of petty-bourgeois ‘realism’ does, or to make that reality more palatable through decorative and sentimental
composition. The soundtrack as well is unashamedly commentative. It is not there merely to enhance the illusion of reality
and thereby to present a false catharsis through unthinking identification. In fact, in Ritwikda’s films, no shots are more
eloquent than the circular panoramics, which speak of the indifference of nature to human suffering and conflict.
The characters may invest the landscape with their feelings. The young lover in Subarnarekha finds the landscape
beautiful because the discovery of his desire makes him feel so, and he is too shy to confess it directly. The heroine of
Meghe Dhaka Tara may dream of freedom in the expanse of the hills, but these very images are turned objectively against
the subjective feeling of pathos. The subjectivity and the lyricism of poetry are retained without the most pernicious form
of falsification achieved by directors who manipulate minds through cathartic realism. Wherever, indeed, the landscape
is made to reinforce the feeling, it is done with such violence – the platform scene in Subarnarekha – that it can only
be seen as the intervention of the director, not reality as it is. There are no lamps flickering ‘realistically’ in symbolic
sympathy with a dying girl. Nor are there characters ‘storming’ one’s life with elaborately detailed sound and fury.
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Kumar Shahani
The falsification of such symbolisation is often justified on grounds of ‘communication’. In other words, because
the feelings of the characters or their formalisation by a large section of our audiences are still struggling to find a
genuine method of meeting present-day reality, the ‘communicators’ unhesitatingly exploit this regression. Thereby
they negate the function of the artist, who, living and performing in a technological society and a collective medium,
deliberately avoids bringing this new consciousness to his audience for fear of affecting the sale of his commodity. These
symbolisations not only violate the medium, but are in stark contradiction for one who has experienced the partial
conquest of nature. A man who has travelled by aeroplane – in other words, a man who has taken advantage of modern
meteorological techniques – is being dishonest when he signifies pathos or sentiment through a storm.
On the other hand, let us examine the symbolisation which transforms tradition by maintaining a close link, and
yet changes its meaning and arms us with new consciousness. Thus, for example, Ritwik Ghatak uses what were earlier
merely religious symbols. But he secularises them through juxtaposition – for example, the bahurupia in Subarnarekha
and even the deserted airport are both ‘archetypes’. In a society which is only now trying to break away from feudal
relations, it is inevitable that secularisation be one of the foremost functions of the artist. The European Renaissance
clearly demonstrated this principle. ‘Pathos’ is reduced, passion is replaced by perspective. Nature is objectified. Even the
creatures and characters of Christian religion and mythology are sensualised. In our own country, when mercantile capital
evolved through commodity production for a brief while after the Buddhist revolution, art along the trade routes (e.g. in
the caves) demonstrated its rationality and its serene sensuousness.
Unfortunately, the low level of technology could not sustain the Mauryan centralisation necessary for the
protection of trade routes against warring chieftains. The logic of the self-sufficient villages led to their domination
by narrow, local, unproductive astrologers and samantas to take over power. Thought no longer led to material
change but hairsplitting argument. Reality became overburdened. Form did not materialise into a lively means of
exchange, a language, but was an end in itself. Structure was decomposed into the proliferation of detail. It is therefore
frightening to see how the total realism invented by world capitalism’s last ideologies is being combined with our
medieval tastes for detail or hairsplitting formalism. This should have been a period for construction in every sense
of the word. But even some self-styled committed critics are content with the crass distortions of the commercial
cinema. They have forgotten the fundamental meaning of montage, that construction, not isolated passages, shots or
dialogue, makes for content. They seem to believe that progressive art should be bought like soap. They are therefore
willing to endorse the humanism which dilutes class contradiction in ‘eternal’ moral sentimental relations, to not only
exploit the labour of the working class but to wash away their residual violence and creativity in tears, blood or the
humours of refined sentiment.
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Ritwik Ghatak had proceeded to draw attention to the real problems by the very violence of his audio-visual
structure; the nature of symbolisation, the wide-angled lens, the whiplash on the soundtrack. His ruggedness emanates
from his personality. We have, of course, to find means that are derived directly from our environment and individuated
from our temperament. And, hopefully, to carry forward from where he leaves off. I remember that my introduction to
his work was through Subarnarekha. By then he had broken up the ‘melodramatic’ narrative sufficiently to approach the
epic form. The epic was implicit even in his earlier films, especially Meghe Dhaka Tara and Komal Gandhar. Already the
narrative was interspersed with song, with elements of structure that were allusive, not affective. Predominantly, however,
they had been made in the dramatic mode, with the abstraction of music, poetry and didactic reference freeing them from
being the extended organic metaphor that drama implies. In Subarnarekha, the dramatic element disintegrates, its clichés
are turned against itself; the traumatic prostitution of our culture is exemplified as Sanskrit becomes part of La Dolce Vita
in one of the world’s poorest cities. We are made to face our self-destructive incestuous longings, which are otherwise
so delicately camouflaged by both our sophisticated and vulgar filmmakers. The sophisticate camouflages by presenting
a formally created void through signs that negate each other or, at the other extreme, by recourse to a superabundant
realism. Both deny the active intervention (even its possibility) of the artist and the audience in reality. They lull him into
the acceptance of a reality which is apparently objective but which can never be so, precisely because it is dissociated
from the very creator of that objectivity – social man. The creator in the vulgar film is, quite literally, god or his surrogates,
natural law, human nature – external, immutable, omnipresent, transcending history.
But the collapse of Ritwikda’s hero is also the breaking up of the values created by our world. If he could see the
golden bank by the river, it is because he could once again be responsible, see the significance of his acts. The primary
role of cinema is also to signify, to develop a language which leads to rational action, not to fascist incitement, nor the
emasculation of abstract ‘moral’ or metaphysical individual salvation. In the early 60s, when I first came into serious
contact with the cinema, I had naively asked Ritwikda how he reconciled significant form with photographic realism. He
had merely smiled in acknowledgement of the problem. Its parameters were then not specified, even in the cinema of
the more advanced countries. Today, these problems of language are more clearly defined. We are making a beginning in
cinema. If Ritwik Ghatak’s films are individually incomplete accomplishments, as some critics feel, it is precisely because
as a body of work they are the most complete, the most generative. He has never cared much to show off his technical
accomplishment, and I understand that in his latest film, he is totally indifferent to it. But one can be relatively certain that
his work will always serve as a landmark to the young whom he loves so well and who continue to relate to his work, even
to break away from it – to return and to move forward in uncertain areas in the spirit of the pioneer that Ritwikda has been.
The others faltered at the first steps; having mimicked reality, they mimicked themselves.
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‘I AM BURNING,
EVERYONE IS BURNING . . .
THE UNIVERSE IS BURNING’
1977
First published in Indian Cinema 1977, edited by Rani Burra, New Delhi: Directorate of Film
Festivals, 1978.
This is Shahani’s second major essay on his mentor, Ritwik Ghatak: on his last film, the
autobiographical Jukti Takko aar Gappo (1974). That film had had a controversial reception
politically, and more so for what was viewed as its somewhat self-indulgent autobiographical
idiom. Ghatak died soon after it was made. It was additionally a matter of some irony that
Ghatak’s first film, Nagarik (1951), long believed lost, was screened – after a gap of decades –
more or less along with his last.
After a generation has passed, Ritwik Ghatak’s first film is released – along with his autobiographical last. Yet we should
not be surprised. We have a habit of offering oblations to the dead while we starve the living. I remember him at a
screening of Komal Gandhar at the Film Institute, the burning ash of his bidi falling on his kurta, watching his own film as
if he had never seen it before. It had been taken off from Calcutta’s cinemas a few days after its release. He had tears in his
eyes when a well-known Marathi film director who, along with a couple of Ritwik’s favourite students, was watching the
film, often turned around to express spontaneous appreciation. If Ritwik had a particular fault, it was that of arrogance.
So we were surprised by his childlike, helpless response when we told him that he should show this film to the whole
wide world. We did not know then that he had felt deserted after Komal Gandhar, and his deep sense of waste, so sharply
expressed in Subarnarekha, was being frenetically confirmed by his addiction to the bottle.
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Nilkantha Bagchi: For a bottle I will lie or steal, but for name or fame or position – I will never lie!
Young man: You have practised that pose long enough to have become an adept!
Nilkantha: (Laughing) You have caught me out!
But it was true of Ritwik. It is not a vain boast by a filmmaker, narcissistically looking at himself. His commitment
to truth, in and through the cinema, was total. It is not surprising, therefore, that even in his alcoholic condition, he is
not self-indulgent when he presents himself. He himself is guilty, like his generation: a humbug whose childish demands
never ceased.
With the suffering of Partition (into East and West Bengal), he also took on the guilt of the dismemberment of his
‘mother’. He always wished to be fed: by the bottle, by his wife – by his Bengal. He tried to fight those who had violated
and killed the unity of this mother-surrogate. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, the fertility principle suffers the same three-way
split that Bengal society does: the cruel mother, the sensual daughter, and the preserving and nurturing heroine who dies
in the process. The middle class itself is seen at the unsteady apex of an inverted triangle, a society divided three ways,
which can find no equilibrium.
In Jukti Takko aar Gappo, the contact with the fertility principle is almost lost. The wife has rejected him, justifiably.
The young girl, the future mother, is unabashedly asked: Are you the soul of Bengal, resurrected after the massacre of
Bangladesh? Will she unite those who have already violated her selfish needs or narrow preoccupations? Will her desire
for the young man, who resents her presence, bring forth children who – unlike Ritwik’s generation – will not prostitute
her? Perhaps; but he gives the girl no flesh and blood. And those who have no flesh and blood are dehumanised by that
very condition.
No, Ritwik does not take a pessimist viewpoint. He only recognises the inevitability of violence. And, caught in that
crossfire, it is not he alone who dies unheroic, but also the young heroes whose moral courage he admires. But when,
in his own way, he tries to deepen their humanisation and criticises himself, the answer is that ‘You have practised that
pose long enough to have become an adept’. Perhaps the soul of Bangladesh will now deliver a child of flesh and blood,
with a purity which is not one-dimensional – or will cruelty, violence, the recurrent dreams of youth generation after
generation, merely reproduce themselves? Ritwik seems to rejoice in the contemplation of the mere fact that life will go
on – for if it moves on, it must to something better – though the knowledge of that process frightens him.
Ritwik was world-weary, but could not forgive himself for that. After all, he was the most robust of filmmakers that
India has produced. Unlike most others, he was ruthless in the analysis and condemnation of the social decadence that
he observed. The other cineastes, in search of mass acceptance, have often tended to caricature, either by way of slogan-
raising or an appeal to indulgent humanism. The heroes and heroines of Ritwik’s films, while their energies are sapped by
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a society which can sustain no growth, have inner resources that seem to assert themselves. In Subarnarekha, the young,
slim slip of a girl is given, by way of a curious inversion of symbolisation – the sound of an anklet – a great strength. The
apparently weak hero, the singer of Meghe Dhaka Tara, for whom the economy has no use, derives his strength from his
disciplined pursuit. The cry of the nourishing woman Nita, even as she dies, asserts itself against the grand indifference
of nature.
Ritwik’s films are replete with semi-circular panoramics which show that nature is too great a container for
individual sentiment. It is implied in the contradiction that while characters often express their own feelings – and,
often, even social failure – through the poetry of nature, the pathetic fallacy is an untruthful device. For this reason,
one thing I cannot forgive in Ritwik’s last film is the cliché-ridden sequence of his youthful love: ‘I am in love, there’s
pleasure and there’s pain . . . in my every limb the flute is playing . . .’. Here alone is the glaring flaw within his own
aesthetic. The technical flaws are understandable. He had told me that he was short of funds and vomiting blood when
he made the film. Perhaps he was tired – that’s all. Yet in the scenes of confrontation with his wife and when the young
woman of Bangladesh appears, he has shown his usual dynamism. The shot where he sits against the light falling from
the window, the face emerging from the washed-out area as of a ghost, is dazzlingly expressive. His performance of a
drunken man is, to my mind, unparalleled in world cinema.
In Indian cinema, the only other performance of such great simplicity and directness that I know is that of the
saint-poet Tukaram (in the film of the same name), played by Vishnupant Pagnis. The great saint in his own time was also
surely considered a deviant. Is it a commentary on our society – in the vein of Ritwik himself – that modern saints should
be so driven to alcoholism or such other behaviour that they are emasculated before they can make a lasting impact?
Sant Tukaram has lived through his songs and the legends about him amongst the people of Maharashtra. He has made a
permanent dent in the rigid caste structure. In his own small way, Ritwik must have hoped to help make a global change.
In all of the fifteen years that I knew him, every objective crisis brought to him a sense of euphoria.
The Communist upbringing of his youth had taught him to act with a renewed vigour and hope whenever a crisis
or breakdown occurred. But, like other poets, he had not the ability to organise. He chose instead to sing – or was
that his form of action? At the time I met him, in the early 60s, he had already rejected the mechanistic and somewhat
alienated modes of some of his colleagues. He was extremely disenchanted with those of his colleagues who wanted
to maintain a false unity, and were not, implicitly, pained enough by the splintering of every form of social and cultural
values and movement. His Komal Gandhar, interweaving the emotional break-up and confusion of the heroine with
the splintering of Bengal and the Communist theatre movement, was boycotted by those of his colleagues who had
produced this very situation.
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But in this social destruction, he continued to draw strength from the proto-materialism of the fertility cults. It
is this tradition, secularised, that transforms the films by its complex structure – what may appear to the uninitiated
to be mere melodrama. Moreover, by his extraordinary use of sound and the brutality of his narrative technique, the
melodrama takes on an epic, rather than tragic, dimension. More and more, the episodes are fragmented and emotive
signs, like the whiplash, become commentative signs. The ridiculous elements of the commercial cinema and theatre are
here turned upside down and given sublime brutality. In nearly all of our commercial cinema, the audiences are made
to enjoy the subterranean feelings of incest through an unspoken sexuality. In Ritwik’s films, particularly Subarnarekha,
incest is named as violation, destroying the very base of family entertainment.
It is these factors that make Ritwik’s films a vitally generative force for the young. He does not hide behind a
medieval or dead past, or a decorative Indianness. Nor is he content with the nineteenth-century critical tradition of
the novel, moving from the romantic to the iconoclastic frenzies of a basically anarchist political genre. Very few of
his contemporaries have avoided these pitfalls, whether they work in the cinema or other arts, or in the theoretical or
cultural sphere. The conservatives have glorified the past in decorative and theological terms, and the moderns have
rejected tradition and history to deprive even the contemporary of its meaning. The problems of underdevelopment
have led them to civilise themselves through chauvinism or a totally alien reference system. It is as if they are ashamed
of being themselves today, with their true history.
I hope that the young, who are beginning to return the love that Ritwik had for them, will neither be ashamed nor
haughty about themselves or their society, but will meet the darkness around with Ritwik’s bright agility.
I remember him on the days when he stalked down the Film Institute corridor and we addressed him as the tiger
from Blake’s poem. In Jukti Takko aar Gappo he seemed to remember it too – only, with a change of meaning: ‘I am
burning, everyone is burning . . . the universe is burning.’
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CAPRA’S FILMS
AS SOCIAL COMMENTARIES
1978
Paper presented at a Frank Capra Retrospective, USIS, Bombay, 1978, on the occasion of Capra’s
visit to Bombay; previously unpublished.
In this rare essay engaging with Hollywood, Shahani evidences an interest that he would also
evoke in his major melodrama of the time, Tarang. He admires Capra, and more generally
Hollywood, for their unique ability to build their own myths: in Capra’s case, myths around the
‘faceless little man’ and the ‘nation, or rather the idea of what the nation was’. Capra’s little
hero, by his ‘goodness and his good fortune, was to fight economic deprivation, injustice and
pretension, to reaffirm not only the positive and great achievements of individual freedom in
American society since Lincoln, but also the benevolent family with the patriarch at its centre,
the corrupted men with hearts clean at the beginning, as also the social system so good and
strong at its origin’. Such myth-building is problematic, of course, seeing how the ‘modern,
mass-communicated myth’ can ‘appear more real than life itself’. Yet, for Shahani, there are
important lessons for us Indians, given that our situation is so ‘entrenched in tradition’ that
‘every regional, linguistic and religious group is further sub-divided into historically discrete,
insular cultures’ which are only just beginning to form a mainstream. Shahani’s investment
in what Frederic Jameson later explored as a theory of reification in mass culture (Jameson,
‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’, 1979) is evidenced both in this essay and in the climactic
‘gangster-movie’ quotation in Tarang.
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America of the Depression years could not have found a better ideologue than the maker of Mr Smith Goes to Washington
and Mr Deeds Goes to Town. In more senses than one, these films are some of the most successful examples of fiction
with a direct basis in ideology. In the first place, abstract principles are simplified and transformed into ahistorical, populist
terms. Again, the myths closest to one’s society and one’s milieu, those that sustain us through the harshness of the reality
around us, sometimes to the extent of blinding us to it, are present here – in the work of Frank Capra – as the most palpable
truth. For this, in spite of Capra’s assertion in the belief of ‘one man, one film’, I would give as much credit to his writers,
especially Robert Ruskin (who has written three of the films seen in the present Capra festival and, I understand, almost all
of his important work except Mr Smith).
It is evident from his criticism of the younger directors in his book (The Name Above the Title), as well as in the
interviews given by him, that he identified the content of his films quite plainly with the subject photographed, the
characters, and the action that takes place in front of the camera and the microphone. When we had the opportunity of
meeting him here in India, the last time he came to Delhi, some of us told him that we thought that American cinema was
far away from its days of innovation; that its vitality right from the days of The Great Train Robbery to the early years
of the War had somehow sapped. He reacted in his characteristic manner. He was still the ambassador of America: he
insisted that the Americans had been in the forefront even through the 60s. In defence, he said that violence was never
examined so closely as in The Clockwork Orange. Secretly, though, I feel he was quite happy that we should consider the
pre-War years of American cinema as its zenith. For, in his book, he admits it as the ‘golden era of film’ which he helped
create, and regrets that the ‘giants who could take an audience by the scruff of its neck and make it shriek with laughter,
weep with sorrow or shake with terror . . . are mostly gone’. And he hopes that those who now speak for America will not
do so by degrading the values of love and glorifying its dementia . . . or by apologising for the brute people! Of Stanley
Kubrick, too, he says that he is trying his best to say something. He will – when he learns to say it simply!
His directness and the straightforward, uninhibited use of the great American myths derive their power because of
his own experience, his own desire to be American – and his incredible success in achieving his goal. For a first-generation
immigrant anywhere in the world, the first and most urgent necessity is to ‘establish his identity’. The same is true for
anyone from a minority community. The social attitudes, the relationship to the community, to political institutions and
to the national culture, are determined by this need for a secure identity. In most cases, a dual and contradictory process
follows. On the one hand, rebuffed by the conservative elements of a majority, its linguistic and cultural norms, one may
tend to assert one’s ‘original’ identity – and create a conservatism of one’s own. This is often the case amongst the most
affluent. Indian emigrants who have lived abroad are, for example, often more caste-conscious and speak with an archaic
vocabulary. I believe the American language itself contained, for a long time, several archaisms of English. The other
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possible responses are of dissolution and assimilation, pure and simple (the response that Capra adopted), or a constant
assimilation and opposition (Picasso, Einstein, Chaplin). The fact that Capra, like many other European artists, could be
assimilated speaks highly of the resilience of the system. And, it is evident, throughout his career he remained extremely
grateful – and loyal – to a system that could not only take him in, but could also expand his horizons from the rocky
landscape of Sicily to an unending global involvement.
In his films, Capra, like America itself, does not burden himself with aesthetic traditions. Perhaps the greatest
impact that American culture has had is through the movies and through jazz. Like Capra, America itself did not have a
great burden of indigenous culture. For us as Indians this is important to remember because of a situation which is so
completely opposed, so entrenched in tradition, that every regional, linguistic and religious group is further sub-divided
into historically discrete, insular cultures. Our different strands are only just beginning to form a mainstream. Moreover,
in terms of a political tradition, America had enough to pride herself upon. America was the first nation to pronounce
the rights of man – even if, as Capra discovered, its society remained far behind the dream of its founding fathers. In any
case, Capra quite unequivocally identified himself with the ideals of the American political tradition – at a time when its
culture had not acquired its own identity and its economy was threatened by its gravest crisis.
But before he could so firmly realise himself through the reaffirmation of his society’s values, Frank Capra had to
go through his own little personal crises. Unlike the society that he lived in where the system seemed to be floundering,
his crisis was one of success. It Happened One Night had got him all of the five major Oscars. He had to discover his
responsibility through a painful period of psychosomatic illness and apathy and a semi-religious experience, a possible
hallucination of the little faceless man who told him what he owed to god and the people!
Was that little faceless man Capra’s image of the provincial middle- and lower-class spectator who multiplied
himself into the millions to become both his hero and his audience? Who could reiterate for this so-called faceless man
with greater conviction that America will survive its economic depression, and he his mental and spiritual crises, by firm
faith in the institutions of god, the family and the nation, but a peasant Sicilian immigrant who had made it big in the very
world that seemed to be floundering? Capra had made it to the top on more or less his own, confused terms. For, until
his success, he did not quite know what they were. After that Capra was committed to himself, the faceless little man he
created and catered for, and the nation, or rather the idea of what the nation was. His little hero, by his goodness and
his good fortune, was to fight economic deprivation, injustice and pretension, to reaffirm not only the positive and great
achievements of individual freedom in American society since Lincoln, but also the benevolent family with the patriarch
at its centre, the corrupted men with hearts clean at the beginning, as also the social system so good and strong at its
origin. Every hero – leader and lover – in Capra’s films is a father-figure. Every girl who has lost her innocence due to the
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the shock of desire and other essays Kumar Shahani

pressures of modern life (being a reporter or a secretary) can restore herself through the father–lover. So also America, The myth would break down. But its terms would acquire reality. The faceless man would acquire a face, not be
through those tall men who gave her birth! It is a neat grid of oppositions where the moral and abstract good, the addressed like every other person. Communication cannot take place with a mass but with several individuals. His films
father, the nation, the original Lincoln, are not only opposed to another set of evil, the girlfriend–wayward daughter, the may have then been less appealing, as indeed he suggests Meet John Doe is, where he seems to question the basis of mass
depression, the contemporary, the white-knight senator, but, within their own set, synonymous. Thus one term evokes communication. Liberty may then indeed be not Lincoln’s monument, but the damp arch of a bridge sheltering a bum – as
all of its own set and opposes all others. truly palpable as the log cabin or the Civil War that Lincoln fought and won.
Every society seems to build its own myths in this fashion, of course. But one of the unique features of modern, It is not surprising that Frank Capra could not find an ending to what may be his most mature film, where he
mass-communicated myth is its ability to appear more real than life itself. Capra’s insistence on artists without make-up, questions himself, the gullibility and fickleness of a mob, a ‘mass’ audience that utopian democracy has an inherent
naturalistic lighting, a construction concealed in human sentiment and full-blooded characters, produces what was called tendency to authoritarian control. We have also known the fragility of democratic institutions, though our institutions
Capra-corn by some critics, but what was hope and illusion combined for others. All his films (under review) hark back to are not even four score and twenty years old. I have no doubt that Capra had a healthy irreverence for all authority. But it
Shangri-La, which is not in faraway Tibet but right there in America, at its heart, its true and original self. To bring about would seem that he could never get over the crisis of success. To find a true end to his own creation of John Doe. He has
the combination of real hope with illusion, a marriage between realism of appearance and action with lofty ideals and the honesty to admit it, if not the courage to carry it through. Or will every social system turn its artists into conformists
pathos was necessary. Even for the Lost Horizon to be credible, Capra had to use a larger-than-life situation to begin with. of different shades?
What followed was a rather gauche aestheticism. Capra had no practice of symmetry in his apprenticeship as a gag- For all that might embarrass one in Capra’s work and life, one might at least go with him in his gutsy hope in those
writer. For gag-writing concerns itself precisely with asymmetry in social, human and, in the great burlesque traditions of who have fought for liberty – in America, here and elsewhere.
American film, in the relationship of man and object. But it is an asymmetry with a basic and shared assumption of fixed,
determined form and function: a utopian symmetry. Lost Horizon is an attempt at sketching out that symmetrical basis, the
deviation from which leads to pathos and laughter. The idealism upon which the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Western civilisation sustained its equilibrium against its own momentum, with all its appendages of crude romanticism,
is present in the film. The beauty, compassion, youth, humaneness and order present are in an abstract elsewhere (the
Asiatic ancient-original Tibet, of course!), but the High Lama is Belgian. The Great Father is on top of a hierarchy where
one finds natives still – happily and voluntarily – acting as beasts of burden. The successor is also a handpicked European
who, also, has taken upon himself the burden of suffering and war-mangled Asiatics. No wonder the film had such a
curious fortune in the fascist countries: Nazi Germany banned it, and Mussolini’s Italy dubbed it with its own propaganda.
The lessons of Abraham Lincoln obviously had remained utopian and abstract. For the real progeny of this great
father-figure should be those who refuse to be masters (as well as slaves), even refuse to be charitable masters. For
that, Capra would have had to question the institution of private property, not merely a passing and individual-moral
aberration of it, as in the corruption of senators, journalists, industrialists and the like. But if he did so, the neat systems of
opposition would be destroyed; realism of the image, character and situation would have to be replaced by the realism
of what lies between them. To examine the reality that governs the relationships. Not propose a certain culture as the
final realisation of nature.

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CHARLES CHAPLIN
1977
Written as an obituary to Chaplin for a national newspaper, but it does not seem to have been
carried; previously unpublished.
Through the 1970s, when Bombay had a flourishing intellectual life along with a vibrant film-
going public, Shahani participated extensively in the media, including hosting a film discussion
programme on Doordarshan, titled ‘Montage’, and writing short essays and occasional film
reviews for newspapers and magazines of the city, notably The Times of India, Debonair and
Imprint. This note can be read alongside the Frank Capra essay, as he speaks here once again of
the relationship of myth to reality. If, in Capra’s instance, this was the ‘faceless man’, presented
with ‘artists without make-up, naturalistic lighting, a construction concealed in human
sentiment and full-blooded characters’, with Chaplin the contrast is with an ‘undecorated
reality’. As the ‘dance of bread-rolls’ takes place, as ‘shoestrings turn into spaghetti and a bank
safe is used to deposit a broom’, the ‘real’ world around the tramp ‘suffocates itself with a social
and psychological illusion of its own making’.
‘The news of my death has killed me’, says Napoleon at the end of a film planned but never executed by Chaplin. Chaplin
is dead. I hope that we will not bury him with praise.
In the art of Chaplin, things and events are supposed to be what they are in their brute state, without the trappings
of ideology or interpretation. Each event is complete in itself. Each thing assumes a monstrous autonomy. He takes up the
flag by accident, not to protest, but the flag takes him to prison. The machines of modern times and the stormtroopers of
the great dictator turn as blindly berserk as the painful formality of language, gesture, habit, the civilisation of their agents.
To counter the autonomy of objects and events, Chaplin could only give them a higher autonomy, a total
multiplicity of meaning and function. Gesture and imagination become one, affirming an absolute freedom. Deprivation
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Kumar Shahani
and loneliness express themselves in the dance of bread-rolls, shoestrings turn into spaghetti and a bank safe is used to
deposit a broom. The precise and simplified gesture of the tramp compels us to an undecorated reality, while the ‘real’
world around him suffocates itself with a social and psychological illusion of its own making. The more one meets the
other, the greater the ‘chaos’ that emerges. Chaplin rejects uniform stylisation as he rejects uniform reality. Both arise
from the need to dominate and a compulsion to hide the truth. From oneself, to begin with. From the other, as intention.
Finally it turns upon itself, snapping the dynamic tension which gave rise to the artist’s disguised subterfuge. Chaplin does
not allow mistaking him for his disguise, as stylised or realistic illusion. He constantly indicates reality and does not seek
to replace it.
Can one, having taken a moral and social view, so insistently show things as they are? Or does one inevitably get
trapped, however ‘original’ the system one operates with, by a self-contained grid? What distinguishes Chaplin from
lesser artists like Keaton is precisely that he could dismantle this grid as effortlessly as he reveals it. Keaton had the
precious purity of a culminating tradition. Chaplin extends his healthy irreverence to himself. There is far more that
is sacred to him fundamentally than aestheticist perfection. The speech of the barber-turned-dictator can embarrass
us only if we forget the historical context. His gauche metaphor of workers herded together in a factory as sheep may
have been impelled by the same urgency. The untruthful archaism was nowhere as true and poignant as the compulsive
coordination of his wrists and eyes on the assembly-line. He could dare to disregard his own assembly-line of events and
gestures because of his directness and immediacy.
He is perhaps the world’s first great artist to rebuke man’s desire for immortality. The classical arts were founded
upon this desire. The contemporary artist, watching men frightened into servility by his own creations, wishes the
audience to destroy them immediately after use. For fear that the individuated life of his art, instead of being cremated
after its death, should be used as an instrument to deaden others by example.
Chaplin had accused Hitler of stealing his butterfly moustache. Imagine what Gandhi, Marx and Einstein could
accuse us of! Perhaps, after all, this new search to be mortal is futile. Chaplin is dead.
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A MEETING WITH
MIKLÓS JANCSÓ
1978
First published in National Centre for the Performing Arts Quarterly, Bombay, September 1978.
In the late 1970s, Kumar Shahani received the Homi Bhabha Fellowship, Bombay, to conduct
a study on the epic form in the cinema. That inquiry led him to the Soviet Union to research
Eisenstein and meet with Naum Kleiman, to the USA to study the early epics of D.W. Griffith
and John Ford among others, and, as we see in this essay, to Hungary to meet Miklós Jancsó.
Shahani’s contention that the epic form, typically considered a ‘low’ form by bourgeois society,
had – after an initial flowering in the silent cinema (Griffith, Eisenstein), driven into low-brow
popular culture and replaced by the lyrical as the ‘highest’ art – seen something of a revival
in the 1970s with Jancsó, Angelopoulos, Tarkovsky and, interestingly, Coppola, comprised part
of the purpose of this study. The study, which included work on the Mahabharata that Shahani
did with teachers in Bombay, directly fed into his next major film, the epic Tarang (1984).
This conversation with Jancsó, originally published in the short-lived journal of the National
Centre for the Performing Arts, Bombay, edited by Kumud Mehta, opens up further Shahani’s
understanding of the grammar of mythic structures.
It was a grey morning when the interpreter came to pick me up for a meeting with Miklós Jancsó. We drove through
the Hungarian landscape with a soft light falling upon its mid-May greenery. Mr Pal Papp of the Institute of Cultural
Relations explained that the film on which Jancsó was working was a mammoth production. It dealt with the life of an
extremely right-wing man who, led by events that threatened Hungary’s national integrity, undergoes a transformation and
joins the revolutionary forces. It was based on fact, but the film was fictionalised. With a quiet gentleness Mr Papp, who
had organised my stay in Budapest, suggested that there was great nervousness about the complicated production and
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Kumar Shahani
hoped that I wouldn’t find Jancsó too preoccupied. I could well imagine the situation, knowing the need for singleminded
attention even while one directs a less spectacular film.
Moreover, Jancsó is under a multipronged attack. The official line, which I could glean from meetings with people
of different functions, suggests that he seems to protest against all forms of control. Fascism, they assert quite rightly,
is a historical and not a periodic phenomenon. Forms of oppression at different stages of history should not be equated
with one another. It is possible to interpret Jancsó’s work in a purely cyclic manner if one does not take into account its
inversion into openness. What is true of the inverses of finite and infinite spaces in his work is also true of the circular–
spiral equations in his narrative patterns. It was particularly invigorating to discuss this issue with a woman critic who
combined the fluffy roundedness of an Austro-Hungarian aristocratic portrait with the austere confidence of the socialist
woman. A theatre critic, she also accused Jancsó of pornography in his Italian work. This is a charge that is repeated by
critics and laymen alike. Having seen only his Hungarian films, I find this difficult to believe. His nudes have the brutal
dignity of nature. Younger filmmakers apprehensive of Jancsó’s formalism usually shrug off this accusation. The young
are moving away from the stylised and allegorical framework towards naturalism, in perhaps a more mature form than
the Western European films sponsored by television. It is a naturalism which has at its base the same urgent desire to
break through the controls that Jancsó’s films have. It is a tendency which in Hungary was greatly refined by a full-length
documentary made by a woman director, Judit Elek. Her film, A Simple Story, was a microscopic study of a Hungarian
village and took five years to document. It has been difficult for her to make another film. But two films which are current
successes with audiences and critics alike are both naturalisic (The Film Novel and Gyuri). The first tells a story through a
documentary camera. The second photographs actual incidents and puts them together as a story with social comment.
The need to assert a psychological personal vision to document experience with immediacy makes young filmmakers
move away from Jancsó’s film ballets.
Yet, everyone unanimously agreed that I must meet Jancsó to discuss with him the epic structure. Two of the major
problems, as I see them, after the cinematographic achievements in this direction, revolve around the separate questions
of individuation and the positioning of myth. This, while retaining the scale and scope of history: of all that has passed
concretely (been thus) and is in the world (see the Mahabharata’s description of itself). These are problems of content
first and, therefore, the solution cannot be of a purely technical nature. They would need to be resolved in the truer
terms of form, as experience and philosophy. Their resolution would not only terminate the seemingly endless cycle of
formalism/naturalism, but probably bring Lukácsian aesthetics into a deeper understanding of the combinations of the
lyric, the dramatic and the epic as practised by contemporary artists. Jancsó and his colleagues could then wander into
new pastures.
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As we reached the location, all the signs of a Jancsó film came alive. The accents of red in the sashes and the feathers
of caps, the olive uniforms, the blue-grey-black costumes, the white blouses of women, the off-white thatch which
would saturate to a subtle yellow on film. The stark black-and-white contrasts of oblong barracks, against and around
which the circular movements of people would hold up the banner, and the ellipses of horses at infinity, now silently
near and threatening. We walked through the slush and silently took up a position from which we could watch him
rehearse. There was a light rain but the rehearsals went on uninterrupted. Each element of the complicated movements
is added on. First, there are three distinct movements taking place simultaneously, then four: a fifth, the slow, stylised
fall of a door, the sixth, the encircling of an angelic little girl who performs with the utmost ease. The silence required
for the rehearsals is too oppressive for the scores of people waiting around, even for the geese and dogs that have to
participate in the shooting. Jancsó and his cameraman are as unruffled as one would be if one were shooting with a single
character. Jancsó has to make the movements of a symphony orchestra conductor but demands silence only once. He
takes the shot. The very first combination of movements hasn’t worked out. He goes up to the actress who holds the
fluttering banner and the old man who is to embrace her. He comes back. There is a lull. He recognises my host and comes
up towards us. We shake hands. He says it would be an hour before he can chat with us. It has stopped raining and the
light has improved. It was here that he had shot Silence & Cry. They rehearse once again and are ready to shoot. After a
couple of takes, he is satisfied. There is a great rush to set up the next shot. To my great surprise, the camera is taken off
the light crane and set up on a tripod. It is very much brighter, although the light is still soft and only caresses the hair.
Jancsó walks back to the previous camera position. A horseman rides up to him to tell him that he is a genius. There is
general laughter as he tries to hide his embarrassment. He takes the next shot. It is the embrace again. A shot of such a
short length and a cut-away. It is impossible for him to use the shot, I feel. He comes towards us and, in a characteristic
bird-like movement, he spreads out his two arms to place them on our shoulders as we walk. The interpreter gives up
following us as Jancsó starts speaking directly to me, in French. He has been told what I am interested in and there isn’t
much time to lose.
KS: Tell me if this is true. There is a reversal of finite and infinite space in your films. It suits the content of your films
admirably – the recurrent aspiration to the infinite and the oppressive finiteness of human society . . .
MJ: (Smiling broadly) Yes, this infinite space we discovered through the landscape of Hungary itself, my writer and I. We
thought that no other country perhaps has such a flat landscape. From that we worked to the relationship that you speak of.
KS: And the use of the plan-sequence in an enclosed space also does the same, by inversion . . .
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Kumar Shahani
MJ: Yes, that’s very true. But I’m beginning to change that. I may not use the plan-sequence as much. It becomes too
abstract. And now I’m doing something – a trilogy – based on historical fact; I want it to be more concrete. It is, of course,
imaginary reality. Things didn’t happen in the same way as we will show them. But I don’t want it to become too abstract.
It’s different on the stage, you know, when you arrange the mise-en-scène. Those real people are seen, felt by the audience
as real. But on the screen it may all look and become unreal.
KS: All the same, I thought the plan-sequence and this finite–infinite inversion suited your theme of circular oppression.
MJ: Yes, that’s true. (He smiles and does not answer immediately.) But all oppression is not the same. And if it becomes
abstract in the film, it appears to be the same – one form of oppression and the other. I wanted to get away from that
unreality. Moreover, so many other people are doing the same sort of taking now. In the beginning it was Angelopoulos,
the Greek, and me. Now, with Angelopoulos, he needs it: the plan-sequence. Because through it, the scene does not only
refer to the present, but also begins to suggest the future. He uses it as a device for that – for making transitions of time.
While I am searching for the ‘presence’ of the theatre, to make the action come alive.
KS: But isn’t it true that you have to banish all life from the theatre to be able to say anything through it?
MJ: That’s what is contradictory. Exactly. In the theatre you have live actors, you do away with life. In the cinema you don’t
have live actors. But it is supposed to mimic reality . . . that’s what we started by questioning. Say in a Western, or in any
of the traditional genres of the cinema, the spectators enter inside the scene, they participate by entering into the action.
The illusion of reality is considered to be real itself. If you follow the mise-en-scène of the theatre, make it abstract, the
abstraction becomes the reality. That’s what I want to avoid now.
KS: It becomes mythical. (He nods vigorously and says, ‘The theatre is mythical.’) In your earlier films, Cantata and My Way
Home, to avoid that, you had a three-way basis of relationships and narrative. You had a structure which could perhaps
be represented like this /\/\/\/\/\ (He nods in assent.) From Round-Up onwards it seems like a spiral. (‘Yes, yes, that’s
how it is’.) But in Elektra you ended on a myth . . . that is, you functioned with a closed relationship.
MJ: Elektra is a myth. It is myth . . . how shall I say it? . . . a myth which is bitter. It is the hope for justice. For the
resurrection of justice. I didn’t want to stick to the original, naturally. It is very well-known and that would have been
pointless. I wanted to convert the old myth into a new one. So, it ends on the myth of optimism. But the undercurrent
is not optimistic; it is bitter.
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KS: Do you believe that any two-way relationship, a dialectical relationship, must end up by being mythical?
MJ: That’s why the theatre is mythical. I am a Marxist and I believe that the dialectical method is the only one by which we
can know the things of life, of reality. But I cannot subscribe to dogmatism. I believe with our great thinker Lukács that we
are still nowhere near our aspirations. The people should not be treated like children or shephereded around.
KS: Did you know Lukács well? I believe he had seen some of your work?
MJ: I didn’t know him very well. And unfortunately, only in the last years of his life. Yes, he liked my work and had made
certain declarations which we can arrange to send to you. (It has become quite bright and there is even a hint of shadows.
Jancsó is visibly restless.)
KS: Do you think that all ideologies, whether ‘materialist’ or ‘spiritualist’, lead to oppression?
MJ: So far, yes. But one continues to work and hope and believe in a possibility, however unobtainable it may be. . . . (He
switches to Hungarian) . . . I must get back to work, forgive me. (Repeats this in French.)
We shook hands and left. The landscapes in the bright sunlight did not seem to be as enchanting. There was so much more
to speak of; above all, the difficulties of individuation, after the giving up of motivational characterisation. There was
the question of archetypes and their reversals . . . the women in the water (apsaras), the women on horseback and on the
shoulders of men. The placement of static myth in open-ended, free-flowing epic narrative.The simultaneous presence
of brutality and innocence in nature.The contradiction of pornography and art. Perhaps his Italian films, like his work in
his own country, are seeking for that significant continuum that will destroy our oppressive language and the traps of
totalitarianism which the artist creates for himself and his audience.
Perhaps his attempt is to trace that ‘immanence of life’ which Lukács found in the great epics. The totality of life
resists any attempt to find a transcendental centre.
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NOTES FOR AN AESTHETIC
OF CINEMA SOUND
1978
Written for a conference on film sound held in New Delhi. First published in Journal of Arts &
Ideas, No. 5, October–December 1983; reprinted in ‘Dossier on Kumar Shahani’, Framework, Nos.
30–31, London, 1986.
This text, together with the statement on ‘bazaar realism’ and the chart on the epic form
(fig. 21, p. 116), remain the closest we have to a formal manifesto. Here we have Shahani's first
statement on cinematic sequence, and the role of the khayal form of Indian music in defining
that structure. The argument pivots around two key formulations. One, taken from music,
is that all musical notations are a mere approximation; that we should strive only to name
approximations, not absolutes, but that it is ‘the search for precision that yields to flexibility’.
The second, taken from the cinema, elaborates on Bresson’s famous line, ‘the soundtrack
invented silence’. While silence in music ‘relates to space indirectly’, in the cinema silence
‘relates to space in movement’. It is, Shahani says, the ‘arbitrariness of silence, created both by
the sounds, the music, the speech and its juxtaposition with the visual imagery, that changing
in tone, line and colour, that articulates silence further’ when it comes to the cinema. ‘Neither
the spoken word nor music can work in such discontinuity.’ This is also the essay in which
Shahani first explores the concept of cinematic sequence which would become a major mode
of cinematic organization, and would also be elaborated in his ‘Film as a Contemporary Art’
(pp. 204–21), and in other texts of the 1980s and early 90s.
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As life slowly climbed the ladder of evolution, one sense after another arrived and developed.
Hearing was the last to arrive, and the last to attain a state bordering on perfection. We have
acquired a habit of giving a greater part of our attention to what we see, leaving a mere fraction
to what we hear. (James Jeans, 1937)
Both the senses of sight and sound, it may be noted, arose out of the need to perceive movement; to locate an
object and one’s own relationship to it; to gauge the pressures at work; to achieve points of equilibrium and to move in
a controlled manner not only from static point to static point, as we seemed to imagine in our classical civilisations, but
to find in these different vibrations, and differences of pressure, the vitality of being itself.
‘When does one say that a piece of material lives. When it continuously does something, moves’: the atomic
physicist Erwin Schrodinger, quoted by Fritz Winckel. Winckel goes on to add that
impulses to movement are, for example, electrical or chemical potential differences. When they
are equalised, the tendency to form a chemical bond ceases: temperatures become equalised
through heat transfer. Thermodynamic equilibrium results in a condition of constant rest (of
maximum entropy), a condition which is precisely: death. From the physical standpoint, disorder is
continuously created out of a condition of order. Nature strives for a condition of ideal disorder.
And again Schrodinger: ‘The trick by which an organisation can keep its place on a rather high level of order consists
in reality of a continuous absorption of order out of the surrounding world.’
Thus Music;
Music is perhaps the most highly developed sensate function of human understanding.
One can begin to speak of the aesthetics of sound only in relation to music because it is this that provides the most 29
fundamental expression of the states of being and of acting in a continuously impinging disorder.
It is possible to read speech, to make sense of words one has never heard, as signs that refer to a content for a state
of being or of action.
As for incidental and atmospheric sounds in the cinema, they lie between
The organised sounds (music) drifting into entropy and
Contextual sound (speech).
The rest is silence.

Musical space on its own can relate ‘to the sustaining of a note, to reverberation, to
absorption by the spatial enclosures, producing, transmitting, reflecting, and receiving the
sound’, whereas in the cinema it can do all this and yet more. In fact, ‘the cinema may or
may not relate to the spaces which produce and receive sound’. figs 29, 30 Khayal Gatha
(1988): picturization of the Miya-ke-Malhar bandish, 'Karim naam tero'. Over rain on the
terraces of a dargah we see a piece of cloth fly, which lands to the ground only to become
180 the woman sitting on the steps, and walking.
 Kumar Shahani

Yet silence, from which everything was originally supposed to begin, does not exist in an absolute sense. ‘The
soundtrack invented silence’, says Robert Bresson, and this is perhaps true in a far deeper sense than even he meant it. On
the most obvious level, silence in music relates to space indirectly. In the cinema, on the other hand, it relates to space
in movement. In music, it relates to the sustaining of a note, to reverberation, to absorption by the spatial enclosures,
producing, transmitting, reflecting and receiving the sound. In the cinema, all this and more. In fact, the cinema may or
may not relate to the spaces which produce and receive sound.
It is the arbitrariness of silence, created by both the sounds, the music, the speech and its juxtaposition with the
visual imagery, that changing in tone, line and colour, that articulates silence further. For this, perhaps, a reference point
could be the discontinuities of sound in the scene where the heroine of Subarnarekha kills herself offscreen.
Neither the spoken word nor music can work in such discontinuity.
The smallest unit of the spoken word in any language is the allophone. In specific languages, it is the specific manner
of continuously linking allophones that constitutes a word or even a nonsense syllable.
An isolated note cannot be perceived as music. If it is held for very long, it may not be perceived at all. An isolated
note is no different in meaning and perception than what we have just cited as an example of discrete sounds in silence.
The silence of John Cage, or the pure frequency of the computer, if it is music, is so in a special sense which
corresponds most closely with the function of speech, of context.
Yet I am sure that it does seem to you, as it seems to me or to anyone who has worked in the cinema – I include
those who actively see the cinema – that there is a great deal of overlap between all our categories.
In the development of almost all traditions of music, at any rate, the speech and the recitative has always been
30 closely related to changes of frequency, if not the motive force. Many of the classical languages – and some of the
modern languages – had developed meters from pitch and frequency variations rather than stress. In fact the khayal
gayaki, a system of music we are all familiar with, may be recognised as the highest form of the speech–music continuum.
The absence of rigid notations, experienced by us today as a near-impossibility, along with the apparent semantic
poverty of its words, has perhaps made it possible for us to come nearer to what James Jeans conjectures to be the
music of the future: ‘a continuous scale in which every interval can be made perfect’. The simplest example can come
from the infinite variations upon the bhairavi. But closer examination may reveal that we approach it even in pentatonic
ragas like the bhoop.
For Helmholtz (1877) from whom all modern studies of the sensation of the tone and the theory of music begin, a
continuous scale was unimaginable – at least its understanding was impossible. For Winckel (1939), it is only in the context
of disorderly sound movement that order arises. And music already begins for him to link itself with indeterminacy.

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It seems clearer than ever before that notations are a mere approximation. Since shrutis have to be heard, we should
strive only to name approximations, not absolutes.
Yet it is heartening to find that it is the search for precision that yields to flexibility. And vice versa, that it is the
flexible language structure which is meaningful. Heartening for every artist who wishes to place himself in a tradition and
yet to innovate, to individuate.
It seems to me that in the use of sound, the cinema has only opened up great possibilities without realising them.
When Bresson speaks of the evocation achieved by sound, he is often still speaking of the visual images it can conjure
up as against the visual images that are concretely present. When Godard speaks of the destruction of images, his
form becomes anarchic – subservient to speech. And yet they, including Ghatak, have gone the furthest so far in the
juxtaposition and superposition of text, sound and music.
When Bresson asserts that the eye is less attentive than the ear, he is speaking of a condition when the spectator
is attentive at all! For in the West, the twin enemies of the development of sound in cinema have been realism (note
the unnecessary, unimaginative recourse to music in the best of the neorealistic work of Rossellini and De Sica) and the
theatre (the privileged synchronous word). Even today, despite the most sophisticated mixing equipment available, you
can see the dips that take place the moment characters project dialogue. In India, it is the same expressionist–realist
theatrical tradition that has deafened our ears to sound in films.
Our epic theatre not only used music as part of its narration, it had linked itself to what we clearly find as a
correspondence with music in the gesture and the use of verbal imagery.
In Koodiyattam, Draupadi’s lotus eyes, touched by kajal, could find a myriad means of expression through the
employment of a few basic modes. The curvatures of sculpture find a unity in our aesthetic with the melodic lines that
lead to a point of rest (nyasa).
It is this epic unity that we seek today, which would include in it the theories of causation and of history that have
shaken us from our refined slumber . . .
It is chronology, not narrative, that we have to abandon.
184
A HOMAGE TO TARKOVSKY
1979
Paper presented at the Andrei Tarkovsky Retrospective, International Film Festival of India,
1979; previously unpublished.
Tarkovsky’s work, like Jancsó’s, was significant for its time. Some of Tarkovsky’s films, especially
Solaris (1972) and The Mirror (1975), had been made available in India through the House of
Soviet Culture, and were widely screened in the film society circuit. Solaris was also available
in an edited 90-minute version dubbed in American accents, and commercially released. On
the other hand, the elusive Andrei Rublev (1971) and Ivan’s Childhood (1962) were seen in India
much later. This essay was written by Shahani on the occasion of the first major retrospective
of Tarkovsky’s work in India which screened several of these films, including The Stalker, which
had just been made.
The work of a poet, we have believed for long centuries, is greater than the work of Nature. Our earlier aestheticians had
placed the poet above god, for the poem transcended laws while Creation was subject to them. The work of Tarkovsky
gives a precise confirmation of our belief. To read allegory into his work would be adequate but not sufficient. For the
framework he chooses calls for a constant rearrangement. It cannot be fixed into clear objective correlatives. The subject
enters the framework and immediately all perspectives seem to change.
With Tarkovsky, one has felt that one was watching Soviet art once again. It may lack the elan of the earlier
revolutionary artists. But its scope is as wide, its content as fundamental. I have read no statement by Tarkovsky, nor are
we really aware of the debate around his work in the Soviet Union (where it matters most). All that I have gleaned from
people who know him is that he is a difficult, almost incomprehensible man.
The trouble begins when we wish to comprehend films in the same manner as we read sentences and paragraphs.
Pudovkin had tried to make films after the word, metaphor and sequence. In the end, he had to lag behind Eisenstein.
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The great medieval icons of Russia, ordered by a theocratic state, beautiful and correct as they are in their depiction of touches it, there is a tear, while he sleeps on smooth plastic sheets in a totally controlled environment. Yet, he recognises
the object of worship, could never evoke the unknown infinity that Andrei Rublyev can shroud us in. I do not know if his past, its fragments: the love lost over and over again, the elusive, cruel mother, who nevertheless comforts him. And
Tarkovsky has done justice to his subject, but it is his subject. the father? Existing, innocuous, unknown or uninteresting?
For us in India, Tarkovsky’s career into the unknown started with Ivan’s Childhood. For what area of one’s mind could He knows these to be fragments and, therefore, he can afford not to give up the search. He can put them together
be as mysterious as that of one’s childhood? And here in the rubble of irrational war, one pierced into the folds of a bud. where they splinter the most. He creates a whole object, which seems to die in orgasmic spasms. He recreates the
The apples, the tall bank of trees, the still puddles of water were archetypes come to life, making nonsense both of the object. Ultimately, it is the object which decides for itself. It is no longer a hallucination of a single individual. Here is a
other-worldliness of those who speak about them and the mad this-worldliness of people killing one another while the whole life, a consciousness which others have to accept. Early twentieth-century science had already accepted the view
silken-skin boy’s thin body trembled. that the object itself is transformed in the act of observation. The Marxian idea of practice should already have led us
In spite of its awkwardness, the film stunned us, both by its unusual adolescent beauty and by the fact that socialist to the transformation of the subject in the act of changing reality. It is, of course, the psychologist (in our world, the
realism could allow the rebirth of the problem of subjectivity. Others who followed Tarkovsky in Central and Eastern psychoanalyst) who must make us realise the vital independence of that which we ourselves created.
Europe, in dealing with the subjective, merely imitated the romanticism of the French New Wave. The relapse into a If Solaris is our world, can we, like the psychologist, kneel and embrace that figure that we neither knew nor found
purely naturalistic, psychological treatment, aided by the fluidity of television techniques, has reached a point where interesting, in the warmth and expanding comfort of nature that we thought was cruel, mysterious, inaccessible, given, in
the fact of the intervention of the director is camouflaged and the borders between film and reality are hidden. The another form, to fatal orgasms? I do not know if one should be as subjective as I have been in writing about Tarkovsky,
naturalistic ‘psychological’ examination of the camera ultimately treats all surface symptoms like objects displayed in a stammering in front of the Mirror. But I hope that this error might interest someone close to him, somewhere in this
drugstore. You can neither get at the subjectivity of the person who has manufactured them, nor at the internal relations lawful universe, someone for whom the Word is Bach.
of matter and substance itself. Having given up, quite rightly, mechanical causation and motivation, these directors in the
East and the West have given up all attempts to understand, for the pleasure of ‘recording’ itself.
Contrary to all this, Tarkovsky seems to deal with the problem of subjectivity at a fundamental level, within the
context of the closed utopias that we often seem to aspire to, here and in other lands. Technocrats, the multinational
corporations and the gigantic state apparatus constantly promulgate immutable laws of nature, while whatever men
do, think, feel and act constantly points to the error in these laws. The bio-scientist creates such monsters that he is
embarrassed with his function. He will not let you enter his chamber since he himself will not enter any space within his
mind. In fact, he lives without a past and a future. He cannot explore and will reduce everything to what is here, in the
present. He can, therefore, neither remember nor forget.
The physical scientist analyses and, therefore, needs to fragment reality. He can remember, because he does not
want to manipulate life. But remembrance and knowledge are projected into part-objects which replace the whole. The
ear and the radio-telescope are extensions of that beginning that we know, in so many cultures, as the word or sound.
The life that he nurtures, therefore, is a bonsai plant.
The psychologist also deals with objects, studies them; the objects are men. Like everyone else, like Tarkovsky
himself, he analyses them. Will he be able to put them together? His past is a patchwork crochet of events. Each time he

186 187

THE SAINT-POETS OF PRABHAT
1980
First published in Filmworld, Bombay, January 1980.
In the early 1930s, the Pune-based Prabhat Film Company made a series of famous ‘saint’ movies:
popular biographical films based on the lives of Marathi saint-poets. The genre was not unique
to Maharashtra – such films were also seen in Telugu, Tamil and Bengali, among other languages
– but it was a somewhat distinct sub-genre of the mythological film, linked often to devotional
practices associated with specific saints. Among the most popular of these films was Sant
Tukaram (1934), starring Vishnupant Pagnis, and – interestingly, given the later reputation the
film would acquire – intended as a low-budget quickie laden with ‘miracle’ scenes, as the genre
required. Shahani himself was a great admirer of Pagnis’s performance in Sant Tukaram, as he was
of the ‘un-selfconscious directness and simplicity which fused thought and action’. The legend,
the heroic saint ‘himself dictated the movement of the film. In Sant Tukaram they did not strive
after style and the style emerged.’ Such simplicity – true of Chaplin, and the basis of Rossellini’s
sketch with Anna Magnani on the telephone – Shahani warns, can ‘rarely be repeated, even by
the authors themselves’. ‘The transformation of subject matter itself into form and content is
hardly ever possible’, he says: ‘I do not know if, in most cases, the aspiration itself is dangerous.’
As we go back to the times when the regional languages of India were being born, we feel that behind the dust of
religious and medieval institutions, there is so much that we can share with the saint-poets’ predicament. For many
hundreds of years, people have been let down by those who had taken on the roles of being their material and spiritual
guardians. Today, the intellectuals who self-consciously say it about themselves are unable to go beyond their ritualistic
self-flagellation. The politicians need no caricaturists to describe them any more. The ‘people’ stand in long queues
outside temples and cinema halls. It is not surprising that the revival of the saint-poets of Maharashtra was made in the
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Kumar Shahani
late 30s and early 40s in our cinema. The causes that they had expressed had found a truer material foundation in the
gathering movement for Independence. But our twice-born freedom has been twice deceived.
Yet, looking back at the days when Prabhat made its films on Tukaram, Dnyaneshwar and Eknath, one cannot but
envy the context of their work. It was an age of struggle and sacrifice, and these are films about individuals living
centuries ago, who set an example of strength and compassion. There is a great deal that is naive, even gauche about
these films. But the conviction with which Tukaram is played, for example, has made it scale such heights that today’s
popular art can barely sustain. I think that it is the context of the work which is responsible. There is no contemporary
movement of the kind that led up to the events of 1947. All the same, one would not like to let that fact devalue the
achievement of Prabhat, specially in the case of the film on Sant Tukaram.
All the three films are based on legends, pieced together from what is believed to be true about the saint-poets
rather than about the facts. But what comes through, above all, is the authenticity of the thought and the life of the
saints, specially of Tukaram. It is obvious, of course, that in the case of Dharmatma, there is as much of an intention to
use the popularity of Bal Gandharva and his versatile singing as to transmit the message of ahimsa, satya and samanata.
These were principles associated with Gandhiji’s movement of non-violence, truth and national consensus. The fusion of
Eknath’s active idealism – in the seeking of equality between the castes without upsetting the authority of tradition –
and Gandhian practice was nearly complete.
The content of Eknath’s thought as projected in the film sees the world as a reflection of the mind. He who thinks
of the other as low has lowliness in his mind. Yet, this form of idealism, with its emphasis on the purity of thought and
action, is not reflected in the style of the film. Heavily influenced by German expressionism, which is the exploration
of the irrational, the obverse side of idealism, the film often finds external terms of symbolisation of that nature. The
acting of the minor characters is expectedly so. The cut-aways to flowers and lamps to signify ‘good thoughts’ are by
now familiar to Indian cinema-viewers on the lookout for the so-called ‘directorial touches’. The expressionism is also
present in the narrative itself. The trampling upon the flowers brought by the Mahar girl is the beginning of the conflict
pattern of the film. The theatrical nature of the acting and the music is reinforced by the placement of the camera, almost
throughout the film, at mid-distance and a low angle.
While the formal unities are sought to be derived from expressionist theatrical and other extraneous sources, the
unity of the legend and the conviction in the truth of the message infuses neat oppositions and conceptual clarity.
Thus, one finds the contrast between Eknath and the other orthodox and religious men expressed by opposing keertan
to pravachan, grihastha to brahmacharya, etc., in an absolutely unembroidered fashion. More important is the fact that
for a saint who has chosen to reconcile domestic virtue with spiritual knowledge, the conflict rightly centers upon the
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continuity of tradition. This is expressed in the conflict between father and son, and in the ritual to be performed for the
ancestors (the shraddha). The legend as seen in the film places Eknath’s role in the right context of carrying forward the
work of Dnyaneshwar, of reforming within the tradition and of revitalising it. Of course, for ideas of equality to find a
secular base, we had to wait for our contact and conflict with a colonial power.
In the meantime, with our constant appauverisation and the plunder of all wealth by others, from inside and outside,
it was only a kind of moral force that could sustain people through their lives. Today, Sant Dnyaneshwar is remembered
and revered for the founding of a literature. But it was his own struggle to acquire and to give dignity to his people that
could be recalled. The film (in 1940) attempted to do that. It would be difficult to sympathise with the views of Sant
Dnyaneshwar if viewed historically, in their absoluteness: ‘The duties that accompany varnashrama are as natural to it as
fairness to the fair body.’
But when he distinguishes ritualistic karma from the need to act and converts the philosophy of non-action into a
voluntaristic notion, one realises how he precedes the social reformers right up to our Independence. ‘If you walk quickly,
you find you can rest sooner. Such is the case with karma. The more there is of action, the sooner does one reach the state
of non-action.’ The film treats this ambivalence by making the rugged and simple man heroic and in direct communion
with god (truth). It isn’t surprising that when the Chinese Cultural Revolution took place, in the midst of a failure to
transform natural conditions, many Indians who justify the ‘original’ caste system found an echo in the heroism of simple
tasks like looking after pigs.
Himself born into a family of outcaste Brahmins, Sant Dnyaneshwar had to reinterpret the Gita and the Hindu
tradition to find a place in society. A personal tragedy, for which he was in no way responsible, was transferred into a
need to shift the focus of a social ideology. Apparently, he felt so fulfilled in his mission that he repeated the tragedy
of his father’s compelled suicide at a higher level of voluntary suicide. Was not his own social and religious action
and philosophy similar? Convert that which is given into an act of choice. However, while the film opens with greater
austerity, it is not able to sustain the rigour which Sant Dnyaneshwar’s life deserved. Instead, it degenerates into fake
cinematisation of naive pictorialism and inter-cutting in the final sequences where the young boy has turned into a
handsome hero, with the recommended walk for the vira rasa confronting the levitating Changdeva.
Can metaphysics be converted into action? And can action have meaning beyond itself? These are the questions
that have haunted filmmakers who do not stop at naturalism. If the answer is in the negative, neither Sant Dnyaneshwar
nor the post-Rossellini cinema would have been possible. But Fattelal and Damle, who made the film on the saint founder
of Marathi literature, were clearly not equal to the task, except in sequences which were direct and didactic. And that
indeed was the secret of their success in Sant Tukaram, an un-selfconscious directness and simplicity which fused thought
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and action. The legend, the heroic saint himself dictated the movement of the film. In Sant Tukaram they did not strive
after style and the style emerged.
The greatest achievement of Sant Tukaram is, of course, the performance by Vishnupant Pagnis. But this great
performance, as in the work of Chaplin, was rarely hampered by stylistic devices. The best moments in the film are when
he is allowed to present Tukaram without any devices of editing or camera interferences. This was true of Chaplin too
and this was the basis of Rossellini’s sketch with Anna Magnani on the telephone. Such simplicity can rarely be repeated,
even by the authors themselves. The transformation of subject matter itself into form and content is hardly ever possible.
I do not know if, in most cases, the aspiration itself is dangerous.
In the case of Sant Tukaram, it is the total and integrated conjunction of belief, social action, and the lack of
deception, which gives it such dignity. It is said of some of its specially composed verses that they were indistinguishable
from the saint’s. The supplementary cast supports Pagnis with somewhat different styles of acting. And yet, because of
the directness of the narrative and the conviction of the players, one can feel the warmth of their living and sensitive
existence. Gauri, who plays the saint’s wife, for example, has all the naturalistic gusto of the village woman, as well
as the lower-caste accent. In fact, the traditional opposition between man and woman, normally viewed in absolute
and reactionary terms, is given a more robust interpretation here. For, Tukaram’s beliefs are almost magical, whereas
the healthy practical material outlook of the woman calls for an immediate identification. The cause of women was
as dear to the saint-poets as the spiritual upliftment of the shudras. Of course, in the end, by sticking to the legendary
and the miraculous, the film distinctly takes the side of Tukaram (the male principle) and makes us pity his wife (the
female principle) when she expects him to come back and eat with the children, while Garuda is to take him up to the
skies into Vaikuntha.
But the contradiction in their relationship and its great poetic ambivalence has its finest image when he ‘undresses’
his wife, deprives her of the nazrana (the gifts of jewellery and other objects) sent by Shivaji, in the open verandah where
he had accepted the prostitute’s devotion, even her sensuality, without temptation. Indeed, in the exposition itself, the
basic content of dignity had been established by the simple means of Tukaram’s movement above the hips and Salo’s
uncontrollable movements (less rigid but composed on the tamasha pattern, with two lackeys on his side), and the Ravi
Varma-like posed sensuality of the prostitute. Here, hybrid visual construction is meant to signify corruption.
But for those who have come later, and have absorbed the ‘hybrid’ into our system, as indeed has India through the
ages, knowledge is not corruption. It would be suicidal to attempt the naive quality of Sant Tukaram which was denied later
to the creators themselves. Nor can we regret the loss of innocence. One can only attempt to impart the dignity that is
associated with the work in a world threatened by a stubborn division between those who consume and those who produce.
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MEET JULIA
1980
First published in Imprint, Bombay, February 1980.
This is the first of a series of contributions by Shahani to a well-known, independent journal
that saw a brief revival in the early 1980s. It comments on Fred Zinneman’s Julia (1977), featuring
Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda. The film, when released commercially in Bombay in 1980,
became something of a cause célèbre among left circles in the city for its astonishing portrayal
of the relationship between two women within the political history of Nazi Germany.
What would one expect in the seventies from a successful Hollywood film director born in 1907? Frankly, one had not
hoped that he would introduce us to Julia, a woman so convincingly herself and yet a truly modern heroine, the like
of whom is rarely treated even in the well-known feminist literature of today, and hardly ever in the cinema. Julia is
significant for many more reasons than that.
The threat of fascism surrounds us. No matter which party comes to power: the authoritarians, the Communists
or the opportunists, as they have named one another. Apparently Lillian Hellman, played by Jane Fonda, also lived in
a world of little political choice. It was a world different from ours, but a world which had not articulated itself in its
political choice as had the rest of Europe. But Lilly had begun to make her choices because they were created for her by
those that she loved. There was Dashiell Hammett, with whom she lived and who told her she could write better, if she
wanted to, of course. Or asked her if she wouldn’t rather go to Europe than live with her unbearable anxieties in America.
But above all there was Julia, her Julia (recreated for us by Zinneman), who told her, ‘You will make your choice but don’t
talk about it now.’
This is the stuff that resists fascism. I do not know how many people one meets here who actually mean to respect
your choice. And if there is someone who makes a choice, how far he goes to act upon it without having to brag about it.
Fascism creates that other terrifying condition: that one has to be discreet about the truth! There are too many secrets
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parked in the hat-box. Lilly was to discover that. In the beginning, she was bewildered by what was happening around
her, so perfectly captured by the neatly ‘disconnected’ episodes in Zinneman’s version.
Yet Lillian Hellman, like him or like any of us, was bewildered by the existence and power of evil. Fascism, which
can convert a lie into the only truth because people have to be discreet about the truth, even about babies. Julia, on
the other hand, had decided to have a baby from a man she might have admired and despised at the same time. Lillian
Hellman makes that appear clearly in her sketch. Zinneman had necessarily to throw away the references to Julia’s social
climbing lever when Lilly saw him briefly, years later, in California. It makes Julia appear more self-sufficient, just as Lilly
had thought of her.
‘People are either teachers or students. You are a student’, Julia had told Lilly.
Lilly had wondered whether she was a good student. Julia had said that she would be one when she knew what
she wanted.
People have compared Vanessa Redgrave’s performance with Jane Fonda’s. It was brave of Fonda to play the student.
And it is the success of Zinneman and Fonda that Vanessa Redgrave should come out so strongly. She had to act less and
be more herself, using her handsome physique, her sharp looks and distinctive, but therefore neutral, accent to rise above
selfish interests. Yet it was her dishevelled hair, the clumsiness of crutches and the indifferent reality that had wounded
her which made her come true, even in the lush images of Slocombe and Zinneman. But what helped her most was the
strategy of Jane Fonda’s acting, designed by her with her director, to play her role in each complete, distracted fragment
of reality by itself. In other words, to allow the mannerisms of characterisation to disappear behind the event. I think
here we have a lot to learn from her performance. In the end, more for what it tells us. Because we are all students like
Lilly, like Julie herself, when it comes to Freud, Buñuel and Haldane. And it is for us to decide whether to be bewildered
or not, the next time we see everything going wrong and yet find that the trains run on time.
When instructing Lilly about her onward journey from Berlin, Julie laughed and said, ‘Left, Lilly, left, have you ever
learned to tell left from right, south from north?’ I don’t know if we will have learnt to do so, when we are threatened
or whether we could even be reproached as easily as Julia did when Lilly was on her way to Moscow. It is difficult as it is
to live with people so far removed from us as Julia and Lillian. But I have met several young women, moved by the film
in Bombay, who have wondered how men have responded to it. The friendship between the two women has been seen
by many as a defiance of men’s ideas about them. I would add that it is indeed more defiance of women’s ideas about
themselves. I remember having a heated discussion with a feminist who interviewed me in France for television. She
resented the opinion that held out that women were being conditioned narrowly to be concerned about themselves. I
told her that as a man who sympathised with her cause that women artists, writers and directors should reach out and
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describe the whole world, to dare to talk about the inner life of men. Just as the pathos of Ghalib is rendered by Begum
Akhtar, or the spiritual and social aspirations of the Bhakti poets rendered by an attuned feminity. She found this view
intriguing, but the Hungarian filmmaker Judit Elek, who was with me, agreed that she would like to do that.
Inversely, while paying tributes to Fred Zinneman, the emancipated woman is also mistrustful of a man treading
on ground which perhaps many feminist writers have not succesfully covered, though they regard it as their field. I
suspect, as the debate around Julia has substantiated, it is because there is a fear of meeting the sexual overtones of such
friendships. I would argue that Zinneman has gone further than Bergman and others because he has treated sexuality for
what it is, and not wallowed in its baseness nor drawn from it a metaphysical cosmos created by an incestuous god. Lillian
Hellman’s own way of putting it has the same simplicity and directness that dominates the entire film: ‘I have had plenty
of time to think about the love I had for her, too strong and too complicated to be defined as only the sexual yearning
of one girl for another. And yet, certainly, that was there.’ She adds that the sexual feeling never gave itself to overtness
and that fact doesn’t matter. As indeed it doesn’t. Fred Zinneman has been entirely true to Lillian’s experience of Julia, of
what she embodied. It is precisely because of this simplicity, this directness, that the sketch by the woman and the film
by the old man can speak of so much else, including friendship.
Julia is the kind of adaptation which is remarkable for its fidelity in an old-fashioned Hollywood sort of way. Yet it is
a fidelity which would not have been possible if, in the intervening years, the centre of world cinema had not abdicated
control over the rest of the world. For it uses the devices of time and space jumps that American literature had acquired
earlier, and which the cinema allowed itself only in the late 50s and after, with the Left Bank cineastes and new novelists
making films.
Fred Zinneman must have felt the kind of freedom that he had always aspired to, given his anti-Nazi antecedents
and of having in the past to employ guerrilla tactics in battling the studio’s ‘front office’. Zinneman could have that
access to freedom of going back and forth in time which Lillian Hellman’s sketch has because of experimentation. If
Hollywood does not realise it and if, in the process, the small-budget cinema is stifled (no matter from where it originates
– perhaps from Hollywood itself), it will not be able to sustain its radical freshness. Perhaps it is already tinged with a
sophisticatedly justified nostalgia, as in the music of Coming Home, in its choice of subjects, the velvet photography of
Slocombe’s Interviews.
I am sure the cinema in America would not like to go back to equating technological advance with aesthetic
innovation. In fact it has been demonstrated time and again, as in the case of sound and colour, that it takes years for
technological change to be assimilated into the form and find genuinely significant terms of creative expression.
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PORNOGRAPHY
1980
First published as ‘How and Why of Dirty Films’ in Imprint, Bombay, March 1980.
This essay addresses an unusual situation that was being encountered in Bombay at the time: the
release of a series of Malayalam films in dubbed Hindi version. Although the films had a somewhat
different history, they were all mainly targeted towards a pornographic market. The specific film
to which the essay refers, Man ka Aangan, was originally I.V. Sasi’s Vadakku Oru Hridayam (1978),
written by Padmarajan who adapted his own novel. Shahani uses this occasion to make the claim
that pornography, in the way it surfaces in some kinds of popular art, constitutes also a political
demand for social change ‘to face real crisis’. He was working at this time on his screenplay for
a film on the British psychoanalyst W.R. Bion (‘A Memoir of the Future’), which was partly shot
but never completed. The reference to psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer and his work on the ‘knife-
edge balance’ between creation and destruction emerges from that project.
About a year and a half ago, at a seminar in Cochin, one heard of a porno wave hitting the cinema in Kerala. It was difficult to
imagine the kind of special pornography that this could be. Most of our consumer cinema is insidiously titillating anyway,
and our censorship laws couldn’t possibly allow a more ‘explicit’ definition of sex. In fact, the forms that pornographic
content takes in our films is the direct cause of voyeuristic gratification. When it does not permit full nudity, for example, it
may force a filmmaker to resort to such fragmented exposures as may serve to titillate audiences rather than evoke erotic
or other experiences. In the Renaissance tradition, the convention of covering the pubes, a kind of internal censorship,
denied the existence of female sexuality, thereby successfully rendering her into an object. We are going through a period
of half-digested and rotten Western cultural conventions, and are easily identifying them with our own.
I do not think that the Hindu or Buddhist traditions had denied female sexuality. Nor did these deter manifestations
of Indo-Islamic culture, epitomised by the Sufi poets of different languages. The Bhakti poets spoke of a divine communion
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(what an alienation that seems!) in terms of a woman longing for her lover. Yet it appears that in our theatre and films, we
wish to run away from stating the existence of female sexuality. And when we state it, as in the Malayalam film released
in Bombay as Man ka Aangan, we seem to imply that its existence leads to the ruination of the woman protagonist and
of those who come into contact with her.
The interpretation of pornography in India seems to be as dislocated as its sources. The case of Sakharam Binder
is well known in Bombay. The Stage Performance Scrutiny Board, formed under the Bombay Police Act, cancelled its
certificate abruptly and it was only with the intervention of the Bombay High Court that theatrical freedom was restored.
According to Ashok Desai’s article (NCPA Quarterly Journal, v 1, n 2), a member of the Board was frank enough to state
that in his opinion, ‘no play having a sexual theme could be permitted at all’. The absurdity of this position is so clear
that one should not have to take pains to argue against it. But people in the theatre and the cinema are constantly
coming against obstacles which are so external to their pursuit. In the same year as Sakharam Binder (1972), I had to fight
a censor objection to a shot in Maya Darpan. It was a shot of a woman painted blue, alluding to the folk paintings of the
goddesses of fertility. On the music track we used a lullaby to signify motherhood. Yet, while this static and stylised shot
was objected to, they continue to allow the most provocative of dances in film after film. What the censors object to
anywhere in the world, invariably in the erotic sphere, is the explicit, that which frees one from titillation, not that which
provokes. Obscenity laws, no matter where they are framed, keep speaking of the intention of the ‘artist-provocateur’!
Intentions, of course, are only to be found in the minds of people. They may well be in the minds of the viewer, the
censor and the artist, not in the work of art itself. The point is, can we prevent their realisation in objective practice by
censorship of art for adults? Frankly, I think pornography can be attacked only by social change, not by the expression of
its need. Pornography, when widely practised, is in a sense a demand for social change to face real crisis.
In the case of Kerala, it is obvious that the emigrants have expressed their deprivation of human relationship by
their patronage of such cinema. In Europe, where a few years ago about 60 per cent of theatres ran ‘hard-core’ stuff, it
was a period of regression in cinema and in society. The youthful élan of the 60s died out with no real change occurring
in institutional structures. In Europe, with its proud history of revolutions, the students were beaten back. L’imagination
au pouvoir, the promised takeover of power by the imaginative, was in fact snuffed out by consumerism. In Kerala, a
proud tradition of respect for women has suddenly found itself swamped by the lucre of its emigrants, unable to provide
growth in its own soil.
It takes much too long for a society to fulfil its goals. In the meantime, whatever the political moralists may
say, supported by a police force, they themselves generate a symbology which converts the erotic into untruthful
and perverse ideas of the human form. Witness the obvious narcissism of the political leaders in the third world, the
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incredible projections of physical invincibility. But social language goes far beyond it. In day-to-day dealings the dead
metaphor may replace the lively contact. In Western society, it is advertising which takes on this role: of displacing the
need for human contact to that of dead objects with a language which does the same. In India, it is the repetition of form,
the helpless reiteration in language and gesture which may deny the renewal of life, that one experiences through the
erotic. Thus Man ka Aangan, for example, both explicitly by its words and implicitly by its repetitive narrative, reiterates a
fatalistic decline, not even a cyclic renewal. All of consumer cinema in India, no less pornographic than the so-called film
of that kind, is also insistently repetitive, forever seeking the new in its attempts to seduce, but returning to retrograde
values which it can no longer support with its language.
But is it possible for the individual to protect himself from the fragmentary assault of language and society? I
should think so. Otherwise, there would be many societies surviving without art, without even the necessary creativity
for its survival. Not even Mao’s China, with its insistence on purposive creativity, could banish the poets from its cities.
Ultimately it will have to be Chiang Ching who will have to leave the stage. The individual’s creative activity, whatever
it may be, brings him to so closely face the destructive in himself that he can begin to free himself from it, even if it is
imposed on him by language and society. Donald Meltzer, in his Social States of Mind, speaks of this mental condition in
terms of a ‘knife-edge’ balance. Many artists have testified to the precarious nature of their practice, of being so close to
their deepest insights when they are on the brink of losing all control. In fact the most prevalent image of the artist today,
where the individualist–romantic view is generally accepted in India, is painted mainly as the ‘genius on the brink’. Of
course one rejects the extreme irresponsibility of this view, which absolves both the artist and the society that produces
him of building up a tradition and language. But the romantic vision certainly created a great revolution in art and has left
behind a great number of insights. Meltzer himself mentions ‘commercial motivation’ as a potentially corrupting force.
But even Marxist artists have to accept the fact of commodity production. In a sense, The Last Tango in Paris was an
attempt by Bernardo Bertolucci to cope with this problem within himself, in the language of the cinema, and the socio-
political relationship between Europe and America which shaped him and his idiom. Do you remember how it was hailed
as a masterpiece by the American critics and dismissed in absolutely categorical terms by the most ‘commercial’ of our
film folk who trooped to London to see it?
I don’t think the moral indignation was mere hypocrisy on their part. I think they sincerely believed that Bertolucci
was obscene. They attributed to him their own intentions, their own framework of thinking. The viewer of pornography,
though less vulnerable, is as likely to be damaged by it as the one who assembles the dismembered parts to present it
to him. There is no such thing as a totally permissive audience, just as there is no artist who is absolutely free. There
is, however, a captive audience and millions of artists who would wish them to remain captive. Pornography and false
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propaganda serve the same purpose and acquire the same form – of disintegration of the whole and the fetishistic
concreteness of a part, replacing the actual and complete experience. The ‘knife edge’ is thin. Perhaps that is the reason
that Hitler’s propagandists were asked to study Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, which he had banned. Indeed formalism
– always a handmaiden of fascism – seeks to make bloodless abstraction the only truth, replacing it and making it the
only concete reality. Pornography, too, is experience alienated from itself. For the same reasons, pornography is the
product of abstract moral censure.
Pornography cannot be contained. It may be best to accept its existence as a necessary simultaneity with any form
of the creative impulse. Particularly in our age where commodity production is unquestionably the accepted goal of
all societies. For, centuries before the mercantile revolution took place in the world, the erotic experience has been
associated with material wealth. To dissociate it from modern urban art as a prime moving impulse would be to invite
insipidity. I don’t know if we will ever get there, but in a world where thought so quickly takes on technological wings,
we may have to find a new humanism to celebrate our bodies.
CINEMA AND TECHNOLOGY
1985
Written for a seminar on ‘Cinema and Technology’ at the Festival of India, Paris, 1985; previously
unpublished.
In 1985, India presented its well-known ‘Festival of India’, then also known as the ‘Year of India
in France’, in Paris; earlier such events had been held in London and New York, and Paris would
be followed by Moscow. This paper was meant to have been presented at a seminar on that
occasion, but the presentation was never actually made because Shahani replaced it with an
extempore statement. Shahani later co-edited a book on Television in France with the well-
known French film theorist Jacques Kermabon, and there was also some discussion about a film
he would make on Descartes: referred to in his comment, ‘I believe that new technology will be
worth its name only when the Mahabharata will be presented in the Festival of France in India,
and an Indian filmmaker will take a film on René Descartes to Cannes.’

The New Cinema in India represents our aspirations to free ourselves and become a self-determining people. The act of
self-determination is one that has ramifications which go far beyond those of ethnicity and poverty. It implies, more than
anything else, the recognition of a tradition as a historically vitalising and modernising force. It implies that we internalise
the new technologies which have evolved elsewhere and through other traditions, into our own.
Moreover, often these technologies are expensive. It therefore means that our understanding and use of these
technologies have to be even more efficient than in the countries of their origin. Hence, tradition, which embodies our
most formalised thinking, i.e. the classical against the local, gives us the basis, through its highly structured modes of
thinking, for absorbing human experience in its broadest spectrum, geographically and historically.
Innovations in Indian cinema have therefore to be global. By taking shots with a lens which is based in the Renaissance
perspective, yet preserving the specific qualities of line, colour and tone embodied in ways of looking, thinking and acting

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in a great three-thousand-year tradition of art, to which Parisians are sensitive, as they have been, particularly from the
eighteenth century onwards.
If the contact with the East produced the great romantic movement in Europe, thus finally individuating the artist,
the work of art, the protagonist of action in drama and narrative, proposing above all a contact with Nature which
transcended the purely confrontational one, then our contact with the West has to go beyond the twice-imitated one
of realism, founded by colonial imposition, forcing us to look at ourselves as purely an ethnic oddity or a civilisation in
which poverty is endemic.
Instead, if we link up with the new technologies, by making it possible to work on extending our epic structures
globally, by making it possible to use them not as purely consumable products but with as great a formal understanding
– and therefore efficiency and inventiveness – as the great traditions of India and Europe actually propel us to do, we
would make ourselves self-determinate, overcome the crisis of mass culture which has alienated man from himself, by
trying to replace his finest creations – like art, like love, like cooking, like nurturing, everything that involves a gratuitous,
self-fulfilling behaviour – to replace this by fetishised commodities, readymade solutions, a highly centralised populism
that empties us of our affective emotional life and puts it into objects of consumption.
Technology is meant to help us realise ourselves, i.e. it is meant to do exactly the opposite of what, for example,
television networks controlled by high finance, multinationals, and manipulative politicians and bureaucrats would have
us do.
I believe that only the New Cinema in India, which has by necessity developed talents of extraordinary discipline
and vision, can hold hands with the New Cinema in France (with its own great antecedents), to create a world where the
French are not stereotyped into a rather sexy set of colonisers nor the Indians as beautiful, starving people who love
their cows to death.
I believe that as in computer science, so in the areas of cinema and television, new technologies would find a
developed imagination, woven in this case from threads of epic narrative, the nuanced melodic tones of Indian classical
music, of the colours that vibrate in the bright sun, of people declaring their freedom by affirming significance in every act.
I believe that new technology will be worth its name only when the Mahabharata will be presented in the Festival
of France in India, and an Indian filmmaker will take a film on René Descartes to Cannes.
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THERE’S ALWAYS
HOPE FOR CINEMA
WITH MARGUERITE DURAS
1985
First published in Cinema India-International, Bombay: NFDC, April–June 1985.
Shahani attended the Berlin Film Festival in 1985 to screen Tarang at the International Forum
for New Cinema, curated by well-known film historian Ulrich Gregor. This is a review of the
films he saw in Berlin that year, which was published in the shortlived journal of the state-run
National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). Apart from his long-standing admiration for
Duras, he continues his equally long-standing criticism of Godard’s work here, with reference
to his Hail Mary (1985). Less expected is his attack of Robert Kramer, of whom he says, when
the filmmaker is ‘forced to make violence his own methodology’, the ‘subject of the film
becomes its attitude’. Shahani would have occasion to discuss this response with Kramer later
that year when they met at Pesaro, Italy.
We lost count of the degrees below zero to which the temperature had dipped. We lost count of the films we had wanted
to see but missed. Yet Berlin in the snow is more than picturesque. It is bubbling with enthusiasm for cinema in a world
where most nations are facing a new decline in attendance. I gather that the warmth at Berlin has been generated largely
by the efforts of the Gregors who look after the International Forum of Young Cinema. From the personal experience of
meeting them, watching them speak to other filmmakers who had come to present their works, documenting data on the
cineastes and their pursuits, I believe that the Gregors have truly fought to make Berlin a festival where the Alternative
Cinema is treated with as much dignity as the mainstream.
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Yet, there is a crisis of sorts that the cinema must overcome, especially in the Euro-American world. I am referring
to the spiritual–artistic crisis, not the economic one which may well lie at its base. Curiously, it can be compared to the
state of the arts in Europe around the turn of the last century when cinema first appeared, making virtuosity in realistic
painting and theatre redundant; forcing films for many decades, with brief historical exceptions, to take on the burden of
mummifying change in reality. Today, it has certainly reached a point of reaction.
Judging from most of the films in competition, one would say that their theatricality, the made-up stories of
action-packed emotions shot in saturated colour, are a kind of reversal of the cinematographic art and its extraordinary
development. When John Ford made his sagas of the building of a great new society – in the silent days (The Iron Horse)
and after – with all the optimism permeating his form, the robust acting and a logical narrative turning into an epiphany
of the new world, it carried conviction. Robert Benton, with the same skills (Places in the Heart), awarded the prize for
best direction, seems to be saying something that is patently an illusion becoming more and more incredible, the more
you think of its credible presentation, forcing an emotion and nostalgia out of you.
On the other side, in the Young Forum, were films that would jerk you out of such emotions (The Secret Honour).
The fictional portrait of Nixon, personifying a system gone to seed, is as believable as the great building of America by
Griffith and Ford. Altman’s gone all the way choosing the challenging form of working with a single actor, but turning
theatricality on its head. The single actor form particularly suited his subject. There is a space which is deliberately
‘unpeopled’! A space with history as ambition and intrigue and class domination rarefied, where human language, where
it intervenes, is reduced to abuse on miles of tape. The startling cuts to the video machines reflecting back his own
outbursts give the film an aura of frightening mental space that we carry within us in a technological era, devoid of direct
contact. The Secret Honour of Richard Nixon is our disgrace.
Yet what works as truth in fiction surprisingly boomerangs when the critical investigative method is applied in a
realistic framework. Notre Nazi (Our Nazi), also in the Forum, puts to the test, perhaps inadvertently, the virile methods
of the direct, instantaneous exposure. The film made by Robert Kramer shooting Harlan investigating an SS murderer who
considers himself human and has the temerity to be aggressively self-justificatory, forces the filmmaker to make violence
his own methodology. Thus the subject of the film becomes its attitude. What were the filmmakers to do, and what are
we to do as we watch this happening?
There were other films that explored the fascist phenomenon but with a certain distance and dignity, from Hungary
and from Japan. Masaki Kobayashi’s The Tokyo Trial, a film of four hours and forty minutes, quite enthralled the festival
delegates. It is a film made from a hundred and seventy hours of material conserved by the Pentagon. It took five years
to make and covers the twenty years of Japan that saw the rise of the self-destructive thrust of power to which the
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great Asian nation engaged itself. Louis Marcorelles (Le Monde) describes it as Kobayashi’s reinvention of cinema by
confronting the ‘objective’ reality of the images and sounds of the past with his own discourse of today.
From the historical we transit to a look at the baffling role of sexuality through the legend of the Virgin Mary.
Godard, whose influence on the Alternative Cinema has almost led to a total fragmentation of its classicist language,
seems to share the ambivalent, bewildered feeling of men faced by the emerging ‘self-sufficient’ new woman. Antonioni’s
Identification of a Woman and Godard’s Je vous salue, Marie are, I think, symptoms of the primeval fear of men as
they come into contact with the ‘pure’ creativity of women. In the Western world, there is no better metaphor than
that of the Virgin Mother even when it is used with tongue-in-cheek irony by a new-look Jean-Luc Godard, looking for
spiritual contact where the physical seems to have broken down. But Godard’s strategy is dubious: the picture-postcard
quality of his landscapes, the back-lit shots of odourless nudity, the fragments of event and body, are of course an
evident conterpoint to the unashamedly metaphysical concerns of a great artist feeling despondent, old and left out.
The inverted female triangle, the principle that Marie as a young girl is trying to assert, her desire for the union of her
parents, may have indeed given Godard the sign for developing a more pagan metaphysics. The sketch of the young girl
by Godard’s friend Anne-Marie Mieville precedes the film, and seems to provide more than a ‘psychological’ explanation
for the behaviour of that woman who does not need a man to create new life.
Godard’s own metaphysics seems to separate the soul and body so that the possibility of a new ethic does not seem
to work from the Virgin’s pagan sources. Instead, it is a return to her purity. So Godard remains a good Christian; indeed
he gets all the laurels from the Catholic and evangelical organisations in spite of frontal nudity and the ironic shots of
the animals present at the Child’s birth.
But the metaphysics that scaled far greater heights than Godard’s was that of the great writer-turned-film director,
Marguerite Duras. Her film, Les Enfants, goes like an arrow to pierce the problem of being oneself and knowing the
world. Ernesto, the principal character in the film, does not want to go to school because he ‘does not want to learn
what he does not know’. Nothing will bring him back to school – the affectionate parents who let him decide as he will,
the understanding teacher who soon learns that the child is asking the most fundamental of questions, the scandalised
journalist who is angry to find that that there is no possible institutionalisation for such genius. Yet that genius is in every
human, ‘schooled’ into conformity by society. If it can freely recreate language like Ernesto, like Marguerite Duras, we
might yet keep the spirit alive in spite of the gloom of a well-meaning but totally misconstrued world. The film has a
playful use of language and gesture appropriate to its message, creating beautiful moments of light and laughter in its
visually vacant surface.
There is a lot of hope for cinema so long as the likes of Duras are with us.
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FILM AS A CONTEMPORARY ART
1985
Delivered as the Damodaran Memorial Lecture, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 1985.
First published in Social Scientist, Vol. 18, No. 2, March 1990.
This is Shahani’s first comprehensive text on the cinema. With his three Rita Ray Memorial
Lectures delivered in Calcutta in 1988, this may be said to constitute the kernel of his
contributions to film theory. The essay explicates several of his well-known concerns around
film – notably that of narrative sequence, first developed in his ‘Notes for an Aesthetic of
Cinema Sound’ (pp. 179–84) – but here it also includes his own cinema, which he rarely discusses
in his writings, and its origins in film, literature, music and the visual arts. This is also Shahani’s
first elaborate definition of what he considers the ‘epic’ in the cinema, derived on the one side
from indigenous epic practices, and on the other, from Eisenstein and Brecht.
From the mute to the articulate, that is how I see my presence amongst you. At its origin, my métier is one of seizing
shadows and reflections. Yours is that of grasping the very substance of that flux that the world is made of: the world
that we together interpret and, sometimes, change. The Heraclitean paradox, after all, can only be overcome by an active
intervention in that world, which we may know only as we ourselves transform it by an infinite series of acts. Each of our
individuated beings is a creation of that very process of interaction. The world shapes us as we change it. You have taught
us to recognise it; to name epochs and events, to grasp what lies underneath them. Is that perhaps the reason why we
respond with palpitating hearts when we look at the banal event of a train chugging on to a platform, amongst the very first
moving pictures taken by the Lumière Brothers? I remember watching these and other equally mundane happenings with
Ritwik Ghatak at a film festival here about ten years ago, in a package of the Lumière films. We smiled, as if to reaffirm our
faith in the magic that could be wrought from these mute, banal, mechanically reproduced images.
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The history of the cinema – viewed both materially – from the time of the invention of the cinematograph – and
mentally – ever since the time we wished to hold together our perceptions and acts, whether in sounds fashioned with
frequency and stress to become vessels of meaning, or in tones, colours and lines to contain a fleeting glimpse of eternity
in our desire – has the same movement in time that I experience here in space.
From the mute to the articulate.
Indeed, it is a necessary condition for every single work of art that it proceed from an insight unknown to the artist
himself: an insight of which the artist has a suggestion of a feeling, unnamed and yet unnameable, constantly present.
The presence of a thought that he cannot recognise. The gratuitousness of sensations that grow from self-evolving
forms. Like cells in the body, each made like the other, yet each gaining its own quality, becoming bone or liver and,
what is more, ova and sperm. Later, perhaps, we can decode their progression through simple mathematical formulae of
logarithmic spirals.
Quality may be explained by quantity. And organs of function may perhaps thus be reproduced. But the nature of
individuation in art from both the mechanical and organic viewpoints requires what would amount to an error, be it
rational, anthropomorphic, even aesthetic.
A work of art has to take you from disorder to disorder (of the world from which its own particular order is created).
The most succinct statement of art’s relationship to natural and social order is perhaps that it is unfettered by laws
prescribed by Destiny or Nature, that it transcends them (Mammata’s opening of the Kavya Prakash).
It is, perhaps, for this reason that art seems forever to fluctuate from the didactic to the sensate, sometimes
containing the one in the other, in fickle yet versatile agitation, violating its own aesthetic norms, destroying the craft that
makes its realisation possible, considering its states of equilibrium states of death. Forever, threatening death with life.
I should think that the spirit of modernity consists in this – and yet its origins, as we have seen, lie in centuries of
tradition; not in something fixed but as something fickle, versatile, trembling with its own desire to change, to disturb
the state of entropy.
The particular fault in man freed his epistemological instinct from that fate which he considered organic to his
being. The swollen foot of fate (Oedipus) did not impel him to a destructive knowledge. It was something rotten in the
state that he acted out his tragedy against, man against the disease engendered by him. At the cost of self-destruction,
with the benefit of redeeming that spirit which was until then his fault.
It is not truth, with its axioms or its evidence, its homes alternating between the mental and the physical, its
transformations and conclusions sanctified by religion or science, that by itself constitutes the content of art. It is the
tension between the axiom and the evidence, the very process that produces the generative error, that makes our actions
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emanate from our being (itself not essential, static, axiomatic or evident) from moment to moment, that forms the
epistemology of beauty. It is the praxis of truth, not its descriptions, definitions, nor its realisations.
We may all disagree with a work of art and yet acknowledge it as great; as providing us with insights every time we
approach it – even if it be removed from us in space, time, ideology, established knowledge and its structures, the ethics
of our life and times.
We may distance ourselves from the political logic and the consequences of Gandhi’s action, but we can only go
into raptures over its poetry. We can acknowledge in him what we would rarely do with anyone else, his claim that ‘there
is truly sufficient Art in my life, though you might not see what you call works of art about me’. For, as he says, and rightly
so, ‘Jesus was to my mind a supreme artist because he saw and expressed Truth.’ And so was Mohammed. They strove first
for truth, and the grace of expression naturally came in.
Lest we forget, these are the extensions of art in life, where beauty and truth are simultaneous with socialised
virtue. From practice, we return to practice.
Art can make this possible only if we allow it to be free of the diagnosis and prescription of practice. Even for
someone who identified himself with the prophets, it was necessary to say that ‘it would be an impertinence on my part
to hold forth on Art . . . my functions are different’. This, from a man who has shaped our crooked destinies, and to whom
writers from Gujarat accord the mastery of simple discourse, in a language seeking to be close to speech and experience.
In the tradition of the Bible. Of Jesus and Mohammed. The prophet is of necessity a poet. The poet, however, is often
frightened of the future (with good reason) that he foresees.
If we, following Lenin, would defend Tolstoy, in spite of his aristocratic ideology, his blissful ignorance of the sciences
of psychology and society, it is because he was able to contain the contradiction of his times in his own subjectivity, finding
his truthful objective practice in literature. Strangely, the very sciences that he ignored have acknowledged him as the great
master, giving birth to an ethics diametrically opposed to it. Simone de Beauvoir, the doyenne of feminist writing, sees in
Natasha’s growth the truth of feminine being, as she examines herself before the mirror, revealing and hiding the ‘second’
sex as it bursts forth in the life of every young girl through a subtle subterfuge of etiquette, sensations and emotions.
We who share the belief that we can live with dignity only if we know and act upon the historical process, have
to embrace that very work which rejects meaning in history: to find significance, both individual and collective (for the
absence in the other ensures the absence in one), where apparently no purpose exists.
It is for these reasons that art which proposes itself either as purely political or as ‘mass communication’ can neither
achieve its own purpose, declared or otherwise, nor perform that function which it has acquired (through history) by
its autonomy, its judgements upon itself inherent in the individual work of art. To give back to those people what we
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have learnt from them requires an internalisation whereby their spiritual aspirations become social habit and custom,
open-ended forms that contain ever-changing thought and feeling, so that we may truly speak of a tradition. Culture
cannot be put to use by intention, except for short-term goals, either of an immediate practical nature (as in ritual-based
mythology) or in such configurations as arise out of an epic context. All myths are totalitarian in their neat and absolute
oppositions, where the concrete replaces the abstract, and where it is divorced from its historical narrative understanding.
The concreteness of the myth has to dissolve itself in the practice of history, where it becomes an instance of the many
metonymies of that it suggests.
Not a confusion of the container for the contained. Nor its opposites. A myth that saturates the mind with the heavy
concreteness of its parts cannot give us an indication of the whole. Its own wholeness often hides the volatile possible
relationships between itself and its parts as it juxtaposes, superposes and opposes them against each other.
Yet, when the mythical enters the epic, it releases the epic of its own fatalism, as it frees itself from its own aesthetic
and habitual prison.
In Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ritwik Ghatak), Durga, whom we should have propitiated with our sacrifice, is herself
fragmented. Her visarjan is not that of an idol sent back into the waters to be recreated, but consumed by the fires
of industrial disease. Durga is sacrificed to us. Will she return, forever to be thus consumed, or will we celebrate her
recreation as she stumbles upon us?
In The Trial of Joan of Arc (Robert Bresson), Joan of Arc pleads that she not be consigned to the fire because she is not
impure. Yet she has cut her hair, worn men’s clothes, driven them to battle against the wishes of the Church, liberated her
people, and claims to have spoken with god’s angels. The myth of purity, the reality of history, the question of freedom.
In the miraculous film from Prabhat Studio, Sant Tukaram (Fattelal/Damle), it is not the division of the material and
the spiritual as the opposition between the female and the male principle (upon which its mythology and theology is
based), but its interpretation, which brings to it the spiritual force of the saint-poet’s life and song. The direct access to
god through the deux ex machina is merely crudely decorative compared to the freedom that he gives to the other, the
maternal concern for suffering that he can only alleviate by words, the feminine helplessness, even his dance-like poise
that may eventually be learnt from and acquired by the prostitute. If there is spiritual poignance in the film, it is when
things go against the intention, the persecution becomes sharper, nature responds with hunger, or, when rewarded, he has
to undress his woman of ornaments.
In my own Tarang, I have taken the ritual myth of Urvashi and Pururavas, tragic in man’s search for immortality, to
speak of the potential future that has yet to manifest itself in our reality.
To apply a reductionist approach to myths and to saturate their meanings – as is done more often in analysis
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than in practice – is again to find in them a concreteness that can only become exploitative. It is thus imperative both
to maintain the ambivalence of their terms, their poetry, and to place them alongside history, fact and facts, their
relationship, the epic.
Not the concrete. But its immanence.
Itihasa. Thus it was.
‘Thus’, because the manner often contains the matter, the relationships of fact that change and call for a new mode
of action. ‘It’ includes all that is in the world, including that which may be its potential. ‘Was’, the past tense, is necessary
so that you may actually judge the process of the event; not get involved in the illusion, the event itself. Narrative theatre,
as Brecht saw it, also breaks off that cathartic process which, instead of making you recognise your condition, purges you
of its consciousness. Sequence, as we have been approaching it through history, frees the myths (consequently our axioms,
scientific or moral) of the spatial rigidity of their terms and meaning.
To an idealist, as often to those who deal in ideas, artists, scholars, intellectuals, sequence may initially seem to be a
form of corruption. A vague regret is often found in the loss of purity, of aestheticist confirmation. A return to the origins
can make us either see the whole historical process to enrich us or breed a nostalgia for the past, to seek an unreal home
for our spiritual life.
As against this, the epic may go to the origins: the archetypes of thought, emotion and spiritual desire,
and dissolve them in the present. The sensuous, contemporary life, seen from the perspectives of both past and
future: film.
Like music, the cinema is experienced as a continuous, live process of energies. It is conceived and best remembered
in a flash, a composite whole. Bresson: ‘Your film must resemble what you see on shutting your eyes. (You must be
capable, at any instant, of seeing and hearing it entire).’ Unlike novels, it does not describe, it makes us see and hear
(Griffith). Unlike theatre, drama, it cannot bear the language or space of metaphor. It can precede it, reveal it, mock at
it, bring together the metaphor’s elements that are absent with the present; the word and action; man and nature; the
crafted and the crude.
The dramatic will always have to yield to the epic in cinema. It inevitably frees us from anthropocentrism. If there is
drama in cinema, it is that of all nature. Remember The Condemned of Altona where the cold outdoors, the nape of the
heroine’s neck, her overcoat, expressed more than the wonderful dialogues of Sartre: words for a moral action manque.
In Solaris and The Stalker, the drama is of all nature. Tarkovsky’s dramatic structure is conventional to the point of

31, 32
Colour in relation to the construction of ‘epic structures’. fig. 31 In Khayal Gatha (1988), the
softer colour-within-a-colour is used for the elusive figure of the nayika flitting across spaces.
fig. 32 In Maya Darpan (1972), on the other hand, it has a harder purpose, linked directly to
individual motivation. fig. 33 A third use: the famous ‘blue nude’ in Maya Darpan, alluding
208 to ‘folk paintings of the goddesses of fertility’.
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having symbolic characters, near unities of time and place and action within which the characters are brought together
to play out an allegory of something happening beyond the unified time, place and action, even if it be in outer space
or the mysterious zone. It is his cinema, the content that emerges from the activising of nature, that breaks through
the conventionality of his thought. I contend that this degree of activising of nature is a gift to him, not only from the
present evolution of our re-thinking on the issue of Subject and Object, but also and first, a gift of cinema to its author.
The rediscovery of the epic in modern times has often been the rediscovery of these oriental forms of culture that have
given importance to the multifaceted nature of our experience. Practice is not limited by the rational; nor its opposite.
The cinema cannot imitate reality. The camera and tape-recorder certainly do. Nor does ‘nature imitate art’, as has
been claimed, in the cinema. ‘Your genius is not in the counterfeiting of nature . . . but in your own way of choosing and
coordinating bits taken directly from it by machines’ (Bresson).
Akbar Padamsee, while watching some films with us, had remarked, ‘The cinema is condemned to be cubist.’ I would
like to refer you to Eisenstein’s quotations in The Film Sense (of René Guilleré, in ‘Synchronisation of Senses’), which bring
these statements out as being perfectly true in a certain openly significant tradition in the cinema.
Bresson appauverises the image. Luis Buñuel enriches it by the unexpected. Remember that the only visual he could
remember of Bresson’s was that of the nun’s foot being kissed in Les Anges du Peche. Eisenstein constructs it. Even
Rossellini, who was so often quoted as saying, ‘Things are. Why change them?’, discovered another gift of the cinema to
our culture: things are, discover their process of being, give it the name that cinema alone can give it, teach people with
these things what these things are. This respect for reality ultimately led him to the didactic, not the formless poetic
impressionism that was fashionably thought of by the Cahiers du Cinema group and later by structuralists like Christian
33 Metz who denied the possibility of an articulated discourse to the cinema. I wonder what they would have made of
the didactic in the later Rossellini. Repeated the subtle subterfuges of Bazin in describing Bresson as a realist, where the
‘reality’ of literature (the text) is said to have been juxtaposed against the realism of the image (which we know to have
been appauverised)?
Among our spiritual formalists, I would place the poet Bal Sitaram Mardhekar very high. For at no point did he
confuse techniques with form, nor mistake the material used for the medium. The impetus that he has given to modernity
in Marathi poetry is well known. But for us to fully internalise his contribution, we need to elaborate upon his quite
original practice and theory of aesthetics in the fine arts (in which he includes literature); to finally oppose it, having learnt
from him. This theory of aesthetic organisation does not deprive us of content; even as it militates against sentimentality,
it reaffirms beauty and truth. While it denies – wrongly – the presence of ideological matter, it attacks the reactionary
for not seeing that his demand for converting an aesthetic organisation into a moral or ennobling organisation is also

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a demand for propaganda, for art as use-object. Indeed, it may expose sentimentality in progressive art as well. The
greatest tragedy for works of art in our times has been to treat them as use-objects.
Where the left seems to let itself down, again and again, is that in the field of culture it refuses to take up a position
arising from its own understanding of history. As we free ourselves from craft, we should free our consciousness: that is
the history of art. A greater degree of organisation of the collective should produce a greater degree of individuation.
Christopher Caudwell knew this. It can work for an aesthetic principle too. The more one structures one’s forms and
thoughts, the more one can improvise.
We have perhaps one of the greatest traditions of improvisation in classical Indian music, where perhaps the most
dramatic changes took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like a great source of a movement in art which
defies all notions of the symptoms of the Asiatic Mode. The ability to improvise and yet present a sure sense of form is
at the centre of the practice and enjoyment of our musical development, i.e. raga-based music.
To me it seems a worthwhile conjecture that a civilisation best expresses its construction of time through its music.
For Ritwik Ghatak, film form was essentially musical. Satyajit Ray has said that the looseness of narrative construction in
Indian cinema can partly be attributed to our musical tradition. In comparison, he feels that the Western musical tradition
builds up narrative in much the same way that Western cinema and its related performing arts do. It would seem to me
that a certain period in Western classical music, beginning from the Renaissance, definitely corresponds to the evolution
of the descriptive narrative, culminating in the novel. But as the novel reached its fulfilment, and its crises, in the work of
James Joyce (refer Eisenstein), so did that tradition in the early part of this century. When it did reach this point of crisis,
it not only began to look for dissonances, but also at the possibility of extending the scale.
Indian music has a continuous scale (Pandit Sharadchandra Arolkar). The search for fixing it into 22 rigidly marked
points between two shadjas therefore seems problematic. If they are looked upon as an approximation, with notes
tending towards an adjacent ascendant or descendant, and as notes that have a hint of a third, a fourth or a fifth, then
alone will the naming or mathematical fixing of these notes have value in practice.
Recognisably, the internalisation of the interrelationship of shrutis (ansha, the proportion) would lead us to the forms
that we would develop in movement, between one static step and the next, between the arrangement of compositional
elements in the static step itself. The proportions would, for example, certainly tend towards a greater nuancing than a broader
clash of interweaving melodies would. Moreover, concepts of editing would themselves include fractional proportions and
not merely those of broad displacements in fixed and unshaded ratios. The scenic division, the shot-to-shot transition, indeed
the disposition of movement whether physical or that of the eye, may, for all we know, be guided by the basis of raga
construction: graha, ansha, nyasa.
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The beginning of each segment, its home, is with a quality – not so much at a fixed or symmetric beat but around
one of the sub-divisions. The development through a play of proportions, of the notes in tension with the syllables
(akshara/sahitya) and the tala. The very poverty of the sahitya gives it musical strength: like mother and child themes in
painting and sculpture. In the cinema, the development of specific quality is in tension with the thematic – and by this all
elements will manifest themselves as objective data where interrelationships jell only after the whole work is perceived
as developing. The end of development is a point of rest (nyasa). We tend to work on time and space, those of us who
have internalised Indian music around cyclic grids of this nature. Looking at the Mughal miniature paintings of Akbar’s
period suggested to me the hypothesis that our sense of musical construction may extend to space or its temporalisation.
Since Indian classical music embodies all relations, including those of space, into time-relations, it is of particular
significance in the cinema, an art which necessarily converts space into time. It seems to me that Western music, on
the other hand, converts time-relations into space. Again, a necessity in the construction of sound (time) in the cinema.
Western music not only uses timbre, silence and ‘vertical’ layers to a greater degree than we do, its basic metaphor
has always been that of architecture. In Indian music, the metaphor is that of sculpting, more in its processes than the
finished object, with aspects of the finished object shown in time. The answer to one melodic phrase is given by another
that follows in sequence, immediately or after a lapse. Harmony itself is sequentialised, is not simultaneous, except in
the ever-present drone.
Now, in cinema, we do use sound vertically, taking it from space, using time in space and as space. Whereas the
picture is made either to flow or jump, positions in space become positions in time. For instance, a film made entirely
of the most stacatto images will have the most static rhythm. Evidently, then, Indian music – itself devoid of spatial
construction – can nevertheless become the basis of space construction in cinema. Not that of time, because the cinema
demands the complete transposition of space into time-relations. But where Indian music is itself used as an element in
film, it has to evolve an acoustic, which will make up for the absence of space in its inherent form: silence, reverberations,
the simultaneous presence of harmonics in the tones (timbre). Of course, by the very fact of necessary fragmentation of
music when used in films, it acquires some of these elements. On the other hand, the principles of Western music, in that
they create the architecture of sound, are inevitably a part of cinematic construction.
The cinema, like many other convulsions in contemporary thinking, forces us to give up colonial modes of thought,
based as they are on the Eurocentric idea of development; and move to one of contact and of generative conflict
between systems which have developed one or another aspect of forms, of thinking and of action, achieved obviously
at some cost. The pioneers of geometry, and those who have held it at the centre of its civilisation, are beginning to
acknowledge the limits of their systems. It is up to us who have internalised number, sequence, to either encourage
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ourselves and then to overcome these limits of our separate traditions, or to hide behind our linguistic sophistication.
It is up to us to transform the conditions of our being or to retreat into nativism which sees contact as valid only when
restricted to a discrete group, claiming our identity primarily through closed systems: of language, skin, colour, habit. It is
up to us to reject that image of ourselves that the terms of colonialism/feudalism have imposed upon us.
For, nativism is clearly formed as a reflection of what the colonial/feudal held himself to be, as he did the other.
Contrary to nativism, the programme of self-determination can only be transformative of the present condition – whether
economic, social or cultural, or spiritual, whether of oneself or the other. The cosmopolite, at the other extreme, not able
to internalise the context of his own experience, falls into the same state of inability to transform the present.
It is only by recognising the tension between available forms that one can achieve any transformation. This applies
even to systems available within the culture – like margi and desi in ours. I am led to believe that the remarkable
achievement of our poets in creating or infusing our languages with vitality from the period of the saint-poets has been
in the recognition of such tensions at both a societal and linguistic level. The development of the khayal into what has
been aptly termed a classic-romantic form, owes its efflorescence to precisely the tensions generated between the margi
and the desi; the temple and the court; the court and the people; the nomadic and the settled.
The moment one starts working with two formal systems concerning the arrangement and conceptualisation of the
same experience, not only does an openness enter into our relationships, but there is also a greater broadening of content.
‘Culture-specific’ universalisation – if it were possible at all – is so narrow in its application, so dependent on the idea of
authority, rather than the historicity of tradition, that it can mislead the greatest among us to blind themselves to what is
happening in front of our eyes. I am thinking of Aristotle, whose theory of politics was unable to include the empire that
his own pupil Alexander was building. One is thinking too of Karl Marx, who is today quoted, revised, discussed, as much
as the ancient philosopher. He went against his own understanding of the history of civilisation – probably because he
had imbibed the myth of ‘Western’ culture against our ‘Eastern’ one – to propose the dubious theory of the Asiatic Mode
of Production. I am thinking of the novelists, the filmmakers, who accept the notion of a beginning, a middle and an end,
without questioning the secular teleological functions of such forms that embrace the entire content. To what practice
of ‘nativism’ does its critical-realist function belong? The novel itself destroys, giving values by explaining, examining
reality in such detail that its own purposive action is questioned. Jean-Luc Godard has said that, of course, his films have a
beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order. Rauschenberg had designed a machine that destroys
itself. The novel form, as indeed other kinetic forms of our times, are in a certain tension with forms that either organise
experience in a cyclic manner, or reveal themselves in the cyclic experience.
Inevitably, this cyclic manner of organising will express itself in our music, our writing, our films and our painting. We
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cannot wish it away with a nativist or cosmopolite ideology. Such inter-system tensions give rise to the contemporary
in art; not through a radical uprooting, since they are squarely based on traditions (however eclectic they may be, as
our foremost art critic Geeta Kapur has repeatedly pointed out). To shape the contemporary necessarily involves an
alienation into consciousness, a distancing from convention, that would make it a transformative act.
I think that this state of consciousness/alienation – which has been widely accepted as the human condition
by various schools of modernism – from which the human action arises, is deeply embedded in our culture as well;
perhaps elsewhere too, for realising the moment of truth. Arjuna’s conscious questioning of his dharma is his moment
of self-realisation. The legends of Gautama Buddha’s renunciation, of the Mauryan Ashoka’s embracing of Buddhism, the
subsequently revolutionary ideology and practice of these two greatest men of our history, demonstrate its necessity.
In Yudhishthira, son of Dharma, himself born of shudra yoni, higher than any brahmin in the pursuit of truth, having
mastered anger, arrogance and desire, his constant alienation from his own place in the world, his reticence in living up
to the kshatriya code, so much so that Kunti had to tell Krishna of one who resembled her eldest child, who was told
by his mother that she gave him birth from her vagina, not the anus – that Yudhishthira, world-weary, who saw in his
compassion life assert itself in a dog, not in his kin, could accomplish all the aims of man.
The Mahabharata is full of arguments – and events – against the custom, through comparison with other customs.
It seeks the universal from amongst great dissimilarities, thereby illuminating the particular of the here-and-now. I think
only such tentatives can make a culture resilient. It has been observed by educationists that those who are extremely
adept at observing differences without the ability to observe similarities are unable to develop mental functions.
Needless to say, they are also the most prone to exploitation and physically deprived.
Even realism, at its peaks, refuses to imitate reality. Instead, it systematises it – achieving universality, synthesis,
relations. Leonardo’s sketches of rock and water are based on the study of the action of the one on the other –
demonstrating inadvertently the principles of Chinese painting. If you want to depict the female principle, know the
male; and vice versa. Leonardo’s realism proceeded from natural scientific synthesis, systematisation; Courbet’s from the
great foundations of the sciences of society being laid along the cobbled streets of Paris. Realism in the cinema has its
own peculiar problems. How quickly it breeds the touristic, the propaganda through illusion, and the sentimental, we
have seen already: particularly in the post-War years where the delight in being is transferred to ethnic ornament, when
revolution is packaged for ‘target’ audiences. Reach out for Lenin as you would reach out for chocolates, brute realities
for consumption both; and our children are asked at school who played Gandhi with such verisimilitude, not what Gandhi
stood for. The demand for art-in-use has inextricably linked itself with illusionism and entertainment. Inevitably, even our
classical arts are subjected to this pressure; the evidence of our Shastras is also put to the purpose of such consumerism:
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Ranjayatiti raga
swar varna vishishthena dhwani bhedena ka punah
ranjayate yena sachhitam sa raga samatah sattam.
It is however forgotten that before this hedonistic aesthetic, entertainment was already seen to be subjectivist, as seen in
the Sangeetasar compiled by Pratapsingh of Japiur:
Raag to swar taal ka yukt dhwani hai
Aur anuranjan apni ruchi se hai.
I would not be surprised if this truth were realised earlier, and has been paraphrased in this nineteenth-century
text. The special and the specific in relations is what needs to be emphasised, through which individuation takes place.
In the teaching of the khayal, often the internalisation of the bandish, its specificity, is revealed to you. Such as the light
touching of the varjit swara, pancham, or the sama itself in the Malkauns cheez: Peed na jaani. The specific becomes the
particular not through imitation, but through the development of individual treatment, achieved through the enmeshing
of proportions. Film, while proceeding further from the phenomenology of the novel, its realism of time, also individuates
through its tapestry of proportions. When it states relationships, like the novel, it is reduced to the mechanical function
of its tools. When it overcomes the transparency of the camera and tape-recorder, it goes beyond statement, to evoke.
Thus the statement itself becomes one of the thematic elements, not its content. But when you juxtapose the statement
in idea, as for instance in literature, with the physical/social process underlying the statement, their incongruity leads to
new perceptions and relationships.
The geometry of relationships poses special problems for us: since it is present not only in space but also in time;
since its magical metaphysical import coexist with what we designate in the modern world as rational. I would like to
stress here that the rational has, by social realists and others, often been either opposed or confused with the real, arising
out of philosophic thrusts of idealism and materialism. While speaking to Naum Kleiman of the Eisenstein Museum, he
disclosed a thought of the great filmmaker: in neorealism, Eisenstein had seen the restoration of the magical in art. Just
as talismans, real bones untransformed, or other parts of the body, teeth, fetishes to keep us alive against natural or
social oppression – the return to nature of post-war European cinema (with the exception of a few) became fetishistic in
redeeming the physical reality, although its first tentatives were socially activist. The same fate has fallen on naturalism
practised here and elsewhere in the mid-seventies. Starting as protest and affirming the dignity of our own being, it now
thrives on formlessness and nativism.
In Europe itself, it was only when the anarchy of consumerism examined itself – e.g. in the work of Jean-Luc Godard
or the painter R.B. Kitaj – that, with a sense of irony, the poems of Mayakovsky stood out against the picture-postcard
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idea of a world over and above the parroted quotations of Lenin (Les Carabiniers). The fetishism became the content of
the fetishistic form. It is not formalistic for art to draw attention to its form. It is, on the contrary, laying content open –
as Brecht, Le Corbusier, Eisenstein, Bresson, Kitaj, Ritwik Ghatak (before Godard, in fact) have all shown us. The problem
with European cinema has been its inability to get out of the collage presented by its materialism. Whereas artists in our
country, as perhaps elsewhere among the oppressed – compare Ghatak with Godard, or Vivan Sundaram with Kitaj – can
transform the given sources of reality, since there exists in our mental and material reality a hierarchy of values.
Thus we can return to the question of the geometry of relationships. Geometry must concern itself with more than
two points in space, since even a line can be interpreted in a pure time sequence. The geometrical mode of thinking,
with its forms embodying simultaneous time graphs, extends to relationships inherent in sequences seen as a whole
and completed; as well as those existing between two forms. The planes thus formed are verbal, textual, musical, tonal,
chromatic, etc., whenever simultaneous. Yet, if the cinema is not to degenerate into multi-media bombardment of the
senses (as it often does in our new culture, inspired by theories of target audiences), it has to come to terms with the
significance of these forms, for they contain the feeling, they perform the functions of spreading an internalisation of
human experience, human imagination leading men to transformative change and not merely ritual change.
Now, rational and transformative acts are hardly ever separated at the origins of any civilisation. How are we to
reconcile the refinements of all our arts based on the centrifugal impulse of movement from a still centre, as practised
traditionally here with the rational derivations of geometry, the scientific perspective in its physical and figurative sense,
the representational, the inward with the outward movement? The still centre with the shifting centre, both derived
from the mental space–time continuum?
I do not think that what we are confronting here is merely a reiteration of the subject–object opposition; not merely
the alternating of the abstract and the realist in modern art. These tendencies seem both to be different aspects of the
representational. Ritual, drama, theatre, remain at the centre of the representational in art: the metaphor, the present
standing for the absent. Without a doubt, the art of any civilisation begins there, as magical or cosmic representation. But
it may be that the Asiatic and other older cultures that had a continuous evolutionary development, while maintaining a
link between the arts, began to consider poetry, with its evocative rather than representational character, as the highest of
arts, giving it an autonomy from ritual significance. Music may be considered as a further extension of poetry as it so clearly
evolves from the manner of vocalisation, the intoning of words assuming a greater significance than what the words literally
signified. Dance: beginning as an expressive metaphor, progressively moving towards an achievement with the body, similar
to what music achieved with the voice. On the other hand, the aesthetic formalisation of the epic is completely given
up, itihasa perhaps being seen more as ethical, enlarging significance from the momentary ritual to all of life. In the West
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too, for a long time, and perhaps even today, the epic is seen by the dominant culture as preceding, and therefore more
primitive, than the dramatic; while the lyric, and its further evolution, music, the most evolved of the forms.
It is now that we are faced with the total loss of significance in Europe after the war, in the colonised nations
after the disruption of its cultural values, that the restoration of the epic has become a pressing need. Ethics was the
aesthetics of a remote past. Ethics will be the aesthetics of the future. But the terms are often so neatly reversed
by political expediency that the internalised motif of change (ethics) is projected into the external abstract State
or Party.
Instead of the still centre becoming the shifting centre and building its own harmonies (giving life to dissonances,
abandoning the idea of simultaneity since the centres are never at one place and therefore not of the idealism engendered
by harmony), instead of that, an aesthetic derived from dead laws of the immediate past is anonymously imposed by the
Market and the State – the two most immediate sores – of commodity production and commodity exchange, of which
contemporary art is one of the symptoms (trying to cure itself of the infection that caused it to appear).
Art cannot accept that the relationship between things is the relationship between people. It has to restore
qualitative relationships where the generalised language of exchange has become that of quantifying man’s intervention
in the world. Yet, on the other hand, the potential of abstracting the particular, of internalising the senses and of
transforming, speaking to another far removed in geographical, linguistic, ethnic terms, was never as great as it is today.
Already Rabindranath Tagore had said in 1926:
There was a time when human races lived in comparative segregation and therefore the art-
adventurers had their experience within a narrow range of limits, along the deeply cut grooves
of certain common characteristics. But today that range has vastly widened, claiming from us a
much greater power of receptivity than what we were compelled to cultivate in former ages.
. . . Even then our own art is sure to have a quality which is Indian. When in the name of Indian
Art we cultivate with deliberate aggressiveness a certain bigotry born of the habit of a past
generation, we soothe our souls under idiosyncracies.
The specific realism of commodity exchange which devalues the message and the significance of the work was
noticed some decades ago by Premchand. Speaking of the short story, he derided that tendency in fiction which prefers
the faithful rendering of gossip and rejects significance. Nor would he have accepted the mere reaction to commodity
production that has characterised a great amount of work in film, painting and fiction since the war; the reaction being
either in the acceptance of reification, enforcing voyeurism and a quantifying of human experience, or in the rejection of
abstraction to reaffirm nature in its own state.
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Prakriti ki jo kala hai, woh prakriti ki hi hai, manushya ki nahin. Manushya ko to wohi kala mohit
karti hai jis par manushya ke atma ki chaap ho, jo gali mitti ki bhanti manav hiday ko sanchey
mein pad kar sanskrit ho gayi ho. Us mein hame atmiyata ka sandesh milta hai.
The mediation of man is seen as essential to restore the cognition of his own selfness, precisely what commodity exchange
deprives us of at the same time as it releases us from the fetishism of religion and the fantastic.
Muktibodh rejects the idea of translating experience into poetry, since experience had to be mediated by the
imagination, which works with its own momentum before it enters the momentum of language.
The need to re-invent the language of the painter, poet, musician or filmmaker should be seen not as it often is,
as a return to nature (phenomenological time and imitation of space), but precisely because its relationships are being
reduced to objects, carrying human labour as quantified abstraction.
The modern Indian artist, confronted by apparently antagonistic traditions in his daily life, is in a natural state to
evolve new forms unless he programmatically becomes subservient to a cosmopolite or a nativist ideology. Amrita Sher-
Gil, whose troubled life gave birth to the present-day effervescence of Indian painting, rejected the paltry academicism
of the one, imported from the West, as much as the weak imitation of earlier Indian art. Her need was to find significant
form; in this she could align herself with Ajanta as much as she did with Van Gogh or Gauguin.
How does the reinvention of language – along with our imagination, and the experience that it mediates into
freedom: internally, the commodity that is the work of art, therefore labour and man, as externally, by producing a
commodity which is different from all the others and not seen as the same – how does this provoke us out of a passive
and therefore into an active state? Marx has already clarified how such a work of art stands in relation to societies based
on commodity production:
The same kind of labour may be productive or unproductive. For example, Milton, who wrote
Paradise Lost for five Pounds, was an unproductive labourer. On the other hand, the writer
who turns out stuff for his publishers factory style, is a productive labourer. Milton produced
Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity of his
nature. Later he sold the product for five Pounds. But the literary proletarian of Leipzig, who
fabricates books under the direction of his publisher, is a productive labourer; for his product
is from the outset subsumed under capital, and comes into being only for the purpose of
increasing that capital.
Internally, the object that refuses to subsume itself under capital, yet uses the enormous potential of forms released by
the greater absorption of its systems, to metamorphose from a silkworm into the equal of angels of paradise, has not only
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to dismantle the relations contained in post-capitalist forms, but to reintegrate them, through the medium of imagination If the intellectual has to split off the good from the bad, the true from the false, to recognise the invariant dualities
(not just experience) and the reinvention of language. in nature and culture, so long as it does not turn upon itself and become guilty as in this last century of European art,
Ritwik Ghatak, acknowledging his debt to Brecht, clearly saw the need for the epic (because that alone would the body can throw up a flame that will coil in union, as in M. Govindan’s serpent (Sarpam). The fragmentation of
show how a performance or a work of art is made), developed it further to inject the archetype as the vibrating human subjectivity and its projection into objects of consumption is countered by the celebration of the body in today’s
membrane between the contemporary and the eternal in man. Simultaneously, he showed the fetishism that attaches Indian narrative painting. Even the mathematical mind (Akbar Padamsee) has found its epiphanous song (as characterised
to objects of use, going to its historical origins (Ajantrik). Bresson opposed the cinematography to the cinema: ‘Because by Geeta Kapur), restoring nature to the imagination. Our music, which has always abhorred the readymade polished
you do not have to imitate, like painters, sculptors, novelists, the appearance of persons and objects (machines do concreteness that makes the individual anonymous, takes us back into direct contact with our self-ness, otherwise
that for you), your creation or invention confines itself to the ties you knot between the various bits of reality caught. atomised in unimprovised relationship.
There is also the choice of bits.’ ‘With the centuries, the theatre has bourgeoisiefied. . . . Photographed theatre shows For, now we have to keep in touch and we must do this with our entire self-ness intact. Let there be commerce
how far.’ between us, with full knowledge of our contract, so that the metaphors expressing our thought and emotions neither
With television, one feels that it is lumpenised. hide nor fully reveal their meaning, allowing us to finally annihilate them in silence, to discover that which is, our being.
We have to work towards the re-establishment of those bonds, ‘bonds that beings and things are waiting for, in
order to live’. For this, Bresson replaces the actor with the model, snatching moments of being and not impersonation.
For Amrita Sher-Gil, to proceed away from academicist-realism of models as things she inherited from the tradition
that evolved together with the commodity, through a realisation of her projected subjectivity in her early Indian work
to the Woman Resting on Charpoy where the living subjectivity of her object reaches us with all its languor, was to set
an example to all contemporary artists. In her earlier work, the ‘emotion she characterises in her subjects flows from
sources in herself rather than from the subjects’ (Geeta Kapur). In her later work, these sources themselves get more
illuminated: melancholy becomes languor, palpable, because she has now overcome the alienation of people as things,
rediscovered them in her imagination, found her stylisation, affirmed both our own suppressed sensuality and awareness
simultaneously with hers. ‘We are made to feel a shocking intimacy with the woman by her erotically suggestive pose
and the tilted charpoy which puts us immediately above her. Yet, though she seems to lie passively, there is a restless
movement in the woman which suggests the painful birth of an awareness. A consciousness of the restraints imposed on
her by her social engagement’ (Vivan Sundaram).
The images of dismemberment that Adil Jussawala has found permeating Indian writing are necessary for the
evolution of our language as the re-integrating élan of our new figuration. Our speech and writing evolve the forms and
vocabulary of critical realism, which can no longer rest in the cradle of mechanical causation – the volatile nature of
our language seems to lead to a splintering of consciousness. The only way that literature can begin to contain it, is to
first acknowledge the process. While darkness surrounds us, as in Nirmal Verma’s world, the diaphanous surface of his
language makes us see the arched longing of shifting subjectivities.

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THE PASSION OF
A RESURRECTED SPRING
1986
First published in Ritwik Ghatak: Arguments/Stories, edited by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Amrit
Gangar, Bombay: Screen Unit/Research Centre for Cinema Studies, 1987.
This is Shahani’s third major essay on Ghatak, on his Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1972). Astonishingly,
he only saw this film a decade and a half after it was made, and in Pesaro, Italy. Titash, made as
a Bangladeshi co-production, was effectively unavailable until it was shown first at the Festival
of Three Continents, Nantes, and then at Pesaro. It was an extraordinary moment for Shahani
to see so ambitiously realized a film as this so many years after it was made, and after its maker
– his teacher and that of several in the audience – had passed away.
It was an unusually cold morning last year in Pesaro, Italy, when that name was evoked: Titash. A river’s name it was.
Ritwik Ghatak, who had been driven away from one home to another, had returned to Bangladesh to make Titash
Ekti Nadir Naam. That was over a decade ago, and we had to discover it far away from our shores to be struck by
wonder and awe by its grand lines of myth-thought. This wasn’t transparent celluloid. Here is a film sculpted with
light, with the cold pigmentation that has come down to us from the chiselling of granite and other rock yielding
itself to elemental energy.
In Jukti Takko aar Gappo the elements were presented in their raw form – reason, argument, story, song, that
hunger which is the basis of human creativity – so that when Ritwik calls himself a humbug, a civilisation sees how it
is reduced to ashes. Yet, there was no nihilism; he dies pleading with those who would annihilate their compassion
along with their enemy. Our heroism will only find itself trapped in the mechanical cross-fire of gunpowder if it refuses
to nourish itself on nature and history. For Ritwik, the heroic act, the ultimate and the first sacrifice, has to be the act
of union.
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In Titash, separation in union is made the principle of construction itself. In a sense, of course, this principle has
permeated oriental thinking and almost all of the greatest art in the world. But here it is not just a matter of craft: the
point of release is also the maximum point of tension. It is internalised as a principle of existence. It is as if the feminine
principle, dismembered, used and abused, joined in devices of seduction, juxtaposed in metaphysical search, has finally
revealed itself to give birth to a new form and meaning in spasms of untrammelled passion. This process promises to
be the furthest development of montage in narrative sequence, taking us to its origin in the dialectics of nature as
experienced by us.
Separation in union goes beyond the synthesis of opposites. It opens up layers of experience of the mind and body
that were hitherto latent, presented only in mythological thought, unyielding to science and open-ended codes. Now, it is
up to us to rob and hoard it with the guilt of male knowledge, or to choose, instead, to deliver it in its pristine creativity.
I think Ritwik has warned us through the body of his life’s work that it is a secret that will resist all vivisection,
containing both pleasure and pain, to return us to that caesura where we pant for breath.
To come to that bank of wisdom, Ritwik himself had to swim against the current of rivers that forked out in
coquettish impulse. The storms of history that have so uprooted and dislocated millions of individuals, had thrown him
on the metalled roads of Calcutta and beyond, leaving him footsore and burning with rage.
The refugee asked for food and shelter every time he was hurled into the city, sent away by the one who fed him
to discover the abode of Yama.
Yet, what could she do? It was not her wilful nature that had turned her into a demoness. It was the greed and
rapacity of men that had introduced these divisions which did not cease to multiply. Before the good and the bad, there
was the giving, the bringing forth, the flesh of the flesh, the bone of the bone.
Ritwik must have known it all along, otherwise where would he have found it? But this knowledge remains hidden,
its subtle rhythms covered by the very instruments that should help us reveal their melodies of time. From ideology in
Nagarik, through the metaphors of Ajantrik, turned upside down, through the prisms of consciousness that dispersed and
fragmented our vision, he was looking for that integration which he presents in Titash.
It was as if the erotic impulse in its cosmic sense had been suppressed. Not unlike Nita of Meghe Dhaka Tara, who
gave without receiving, only to succumb to tuberculosis engendered by a parasitic environment. Ritwik echoes Nita,
affirming his desire for life, by integrating the principle of fertility with the feminine erotic impulse in Titash. At the
end of Jukti Takko aar Gappo as well, he seems to suggest it, but its fierce manifestation overwhelms its ambiguity. For
it to reach a true integration, Ritwik had to show its fragments in Meghe Dhaka Tara, its violation in Subarnarekha, the
resistance to its promise in Jukti Takko aar Gappo.
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When he had displayed the fragments as he saw them, the fierce, the erotic and the nurturing, it was only the last one
that he internalised and celebrated. The fierce seemed to be an essential persistence of the past, demanding and exigent
of sacrifice, personified by the biological mother. The erotic had been reduced to the sensate and seductive, incapable of
bearing a spiritual future. It was only the nurture of the heroine that gave of itself not only to the demands of innocent
need, expressed in the impulsion of music and scientific enquiry, but also to the violence of selfish divisiveness.
In Komal Gandhar the splitting had taken hold of every layer of life – the Partition of Bengal had become the
generative mechanism of all that was to follow. Sita of Subarnarekha had the strength and the youth to inspire men
to their manhood but the ‘circumstance’ of history reduced her to a suicidal seduction, the once golden marshes to an
abandoned airfield of destruction, and knowledge to hedonistic wasteland.
It is the knowledge of being separated that creates the passion in Kishore of Titash, that madness which had made
of itself a tribal archetype, upon which the great myths, across cultures, of Siva and Christ had been built.
For me, it was startling to find that such diverse mythologies as those of the self-created phallic god and the
immaculately conceived martyr could rest upon the same archetype. It is not only the long hair and their unflinching
attention to the secret of being that characterises them, but also the way they are placed in relation to the evolved tribe.
It is only through the realisation of their madness that tradition will live, renew itself and Death can be forgiven for
drawing every child to himself.
There the archetype ends and the myths make their own distinctive elaborations.
Siva had left loose his long tresses and the waters of the Ganga had rushed out to flood the world. He had to tie
them together again to contain her flow. Is this a reversal of an earlier myth or an anticipation of Leonardo da Vinci’s
metaphor of water for hair? In a great access to daring, Ritwik creates his grand pause of silence in Titash by a shot of hair
and water that unites the two terms of the container and the contained. A repose of such bursting energy that it makes
real the imagined creation of the universe.
For, in the end, all myths refer to origins, ultimate causes that precede the concept of god. Titash Ekti Nadir Naam is
not about the drying up of a river but of bringing it forth again. It is itself a ritual which takes on the form of ritual-myth
that preceded theism and its attendant institution of prayer. Like the Vratas that created fertility through transference
of human modes of reproduction and thought-feeling to nature. That is the basis of language and, therefore, science as
well as myth.
After Nagarik, Ritwik began to search for the content of the ideology that had seemed to him to be the only true
restorative one. To unravel that content, he had to investigate, precisely, the forms that materialism had specifically
spanned our own and other cultures. He had then to wait for cinematography itself to yield to these forms. In that sense,
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he is the truest inheritor of Eisenstein. His concern with all language, extended to cinematography, made him question
the metaphor by giving inside it, viewing it in movement, like the Cubists, in Ajantrik. From these began his rejection of
the pathetic fallacy.
That’s how he reached the 180-degree panoramics that spoke of the grand indifference of nature to human suffering
with tragic resonances in Meghe Dhaka Tara. The absence of the metaphor itself became the foundation of the construct
of tragedy. Unlike the presence of the metaphor and the absence of the reality that the Greek dramatists had bestowed
upon world art. Its development in romanticism by extending and particularising the metaphor in organic form was that
mysterious blending of the East and the West from which all contemporary art must start. And it has the metaphor’s
presence in the romantic tradition, come to us through realism, which Ritwikda had to contend with, break apart and
reintegrate through metonymy, by itself a more primitive form; but vibrant with greater energy and yielding itself to
higher transformation through the interventions of a scientific consciousness of reality.
Hence, the freedom to juxtapose in the same frame, the extension of the little girl, Basanti, the boat and the river,
in a continuous unification of articulate humanity and nature.
It is through bringing together the container and the contained as the reality, that he presents the emptying of
content that characterises the falsifying myths as against the vitalising one.
This is unprecedented in cinematography and perhaps has just one precedent exception in the whole history of
world art, the great Buddhist period of sculpture and painting in India.
I think the depth of Ritwikda’s research has today moved filmmakers, critics, archivists, to make an intense assertion
that he and his cinematography belong to the world; that we owe it to ourselves to show it to everyone, to preserve it
and to develop it. Yet, his cinema has not found a place in the market.
For the market is concerned neither with the passion that brought it about, nor with the resurrection of spring that
it fondly believes to display eternally.
Yet it claims to be Christian in its ethics and pagan in its celebration of life.
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IN THE FOREST OF THE NIGHT
1987
First published in The Times of India, Bombay, 5 July 1987.
Shahani reconnected with filmmaker John Abraham, his old friend and former colleague from the
Film Institute, at the Pesaro Film Festival in 1985, and at the first Bombay screening of Abraham's
Amma Ariyan (1986) the following year. Amma Ariyan had been made as a result of community
support in Kerala and had confirmed the filmmaker's iconic status in that state. Shahani wrote
this essay as an obituary for Abraham, who died under tragic circumstances in 1987.
In the old Italian town of Urbino, the cobblestones curved upon a hill to take us to a high-vaulted museum. I remember
standing for long, transfixed by an icon of the Virgin, the child held out to fasten us with his eyes. The reds that surrounded
the worshipped figures were as bright as the kumkum that we apply to idols of stone. Yet one always returned to Mary’s
gaze that held the child as strongly as her limbs. I heard a gentle but insistent whisper, ‘She is offering him . . .’.
That was John Abraham standing beside me, looking even more intently than the Virgin at the Child.
‘Yes’, I said. I had no need to say any more.
John had accepted that he was the infant to be sacrificed.
It was, in a sense, his choice – born out of need. But one wonders if one is compulsively reinforcing such primeval
practice through the ethics of our institutions. Is the artist as the prophet destined to die young and unfulfilled, so that
his work may render fecund our impoverished land?
The mother, in Amma Ariyan, is exhausted. Yet she gives birth to so many sons who die in anonymity. John Abraham
wanted to give each one of them an identity, if not a name. It is not easy to do so. For names have a way of becoming
spurious, fixing the individual in a religious, social framework beyond which he may not extend himself.
When John presented Amma Ariyan, he spoke of reaching out to the people, working with the masses. I squirmed in
the hard chair of the auditorium, remembering all the dictators and demi-gods who speak in the name of an undifferentiated
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mass. The difference was that John spoke quietly, with the certainty of one who has walked through the forest of the
night. It was as if he were tired and wanted a drink. His words were transparent screens through which you could see the
involuntary concern of a mother.
He could never stand the opaque shells that we build around us to shelter us from reality. Once, while travelling
together on the ‘Deccan Queen’, he picked out the luminous faces and clapped his hands with joy. Those, on the other
hand, who wore masks of self-importance were as good as dead to him. At Pesaro in June 1985, he booed his own widely
acclaimed film. It was done less to disown a work he had outgrown, more to puncture the posture that cineastes assume
for their public image.
An identity derived solely from the image is soon discovered to be a cipher. Now does one fill that empty container
with a selfness if, as in infancy, one recognises one’s image in the mirror before knowing what one is about? Amma Ariyan
begins with a man looking at his image in the lagoon where he bathes. Later, the reflection is found in the faces of men
without life. On the other hand, the populace multiplies, infinitely, like cells in a reproductive body.
The paradox of it all is that to come out of the privileged space of the womb, even to define oneself within it, to
grow, one has to suffer a series of separations. It is not cowards that die a thousand deaths but the brave who venture
out into the world. Without separation or death, there is no metamorphosis.
John felt that he had to keep himself open to catastrophic crisis all the time, to realise a dream, if nothing else.
After our first visit to Kerala, my wife and I had met him in Madras. We sounded as if we had discovered a potential
paradise around Trichur.
‘Come and live on my land’, he said in immediate response.
‘What will we do there?’
‘You make films and I will till the land for you, feed you with tapioca and sardines.’
He acted on all the impulses that he had towards those he wished to hold and protect. At Lodi Gardens in New
Delhi, he embraced a tree at night and was bitten by crawling insects all over his face. He always recalled it as one of the
happiest moments of his life.
His fluent, nomadic existence was an affirmation of all being. It had no morality. It had a depth of concern that
wished to go to the source where infinitesimal pulsations begin, strike a note whose overtones stay forever in the
atmosphere. The envy of the mother in John’s case could have made of him a little Narcissus, attributing to himself the
powers of creation and self-containment.
That envy that we all have in some measure could have drained the nourishing breast as he did the bottle.
I think that in the last few years, John had begun to realise that it is possible to overcome envy. He had begun to
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want to become the mother himself, in his own fashion. He wanted to be in touch with the spores that burst into muscle,
leaf and gill. He was equally fascinated by the geometry of existence.
But to go far into space in flight seemed like a betrayal of the mother. Sometimes he would get tired of that infinite
contact with reality which he wished to sustain.
He turned away his eyes from the sharp green of the rice fields – to seek comfort in music, in ideas. At those times,
he would ask young ladies to cover themselves in drapes like the Madonna.
The girls did not take offence, because they knew that he was actually identifying himself with them.
It was no longer in the mirror-image of himself, the infant offered up to the world, that he sought his identity.
He had now transferred his identity to the Virgin Mother. He would have found himself in Giovanni Bellini’s paintings
between 1460–1464. Here, the Madonna rejoices in her infant’s body, only just separated from her, while her reverie turns
into an averted, wistful look inwards at what separates her from the socialised world.
John’s next film would have needed to carry no reports, messages, corpses, to the mother. He would have boldly
gone to the crossroads and demanded a sacrifice for himself.
GENIAL BLASPHEMIES OF
LUIS BUÑUEL
1987
First published in The Times of India, Bombay, 15 January 1987
Four years after Buñuel’s death in 1983, a retrospective of his films was held in Delhi. While in
Paris in the late 1960s as a student, Shahani had attempted to make contact with Buñuel when he
was beginning the shooting for his Belle de Jour; and although they never met there was a brief
exchange of correspondence between them, as mentioned here. In this essay, Shahani outlines
Buñuel’s essential strategy as comprising two moves. One, where ‘the most brutal unconscious
phantasies are shot like a newsreel’. And two, where the ‘most commonplace events, borrowed
from the clichés of commercial cinema, are made to bristle with animal candour’. We are thus,
he says, faced with a phenomenon that was of direct interest to Shahani’s own early cinema:
‘banal surfaces that electrify everything within’.

‘In practice, I am not at all a sadist or masochist. I am only so in theory’: that was Luis Buñuel talking to André Bazin in 1954.
Sexualised violence is the mainstay of television and cinema all over the world. In India, up to the late 60s, we
found it mainly in the domestic melodrama. Women were dragged by their hair, while their lovers were consumed
by tuberculosis and unrequited love. The obscure object of desire has never been within our reach. Now that mass
communication is the ‘in’ thing, women are possessed by soaps and phallic power guaranteed by motorbikes. A conflict-
free society is equated with the promised satisfaction of unconscious fantasies. A ‘good’, ‘progressive’ social message is
added on as extra fuel for a fire. In the meantime there is perpetual excitement. We are fast getting our children hooked
on to it.
Buñuel had loved Bresson’s Angels of Sin and, in particular, the scene where the nun’s foot is kissed. Throughout
the film Buñuel had felt a kind of anticipation of something that would burst forth in an image. Here it was

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‘troublante’, disquieting, ‘But having said that, I do not like to kiss the feet of dead nuns nor those of green cows,
nor any foot at all . . .’.
Buñuel’s inversions are extraordinary. It is easy enough to spot them in the stories. The people with the ‘good’ social
message, like Nazarin and Viridiana, are purged of their own aggression which maquerades as faith, love and charity. All
hell breaks loose as those that they try to rehabilitate, act out the reality of imagination that is theirs and ours. The last
supper turns into an orgy.
It is the image, after all, that shocks. Yet, he had said to Francois Truffaut, ‘Technique does not pose any problems
for me . . . with my cameraman. I sometimes compose a superb shot, very precious; one takes care of everything, one
is finicky and at the moment of taking it, one bursts out laughing and one destroys it all to shoot simply, without
camera effects.’
But one observes a trajectory here to arrive at that image which is at once simple and powerful. There is a strategy
worked out in two moves. The most brutal unconscious phantasies are shot like a newsreel. The most commonplace
events, borrowed from the clichés of commercial cinema, are made to bristle with animal candour. We are faced with
banal surfaces that electrify everything within.
In this way, instead of identifying with sadistic impulses, we are made to recognise them as everyday occurrences of
the mind. In psychoanalysis verbalism plays the same role as does this seemingly unmediated recording of violence that
we habitually project upon the other.
A ‘civilised’ society pushes into the dark recesses of our minds, desires created by its prohibitions. They are then
displaced and transferred to objects and persons which create the fiction in which our lives get imprisoned. From Freud’s
time to ours, a shift has taken place in the way we deal with the erotic. The violence of repression has transformed itself
into seductive deceit.
Buñuel and the surrealists clearly thought of the erotic as a liberating force. But he has spanned the transition to our
day when it is used to tie you down to living out a dream manufactured by others for you.
Belle de Jour, about a middle-class woman who indulges her masochistic fancy in a brothel for perverts, was
Buñuel’s greatest commercial success. Characteristically, he says that he attributes it more to the ‘marvellous whores
than to my direction’.
Blasphemy was a way of life for him. He obviously carried it over in his pronouncements about his own films. He was
a heretic. And, as he himself points out, all heretics have something deeply religious about them. I think that in Buñuel
the ‘religious’ was his strong sense of commitment to chasing the phantoms of liberty. It also expressed itself in the sense
of mystery that he attached to life.
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I remember in 1968, when it was not very fashionable to recoil from any sort of violence, a conversation about
Buñuel with a tall slender woman in black who worked with Godard.
‘You would’, she said, ‘At heart, you are a pacificist, like Gandhi!’ When I told her with some ardour that I liked
Buñuel, she gripped her glass as if she were about to fling the red wine on me and splash me with blood.
In response to my quiet defence about Buñuel’s revolutionary credentials, she said, ‘You know what he does in his
rat-infested castle in Mexico? Well, he collects all the rodents in traps, puts them in the boot of his car, drives them out
into the country only to release them there.’
I was very moved by what she had to say about him, even though I did not know if I should believe her. It is more
or less confirmed in his autobiography, with a kind of bashfulness.
It was almost like a live metaphor for his freedom in exile.
His painful awareness of those who live in exile, even in their homes, can be seen in Los Olvidados. It is the sort of
plot that could easily have become a vehicle for sentimental cynicism. Instead, there is compassion, because it speaks
of a condition of violence: a kind of homelessness where one does not know where to return. Buñuel had wanted to
introduce completely disparate elements in the realistic scenes.
‘For example, when Jaibo wants to go and fight and kill the other boy, during the camera movement, one sees in the
distance, the structure of a big building of eleven stories under construction. . . . I would have liked to put an orchestra
with a hundred musicians in it.’
For him, Los Olvidados was a film of social protest, struggle. But he insists that he never ever wanted to make a film
with a message.
Our sponsors in India and elsewhere should begin to understand that in most cases the ‘message’ turns against itself.
It is not the ‘international’ that stays in the cinema – specially if one tries to suppress all that is instinctive, the irrational
present around you.
‘I was always attracted to that which is unknown or strange and which fascinates me without my knowing why . . .’.
It is a question of discovering accidentally, stumbling upon what one has never imagined. The surrealist manifesto,
signed in 1938 by Breton and Diego Rivera, speaks of scientific and artistic discovery as ‘the fruit of a precious chance, that
is to say, the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity’. The document was hammered out after separate
discussions that Breton had with Trotsky and Buñuel in Mexico.
Chance and necessity played their role in making one of the finest finales of any film ever made. The Spanish Board
of Censors completely rejected the original ending of Viridiana. He had to ‘invent a new one, which in the end was far
more suggestive than the first because of its implications of a ménage à trois’.
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In those images, Buñuel the anchorite returns himself and Viridiana to the ambivalence of life, too rich to put a name ANGEL WHO GATHERED
on and encapsulate.
I remember the feeling of elation I had walking the streets of Paris every time I had seen a Buñuel film. One knew THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
that one was far away from home but one was reassured that it was there. When Buñuel came to Paris, Madame Sadoul,
wife of the noted film historian Georges Sadoul, rang me up to write to him. I did, that very morning, August 7, 1968. 1993
When I came back before the light had gone off from the sky, I picked up a letter lying on the doormat.
Buñuel had sent his handwritten letter by the pneumatique. After regretting that he had appointed his assistants
over a month ago, he added a postscript, ‘I am shooting the whole film in natural exteriors, outside of Paris. Otherwise I
would have asked you to come over to the studios whenever you wished.’
First published in The Economic Times, New Delhi, 13 November 1993.
Shahani wrote this obituary for Federico Fellini for what was then the liveliest arts page of
any newspaper in India, The Economic Times, Delhi, edited by the cultural critic Sadanand
Menon. This essay, and others like the note on Buñuel, keep intact Shahani’s legacies within
a classical European tradition of cinematic modernism. Inverting his standard criticism of all
cinema claiming a ‘mass communication’ idiom where ‘few apostles of mass communication
. . . communicate at all’, what Fellini does is to ‘admit it to the world that he had really nothing
to say’. After this, he can ‘say it all’, ‘indulge in fantasy and confess the sins of thought to his
priestly audiences’.

Jesus Christ blesses women in bikinis sunning themselves on terraces. Rome is no longer the open city with voltage
fluctuating upon the shocks delivered by partisans who saved it from the fascists. The Second World War is over and
forgotten. For there are no professors begging near the Pantheon. There is no need for professors, acrobats, prostitutes.
Everyone is playing at being everyone else. The only reality is – mimesis.
The dubbed voices from the Tower of Babel; the attitudes and postures of sculpted prophets, appearing in cabarets;
the donning and shedding of clothes, suggesting nothing, not even the void. For, there is nothing to show, you have it so
good. Life is a carnival, a perpetual circus in which you seize the moment like a trapeze artist.
Rome, eternal city, you dropped Giulietta Masina on the streets to excel the protest of Chaplin against the market.
You abandoned her for an icy ogress who promised the sweet life; now, with Fellini gone, find someone to celebrate/
mourn your impulses.
Like Baudelaire and Manto, he will be remembered for the grotesqueries of the city. The damp darknesses, peopled

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by figments of the imagination, hold promises of origins long lost in memory. Most boys wish their conceptions to be
immaculate. The girls know better. They offer them to the world as it were. Made to offer themselves as repositories of
illumination, girls are both containers and the contained. That is how mixed-up boys like Federico do not know whether
to blow or suck.
The Great Metonymy of all history, the female breast, is turned into a bloated fetish in the era of plenty. Isn’t
Roma herself a bit like Kamadhenu, yielding all desire? Or is that a myth, recreated by one of Fellini’s posters? By what
quirky amalgamations of history and legend, the play of language and music through bawdy exchange, did the husband
of the gypsies meet up in name with this fountain of milk? Well, he too had set out to satisfy all desires. Until 8 ½, even
Hollywood bowed to his appearance in the world where it had normally only its macho exhibits on display.
There are few apostles of mass communication who communicate at all. In the first place, the basic assumptions
do not permit communication. Instead, they encourage the building of human pyramids, exclusion and extermination of
cultures, the envy of coming together in creative union, the fear of beauty.
So, when he could admit it to the world that he had really nothing to say, he could say it all. From then on, he could
indulge in fantasy and confess the sins of thought to his priestly audiences. This, instead of the usual reiteration and
targeting of the audiences’ own displacement of desires in confessionals of gurgling pity and fear.
Here was fact abandoning the last links with fiction. Unlike Rome, the classical age, which had insisted on constructing
both fact and fiction as chronology, history and epic. Here he was making a break from his immediate predecessors who
had thought that the poetry of cinema needed no artifice. The transformative quality of holding movement in seemingly
life-like pictures at 24 frames a second had so recently proved enough to dismantle all vestiges of blind power that
Mussolini had promised a nation, frustrated in releasing its ideals.
Artists like Fellini obviously perceived rather easily the excesses of an aesthetic based on similitude, just as they
rejected the utopian spirals of Croce. But, no prison notebooks are admitted. Only mistakes. Ritwik Ghatak used to
attribute a quotation to him, ‘A film must have mistakes, like life, like people.’ What mistakes can you make when you
have an orgy? For a start, don’t tell anyone that you work. You will be the object of ridicule. The man of leisure had finally
arrived to give himself up to a surfeit of hedonistic indulgence.
Did Fellini anticipate our world where no hands need to be soiled nor minds exercised because there are no jobs?
The autonomy of money and machines has superseded the freedom of the will. Goods are made and move about on their
own. Where we find no labour, we find no love, Juliet looks about for inner light, as embarrassed as the Beatles when they
discovered incense and Ravi Shankar. Giulietta Masina is the eternal girl-child wishing to be a woman, to give innocence
to a world which feels no want.
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Kumar Shahani
Instead, all around, there is an all-devouring greed. Television cameras and flash photos that leave no room for
Oedipal longing, as the oracle is replaced by aphorisms of signboards and sun-dry figures flattened out by them. Neither
poet nor sculptor, devoid of honours for his dubious art, the cineaste was fast being reduced to banausian status by
electronic duplication and channels governed by numbers, ratings, money. In such a state, there is no real hunger for
language or speech. Even as reality passes him by at hectic speed, the consumer consumes himself. Fellini was shooting
Satyricon that winter after May 68, when I first entered that whirlpool of a city, both memory and dream of all citizens,
uplifted by its piazzas to public dignity.
It was easy to answer the men who would walk up the steps to question the length of hair, thanks to the status all
around. It was more difficult to resist the invitation given by a gaze, strong, full, penetrating and enveloping, to appear
on Fellini’s studio floor.
Was she the girl-child across the water whose spontaneous warmth would not reach Marcello with his knees upon
the sand? How could one not attend to her call when the secret codes of civilisation were being washed ashore as dead
whales? Was she the elder sister whose foetus-folds held the live algae of the children’s depths?
I had a sign that she wanted to shape me into a Fellini sign: half-animal, half-god. Hesitantly, I said that I am a man
like any other. I want to fly. She shook her head and sealed my lips, to set me free. Fellini is now in Paradise. While he was
here he had gathered the flowers of evil, rested close to Satan,
Under the tree of knowledge which has spread
Its branches like a Temple overhead.
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 Kumar Shahani

HOLOCAUSTS AND LOVE POEMS Holocausts and Love Poems

1994
Paper presented at a seminar on ‘Colonialism and Culture’, Goa, 1994; previously unpublished.
Shahani inaugurates what we may call his late style with this essay, combining personal notes
with screenplay writing and commentary, including a free mix of citation, sometimes quoted
from memory, with original text. Parts of this text combine material he intends to use for a film,
if he can manage to make it.
The Yellow Bird
Livia adored her father since the day he was taken away to the Hungarian labour battalions, Livia had hoped that each new
day would bring her father back home. But the days kept passing and Livia’s father did not return.
One night Livia dreamed that she was standing with her father in the small dark storage room in back of their store.
The door was ajar. Through the partially open door, beams of light were streaming into the dark room. Livia’s father was
wearing his grey overcoat, which he always wore while in the store. His face was very pale. A bird flew in as if it were
gliding on a ray of light. Its dazzling yellow colours were set aflame by the sunbeam, and Livia was overcome by the bird’s
strange, hypnotic beauty. But not her father who grabbed her arm in terror and repeatedly said, ‘Look at it, look at it,
look at that bird!’ She looked at the bird again, and only then did she realise that the splendid yellow bird was indeed
terrifying, a peculiar Firebird whose glow set everything ablaze. All that time her father held on to her and repeated the
same sentence, ‘Look at it, look at it, look at that bird!’ His face was even paler than before and his terror-stricken eyes
followed the bird in its strange, acrobatic, silent flight.
Livia woke up, covered in a cold sweat, trembling with fear, and with a strange premonition that her father would
not return home and she would never see him again. A few months later, Livia, her mother, brother and aunt, with the
rest of the Jews of Nagmagyar, were deported to Auschwitz.
(Based on an interview by Emily Bitton, daughter, with Livia Bitton Jackson, May 1979.)
The hand that held my breast in its palm lies severed on the field.
Is it the hand, the breast the palm?
Was this separation sought out, for what reason, by whom?
There is a transference here, the transference of a subject that is no longer self-aware, incapable of constituting
itself.
What it seeks, is brutally optical; the triumph of a civilisation that began by objectifying the human being’s
position in the world,
in a fixed relationship
and is now involved in the dissolution of both in a flux of sensation.
Separations have become consummations, as barriers of contact between one and the other fall, as in Berlin.
What exists is neither one nor the other, neither dual nor non-dual; neither the multiple nor nothingness is
perceptible.
Only opaque figures transforming themselves into analogies of experience.
Here is a loss of memory and mourning
in cyclones of images, sounds, gestures that disappear as soon as they are named, without recognition of any
individuality.
There are soliloquies emanating from Solaris seas, dismembering the senses to displace desire.
How can I speak of pain when my inner body trembles like the blade of a Sumeet mixie grinding coconut to a wet
paste?
Shall I anoint my body from within with it?
Such sacrilege!
God had enjoined me to hide my face, lest I should burn the spectator to cinders.
Yet men seek revelation, as if reason’s motors were propelling them to it.
What is this desire that seizes me?
Quick, hold your breath, so that my heart-beat does not betray my elision.
The cultures are at war, not I, not you, my love, my-self.
Having made me invisible, do you want me to be speechless, thus?
I have covered myself in colourless fabric to make up for your loss of skin.
I am your candle.

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Look how the myriad mirrors reflect and obscure the light upon the expanding night of the single wish to know.
I wear it upon myself, I hide my belongings, your treasures within them.
Do you not know?
That’s happening in the real world. We’re out of the sitcom at that point. Mickey breaks
out of prison – it looks surreal, but it does happen. Then once they’ve killed the father and
mother they’re on the road to hell – in Buddhist thought that’s the worst crime you could
commit. In the scene on the bridge, Mickey says, ‘As God of my universe’, which is a key
thought in the sense that the whole first part of the movie is structured like a virtual reality
trip. The audience is in the driver’s seat, but Mickey and Mallory are in charge of the world,
they’re having fun killing and you’re having ‘fun’ watching it. It makes you confront yourself.
The unpredictability, the hallucinatory, feverish aspect of changing from black and white to
colour to video to 8 mm to animation – which is included because they are superheroes in
their own mind – all these changes empower you, you control your environment, you can be
what you want to be.
At Sarajevo, in Somalia, yesterday it was s. . .
What are they trying to remember, to recuperate, to reclaim?
They travel through Jaswan dun, Ropar, Banur, Ambala, Shahabad to reach Panipat on 12th April
1525. Seven hundred carts were joined together with ropes of raw hide. Between every two
carts mantelets were fixed, behind which matchlockmen were posted. Opposing them was
Ibrahim Lodi’s army of 1,00,000 men and one thousand elephants.
Mustafa, the Commander of artillery, made excellent use of his guns.
Babur records:
Mustafa the commissary for his part made excellent discharge of zarb-zan shots from the left
hand of the centre. Our right, left, centre, and turning-parties having surrounded the enemy
rained arrows down on him and fought ungrudgingly. He made one or two small charges on
our right and left but under our men’s arrows, fell back on his own centre. His right and left
(qul) were massed in such a crowd that they could neither move forward against us nor force
a way for flight. ‘When the incitement to battle had come, the Sun was spear-high; till mid-day
fighting had been in full force; noon passed, the foe was crushed in defeat, our friends rejoicing
and gay. By God’s mercy and kindness, this difficult affair was made easy for us.
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Kumar Shahani
Ibrahim lay dead among thirty thousand of his soldiers.
The victorious horses are in blue, gold, and red, riding through
Imaginary hills.
The deed, that stamped an Indra stigma vile
The deed, that sought Draupadi to defile
The deed, that stained the moon’s once stainless face
The deed, that left no scion of Ravan’s race
The deed, that set at Keechak’s fierce Arjun,
The deed, that burnt Bhasmasur’s life away,
Is now a toy, wherewith men lightly play
(Rupmati, translated by L.M. Crump)
That deed which is translated by Crump as sin may have meant to Rupmati – the original is lost! – evil is clear not only in
direct consequence, but also in a far deeper sense:
trivialisation:
the loss of signification.
Where did the footage of Night and Fog come from?
From Nazi archives? In other words, there was an attempt to immortalise mass murder.
Yet there has to be by law, and has been, a silencing of those who could name collaborators accompanied by a truce
of secrecy for the desire for mass murder.
Is it possible that the loss of the ‘signified within the signifier’ is also a realisation of an ordained desire, that human
evolution needs video to appear in its present unpunctuated state to approach patterns of meaninglessness through
wilful, non-referentially coded reductions that create seeming image-narratives which cancel one another out in a stream
of concrete events obliterating unexplored suggestion, ambivalence, possibilities of imaginative histories, personal and
public that could recall and restore the subject, enabling her to reconstruct the world?
She had been separated (three times) and had the accoutrement of mourning, carried herself with dignity
unsuppressed but clapped her hands when she saw the baby and kissed his feet.
It is known that the breast was withdrawn from this dyslexene child when he was less than two years old.
When the rivers’ waters had receded, the lowly men of its banks had saved the Emperor’s father, while the armies
and the horses were returned to the soil, turning into soft, giving, clay and fertile sand.
When she returned, he recognised her.
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His campaigns were all-inclusive, mourning the loss of glory of those kites that he razed to the ground. No, it could not have been a fragmenting voyeur born before the Prophets, but someone who inherited the wounds
She continued to dress the meats for the festive occasions until well after he had established a great empire, having that could dare to say about her, ‘when she was a virgin.’
made both love and war to a land no more alien to him. A bride without a dowry, with a deep navel in her suntanned belly, a little pit for birdseed and water. . .
She had lived long enough to intercede on his son’s behalf and that of his subjects, now tied to him by other bonds, She’s got a will of iron inside
in vermilion and turmeric. that soft, self-indulgent flesh
There was the grubbiness and the blood upon the body that she cleansed of the boy, I thought, even as the clothes What a terrible bloodbath
were unstained and had the perfume of unsolicited movement. she’s preparing for herself
As she felt the creviced lobes of his ears, the pressure of her fingers – upon the fissures of the cartilage – made her What a Roman arena streaming with blood.
remember the long-forgotten sensation. (Yahuda Amichai, ‘A Bride without a Dowry’)
She had just washed her hands upon which was the dry flour and the wet as she had been rolling gellets of dough, What are these memories that the oracles have to remind us of: that we fear as much as we desire.
to roast them upon the fire, when he had come for her to smile upon him, as he moved away and she towards him, She who sat on the floor looked at the window – open.
magnetically. ‘You find peace sitting on the floor as you do . . . we have
Abandoning the freckled light of her space, in which lay the disc of wood and pin, the stone and the fuel. enough time’.
There was already a residue of ash forming. ‘It is true’, she says, but says no more, nor moves.
She remembered that her hair was so thick that the plait that hung from her head seemed to scrape her with a caress Silence.
when she saw that the symmetrically centrifugal journeys of her embroidery had colour running off their borders, just Suddenly she shivers, apocalyptically, helplessly, as she tries to stop shivering the other’s voice seeks the source of
spilling over ever so slightly. the tremor, in deep tones of comfort.
To return her to her black, centered glass, in which teasing reflections glinted to reveal her creation to herself. She does not try to stop the shivering. She perspires.
. . . it matters hardly at all in the early universe whether space is finite or infinite. . . ‘You want to know what is happening in my heart? . . .’
How shall we hold together what has a tendency to tear apart, if heat is the sign of existence from the beginning? It is the dissonant shivering that lets the cadence of speech appear.
Our inability to accept chaos can only be met by annulling the will to order, while accepting and learning to enjoy those One cannot look for truth in a single event,
vibrations that distinguish any event from equilibria, either natural or imagined, forms that appear in relationship to allowing catastrophes to appear natural and avoidable.
several intimations of the formless. The eccentricities themselves have to help us find focus; the motif itself as ornament It is as if in our desire to know the beginning, we end ourselves in a reckless blaze of hunger.
and being, all at once. Thou art the soul of the Wind, a purifier, and the body of the herbs.
The excess of life is stressed through the austerity of one’s claim to be redundant in oneself, not in the image Water is thy source.
presented necessarily, but in the imagination. Light and thou art the source of water.
What kind of doodles will the text of our actions accommodate? Upward and downward they go, and sideways they spread
She played with her salwar as she sat on the floor near the window, declining the chair offered to her by a Thy flames, O most powerful one, like
strange man who wanted to share her emotions, not to repeat the event. It was out of the question that she assume the rays of the sun
any other posture. (Agni is addressed thus in the Khandava forest).

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There is a fog created by nations of war’s industry and cultures that pointedly forget the presence of the past,
impinging from within with such such memories that only dismemberment will annihilate.
One had thought these were rumours, sound and fury that signify nothing.
She said, ‘The crowd broke the door and entered . . .
‘I was in an inner room . . .
‘They beat him, broke the fridge, took away the mixie . . .
They caught hold of her, pulled her and they threw her on the ground.
They brought in big, powerful lights.
‘A man brought a video camera . . .’
She was in tears, able to express them and see.
In Godard’s My Life to Live, Nana begins to sell her body, watches Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, and weeps.
In Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc based on the actual chronicles, Joan says, ‘Do not burn me, I am pure.’
Hitler had set up cameras to stage the capture of Gdansk.
The record of Hiroshima’s nuclear bombardment is preserved in a museum in Japan.
The war in Iraq was presented in real-time mode over broadcasting networks in the style of the moon-landing.
Science fiction, spectacle with masks that do not fit the face nor armours the body.
No wonder Oedipus blinded himself.
‘I had a dream last night, I want to talk to you about that.’
It happens in my own locality, but across . . . there is an open ground. . . . I walk from the house
to the open ground . . . as I walk, fires erupt. . . . I walk and walk through the fire . . . a man milks
a buffalo . . . the landscape expanded as I walked. . . . I see a tree with flowers that are white .
. . wherever I walk, the fires surround me . . . I’m in the fire all the time . . . these are enormous
flames, yellow and rose, that surround me. . . . As I tell you this, I feel that I may have my life again.
May Valmiki’s grief find the metre and rhythm that will liberate the hunter from his curse, the plough from its guilt,
the machine from its anonymity.
May Rama defeat all covetousness, while we beg forgiveness of Sita, release them from the bondage of worship
to move towards infinite perfectibility.
242
DANCE AND FILM
1995
First published in Rasa: The Indian Performing Arts in the Last Twenty-Five Years, Volume I:
Music and Dance, edited by Bimal Mukherjee and Sunil Kothari, Calcutta: Anamika Kala Sangam,
1995; reprinted in the catalogue Purush: Expressions of Man, Madras, undated.
Written in the context of Bhavantarana, Shahani’s film on Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, this
short essay provides one crucial insight: the ‘mise-en-shot’, as Shahani calls it – his mode of
shooting a dancer. He continues his interest in the link of ritual to narrative sequence (also see
‘Figures of Film’, pp. 284–89).
Dance is the ultimate expression of what nature contains. It pre-dates history in its origins and yet it is a succinct reminder
of what a civilisation has achieved in the particular direction that it has taken. A single pose from a dance tells you of
the notions of equilibrium in a culture: the body’s points of rest are in implicit conjunction with what the universe must
constitute for it.
Upon two basic poses and two basic movements, one can build up whole cybernetics that reveal the nervous
system’s encoded signs of nature, freeing the body all at once from pre-determined governance, to work with or against
gravity, discovering new sources of speech.
If it was through photosynthesis that the eye created light – that it may know the self’s trajectory – so was it to seek
temporary balances, perhaps, that the ear created sound. That’s how, then, nritya forms part of sangita.
Cinematography, as sight and sound, opens itself to all movement, including stillness as movement’s primary
component.
Cinema too is gestural – if one realises that it involves a single gestalt of mind and body integration arrived at
between several individuals. Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra knew that fact as well as anyone else at the shooting, bringing
about an urgent and precise contact between him and the cinematographic team of Bhavantarana. I had gone into
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conversation several times before and gone into questions that he had asked himself, I am sure, but had not really needed
to put across to anyone else. What would a filmmaker do, he asked common friends, with what are seen as concerns
purely of a dancer, concerns through which he seeks self-revelation, often posed as if they were merely technical?
Such ‘tension’ is generative. The dancer puts a dance into question. The filmmaker thinks that it is the last time ever
that he will make a film, or want to make anything in an idiom that has been ‘privatised’ in more senses than one: the
violation of possible discourse for purposes of sensation leaves hardly a trace of speech to be recovered.
To savour the sensuous is another matter. To discover in it the bouquet of evolution; the tearing, surging cataclysms
that form Beauty and remain inherent in it. How shall I open it all out? The given languages of the moving image are
entirely ‘cultured’, not in laboratories but in the minds of commissioning editors, distributors and a section of the
clientele imploited into accepting time–space structures to dead or distracted attention spans.
Nor did I want to repeat myself. In my first fiction feature, Maya Darpan, dance took over the energy from colour
at the end of the film – to make visible the choreography of camera movement vis-à-vis form and tone, as well as the
visibly subjective action of people, trees, buses, trains, water enveloped in wind or dust. We had looked hard for a valid
form, Chandralekha and I; suddenly Sunil Kothari told us about Chhau. We went to Mayurbhanj with K.K. [Mahajan].
Then it emerged, burst forth, in a flash. It had to be like Ajanta in its sweep. It had to be the simplest of all solutions: a
continuous crane shot that put together allusive narratives in the most ancient presentation of colours – red, black and
white. With the meagre material resources that we have in India, you know that it is above all the imagination of our
fellow countrymen which realises everything. There was Bansi Chandragupta, the bewildered Tollygunge crew which had
expected a different kind of dance picturisation from Bombay-wallahs, being led by K.K. to realise through urbanising
tribal bodies a dream-vision of a debutant director in collaboration with a rebel dancer. 34
Nearly twenty years had passed since then. Kelubabu had carried with him the mystery of Orissa like a water-diviner.
In the meantime, I had not only caught glimpses of it, but had had the joy of immersing myself in the wonderful forms of
Kerala, along the lagoon and the coast, as well as Kathak, that the Ganges had gifted to us.
All along, as a film director taught by Eisenstein and Ghatak and Kosambi, I looked for the archaeology of the mise-
en-shot, the ritual transformed. Urvashi apsara held the secret of our history in the water of her sacred pool. She held for
me the key to composition that would overcome the horizontal of Cinemascope with as much vigour as the widescreen
overcame the male-dominated golden section. The Virgin Mother, bride to her son, in whom God had to discover Himself
as an offering, had to be brought back from her exile to assuage man’s thirst for immortality. I remember speaking to
Uttara Asha Coorlawala, modern dancer, back in India to rediscover the sources. With her and Smita Patil, we tried to

In several of his 1980s films, Shahani collaborated with some of India’s leading dancers. Some
of the collaborations were originally choreographed, involving dancer and cinematographer
in some kind of performative dialogue (the ‘mise-en-shot’). fig. 34: in Bamboo Flute,
Bharatanatyam dancer Alarmel Valli; fig. 35: in Bhavantarana, Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra;
244 fig. 36: in Khayal Gatha, Pandit Birju Maharaj with Alaknanda Samarth.
35
 Kumar Shahani

create a bird-like incarnation over the creek, the terrifying first glimmer of light, elusive. From the pushkara in Mohenjo
Daro or the Hetaera in Greece – there was a great traversal in both history and myth. The entire mise-en-scène in Tarang
grew out of the last scene, committing us to an ethical system out of epic movement which did not have to be contained
within the frame.
A few years later, when we made Khayal Gatha, we completed the breakthrough even as we used the Golden
Section, the forms within becoming vehicles in simultaneity. Pandit Birju Maharaj spared less time than we had expected.
Yet, it was a great pleasure to all of us, as we could realise within hours with him what would normally take a few days
to condense into significance.
There are, thank God, no formulae. The universalisms offered by our specificities are fortunately open to
improvisations, allowing both history and cultural space to expand and elaborate individual temperaments. In Kasba we
could work on choreography without recognisable dance! There are transferences from the image to the actor and the
actor to the image which have themselves to find dissolutions into a more immanent abhinaya.
Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra believes in the moment of dance in the invocation of what leads to our space, as the
space that is finally created, in which we feel freed from the concreteness of the world, which turns into an atmosphere
of cinematographic imagination, displaying the immanence of that reality, not fixing it. From which emerges the pun, the
exchange of energy between nature and culture, between male and female, dancer and camera/recorder, consonance
and dissonance.
When Kelubabu took us to Konarak, I would look at him and then Konarak – and not know if it had come alive.
Such wonder! Yet there were tourist guides who wished to show him the way! Once again, I experienced the abandoned
36 temple as the celebration of nature. That night, developing an intuition, groping upon the cool moonlit sands, heady with
an unknown desire, the wonder was whether we could include wind, water, trees and rocks into his dance. How should
we do that? By light, perhaps? I asked Alok Upadhyay, the cameraman with whom Kelubabu later developed a most
endearing gesture of holding hands after each shot. By light, yes, but that was only the beginning.
Siva had to reach towards an infinite end.
Abhinaya had to make him appear, going beyond the sense of performance into that of all-pervading joy – for that
to happen, the ever-changing bhavas had to be present in all our equipment, in front of it as its operational detail.

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RITWIK
1995
Delivered as the Alamgir Kabir Memorial Lecture at the 4th International Short Film Festival,
Dhaka, Bangladesh; previously unpublished.
Written on the occasion of Shahani’s first major visit to Dhaka, which opened the floodgates of
memories of Ghatak, this is the last of his key texts on his master. It continues the subjective
free-associative style he has adopted in his writings since the mid-1990s.
An acid staircase in a laboratory. Followed by a velvet carpet, the colour of a deep cavern. You would hardly expect to
immerse yourself in golden reflections.
Yet, there they were, shimmering in the light of sorrow.
‘The ground has slipped away from under our feet, we are airy nothings.’
What is the song of sundering that calls itself Subarnarekha?
The earth’s cleavage gave birth to Seeta and the earth took her back.
In between were the wars, the usurpations, the hunger . . . in between are the demolitions, riots, bombardments,
airfields, the quenching of thirst and the assoilment and release from the cycle of birth. And of course there is the
boatman from whose boat the net is cast to fish or ferry across divinities. Seeta, frightened by the bohurupee: Are you
scared of all the forms that you assume yourself?
After a whole day of shooting, we encamped on the river bed. Things were not perfectly cohesive
in my mind. The outdoor shooting was rather scattered and disjointed. One fine morning, my little
daughter came running and described how she had been terribly frightened in her solitary loitering
by a bohurupee who dressed like the goddess Kali. My daughter reminded me of Seeta. . . .
Then one day, Bulbuli, having nestled among the silhouettes of dark fruit, comes like a breath of fresh air upon my
balcony. ‘I am Ritwik’s daughter’, she says.
The domes that were vaults of heaven no longer surround us, nor pervade our being. She presents the debris to my
daughter, Revati.
‘. . . the paramount criterion of beauty in domes (is) their apparent lightness . . .’
‘I’d a feeling it would hurt you if I displayed the body’s seals of love.’
A Eurasian woman screams at me for endorsing Nita’s tragedy by praising Meghe Dhaka Tara’s structure that makes
‘her cry, as if she collapses in the hills that she had dreamt of, affirming again her life’s desire’.
You know the ‘girl’ whose slipper-straps snap again is watched by us and she smiles at history’s tragic exultation.
‘To redeem and liberate our sensibilities from the oppression of the known and usher them into
a realm of re-awakening through heightened aesthetic experience.’
Sometimes through crude whiplashes. At other times through ‘a symphony or the harmonic rendering and growth
of a Raga’. Is that possible? A Malhar in the rainshadow.
‘Come. I will show you a birth.’
He stood upon a horizontal vein of a hill at night in front of Studio No. 1, the light reflecting off his glasses, the glare
from a bulb high amongst the creepers hanging over a shed that had housed other peripatetic incarnations:
Sant Tukaram, Eknath, Dnyaneshwar.
Witness a birth
In a re-recording studio.
The water falls in great drops in puddle upon undulating rock.
Sa re pa ga-a
Re sa re (sa)
Ma pa ni (pa)
Dha-ni (ni) sa
Hours of the night and early morning inverse as the projectionists change reels for the next mix. In the adjoining room,
the prohibited hooch looks like hypo in a glass to which the volcanic water’s mineral gives an unscrubbed look of frost.
‘Buddham sharanam gachhami.’
If the other is the source of the self, why give up desire?
‘When shall I crush you
Against my pitcher breasts?’
Just hide the sorrow with laughter, make every occasion suspicious with obscenities and know that all your longing
and significance has its home in shunyata.

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Sleep at sunrise.
All this in retrospect thirty years and more after the event, 180-degree panoramics searching for the transformation
of bhava.
1976: ‘Don’t come to the funeral. There are people shouting slogans over Ritwik’s dead body. You will be distressed.’
I was in Calcutta for a seminar by coincidence. I went to walk on College Street, having observed without protest
a minute’s silence.
‘. . . I’ve left un-said the phase we are now passing through, a period of neo-colonialism,
absolute neo-colonialism. . . . You see what I have done. I won’t speak out. The then-existing
socio-economic conditions that affected townspeople and villagers all alike are fundamental
in this picture. There might be some autobiographical touches though it is not autobiographical
in the strict sense.’
Is it a mock-autobiography of a ventriloquist? (Geeta Kapur) Yes, emphatically so.
‘Go and see my acting’, he said to Karuna Bandyopadhyaya the last time that he met her.
‘That’s why I have come’, she says, and she tells us ‘. . . he did not act in Jukti Takko aar Gappo. He only loafed
through the pages of his life. Some of them were torn, some were brand-new.’
‘My days were spent on the Padma. . . . The people on the passenger boats looked like dwellers
from some distant planet. The large merchant ships carried sailors speaking a strange tongue.
. . . I saw the fishermen. In the drizzling rain a youthful tune would float in the village air.
. . . I have rocked in the steamer on the turbulent river after dark, and listened to the rhythmic
sounds of the engines, the bells of the sareng, the cry of the boatmen measuring the depths.’
Years later he flew over it. Weeping. Is the epic form merely the superstructural symptom of the Asiatic Mode of Production?
‘Every artist has to learn his own private truth through a painful personal process . . . there is no
such thing in the world called a class-less art.’
The great bloody revolutions starting, perhaps, with Ashoka’s self-criticism on the battlefield were to end all sacrifice.
The transition from ritual to art perhaps also took place in the same instance, politically. Its earlier manifestations
were linked more to the multiple contradictions within nature, within culture: a complex of ambivalences that fractals
revealed in relatively simplified patterns. The simplified patterns express themselves not only in surfaces, continuously
designed in alpanas, in embroidery, basketry, and ‘transformed’ into dances of community (Ritwik’s Oraons), thought-
projections of the self (Itihasa). Rama as the Purshottam maryada cannot escape contradiction. Nor can the Ramayana
itself with the interruption of love-making of the birds that visit sorrow upon the world.
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Kumar Shahani
‘Ghatak launched with Ajantrik a new investigation into film form, expounding the refugee
experience into a universal leitmotif of cultural dismemberment and exile, evoking an epic
tradition, drawing on tribal, folk and classical forms.’
The Oraons accepted the plough while giving up the hoe and the implements of war. Their ironsmiths did not
develop them. They stuck to magic, removing terror through dance, not through reason and the beginnings of religion.
They did not accept class contradiction as a necessary force within their society but suffered from it arriving upon them
from without. Reason already had turned upon itself as it elaborated the vira rasa in multifarious modes of oppresion,
sanctioned by the progress of religion: ‘the priest with his appropriative formalisations, the warrior with his can(n)ons,
the moneylender with his accounts. Yet, possibly the Mauryas were Shudras who consolidated the state’ (Interpreting
Early India: Romila Thapar), centralised it and took it forward into a higher realm, both of material welfare and spiritual
tolerance, even as it launched us on the turbulent rivers of knowledge and history. Narbada, rakt-varni, continues to
demand sacrifice through the agency of civilisation: language, organisation, art, even movements of counter-culture
decimating unities as structured hierarchies while proposing horizontal multiplicities that are vulnerable as vermin are to
winged creatures, fortified with bombs and mutations in the air. Narbada, Ganga, the Mississippi.
Traders strike coins which are ratified by kings, the oligarchies, the democracies, where demos suddenly refer to
mobs, temporarily coming together to impose sectarian concepts of truth as cover-ups for their anomie. The world
splinters into discrete fragments, of the nation, of the classes, of the genders, of the body and the mind, while the
economy globalises. We have in India today a Miss Universe and a Miss Beautiful Eyes, Hair, etcetera. Ritwik’s metaphors
for the self-liberation that ended up in schizophrenic self-annihilation are now seen to tear through the cultures of all
lands simultaneously with the takeover by a unipolar economy. The riots in Bombay were unprecedented; elsewhere,
new nations come up with populations less than one-third or one-fourth of that island city.
Meanwhile, uniform codes have been hammered out, for intellectual property rights, trade and tariff agreements
that will set up audio-visual regimes, conquering not territories but the hearts and minds, the environment of invisible
sacred places, the acoustics of unheard songs. After all, overtonal implications are imagined; it is not a matter of simple
technical realisations of the melodic, the harmonic, the modulatory. Improvisations themselves have different dialectics
in different cultures. Their signification changes from individual to individual, from moment to moment, in contexts that
are swiftly gifted to the past or the future as they appear in the present.
How can one try and patent, possess, commodify, release or consume a badhat (an elaboration) or the unanticipated
glimpse of eternity? Badhat is the essence of performance in some of the oldest civilisations of the world. If one attempts
to apply property rights to words, music, visuals, one will only kill it all. The loss will be global. And there may indeed be
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other instances of creativity in other cultures – even in those of the great metropolitan centres – which might be stifled,
at least temporarily, wiped out from our consciousness. All forms of speech in fact will, thus, have to find ways of skirting
the fossilised clichés of capitalism to be able to flow like rivers, to rise like sap, to fertilise and fall lke rain.
Does god play dice?
Who can say?
Yet, it is well known that those who are nearest the truth – the world of becoming – have always touched upon the
vibratos to produce tremors between the sensible and the intelligible.
While physical science gave up on point, line and plane in their idealised forms, social scientific thought persisted with
rigid constructs such as mechanical technology had proposed. Or, in opposition, the organic metaphor keeps returning
– through ‘races’, cults, imaginary unities based on partial facticity. In effect we have hardly learnt to think in terms of
our knowledge of how energy travels. Nor have we as yet absorbed the links of complex growth suggested by qualitative
change in biological, geological and other seemingly near-chaotic yet awesome and wonderful phenomena. Very often
what we know continues to be reductive, bringing together collapsible form, eliminating contexts while proposing new
fundamentalisms, ‘backgrounds’, so-called ‘deviations’ from norms as attempted reforms from orthodoxies that get stuck
in mirror epistemes.
In such an atmosphere, while technology receives and retrieves information for purposes of finance-capital at
speeds where continuous movement is intrinsic to the operation itself, adequate freedom to begin to cope with it is not
yet given to the dispossessed citizen, no longer imbued with the promise of the working-class consciousness which in its
glory produced the cinema – of Ritwik Ghatak.
The cinema of the European nations – with the Soviet Union and the United States at two poles of the European
impulse – continued to work from the Renaissance parameters. The knowableness of the world in a unilinear technology
buttressing the ramparts of bourgeois edifices would admit only such gargoyles as a whitened Christian Church allowed.
It was only people like Eisenstein who actually stepped out of all constraints including those of expressionism and
futurism to seek out other conjunctions of language from traditions suppressed within its own community. Thereby he
marginalised himself, even within a revolutionary society that permitted him some practice. Ritwik inherited from him
the desire to reach out, not in accepted forms of veneration such as the Bengal Renaissance had objectified itself into, but
in the survival of language-formations that are present in the dances of the Oraons, the poetry of the Bauls, the speech
of the fisherfolk here.
The sign-formations, as Kosambi had discovered, are present in all significance and therefore, for me, in all musicality,
even in the mortar and pestle. Archetypes, as Jung and his normal followers (including many who apply psychoanalysis
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to art practice and social science) can void thought and objects of history, claiming a perenniality which is as touching
and as true as idealised beauty. But archetypes that are shot through by a working-class consciousness such as a self-
liberating people, with their boats seeking an anchor on different banks and in the world’s greatest harbours, have
history, change, movement, intrinsically embedded in them.
Like mobiles, these significations are not elect instances of representations. They are themselves, to the extent
that they contain several subjectivities, resistant to instant interpretation, yet openly absorbing, responding to action,
emotion, and ever-evolving modes of reason, reconciling civilisations that confronted each other through inhibiting the
infinite desire of humanity.
What are these modes that the cinematographe has released? Just as the capitalist world attempts with every phase
to validate its control over history: the Protestant Ethic yielding to decimation of other ‘races’ or their civilisation, to
an accumulation of surplus through colonial labour, viewed now as the burden of the white man, now as a threat to his
health, now as the consumer of self-creating capital; so also the working-class consciousness, even as the proletariat
disappears, has to find answers to free individuals in new collective formations from acting as a targeted market required
for capitalism’s survival, transforming itself into civil activity through linguistic, artistic, musical and other self-revealing
modes of being.
But when such a release of energy takes place, the unconscious centrality, uncontrolled, can create explosions
instead of implosions. The Rasas include both the Shringara and Bibhatsa, the Karuna and the Bhayankara, simultaneously
present at every instance.
There is likely to be such suffering that we may cry out for another Buddha, another Christ, another Mohammed.
Even as images of pleasure increase, proliferate, surround us, our desire is continuously reduced to needs. As if
desire were not infinite, it has to be dismally suppressed by displacement and by goods that promise satisfaction if not
satiation. As if all desire is condemned to seek its death while one is alive, not the groping, sobbing caesura of life and
its varied forms of poetry and music. How fond Ritwik was of the Kumarasambhava, I have recounted elsewhere. How
truly through his Titash we have sensed the convulsions of desire. When will we realise that separation and union have
to occur at the same time?
The proposal of the working-class consciousness that converted the crafts of mechanical reproduction into the
arts of infinite overtonal response are still to be realised. The official socialist art had imitated weakly the sinews of
Michelangelo’s men forgetting the enveloped robes of women, the dynamisations through postures that were nearly
possible, a kind of celebration that Michael Jackson may have been capable of, if his talent were not bought instead of
being rewarded.
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Indeed, the entire potential of electronic fields in extending our perceptions is being retarded by its assimilations into
modes of thinking that pre-date the cinema both as knowledge through light and as signifying sequences in a continuum
rather than objectified instances of the real or of reality. The technology of the video has transcended the mechanistic
copying of events only to find itself at the service of the most positivistic concreteness in its media-praxis. Its possibilities
of engendering the subjective and fantastic are themselves going to be even more insidiously controlled than the falsely
objective time that passes you by and which the TV box authorises through manipulative illusions presented as news.
I can see the plastic arts in conjunction with the cinema, literature and music, freeing subjectivities generated by
the tumultous history of the twentieth century in which all manner of social oppression came close to an end, only to
slip into an egotistical passivity where the individual is aggressively defining herself by what she buys, not by what she
creates or transforms.
In such a situation, to go back to hand-crafting would certainly be therapeutic. While to be content with
technological formalism within the bounds of a multinational boardroom can only constitute an act of self-hatred, since
it is being almost entirely activated by cretinous committees. We have to now search for our atmas in those scratches
formed by particles of dust embedded on negatives made of polyester positives. For they are carried by water to give life
to the signs of distant life. It is the vulnerability of being to the accidental, the redundant and the erroneous that bears
the truth in beauty: Basanti, Seeta, the little boy on the paddy fields or the bank of dissipated rivers.
The thirst of a woman in the desert made the spring burst forth . . .
Rehmat Khan, in his wanderings, made the air over the subcontinent vibrate with his Zamzam. When the pukurs dry
up, the longing for water fills the domed hills. Between the mountains of Safa and Marwa in the desert, she girds up her
loins, seeing her prophet-child suffer from thirst. She runs like one mad, seven times whereupon the angel makes a hollow
with his wing or foot. She fills the empty skin with water, drinks from the skin and suckles her child, may she be blessed,
for had she not done so the Zamzam would always have remained an overflowing fountain. Now let us ask them to tell
us about men who go mad.
I know the story . . . but I won’t tell you . . . the mad man went mad in a foreign land . . . because he lost her when
he was hungry in the boat. . . . I hope that the mad man is not hearing us and the wet hair will not ripple upon the river’s
edge in terrorised calm . . .
Ritwik, you will come back to the rice fields, perhaps among the cranes, in twilight cloud, perhaps as the swan
companion of a maiden or the seed in the ghungroo of Uttara’s sanguine feet.
You had always sought the blessings of the young. You died when you were 50. And here I am, 54 or more, not far
from the Padma. Shall we seek your blessings or you ours?

fig. 37: Joint letter to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi from Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul,
256 arguing for the need to set up a Chalachitra Akademi.

THE CENTENARY
1995
Previously unpublished.
Part of a series of short notes that Shahani wrote on various occasions of the centenary of
the cinema, several of the references here are directly autobiographical, linked to his earliest
memories of the city of Bombay where his family moved when he was still a child, following
Partition. Much of his more recent writing also is autobiographical: see ‘The Shock of Desire’
(pp. 261–70) and ‘Desire’ (pp. 358–61).
The trams are being phased out of Calcutta, I hear. It makes us tremble with fright.
I remember the trams that went out from Diana Talkies in 1948, Tardeo tram terminus, to different sections of
Bombay. The cinema ticket would cost us exactly 4½ annas. In Larkana, my father used to leave me at the Royal, I think,
while he went for a walk. I would watch Nurjehan in a halo of light. Here, on this island city, it was different. You took a
tram that may clang through an hour to bring you to the illusory halo, surrounding another desire.
We had won independence. Yet, most of the time, we wept. Not for what had been left behind, but for the clear
struggle that we would have to put up to let that torch of freedom lead us.
Across Diana Talkies, in the balcony, one could spot Meena and (Baby) Nanda, whose Marathi was like music to the
ears, just as their father’s seared through all hypocrisy in the famous Master Vinayak films.
There was as yet no colour. Imagine what joy it could have brought us, had someone like Amrita Sher-Gil or Ram
Kinker inspired spectacles like Ajanta to celebrate ahimsa and the Shanta Rasa.
In the meantime, it wasn’t Gandhi alone who was shot down calling upon Rama to forgive those who would
perpetrate holocausts. Those that did not forgive were blanketed out, their slogans on film scratched and obliterated
with some dark ink. Some that I had seen were in Rabindranath’s Bengali. Were these doodles on film to yield new
forms? Remember what the poet had said, it would have to free itself from literature to become itself. And from forms
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of political, economic and, indeed, cultural control. The question is becoming ever more urgent, as we find increasing
numbers of people marginalised from production and targeted as markets.
They say that Edison’s Bulb is still alive. By 1996, General Electric plans to ‘have aircraft engines, appliances,
broadcasting, financial services, industrial and power systems, medical systems, plastics, transportation and electric
motors in India’. Today (February 1, 1995), quoted in The Afternoon, Bombay, is the President of GE-Apar Lighting: ‘The
way you light your homes becomes an extension of your desires, emotions, aesthetics and lifestyle. . . . We are here to
meet the need.’
Meanwhile, Newstime, Hyderabad, has a Reuter report for British lovers headlined, ‘Long-distance cyber-kissing on
Valentine’s Day’.
The young recoil in horror from images, reading, substance in signs, tradition, memory . . .
They do not wish to live with the trauma of famine, women and men that become . . . for themselves in the violent
evacuation of meaning that digitalised reality condenses into its new iti asti. They have given their pain to you, Somnath
Hore, that you may move your hands to leave eternal traces of wounds. How like the cinema it is to want to keep forever
the aspirations born from that pain upon scorched strips of emulsion.
In the empty, colonnaded nights of colonial business districts of our world, the prostitutes will emerge as shadow-
silhouettes from the dark, etched upon light. Upon those likenesses Manto and Sahir Ludhianvi met them.
Waheeda, barely seventeen, smiled her way through the dubious feminine role of commercial cinema with a
nostalgia for that reality which is at once innocent and revealing of freedom. Ritwik’s Nagarik was not even known. I was
given a ticket to see Pather Panchali at a morning show at the famous Naaz Cinema in Bombay when Rock n’ Roll shirts,
made in Hong Kong, were smuggled into the country. Nehru had launched the indigenous ‘socialist system of society’.
One day at the Film Institute when the uncensored version of Battleship Potemkin arrived, silent, its mute rhythms and
melodies levitated us to such lightness that we believed that heaven was here in 1925. And it took the cinema only a
generation to bring it to us.
Where do we stand now? A hundred years away from the cinema. Seventy-eight years away from Eisenstein’s
imagination.
Yet there have been such glorious retrievals, haven’t there? Enough to give us hope, from the woven wisdom of the
sutas, through the wonder of energy in matter, the upheavals of bigotry, racism, sloth and indifference, annihilation and
power to such miracles that neither religion nor ideology anticipated.
Neorealism wore the world’s physicality as an ornament.
Griffith and Ford discovered, through the cinema, the spirit that went beyond white nationalism. Today, the Chinese
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play off a Hollywood idiom with a desire of self-realisation that can only be achieved with the austerities–excesses of
an Ozu–Ghatak.
Passers-by on a street in Paris ask, ‘Where are you from?’
The lamps are alight a little later than yesterday – or has the mellow sun disappeared earlier? The last few leaves of
rust, gold and red hang on thin, black boughs of trees.
‘I’m learning to speak . . . Bangla, Hindi, Marathi . . .’
‘Do you prefer the original or the dubbed?’
The headlights are almost all that you can see through the gathering. Almost till Ghislain throws his phares upon
the scene. The clapboard has to be rubbed off to write a new number of the shot and the take. The wardrobe man has
to violate union practice to stand in for the absent hairdresser, put the golden wisps of hair in the right place to show
the nape of the neck. The actor has to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ a hundred times. The collar of the overcoat slips down to expose
you to the whiff of snow in the air. A swig of red to keep you going, like a clochard, In the Name of God, through the
grey-blues, brown-blacks . . .
How I long for yellow, orange, vermilion, and the strident cuckoo, stylised into the insistent madhyam of Basant.
. . . All the sensations of violence that were ‘India’, the cinema, Rochester, tomorrow . . .
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THE SHOCK OF DESIRE
1998
Written for a conference on ‘Cinema and the Senses’, University of New South Wales, Sydney,
November 1998; previously unpublished.
This is the closest we have to autobiography. Especially valuable are Shahani’s comments on his
own films and his intellectual legacies. This may have been one of two essays he wrote on the
occasion of the conference, the other being ‘Desire’ (see pp. 358–61).
It is late evening.
My music teacher, Pt. Jal Balaporia, has left.
The night sky is a milky blue, like a billowing sari of a waif.
Bagesiri. The goddess appears in many garbs. Like in the ragini named after her, the veil covers her profile in a million
and more diaphanous waves through the sixth (dhaivat) to the fourth.
The sixth in transit, like my music teacher now, in a slow train to Andheri. The dhaivat passing him by, like silver
and golden light, emanating from empty compartments. Now leave the Night free to rest. Rest on the fourth, Bageshree.
Someone might think she is Durga, with so many arms, riding a tiger, as she overcomes the Asuras. Someone knows that
she is Saraswati, a goddess that may be worshipped by the musician of the Mughal court as well, Bageshwari, the Queen
of the Gardens, Persianised. Bagesiri, a blasphemous creation (apabrahansa), bringing together once again the sister-
languages of Sanskrit and Persian, to re-name the giver of flowing speech: music.
Syncretically, as I speak to you in English, I want to rediscover the beauty of speech – in all cultures at once, not
through a universalism; perhaps through hand-joints that we made in Bombay’s laboratories between disparate shots,
like Kuleshov, pre-montage, before cinema as language. With great musicians like Hariprasad Chaurasia and Garbarek
today, it is possible to take pleasure in two or more systems of music simultaneously. In conversation, as it were, not
in fusion.
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I believe that the cinema brought it about, the possibility of different forms of speech overlapping, coming
together in hybridity that, unabashed, shows its original pedigree, while reflecting in its eyes, sometimes mocking,
the colour of the other, those tones that in the blue light of France may range, in a Bonnard palette, from lavender
to corn yellow, while in Tagore’s golden Bengal, saturated aubergine fills the mind in simultaneous contrast to the
brilliant rice fields.
The word no longer speaks for itself. It constructs an image. It does not describe. It enters the ideas, inverses
the container for the contained, an aspiration turns into an object impeding its own progress. That is Char Adhyay.
The discourses position themselves, extending the meaning of dialectics to pulsating morphologies. The tenses are
condensed into space. It calls out for movement, the trembling of leaves, the blue-violet glissando of pirouetted pathos
that overtakes longing with tragedy. All the more, since we are born free in spasms of jouissance. The tentacles of
pleasure are the same as those of repulsion, as indeed are those of wonder and fear.
We have to live, preserve ourselves in our bodies, perpetuate our species, let the one individual become many. It
pains, for that reason alone, to begin with, and yet we evolve. To savour orgasm, difference and deferral, sublimations,
profanations that tingle at the tongue, infuse our breath, precipitate over vocal chords to shimmering overtones,
emanating from miniatures held like books, to read shades of colour through infinitesimal adjustments of angling the
light upon them.
In Kasba, we reinforce the multivalence of colour by costuming; transparent cool complementaries cover the warm 38
swirls of the walk, from the interior into the sunlight, the temperature and intensity of energy shifting – as deceptive as
the ensemble of actors, as truthful as formal Cartesian propositions are to themselves, tongue-in-cheek, self-mocking
intervals of shots and intonations, modulating movement and speech and allusion.
In Chekhov’s world, the reprieve from the depraved rational self-interest of nascent capitalism comes from its very
origins, an Eastern Christianity, where the meek are truly blessed and compassionate, irrationally seeking contact with
life in all its painful beauty. Its deepest irony, I think, lay in that very simplicity. I had to go further back, into Buddhist
iconography, never literally, only implicitly, to draw from its affirmation even as one met the depravity of late capitalism
in post-colonial India.
They say that the Shanta Rasa was added on to the original eight rasas, after the advent of Buddhism. I am inclined
to believe that to be true. Art in India before and after Buddhism has never achieved the repose of Sanchi and Bharhut.
The frenetic energy of Kailas at Ellora provides the starkest contrast to the quiescent Ajanta, in its neighbourhood. Here,

fig. 38 Janaki (Smita Patil) in Tarang (1984). fig. 39 Ela (Nandini Ghoshal) in Char Adhyay
(1997). Of Ela, but in a way relevant to Janaki, Shahani says, ‘I know that Ela . . . is the tragic
realisation of the same thrust of epic traditions, a sacrifice to the goddess that returns upon
her, with terrible reverberations. Those resonances, however, promise that the desire for
consummation is itself worth a lifetime, an epoch, linked as it is, paradoxically, with freedom,
262 with knowledge.’
 Kumar Shahani

the mineral and vegetal colour is an additional boon; the themes and motifs of other perspectives and civilisations
bowing to prosperity and trade, rational self-control. The fullness of earthy bodies celebrating the insubstantiality of
shunya, of all un-manifest being.
Chekhovian irony, the literary transformed into a continuous imagery of transient images, led itself to Emptiness
Reached, something one experiences so readily in the mountains and valleys of the Himalayas, and that has survived all
the influxes of harassed warriors and refugees in Kangra who have brought to its salubrious undulations the fevers and
passions of the desert, the whimsicalities of the deltas to the pure emanations at the source.
All of the above impelled me to play with the units like configurations that appear at the turn of a kaleidoscope:
the beauty that I remembered from my childhood of broken bangles of glass, creating Islamic mandalas where Godhood
proliferates from ever so many centres, in All Pervasiveness. Chekhovian wisdom has to float gently into the air and,
through it, disappear. Even the actors should not be held to the ground. Or to the surface. Its depth lies in evanescence.
Like the Muses themselves, calling men to forget themselves in profound abstraction, intensifying their anguish,
even as the distinctions between lover and beloved, feminine and masculine, the divine and the mundane disappear.
That was Khayal Gatha. The film that I had made just before Kasba. Far from the Shanta Rasa. I remember Paul Willemen
telling me that his hands shook, after the screening was over, because of the intensity of emotion – and this from a
person who was brought up on other forms of music, of visual composition and of narrative. For me, it represented a
great breakthrough.
When Laura Mulvey introduced me to a young Persian woman student of hers, I was very moved as she said
that she would like to make something like Khayal Gatha, and thereby do something for her culture and for world
39 cinema at the same time that would change its basic language. Similar responses came from colleagues in China, Sri
Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, from the BeNeLux countries. But some of the British and French critics pronounced it too
‘difficult’, too ‘metaphysical’, culture-specific. As if miniatures, epic realisations from the East, non-European musical
and vocal impulses, the movements of the body in relationship to the space of the camera/architecture were, in some
sense, anti-cinematic.
Of course, in a very mechanical sense, the propositions of the Renaissance, of Protestantism embedded in capitalism
and its technology, are and will be opposed to all the possibilities that have resisted the standardised differentiations
accepted by the triumphal march of Profit.
I wish we could respect every individual difference, without essentialising it. Every individual produces her own
subjectivity, an infinity of initiatives and responses, beyond prediction. The legends of love and separation are those of
knowledge individuated: Heer–Ranjha, Omar–Marvi, Shirin–Farhad, Orpheus–Euridice, Nala–Damayanti.

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No structures can contain them. Neither tragic Fate, nor God, nor gods and goddesses, not the Church, the Army,
the State and the Market that have subdued the desire to overcome separation. Perhaps all history is the resistance to
these obstacles.
Overdetermination, overvaluation, the excess in the condition of vulnerability that overflows into colour, suffusing
the basic twelve tones into minute and more minute gradations, into microtonal song and the madness of music, the
mysteries of mathematical release, of those void intervals that nevertheless leave marks on your body and mind – to
create unconditioned forms.
It is not a matter of absence alone, as psychoanalysis has largely led us to believe. Psychoanalytic procedure tends
to privilege the dramatic, allowing, as it does, the word to stand in for action. It is made in the mould of Greek tragedy
and continues to insist on treating the Real, in and through the signified. Thereby, psychoanalysis itself works through
objectification, through transference of substantialising the absence; the metaphor then imposes its own autonomous
logic, acquires an organic-looking character and proclaims itself to be in the nature of things. I find that cultural theory
must treat this mode as one among many modes that offer themselves, build tensions between the signified and the
signifier in contrapuntal rhythmic and melodic lines that will free unilinear and ideological, overly ‘Western-hegemonic’,
overly orientalist, progressive or mystical half-truths, from their fetters.
For all this, I owe a great deal to cultural criticism, inspired by psychoanalysis, by structuralism, by idealism and by
the great historians, economists, art-critics, scientists, artists and writers who have had the courage to veer away from the
positivist, instrumentalist outlook and admitted into our consciousness relational aspects of reality within and outside
of rational thought, the multiple patterns that different languages, cultures, means of computing and locating can reveal.
For that complexity and diversity of interpretation itself, it is impossible to reduce even the erotic, the basic rasa
of shringara, to sexual sublimation, profanation, to fetishism or to some primitive manifestation of thought, emotion
and life. In the late nineteenth and in our century, art has created its greatest cult figures. At the same time, it has faced
near extinction in extensive trivialisation by every means possible, above all through the often helpless consent of its
practitioners to the not so blind forces of the State and the Market.
Is Vivan Sundaram regressive because he refuses to make objects for the speculative functions of Finance Capital?
Or, is he going on forward from Eisenstein, Brecht, Jancsó, Ghatak? Stepping out of the nation and of other groups, yet
not aloof or alone. Questioning his narcissism, he seeks to hide in the mirror and expose, instead, his class.
Amrita Sher-Gil, his aunt, who pioneered contemporary Indian art, whom I have never met, is nevertheless the
woman I knew best. She died in 1941, when she was still in her twenties. In consultation with Vivan, I worked on her life,
a project that attracts interest every few years, only to retreat into the background again. There was also, on the way
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to Khayal Gatha, another biography which I started shooting – that of a great psychoanalyst, born in India, who lived
through the two great wars of our century to come up with some great insights on groups, on learning, on observation.
His name is Wilfred Bion.
I think one of his greatest contributions is to get rid of the residual moralisms that are attached to the theories of
emotion in our quest for self-knowledge that takes the route of the Judaeo–Christian–Islamic institutionalisations of
culture, without at any time rejecting the great insights of the early saints and Sufis, the pioneers of art like Leonardo
or Shakespeare and Keats. The residual moralities often apply to the body in seeking out pathological states of mind,
abnormalities, deviations from the norm, as if it were easy to postulate any. Above all, it is his rejection of the idea of
cure and, therefore, of the judging of mental disorder and disease that seems liberatory.
Emotions and thoughts thus become configurations, to be viewed without one’s own burden of individual and
collective memory, without the intrusions of desire, without the instruments of understanding – at least in the act
of observation. How close the aspiration is to the accidents of photography, to the mutations that take place in the
inadvertent jostling of cultures in the post-modern fancies of chaos, that take you deeper into mirror images, ever more
brilliant, ever more refracted and looping in upon themselves, as if another finite universe were about to be created.
On the way to Khayal Gatha from Tarang, I had made two little workshop films, one in Pune and one in London. The
one at the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII) was made for a girl student of mine who wanted to find a cinematic
correlative to something deeply autobiographical in her. We worked it out through the concept of the sakhi, the alter-
ego figure in the feminine consciousness, with which almost all of Indian secular art since Kalidasa is imbued and which
permeates female camaraderie in folk culture. It is the nearest I’ve come to making an erotic film, this sketch in black and
white, as if the colour were averted by the fear of being overwhelmed by it.
The other sketch is in colour, made with a group of immigrant actors in London, arising out of a workshop conducted
along with Alaknanda Samarth, where the script arose from the preoccupations of the actors themselves in their own
lives, their own displacement. Both these films helped to bring in, explore and elaborate a range of subjectivities – along
with those of the two incomplete biographical projects – that have left me on the threshold of my own self-abode,
always set to depart and wear out my heels.
Janaki, the heroine of Tarang, half-woman, half-goddess, in origin a landless labourer in famine-stricken rural
Maharashtra, may be my ideal. For years, my inner life may be as much of a parody of hers, as is, surely, the peripatetic
existence of many of our ilk, suspended between one homelessness and another.
I know that we are all mortal, but I also sense that we all imagine ourselves as being immortal, and that, finally, we
live by what we imagine and not by what we know.
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The characters of Tarang were almost all as true to life as can be in an epic work of fiction – amalgamates, of
course, representatives of class, yes, ambivalent in both emotion and intent, blundering when they thought that the
way was clear, joyous only when and if they gave of themselves. Those were tumultuous years. The cold war at its
height. The schisms within the radicals funded directly by activist research through various Defence Departments,
espionage agencies, paranoid political parties that had already begun to undermine the precarious freedom that we
had enjoyed since 1947. To throw us into the fires of indigenous finance capital, the Emergency, in preparation for an
India, the ancient land of ideological non-violence, becoming an area for refuelling war planes. Tarang’s script was
written after I had made a short film at the end of a three-year famine in Maharashtra in 1973. The film’s shooting
began in 1978. On 19th December, 1983, I saw the first colour-corrected print. My friends and my wife Roshan, who had
co-scripted the film, had stood steadfast by me. Tarang’s faith in the collective stood fully vindicated. It sometimes
makes me wonder how life and art can predict one or the other. Earlier, while making a short sketch of about ten
minutes on a patient of my psychoanalyst friend Udayan Patel, one had filmed an event that eventually occurred in
his then bizarre life.
It could be that the ‘aesthetics’ – if one may begin to call it that – of the epic form has the capacity to express,
even to generate, such energies in diverse directions because it accepts the dominant mode of exchange: day-to-day
life in praxis, under capitalism, the exchange of word, gesture, look, tone, colour, line, rhythm, melody and modulation
rendered into and through the form of the commodity. For this one had to separate, isolate, free that which can be
retrieved of the non-commodified, to put it alongside the commodified, or to show it in the process of becoming so.
The relatively socialised modes would suddenly shed their skin and acquire new ones. Of course, one cannot programme
it entirely. One has to keep working through many entries. Taking from Hollywood the trolley, taking from Kutiattam in
Kerala the mise-en-scène, to counter the geometric social horizon with the expanding circles from a spiritual centre, or
the psychological ambivalence of acting with the rationality of the plot: the two together mediated by the anguished
search for immortality, be it that of Prometheus or Pururava. To bring together death by water (Urvashi); to see in both,
freedom, moksha, Grace, mukti.
I know that Ela of Char Adhyay is the tragic realisation of the same thrust of epic traditions, a sacrifice to the
goddess that returns upon her, with terrible reverberations. Those resonances, however, promise that the desire for
consummation is itself worth a lifetime, an epoch, linked as it is, paradoxically, with freedom, with knowledge.
The art of the cinema has, from the very beginning, in varied cultures, shown up reality to be fantastic, or, fantasy
to go beyond the imagination in the real. Aesthetic theories which bind themselves to the image or to other thought-
processes or to grammar, to sexuality, opposing one another, possibly ignore that praxis works from the overlap of
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pleasure and pain. Cinema is so full of signs that it should exclude reductive readings. Moreover, as Indian aestheticians
have for long emphasised – and as all music demonstrates – what we enjoy, assimilate, elaborate, is oblique, in the sense
that Barthes had used it for Eisenstein.
It is true that ‘the oblique’ meets with some resistance in epic constructions. This is true only of the surface, though.
If one preoccupies oneself only with the surface, the overstatement of knowledge, the already synthesised cultural
modes of operation that the epic includes, the didactic, the cliché, the objectified imaginary, the myth, seem inartistic,
closed and overloaded with meaning.
To release and recreate its language, people act. For idealists, action, history, the manifest unconscious, often look
like corruption. Therefore, they begin to damn all narration, sequential thought and feeling; the self-image, not allowed
to be static, yet originating in the wonder and awareness of one’s own body, needs only a blue lotus to transcend from
narcissism to shringara. Shringara is to put the limits of one’s boundaries in question at the same time as one recognises
them.
The origins in a primitive state can serve as the mechanisms of an exploitative code, grounding human nature in
pathological states of narcissism and scopophilic alterations between the voyeur and the exhibitionist.
But the desire to look, in evolution, arose from the need to move away from the predatory and towards the
gratifying, to know the secrets of the pressures that were more passively sensed.
All action upon the sensory puts its existence into question. The beliefs in the order of things yield themselves
to displacements which, once again, create the terms where the real and the imagined coalesce to make do with their
incomplete journey to the eternal.
The hopeless realisation that science can yield no morality has created such destitutes of Modernity that they easily
fall back into cold, caged isolation on the information highways.
I feel that an engagement to question is itself the very source of the greatest pleasure, since the boundaries of
sensation and thought, of emotion and reason, of introspective action, open up to the possibilities of experience
that had earlier been foreclosed by culture or personal history. Real pleasure needs years of discipline, true, but that
discipline is the capability to be vulnerable, to have the courage for self-transformation that Taran had in Maya Darpan.
The metonomies of power can dissolve, gender roles shed their disguises, to let nakedness find individual beauty for
ornament, the lover’s desire giving Nature itself a grammar, an opportunity, in every individual instance, of expression.
Not merely a shape, a property, to devour.
It is in this sense, perhaps, that when one loves one has all the wealth of the world. It is in the implicit giving and
receiving of this wealth that the pleasure and the overwhelming pain that accompany it are felt. It is as gratuitous, as
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un-objectified as the implicit madhyam (the fourth note) in Bageshri that Hari-ji bestowed on us recently. It is as empty CINEMA IN EXCHANGE
as The Flute, as dark as Krishna, as free as a metonomy that will not attach itself to any saturation, nor measure itself in
scales of frequencies and decibels that freeze its destiny. 2000
For us, as for the children who stand on the threshold of a global hurricane.
To want to open up the senses is to take the risk of pain and pleasure; and so, to know. It was when a teacher made
me love algebra that I realised that beauty was always opaque, violent and true. Find it in your mother’s eyes that are,
after so many children, searching within the depths of your being, the wounds that they might heal. Clasp your father’s
fingers with your tiny hand to speed to that glorious sunset behind the bejewelled tombs whose reflections will be the
stars embedded in the desert blue of the night. Take a breath, hear the storm disperse the words to meanings beyond Presentation made at a workshop organized by HIVOS in Bangalore; previously unpublished.
horizons, in sounds that seek equilibria in precarious moments, savoured and lost forever, held in modulations with In this paper, written on the occasion of a workshop to discuss the future of the Dutch
scratches, erasures held in modulations with scratches, erasures, bites. To move the world by looking at it, making it grantmaker HIVOS’s strategy for supporting documentary cinema, Shahani takes the strong line
visible; to embrace darkness; to disturb the air between planets with acoustic hollows, rising to fill the intervals with that the cinema has to be linked to celluloid film, and points to the problems that digitization
overtones, so that unheard, unknown before, now, never, after touches you. is causing: an ‘atomised morality’ stripped of all compassion.

A little less than thirty years ago, there was a drought in Maharashtra. I went across to the Films Division of the
Government of India and asked them if I could go to the countryside and make a reportage of sorts on film. That was
the only film that I was ever able to make for them. We had received Milo as food aid with the seeds that our starving
peasants would not trust. The Indian state conducted the relief works with the active help of socialist slogans and the
benevolent advice of the World Bank. Globalisation was trapped in the Cold War. The peasants, sharecroppers, the
landless – for long known to have been indifferent to the machinations of the world’s kshatriyas – either preferred to
die of starvation or take the colonial load of road-building on their heads, giddy with hunger, the ingestion of unholy
seeds and the famous gram that Shivaji had fed his mountain soldiers.
The discourse of Oriental fatalism was obviously the sort of fiction that the comprador had perpetrated in collaboration
with the obverse view of the teleological proselytiser of the triumph of the will. In Marathwada, the destitute were the
hardest working people that anyone could imagine. That is why, in the eighties when I met Boris Taslitzky, Amrita Sher-Gil’s
Boy with Apples who had been captured and saved from the Auschwitz showers during the Second World War, I believed
him when he said that he cherished that experience because he had found the greatest humanity in the concentration
camp. To that, in a slim glass that was shaped like a tube-rose, we drank the eau de vie that a friend of his made from plums.
How was anyone to script that joy and that pain into a film on Amrita, who had died before he reached Auschwitz,
so young, that icon to be, Amrita!

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Not by showing barbed wire. Nor by quoting Night and Fog, which newsreels at the end of Ceaucescu’s regime are
said to have 'quoted'.
Perhaps, then, by showing the embroidery of Transylvania, that her mother or she may have worn as a child?
'You never asked me if we were lovers, Amrita and I ?' he remarked as I got up to leave, along with my friend Latika,
who was also as moved as I was and who did not want to intrude any more.
'Why does everyone else ask?' He made a sign, we had another waft of Mirabelle and he gave me the last copy of
a text that he had published, long ago, when love was still a form of protest, specially if that love carried with it all the
quality of sacred mystery.
Does one just record mysteries, sacred and profane, on film, video and digital, or does one transform them into
experiential knowledge, which moves from the sensate perception, itself in a multiple flux of energies that converts
sound into optics, the visual into the tactile, orienting us towards action or nourishment or comfort?
Simultaneously, it reconstitutes the real through the imaginary.
Or, is it reality?
Obviously, we are running into a host of problems here: The idea of reality itself – unless negotiated through the
senses, thought, emotion, the intellect, simultaneously – can itself become an ideology of control, instead of exploration.
See Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s article in the Journal of Arts & Ideas (Nos. 23–24, January 1993), which has a wonderful quote
from Mr Pandian as well.
When the idea of reality begins to confuse itself with Identity and Narcissus looks at himself as the Other, even the
Echoes of reality are muted, dissipated, disappearing, distant, mediated nature morte, stilled.
As for the Real, that will Realise itself in the Rational: where is the State today?
Never before in its history has the State, globally, alienated itself from the people that are meant to constitute it
as much as it has alienated itself today, not even perhaps in those days when the people were expected to find cakes
instead of the bread that they missed. The State, everywhere, has aligned itself with technology which makes the citizen’s
life fungible.
True, there is no bloodletting and starvation at the moment of the magnitude that the last three terrifying centuries
have seen, except perhaps at the very doorsteps and windows of this subcontinent and the garden that it has borne. But,
there is no genocide needed when the 'citizens' are as abstracted as the State itself, as absent in visibility when they are
traded as stocks and shares and re-aggregated as markets.
Perhaps, environmental degradation will have the Malthusian effect, desired by some who find the burden of
humanity as great a load upon itself as Prithvi, the Mother upon whom we stamp our feet.
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But the State stands above and beyond, the more powerful it grows, freed from its location in nationhood, yet
controlling aggregates that have been disaggregated by its structural invasion of life-processes that have rendered the
citizen incapable of historical intervention. At the same time, the apparatus of coercion is made to appear participative.
It is being made to appear that the aspirations of the people are in themselves logically leading to their disempowerment.
Mechanical technologies freed us from the need of physical labour. They also speeded up every form of activity to
a pitch that compressed perception into scales that overlapped, and perspectives that attempted to collapse sequences
into idealised harmonies.
Inevitably, when the formalisation of these processes led to automation,
Objects and events began to get an autonomy from the active Subject.
Buster Keaton and indeed most of the burlesque of the early American silent cinema presage the melancholy of
Jacques Tati and Woody Allen, while mocking at their own pathos, the fate of the individual snapped out of his own
gesture and linguistic impulse and hurled into the collectivity of Capital, freezing the energies that it unleashes, in their
moments of youth.
The processes of cultural rehabilitation of the individual, be it from the ‘free’ metropolitan centres of control or the
Socialist Fatherland, from the Axis powers that wished to cleanse the world of all other ethnicities, or the nations that had
been subjugated by God, Nature and the War Machine of Competition, seemed to be nearly impossible after Hiroshima.
The existentialist tradition met its Nemesis in the Welfare State, a kind of exchange taking place between Europe
and the USA, as they traded the supremacy of the individual for the supremacy of the Economy on the Keynesian model.
The few that would not relent were those that would not accept social engineering – I am thinking of Bresson, of Godard,
of Joris Ivens, one renewing links with a long tradition of the cradles of civilisation, mediated through anti-institutional
Christianity, the other aspiring to reject every given essence to reach in reality a union of thought and action through the
Rimbaud-like ‘systematic derangement of the senses’, the third abandoning all moorings of comfort to explore the self
in distant and threatened communities. In our mythological world, Ritwik found the atma in the original configuration of
the archetype, transformed by individual experience in a universe threatened by man’s rapacity.
It was left to people of the persuasion of Karl Popper to advocate, in the name of scientific anti-idealism, the life
of atomised morality in a society which engineered Christian ideals stripped of all compassion. George Soros, in his
extraordinary life and the book that speaks of the crisis of today’s economy, speaks of the subversion of rational self-
interest by its own absence of reflexivity. Thus, all action, the more ‘successful’ and outer-directed it is, meets with the
closing up of thought, intention and the play of subjectivities. Almadovar creates a whole idiom in which all subjectivity
itself is turned into a masquerade, invented as kitsch that frustrates every desire for love, compassion and creativity. In a
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film entitled All About My Mother, it is the ‘MY’ which is finally the most elusive, as the subject whose mother the film human knowledge. However, cinema took just a few years to begin to do that. Are the new signals being forced into
depicts dies at the beginning of the film. imitating, at second or third remove, the sheer instrumentality of cinema? If the linearity of the new signals proves
In an accident. The accident is history, brute Chance, reducing all desire to needs that will be satisfied in the market, resistant to any artistic purpose, why should we force them into it? Also, do we need any art or have we decided to
by calculated surrogation. abandon it – perhaps in favour of speed, hard-core representation that converts itself into market capitalisation at
In the virtual world, almost anything can take the place of anyone, a multi-dimensionality replace the sensations of a velocity that leaves our four-dimensional experience behind in a limbo at every instant, erasing the curves to form
perception, relationships – physical, temporal, emotional. predictable, designed, organised by anonymous forces interactivity, forcing us into the Pascalian paradox between faith
This multidimensionality is welcome in the fields that help us overcome the limits of our body. When used in and the intellect.
projections of architecture, surgery, medicine, acoustic environment that pulls us out of the gravitational field, it can open We have to know the nature of the signals that we are offering to the world before we brainwash ourselves
up our minds to possibilities that older technologies suppressed. Why should these technologies perform illusionistic into believing that society, God or country, our own bodies and minds, are being served not being subjected to a
functions, except in the event of extreme privation? What is the need to hook people on to ersatz. Is that the function new reduction.
of democracy? True, interactive modes have the seeds in them of finally doing away with all representation except that I have faith in our capacities to discover absolutely new imaginative resources within ourselves to deal with the
desired by the subject herself. However, it is an extremely remote possibility, since most software for the interaction is video and the digital without doing harm to the great evolution of our individuated bodies, minds, the arts, all those
designed by corporate entities to maximise profit, not interactivity. marks of a civilised species that have an infinite capacity to give, not necessarily in exchange alone.
Digital sound can restore lost voices, stitch together in seamless texture tones ruffled by the medium through which
they travel. But, by definition, deprived of the context of noise, the motive force of the music is obscured or absent in
its overwhelming clarity. More than anything else, the new energies are working towards compression of all sorts, and
have such great uses in storage, transmission, medicine, etc. that their overproduction becomes necessary to sustain
expensive processes.
However, overproduction always works into spillovers into areas where the processes and materials, simply because
they save time and money, are used indiscriminately.
I have a fear that instead of finding ways of culling artistic practice and potential from the media, we are applying
them and abandoning them as quickly as cheaper, faster, more portable models, modes and procedures become available.
Art began to distinguish itself from design and craft at a fairly late stage in every civilisation. And, within civilisations,
again and again it had to re-establish its distinction, as every fossilised form had to be replaced by the appearance of
new languages, figures of the imagination. Today, we are witnessing a curious phenomenon where the new techniques
are forcing art into a fossilised universalism that will destroy all personality.
Can we not find all those mysteries of unanticipated intervals, metonymies, displacements, attractions, substance
yielding to energy, relocation in the world of digitised knowledge and entertainment?
Cinema had to overcome its own technological predilection, wrongly proposed as its form in its early stages and
thereafter by people who see it only as an instrumentality, an almost physical medium alone with no proposals for

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psychoanalysis, philosophy, film THE SELF AS
AN OBJECTIVE ENTITY
1988

First Rita Ray Memorial Lecture, Chitrabani, Calcutta; previously unpublished.

Shahani was invited by Fr. Gaston Roberge, then in charge of Chitrabani’s mass communications
programme, to deliver three lectures. These were in part intended to dialogue with Roberge’s
own writings of the time, assembled in 1985 as The Subject of Cinema. Together with ‘Film as
a Contemporary Art’ (see pp. 204–21), these lectures by Shahani comprise the key texts of his
theoretical work. Their concerns are wide-ranging. The first lecture moves from psychoanalysis –
an enduring interest, demonstrated in the short film, The Object (1971), that was intended as part
of the supervision of Shahani’s old friend, psychoanalyst Udayan Patel, and later, the unfinished
‘A Memoir of the Future’ on psychoanalyst W.R. Bion – to anthropology (Kosambi, Lévi-Strauss),
to finally address the question that he wants to foreground, namely, how can we free our
experience from its idea? Such an endeavour is only possible if we also free ourselves ‘from the
trauma of birth, the terror of orgasm and the wish for death’, and ‘disinvest our subjectivity of
the load of convention and the object of our ego’. He finally leaves it to his reader to decide
which is the best way to do it: ‘to draw attention to the spectator’s position’ through deliberate
processes of aesthetic intervention – or to take the view that ‘the object is the image’ – or for
the spectator to know and to ‘develop this language by the desire created in him by the object’.

We accord the status of life to everything that breathes, to everything that brings about the condition which can take in
air, ingest and reproduce itself. The passage from non-life to life is itself one of trauma, of splitting. It is the caesura which
marks the inner rhythm of all that follows. Looked upon as suffering or joy from which men seek liberation – through
desire or its absence, through struggle, through understanding or perhaps through the acceptance of the nature of being.

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He who knows the nature of his self and understands how his senses act finds no room for the ‘I’ and thus he will
attain peace unending. The world holds the thought of ‘I’ and from this arises false apprehension. Self is an error, an
illusion, a dream. Open your eyes and awake. See things as they are and you will be comforted. (Thus Spake the Buddha)
Yet to see things as they are is not easy. Ideal forms haunt us for centuries; it takes a Newton to intervene before we
can amend the circles to make them into irregular ellipses. The sentient get trapped by single impressions, strait-jacketed
into fixed figurations of being. When we free ourselves from the ‘sensuality-based mind’, the resultant emptiness of signs
is unable to cope with the ambivalence of experience and praxis. The awake, conscious subject, even when devoid of
the ego, is faced then with the repetition of desire, unable to realise himself or observe in freedom the resistance the
world offers so that he can change it in his determination rather than serve it in opposition, by opposition. Identity and
opposition are two inevitable forms, one linked to the image, the other to the idea which can throw us into disintegration
and death or to the affirmation of life in all its transience. I am, you see, speaking of the cinematographe.
Jean Mitry: ‘l’Art a ses origines dans la Religion. Plus exactement dans le sentiment religieux, de l’angoisse de
l’homme devant le mystère du monde et des choses, du besoin . . . de saisir l’insaissable . . . à retrouver en tout et partout
l’harmonie e l’équilibre dont il a l’intuition comme étant lui-même harmonie et équilibre’. That emptiness of the word,
that negation of the object (that the first letter of the alphabet proposed to Buddhism) filled itself in reality with a
startlingly modern view of political economy!
‘The best way of spending surplus accumulation, whether in the treasury or from voluntary private donations, would
be in public works such as digging wells and water ponds and planting groves along the trade routes . . . liberated from
robbers and cheats. A citizen could bring up his children in comfort and happiness, free from want and fear. . . . The new
philosophy gave man control over himself. What it could not give was limitless scientific and technical control (D.D.
Kosambi, The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India in Historical Outline). No wonder this period in our history gave
us perhaps the first organised religion, integrating man to nature. Buddhist art at Sanchi has burgeoning wealth, in its
fullness, offering nourishment. Nature itself is in a reverie, serene, not overwhelming in its power.
Lévi-Strauss about Bharhut sculpture: ‘S’il est un art éternel, c’est bien celui-là: il remonte à cinq millénaires, il est
d’hier, on ne sait. Il appartient aux pyramides et à nos maisons; les formes humaines, sculptées dans cette pierre rose à
grain serré, pourraient s’en détacher et se mêler à notre société. Aucune statuaire ne procure un plus profond sentiment
de paix et de familiarité que celle-ci, avec ses femmes chastement impudiques et sa sensualité maternelle qui se complaît
à l’opposition des mères-amantes et des filles cloîtrées . . . féminité placide et comme affranchie du conflit des sexes. . . .
Si le bouddhisme cherche . . . à dominer la démesure des cultes primitifs, c’est grâce à l’apaisement unifiant que porte en
elle la promesse du retour au sein maternel ’ (Tristes Tropiques). Neither the Lack nor the Difference intervenes here, even
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as it is so perceived. The nurturing mother fills up the void. There is neither the good nor the bad. There is the presence
in the absence. Here is the beginning of all language.
As the mother contains the penis, the image contains the mother. Its insubstantiality is filled with codes that have more
than the memory of the primal scene. The need for separation, individuation, splitting – joy in that sorrow, organic events
that become determinants of psychosomatic generation of experience, which in turn generate thoughts and their linkages.
The way to knowledge is opened out here. The prohibition on incest brings with it a frenzy that transfers the psychosomatic
tumescence to other areas of the body and mind. Oedipus will not heed the warnings of the Oracle. What the Sphinx yields
to Oedipus – power, money, tyrannical control over the world – is that of a usurper, although he himself is the legitimate heir
to all. Man, who is the measure of all things, is the victim of that very condition. Oedipus’ epistemological instinct leads us to
violation. For too long is the demand left unsatisfied. Reason then takes him back to sacrifice, self-immolation. He tries to put
out the image because his cogito has failed him. That is when Oedipus knows himself for what he is. He is not the measurer but
the thing measured, not the equator but the thing equated. He is the answer to the problem that he tried to solve . . .
In this self-recognition of Oedipus, man recognises himself. Man measures himself and the result is not that man is
the measure of all things. The Chorus which rejected number and all that it stood for, has learnt to count; and states the
result of that great calculation. ‘Generations of men that must die, I add up the total of your life and find it equal to zero’:
Bernard Knoz in Tragic Themes in Western Literature thus speaks of Oedipus. Oide – swell, but is also Oide – ‘I know’. The
foot of the tyrannos is what the ‘Sphinx had forced us to look at’, ‘the laws of Zeus being high-footed’.
The layers of meaning that accumulate through praxis and history seem to obliterate the difference between nature
and culture for the spectator, placing the subject in such a position that he cannot distinguish between his projection
and his introjection. In the cinema, it has given rise to a ‘cosmomorphism’, thus charging man and his world with a
cosmic presence akin to ritual and to later anthropomorphism of language. All languages are filled with anthropomorphic
metaphors, for this is how we project our experience and give language the qualities of human beings. Much of the
concern of the ‘New Novel’ has, in fact, been to be able to describe without the metaphors of anthropomorphism. Yet
the cinema is radically different because it establishes that subjectivities may shift and may indeed be impersonal.
Almost all the excesses of cinematographic theory are traceable to the fact that cinema arrived on the scene after
the flowering of phenomenological thought, particularly in the Novel. So that the receptivity to its ‘cosmomorphism’,
evident even in Bazin and the early Metz, seemed to deny it the possibility of generating civilised meaning. In the theory
of montage, they seemed to suggest that the meanings of things-in-themselves were distorted through verbal, imagistic
and rhythmic construction. On the contrary, the basis of montage was absolutely the same: any two unrelated, neutral
events would yet yield their immanent meaning when put together. What Eisenstein had called for was to increase
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the consciousness of juxtaposition, his semiotic impulse leading him to examine the nature of languages which do not
necessarily function from the apparent conventionalism of the alphabet.
I leave it to you to decide which could generate the greater excess: 1. to draw attention to the spectator’s position in
what passes before him albeit through the conscious and deliberate processes of aesthetic intervention, or 2. the stance that
the object is the image, or 3. the spectator knows himself and develops this language by the desire created in him by the object.
The enterprise of including psychoanalysis, the study of ideology and linguistics ‘to establish the pertinent features of
the matter in the cinema’ (Metz) is of course commendable, but not without establishing transpositions which transcend
the literality of the vocabulary. To an extent, also since there is such a great pressure in the cinematograph of many
hybridities that only go by the name of cinema because of the use of celluloid, the enterprise might often fall into the traps
of superposing the states of mind of the mass consumer on to the spectator of the cinematograph. It is therefore centrally
necessary to remind oneself that both the making and viewing of films are as much a culmination of a history of the religious,
philosophic as material and artistic practice, as they are the beginnings of an innovative participation in the universe.
The detailed examination by Melanie Klein of the novel If I Were You by Julian Green, to illustrate her thesis on
identification, could well be the psychological basis of the elaboration of reincarnation theories that preceded it long
ago, neither validating not invalidating them but opening up areas of thought that hitherto remained closed to modern
attempts at understanding subjectivity. In Lacan’s regret that it is not in our mere power as practitioners (of psychoanalysis)
to accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of ‘Thou Art That’ in which is revealed to him the cipher of his moral destiny,
there is almost certainly a reference to the Gita. When Freud elaborates upon Narcissus and his incapability to love, I
believe he is exploring the links between idealism in its many geographic and historic perversions, and the reduction of
the cogito to the form of an insubstantial image preventing the dialectic of heterosexuality from entering into history.
Particularly, when the self is reduced to an egotistical subject within a group. Bion’s pioneering work in this area can help
us understand the imploitation (Brecht’s expression) which the spectator might impose upon himself, because the primitive
assumptions of the group might differ from his individuated being, itself otherwise in consonance with reality.
But like any other human systematisation, psychoanalysis must derive its validity from its limits. It operates best in
relation to the particular. The moment it opens out or back into generalisation, its conjecture moves into abstractions
which need the support of other sciences, other disciplines. That very experience should prevent us from building a
general theory of the spectator with untransposed terms that have yet to find their differentiation in practice. In other
words, it would perhaps need long and detailed analyses of individual cinematic works done by psychoanalysts of
Melanie Klein’s calibre, with the inevitable errors of meaning that such an application is likely to produce, before we can
transpose terms with confidence to fit our search.
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To begin with, for example, the psychoanalytic referent would have to free itself from the pathological, the moral
and the essential before we can come close to the listener–spectator–creator. For the pathological, the moral and the
essential – in their different, often curiously radical garbs – may be necessary to establish norms, not to synthesise angles
of vision and auditory fields.
Wilfrid Bion had not only rejected the idea of cure and, therefore, of the pathology of mental life, but also attempted
to move towards non-normative categories of truth. This approach may have its own danger of claiming to be value-free.
But, since Bion accepted the reality of pain in the analysand as the principle source of his being on the couch in the first
place, Bion restored qualitative meaning to whatever mathematical configuration was visible. To clean up the mind of
the fragmented, bizarre objects that occupied the finiteness of space that they conjured up, he wished to unsaturate his
mind himself. To this end, he proposes that the observer free himself of memory, desire and understanding. While we
may dissociate ourselves from the phenomenological–idealist tradition with which he himself struggled in the latter part
of his life, a mind free of memory, desire and understanding having experienced what these words mean, would be able
to enter and become what they observe. Instead of preserving or being possessed by what one thus has, one becomes
continuous with what is. I realise that the romantics had tried to resolve the tension between the subject and the object
by obliterating the boundaries between the Self and the Other. The concept of jouissance used in almost all cultures as
a sensual, structural support for artistic expression may also yield similar approaches.
But only if we recognise, and through that recognition free ourselves, from the trauma of birth, the terror of orgasm
and the wish for death, can we then free experience from its idea. For, it is through our consciousness that we beome
continuous with the joy of life, make our barriers points of contact, disinvest our subjectivity of the load of convention
and the object of our ego. The problem of romanticism was/is that both in the political and aesthetic spheres, its
self-realisation/determination held on to a static idea of nature, unmediated by history (that being the corruption of
civilisation). The conscious individual has since then been condemned to the prison of his ego. In fact, it is that equation
which makes some believe that the spectator should be, or is, in a state between dream and waking.
In fact, it is the awakening to all states of our being that brings about the joy in reconstituting it in art, science or
praxis that we experience as its realisation. In it the synchronic and diachronic meet in one instant, yet are not confused
one for the other. Just as the sensuous and the spiritual. Speaking about the theory of Saussure on the autonomy between
status and history, that is to say, between synchrony and diachrony, Roman Jakobson observes:
My attention was immediately drawn to the fact that synchrony, which is the ensemble of
the phenomena of language existing in a community of speakers, was equated by Saussure
both terminologically and theoretically to a static state and was contrasted by him to another
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equivalence, that of dynamism and diachrony. In criticising this conception, I referred, by no
means accidentally, to the example of cinematographic perception. If a spectator is asked
a question of synchronic order (for example, what do you see at this instant on the movie
screen?), he will inevitably give a synchronic answer, but not a static one, for at that instant he
sees horses running, a clown turning somersaults, a bandit hit by bullets. In other words, these
two effective oppositions synchrony/diachrony and static/dynamic, do not coincide in reality.
Synchrony contains many a dynamic element, and it is necessary to take this into account when
using a synchronic approach. If synchrony is dynamic, then diachrony, which is the analysis and
juxtaposition of different stages . . . most take static elements into consideration as well. There
is an attempt to suppress the tie between the system of a language and its modifications.
Consider again the infinite modulations which music (and the Bergsonian–Upanishadic concept of time) sensitises
us to where significance flows out of the boundaries of language-like structures. I think we are up against far more than
overdetermination: the archaeology of experience in the resplendent debris of forms that survive.
Scientific thought is a development of pse-scientific thought. . . . Supposing an archaeologist
belonging to a later culture finds a textbook of Euclidean geometry without diagrams. He will
discover how the words ‘point’, ‘straight line’, ‘plane’ are used in the propositions. He will
also see how the latter are deduced from each other. He will even be able to frame new
propositions according to the known rules. . . . But only when point, straight line, plane . . .
convey something to him ‘will geometry possess any real content for him’.
With our pre-scientific concepts we are very much in the position of an archaeologist in
regard to the ontological problem. We have, so to speak, forgotten what features in the world
of experience carried us to frame these concepts, and we have great difficulty in representing
the world of experience to ourselves without the spectacles of the old established conceptual
interpretation. An aside: ‘concepts’, of course, have reference to sensible experience, but they
are never in a logical sense deducible from them. The concept of space . . . seems to presuppose
the concept of the solid object . . . constituted from visual and tactile impressions, the fact that
they can be continuously followed through time, and that the impressions can be repeated . . .
From the point of view of the sense-experience, the development of the concept of space
seems . . . to conform to the following scheme: solid body, spatial relations of solid bodies,
interval, space.
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It is clear that the concept of space as a real thing already existed in the extra-scientific conceptual world. Euclid’s
mathematics, however, knew nothing of the concept as such; they confined themselves to the concepts of the objects
and the spatial relations between objects. The point, the plane, the straight line, length, are solid objects idealised. All
spatial relations are reduced to those of contact (the intersection . . . of lines and planes). Space as a continuum does not
figure in the conceptual system at all.
I view the above as a critique of the Ideal, the Imago, at any rate giving us the limits in the vocabulary and structure
of the great physicist-scientist’s system. It was the Islamic synthesis between the number system and geometry that
anticipated the ‘space as continuum’. In Europe, this concept was first introduced by Descartes, when he described the
point-in-space by its coordinates. Geometrical figures appear up to a point as parts of infinite space, which is conceived
as a three-dimensional continuum.
In the Cartesian treatment, ‘all surfaces are, in principle, equally represented, without any arbitrary preference for linear
figures in the construction of geometry’. Sometimes metaphysics may precede physics as in the Islamic concept of the ‘unity
of all existence’. Space as a whole, as conceived by Descartes, was absolutely necessary to Newtonian physics. For dynamics
cannot manage with the concepts of the mass-point and the (temporally variable) distance between mass-points alone. His
system helps us plot the melodic line.
And yet, the subject closed in upon itself, its existence proved by its thinking, truth and falsehood by deductions
from axioms. Delivered from the insubstantial essence of the Imago, identity hung itself upon the Law. From there we have
moved to the reality not of space as a rigid and homogeneous something but as a power to take part in physical events.
Today four-dimensional space does not permit absolute significance attached to the ‘now’ in the world of events. There
cannot be a splitting up of time and space in an objective manner, with the discovery of the relativity of simultaneity.
The four-dimensional space of the special theory of relativity is just as rigid and absolute as Newton’s space.
(Above quotes from Albert Einstein, The World As I See It.)
It seems to me that we constantly reconstitute our separate selves through the assertions of the absolute and the
objective. In our post-religious systems, there seems to be embedded the Supreme, the First or Absolute, sometimes as
rational, more often as the irrational. Since it is that very knowledge that makes us identify the knower, we presume to
apply to him – as object – the laws and attributes that his intervention brought into existence in the world.
But the Self is in the being, in which knowledge is submerged in the experience. If the Creation was preceded by
nothingness, the Self is of the Creation and will perhaps be as free of that division and hierarchy of God, man and not-
man that has founded our sciences, as most other accesses to truth.
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FIGURES OF FILM
1988
Second Rita Ray Memorial Lecture, Chitrabani, Calcutta; previously unpublished.
This lecture explicates a theory Shahani was working on, both in writing and through experiments
with film students in Pune and Calcutta: the relationship between ritual practices and narrative
sequence. Ritual, as a particular way of practising mythic narrative, is explored through the
ritual of baptism. The relationship between figures of speech and those of film have been
controversial. Here he contends that all of these figures – metaphor, metonymy or another –
can be made to ‘move along the trajectory to return them to their pre-linguistic existence from
which another might be created’. The error of the realists was to ‘imagine that onomatopoeia
has a direct transparence to reality’, whereas the figure of film in its transparence illuminates
not reality but the sense-impression. And so, it is the ‘formulating metre’ which relates these
images to reality. There is ‘no escape from montage’.
Outer space is finite, absolute, determinate, and inner space is not so. Parallel lines meet at infinity – even though such
lines are defined as being equidistant at all points. Here itself is, quite literally, a trope. I believe that even in the exact
sciences, the breakthrough is achieved by admitting the continuous in the discontinuous. It speaks of the relation between
thought and reality, transcending the subjective states, and, thereby, also the objective ones of infinite divisions such as to
affirm being and not to appropriate it. But the steps to such achievement are many and painful and not easily identifiable.
It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, specially in Literature, and
which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man
is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason. (John Keats)
It is neither safe to keep reason apart from the spiritual and the psycho-sensuous, nor to confuse one with the other
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in language. For the one attitude leads to withdrawal, the other to a form of megalomania. It is best to know the limits of
a system of knowledge for that alone develops it. It is the fundamentals that are the contact and the barrier with areas
of being.
In both science and art, the elusiveness of experience is sought to be reached by ‘figures’ that imply such subtle
subterfuges that they unconsciously control the whole of civilisation and hide, as much as they reveal, the Self from itself.
Superstition cannot arise, unless it has some deep productive roots, though it may survive by
inertia. One of these functions was a good calendar. It does not suffice here . . . to note the
end of winter by natural signs. The word for rain, varsha, also means year, so important is the
annual monsoon for India. The Indian farmer has to prepare his land before the monsoon sets
in. The sowing can only be done after the proper rainy season has begun, or the sprouts will
die. The fields are best weeded during the mid-monsoon break. If the harvest be brought in
before the last seasonal rain, there is every chance that grain will rot on the threshing floor.
Empirical observation says that the four-month rains set in, break and cease at approximately
fixed times of the year. The real difficulty lay in telling the time of the year, accurately. The
Egyptians forecast their corresponding basic agricultural event, the annual flood of the Nile, by
its correlation with the heliacal rising of Sirius. . . .
The Chinese followed another system.
Something similar was needed for India, where the problem was complicated, with poorer
instruments of observation and the absence of materials upon which long records could be
preserved.
The moon, with its phases, sufficed for primitive man’s simple ritual, while the birds,
beasts and plants themselves furnished all necessary information to food-gatherers. This left
the indespensable heritage of the lunar month, and prognostication by omens. The food-
producer’s year is solar, which requires constant adjustment of the lunar months. The urgent
need for a working almanac lay at the root of astronomy, algebra, the theory of numbers, all
of which were conspicuous Indian (specifically brahmin) achievements. The season could then
be foretold even if the sun and moon obliterated their starry background, or were invisible
because of clouds. Primitive reasoning led inevitably to the conclusion that the heavenly
bodies not merely predict but form the all-important weather: the word ‘meterology’ still
implies this. Therefore, the stars and planets foreshadow and control all human life. Thus the
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horoscope (which even Galileo drew up in his day), astrology, mantras, and ritual to placate
or influence the planets were natural concomitants of the indespensable brahmin panchanga.
To this day, Indians speak, with fair accuracy, of the rains of such-and-such constellation being
due. On the other hand, the largest Indian crowds bathe at sacred places during the kumbha
melas, or to free the sun from an eclipse which is accurately predicted by the Nautical Almanac,
not by brahmin theories.
There are at least three different major calendar systems in use . . . in various parts of the
country, in spite of a common theoretical basis. The differences may ultimately be traced to the
different local behaviour of the monsoon rains. In the same way, the science of geometry (‘earth-
measuring’) received its great start in Egypt, where triangulation was necessary to apportion
fields and plots in the area of uniform fertility, after the silt deposit of nilotic floods had
obliterated the boundary marks. It may be noted that Euclid brought the science to its highest
pitch under the Ptolemies, whose main preoccupation was to expropriate the maximum surplus
from the enslaved peasant. (D.D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History)
From the myths and rituals associated with the several modes of knowledge grew the correspondences between
objective practice and the socialised subjects of the riverine civilisations. One mode often suppressed the other, thus
giving rise to figures that concretise abstract space–time in radically different ways. The one with the abacus divided
the world into apportioned segments, mine and not mine, good and bad, present and absent. It was the absent and the
absolute which was idealised. The appropriation of the present as the absent and idealised form consisted of the control
and appropriation of nature that one sees in the sculptured likeness, the purgation of time and fate as of emotion to
reach a pure and akin state.
The civilisation of the mandala so enmeshed itself in its refinements that it forgot where it all began, where it
might end; this exploration which assimilated culture to nature became ahistorical. It is in this fashion that while it
could extend its continuities between the lowest being, including mid-way the Varahavatar, it established the most rigid
hierarchies and differences, unassailable because they were considered to be in the nature of things. Today, if civilisation
is threatened with extinction, it is because of this confusion of our identities with race, colour, linguistic groups, areas
of residence, religious order.
This shift from nature to culture and culture to nature is perhaps at the root of all articulation, and once a system
of articulation is formed, within the system, it is the figures and tropes that our imagination loops into transparent and
opaque spheres of contact between inner and outer space-time.
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The first origins of organising inner and outer space lie in ritual. Through a series of transformations, it has come
to mean mise-en-scène in our art. I am not referring here merely to the organisation of space or continuous movement
within space, as mise-en-scène has often been understood, or misunderstood in the rather protracted controversy
between editing methods (of linkage, and those that retain the unities of plan-sequence). I am referring to it as the total
transformation of an objective reality to make it compound to processes that our imagination has synthesised from all
experience, the conscious and the unconscious, thus projecting the introjected, including the introjections that have
acquired discontinuous meaning and are re-absorbed into the continuum. Linking this to ritual, a group of students at
the Film Institute of India and I worked on two dissimilar rituals which nevertheless revealed a great deal about one
another and helped us clarify the formation of figures in time and space, distinguish figures in film from those in other
arts without the need to take recourse to an essentialist criticism. The truth is that the other arts are always present in
the cinema, not only in the objects but also in the subject, in the camera and the tape-recorder. Finally, in the systems of
projection and broadcast. It is how the cinematographic resistance to all that has preceded it generates metaphors and
metonymies that we are building up: presences in absences and conceptual content in concrete attributes.
The mechanics of condensing and displacing which are now part of the vocabulary of cine-linguistics are present in
the social processes, including the cinematic apparatus, other carriers of meaning and the formulations which constitute
the subject. In a word: tradition. The Oedipus complex is in itself constructed as a myth. What has further complicated
the problem is that no cineaste–spectator today lives in an enclosed, self-constituted culture. In fact, since no culture
ever developed without reference to the Self as Being, it only suppressed certain possible transformations in favour of
another. If one believes that all desire seeks to fill in the absence (of the breast) with its symbolic equivalent, metaphor
is the beginning of figuration-articulation. The fulfilment of desire, temporary as it might be, the basis of exchange,
communication as mythology, the beginning of a system in the concrete through the container–contained relationship,
making the metaphor yield to metonymy and synecdoche as the absence is realised.
But ritual and mise-en-scène are not content, merely, to elaborate the terms of exchange between the spectator
and the world, but to make of him a concrete participant in the world, to join him with other subjects and to let matter–
history–creation reveal itself. In this manner all mise-en-scène, perhaps each and every work of art, concerns itself with
origins, with birth, growth and death, where growth and death themselves acquire meaning as acts of separation in a
continuous spiral.
In the ritual of Baptism, it is the washing away of ‘original’ sin which gives it its motive force, working through
inversions to form a mirror-image of life. Note that the impure animal-borne is given the pure spiritual birth by assimilation
into the group through a series of symbolic acts. In the ritual of Kanyadaan, the daughter and, through her fecundity,
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wealth itself, is gifted exogamously to the ancestors, i.e. to Nature itself in its highest manifestation in the hierarchy
(whereas wealth is the lowest in the Indo-European functions, see Dumezil). In it is the idea of succession and return.
Both the rituals re-unite the male and the female principles and contain them in the Mother, although its ideological
figures are those formed by patriarchal functions. There are, in fact, carry-overs from societies dominated by women, the
early riverine water symbols that confer the ability to be and belong to the group.
Thus the restoration of purity and light through the immaculately conceived son, the phallic in the womb of
the church.
Thus, also, the renewal of the gift of life to the self-created gods.
It is frightening to know that those who have banished the Mother, established the pre-eminence of science, the
rights of man, and released capitalism’s enormous energy, have to flounder in the debris and fragments of a civilisation
thus cannibalised by the voyeuristic act; while those who cling to her nurture have been submerged in the flood that all
cities have dreaded.
To restore the mother in her reverie, the daughter in her vitality, the father in his unconscious principle of
eccentricity, the son in his vigour, the subject-object to it-self, we would have to be free from the cloister, the battlefield
and the State, not just change ground. From lineage we have come to the State (see Romila Thapar’s work). From here to
Statelessness still seems some way ahead. We will have to build our bridges with the debris that lies in the flood.
We have for long opposed representation to abstraction in art, no matter in what culture we find ourselves. In fact,
beyond the surface, this can be a false opposition. Representation is as dependent on the mode of abstraction in a given
culture at a given time as an abstraction is on the interpretative method, however rarefied it may be. Moreover, we know
that the interpretative method retains its vitality so long as it is transformative. Figuration is not the thing represented
but figurez-vous (!), what is imagined.
Figures of the imagination move from the pre-onomatopoeic sensuous impressions, beyond the didactic, to the
fullness of silence. Thus one is ready to receive the sensuous impressions again, to savour the spiritual experience, as one
does wine. Alas, being strangers on this earth, when we learn to love it with all our heart’s desire, we have to prepare to
leave. Immortality is evanescence.
The figures of film, picking up from a point in the flux where they appear to be metaphor, metonymy or another,
move along the trajectory to return them to their pre-linguistic existence from which another might be created. The
error of the realists has been to imagine that onomatopoeia has a direct transparence to reality. In fact, the figure’s
transparence illuminates the sense-impression. It is the formulating metre which relates these images to reality. There is
no escape from montage.
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The greatest development of the dramatic, on the other hand, has been in the tragic. In those absences that have
to be filled in by the metaphor, a condensed and idealised image of what is not there any more and whose substance is
elusive. In the purely onomatopoeic-lyrical vision – if it were possible – the idea, the geometry of plane, line and point is
projected into, embedded, in the thing itself. In the dramatic idea, the metaphor is expressed, i.e. its movement from the
inside to the outside is seen and acknowledged. Objective events seen, described and delineated in detail are the death
of drama. The Novel form was the beginning of the end of intention, motivation, characterisation. It moved briskly from
linear causation to configurations of the stream of consciousness. Film, which is inevitably post-Cubist since it never sees
an object from one vertex, has also absorbed the space–time freedom of the other movements, like surrealism. It has to
move from the imaginary to the real and back to the imaginary, irresistibly.
Film establishes relationships in the process of being made, rather than through a stasis. So when it takes up a highly
articulated symbol, statement, metaphor or the like, it returns it to experience. It has always to end up re-establishing the
epistemology of its object, privileging, as it so often does, the redundant, waiting for that false step in its own movement
that will release the energy of Nataraja.
Forms that reveal their own substance, subjectivities that flow from one to another, the immanence of the concrete,
of such stuff is film, and perhaps all art, made. Leonardo’s sketches of wind, water and rock went beyond his calculations
because each was present in the other. Finally, he was able to overcome his avoidance of ‘all contact with and access to the
feminine body’: Julia Kristeva, ‘Motherhood According to Bellini’. In her otherwise provocative and, I think, fundamentally true
essay, her polemic makes her overlook the sketches. But she draws our attention forcefully to Western man’s vision, which
we in India are now internalising, when she asserts that the artist, as servant of the maternal phallus, displays this always
and everywhere unaccomplished art of reproducing bodies and spaces as graspable, masterable objects within reach of his
eye and hand. They are the eye and hand of a child, underage to be sure, but of one who is the universal and nonetheless
complex-ridden centre confronting that other function, which carries the appropriation of its objects to its limit: science.
Orpheus did not believe that he would lose Eurydice forever if he just looked back to take her once with his eyes.
And, just imagine, all the living around him had pleaded with Death to return her to the musician whose lute had filled
them with his pathos. Return to the melody, Eurydice will live it again.
We obliterate all myths by putting them into practice.
Narcissus will give up his image and find Echo in the caverns.
The Law will yield to Rhythm. We will give each its autonomy.
The indestructible word will dissolve itself in the constantly renewing layer.
Ethics will be the aesthetics of the future.
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NARRATIVITY
1988
Third Rita Ray Memorial Lecture, Chitrabani, Calcutta. First published in Aruna Vasudev, ed.,
Frames of Mind: Reflections on Indian Cinema, New Delhi: UBS Publishers & Distributors, 1995.
As the introductory essay in this book has argued, this is perhaps the most subjectively personal
of Shahani’s key theoretical texts, and might be read, among other things, as a commentary on
his own early film work. Here he refers, in particular, to the ‘fear of cinema’ – the ‘blank screen’
which can be ‘the most closed or the most open form of narrative’, at one extreme provoking
the ‘horror of the vacuum’ that one may ‘fill up the space with projectiles of a passive subject
whose identity is manufactured in impotency, desire reduced pathologically repetitive, the
object fractured into fragments’. Typically, the problem is the novel form and its cinematic
inheritance. The novel has been ‘destroyed’ by cinematographic sequence, but, on the other
hand, by ‘providing the visual concreteness of “events” and “characters”, it has given a privileged
position to their relationships as they constantly redefine themselves.’
Narrative is most intricately woven with ethics. It is narrative which determines the involvement and the alienation of the
spectator–director. It invites him to participate or to distance himself, to change or to accept reality and its interpretation.
It can free him from his own ideology and that of the ruling class, simultaneously: or imprison him in both.
The cinema, which is being discussed for the most part by Metz and others, is one subservient to ideology, not
concerned with ethics but with the pathology of pleasure. The ethical person cannot go to such spectacles, far less make
them. His aim is to integrate himself, not to suture the wounds of his own identity and that of his mother.
In fact, ethics is interaction. The conflicting forces that act upon us through our natural and cultural being, and often,
as we have noticed, by the confusion of the two, produce a response which looks at the manifest either as epiphany or
as tragedy. Or, better still, knows the presence of the one in the other. Both are propelled by action upon knowledge.
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Narrative proceeds through action. The action of the narrator, author and maker, through his mode of address,
shapes the world to an end that he considers worthwhile in itself. The interpreter, bringing his history into play, enriches it
with his own experience. The spectator carries it back into life, elevating the repetition of desire, to affirm the realisation
of being which assumes self-determination.
The four ends of man are simultaneous in sequence. Dharma, artha, kama and moksha are not unconnected with the
pursuit of happiness in honour, wealth, pleasure and contemplation which Aristotle takes as nodal points of discussion in his
work on ethics.
The problem of narrativity in our times has been the replacement of god by mechanical causation. The structural
rigidity of a framework which underlies concepts that reduce acts to invariance, excludes the participant–observer. To
compound the loss of agency the illusion of reality, inexorably led by its ‘scientific’ natural laws, threw the spectator
out into the cold, deprived of his passion, incapable of ecstasy or pathos, or any form of awakening to self-awareness.
While science initially liberated us by a complete submission to the law, it can only realise itself out of its present
impasse in the life-sciences by admitting the presence of individual agencies that wish to cross the threshhold from the
subject to the self.
A group of cells may have the same code but the object of their action is to individuate themselves. The reason that
there is yet no anarchy is that the action is affirmative and not negative.
A reductive, definitional and functional understanding tends to end up with essences which give birth to other
essences or, at worst, their corruption. One goes to the origins to clarify, not to muddy our thoughts, to view in them
that glorious act which annihilated the given code in favour of virtue, wealth, beauty, truth.
One aspires to that improvisation which includes the excluded, having known that even nature abounds in
redundancies.
The blank screen can be the most closed or the most open form of narrative. In the horror of the vaccuum that it
provokes, one may fill up the space with projectiles of a passive subject whose identity is manufactured in impotency,
desire reduced, pathologically repetitive, the object fractured into fragments; the morality of a system beyond him
imposed through illusionistic means, confusing the moral with the natural law, the central equation being that of
private property.
The foundation of the great republics, it is true, have been laid upon the institution of private property. But this
institution has been built upon the disappropriation of the majority by means of war, trade and the enunciation.
It is the enunciation which seems to have determined the group’s identity of itself; having found it through that inner
space–time by which it first became the other, the group used its enunciation in outer space–time towards disintegration
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of whatever it confronted itself against, treating the other as still-life or barbaric, who as long as he had another tongue
or colour, was destined to be nature morte.
In that sense, Christianity is right in giving the same weight to thought, word and deed, if only not linked to original
sin. The question is to free desire from guilt. Self-awareness will then not be a series of voyeuristic acts fragmenting
infinitely the subject and the object, just so as to be able to create a self-image. The integration of the ‘psycho-some’
can only proceed if while distiguishing different functions, we acknowledge the source as common to both sensuous and
mental functions. It is their objectification which fills us with awe and wonder with what we make of ourselves.
The modernist debate as well as art practice, having inherited a closed system of cause and effect, ‘the sins of the father
having visited the children’, has tried to contain itself through a minimalism that frees forms of their specificity, history
of its events. In this way, Freud’s Oedipus Complex is assimilated into variations upon a myth; psychoanalysis itself as a
system and not practice. The conflicting and converging aims of man, when viewed from a metapsychological and linguistic
perspective, embed norms into natural law, and deprive the spectator both of his voluntary and his transcendental act.
He is first denied the status of subjectivity by the doctrine of individualism, by the positing of an absolutely
knowable–consumable objective reality. The rarefied and fetishistic parts of an indestructible structure are offered as
constructs of his desire.
If god doesn’t exist, collage does. Preceded by poetry, art, cinema and of course the experience that generated
these superstructural fragments of figuration, present-day criticism is developing the same opacity and anarchy of a
passive subject.
In the ‘Third World’, the reflection of this loss of faith – for what else can one call it? – is demonstrated through
fundamentalism, fanned by the totally transparent, literal terms of discourse that develop finally into opacity in any
dialogue. Praful Bidwai’s excellent analysis of the modern-day Kulturkampf in our ‘different’ world from the First and
Second reveals to us the violence of intellectual passivity. It is through all our differences that we will increase the
richness of the surface of a collage being stuck on elsewhere.
As the fortuitous is condensed into vacant metaphors, the absence of organicity forces an organisation of
symmetries. The Novel form, in trying to criticise the iron law of the market-become-nature, introduced the full-blown
subjectivities whose energies were released by that very turn of history. The accident too came into its grasp, with its
simultaneous presence in the organised event. Unpredictable mutations became part of the historical praxis of its times.
Through its own critical structure, it came upon the loss of significance and the absence of life in its metaphor.
The Novel has had more than one way open to it, since about the time that the cinema has placed itself parallel to
it. It could restore itself by a movement towards myth, presenting and naming it as such, while transforming it through its
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descriptive passage of time. It could enlarge and deepen the metaphor by permitting the word to enter unknown recesses
of the mind. It could enter into a formal equilibrium with itself.
The safest method, of course, is the last one. And, by and large, the modernist solution has been content – in all the
arts – with finding an equilibrium which is, at least, not false.
This step has to be the very first towards reintegration. Before we can ask, ‘where do we go from here?’, we have to
know exactly where we stand.
The fictional form may then appear as a long drawn-out algebraic equation in descriptive language, to describe
a state of events that had neither the blood nor the sweat of things past. It seems to approach the symmetry
of verse while poetry itself withdraws into collage, asymmetries that yield meaning only in and through their
disproportion. Films, likewise, that thus break away from the dead and arid mainstream, are unable to water the
banks that meander about them.
There is obviously a crying need for restoration. The cannibalisation that has taken place will have nothing more left
for it to feed on, not even its own body which it construes as its own image.
The beginnings will have to be made by the gaze itself. The gaze that fixes itself in aggression or lowers itself to find
the same fetishistic pleasure would have to learn to be attentive instead.
To see through the intermediary of a ‘machine that does not see what you see’, and yet to build the bonds that
beings and things are waiting for in order to live, it will need the profound look of the reverie. It is that caress, at once
intimate and distant, that holds together the flaying limbs. The groping hand, the exasperated breath, legs that strike air
instead of water or earth, all contained by the look. The voice comes later, filling up her absence.
The words fill up the sounds; the images, the words. The body, the images. Invocations of breath in the body, of life
which returns it to life, music, enchantment.
These are the magical happenings which we all encounter and observe, extraordinary in their everydayness. They
are the propulsions to knowledge, not in contradiction to it as those who wish to mystify might wish to proclaim. But, of
necessity, they are the frontiers, rather than strictly within the scope.
Narrativity in film obviously has to transform this enchantment of musical elements into a space–time axis that
includes the visual, the auditory and the historical.
Our articulation of these functions has been hitherto separate, forming traditions within single homogeneous cultures
which develop with the suppression of parallel possibilities not only within the sense-continuums referred to, but also
mental systems of organisation. Thus melody might develop at the expense of harmony; it may also demand that units
may not be separated from one another and brought together in a perspectival combination. Instead, the combination, the
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harmonic, may be contained in the unit from the overtones of which a sequence is developed. Inevitably, the historical can Evidently the impulse was spiritual, the breath-taking experience psychosomatic, the forms social. The spectator
be viewed as being inherent in a situation, action as being. The reverse would be true in a predominantly harmonic system. too must enter, find the points of entry into this inner world extending into space–time, simultaneously, in his social-
Action would here be seen as being. However, in both cases, the simultaneity of the two would be established. psychological, the personal as universal being.
As indeed would be, in every case, the placement of the individual in the sequence with the intervals that he will fill The gift that one makes to nature in return for being gratuitously part of it has to be renewed constantly. In the
up with such significance, mental–emotional–physiological–sensory, that carry it over into the passage of time, not only renewal, the epiphany may turn into tragedy, yet will uplift the pathos to such heights that those blinded by it will weep
within the work of art but outside it. more of their wisdom, less of their sorrow.
The cinematographic sequence has destroyed the old condensation of drama and the evocatory description I think that as we pass from a world governed by law to that where a sense of play and the joy of re-creation will be
of the Novel. On the other hand, by providing the visual concreteness of ‘events’ and ‘characters’, it has given a made real, as full and eternal in its transitory reality, we will discover the narrativity that cinema has to offer, the ethics
privileged position to their relationships as they constantly redefine themselves. It is the music of history, as it is of weaving a language with which you may wrap and unwrap yourself in sensuous ease; not to shroud existence with a
of colour and form, that the cinematographic event brings out, where earlier the historical had articulated itself in will of prophecy, but to facet experience with the brilliance of a thousand suns.
arbitrary signs (often reducing ethics to a culture-specific morality proclaiming itself as absolute). Simultaneously, It is at this catastrophic hour that we may wonder how we have survived our tale. Like Yudhishthir, we may assign
the visual in its earlier incarnations had to overcome its representational ‘thereness’ by appeals to magical- reasons for the fall of those who did not survive and were believed. Like Yudhishthir, we may overcome the ultimate
decorative function or to mythical condensation. With the opening out of sciences of perception (which inevitably ambivalence of the many religions and societies to affirm our faith in the dog.
have to look upon every presence only within a scale to make any sense of it) and the cinema which assimilates and We may, at the end of a millennium, be weary of the world. Let not the world be weary of itself.
grows out of these sciences, all art has been given a new lease of life since it brings to the foreground, again, not
the existence of things and ideas separated, distinguished and understood, but held together, grasped, lived and
restored. Or, at least, that is what the cinema, like all art, is capable of when left to itself.
Yet, it is hardly ever left to itself. The strategies for the exploration of the self have to contend not only with the
profit motive and the propaganda machine, obviously present as controlling forces, but also with the resistance of modes
of thought that persist even if they no longer serve the dominant ideologies.
At a formal level, the difficulty lies in transpositions. From myth to music, from the articulated series penetrating
to an unconscious to the permeation of the entire body and mind with the rhythms and self-created world, with all the
immortality of time.
The visual distinctiveness of phenomena is transposed to the aural or intellectual, moving towards the opposite
directions of poverty of matter. It is as if the logic of systems constructed by us leaves us all the time in partial realisations
that militate against each other. Each art and each tradition of the art, linking itself to history and to nature, tries in
despair to break itself down to reintegrate the whole of existence.
Compounded with the modern empiricist’s total fragmentation, these transpositions are themselves rendered, both
in theory and practice, into mere transliterations from one discipline to another, referring to little else beyond the
narrow ‘terminologies’ and techniques that were crafted to contain ineffable intimations of immortality.

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THE IMAGE IN TIME
1988
Ritwik Ghatak Memorial Lecture, Calcutta; previously unpublished.
Although a self-standing lecture, this may well be seen as continuing the Rita Ray Memorial
Lecture series, and, indeed, core aesthetic concerns that had been inaugurated with ‘Film as a
Contemporary Art’ and would conclude with the essay ‘Modes of Representation’. Moving in
this series from psychoanalysis to language and thence to narrative, Shahani is here pushing
the limits of creative practice, linked, he says, in some profound way, to ‘hunger’: to be moved
on the one side to the desire for acquisition but on the other to the birth of language: the
impulse to express, the sources for that expressive material and eventually the vacuums that
the expression can potentially fill.
The electronic image forms itself in front of our eyes, disappearing only from itself again. The image may not, in fact, be
recorded. It may have no reference point other than the immediate configuration that takes place. Here and now, before
our unblinking eyes, the signal takes shape as light source.
Literally and figuratively, it does not illuminate. It informs.
In many ways, it behaves like reality. It passes you by, even if it allows you to store the information, or to re-juxtapose
it. For many lives, it has begun to replace reality. So much so that the substitute is sought in reality, whose richness and
ambiguity thwart the facile temperaments created by public transmission of controlled, appauversied images.
The most bewildering images are the most informative, the most supportive of future development. They are
bewildering precisely because they do not fit into any of our old preconceptions. They move into areas of thought,
feeling and sensations hitherto untouched. It is from such experiences that culture (sanskar) protects us. Contrarily, it
is into these experiences that art (kala, kavya, sangeet) leads us, illuminating them in such a way as to help us realise
ourselves, to make real our imagination.
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The transmitted electronic image, on the other hand, does not permit a realisation. If one meets a situation in some
way resembling the substituted reality of the small screen, it only confirms the ersatz nature of the new reality which one
encounters, robbing it of its possibilities by giving it a fixed significance and an irretrievable transience.
If the signification of the irretrievably changing world gets fixed in itself, to what purpose would one intervene? Any
intervention would appear like acrobatic somersaults in the air, which can give you a high and draw some applause from
the onlooker. Life will pass you by, like on television – even if you record a programme or two every day. The transmitted
programme consumes us simultaneously with what it is meant to offer us – sport, romance, politics and culture. It
consumes us. We do not consume it. Looking at the voracious eating and drinking and other semblances of appetite that
television-watching seems to cause!
The appetite informed by television leads us to seek physical satisfaction for mental needs – otherwise called
desires? If the most noble function of advertising is to inform, there is no better avenue than the broadcast signal. The
immediacy of the real-time mode, juxtaposed with advertisements, can make people accept the instant need of satisfying
desire, as present in time as man walking on the moon, a sixer being hauled off the last ball to make a ‘nation’ win or lose,
the prices of shares tumbling down Wall Street. Over the long run, it can create anorexia.
The reasons for this specific form of anorexia are fairly obvious, being quite the same as the compulsion to consume:
1. The induced urgency of, say, the need to buy a motorbike to realise masculinity; 2. The necessary prolongation of the
same need, temporarily distracted by the most available articles of consumption; 3. The insubstantiality of what is sought
in a motorbike (i.e. masculinity instead of mobility), as against the realised event in its occurrence experienced through
broadcast signals.
In a sense all images, visual and others, conjured up by culture are the products of hunger. The hunting scenes in
caves are evidently so. The difference is that they are products equally of hunger and action upon it. The baby’s cry,
equally a symptom of its amphibious nature, also transforms itself through a series of experiences that make a child
realise the differences between need and satisfaction. From separation, distance, prolongation, absence, appears form
at its most primitive level which one can hold when the ‘real thing’ is not there. But if the surrogate replaces reality,
anorexia can set in whenever the metaphor tends to satisfy the formal rather than the actual need.
The development of language requires the capacity to make links that integrate the everyday gesture in all its
sensuousness and ambiguity with structures that globally represent them, leading to abstractions sufficiently far removed
from customary observations to give insight into nature that custom itself had separated.
I have believed for a long time that the development of any mode in art begins with the suppression of some
of its own elements. For instance, the development of a continuous scale with its infinitesimally articulated melodic
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line, characteristic of Indian music, was achieved by suppressing the possible explorations of harmony. Western music
developed its architectural, perspectival dimensions through harmony at the expense of articulated shrutis. This is not
to say that Indian music either lacks concepts of harmony or that Western music has to give up the melodic. In Indian
music the harmonic exists in sequence, in such magical proportions that have dared our understanding of fifths, fourths
and thirds. The resonance of a note may pervade the whole range from as far apart as the fifth to as near as the one
touching it. Raga Shree is said to have perplexed many musicologists. In fact, the practice of any raga should demonstrate
the same principle.
I am sure that traditional Western music has its own surprises for those who have known it from within – where
shrutis may be hewed out of space, as in our sculpture, rather than as notes placed in time and measured as distance,
architectural objects far and near, constructed to carry weight vertically.
In similar fashion, on a broader scale, the development of visual abstraction of Sino-Japanese characters, while made
at the expense of possibilities of phonetic abstraction offered by alphabets, has not only given rise to forms of thinking,
art and technology, but also helped ‘contain’ variations of pitch in speech.
It is not surprising that even within a historical tradition, such as that which passes from dhrupad to khayal, this
dividing line should necessitate strict prohibitions of structure, only to make the prohibited appear in a different mode.
It is, as it were, that the system – to realise itself to its extreme – requires conscious as well as unconscious
articulations. For the breaking of rules itself is a condition of art, of language, its very joy, as much as it is not of its culture.
It is here that science and art may meet – in opposing culture, and somehow maintaining some of its very prohibitions.
The case of the elliptical orbits of planetary motion is mentioned. Galileo had, in his struggle on behalf of the Copernican
system of planetary astronomy, opposed Kepler’s idea that the planets moved in ellipses instead of circles. It is said to
have been repugnant to him on aesthetic grounds. Eventually Kepler’s diagrams (visual representation) are still used to
imagine planetary motion, while superposed by circular (harmonic) motions of different amplitude, frequency and phase
to understand the phenomenon conceptually.
It is not as if nature is made one way or another, or that there are no absolute relations that govern it, so as to
leave them out of the question. It is the putting into question that which surprises our intention, which can help us get
anywhere near existence, unbound by essence and idea, a part-experience.
The cinema had begun to question modes of thought, perception, experience, which had become deadened by habit
and fossilised into essence. Eadweard Muybridge:
If it is impressed on our minds in infancy, that a certain arbitrary symbol indicates an existing fact;
if this same association or emblem and reality is reiterated at the preparatory school, insisted
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upon at college and pronounced correct at the university; symbol and fact – or supposed
fact – become so intimately blended that it is extremely difficult to disassociate them, even
when reason and personal observation teaches us that they have no true relationship. So it is
with the conventional galloping horse: we have become so accustomed to see it in art that
it has imperceptibly dominated our understanding, and we think the representation to be
unimpeachable, until we throw off all our preconceived impressions on one side and seek the
truth by independent observation from Nature herself.
In a sense it may be argued that the history of the image in modern times linked up with all those varying tendencies
in different civilisations that wished to capture reality in motion.
From the Buddhist rejection of intransience to its affirmative repose of movement from life to life in its sculpture
and painting, one begins to accept the reality of pain and pleasure, as well as the transformative aspects of life, form
and content. In a similar fashion, the co-presence of the past, present and future in the miniatures through an abstracted
narrativisation can be seen to be precursors of cinema’s age. In that manner the fixed perspective of the Renaissance was
made to yield to its own ideal laws of a static world-view to a number of superimpositions and juxtapositions of the
static observer in an immutable world.
So, while the technology and culture of the cinema (Cubism, Liberalism) was condemned to the refraction of its lens,
the cinematographer sought an objectivity beyond it.
Undoubtedly, the most creative cineastes were those – and are those – who are not held back by either the culture
of its technology, embodied in the camera or recorder, or that which prevailed in the markets that it sought. Dadasaheb
Phalke went straight against the proposed objectivity of the lens (through special effects, legendary narrative) as he did
against the taboos of his own milieu by crossing the seas, joining a profession seen to be clubbed with prostitution and
gambling, and even daring to place his own daughter in the role of Krishna. David Wark Griffith shocked the bhadralok of
the USA by displacing his camera and the crowds of working men that he attracted to his shows. He was accused of being
a Communist in spite of those scenes that one well remembers in Birth of a Nation. It was in Intolerance that he finally
met his nemesis. For, in it, he dared to go across history and civilisation with just one static idea in his head, to cover the
flux of all transformation, the specificities of time. It was left to Eisenstein, looking ahead, absorbing a part that was not
his own in the narrow ethnic or national sense, to develop a language that made the inheritor of realism, initially offered
to him, to acknowledge that montage is ‘my fine care’. Godard:
If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee the characteristic of both; but one seeks
to foresee in space, the other seeks in time. Suppose you notice a young girl in the street who
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attracts you. You hesitate to follow her. A quarter of a second. How to convey this hesitation?
Mise-en-scène will answer the question, ‘How shall I approach her?’. But in order to render
explicit the other question, ‘Am I going to love her?’, you are forced to bestow importance
to the quarter of a second during which the two questions are born. It may be, therefore,
that it will be for the montage rather than for the mise-en-scène to express both exactly and
clearly the life of an idea or its sudden emergence in the course of a story. When? Without
playing on words, each time the situation requires it, each time within a shot when the shock
effect demands to take the place of an arabesque, each time between one scene and another
when the inner continuity of the film enjoins with a change of shot the superimposition of
the description of a character on that of the plot. This example shows that talking of mise-en-
scène automatically implies montage. When montage effects surpass those of mise-en-scène
in efficacity, the beauty of the latter is doubled, the unforeseen unveiling of its secrets by its
charm in an operation analogous to using unknown quantities in mathematics. . . .
Cutting on a look is almost the definition of montage, its supreme ambition as well as its
submission to mise-en-scène. It is, in effect, to bring out the soul under the spirit, the passion
behind the intrigue, to make the heart prevail over the intelligence by destroying the notion of
space in terms of that of time.
The passage has echoes of both poetry and theory. But I do wish you to observe that what has come to be known as
Western culture had considered space a higher function than time: one a function of intelligence, the other of emotion.
While many Russians consider space and time in similar fashion, Eisenstein had in effect subjected mise-en-scène to the
primacy of montage. He could arrive at that position, in effect, because of his contact with thought processes that lie
behind visual configurations and abstractions of the non-phonetically notated word.
Strangely, the dominant ideologies over the whole world seem to have accepted certain hierarchies, even when it
leads to self-exploitation – or imploitation as Brecht called it. Thus there are innumerable filmmakers from Asia, Africa,
Latin America, who would accept having more heart than head, place time below space, stress difference (a lower form
of understanding) through culture-specificity in their own case, and hand over higher functions of synthesis, such as
innovation, research, generalisation, to the perpetual founders of our times who live elsewhere.
While we can only applaud Godard for the search of inner continuity, and the discovery for himself of the integration
of mise-en-scène and montage, the remnants of a degraded realism subsisted (in this passage from the 1950s) in ideas like
‘the superimposition of the description of a character on that of the plot’.
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The descriptive has come from the Novel. In it, with the aid of a phonetic alphabet, arbitrary signs accepted as words
create images where simultaneity is of necessity sequentialised. In the Novel form, therefore, while the onomatopoeic
in terms of sound, taste buds, dryness and wetness, tactile sensations of the tongue and lips, and those of breathing and
digesting are more easily accessible, the greatest spiritual reaching out is surely the exact representation by words of the
results of personal observation on account of the salient identifying features of something existing in space.
In the cinema, this very spiritual function of the Novel is effortlessly achieved by the camera, in the light source
and in the literality of what you put on the screen. It is true, Griffith used montage mainly to interpose the description
of a character on that of the plot. But Eisenstein went much further in a direction, the potential of which Griffith had
only glimpsed. And Godard has gone further in a direction that seems to come with the light of the wounds inflicted by
mass communication on the eye, the gaze, the look, the mind and the heart. He is as yet too embarrassed, too arrogant,
to reveal his own wounded spirit.
The senses together have to evoke the spiritual, and one another. Unfortunately, in a technological era, people are
prone to technicism. The principles of technicism are result-oriented. Not only does it unhesitatingly target its directions
without ethical concern, it also demands that it strike in the least amount of time with the least amount of effort. It is
only interested in effect, and only superficially in affect. Its instantaneous stimuli produce instantaneous reactions. It is
therefore doomed to repetition and to reiteration. It is, then, in its intention and practice, completely opposed to the
very impulse of cinema; to seeking of immortality in transience. The cinema seeks to immortalise what would otherwise
pass one by, precisely because its technology, as of the video, permits us to overcome the fear of death. In simultaneous
fashion, if we were to free technology from its own limits, the electronic signal would have to find a different social
organisation, leading to unknown areas of freedom. It is in the traditional arts that the medium is the message, not in
those that surround us in the twentieth century. In the traditional arts, the medium provided such material resistance
to the artist that the medium itself seemed to contain the truth. Those known areas of resistance and truth are more
or less contained as messages of the past in the lens, in the interpretation of sound by magnetic and optical waves. The
resistance of new technologies is to mental, emotional and spiritual configuration, and, therefore, the technologies
should engender – and they are capable of doing this – a spiritual regeneration precisely by the tensions of knowledge
contained in them and the knowledge that we as a species and we as individuals wish to attain.
The traditional arts are themselves, to a large extent, the raw material. The classic example is acting, theatre, the
metaphor of absence and presence. Since the beginning, the cinema had to come into the most volatile relationship with
it. We have seen how so much of its commerce has got linked to it, and how many different styles have emerged. The
questions have remained wide open.
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fig. 40 One of many film proposals that Shahani generated in the 1980s. Written on the
letterhead of Bombay Cinematograph, the production company under which Shahani had
made the few films he had also been able to produce (e.g. Khayal Gatha, 1988), this is a
proposal for a film on Siddheshwari Devi that claims to be a ‘modern musical “ritu-samhara”’.
the shock of desire and other essays
Again, if one were to take music, every modern director has expressed discomfort with its use. Since the form
itself is musical, how does one use music? Literature has had as many mishaps in the cinema as there are viewers. How
often have we heard literate filmgoers say that they preferred the book to the film. But in real fact, you cannot prefer
the book to the film, King Lear to Ran, compare the presence of Laurence Olivier on stage to Hamlet, as it were, playing
him on screen, the absent life-force to the empty vessel that draws you in as does the film image. In that sense, the film
image is closer to painting than it is to television, where the light source itself projects towards you naked things which
you cannot hold. But these naked things may actually have no existence except as representations which are things-in-
themselves, referring to themselves, making nonsense of the world that seeks to resemble them.
In a sense, the whole mimetic tradition – in whatever art one chooses to examine – had inevitably to lead us to the
dearness of images without life but with all its semblance.
The semblance of life cannot give it significance. If one holds up the mirror to oneself in perpetuity, one will die
like Narcissus, without love, without knowledge. And if the mirror forces you to be its image, you have to die a thousand
deaths every day, never be.
I am inclined to believe that all life seeks meaning, changes form, not merely to survive but, in the very first place,
to want to live; it must have that impulse.
That impulse cannot be satisfied merely by appropriation, the means for which cultures built on economies of
overproduction have proliferated. Technologies which have taken over the drudgeries of mental functions can create
cultures where the need for art is recognised as fundamental, rather than get subsumed in them. After all, with the
possibilities held out by the electronic signal, one can begin to notate visual phenomena and re-synthesise them as much
as a composer would do with music. Sensuous experiences of a child get heightened by the resources of language given
to them, if the school, the environment, does not substitute language for the experience itself.
A child of three or four miraculously begins to relate to the world in such a way as to create playful relationships
that give insights forgotten by the adult, both in language and what it signifies, both globally and in the individual context.
While cultures congratulate themselves on the child’s quickest transition to adulthood, the spiritual vision in
science and art celebrate the childlike capacities of finding significance for oneself.
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MODES OF REPRESENTATION
1987
Paper written for a seminar at the Festival of India, Tashkent. First published in Cinema in India
(Bombay), Vol. 2, No. 2, April–June 1988.
This is the last of the series of texts written by Shahani in the late 1980s on aesthetic practices
as they relate to the cinema. The long reference to filmmaker D.G. Phalke of the silent era,
commonly considered the ‘father’ of the Indian cinema, is unusual: Phalke, like the visual artist
Ravi Varma, was generally not of interest to modernist art practice in India. Phalke nevertheless
symbolized the iconicity question in a way that allowed larger issues of representation, which
are an enduring interest in these texts. The capacity (or incapacity) of modern structures,
especially those of the modern state, to assimilate civilizational legacies inflects the process of
representation in various ways. The ‘realities within the reality’ can cause a celebratory break
with the past, with significant consequences.
‘We have yet to find ways of integrating the future into our heritage.’ – Ritwik Ghatak
We can begin to understand the nature of documentation in any society only if we attend to the dynamics of change
within it. ‘Facts’ are not absolute figures. Facts are constituted, mediated through human agency. They may be expressed
equally as mathematical equations as they may find objective existence in more tangible products of human endeavour
and imagination. Facts are not to be considered as things or events. If we treat things and events as facts in themselves,
we are bound to be trapped in an ideologically determined view, thus abdicating our basic impulse of changing the world
to change ourselves. Anyone who accepts facts as given entities can only practise the modern version of superstition.
Thus, to be able to grasp facts, one has not only to experience reality, but to examine how it is represented to us by our
specific position in history and tradition.
India being an ‘ancient civilisation’, layers of history and tradition exist one upon the other, sometimes as dynamic
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forces, clashing, coalescing, assimilating each other, at times as fetishistic, reactionary and revivalist forms, and, often
enough, in dead or dormant states. Each of these existing traditions, inevitably transformed by the energy and pressure
of contemporary life, presents variations of our systematisation of the truth. At the beginning there are the cults of
fertility. Inevitably they are bound up with the absorption of superstructural systems which make invisible their origins
in material practice. Nevertheless they are present to this day, be it in the microcosmic relations of, for example, male–
female relationships or the creation of the wealth of nations. Of what constitutes the rational and the irrational. Thus
a film, whether named documentary or fiction, re-formulates for us a reality, itself full of constituted things, objects,
events. Nature itself in all its varied glory, its mystery, when given a name, a shape, a number, when recognised, contains
within it our history. It shows the history of the world with its movement, not only from religion to rationality and
science and beyond, but also and above all its experience. The documentary or fiction filmmaker, faced with a world of
superabundant meaning, has in every shot to contend as much with primitive fear as with the anguish and joy of self-
discovery and self-assertion that any act of transformation brings about.
The founder of Indian cinema, Dadasaheb Phalke, was expressing, in his own context, much of this fear, joy and self-
assertion when he said (on seeing the film The Life of Christ):
That day, that Saturday in Christmas, marked the beginning of a revolutionary change in my
life. That day also marked the foundation in India of an industry which occupies the fifth place
in the myriad of big and small professions that exist. While the life of Christ was rolling fast
before my eyes, I was mentally visualising the gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramchandra, their Gokul
and Ayodhya. . . . Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?
Dadasaheb Phalke’s aspirations are those of the great realists of all times: to free the self from alienation by social action 41
that brings about cultural forms that rejuvenate our contact with the world.
He was not a maker of icons. He fancied himself as a deliverer – both of the icon and the worshipper – from the
voluntary subjugation into which the model, the mode and their creators had fallen. He placed himself in life, so in art,
squarely within the movement of self-determination described in nationalist forms as ‘swadeshi’.

Khayal Gatha (1988). In the first image, fig. 41, the student-protagonist of the film, here
playing Raanjha from the Heer–Raanjha legend, leaves his beloved behind and walks
through the desert. He keeps hearing the sound of her anklets behind, but when he turns,
she is gone. This also reproduces the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the second, fig.
42, at the beginning of the saga, as he stops to drink water, he encounters for the first
time the oracle figure reflected in the water. The direct use of myth has been perhaps
the most contentious aspect of Shahani’s cinema, with his further contention that when
layers of history and tradition exist one upon the other, ‘sometimes as dynamic forces,
clashing, coalescing, assimilating each other, at times as fetishistic, reactionary and revivalist
forms and, often enough, in dead or dormant states’, each of these traditions, ‘inevitably
transformed by the energy and pressure of contemporary life, presents variations of our
306 systematisation of the truth’.
 Kumar Shahani

For Phalke, the lives of epic heroes were representation of fact as perceived by a tradition. They were not artefacts
to be animated as the film on Khajuraho activates its images of medieval mythology. In Indian mythology, as surely
elsewhere, it was not merely practical ritual that was embedded, but maps useful for those who set out to sea, the
currents and wind directions, the movement of the stars, mathematics and music. The classical imagination of any great
civilisation, we presume, does not separate into compartments of being the heart, the mind and the body, in such totality
as to make reintegration impossible. Paradoxically, of course, its reintegration is based on a rigid and hierarchical division
of labour and social systems that first perfected the instruments of exploitation.
Thus, the Bhagavad Gita, the most disseminated portion of the Mahabharata, has seen the most opportunistic
political usage, at the same time as it has provided the people’s poets (like Sant Dnyaneshwar) the basis from which to
find the literatures of languages spoken rather than learnt. Krishna, who tramples down and expels the snake that blocked
access to the river Yamuna, is also the container of the great but ambivalent wisdom of the Gita, embracing within its
discourse ‘a great deal of the doctrine . . . borrowed from Buddhism’ (D.D. Kosambi). An amalgamation of several local
incarnations of gods, the dark hero underwent great transformations to meet the expediency of the times, from the
matrilocal version of the Oedipus myth when he kills his tyrannical uncle Kamsa, to the vanquisher in Phalke’s film of the
alien and fearful Naga who had to be expelled, like the colonial presence, by a child who had barely learnt to use his arms.
In the film of Dadasaheb Phalke, his daughter is introduced as his daughter who will play Krishna. She is shown
responding with that childlike wisdom we are familiar with. When she begins to play Krishna, she is Krishna; that is, she
has, in a sense, exchanged her breath and her being for that of the brave little god who steals butter.
The principle of iconicity, in fact, works through a series of such exchanges of being before unity is arrived at, such
42 as that between Radha and Krishna. Now, there is a difference between the identificatory devices in illusionistic theatre–
cinema and the icon’s being that comes to life. The icon is given life so that the performer or the worshipper may breathe
his. In both cases, of course, there is a projective identification – at least to begin with. However, projective identification
is divested of its psychotic features in a form where objectification is demanded at the outset. In the illusionistic arts,
there is an outright exploitation of the private, displaced desires and the guilt thereof, just as religion has by and large
done, in its own history. In a sense, both forms can be the source of alienation. But it is important to point out that while
the mythical ritual form places you well within an objectifying discourse – as Ritwik Ghatak, for example, has shown in
his work – the illusionistic form moves towards a disjunction between the subject and the object, reduces relationships
to voyeuristic intercourse, and privatises the universal. Paradoxically enough, the sources of this form are in precisely the
most progressive stride in Western art history. (Not so paradoxically after all, if we remember that Hitler had asked his
filmmakers to learn from the school of Montage while suppressing Soviet cinema itself.)

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Yet the leaps that have been made in realism have always accompanied great social movements. They are virtually
spontaneous means – adopted, found, discovered in actual social praxis. On the other hand, if it is made into a credo,
there can be nothing quite as false, in spite of the best intentions. I think this is a worldwide phenomenon.
An example of a film made with the credo of realism and factual detail – on Indian temple iconography and its
meaning – is Khajuraho (1955). It demonstrates to us the contradictions which begin to govern attitudes to an inherited
culture. But by now, we have also inherited the varied schools of realism and have seen the laws of nature either move
towards empiricism, creating an imitative art which denies its source – or an art which, in our times, internalises the
concerns of knowledge systems that will open out the world to us. It is in these cases that the institutes of film, drama,
art, set up after Independence have created an environment where a third-worldism does not suffocate its inhabitants.
Earlier, it was in the city of Calcutta that the long experience of colonisation led to the culmination of internalising
‘Western’ values of realism in the 1950s. Ritwik Ghatak’s Nagarik attempts to reconcile socialist realism with the prevalent
Western theatrical version of an Ibsenite dissolution of a dying class. Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali wins worldwide
acclaim for its documentary quality, being called the ‘best human document’ at Cannes. He was invited by Mrs Flaherty
as she had heard that he was carrying on the traditions of the great documentarist. Although a fiction film, it is not only
the beginning of the breakdown of hieratic structures in Indian narrative and visual forms, but also of that new humanist
vision with which the anthropologists of the West wished to integrate the former colonies into the Family of Man.
In fact, the battle for control of markets, as well as political mobilisation, is seeking new forms, with methods for the
revitalisation of culture fighting against that which would fossilise India, with its many regions, into Balkanised identities
of itself. Most other regional production centres, as soon as local bourgeoisies spread themselves, adopt the ideology
that art should arise from caste and linguistic differences. In fact, while accepting Western techniques, this ideology
rejects not only internationalism, but also, necessarily, its pan-Indian form of a civilisation knit together by centuries of
assimilation and synthesising. The metaphysics of the ritual object is sought in the crafting of films from the clay of the
soil.
However, Ritwik Ghatak, of whom Ray is said to have observed that he was more Bengali than himself, had, along
with the other modernising spirits of India’s music and poetry over the centuries, sought roots in soils around the world,
not merely where they were born. Indian classical music developed from its contact with the makkams of Uzbekistan and
Persia, the melodies of Turkey, the rhythms of seafaring folk, as of those who rode the ship of the desert. Amongst the
visual and other stylisics, such as those of the performing arts, what we had come to recognise as an Indian civilisation
was already a world culture that had united eclectic modes from the West and the East, starting from contacts with the
riverine beginnings of ancient man to these days of levitation. Among the legends of Guru Nanak are those about his visits
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to Mecca and Medina. The Granth Sahib includes the verses of several languages whose poets stood for an egalitarianism
against the priestly order, embodied folk aspirations from different areas in India. Gandhi’s stylistics were influenced by
the Bible, his thought by Tolstoy, even as he identified himself with the Indian villagers. When the Communist Party sent
out its poets and musicians to imbibe the vitality of folk cultures, we received from them, often through our films, the
cultures of the world. Salil Choudhury, a friend and colleague of Ritwik Ghatak, drew with equal ease from Mozart as he
did from Bengali, Yugoslavian, even Portuguese-influenced Goan melodies, apart from the established classical systems
of dhrupad and khayal.
But for many years Ritwik and Salilda lived in a kind of exile within their own country. More and more, this state
has begun to be the human condition. In Bombay, where the most significant films from any one centre in India have
been made in the last couple of decades, migrant labour pours in every day, be it from rural Maharashtra or further
afield, moulding our vision – sometimes to a myopic here and now, sometimes enlarging it, extending it, to universal
horizons. One has begun to see a similar phenomenon in all the urban centres in India. Calcutta is claimed to have been
inundated by refugees. One of them was Ritwik Ghatak. In Delhi, one hears that the city has no culture because it is
made by refugees. How else, one wonders, did the great metropolitan centres become the hub of activity-machines that
revolutionised thought and practice?
For my part, and some of my colleagues in my own and other arts, the realities within the reality can lead us to a
celebration, thus making an ontological break with the past where, in an ancient culture, it was linked to sacrifice or,
in the more modern, post-religion systems, with laws which so governed men and nature that willy-nilly one had to
submit to them. The sources of celebration lie in our history: the poise with which the arts of Sanchi, of Ajanta, mould
the frenetic energy of earlier forms into a pure consonance with reality, rather than control over nature; the liberating
influences of realisms that countered the orthodox of the State, the Church and the Market; the combination of the
wonder embodied in mathematical rigour and the irrelevant anachronisms that make up any poetry. For, in paying tribute
to our tradition, we have to align ourselves with the youth that makes it come alive.
It is the natural condition of the youth to be brave in the face of socialised reality that autonomises terror in most
parts of the world. It is up to the artists and filmmakers to articulate their bravery, to question given truths as facts;
to free the erotic impulse from consumerist fetishism, to restore links between emotion and knowledge, inference
and experience. The future then may reveal itself through suggestion. Only then will people stop saying that their
brutalisation represents the truth.
‘All the rest is cinema!’
‘Documented fiction, did you say?’
311

REFLECTIONS
1990
First published as the Introduction in Jacques Kermabon and Kumar Shahani, eds., Cinema
and Television: Fifty Years of Reflection in France, London and Hyderabad: Orient Longman,
1991.
Shahani co-edited a book on television with French film theorist Jacques Kermabon in a series
jointly co-authored/co-edited by French and Indian intellectuals as part of the Year of France
in India (also see his ‘Cinema and Technology’, pp. 199–200). His well-known position on mass
media – that these are merely modes of transmission, whereas the cinema is a language –
is further expanded here. Of some interest to contemporary media practice perhaps is his
initial exploration of the idea of video art. What would happen if all television sets came
with video-cassette recorders? The ‘conquest over space that the viewer has potentially made
could become a conquest over time as well’, where one could ‘rearrange sequences of real and
fictional events’. Although it is true, says Shahani, that institutionalized cultural activity tends
to ossify itself into a mindless bind of repetitive gesture, it is also true that ‘by that very art
of repetition, a culture becomes self-aware’, and modes of criticism ‘take a leap from a purely
technicist view to that of examining the fundamentals, thus releasing the energy to change the
institutions themselves’.
The possibility of new conjunctions has so bewildered the world that at this very moment not even the most Proustian
sentence would suffice to take us through a labyrinth of truths, on a flight to that clear continuum of knowledge and praxis,
promised by the preceding centuries.
Cinema, as the arts of its time, those arts that dare to commit themselves to affirmation, celebration, could
reintegrate points of view, inverse the position of the viewer and the viewed, take off tangentially into elaborations of
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sheer joy in the living and can even pull out its tongue at its own omnipotent subterfuge of established presences. Cinema
can do so with playful abandon, whenever its twin oppressors, the market and the state, have allowed it to manifest
itself. It can do so because it finds its individuation, through the chaos of collective manufacture and consumption, to
a specificity which lays claim to the universal. The specificity is less dependent on region, language, codes of behaviour,
personal history, than on the reintegration of signs that are intelligible and can give one the joy of insights across culture
and other barriers. The universalisms sought to be imposed by organised industries, like those of Hollywood, India, Japan,
the Soviet Union, have tried to pin down the specific and make it a caricatured presence of itself. The history of cinema
has proved how shortlived are designed universalisms of political consensus marketed at saturation levels.
The tragedy of television is that it accepts the shortlived as if that alone were the universal, reductively equating
the domestic chore to a nuclear explosion, voiding both of their meaning. Indeed, its greatest success is in the real-time
mode. Everything happens or does not at that minute, in that instant. It does not reveal; it shows rather than informs in
such a way as to obscure the past and the future, hiding its fictions, its intentions, under the cover of anonymous fact.
The cinema also speaks in the present tense, but since it is a made object, the past, the intention, the fiction, has to
unravel itself. Through its myriad suggestions, the superabundance of processes in nature, palpably felt, it ‘epiphanises’
the future, promising self-realisation.
Of course, one is here speaking of the cinema as an art, steadfastly adhering to its truth, democratising it even as
it refuses to offer itself for thoughtless consumption. One is speaking here of the great pioneers in every country; even
those like Griffith and Dadasaheb Phalke, or, later, Buñuel, Rossellini and Godard, whose idioms have been levelled down
mercilessly to fixed modes of address in the cinema and on television.
Almost everyone has agreed that television has brought access even to the cinema that we recognise as an art –
where there was none before. It can be said that many of the world’s greatest cinematic events in the last twenty years
would have not got beyond a small circle of cognoscenti had it not been for their transmission by television networks.
Yet, not only have these works been presented in the incredible flatness of the television screen image, demands
have now begun to be made by the often monopolistic/oligopolistic networks to create cinema to organisationally
determined norms based on faceless data of ratings and surveys. These forms of feedback have little or no room for
qualitative evaluation, leave alone discussion. True democracy can only function through qualitative discrimination and
elaborate debate, not through populism and the brute force of a majority. We know of even authoritarian regimes in
our times, actively aided and abetted by astute transmission in countries with longer histories of modern democracy to
doubt the extraordinary damage done by the subtle control exercised over apparently free media. In fact, this has been
the most visible of problems generated by the inevitable control exercised by the monetarily and politically powerful
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in any country. So much so that at this juncture in India, when the issue of granting autonomy to Doordarshan has been
debated all over the country, little or no attention has been paid to the possible spiritual and material resurgence that an
open use of the media can bring about to a people so long left with no option but to let politicians speak on their behalf.
Indeed, the whole debate has barely blundered through legalistic, organisational and politico-economic questions.
It is time that we began to look at what inheres in a configuration of an image, a sequence, the ways a surface
speaks, opens itself out as it travels from here to there. We may learn from the great work that has already been done
here vis-à-vis our ancient art, aided by the formalisers of those times and by our contemporaries, inspired by our still-
incomplete independence movement, who have written history or have carried it forward in practice. Often, there is
conjecture coupled with science in such effort, as you will surely find in this collection of essays as well. But so long
as the speculation is poetic and the speech rigorous, it opens our mind to wonder, question, debate, and to reach our
own conclusions. In looking at what is possibly inherent, one is able to free onself as the auditeur–viewer from the
manipulation of those who design programmes for mass consumption in a reductive idiom. If we refuse to infantilise our
adult responses and if we demand instead, quite insistently, the right of discovery, the sense of play in language forms
that a four-year-old is granted in civilised societies, we may yet learn to look at the aggressively new culture generated
by the globally dominant consumerism that has invaded the world.
Television is said to have engendered a great leap in visual sophistication amongst viewers who have more or less
grown up with it. While it is true that it has accustomed viewers to quick changes of perspective and identification of
objects within the frame, transparently denotative of concrete things and events, it seems to progressively exclude all
other evocation of meaning, almost by design in the way programmes are presented and now often produced/bought by
direct television supervision. There is a calculated denial of the specificity of an image, a viewpoint, an attitude, so that
the zappers and the zapped annihilate each other, while the thing to be consumed remains, in its fetishistic totality, an
image-thing, more satisfying than the real thing can ever be. What could be closer to the aims of consumerism? But in
effect, at the same time, it invites you not to use your perception to bring into a dynamic relationship, either sensuous
or abstract (the two are always connected, of course), what you see or hear in terms that go beyond the most immediate
‘satisfaction’.
This immediacy has often been falsely compared to that of the theatre. True, degenerate forms of the theatre
in the nineteenth century fathered the conventions of mass communication in the twentieth. But these were indeed
degenerate forms in so far as they had become non-participative and bathetic. These were the forms that divided the
spectators from the players absolutely, and used the audiences, literally, as targets.
The targeted consumer of television is made to believe that he is sovereign if he agrees to conform to the habits
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and preferences of a majority, carefully manipulated to accept the tinsel crown of marketplace democracy. Most of the
works done on celluloid, once the novelty had worn off, were, ever since the addition of sound, also used for the same
purpose. Yet, there have been important differences.
It would be impossible to pin down the reason for these differences. Indeed, the cause and the effect can often
be confused when they appear in such simultaneity. The atomisation of the individual in modern Western society, for
example, has certainly been exacerbated by both the conditions of viewing television and by the forms of fragmentation,
voyeuristic delight and projective identification that most cinema and it encourages. However, that very atomisation
was almost stated earlier as one of the Christian goals of Western democracy. In effect, all it has done is to alienate
possible means of finding one’s human identity through the integration of one’s spiritual and sensuous faculties. Instead,
what is proposed is an insatiable desire, to be fulfilled by a displaced and packaged object, with an equally insistent
acquisitiveness directed towards love, liberty, compassion. The impossibility of any self-realisation through the process
of devouring art objects, messages of peace, the élan of freedom, has necessarily led to cannibalisms of different kinds.
It is the same phenomenon which produces the longer queues at art galleries and at fundamentalist meetings,
perhaps – the loss of self to be re-appointed through passive cultural activity. For, today’s fundamentalisms are curious
beyond belief. They are often oblivious, indifferent to the sources, the traditions of their practice. Moreover, they are
not fanned by any form of interactive forces such as self-determination and the national homogeneous market. It is
as if separate fundamentalisms were being deliberately fanned by a force which will later take on a final centralised
integrating function.
It would be extraordinary to presume that cinema, by and large, did play an integrating role. All one can say is that
it came into being alongside the popular urges of integration, independence in Asia and Africa, the restructuring of the
post-war societies in Europe, the heroic aspirations of the Latin Americans to freedom.
In 1989–90, television is apparently playing a near-revolutionary role in Central and Eastern Europe. However – and
in these same times – the great danger of controlled electronic media is that images which appear extremely realistic
can be artificially produced through a computer programme with no actual referent in reality. How far this has already
been done in times of stress, one has no idea. Yet it is a frightening thought that ‘facts’ can now be so ‘delivered’. Seeing
is no longer believing.
The evolution of the senses allowed us to perceive movement: the mental field created by our perceptions propelled
us to action upon the environment. The resistance offered by the environment gave us the power of thought, prediction.
We transited from the urgency of survival at sea to the certainty of distant stellar orbits, producing harmonies that were,
to our eyes and ears and minds, still shaped in static, ideal forms.
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At the end of the past century and the beginning of the twentieth, we broke loose our own mental sets that had
bound us to single vertex perspectives in expression. True, there have been modes earlier – now considered ‘traditional’
as opposed to the ‘modern’ – that gave suggestions of how multiple subjectivities can be revealed and elaborated.
Necessarily, these are improvisatory forms, linked to practice, defiant of every theoretical construction. Theory could
after all, as long as it remained tied to idealist assumptions, only posit fixed points in space and time.
The cinema, along with Cubism, dynamised our ways of seeing. After the furthest explorations in sequence and
narrative, the possibilities opened out to television and video are unlimited – in theory and in practice.
The possibility of creating an objective world in which one can float as the Man on the Moon is right there before
us, and is occasionally realised. The demands that it makes on the subject as a voluntary agent are of a magnitude quite
beyond single individuals. Yet, it will have to be individuals whose talent, rigour and courage will be called upon before
the passive class of viewers activates itself and imposes its discovered will upon institutions that mask their subjugation.
On the global level, given the equations of power and education, the presence of an active television viewer seems
a remote, utopian possibility. Yet if it is true that the instinct for knowledge exists inalienably in our self-perceptions as
human beings, there cannot but be a refusal to accept a received universalism. Moreover, perhaps dialectically, because
of the hedonism of our age, we have seen that knowledge and pleasure arise out of the same impulse. It is indeed
knowledege of the other that reveals to us the contours of pain and pleasure, that refines and leads to new discoveries
each time, in experiences which would otherwise be brutally repetitive and monotonous.
Anyone who can thus use television to get access to the corroboration of information, to its rejuxtaposition, to
allow himself to be introduced to an unfamiliar world or to recall what has intrigued him, opens out the possibilities of
what seems otherwise a deadening medium of transmission.
If all television sets came with video cassette-recorders, the conquest over space that the viewer has potentially
made could become a conquest over time as well. For, with VCRs one can rearrange sequences of real and fictional
events, not merely switch on and off at fixed times or from one channel to another.
Perhaps schools and other community centres could encourage their members to actively handle given audio-video
images, to reintegrate them into new shapes and sequences.
All this might sound utopian, but just as one disabuses oneself of language distortions by realising one’s own ability
to speak, so also one seeks the truth by being able to play with the elements of audio-visual media to discover its sources
of meaning.
It is true that all institutionalised cultural activity tends to ossify itself into a mindless bind of repetitive gesture.
However, by that very art of repetition, a culture becomes self-aware. Modes of criticism take a leap from a purely
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technicist view to that of examining the fundamentals, thus releasing the energy to change the institutions themselves.
Popular culture, as distinct from folk culture, is a product of the industrial revolution. For long it was looked down
upon, sniffed at with aristocratic hauteur. As soon as it was realised that it could be put to use for the machinations of
the state and the market, all modes of mechanical reproduction have been mobilised to take control of the imagination.
Evidently the breakdown of traditional relationships, the anomic response to the world, displaces the affective
from the individual to the collective. While Reason or the Scientific Spirit promised to chart emotion into production
and culture in the nineteenth century dominated by Europe, imagination was largely pushed out or under into the savage
undifferentiated substratum of civilisation. For a while it was art and/or popular culture that provided the reservoir
of strength by which people could live, instead of killing their neighbours or natives of faraway lands. Today popular
culture, mediated largely by television, is not only the subject of voracious attention but also a complete charade in
which we engage ourselves. At its basis is the fact that what is known as popular culture is no longer produced by the
populace. All the possibilities of the charade were, of course, anticipated by the cinema in its primitive state.
By and large, the Movies have stayed in the cinema’s primitive stage. In fact, every technological breakthrough has
had quite opposite effects on the evolution of cinema. In the beginning, when silent black-and-white moving images were
first seen, the great pioneers in almost every country realised the tremendous potential it had in producing a new synthesis
of the arts that went beyond the given cultural norms of their histories, while the bulk of the old productions went into
untransformed imitations of the older arts, bolstering thereby the cultural prejudices of each country.
Stereotypes were sought to be strengthened – in perception, in modes of narration, in philosophical and social
thinking. On the other hand, the pioneers, often in spite of their own conditioning and that of their patrons, pushed
through the innovations that were to make it the most important transformative art of its times.
The physical introduction of sound – till then it was suggested through rhythm, tonalities and the word – helped
the cinema, at once, to liberate synergistic conflict, different energies generated by the senses, while most of the films
were harnessed to tyrannise audiences into conformist modes of thought, behaviour and feeling.
The less powerful people of the world who were not nearly nations yet had to stand in symmetric opposition or
accept blindly the modes of metropolitan control. In visual, musical-narrative terms, it meant either a complete renovation
of traditions, some of them with a continuous history of two-and-a-half thousand years, or the complete hollowing out of
their being, accompanied by an appropriation of its manifest objectifications. In fetishising the cultural object, in making
the cultural appear as the natural, the cinema denied it both its poetry and praxis. The transparency of the image renders
its object opaque. On television, the transparency seeks a complete identity with its object. The making of the image itself
seems not to intervene in any way in the access it gives to brute reality. By denying subjectivity in the image, it denies the
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presence of subjectivity in the object and thus makes the viewer question the very presence of it in himself, except in so
far as it is completely natural to him, or, quite simply, culturally conditioned.
Images that clearly show themselves as images – i.e. where the imagination, the mediation, is declared by the
makers and allowed to the viewers – are, on television, those that energise the consumer-object to life and rekindle the
subjective in the viewer, limiting his desire to that object with that particular brand name. Subjectivity is thus enjoyed
only by the inanimate package or that ultimate commodity, the pop star, the national football captain and the like. All
other players including the viewer himself seem to be flotsam in the miscellanea of electronic impulses anonymously
generated by an incoherent world as its inner life.
Colour, a bigger scale, a greater depth, have been the technologies that are supposed to have raised us from the
dead. For the most part, the sensate illusionism to which these advances cater can only further put to sleep the already
jaded, inattentive, massaged viewer. Add to it the beliefs – that most media networks have – about the attention span
of the viewer, and one is aghast that one voluntarily accepts the contemptuous view of oneself every time one clicks on
a television set or buys a ticket at the mainstream box office.
On the other hand, colour and the different possibilities of proportion and scale that the new technologies opened
up can begin to give expression to tendencies in world art that had otherwise been locked up into the perspectival mode
of the European Renaissance.
Colour is perhaps the ultimate human response to light. Whereas line and visual tone are more subjective to
measure, colour immediately signifies quality, discrimination; the particular, not just as an instance of the general but
also as it offers itself in its individual history. Colour musicalises its space and time components simultaneously as it
evokes a season, a fruit, a cultural nuance, treating memory and desire with playful abandon.
Together with colour, the different possibilities of proportion and scale can let old traditions of mise-en-scène find
completely new correlatives in the kinetic arts, thus rekindling on the primeval level the desire for knowledge in a group.
The image itself, instead of parading dead, hunted objects, can begin to seek illuminations that traverse layers of
thought and feeling if programmation gave up the universalist idiom in favour of the individuated. Television will learn
to generalise only when it stops playing the role of the Great Leveller and begins to look for the unique. Its whole mode
of address has to change – if we value intelligence and have the pride and pleasure of being endowed with it.
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INTERROGATING
INTERNATIONALISM
1990
An extempore presentation made at a Kasauli Arts Centre workshop on ‘Dialogues on Cultural
Practice in India: Critical Frameworks’. First published in Journal of Arts & Ideas, No. 19, May 1990.
In the late 1980s and early 90s, Journal of Arts & Ideas and the Kasauli Arts Centre conducted a
series of workshops titled ‘Dialogues on Contemporary Cultural Practice’, conceived by Geeta
Kapur, involving artists, social scientists and historians. These workshops saw two issues being
published of the journal: No. 19 (May 1990), titled ‘Critical Frameworks’; and Nos. 20–21 (March
1991), titled ‘Inventing Traditions’. The editors transcribed the tapes of the original discussions,
and so the flavour of the event itself was maintained. The present text by Shahani, which
inaugurated the entire discussion, was in conversation with several key interlocutors: Geeta
Kapur, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, Sanjaya Baru, Susie Tharu, Sudipta Kaviraj,
Arun Khopkar, Madan Gopal Singh, Kumkum Sangari, Anup Singh and others.
Last night Geeta enjoined me to break the silence that we are all enjoying here.
In recent times I have increasingly come across events that seem to me to point to a crisis of internationalism, and
these, in the cinema in particular, seem to connect up with what was happening immediately after the Second World
War – in poetry first, perhaps, poetry being the most common mode of address in the arts in the sense that everyone is
equipped to be a poet.
The symptom was of the control of imagination. And recently one has seen this symptom appear in the cinema:
of the effort to control and to standardise the imagination. For instance, directors of film festivals such as Hubert Bals,
who ran the Rotterdam Festival and supported that cinema which spoke with an individual voice, without pressing any
ideological determination on the voice in the programming of the festival, began to mourn that there was hardly such
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cinema today in the world. Bals used to see five hundred films every year and make a selection for his festival, and last
year he saw a thousand films; he said he liked perhaps three or four. This naturally posed a great problem to him to
mount the festival, and when I went there in January this year, he was extremely apologetic about the kind of fare he was
offering. And I think this situation has come to such a pass because of a standardisation, an internationalisation of the
market along with centralised distribution networks like television. There is still tremendous confusion, even amongst us,
about these centralised modes of distribution, and I think we should take this problem up right away.
Many people believe, for example, that television is a kind of art form (even Godard says something to this effect),
which I don’t think it is. Television is a broadcasting medium, it is not a medium of discourse of any kind. This initial
confusion is further compounded by certain things that television has itself led to, which is a quick ‘reading’ of images, one
that actually leads people to believe that they have become visually more sophisticated. I think we haven’t, I think that
instead of looking at visual images we have started ‘reading’ them, like signals whose interpretation may be made only in
a certain direction, certain predetermined responses programmed to the visual stimuli. So a painting of, let’s say, a mother
and child has stopped yielding anything more than a transparent image, although we know that in the history of art, this
is merely a thematic substance, that it may have nothing to do with the universe that the particular work of art straddles.
Such a habit has actually led to the abdication of the very effort to structure an image, to structure linkages
between different events, whether musical events or visual events or narrative events. There has then been a reaction
to this, in movements that have taken often quite deliberately retrograde steps, opposing such internationalism with
a geographically determined nationalism, articulated through the region, whether these are visual, philosophical,
narrative or musical articulations. If one starts with whatever is ‘known’ as a geographical entity, let’s say India or Britain,
which starts with the concept of a nation-state, you instantly arrive at regional identities which are counterposed with
national identities, and, in places like ours, caste identities and so forth. Even modernist reactions have thrown up a
kind of retrograde lumpenism, like the punks in England, who are reacting against a standardisation of behaviour and
of aesthetics, to propose a group that challenges the dominant on virtually no grounds except of being outrageous.
In China we had a Cultural Revolution that has now been seen as a highly infantile way of reacting against traditions
which developed out of great struggles and a great amount of practice over hundreds of years. These symptoms were
of course also a part of every revolutionary or semi-revolutionary change, but it is only now that they have begun to
get such a strong base. For not since the Byzantine empire have we had so massive and monolithic a centralisation and
standardisation of expression as we do today.
The problem is extremely real, no matter what mode of address you take up. Working in the cinema for example,
I have to work with lenses; as Bazin points out, the lens is known in French as objectif – the lens is supposed to give
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you a view of objective reality, and the technology of the lens has, we know, developed directly from the efforts of the
Renaissance painters. So now we, as practitioners of the cinema, have to constantly devise subterfuges to work against
the lens and to somehow restore relations to nature which are at once more contemporary than those proposed by the
lens itself and, at the same time, are related to the tradition within which you choose to operate. What usually happens
is that one has recourse only to the decorative surfaces from the tradition. As a result, in the cinema at any rate, what
comes to be known as ‘Senegalese’ cinema or even ‘African’ cinema is not what goes behind the formulation of a visual
image or an audio image, but is what is presented, like the costume that someone is wearing. And not only does it restore
that dangerous transparency of the image we referred to earlier, it also restores the idea of a Third World culture, an
‘underdeveloped’ culture, which is supposed to catch up with and one day become First World culture. Like the witches
of the medieval ages, we, the artists, respond by accepting these notions unconsciously, and in turn begin to emphasise
elements like ethnicity through costume and through obvious behavioural patterns. The problem of self-determination
is only further removed by such pressures. It seems to me that the whole history of internationalism has in our times
reinforced precisely this kind of response from groups who would in fact like to work towards self-determination, but
who end up following a self-image, one that is imposed upon you by a form of patronage which you begin by reacting
against but end up accepting through a series of vicious somersaults.
I think many Communist movements in the Third World have begun falling into this trap, the most recent being
the Cultural Revolution, but even before that, the friends we have had, the teachers we have had, have shown us that
the problems they faced then were not very different from the ones we face today, although the tactical line was
perhaps different in its response. In the history of the Indian cinema, some of our most talented poets and musicians
and filmmakers have had to do populist work by relating to folk culture with an initial mistake that did not differentiate
between folk art and urban popular art, the vastly different mechanisms that make the two, and the identities that
emerge from those relations of production. This was not examined at all. And it is a curious thing to note that the kind
of impulse generated by a well-defined policy of sending out these poets and musicians to work with ‘the people’ has
now become the policy of clearly imperialist-supported culture. One has only to see how the West rejects, most of
the time, anything that lays a claim to being contemporary while lapping up all that smacks of ‘ethnicity’ to see the
truth of this policy. This situation confronts one all the time. I don’t know if a study is feasible, but one should examine
how institutions supported by imperialist agencies, or often just the state which supports imperialist agencies, actually
intervene in a culture. I’m sure this thesis will be supported.
But the problems for the practising artist will remain not only at this social level, but also, and substantially, in
the internal practice of whatever form within which s/he chooses to work. This is partly because of the technologies
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available: I’ve mentioned cinema lenses, but even painters have to work within industrially manufactured pigments which
lend themselves to certain kinds of colouring and to certain material relationships with the work they are proposing. In
film, we have this precise problem in the emulsions we use for making films. The most versatile emulsion we have is made
by Eastmancolour Kodak, and it works fundamentally with the principle of saturation. I would like to elaborate many of
the cultural and political problems I have referred to earlier by showing how they would feature in the actual practice of
making films, by expanding on this principle of saturation.
The principle of saturation has been a very generative universal principle, because it has actually been abstracted
from art practice, but in fact it does not even apply to the light one finds in Northern Europe. Even to capture North
European light, leave alone the kind of light we find in India, one has to work against the saturation principle. For unlike
Agfa stock, which does not work with such a bias, Eastmancolour asserts that saturation is the first principle of colour
composition, and in consequence, even colours that are not saturated in reality become oversaturated on film. I once
discussed this problem with technicians from Technicolour, London, and asked them if there wasn’t any difference in the
emulsions presented by different Kodak factories. They said that they imagined the light at Rochester would perhaps
approximate closest to the light in India. Such cultural colonialism, which in this case goes back to the Renaissance,
affects even the Americans, because their films, which are on Rochester stock, have hardly ever overcome the principle
of saturation as a means of defining colour composition in their work.
The problem is so difficult that every time one works one has to evolve new strategies of meeting it, and most likely
these interventions will not even be accepted as interventions of quality. The only American film in the mainstream
that did make an effort, not towards desaturation but towards shifting the principle, was Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.
Whenever this film was discussed in Europe, people kept describing it as a failed experiment, though a fantastic one. In 43
Europe there is of course the work of Antonioni, which did not work with the principle of saturation, replacing it with
sharper and more luminous colours that could be internalised rather than seen only as sensations. Europeans had also
become sensitised to these colours because of electricity, I believe, and it is also important that Antonioni’s major work
was at a time when hippie culture was at its height.
Let me elaborate on the principle of saturation a little more explicitly. It is very much the same principle as in
painting, I think. For instance, when I work with colour, I have two reference points: the scales that are actually available,
and the experience of the light of a particular place, which is of course not available in a scientific or codified form. I
have named the principle of colour composition as luminosity for my own use, but this may well not be so; it may be

Dialogues with art. ‘They have given their pain to you, Somnath Hore, that you may move
your hands to leave eternal traces of wounds’. fig. 43 Char Adhyay (1997): the white-on-
white directly citing Hore’s ‘Wounds’ series of works on paper. ‘You can reorganise the
format given to you of working within the golden section in such a way as to bring in
proportionate relationships, of volume, of distance, of focus, of colour, which will recall the
experience of seeing miniature painting or a fresco.’ fig. 44 Khayal Gatha (1988): engaging
322 with miniature painting conventions.
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just a hypothesis I have. Now the scales, which are of course elaborately worked out, are available in charts. Kodak gives
us a chart that shows us, let’s say, blue in all its variants: tonal variant, variants of white and black, all of which lead to
a certain centre, one blue which is described as the purest blue, or, in the same way, the purest yellow or the purest
red. Johannes Itten’s book on colour gives us these charts also. One uses these charts only to think of these as scales,
and they are useful in posing the right kinds of problems to the cameraman. The cameraman always works with these
charts, which have themselves of course been evolved through centuries of practice. Once I have this basis, I could tell
my cameraman K.K. Mahajan, when we made Maya Darpan, that I wanted to desaturate, that I wanted to eliminate the
blues, and to strengthen the warmth of the human skin. As I shift, I can then begin to work with the gradations of light
we have here, one can violate some of the conventions of exposure, and then even of selecting material that has become
traditionally operative in cinema.
Naturally, such interventions on the part of the cameraman and director begin to produce possibilities that few
would recognise as being innovative at all. There is no evolved reference system to see whether such work is innovative
or not.
Painters would, similarly, have problems arising out of scientific perspective proposed by the lens and by all the
great art that has been made in the West since the Renaissance. These problems, l think it is clear, are not those of
technology alone; they lie both in the quality of sensuous reaction to the world and and in the way one abstracts from
that sensuous reaction. The problem of scientific perspective is even more difficult to counter. On a purely formal level,
it is not so difficult if you know that you cannot, let’s say, imitate the Mughal miniature through the lens, but that you
can reorganise the format given to you of working within the golden section in such a way as to bring in proportionate
44
relationships, of volume, of distance, of focus, of colour, which will recall the experience of seeing miniature painting
or a fresco. And that you can use camera movement, and the relationship between camera and actor/object in such a
way as to destroy all that goes with the idea of scientific perspective (and there is a lot that goes with it). Even the most
conservative philosophers of Western history include the contribution of the Renaissance painters not only in the area
of geometry, which is a relatively technical area, but in the very formation of ways of looking at the world. All these
questions we face actually approximate to ways of looking at the world, and they inevitably interlink with all the other
areas we deal with in cultural practice, such as narrative or performance, and all that narrative or performance has to
‘say’, all the systems of meaning it has to carry with it.
People often consider it far-fetched when one points out that the use of colour in a certain manner, or of field-
depth in a certain manner, affects the forms of acting in film as well. This becomes the most unacceptable area of
filmmaking, possibly because approaches to speech and to acting are considered by many to be elemental, and they

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have suffered because of this elemental quality. Scientific perspective, it then becomes evident, brings with it a certain
morality as well; for if you think the world is knowable in a fixed way, although you might have replaced an earlier
mode of religious identification, you are actually replicating another kind of religious fixity. We see, all around us,
forms of science that are still deeply embedded in religion, in the idea of god as objective law. It seems to me that
even in this post-Cubist or post-Cezanne world, when central and fixed perspective has been replaced by perspectives
shifting in time, we still suffer from the proposition of a law, one that pre-determines reality by simply suggesting that
reality is knowable in a fixed, determinate way. When one discusses the work of Heisenberg with scientists, or the two
different ways we have accepted in which light travels, the wave and the quantum, one inevitably finds them insisting
that these do not include the kinds of subject–object relationships that artists, in the West at any rate, have been
attempting to propose. Science asserts a system of causation that we know through the practice of art to be insufficient
in understanding the artistic intention.
In cinema, curiously, many of the great filmmakers who have been successful in overcoming such scientific
determinism have had a metaphysical bias. These filmmakers have been so successful that they have even attracted to
their form people who otherwise belong clearly to an anti-metaphysical ideology. I refer of course to Robert Bresson.
In Bresson’s mind the morality that scientific perspective has proposed is a given, and Bresson succeeds in retaining that
morality both in the way he makes his actors perform and in his choice of the 50-mm lens (one that has been wrongly
labelled the Normal lens because of the belief that it approximates closest to the eye; in fact it is a direct technological
descendant of a convention used in Renaissance painting). But it is in the fluid movement of an action that inevitably
moves beyond the static to another area, not just of performance but of meaning itself – as this meaning impinges on
the given, the static moral question, to propose the traumas and the crises of our age – that takes him beyond the fixities
of objective law that the technology brings with it. The other obvious example is of Roberto Rossellini. Both have had
students and disciples from even radical political groups who would oppose anything that even remotely suggested
metaphysical or any other right-wing ideologies.
If one begins then by accepting that when there is a shift in the formal system, there is inevitably also a shift in the
ethical system – I now introduce the ethical, for I believe that despite the preference of most Christian-based societies
to reiterate the moral, what they are speaking of and what we are speaking of is in fact the ethical – then it should follow
that the shift will operate from the narrative; from the question of how you begin to structure a sequence of events.
Now in the cinema and, I imagine, in the theatre as well, such a sequencing of events, or what is conventionally called the
‘plot’, is governed quite unashamedly by mechanical causation. I refer to those conventions of physics that were thrown
up in the beginning of this century, of action determining its own reaction and so forth, and of course I include in this
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several conventions that have remained from a pre-mechanical era, like for instance the pathetic fallacy, which is used
repeatedly in the cinema, usually in crude imitation of literary conventions. In the West there have been major artistic
upheavals as artists have attempted to fragment language to a point where it would be freed of such conventions, like
the new Novel in France which tried to eliminate the metaphors of language that still contain remnants of the pathetic
fallacy, or other modernist efforts to rearticulate an epic form. Despite these efforts, art has still to move beyond
structures imposed by mechanical causation, and I don’t think it will succeed as long as the laws of physics are privileged
to the extent they are in our societies. In the biological sciences, it seems, questions are beginning to be asked which have
already been faced by artists: questions of individuation, for example. How do cells that are superficially similar to each
other, which even function in identical manner, grow into a liver or a spleen or an eye or a toe?
And yet, despite the evident problems, the last couple of decades have seen efforts yet again to study narrative
merely through applications of binary systems, a sort of computerised structure of the constituent elements of narrative,
P-l, P-2, P-3 or whatever, whose main quality seems to be to separate narrative from the ethical issues with which it is
bound. Such structuralism seems to me completely the wrong track, irrelevant to either the making of narrative or to
responding to narrative. I think some of the studies have themselves shown up their limitations, studies that speak of
the degeneration of myths, i.e. myths that move from highly aesthetic articulations and clear oppositions, possessing
forms that are easily readable and easily ritualised, to forms which are apparently degenerate but which do find ethical
responses within particular societies at particular stages of their history. But if I see these responses, I would not call
the myths degenerate at all, but forms that have emerged through practice and which retain their traditional focus of
reference, and fully valuable to any effort to articulate a narrative structure.
I think that in areas such as these a lot of work could also be done by those who are outside of the dominant
disciplines that are usually applied. Such work would lead to investigations in art practice itself, to start with, as it would
to the theory of artistic practice which would then have to reformulate the nature of human nature – for automatically
artists would have to deal with issues like characterisation and the nature of what that character means, of the word,
the nature of nature itself – and the privileging of either the persona or the plot, depending on the urgency of the need
to formulate an interaction with the whole world, rather than one limited to a particular geographical area. All this will
necessarily lead to a resequencing, i.e. to an understanding of the element of time differently from what we have usually
been doing so far.
When we speak of time, and especially of sequence, we necessarily come to the instance of music. Normally, when
one speaks to Europeans about music, they suggest a unified history – they often believe that before modern music was
constructed, there was polyphony; before polyphony there were the Chants; they would go back to sheer melody. Now
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we in India work almost entirely with melodic systems, both in the north and the south. But we tend to make far too much
of merely the formal elements of this practice; for example, we know that we do not have the structure of a tempered
scale, and we have been through endless and highly frustrating exercises in inventing a tempered scale with, for instance,
notions of shruti being reducible to 22, 24 or 25 divisions. Now [Pandit Sharadchandra] Arolkar has quite rightly proposed
that we have a continuous scale, which means an infinite number of shrutis. Very few practising musicians will accept
this fact, though they reveal it in their practice. I think that those who have attempted to propose a methodology of
Indian music have also suffered from an anxiety to propose something that will equal the methodological sophistication
of Western musical theory. But the fact that we do not at the moment have access to, let’s say, a mathematical system
of understanding Indian music doesn’t mean that such a system does not exist; it is merely that we have no access
to one right now. I believe that there is considerably more to the question of improvisation and to the individuation
that it allows – a quality of Indian music that has attracted many Western musicians to it – than any current musical
theory would suggest. There is more to it because any experience of playing or listening to Indian music proposes
more than one single way of looking at things; anyone who has had the pleasure of going into the presentation of a
bandish or raga will see that it actually broadens your ways of approaching reality itself. It returns one to the ethical
question, as well as to the question earlier raised about scientific perspective. At the moment we do not have ways of
articulating this, for we either seek to freeze the tradition into various formalisations, as Bhatkhande did, or we arrive at
various highly nonsensical mystifications about the practice. The problem is indeed that the practice is itself so seemingly
self-contained in its completeness that it even gives the impression that there is no need for renovating the tradition,
which there clearly is. Our systems evidently suggest links with Uzbeki music, with Arab music, which our history also
substantiates. And it is ridiculous for us to geographically limit our tradition of musical practice, as it is for us to impose
technical–formal systems that do not relate to the questions that are raised by the practice itself, questions that lead to
one’s own relationships with nature, to history and to ethics.
In our music this kind of investigation is particularly vital, because our music has survived the onslaught of so many
different imperialist strategies; even those that, while apparently supporting the music, do not permit the assimilation of
other kinds of music with which we might otherwise find valuable connections, whether they are from Korea or Japan or
Afro-American jazz. Such assimilation is vital. We must assimilate all those systems we come across, or admit defeat. And
the biggest problem we must face is one that recurs again and again, of how we may satisfy our need for a homogeneous
identity. While so many of our literatures and our musical forms and our paintings have emerged from the abstraction of
a particular sensuous reality, and while that reality has changed and led to newer forms of abstraction, this problem, this
need, recurs: the need for an identity, a need that is in every one of us. This need, again and again, takes us back to tribal
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forms, into regressions that threaten the survival of the identity itself. For they do not equip us to face the challenges
that the world around is posing to us today.
Discussion
Gulammohammed Sheikh (GMS): A few random ideas that come to mind, in response to what Kumar has said. One thing
that immediately strikes me is the ratio you established between Renaissance art and the cinema. And since this concerns
painting, it is of course of direct interest to me; the overlaps between painting and cinema in the use of colour, for example.
The recurrent issue is that, within the philosophy of the Renaissance, the world is retinal, it has been appropriated by the
retina. And the camera lens sustains the retina; it is in fact the central preoccupation behind the invention of the lens.
Necessarily, therefore, any artist using the medium of cinema has to oppose this appropriation, to therefore go against
the properties of the medium itself. There was this shot in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice in which Alexander comes close to
the mirror and you see only a shadow, to realise, eventually, that he has gone close to a mirror which is being filmed by
the lens. And at the end comes a kind of mark which is like touching the lens, a mark that gradually disappears. You see an
effort here to almost go through the lens, so to say.
What I feel strongly about the overlap between painting and film is that a lot of art, in both these forms, has
taken up opposing positions on naturalism, or what you would call scientific perspective; it has revealed alternatives,
questioned the system. But it also occurs to me that, despite all this, both painting and film are finally circumscribed by
this limitation because it still defines the medium; in film it is the basis of the technology. We use the retina to grapple
with reality, and then merely the reducing or the elevating of certain colour tones . . .
Kumar Shahani (KS): . . . will not do very much. Quite right, which is why one has to emphasise that decisions such as
colour tonalities imply decisions in other areas, of overall composition. In fact many of us in film are working against the
privileging of the frame, in the knowledge that the frame will only reinforce retinal transformations and nothing more. We
have to now work with the sequence of retinal stimulations in such a way as to cancel those out and create a different
kind of intemalisation that is no longer dependent on the retina. And therefore all these propositions of narrative and of
sequencing, and the use of musical forms and of ways in which you make a person act in front of the camera.
GMS: I have two questions, then. If you take the retina, two eyes that work together and suggest stereoscopic convergence,
you might also have a mechanism that traces the work freely, and thus, in consequence, a kind of work that permits freedom
to those who see. First, has there been any work done that would grapple with the technical, mechanical functions of the
retina? And second, might there be a system that actually functions outside the retinal system, finding new mechanisms
for its functioning? For example, if the Renaissance world-view reached its pinnacle in the invention of the still camera and
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the lens, whether we might have invented a camera-like device to record reality at similar pinnacles in the history of our
art. When I ask the second question, I am also hinting that Indian art did function outside the ambit of the retinal system
and provided an alternative means to realising the world.
KS: Concerning the first question, certainly there have been attempts at acting against convergence, the convergence that
scientific perspective operates with. Evidently all artists, including Western artists, have worked against convergence –
montage was a major first effort in this direction, in Eisenstein’s work in particular. We see this in systems that have been
opposed by later theoreticians, that would use fluid action and a fluid camera to actually use the fluidity to deny the
convergence.
About the second question, it seems to me that the history of our art and therefore the history of our culture
would have had to be somewhat different to produce even the idea of a lens. It would need to have an idea of a
mode of representation that does not apply only to painting but to all the other ideas that converged upon painting
so remarkably at that moment in Italy. Of course, if our history had gone in a different way, from the Buddhist era in
which one finds an art practice that rejoices in the very natural – if this had been taken up by the history that followed
it, not only in obvious artefacts or obvious ways of dealing with sculpture and painting and so on, but in actual ethical
systems, if the need for such objectivity had been articulated, perhaps we too would have evolved something as
representative as a lens. All this is of course entirely hypothetical, for given our history as it is, I don’t think we could
have invented anything like a lens.
Arun Khopkar (AKh): Perhaps this is demonstrated in the Indian observatories, which are located by a completely
different system than Western observatories vis-à-vis the universe at a particular point. Even the architecture – rays of
the sun striking at a particular point – constructs the whole temple rather than a point of observation, per se, would.
The location of the Indian observatory is itself crucial, not just for visibility but for explicating the cosmic range, as you
see in the Jantar Mantar.
Anuradha Kapur (AK): In theatre the use of the curtain would appear to be an actual attempt to focus but in fact this
device leads to quite the opposite. Sometimes a hand emerges and/or the top of the head, but a great deal of what
happens behind the curtain is not visible. It is always making a disalignment between what you can see or what you are
expected to see as a spectator, and what by the intervention of a theatrical device you may not see. In other words, you
place the performance, the objects of that performance and the knowledge of that performance in a way that always puts
in doubt your ability to converge, or even the assumption that you can see.
KS: That’s quite right, I also find this in the mise-en-scène of most of our traditional forms, which do not allow a
convergence but, on the other hand, working from a centre, or sometimes three or four centres, they go outward. Almost
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every traditional form that we have uses these devices, and this makes it difficult for us to perform, let’s say, a Western
‘well made’ play where the proposition itself is geometric.
AK: And we see this even in the use of the gaze in classical Indian theatre, so that when one character says, ‘Here comes
Bhima’ and looks one way, the actual entry might be from somewhere else. So there is no convergence.
Madan Gopal Singh (MGS): I don’t agree with that. That’s merely a displaced convergence, you are now positing convergence
as an absence. The problematic certainly remains even though it is posited somewhere else. I think the problem is (I am
referring back to Kumar), you mentioned Bazin’s use of the term objectif for the lens. This term is semiotically interesting
because, while it suggests a relationship with an object, it also suggests an objective. It is like a certain conscience towards
objectivity, like snatching the lens from nature, which is in fact how the lens is seen and used. There is a problem to seeing
naturally – you cannot see through a lens lightly. And then the problem of naturalising an entire mode of convergence, or
of tracing the point at which colour saturation took the ideological turn you described – none of these is satisfied by the
idea of displacing convergence – because convergence remains, at all points, an active referent.
KS: That is true, but what Anuradha was suggesting is the possibility through such forms of arriving also at a divergence – of
the relationship of the curtain with the parts of the body, between character, look and audience. Even this person who is
so central, who is, let’s say, at this point, and upon whom we have converged at this moment in time, may be configurated
such as to move away from the convergence. For his convergence is also individuated through the paraphernalia around
him, which is something that is a big problem in Western theatre – because that individuation of the character is so
complete that it actually even replaces the act of seeing. If you are only used to the Western naturalistic system, you will
see only if Bhima is coming in, you will hear Draupadi saying that Bhima is round the corner, you will see Bhima entering
with his characteristic leap. But what you should also see is Draupadi, with all those soft gestures . . .
AK: Thereby making herself invisible, with those gestures.
KS: Yes, but finally you see her, you see Bhima, you see yourself, each one acting from a centre. This is already a hell
of a difference, even in determining the objective. If we see such a system subverting the themes of convergence and
objectivity, what we are seeing is also a system which subverts religious institutions that propose a single set of laws
to govern our behaviour and responses. It subverts all that. What happens then is that, although you perceive that each
different self is possibly linked, you have to form the link. And what we may still have to do is to find out how this link
takes place, a non-convergent link.
Geeta Kapur (GK): I think Madan was trying to point to something slightly different. He was suggesting that instead of
placing the theory of Renaissance scientific perspective so squarely into the passion for the objective, and thence into
the passion of religion, as you have done, Kumar, another system might be possible. For instance, maintaining the active
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reference within the schema – in a given sequence or in the totality of the narrative – one active reference relayed
into another, might lead to a metaphysical summit, the objective of the narration, that would then be different from
the objective convergences in space suggested by Renaissance perspective. I think he was suggesting that narrative
convergences could therefore be of several kinds and that it was not necessary, perhaps not even possible, to take a stand
against the very notion of convergence.
MGS: What I was suggesting might perhaps be best illuminated by Arun, if he were to explain his analogy of the observatory.
AKh: There are several kinds of telescopes, of course: for instance, the radio telescope or the optical telescope, each of
which has its own requirements. The radio telescope would have to be installed in a space where there are the fewest
possible disturbances to the radio wave, while for an optical telescope you might need a mountain and clear visibility,
and so on.
For the Indian observatory, however, certain events are important – which recur in time. Obviously, which events
are important and which are not is something that already introduces what Kumar mentions as the ethical basis of
understanding the cosmos. Now even in recurrence, the Western scientist is more interested in periodic recurrences
in the past, say, of comets that are seen once in every so many years. But for the Chinese or the Indian observer, it
is the non-occurrence, the break in periodicity, that is far more significant, and this is a means for predicting what
you will see. For the Chinese or the Indian, then, an event that might be observed for the very first time is less likely
to be a surprise than for the Western observer. And the interesting thing is that Indian and Chinese predictions and
astronomical calculations have often been far more accurate, despite the West having more sophisticated equipment
for observation.
Sudipta Kaviraj (SK): I have one problem basically, Kumar, which recurred for me in several points you made. There
was something I didn’t agree with, but I was trying to work my way around it to something else that concerned your
presentation. In brief, I felt your presentation had to be received with a certain element of irony. You point to a certain
way of seeing the world which is determined not only in terms of science, but also specifically in terms of instrumentation,
which you trace back to the Renaissance. At the same time, however, you were also laying claim to the right of art to play
a foil to science, in the way art plays upon variations of the real.
But would you say, in continuation, that the vision that you are playing with is also to be seen in ironic terms, in the
sense in which you would require it as a history, a sort of backdrop, in order to retain the originality and the vitality of
what you create? And if this is so, if I am right in suggesting that this is so, then what about forms which you’ve been just
discussing, theatre and so on, which do not function in the same terms of the ironical? Would you have access to them
in a non-ironical way?
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KS: Well, I think the ironic – as you choose to term it – certainly has to play a part, because there is a specific history to the
instruments we use, and this cannot be avoided. But the more interesting question is the other one, of how we then relate
to forms that are presented to us apparently without the burden of an alien tradition.
SK: Would it be possible for us to perceive these forms in a non-ironical way?
KS: I think it is, and the attempt certainly would be to achieve this. But then, to begin with, one will have to accept the
reality of what you term ironical, and the biggest problem is right here – in the pressure that all artists face to believe that
indigenous forms, by virtue of their sheer ethnicity, are, or should be, automatically accessible to us. And that, indeed, the
measure of an artist’s identity is the extent to which he or she is able to appropriate a style of cultural indigenism. This is
of course an imperialist-supported position, and it is intellectually sheer rubbish.
The first thing one has to do is to recognise the reality of one’s limitations, whether it is the lens or the material I
am using, and to say that this is what has gone into building my work.
MGS: This point about the ironic, I find fascinating. Because the ironic is something that doesn’t exist on its own. It exists
as an idea of something. And in this sense it seems to me that if we want to evolve what Sudipta would term a non-
ironical relation to tradition, then we would have to develop something conceptually as powerful as realism has been in
the West. And by this I do not mean an offshoot of realism. I’m still not sure about realism itself as a mode of practice
and what it might mean to us today, but if we were to posit a non-ironical alternative, it would have to be something as
conceptually filled out as the Western tradition of representation. This is in fact a central problem of our cinema, for how
does one go through a history when its very existence, at one level or another, remains an irony? The tension is actually
between a non-ironic state of being and an ironic history.
GK: One of the reasons I feel slightly unhappy about the use of the term burden of the Western tradition, of Western
ideology and history, is because at this historical point – and we could take it back several decades – the issue is to see
oneself or one’s condition in a sort of ironic play with the ‘West’, in the first instance, and then to explore alternative
traditions with the degree of autonomy that one actually conceptually attributes to the Western tradition, rather than
seeing the one as displacing the other.
KS: Yes, the one cannot displace the other, and in fact we have to accept the West – the beginning is in accepting the
Western tradition – which is itself a kind of mythology about which we know something by now. Even this whole argument
about colour saturation I made earlier – some form of that must have developed with the colour dyes that came from
different cultures. Red, for example, came from India, indigo came from India, and people obviously had to work with
these dyes. Apart from this, we know – although there has not yet been enough work on this – that even forms proposed
by Renaissance artists were assimilated from other cultures. Recent research has shown that the Gregorian Chants, which
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precede everything in Western music, had been influenced by the Islamic call, which is related in turn to other forms of
Eastern music. So forms even in the West have developed through links with other cultures; and the more we discover
these links, the easier it will be for us to work.
GK: And yet it will not be an act of distillation. We are not interested in distilling all that has gone into the Western
tradition and reclaiming what is ours.
KS: I think that to some extent we would have to do the distillation, because without that we might again go into other
forms of imitation.
Susie Tharu (ST): To fragment the traditions we inherit . . .
GK: Fragment, yes, I would be more inclined to accepting that, but not distillation – because that argues an essence which
was in some way intact within our traditions; that we have to return to that essence. This is something I am sure Kumar
wouldn’t accept.
Vivan Sundaram (VS): I would like to say something about the alternative metaphysical approach in Piero Della
Francesca and the way this approach was inducted into the dominant ideology of scientific perspective. One must ask
how this highly developed scientific attitude allowed a parallel perception of the sort you see in Piero. This is indicated
in painting language itself – e.g., a scruffy, unfinished quality in parts, informal, spontaneous, in every way opposing the
organised perceptions that formed the dominant ideology. I used to wonder, are these merely unfinished areas in the
painting? But current research, and also the way one is able to see these works, gives other kinds of meaning to them.
One sees other elements that came in almost in spite of the classical organising principles that Piero was supposed
to have followed. In the same way, when one looks at Vermeer today, we would be taking an extremely conservative
position if we said that he was working only towards principles of convergence and doing nothing else. You would have
to see today how the new ways of looking that scientific perspective threw up also gave rise to new ways of integrating
the metaphysical, and not necessarily in direct opposition to it – not just to turn the dominant principle on its head,
but to broaden it. I think we may have a slight tendency to equate everything ‘Western’ with a dominant tendency in
the West and not pay sufficient attention to oppositions that emerged which are now built into it, which are also part
of the Western tradition. In fact, you see this in some of the greatest practitioners of Western art.
Finally, in the way we perceive works of art of the past, we should be able to look at them in ways other than just
the terms within which they were made. We tend to actually imprison those works within their own ideologies. For
example, there is this brilliant essay on Vermeer’s The Artist’s Studio which gives many examples to show how Vermeer
uses multiple ways of looking, parallel and simultaneous alternatives to the principle of convergence which is also of
course there. We shouldn’t oversimplify . . .
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KS: That’s true. Indeed, if these works of art were not of great complexity, they would hardly have been followed by the
great traditions that did emerge.
GMS: Meanwhile I want to return to something I’ve been trying to formulate, something that I would call the Other
Perception. If one looks at Indian visual arts, and the question of the camera which I brought up earlier, I would argue that
this is not an entirely hypothetical issue. It was interesting that, as Arun pointed out with astronomy, there was actually a
direction, a different perception, which was sought to be made into a scientific system, an advanced system.
What I am proposing is to examine a mode of painting that might use eye movement and yet function outside
the sphere of ‘optics’ – i.e. outside of the conventions of the frame-as-window. Mughal painters, we know, had been
exposed to Renaissance painting and there are even instances of them imitating this form of painting because they were
told to do so. But we see that they didn’t respond to certain aspects of the naturalist perspective – they didn’t respond
to foreshortening, nor to shadow. And what I think they wanted to do was to keep themselves free of the mechanical,
instrumental aspect of optics, keep themselves free to manipulate each corner of the frame differently.
And I want to know the difference between this system and, let’s say, the instances Vivan gave earlier from Western
painting, because I feel that even though Western painters did work towards a multiplicity of ways of seeing they were
nevertheless curtailed by the mechanical aspects of the optical system.
KS: Certainly, with regard to the Mughals, there was an actual manipulation – I think it’s a very happy use of the word –
and whether it is a Western or an Indian painter, he has the option of manipulation, which the filmmaker does not have.
Because the filmmaker has to work with the eyes, he has to use the lens to organise his material transformations; and
there’s no way out of that, unless of course one uses animation techniques, as Arun might suggest, which do not use a
photographic idiom at all. But there are other means to work out systems in which the filmmaker is not manipulating,
where although the hands don’t come into play so much, there is a transference of body rhythms, not only of the actor but
even of the cameraman. If the filmmaker can bring into contact these two body rhythms, the result can be explosive. It can
completely overcome naturalistic perspective even though this exists in the lens. Because it is bringing about a new tension
altogether. I think such issues are very much part of the consciousness of people in different parts of the world trying to
break down this authority of technology, among people who are definitely searching for alternatives.
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THE COTTON PROJECT:
PROPOSAL FOR
A CINEMATIC EXPLORATION
1992
Previously unpublished.
A project proposal for what might well have been Shahani’s most ambitious film ever, and
which came close to being made in various versions on a few occasions. ‘The Cotton Project’
was intended to have been filmed over four continents – Europe, the USA, Africa and India – to
make for links that might have been more or less a materialist history of the world. Shahani
was especially concerned with the cultural understanding of the making of this particular
commodity, and forms associated with colour, texture and sound. This also includes his much
quoted line: ‘A reversal of the subject and the object overcomes the European sub-texts: the
search for the Self intensifies, shifting the focus of origin from Greece and Rome to Persia and
India, this time not as the Other but as the Real.’ This is one of two texts reproduced in this
book (the other being ‘First Person Bahuvachan’, on the Constitution of India) that relates to the
several ambitious projects Shahani developed but was unable to realize for want of funding.
Ships, setting sail for unknown horizons, gather unto their sailors and goods the riddles of the universe. Woven winds,
studded with gems, suggest the elliptical orbits of immanent space to those who, in the meantime, far away, learn to
measure the earth. The courses of formaisation differ. Farther afield, across yet more oceans, structure appears within
the fabric. Isolation allows a system’s entropy to take over, while the onward impulse of trade or the momentum given
by alien, sometimes invasive, contacts disturb the equilibrium. From that disturbance is sculpted order, sensibility,
music, mathematics, civilisation.
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Perhaps the single most self-revelatory commodity to millions of people in the world is cotton. Wisdom itself, for
that reason, had to contend with the ‘dyed colours of India’, in St. Jerome’s Bible. A plant which suggested celestial life in
vegetation could then be permitted with sensibilities through colour, evolving complex language patterns that suggested
rasa even as it designated social and marital status, the seasons, a musical tone, a deity with a stellar configuration. The
transient emotions are revealed in glimpses of movement of light as swift as the cinkara’s leap, when wrapped garments
find forms of unrehearsed fancies around the body.
It is the versatility of cotton textiles that have brought them so close to speech. Specially when unstitched, they
allow for immediate response to enquiries generated by the atmosphere: wind, water, light, the degree of warmth, the
quiet gaze. Yet the structure of the fabric is based on clear oppositions moving in continuous order – like all weaving,
later, artificial intelligence. The intervention of the dyes that suffuse the cloth, or are resisted or applied in combinations
that build a superstructure, give the modal base a life that lifts it out of rigid materiality. The flights that emerge out
of the décolletages and the subsequent collations give rise to sequences of thought that the suta had not anticipated.
Practical myth turns into scientific, historic observation, on one hand, and on the other, the playful elaborations
and exploration of impulse as lively, varied in abundance as nature. The principles of improvisation reveal themselves
as overlapping forms empty themselves of substantives, to fill themselves with an infinite plenitude of meanings and
conjunctions not previously programmed. The sutradhara steps out of the stage to release the strings in new conjugations
of verbal space in cosmic proportions at temples and observatories.
The triumph of multiple points of view can engender the passion of truth in a subject as much as it can bewilder
a generality of people, obliterating the object in the process instead of meeting it as an objective. The absence of the
substantive acquires as great a significance as the resolution, as the coming into being of recurrent equilibrium. There is,
as it were, a restoration of ambivalence at the exact measure, through the rhythmic shading or chroma applied in one’s
approach to it. Each reference to the whole need not be that of the cog, nor indeed need it be organic. Each evocation
must be relentlessly induced by necessity, yet driven by a desire for the gratuitous.
The ornament, then, replaces the realistic fetish to affirm life against function. The world-view accommodates
erosion, displacement, seeking immortality in the moment as it rejoices in pain and pleasure of the body or in the self as
an objective entity, with no material existence. Its music is alert to the sculpted solidity of the intended whole and the
continuous scale is invoked in every note, not as synecdoche but as proportions of overtonal response, each changing in
time with atmospheric pressure. The quality of attention is such that as those like Dharma, born of a shudra yoni, share
with the enslaved immigrant in the cotton fields. It is the alertness of the archer who accepts to live in the condition of
what he strikes: to escape the curse of control and appropriation inherited from his hunter-parent.
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Knowledge as the abdication of power posits itself against knowledge as control, both of which have attributes
of virtue.
Whether to delimit, territorialise and objectify the other, or to seek a semblance of erotic consonance and
continuity, becomes manifest as the epistemophilic instinct expresses itself in a culture’s highest aspirations, in social
gesture, hierarchisation of human activity and in relationships of the individual to the world, both shaped by the mise-
en-scène of ritual origins and its belief of cosmic energy.
The recurrent need to redefine ethical norms begins here, both ‘cyclically’ and ‘progressively’, as epochs are launched
unconsciously through collective and individual acts of conscious adoption of new syntheses, meeting points, crosses.
The Indonesians are said to have respected the cotton checks, drawing upon a greater control over the warp and weft in
weaving of textiles in India, to integrate them into religious significance in their archipelago. The cross had surfaced westward
and to the north in other forms of religious–geometric expression. The meeting of four roads in the Swastika as well as the
point of worship of the mother-goddess. When it meets with the formalised square, as in the Greek, it remains the basis of
symmetrical division of space and heavenly beauty, returning to the north and the west the reinforced patriarchy of matrilineal
forms. When it goes across with the Virgin, the vertical extends itself into a fertile elongation of male sacrifice. The bearing in
the borne is as the offering in the socio-sexual act. The golden section becomes a fundamental of visual composition.
To bear and to rejoice seek equivalence in an algebra of forms that reunite differentiated material substances by the
values attributed to them, though not necessarily intrinsic, like gold, textiles, gems, spices. Trade in necessity can lead to
war and conquest. Trade in luxury leads to civilisation, protest, discontent, at least until such time as human life itself is
commodified, colonised or annihilated through barbaric acts of appropriation.
The shrouds of the Prophets shelter men from their own irrationalities; the modes of sacrifice take new forms of 45
teleological struggle; pain and suffering are sought as repetitive affirmations of the trauma of birth. The mystery of
existence is unravelled by lifting the veil, as the great risk of coming to know whereof one may not speak, at the great risk
of blinding oneself, attributing to oneself the will of Providence or the redundant violence of naked creativity, without
the sustenance of the maternal breast now hidden behind sanitised allure or stylised in domes as vaults of the heavens
to be experienced in an after-life.
It is the active and conscious submission to the law that permits the purposive to weave patterns of rejoicing in
the calligraphic and written word of the book, the partaking of cultivated and earned food, the harnessing of labour, the
patterning of animal and vegetal ife as manifest proliferations of Divinity on the ground of the Absolute. Islamic design
and mathematics reinforce the revelation as well as proselytise through the very manufacture of textiles, the building of
monuments, making all activity a textual assertion of belief.

The Cotton Project. fig. 45 Close-up of the sari in Kasba (1990). ‘The transient emotions
are revealed in glimpses of movement of light as swift as the cinkara’s leap, when wrapped
garments find forms of unrehearsed fancies around the body.’ fig. 46 Negative space in
Khayal Gatha (1988). ‘The ornament . . . replaces the realistic fetish to affirm life against
338 function.’
 Kumar Shahani

In the meantime, the Crusades make alike the opposites, carrying with them civilisational traits brought from farther
afield, ultimately centralising themselves in north-westward assimilations of power. While women get excluded from
palpable experience, womanhood is either objectified as nature or internalised as being. Canvases, colour, velvets, bring
to white shores the luminosity of bright light upon fabric surfaces that play with sensation as revelatory paganism, even as
form is sought to be given scientific certitude. Mathematics itself seeks the line of melody and not Pythagorean geometric
harmony of idealised, therefore tempered, point, line and plane. Over here the devotee, in different guises, assumes
feminine forms to celebrate the essentially Formless One. The spinning wheel itself restores women to mainstream
productive activity. But, reaching Europe in the fourteenth century, the spinning wheel, like alchemy, conjures visions of
witches casting magic spells as prophecies to be internalised, turning good men to Christian evil as in the Scottish tale of
Shakespeare’s in which a sailor captains the Tiger to Alleppo.
The ‘witches’, like Joan of Arc, are ‘cremated’ alive to be purified in body and soul for having aspired to a larger
freedom.
A weaver’s incantation produces in India the direct, unfettered relationship to illumination without institutional
sanction; a dyer’s imagination colours all the longings of men and women for release through consonance with the
principles of existence. Music moves to further individuation, each shade and colour differing in infinite variations of
finite grids that may permit shifts of axes. As one shreds the garment of the body or the boll, the celestial life bursts forth.
The gaze is turned inwards as plucked strings discover new areas of being, overlapped on conjoint perspectives.
The margi and desi meet in unresolved tension over utopian canals, while the plunder of water continues to yield
46
sustenance.
Elsewhere, water is harnessed in every way for the dream of attaining India.
Man swiftly discovers his fiery energy as there is the shift of the law from the moral to the material space. While,
in his subjectivity, the longing for the pagan reaffirms itself. Women in mourning helped by the early post-Renaissance
express their scales of grief through the variegated chintzes emerging from the herbal dyes – and cottons of India,
courtesans continue to celebrate the transient saffron yellow of turmeric; the nutmeg creates the East India Company in
an Indonesian island of no other consequence. The Americas open themselves out to invasive incursions.
The volatile energy generated through internal and external convulsions puts the world in a precarious balance,
obliterating histories while creating new ones. With the coming of steam, the ‘wool sack’ transmits from the real to the
ritually significant, as the textile industry establishes its dominance over world trade, creating in its wake completely new
sets of demands of production, of values themselves, and destroying the accumulated refinements of perfected skills,
enslaving those that would need to acquire the new.

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All the continents are ravaged/revived. The reversals of trade engender a historical self-consciousness: the
beginnings of nationalism; re-questioning one’s place in the world as a group and a species. A reversal of the subject and
the object overcomes the European sub-texts: the search for the Self intensifies, shifting the focus of origin from Greece
and Rome to Persia and India, this time not as the Other but as the Real.
There has to be a violent exchange of breath as the sacred is challenged everywhere. While chemical dyes are
perfected, entering the royal garments of England, pushing medical diagnosis forward, the cultivator and weaver and dyer
of cotton, stripped of all his wealth of habit, custom and language, engages himself in war, wherever India was sought
to be discovered.
The Imperial and the Democratic are locked in a battle. The pyramidical and the radial oppose each other in ever-
increasing forms. The proliferation of prophetic symbologies, accompanied by an acute sense of chronology in reality as
well as the discomfort produced it (by contrast with the perception of non-linear time) could neither predict nor shape
the world to their desire.
It is time for retrievals: the ages gone by, the voices suppressed for formal or practical developments in predetermined
cultural courses re-appear to display their wounds as flowers: the charkha, the negro spiritual, votes for women.
The cotton-seed itself yields a whole gamut of products of which some had only existed as unconscious dreams.
On celluloid, a century develops its culture.
Accompanying the computer, the televisual and facsimile image contrast theselves to the alphabetical, the return to
binary modes of thinking take us to a new spiral in the expressive possibilities of the relation between text and ‘textile’,
modes of signification and surface, mind and matter, the known and the knowable.
It is the cine-poetic validity of the above conjectures that we need to seek (by the freedom of time–space ellipses
that it can afford) through a period of research and travel which can accommodate the truth of varied sensuous
experience and sustain unpredictable elaborations that abandon the given.

fig. 47 First cut of a chart outlining the history of human civilization told in terms of the
342 history of cotton. This chart formed a part of the proposed film’s screenplay.

MODERN INDIA:
TERMS OF DISCOURSE
1994
Paper presented at a seminar on ‘Modern India: Terms of Discourse’, Indian Institute of Advanced
Studies, Simla. Excerpts first published under the titles ‘Two or Three Things I Don’t Know About
Her’ and ‘A Girl Called Nirasha’, Times of India, 3 July 1994.
Like ‘Holocausts and Love Poems’ (pp. 236–42), this text assembles various fragments of writing,
including screenplay-type writing, with an ensemble of notes and quotations. Speaking at
a conference consisting mainly of social scientists, Shahani opens up the ‘naïve’ if widespread
belief that ‘man’s attempt to know himself logically’ will give way to ‘social technology handled
by individual craftsmen, who will derive their sense of selfhood by acting on behalf of the
corporations that will identify and satisfy the world’s needs’. His prognosis for what it might lead to
is however unusual: this to him is a ‘transference, a projection of a system’s own impending demise
upon the very disciplines that have sustained it’. The loss of subjectivity has the consequence of
a ‘dismissal of actual existence of any textuality’. Its evacuation of the text is an evacuation of a
‘world that seemingly doesn’t speak to anyone any more but only counter-transfers’.
The late morning sky was washed by a shower as we entered the village on a detour from the highway to Bangalore.
The slanted rays, reflected by the copper wisp of a girl, promised a golden harvest.
She stood like a fragile stack of fibrous sticks against a peepal. The tall tree’s dappled light bathed the plinth upon
which a tiny temple enclosed a stone wrapped in vermilion.
She sang like Krishna addressing Radha, wondering about the beloved’s being fair and the lover being dark.
She enunciated the reply as well in song, the lover and the beloved reversing roles, without need for negation, the
other becoming the self.
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She was absorbed in the indestructible melody of their absorption. Her heart and mind had entered the syllables.
Nothing disturbed her: neither the dust raised by the jeep nor the attentive silence of her spectators, my hosts
and me.
When this nine year-old girl in a ghagra and choli finished her song, she smiled. We went up the two steps to the
large open platform, swept clean by the devotees, abandoning our chappals below.
I wished that she would appear in the film on the girl-child that I had come to research (and would have made if I
had found the funds).
I knelt down, sniffing the coconut oil in her hair to ask her her name, with my arm around her shoulders.
She said, ‘Nirasha’.
My hosts laughed almost triumphantly.
I held on to her even as my hand lost its grip over her shoulder and my gaze searched the laughing faces of my hosts.
They had warned me that each village had its own genesis of the problem: that all casual generalisations failed to
explain the rejection of modernity by our rural population.
They had, within a radius of less than fifty miles from Pune, demonstrated to me the different causal modes of their
recognition.
In a hill village, where some fleeing Marathas had found refuge when their power over the plains had abated, it
was their love of animals which prevented them from adopting the more hygienic, the more literate, the more worldly-
wise, as well as the more spiritually sophisticated ways of the single brahmin family that had come over to service the
kshatriyas in their rituals a century or more ago. The Marathas spurned the lure of money, of modern education, of cars,
of the city, because their dharma was to fight and to breed cattle, men and horses. Our conversations took place in the
verandah of the brahmin’s house, presided over by the visiting matriarch.
In another village, it was the sheer physical geography of the surrounding terrain that made it impossible for teachers
and children of the area to reach the school most of the time. On the way back, we gave a lift to a particularly dedicated
woman who was winding her way home through the deserted rocky landscape after having faced an empty classroom.
On the banks of a river was a settlement, founded many years ago by migrants from another state who would not
send their children to school because they spoke a different dialect.
Already, a fresh new community was settling down beside them to construct a dam.
Later, when the film was slipping out of my hands, a younger colleague, his face bloated with booze, told me that
he would make the film because he was a son of the soil.
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In the village of Nirasha, there were only boys of sixteen and old men beyond sixty.
Nirasha was the youngest of three sisters.
Her mother wondered whether there would be any men at Diwali to help with the harvest.
All working men were in Bombay, at strike or in lock-outs out of solidarity, where they used to make textiles for
the world.
Therefore the need of the hour according to the altruistic agencies intervening in the situation, both local and
international, was to link all these particularisms organically to achieve Results, without any need for Poetry.
I am still abashed by my naive intrusion and quite as much by my forced withdrawal.
The need to speak to you partly in the form of a film-script using the archaisms of the novel’s descriptive language, is to
expose immanent form, unfinished statement. It is through aspected, forever incomplete views and events – where every
thought, emotion and being is open to infinite elaboration – that we can touch upon individuation and improvisation.
Yet, at the same time, this mode of address has to place itself adjacently to the known, the rational, the mechanical,
the paraphrased, the didactic or even the more common codes of exchange that govern our existence, while they begin
to govern our discourse.
The supreme code in the contemporary world is the one underlying monetary transactions. Although we participate
every day in the code’s functioning, it seems to have a paradoxical relationship with the values that it is meant to embody: its
promise of freedom from need could lead to human self-realisation. I must confess that I am bewildered both by its increasing
autonomy from life and the speed by which that very autonomy has destroyed institutions, tribalised communities and
rendered redundant certain unities of discourse. In fact, it is as if merely the speed and volume of its changing hands count
for anything. Thereby the value that constitutes, normally, a term or an object of exchange, is voided from the term and the
object (referent of the term). Only relationships between valueless terms (ironically rendered objective thereby), events and
objects voided of labour, love, constructive intention, abstracted into fragments that replace an erotic continuum, displace
it to control the world through the system’s representation. I am sure that one should go into theories that explain all this
either as a reality or as a perception or as idea or as phenomenon. However, at this moment, I suppose we are dealing with
what the terms of the abhinaya are: representations that contemporary India – marginally incorporated into the global
system, eluding modernity even as it contributes to the post-modernist – will be bringing into being.
In fact, India adopted the dramatic posture of all nation-states – that it could have faith in the acts of representation
and create a world out of them. The faith in representation is that one person or thing can stand in for a collective – or
a collection: a person may represent a class, the whole nation, or even a principle, an idea. Modes of exchange based
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on representation are meant to create meanings larger in context, embracing ideally the whole universe, through the
particulars employed. The representations are not meant to be identical with what is represented.
Yet, there has been a pressure upon the role to be identical with the essence of the matter that it represents –
specially in that segment of discourse which we call modern India.
Reciprocally, role-playing becomes a reality. The doing disappears from the act of performance. The re-cognition
through the re-presentation, which leads the spectator to another state and brings into presence on the stage of
the world the possible bearings of new knowledge, is replaced by concrete, totally resistant terms, programmed to
produce mass responses.
This is indeed the extreme evolution of the forms with which the industrialised, colonising countries approached us,
rendering our languages in their response ever-more literal by the encounter. Representations, thus, become like goods.
They have themselves to be traded through a further mode of equivalences.
These equivalences can establish an algebra of thought, which, in turn, can give rise to several disciplines.
Now, we can be alienated from these disciplines both by their progressive self-referentiality and/or by so saturating
them with content that they become objects-in-themselves, not able to afford the ease and play of language that speech
and elaboration can give us.
The spheres of freedom are thus restricted to exceptional individuals, rarefied and yet made to put up a struggle of
one kind or another. The fight is to achieve a valid synthesis of practice and the possibilities opened up by the discovery
of each new freedom. The censorship imposed by the market does not permit avowals of pain. Privatised institutions
are not accountable in any way for the truth that is hidden, even if it be murder. In fact, an illusion has to constantly be
maintained that everything is on display all the time, so that no one asks any questions.
Whereas the ‘first’ world has both the means and the material strength of modern tradition behind it to sustain
the questioning eccentric, the maverick, the innovator at its margins, outside it lives the spectre of more than half the
world’s population, left out of any access even to meaningful formalisation. The ‘first’ world continues to maintain a
grossly unequal relationship with the rest which it claims not to need – along with a system that sustains the belief that
capital reproduces itself infinitely, in spite of human labour that is seen as being collectively opposed to capital while
individually included within capital, either as human resource or as consumer.
This, while innovation in all languages, including mathematics, is made to reside either in geniuses (the rarer the
better) or in technology (restricted through notions of property rights), or in small, discursively incestuous research
communities funded by defence programmes. Since the making of weapons has been under the control of institutions
of the nation-state (kingdoms, republics, dictatorships), unquestioned, it has from the fair-weather day in Hiroshima
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and Nagasaki acquired a status above that of even the state itself. So much so that even Japan contributes to the global
defence industry through developing components.
All nations, past, present and potential, are made to feel dependent on the industries of defence, financial services
and culture. Culture today provides the rhetoric, the terms of discourse, to obtain our consent as a community to
continue to accept violence as a fact of life and profit as its arbiter: both the representations of the state and of the
‘nations’ (people that wish to create new states) submit to the dictates of financial institutions and defence capital.
Witness, in recent times, the question of sovereignty and the Bundesbank, the question of defence sales that
transcends representational symbologies of the executive in the USA, India, Japan, France, as well as the prevailing
terrorist activity in so many parts of the world. The activity of drug traffic, sponsored by different states at different
times, is so enmeshed with control of the culture and policies of several countries, that it is difficult, and has been for a
long time, to even separate drug-dealing from the weapons trade or the culture industry.
It is against this inviolate axis of the absolute that we have had to play out our contemporaneity, to recover
for ourselves an India that is neither trapped in its specific otherness nor in its endorsement of terms imposed by
determinants that claim their sanctity in the evolutionary laws of the jungle – the survival of the fittest.
Do we have the civilisational resources to overcome a historical condition which threatens the notion of
civilisation itself?
It is evident that those who have assembled here have given their lives to the practice of their disciplines with that
faith. What else would the premise be for rediscovering the terms of discourse?
It is high time that we began by accepting our otherness without having to wallow in its specific location; in fact,
began by insisting on a dialectical relationship with it. If India is constructed as poor, exotic, exhausted and corrupt, but,
in essence or at an earlier date, rich, our very own, vibrant and pure, we will certainly end up inviting someone far worse
than the Queen of Spain’s daughter to visit us. It will be the faceless messenger of death. The pirates of the East India
Company will pale into insignificance beside the ruddy roughnecks of the robotised world order. The world order is
transnational and even robots, like the Golem, have a heart, would rather be flowers.
The world order cannot be seen as being different from our order, internally, any more. Those who believe that they
do not participate in it will only possibly assist it in obliterating everything in which they may seek individuation. On the
other hand, there is no need to justify it on moral or scientific grounds either.
It is true that we have seen the blisters on the fair forehead of our innocent love, and we cannot believe in our
senses any more. All the more reason, then, to change our rhetoric, to be able to act, to do, to perform, to create, and to
not passively accept designed interaction.
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Kumar Shahani
It is possible that in re-proposing India, its own notion finds ‘global’ dimensions that challenge a superimposed
globalisation. After all, the concept of the West or of Islam, or the very recent Judaeo-Christian and Hindu endogamous
monisms are no more than historic conveniences. On the other hand, in the process of formation of a shared identity, the
world is shot through with significance (the point of rest).
If you wish to stand for the truth, know that your father, Dharma, was born of a shudra yoni, that on the battlefield
one has to transcend the customs of kinship; you have to give up all wealth, your self too, to regain it, in all its diversity
and in its divinity.
The identity has to be extensive, reaching across continents, travelling vertically to find modes of signifying that
which shakes the foundations of the edifices of control.
This is probably a naive belief, specially when it is being predicted that the social sciences – or man’s attempt to
know himself logically – will give way to social technology handled by individual craftsmen, who will derive their sense
of selfhood by acting on behalf of the corporations that will identify and satisfy the world’s needs. One is not at all
surprised. Not only has social science been viewed as a dubious enterprise by physical scientists for some time now,
it has also tended to look at the results of systems of power with embarrassing questions. The instrumentalist use of
social science is as limited as that of the other pure sciences. Yet the modes of organisation available in our world have
constantly pressurised the social scientist, the cultural critic and the artist into an encapsulated activism, the impossibility
of which has, in our own century, time and again, declared the redundancy and therefore the end of practices.
But surely this is a transference, a projection of a system’s own impending demise upon the very disciplines that
have sustained it. The total dismissal of actual existence of any textuality accompanies the loss of subjectivity, rather
than being seen as an assertion of that loss, through its evacuation of the world that seemingly doesn’t speak to anyone
any more but only counter-transfers. But chaos has not only been experienced before, it has known its patterns traced
long before fractals were admitted by science.
I believe that every society, every social system, including the one that has colonised or covets us, contained within
itself several possible systems of cognition, of presentation, representation and exchange, including subjectivities and
systems of knowledge to collide and collaborate. In the process, of the several possibilities, very few were realised. The
others were suppressed, sometimes to resurface as monstrous machines of destruction, sometimes as opening the doors
of perception to a greater fullness of freedom and joy in the mind as part of the senses, both passive and active.
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CHALLENGES
1994
First published in Malti Sahai and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Relocating Indian Cinema, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
By the mid-1990s, Shahani was finding it increasingly difficult to make films: the funding was
absent and, equally significantly, changes in the very nature of the technology made him
wonder if the cinema as he knew it had disappeared. Reality, as it gets surrounded by the
virtual, takes us ‘into a seemingly unresisting universe of readymade fantasies’, from which the
only hope for him is now to ‘begin to seek again the outside, just to confirm that we are able
to feel the pain and, therefore, the pleasure of being’. These are now largely personal essays
reflecting on an idea of cinema as a subjective voice, imagining a condition of subjectivity that
is not ‘as despotically provided with objective correlations as today’.
It is as if there were no certainties. And where you do find the certain, it is archaic: the sun will rise tomorrow, as it set
today. The fair and the foul are equally of the past. To build up purpose on the basis of existence was replaced in the
modern age by the universalism of science appropriated by ‘Western culture’, pretending to replace god by the discovery
of objective laws that governed both nature and culture.
While syntaxes persist in habits of thought inherited from consequential patterns (‘magical’, ‘religious’, ‘scientific’),
it is our experience itself and our instrumentations (as the living organism’s extensions) that seem to suggest other
possibilities than the inherited patterns, predictable from the already known nature of our mind–body continuum.
Technology becomes creative, suggestive of restoring the human spirit, only as it becomes redundant, ‘obsolete’, sheds
its ‘practical’ usages and offers room for explorations beyond instrumentalism, the purpose for which it was invented.
Until a realisation, an instrument such as the camera represents aspiration in itself: the study of nature. Once it had
photographed the horse in movement, it graduated to the ‘fantastic’, simultaneously with the assertion of human
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subjectivity by photographing other mechanical objects with such ecstasy in itself as only shots of trains, cars and
airplanes manifest. From The Great Train Robbery and Dziga Vertov, through the American B-movie and Ghatak’s Ajantrik,
to Godard and L’Argent. The interaction between things and people in action or in repose with all the mutations in
realisation is not something that the cultural theories can seize with the immediacy that the contemporary world
insistently demands, ony to dissipate it in word–image baubles.
It is as if mechanical reproduction demands such a rate of reduplication that it must exhaust itself, i.e. its ‘meaning’
(if it proposes any at the beginning).
Other ways of approaching reality do not necessarily need such a depletion. For example, the axiom in Indian
classical music that the veena must approximate the human voice, redeems itself by revealing new approaches and
appeals of enunciation. The veena suggested such startling extensions of the human voice that the ‘dhrupadiyas’, in
conjunction with hitherto repressed musical aspirants, mainly women, created the form of khayal. It also began to
assimilate ‘foreign’ linguistic modes, suppressed until then by the very principles of the local voice culture. In the
same way, the recorder and the camera created the new form of cinema, freeing us from the burdens of imitation
and virtuosity, just as the seventh art began to elaborate upon the newly visible and audible, suggesting unknown
relationships of meaning and movement.
It had simultaneously freed all the arts, including itself, from the imitative, virtuoso representation – the Novel
went into stream of consciousness, poetry into images, painting into sculpture, while suppressed cultures reaffirmed their
predilections in erotic self-wonder. That it was quickly ‘exhausted’ by reduplication is both the symptom of the modes of
social organisation adopted and the inherent weakness of ‘ethnic authenticities’ built upon idealised limited periods and
spaces, flattering narcissims that obliterate the possibilities of jouissance in the unfamiliar, infinitely explorable world.
Increasingly, if the contact with the world is going to be determined by the reductions to the sensate, supported by
the collapsibility of all ‘complexities’, into digitalised experience, the field of jouissance in the way we understood it not
so long ago would become more and more archaic.
Moving as it were in pixillated joints of the dot and the line, formed in fractions of seconds, changing form, colour,
tone irrespective of the light and the context, a new freedom may flounder upon its infancy, simulated.
The fractures of the world might grip us in such calipers of bullets that may yet again yield black holes spreading
their charred energies upon walls, as if these were forgotten flowers rendered historic by victories of struggles, now
celebrated and degraded simultaneously:
Jallianwala Bagh
A postage stamp.
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If someone that I love were to open a letter with a postage stamp soaked in the blood of that tragedy, mixed with the She went on to
glue of everyday starch and stuck upon the envelope, will there be credence to my speech, finding form in arbitrary lines? . . . save all men, giving of her pity
The word has been cut open like the pomegranate in spots of blood that seed. The breath has to find a whole life Surveying the whole universe and revealing the golden lotus
to make sense of itself. Who lives to see it through to its raw redness? . . . The religion of Emptiness has recovered
If Maxim Gorky had exclaimed at the images of trains hurtling themselves at you in the dark, what can a random the brocade cassock
filmmaker say about virtual images that double up a person even as she enters and exits from programmed experiences As the virtual surrounds us and takes us into a seemingly unresisting universe of readymade fantasies, we will
that she considers to be willed, sometimes even desired, by her? possibly begin to seek again the outside, just to confirm that we are able to feel the pain and, therefore, the pleasure of
How would you like your desire to be conditioned by some consensus of memory where the particular is averaged being. To dissolve ourselves into that non-being, through compassion and praxis, to realise that there is a self as there is
out by statistics and is proposed to you in no less qualified sensations? True, it would take less time and money for each the other, with complex, ambivalent subjectivities.
try, frustrated in its very intention as a consumer object that needs repetitive access to it by definition. If that be so, the problems of finding a suitable syntax for the emerging languages, visual and auditory, those of
It’s best to shrug one’s shoulders, as every young person does. all the senses and the body, still remain unresolved. It is only by restoring the capacity of these languages to act and
It is a universe of ‘total practicality’, or ‘total flow’, that makes us so blasé and insouciant. I wonder, if we were articulate that we can invest the cinema with the hope that it knew at the beginning. Underneath the languages we have
to reduce all sensation to how much it costs in dollars to feel it, consciously, not unconsciously, all the time, whether to be able to discover a backing of a mythological episteme which can command faith while it permits individual action.
we would be able to live with that knowledge at all. Yet, in fact, the only valid abstraction recognised today is the Our inability to evolve credible structures will inevitably lead to a disconnected arbitrariness that can be paraded as
relationship between the price tag and the ‘object’ of sensation. multiple subjectivity, locked into its own helplessness.
But as the subject disappears in the ‘total flow’ of electronic images, so does reality. We are unable to trust both I think that, to begin with, it is this inability that seems to ‘bug’ the young and focus them (us) into being ‘dumb’ or
our abstraction and our sensation. ‘cheap’ as they characterise virtually all ‘intentional’ action.
Earlier, reality, however problematic it seemed, had to discover some terms to constitute itself. Let us say, as the It looks like one has to make a new beginning every time.
world mediated by thought. Or, in that which is realisable. Or, in something which exists, independent of our perception. After the end of the world
Or, in its material incomprehensibility, non-dualistically. after my death
Even as shunyata, reality offered itself in one of the most life-affirming periods of our history, spreading to other I found myself in the middle of life
horizons, giving the quality of mercy to fierce gods. I created myself
The immersion in compassion and praxis was so great that Guanyin, the Bodhisattva, could say: ‘‘‘evil” spirit and constructed life
Bodhisattva are all the same in the last analysis – they both belong to non-being’. people animals landscapes
The overwhelming concreteness of being today seems to limit the imagination in such a tight vice that no real change that is the table I was saying
appears to be possible. Now praxis and compassion are both terms of the past as evidence will suggest that the states of this is the table
‘non-being’ are, ironically, born from the denial of the real world of suffering by a sensationally programmed virtual one. on the table are lying the bread and the knife
When the Bodhisattva had to ‘take over’ another’s body (‘the body of Master Emptiness, reached’), she did so with the knife serves to cut the bread
her great mercy – her unbounded divine power and her infinite capacity for transformation to control her will with her people nourish themselves with bread
heart and her body with her will. Is it possible to set out on new journeys when subjectivity is as despotically provided with objective correlations as today?

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There is a constant collapsing taking place – of systems, as if we were living in a state of permanent crisis. As if there
were no crises, just panic! Yet, one cannot begin to believe that there is only chaos and, still, act. One has to be able to
see oneself as a whole (made up of multiplicities, but neither fragmented nor proliferated) even when one is injured.
Similarly, one has to be able to see the world without disjunction, without proposing a totalitarian system breathing
down one’s neck. The absence of ideology, the collapsing of the world into its medians, has itself created a loss of
speech in the face of an oppressive, overarching, universalist view that permits no unslotted signifier to say something,
independently of the known, to create.
The world must have individual authors, if only to save itself from destruction.
Yet, these individuals may have to work from the debris of art, of words, materials, colours, the leftovers of touch
and smell and taste.
Questioning their individualities as relentlessly as Socrates or the Buddha to open up spaces of being, restoring
sequences and narratives from the crushing conquest by the concrete space of the gravitational field and its supposedly
antinomic imaginaries.
Rejection of utopias is not easy, of course, specially in the face of the pressure of so many being offered to one.
Do we have to take recourse to perennialisms and, therefore, de-historicise ourselves once again to re-enter an
artificial non-space?
It is that very prefabricated absoluteness that the concepts of utilitarian humanism and conformist individualism
have given us, which we have to abandon – to rediscover its privileged moments.
In other words, the conditions of the greatest good for the greatest number, when established, will not be sought;
they will be present and, therefore, there will be no need to conform in an assertion of individuality determined by them.
The individual’s access to freedom, where the poetic instant prevails in his own being and is allowed to suffuse
reason, has been rare at any time.
What threatens it today are the faceless forms of violence in which the individuals are unknowingly forced to
participate, with both the physical and linguistic space for redeeming praxis reduced.
The stockmarket, the amnesiac electronic signal, the amoeba-like self-dividing ideologies are the cultures’ model
mediations.
It cannot be enough to oppose them or to accept to live upon the margins. Such strategies were fulfilling in
modern times, when systems were also overt proposals of the world as seen or the world as it ought to be.
Today, the poet’s excesses can be like a Japanese garden, where the error invokes perfection.
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OTHER NARRATIVES
1995
Paper presented at a seminar on ‘Literature and Cinema’, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi; previously
unpublished.
This brief presentation by Shahani looks at two very different strategies for literary adaptation
in the cinema, taking works by his two teachers: Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951),
adapting a story by Georges Bernanos, and Ghatak’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1972), adapting a
novel by Advaita Malla Burman.
The debt to any single individual is inexhaustible, I thought, as I am asked so often to speak of my gurus. Sometimes my
teachers are on the streets, like in Namdeo Dhasal’s landscapes.
‘There was an accident that made me sad’, my colleague says, ‘a few minutes ago. The cycle rickshaws are often with
seats bent forward. One of them, with a boy pedalling and a woman sitting behind, crashed into another. The woman
fell over the boy. He was too little to protect her against falling on the road. The people around started beating up the
little boy. I don’t know if the woman was crying or laughing. She turned away as she stood up, covered her face with her
dupatta or chadar.’
All this in Dhaka, as her deep red arms, made of lava, course over the snow-white tablecloth and back into the
universe she creates in front of me, of earth and sky, her eyes lit with concealed laughter when she speaks of what may
have happened to her these last two years or more that we have not met in our faraway terrains.
Here too the coconut palms offer the same fresh fullness as the gifting fruit lifts itself up from brown to green, from
bark fissures to convexed shades of pools.
If I were to put it on film at 24 frames a second, the tape recorder pulsed on by some charged battery, would I have
to tint the synchronous shots with modulated desire?
How would anyone do it?
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Il venait trouver là où tout n’est que signe.
One has to go look for it there where there is nothing but sign.
Bresson said he would be faithful to the text of Bernanos. He appauverised the imagery, to be true to the cross,
render a symbol to existence.
Image makers come from another area. The making of the image starts . . . before the event . . . a boatload of straw
comes, they make padded torsoes and limbs . . . by spirally winding jute strings around measured bunches of straw. . . . One
day a boatload of clay lands at their slope beside Titash. To the unloaded pile of clods is added finely chopped jute fibre
and water, and the whole pile is left in charge of the Malo boy. . . . Stomping and treading on it, dancing and walking in it,
they soften the clods of earth to pliable clay. It will now be used to make the sky-high image. The boy feels very proud. . . .
The craftsmen then spend days applying the smooth clay layer upon layer to construct the body. The day they
complete the neck of the central image and set the head on top, it seems as if the immense figure wants to talk. When a
coating of liquid chalk is applied and the entire surface area of the image is polished smooth . . . (one would think) that
the work is over and the image ready for worship. . . .
‘No, silly’, the image maker explains. ‘We still have many more days of work left. We’ll now apply colours on the
whitewash. The day we work on the eyes and give them life, at the end of that day, our work will be complete. The
worship will take place on that very night.’
Bresson: Expression through comprehension. To put into an image what a writer would spin out over ten pages. One
does not create by adding but by taking away. To develop is another matter.
Ritwik eliminated large chunks of the novel Titash Ekti Nadir Naam. An interviewer asked with cocky youthfulness
what I thought of the ‘unfinished’ quality of the different parts of Ritwik’s film made in Bangladesh.
I had felt that the structures of the film correspond to epic arrangements leading to the mythic fullness of meaning,
asking for action. Not so unfinished as might appear to linear thinking. I speak of that then:
Rehmat Khan’s renderings used to start at any point in the elaboration that was continuously taking place in his mind,
maybe even on the second matra, and he would move away, with his dog following him, when he felt that he should.
There was certainly no determinate beginning or end. Godard aspired to having the beginning, middle and end, but not
in that order. Ritwik did it with cyclic movements tied to a purpose. Perhaps, we have to aspire to an excess that has
poverty in its terms, audio-visual, verbal, rhythmic, but with a plenitude of content that finds the shadja in every swara.
I believe that is what Annapurna-di does with her notes. The tensions suggest all the other tones, other rhythmic
cycles. If the indriyas (senses), both passive and active, are awakened, we have a plenitude of simultaneities that is
physically both impossible and inherent in everyone.
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Kumar Shahani
The slippage from one sense to another – that the poets have despaired of, from the babblers and composers of
hymns to Rimbaud and Eisenstein and to those of us today who collect words from the garbage dumps of used languages,
stripped of eloquence, waiting to be given voice again – is the matter of photographed literature.
Synaesthesia took on a different form at the moment image and sound were married. Contrapuntal arrangements
seemed to centre round the vanishing points and perspectives, true to the push that the Renaissance had given to music,
narrative, scientific order in visual perception and institutional morality, specially in those who aspired to control the
world. Quickly, it proved inadequate for those who wanted to yield to sensuous poetry as praxis.
How may one employ all the senses in the active and passive senses, bring the cosmos within, find it in gesture, the
look, a word that appears in an elusively particular syntax?
A single shot can possibly illuminate a whole film. At least the filmmaker has to believe it to be able to care for every
shot he takes; similarly, the positioning of sounds in relation to words, as if all life depended on it. Yet, it must ‘pass us
by’ because awareness should be our daily condition. Since that is how we are made, however much we try and fix the
objective world and appropriate it.
After all, the impulse is to enjoy it by knowing it, sharing it. The problem is to de-socialise our longing and re-locate
it in a person, in a practice, in a musicality. That makes the contingent necessary both to its fullness and to compassion
in individuated beauty. To find the heart’s reasons that Reason may not know, so that Nature may reveal itself, abashed
or anguished, as it filters from image to music, from movement in colour, drawing it unto sound, chromaticising voices,
modulating pictures as words light upon whirlpools.
The cinema is always adapting from a world of signs, even when it does not intend to do so. Most audio-visual
address, specially the calculated and instrumentalist, always has an oblique set of meanings to offer, apart from the
obvious or intentional or subliminal one.
When it adapts from any other art, be it literature or music, architecture or its absence, the cinema has to submit
to it, simultaneously as the cinema demands the submission of all arts. To preserve the dignity of every art that comes
together with the other, it has to let those lotus-buds open out like eyelids awakening.
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DESIRE
1998
Written for a conference on ‘Cinema and the Senses’, University of New South Wales, Sydney,
November 1998; previously unpublished.
This essay, read together with ‘The Shock of Desire’ (pp. 261–70), is the closest we have to
autobiography: the extensive statements, especially on his early cinema, Maya Darpan and
Tarang, are unique in Shahani’s writing. The emphasis on experience, and its relation to reification,
takes a specific turn in this essay where Shahani contends that, although most films made today
have as many shots in a ten-minute reel as he might have in his entire film, and despite his firm
conviction that all of these films – usually described as fast-moving and action-packed – are to
him excruciatingly lacking in any movement, leave alone speed, one has to often rediscover one’s
‘inner impulse’ through assimilating these very signals, if only to ‘consciously purge oneself of
them; introduce, instead, new notes from elsewhere and another time, giving breath to archaisms
to shoulder exotic arabesques that were abandoned by the blunt edges of technology’.
This is the first time that I shall cross the Equator, I think; the thought gives me great pleasure. When I take a flight, I often
speculate on the route that the airplane will find in parabolae over the earth. The currents of the winds, the political events
of the time, commercial compulsions, I am told, may change the paths of aircrafts at unexpected moments. It’s not enough
to look at the map, to know the meridian. So one waits to see how it goes. As the plane takes off, its angular and pixillated
representation on the screen makes a mockery of one’s desire.
Is that all I wanted to know, alas!? That we fly over Bali! No, it is truly far more than that. Once you draw a
line somewhere, you know that you want to go beyond it. I think that is my thrill at crossing the Equator, a kind of
transgression of laws arbitrarily made for one’s mental satisfaction. But if I fly over Bali, I know that I will be filled with
other longings. To uncover the hints of hooded sound without a source.
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In the beginning, this was as if non-existent,
Then was born what exists.
That itself made its self;
Therefore it is called the self-made.
This is called the splendid creation.
All creation is splendid,
Rasa is indeed that.
(Condensed from the Upanishads, quotation from Bhavantarana)
But being born is painful. As it is to bear. To lead to a separation, forever, with a part of oneself; a feeling of one’s
very own, a person of your bone, blood, flesh, ‘spirit’, a thought that has lived within, unformed. A realisation is also a final
separation. A form of pleasure that is embedded in pain. The caesura that allows you to breathe, forces you to take in air.
At the heart of the matter is coming to life, the renewal. The last time I went to Paris, hassled, with no desire
to go there, worried about the expense and the negotiation of the visa with an Embassy of the same country from
which I left, I was overwhelmed by the leaves sprouting on the branches of the chestnut trees and others of which
I knew no name. I did not just rediscover nostalgically the Val-de-Grace that I had inhabited for a brief period, nor
did my feet take me to the Place des Vosges. Instead, I found Paris in spring as I should have known it before, when I
was young, in May ‘68. Perhaps it was just that day, that moment. As always, in photography – just that very moment
transforms an eternity.
There are many ways to reach those moments that make up a shot. Usually, in my films, 480 to 960 moments that
make up my unit, as K.K. [Mahajan], my long-time associate, calls the shot that I request him to take. He is my cameraman.
He feels that in my unit there is more than what happens in a shot, and that, qualitatively too, it needs to be designated
in some other way. In fact, the usual factors of screen size, distribution of light, intensity of colour, the space for the
word, for overlaps of sound, incidental and orchestrated, the purely musical, acquire a different unit as a container. While
its immediate ancestry is perhaps in the ‘plan-sequence’ of the Cahiers group, the editing unit of Eisenstein (through it,
Rubliev’s icons, the conjunction of pictographic writing/performance in the Far East), there is above all at its origins the
hieroglyphic nature of cinema: Phalke, Melies, but also and above all the Lumiere Brothers: I remember very often how
Ritwik and I delighted in the projection of The Train Arriving at a Platform. Who will not?
It has all the characteristics of the sacred, of the past as present, of pictures that show positions in time that become
terms of reference in location, identity, movement, event – within the same unit. Beyond and before representation, as
it were, of the alphabetical sign. When the written letters combine, they arrange themselves into closed statements,
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definitively linking symbol to meaning in locked designations that allow little room for interpretation, unless spoken. I had to begin to grope towards that fulfilment with my first feature, Maya Darpan, by actually rewriting the script at
Here, in the pre-Pudovkinian cinema, all statements are open, incomplete, ‘like’ reality. The terms are dissolved into a flux. every stage of production, even though I consider its first draft the best piece of script-writing that I have done to date.
The camera is an open orifice that lets the turgidity of The Last Supper come in an orgiastic jouissance. The three later drafts were not really drafts but writing in the score for the colour, for the movement, for the sound, in
Or, like the thumri, unfolding, arching with desire to hold the passionate thrusts of other ragas, in celebratory detail. Partly, I have never had to consciously go into such detailed notation again; hence the script-writing has become
initiation, losing all lajja, restoring to nature the secret of all ornaments and to us, as continuous with it, magic and more and more synoptic, trusting the photographic, the momentary – the improvised – and, together with the help of
divinity. (For an elaborate presentation of the above, see Vidya Rao.) my technical and creative associates, especially K.K., a certain amount of confidence in the cinema’s capacity for infinite
Or, like Geeta Kapur on Nasreen Mohamedi: ‘Graphic trajectories are like angels wiping space, lifting time of the freedom of thought.
textually rich body of the planet and its surging oceans; decontextualising what is through secret condensation already I think that it is this potential of releasing the glistening energy from every lotus bud as it opens out into thousand-
too textually replete and replacing it with spiritual graffiti like the footprints of the selfsame angel speeding to its last petalled movements, each and every one of them individuated, that lets us live cinema, not just make it – every day,
post in the skies.’ every night.
Each prayer of hers reconstituted nature, reconciled Reason to Revelation . . . ‘this world’s pleasure and the way to
the other both walking towards me’ (Mahadevi Akka, quoted in the same essay by Geeta Kapur). The hieroglyph too has
reconstituted nature and has its own spelling, its own syntax, its own grammar, its own chemistry.
When Reason submits itself to the Visible or the Visible to Reason, it gives rise to voyeurist simulation by breaking
up its own capacity to hold together a subjectivity. It refuses to reveal, to make visible a wholeness, the trajectories of
signifying thoughts and emotions and their forms. Everything is rendered into an instrumentality of knowledge. The proof
of the pudding demanded by an insatiable appetite, in senseless repetition and fragmentation. Often in the laboratories
that I inevitably visit for post-production, each reel of 10 minutes has as many ‘shots’ as I have in my whole film of a 100 or
more minutes. When I go to the cinema to see films which are described as fast-moving, action-packed, I find the movies
excruciatingly lacking in any movement, leave alone speed. The signifying image and the signified are tightly locked into
mechanical clichés of reproduction. These films have the prosody of machine guns, numbing you to death, violence, your
own unexpressed aspiration.
The seductions of their sounds are like routine greetings of civilisation, signals of attenuated aggression that
accompany the intrusive gaze.
Yet, clearly, as one has to oppose this currency of exchange, one has to sometimes elide, sometimes assimilate
these very signals, and, most often, consciously purge oneself of them; introduce, instead, new notes from elsewhere
and another time, giving breath to archaisms to shoulder exotic arabesques that were abandoned by the blunt edges of
technology.
When we make a film, each time we have to rediscover all our inner impulses, individual and collective, that lie
within an unfulfilled technological apparatus.

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RE-MANTLING FORMS
2000
Previously unpublished.
This is an unusual essay by Shahani in which he dialogues in an unstated way with art critic
Geeta Kapur – the title refers to her essay ‘Dismantling the Norm’, written in 1996 and published
(later) in modified form as ‘Dismantled Norms: Apropos an Indian/Asian Avant-Garde’. Shahani
continues his contention that a specific form of subjectivity – and the expression of that as well
as the experience – has to be linked to the kind of arts practice that enables its expression: as
in the visual arts. The essay speaks of Shahani’s longstanding association with Vivan Sundaram
and Akbar Padamsee; he also uses the occasion to speak of Sheela Gowda’s work which has long
inspired him, as he does of Mrinalini Mukherjee and Rummana Hussain.
The most rationalist of all activity is perhaps the pursuit of systemic patterns in observation, be it prophetic, praxiological
or just an absurd bundle of propositions that fit together neatly. In a sense, on the other hand, the world of artistic
discourse is turning out to be one that is supremely meaningful in its precise disavowal of prediction, praxis and form.
The exceptional individuals, like Vivan Sundaram, who still accept the canon of rational intervention, even as the demotic
options close in upon themselves in subservience to the rationale of irrational governance, tilt to self-annihilation in
reflexive paradoxes of radicalisms that invade them. Colour is blanched out or burnt to cinders.
Re-contained in its grey centre, pulled to extreme poles of insubstantial energy, the blacks and whites leave only
inversions and displacements of labour.
To resignify their loss of a raison d’être perhaps? The disembowelling of the imperium of the Victoria Memorial
is also a purificatory emptying of signs at the same time in Vivan’s installation, Structures of Memory, to make them
capable of operating in an ambivalent relay of possibilities, metonymies thus displaced seeking new contexts of historical
comment, of alternatives and the mute struggles of the enabled spectator.
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These metonymies could have made myths out of fetishised objects that come together in the world of advertising.
Instead, they are liberated from the meanings that attach themselves to their marketed manufacture, given the possibility
of epic re-figuration in the construction of the spectacle by the spectator himself. The installation challenges the
presumptions of the dominant culture by voiding its own terms of reference, to allow reincarnations and the annulled
abortions of historical subjectivities to take place then and there as they might have done, in the past or the future.
The dominant culture’s simulations, along with its notions of art and liberatory rhetoric, continue to emphasise the
consumer’s choice as if it could displace and dismiss historical choice as a symptom of hubris. Consumer sovereignty
rules supreme, suppressing the citizenship of the consumer himself. Needs as ‘interactively’ defined by the market force
the citizen to retreat from the discovery of his own desire, creating an amnesia of both the social and his own personal
history. It is the freedom that every person seeks that is the foundation of his desire.
Vivan’s Structures of Memory gives us back our freedom to pose our questions from our very own experience, to find
our own episteme, beyond and through our artefacts of cultural memory and the load of information that they carry on
to our burdens of daily life.
In the science of economics, advertising is still seen as part of the information industry. In fact today, with the
convergence of ICE (Information, Communication, Entertainment) looming large on the horizon, advertising holds forth
the promise of ‘free’ telephones, ‘universal’ surfing, the subsuming of art under entertainment. The full blown entry into
the market of intellectual and artistic property is threatened now, not by the artist’s own resistance alone, but also by
the logic of increasing socialisation inherent in the very process of the conversion of all human action into reified things.
The commodity, playing upon the most primeval instincts of appropriation, simultaneously robs the sign of its creative
content as it privileges its use in a displaced aura of the real, concretising instantaneously, a bizarrerie of figments (see
the work of Bion on psychoses).
Forced into a psychotic position by a nervous system at once amplified and muted by the refined technologies of
targeted sensations, the citizen is terrorised out of his historicity by an ever-absent mother (the Nation/Religiosity),
sometimes epitomised by the persecutory nanny in figures like Maggie, accompanied by the ubiquitous smile of the
Phallic State that towers above Alice and Hamlet in ghostly disappearances.
As God operationally begins ‘to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat’ (Julian
Huxley), the ruler presents Himself as an Apparition, in Occult virtuality, disconnected from the deceitful realities of work
and leisure, the truth of Eros and Civilisation. One can smile and smile and yet be a villain.
The response of the artist can be that of a child, experimental, playful, seeking to clarify, hugging the pillow,
seeking the breast or in bewilderment annihilating its own desire and the memory/projection of its internal/external
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object. Modern Times of Chaplin had more than elaborated upon those options that were available to dismembered
individuals as each limb took on an autonomous life, their artisanal attributes transferred to assembly lines, their
instincts governed by gestures and intrusions of mechanical organisation. As for the grown-up adolescent reluctant
to assume the responsibilities of state, we have known of the many near-heroic withdrawals of such diverse figures as
Baudelaire and Manto, of the range from the abstractions of Mondrian to the reaffirmation of Christian faith in Eliot,
to the wounds that women inflicted upon their own bodies – from at least Amrita Sher-Gil’s times to ours – wounds
as ornaments of redemption.
But are those times, thank God, fast disappearing? One would have exulted at the vanishing of feminine masochism,
had it not reappeared as anorexia, the loss of complementarity with the masculine, the inability to change the political
economy’s valuation of the traditional ‘roles’ of women, men and children. It has kept the shell of the Family intact, as
white as a marble mausoleum, while fossilising Love and Nurture into relics that only obscenities can bring back to life.
Suddenly, it needs tremendous courage to accept the existence of suffering that goes beyond masochism, that
rejoices in the act of one’s own being as a gift to that other who is as uncomprehending as the terms that recoil around in
unravelled anticipations of chaos. Sheela Gowda seems to have had the will to do so, to be restorative by inviting a frank
reverie upon her passion. And Tell Him of My Pain, her 1998 work, ‘becomes the body’s extension/abstraction in longing.
. . . The woman’s body is erotically signified through its absence and the work involves you in a combined enticement:
of her labour and her narcissism which together turn into the act of doing, nurturing, being’ (Geeta Kapur in her essay
entitled ‘Dismantled Norms’).
How do we rehabilitate the aesthetic object if the claim of all machine-made objects to perfection fills up the space
of Plato’s Pure Idea that we had mercifully abandoned in science, but clung on to long after, in our artistic withdrawals
from the criminal march of Nazism? Did Mondrian condemn the diagonal in its actual presence purely because it
suggested action, change, vulgarity, or was it because he preferred another version, the purely mental one of Hellenised
Christian Essence? The goal of Adam Smith’s civilisation is the proliferation of objects that fulfil the abstracted needs
of citizens, where the commodity embodies them in perfection for all purposes of recognition and exchange. The value
that resides in things, thereafter, is given to them by the act of exchange, more than the possibility of their function or of
the impulse that made any of them come into being. The autonomy of the form thereby engendered renders the mode
of exchange the most important element in the generation of meaning. Hence, the further socialisation of human energy
and imagination – in the absence of innovative institutions, transactionally changing the conditions of life, that could
replace the power of money – has transferred all the commodity’s magic to the monetary movement itself. The location
of the first and the third world is also now in the financial deals signified by the relative presence or absence of abstract
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Kumar Shahani
goods and services, the creature comforts taken for granted as necessities, while the rest of the populace is driven to
the margins of existence, at the end of history. It is not to be found either at Marine Drive in Mumbai or at Harlem in
New York, physically. It is everywhere. There was always something shady about miserablisme, which proclaimed that its
depiction of poverty was itself an act of charity. Whether it originates in socialist or romanticist guilt, it tends to prepare
the oppressor and the oppressed for the worst effects of social inequality seen as Natural or Scientific Law. Satyajit’s
Pather Panchali escaped the sense of guilt from its promise of redemption through Bibhutibhushan’s and cinematography’s
love for nature. His later films and those of his school’s tended, instead, to speak as representations of appauversied
ethnicities, waiting to be salvaged by either the green or the cynically degraded red in revolutions. Embedded in a notion
of the ‘masses’ with their needs to be defined and satisfied by those who sold soap, ‘communication’ targeted audiences
towards a simultaneous purging of their desires and their hopelessness. In addition, the Emergency brought in the culture
of rape and the threatened emasculation of men by the agencies of power, in the rhetoric of socialism that Finance
Capital of the 1970s adopted to hide its abhorrence of the populace and its babies. The violence has increased ever since,
with and without the famous ‘foreign hand’. It has for some become the glove, for others God’s own limb that reaches
out to men with promises of fortune or guns and drugs. All that the global citizen can do, in response, is to degrade the
objects of his own imagination – into the twin processes of idealisation and corruption! Both the processes are unnerving
for the artist and yet she has to play along, just to be able to stay outside of the system, only so that her existence may
at least receive recognition.
So, she presents herself as fetish, with genitals as signatures, where the obscene and the sacred meet, abolish forced
migrations, to enfold the violaters in the warmth of refuge, the better to expunge them. Thus Mrinalini Mukherjee’s
‘metaphors for fecundity’. In the everyday mutilations of body, fruit, word, wall of Rumanna’s suffering was the recall
of Nasreen’s visual prayer that converted the mundane into the abstracted divinity of light and shade. Bhupen Khakhar’s
jokes are now open exclamations of terror and repulsion. In the solitude of mathematical opacity, Akbar Padamsee seeks
a new energy in the nude’s self-display. Far away, under the heavy atmosphere of the Empire’s dark memories, Anish
Kapoor makes tumescent a bubble of nature, in a cube of transparent artifice, encapsulated. Made in Redundant Geometry.
Gulammohammed Sheikh tries to find a vocabulary for the people that may not offend, even as obscenity may not abuse.
But the serrated edges of the cowrie shell will permit no promise of paradise. Nor will the full-blown lotus.
That which has acquired power over all spheres of meaning is the movement of capital, over and above capital
itself, beyond the new avenues of socialisation and abstraction, of creativity that it both contained and revealed. Even
money, if not jostled about all the time, ceases to yield significance. There is no time to build institutions, relationships,
traditions. There is only the throw of dice as it were. Every attempt by the artist to re-member adds up to the denuding
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of the depths of the soul who asks for a spectacle, horrific to the eye and ear: Urubhanga as a possible synopsis of the ‘FIRST PERSON BAHUVACHAN:
Mahabharata, already a tale told to the blind.
The artist as witness to violation now lets the world watch in an oscillation of repulsion and attraction, but only for YOU MUST BECOME THE
that instant of performance in fragile mortality that renders him infinitely vulnerable. Or as divine as the glimpse (jhanki)
in Vaishnavism or the light that surprises a Christian when he prays?
CHANGE YOU SEEK’ – A FILM ON
It is to the performing arts that the world is veering; naturally so, as being in perpetual transience is the very spirit THE CONSTITUTION OF INDIA
of the times. How very privileged Kerala is in this sphere, we all know. It is time to open out and absorb the great world’s
other offerings, rather than to sacrifice our own in ritual burials that would bestow our wealth upon thieves instead of 2000
our living icons from the past, the present and the future.
Let these icons infuse us with their breath as we do them, so that artists like Vivan can help us negotiate our
journeys through the world with the silent boatmen on our isolated shores.

Previously unpublished.
Along with ‘The Cotton Project’, this is the only other major unrealized project described in
this compilation. A proposed film on the Constitution of India, if it had been made the way
Shahani wanted to make it, it would have been a truly epic work. It would also have been the
most significant example of what he understood by narrative sequence. The transformation
of legendary time into rational unitary time with the arrival of a national consciousness, and
the specific challenges, in this area, posed by an Indian Constitution that had to accommodate
multiple forms of consciousness, would have been among its several concerns.

An aerial shot of Lothal/Mohenjo-daro.

‘Ruins’, in which the Dancing Girl may descend into the Lotus Pond to the divine rhythm set by Nataraj by tradition.
The rhythmic pattern of these parans inspired Panini to structure, formalises and constitute Language itself.
The oldest bowed instrument, still found in the desert areas contiguous to the Indus, intervenes and runs the
leheriya over the ghatam’s deep, resonant beat. The music continues beyond in curves as melodic as that of the great
river. It presages the tragedy of colonisation, carried over to the signature tune of All India Radio before the Republic was
given to ourselves by ourselves for ourselves, and of our own accord and harmonies. In which the discords of history only
led to the strengthening of the overtones of freedom won through a culture that had for centuries sought the individual

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the shock of desire and other essays Kumar Shahani

in the Self rather than in a doctrine. The bowed instrument is now joined by the primeval flute, said to express the longing A hymn from the Rgveda celebrating her – ‘She moves according to the path of the Truth and, as one that knows, she
of the divine for the human. limits not the regions’ (I.124.3) – could follow in alphabets and characters and digitised expressions that seek to unlock
A woman’s voice is overlapped over the flute and the Rajasthani sarangi: the mystery of meaning that the Indus script still holds in its womb.
Day slants, narrows down ‘You must become the change you seek’ (Gandhi, quoted by Justice Venkatachaliah).
And then I melt Gandhi’s voice may be simulated and juxtaposed with an All India Radio recording.
in the empty space of darkness A Samavedic mantra becomes the full-blown expression of sampoorna sruti structures that constitute ragas like
Though I am severed in two, Bhairavi and Yaman and Sankarabharanam, electronically modified to accept intervals of overtone and overlap that were
no one cares. hitherto impossible to conjoin. We emphasise the purity of enunciation, the precision of percussion in a Shiva stuti, the
Their leafless bough perfection of the mathematics of love and divinity in the architecture of domes where monsoon clouds linger in heavenly
never blossoms! light.
Although they strike root The resonances drawn from the Deccani monuments carry passages from personal records of women. . . .
seeped in my blood, Hoping to blossom (one day) into a flower
I am entangled in python-coils Every bud sits, holding its soul in its fist
for ages. . . . reaffirming, evoking and invoking the Right to Equality, granted in various ways by the Indian citizen to herself
Their venomous hiss through the Constitution, the quotations could parallel those of Andal, Meera, Gulbadan, Ayesha, Salome, Avalokiteshwara
turns my days into night as Guan-Yin, even as their longing is expressed as in the Malhar prakaras that hold in their metre the onomatopoea
And when I reach out for a sun-ray of varsha.
it recedes far away The monsoon winds rock vessels from all ages on the shores of India (as in the illustration of Part XXII of the
like the end of a dream Constitution).
when the eyelid is opened from the stitched and handmade boats,
The aerial shots of the first traces of civiisation dissolved into the signatures of those who wrote the Constitution. inspired by the human mind and muscle
The bricks are morphed into letters through shifts of focus as we open the calligraphed and illuminated Constitution and powered only by the wind and the tide
of India on its last pages: to steamers and nuclear submarines/aircraft carriers
A babble of voices in different languages becomes articulate speech over the Eighth Schedule; images become A shelter in an ancient ashram among the forests with a storm raging about it.
words that become gesture and movement as in the great performing forms of Kerala / dialectical discussions in Tibetan The hair ornaments like a crown and the beads and pearls of the neck of a woman catch the lightning’s myriad
Buddhist monastries and in the expressive outbursts of Tagore. We enact the aspiration of immortality in Pururavas’ plea reflections as she turns her eyes to a voice asking for a refuge.
to Urvashi–Ushas. He asks for fulfilment and freedom, and the possession of prakriti. Interspersed with the choreographic movement of the eyes, the hands, the torso, the graceful bends in the body
To which she says: that render the subject sacred before it reaches the manas, are Articles 393 and 394 . . . Articles 5,6,7,8 . . . ‘that shall come
‘I am the first light of the dawn. . . . It is impossible to hold me. I disappear as soon as I appear! I am as hard to get into force at once and the rest from January 26, 1950’.
as the wind.’ Standing in the storm outside the shelter a refugee boy (or just voice-over) in Bangla/Punjabi/Sindhi:

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‘Give me refuge. . . . I have left home and hearth, far away from here, from now, or so it seems, light years away . . .
have you been here from the beginning?’
The choreographed responses are now interspersed with intertitles from the Directive Principles of the Constitution
(Article 38).
In the distance, a chariot passes through laser fireworks that emblazon the sky. The charioteer speaks to a distraught
archer.
The horses’ hooves turn into rounded harmonics of C Major.
The bagpipers play the Last Post around the Imperial perspectives from India Gate in Lutyens’ New Delhi.
The riots and disturbances across the subcontinent with recognisable voices of that age of transition overlapped in
the notes of the bagpipers.
The New Delhi Police Commissioner’s hair turning snow-white overnight, after he witnesses the scenes of violence.
Intertitle: ‘There shall be one electoral roll . . . and no person shall be ineligible for inclusion . . . on grounds only of
religion, race, caste, sex or any of them’ (Article 325).
Touch upon the rights of citizens, aliens, refugees (in consultation with Justice Venkatachaliah).
Amrita Sher-Gil’s mother, herself a Hungarian, wrote to Mahatma Gandhi after her daughter’s death seeking his help
to punish Amrita’s alien husband even before the British had quit India.
The Right to Freedom touched upon an allusion to her life and work, perhaps through something that she said to a
friend before her death in Lahore.
(Lead through her father, the eccentric Tolstoyan, Umrao Singh, to Guru Gobind Singh and Teg Bahadur, on the one
hand, to the learning, philosophy and fair-mindedness of the classical Indian tradition which her brother-in-law from the
south, K.V.K. Sundaram [ICS, later Election Commissioner] brought to bear upon the working of the Constitution, as did
indeed the majority of the composers of the Constitution.)
We will transit to the debates within the Constitutent Assembly to the December 12, 2001, attack on the Parliament.
Acts of purification will be shown with fire and water. The burning of photographs of the early period during and
after the struggle for Independence, books, newspapers, films, the later threats to the Indian Union, both ‘internal’ and
‘external’.
The prayaschitta that follows . . .
A statement is made by a young person standing against a glass door in an institutional setting, as in a ‘college’ or
employment agency. The statement is a mix of several modes of speaking about oneself – as to a priest, a doctor, an
interviewer, a census-taker, a clerk filling up a form which includes the column of ‘Race’ in colonial India.
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The young person opens the door and we move out with him. We trolley out with the opening of the door on
to a street where history is juxtaposed with contemporary reality in varied ways – of activity, architecture, culture,
cuisine, languages, technologies, like the paintings of Bhupen Khakhar, the cartoons of Laxman, the residual signs of global
ecological transformation.
A kind of symphonic crescendo builds up musically from the different sounds, while a firm, gentle, childlike voice
says (if possible, that of Lata Mangeshkar herself when she made her debut):
‘We, the people of India . . . this Constitution . . .’
On the screen we see a damp old volume being restored by a few hands of different complexions, sizes, the
textures and ornaments around the wrists and fingers in different stones and metals and threads till it looks like
a figure of lived joy: shunyata, Rigvedic Nothingness, Insubstantial yet Self-Proliferating Divinity of Islam and
Judaism.
We look out on the street when the volume is placed in its shelf in the Asiatic Library.
From the street, we enter a dark passage leading to a courtyard as uplifting as a piazza, as colourful as a bazaar and
as mysterious in its niches as the sacred geometry of mandalas. Carried over to the Egyptian sarcophagus by the Star of
Bethlehem and brought back to the individual seeking the origin of the Self, in terms of the several dharmas that coalesce
into a historical citizen.
Inside, trembling through one of the crowded passageways, in contradiction, we come upon the scene of Manto’s
Khol Do, epitomising the tragedy in opening up a new life.
We work towards the generosity of the Indian Constitution, not only to the people who gave it to themselves but
also towards those that had hitherto been exploited/been in a state of exploitation.
What a piece of work is man
The paragon of animals.
In quoting Shakespeare, we also bring out what Justice Venkatachaliah said about the magnanimousness of the new
nation and its Constitution to those who had already looted the country of its wealth.
Vaishnava jana tene kahiye je pid parai jaane re
Par dukh aakar kare toye abhimaan na aane re
Shaal lokma sahane vande ninda ne kare kaini re
Vach kach man nischal, dhan dhan janani teni re
‘He who knows the pain and suffering of others . . . inherits the earth.’
An enactment by the East Indian community of the Crucifixion at Easter.
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Par dukh aakar kare toye abhiman na aane re. Raga Maand continues in different combinations over the carding of As in a reverie, Sita’s return with Rama and Lakshmana that adorns the page of Fundamental Rights in Nandalal Bose’s
cotton resembling an ektara. imagination, so are the figures in plenitude both in their abstract and personified forms from all our performative and the
The spinning of cotton in Arunachal Pradesh. literary and fine arts, carrying to our contemporary critical modes a celebratory aura. With no Caesar or other Imperial
In Central India, the white cotton ball in bloom over the black soil. Sovereign demanding that we return to him what is his by otherworldly right, we gave back to ourselves that which is ours
A mahar boy joins the women in picking the cotton from the plant in gestures of great tenderness. by birth, this earth of which Sita is the paradigmatic furrow.
The mills of Bombay, Ahmedabad, release workers on the streets. Transcending the varied forms of representation/abstraction to a realisation, the Constitution and the film will
The weavers in Bengal thread looms while in the clubs of Calcutta bets are taken over the New York cotton figures reach its moksha as it resurrects all the freedoms in the improvisatory manner of Ragas and Raginis, the kolams that are
and auctions of tea. painted intuitively from equations going beyond the artifices of order to the joy of life’s chaos, known by the heart, the
Mica is strewn over railway platforms in Bihar that glisten. body and mind integrally. Found in the vocalisations stretching from the Indo-Tibetan to the Hebraic, Tamilian, Sanskritic,
The adivasis of Chhotanagpur mine iron ore and limestone. Persian, Causasian, Dravidian, in a network of relationships, the robust movements of limbs that created cities of fantasy
Article 369 of Part XXI (the Temporary and Transitional Provisions). and gold and lifted us to a trance of kaleidoscopic colour, like a Vyjayantimala, garlanding the jambudweepa from Dhaka
The mahar boy wears a tie and three-piece suit in front of a cracked mirror. He blows on his spectacles, wipes them, to Bhambhor, connecting us to a body of the world by the seas.
gathers his books and exits, leaving an empty frame of the mirror (within which may be a reference to Dronacharya) and
fodder collected for sale to the local moneylender (from Professor Gopal Guru’s life).
Gopal sells fodder to the moneylender’s daughter and teaches her as well.
The story of Dharma-Yudhishthir from the Mahabharata, the great upholder of virtue and knowledge born of a
shudra yoni as Vidura; yet ready at the behest of Narada and Krishna to perform the Rajasuya sacrifice.
The Royal consecration becomes the Republican consecration, through the historical repudiation of Sisupala, the
Arthashastra, Akbar’s search for principles of governance in tradition.
The ‘sublime moment in history’ (quoted from Justice Venktachaliah) arrives as the Constitution is enacted. Along
with the formally un-justiciable but truly central in their reflection of the citizen’s expectations are the Directive Principles,
underpinning the proactive nature of the Indian State and its processes that would resurrect a great civilisation.
Marrying the judicial–legislative combine of the Vedic Mitra–Varun (incarnated by Yudhishthir) to the compassion
of Jaina–Buddhist transformations of our society and culture, the prosperous renaissance of material culture described in
the Silappadikaram, the Constitution carries forward the teleologies of Biblical religion and that of self-liberation of the
Bhakti, Sufi, Sikh as of European economic democratisation.
Unlike the American Constitution, with its clear distinction between the ruler and the ruled, and its irrational
severence between communitarian and individual goals, the Indian Constitution immediately engages the state to take a
proactive role in removing every form of discrimination, protecting the life of each individual, irrespective of where s/
he belongs and/or what belongs to her/him.

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introduction to
film & philosophy
2003
First published as the Introduction to Film & Philosophy, edited by K. Gopinathan, Kozhikode:
University of Calicut Press, 2003.
‘Capital loosens its imperial hold over its own people before they worry about us’, writes
Shahani here, and it took a while before even Europe could liberate itself from the ‘prison of
the Renaissance’s objectivity’. On the other hand, the ‘resistance’ has itself become notorious,
forcing filmmakers to ‘accept notions about their experiences of reality within modes generated
by European exclusivity’. He mentions an interesting meeting with Roberto Rossellini, when he
quizzed him on his famous statement, ‘Reality is, why change it?’ – asking him what he might
have to say to the neo-naturalism rampant in French cinema, which apparently was doing just
that without ‘paring down to the barest economy the shot’s action, line and movement’ as
Rossellini did. Within India, cultural thrusts towards self-determination are ‘assimilated into
post-colonial discourses’ or ‘continue largely to be ignored’, providing credence to Louis
Marcorelles’ observation on the ‘swift fossilisation of every innovation in India’, which can only
be contrasted to the equally sudden ‘erosion of almost every trace of the past in corporate
cultures’ surfaces’.
‘J’aime le spectacle’, Bresson said to me when I wondered about his distance from Rossellini.
The light on the dashboard of the great French master’s car was warmer than those that lit up St.-Germain-des-Prés
and the perpendicular Boul. St. Mich; the street lamps of Paris with their funnelled Fall that flared up like the ellipses of
pirouettes.
We ascended to the Val-de-Grâce, my home.
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He, too, went his way.
Yes, I saw the warmth of the golden sunsets of India, even as the universe in the cold dial of the dashboard indicated
how fast we were reaching another destination.
Is there any possibility of feasting upon unleavened bread tonight?
For that to happen, you need human sacrifice! A celebration, in Beauty, of the violence of Truth and Purity.
You see how archaic I am! If there is anything that may be disputed and demolished out of existence, it is the trinity
of these terms. In a sense, ‘modernism’ had already done so by replacing:
Beauty, allowing formalism and aestheticist social organisation to conquer the individual’s creative impulses.
Truth, by the linearity and supremacy of Master Narratives and Universalisms.
Purity by the psychoses of a bizarre baggage of objects, sanctioned by a historically misplaced individualism
touching upon all forms of abstraction that refused to acknowledge the relativity of structures, rationalities and forms,
endogenous and exogenous to disciplines, cultures, morphologies.
These are the symptoms of the age of Imperialism, which keep recurring again and yet again.
The abandoning of beauty as an affirmation of reality has necessarily occurred in accompaniment with the
proliferation of it in the commodities’ growing seduction and fetishisation. Where the signification of the original ‘need’
and its object is undermined by the surrogate’s appearance, hiding the transformative processes that brought into being
both the need in the Subject and the investment in the Object. Deeper than that of enterprise is the investment that is
overlooked. Of the history of human individuation in society and the evolution of the perceptive and cognitive faculties
that celebrates nature by intensifying its intrinsic enjoyment through knowledge and the multiplicity of civilisational
procedures.
Curiously, then, the material mediations that ruptured the direct contact between the Subject and what she finds
(Picasso: I do not search, I find) lead us into an unnamed hunger for the lost, meaningless Object in a hole where the
Supply Side overwhelms us with its Glazed Choice.
The individual’s own transformative impulses are evacuated into an abyss of social passivity. The more the objects
are clearly formed, the more the emotions acquire a concrete chain of cause and effect, the more the critiques and
compositions turn in upon their own fluidity in a viscous, impenetrable non-referential framework. The necessary
metalanguages turn into unfocused areas of blurred conflict. Or, in so far as the individual is allowed to act, it is within
the parameters of the flavour of the month because her needs have been market-researched into a pre-determined
interactivity. So that historical intervention, always a complex set of contrapuntal moves and constructs, is disallowed
by the broadcast of a temporary political correctness, aligned as much to the distribution of a product as to democratic
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participation, breaking apart the poetic coherence of praxis and metaphysical engagement to re-conflate needs and
satisfactions that are centrally conditioned.
In fact, we are led once again to the annihilation of the subjectivity of the Other. This time through the friendly
advances made by the Market, which knows through statistical averages what you need, canceling out what you may
think you need. In the case of Descartes, he thought, therefore he was. In your case, you need, therefore, you are. And
the reader of Descartes could always retrieve his position of dignity by turning Descartes’ arrogant propositions against
the philosopher himself: ‘Que vois-je de cette fenêtre, sinon des chapeaux et des manteaux, qui peuvent couvrir des
spectres ou des hommes feints qui ne se remuent que par des ressorts?’ (‘What do I view from this window if not hats and
overcoats which could be covering spectres or feigned men who shift their positions by a kind of a spring-like device?’).
By identifying himself with the author of this text, the reader of Descartes can reverse the subjectivity of Descartes
and turn him into the object! But, in the world of a systemic market-friendliness where the autonomous proliferation of
objects conditions subjectivity to perceive its fulfilment in the satisfaction of proffered needs, the disjunction between
cognition and perception is as complete as the rejection of all alambana. The alambana are the objective support systems
of all subjective experiences, whether perceptual or cognitive or aesthetic.
By the strange inversions of history, the proliferation of choice in the availability of concrete objects (whether
purely physical or coloured with emotional and ideational content) has applied a closure to the senses. The capacity of
the senses for development into agencies of change, evolution and abstraction is immobilised. It is turned away from
action that could simultaneously lead to self-reflexivity and praxis.
For, the very antinomies of ‘svatah’ (intrinsic) and ‘paratah’ (extrinsic) are now subsumed in a flow, independent of
both, where neither need exists except as anachronisms from the past. Both the Real and Reality turn into a Simulacre, as
opaque as it is transparent. In every case, inaccessible.
The digital Image–Sound–Concept–Fact construct has thus collapsed all dualities, individualities, therefore
multiplicities.
Quantities have congealed into a mass pluralisation that glosses over all the declinations of the singular, the dual
and the multiple into a flow of presence that is endless and instant at the same time, hurtling at a speed that refuses to
recognise divisions of space as well.
Since reason and revelation, since praxis and intuition are caught up in the elisions of desire, there is neither
obscurity nor illumination. There is no veil upon the splendour of the divine because the veil is not woven any more,
while the profane only forces you to turn away your eyes by its artifice, deprived of the energy of obscenity that had
earlier sought divinity and challenged it too.
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Neither the veridical sign nor that of verisimilitude in onomatopaeic alteration find caesurae from our own
experience any more.
In a world full of economically determined needs that have supplanted human desire, how can one create an
epistemophilia with an infinite flowering?
The promise of the Cinema for many of us here, and, I am sure, in civilisations with histories that separated
them from the courageously liberating urge of the European Renaissance’s objectivity, was and continues to be self-
realisation. This objective is relevant both to the colonised and the coloniser, since there are systems of thought, of
social organisation, of visual and musical elaboration which have yet to discover their full potential in individuals who
wish to walk across borders of power, gender, ethnicity. The globalised subject is indeed capable of making all these
transitions, if she frees herself from neo-liberalist discourses that trap her in narcissistic tautologies, irresponsible to
everything but the bottom-line.
I do not wish to make this an indictment of Capitalism. It has already had the misfortune of abandoning its telos
in proclaiming the end of history and the defeat of Communism. It has virtually destroyed the class that it brought
into being and has in the same breath atrophied the individual into aphasia. Of course, it has done all this through a
contradictory process. I have a feeling, as always, that this very process will free the system and its invisible agencies
from its present nervous disorder into a leisurely recovery of personality in imagination and reality if Capital loosens its
imperial hold over its own people before they worry about us.
The American and the French artists, citizens, students, women and, specially, the proletariat were certainly
paralysed into inaction by Cinema’s classical Age of the Talkies, i.e. by their own invention. Their liberation, in a
sense, depended on how we could release ourselves from the prison of the Renaissance’s objectivity. The totalitarian
power of the scientific perspective is present in the lens and in the chemistry of tonal singeing of the film by the
cauterisation conducted by ‘reality’. However, this reality was inhabited by voices from the spaces of the proscenium
theatre committed to an idealised succession of action and reaction. Agency was replaced by human nature and its
permanent condition.
Its suppression of other modes of thought, visual and aural, had to be conquered through a self-reflexive response.
The resistance of the Renaissance’s methodology to non-appropriative meaning-series is by now notorious enough. It has
forced filmmakers to accept notions about their experiences of reality within modes generated by European exclusivity.
Either through imitative exoticism or through mechanistic structures.
Our cultural thrusts towards self-determination, on the other hand, get assimilated into post-colonial discourses or
continue largely to be ignored for lack of support, above all from our homelands themselves.
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Louis Marcorelles had marvelled at the swift fossilisation of every innovation in India. By contrast, one can see
today the sudden erosion of almost every trace of the past in corporate cultures’ surfaces. The anomic individual is
given no scope for any recuperation of time and space. While the critical-analytical tradition of the West reappropriates
the new meaning-series formed by immigrant and other realities into techno-cultural revolutions that still keep the
inequality of the Oriental intact.
What could restore the strength in us to challenge the future or indeed the present, if the past is obliterated along
with all its values? Paul Willemen said that perhaps there is a nostalgia implicit in the mourning of a loss. I agree, be it of
values, a place or a person, of a sense of reality even or of a secular telos. How shall we erase the nostalgia without falling
into the amnesia of neo-fascist contingency, the symptoms of which are present inevitably all around?
I think that we have to re-examine our texts in a manner that a philosophy linked to a new poetics might allow.
By texts, I mean that we may deal with the numerous morphologies, numerous logical/extra-logical interventions that
have been discovered and experienced at every stage of societal and individual consciousness, to open up potential
configurations that every culture has suggested, above all through its dissenting artists. Very often, philosophy, like
other modes of knowledge-gathering, has museumised and rejected prior imaginative speculation in the name of Reason,
Science, Reality and Religion, whatever may be the organising episteme of the particular time and place and its ideological
underpinnings.
Liberalism has the potential to abolish all isms, including itself. To give ear to the particular voice.
It is enunciation that precedes all concepts and the word. Newspaper reports have told us recently of a musical
instrument made some 36,000 years ago! Kalidasa from India and Rumi from Persia have both thought of the bamboo
flute as preceding the prana of human existence, that which imbues it with its own being and transmutes it to the Word
and the Object, unites it with the Beloved Other.
Prana is freed from the possesive, as it were, since it belongs to all life as well as to the particular in which it
manifests itself. It frees itself and the vastu from its inertness, thus permitting the vishaya to appear in metamorphoses
that transcend instumentality and affirm the existence of the world out there, knowable without appropriation, only
through the power of abstraction and suggestion, not by stuffing it with a concrete substantiality.
Both Ghatak and Bresson, my two cinema teachers, accepted the existence of the thingness of things. Both felt that
to know anything, it was not enough to represent it. In Bresson, the geometry of the world is confronted with the Passion.
In Ritwikda’s films, the process of changing the world is itself the Sacrifice/Celebration. As a result, the multivalence of
the vishaya and the vastu are both left intact, even as the one appauversies the visual to come to the bare cross and the
other distils history from archetypes.
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If we try to go further, we may come up with a response, as in praxis, to the Universe, without claiming for
ourselves the universal, nor using partial knowledge to control prana within nor without, in unbridled empirical fervour.
There are other clues from artists. Like in the work of Nasreen Mohamedi, who moved from the eroded surfaces as signs
in her paintings to photographs where the wetness was, in the process of drying, illuminated by socialised geometrical
signs, simple and as unobtrusive as the passage of time shown by the sun’s angle at its whim. She went on to do
exercises, like the riyaz of bundling musical notes in different formations, of what the intervals of lines may resonate
with, on their own.
It was the Call to the missing First Syllable (itself a negation?) and all those that were not heard. A response to the
Infinite tremors of the consonant locks it in multiple closures.
The Cinema, too, is capable of such musical enunciation, in tensions of relay between the visual, the auditory,
the performative and the atmospheric, the excessive richness of thought and feeling drawn into minimalist line,
tone, word, movement, sequential sign. Consider Ritwik’s scenes in Subarnarekha, the economy of the archetype
within the sprawling narratives of epochal suffering. Consider Bresson’s L’Argent, Rossellini’s Paisa and La Prise du
Pouvoir par Louis Quatorze.
In fact, Rossellini’s remarkable achievement is to produce starkly didactic images within orchestrated camera
movements. I had always felt extremely uncomfortable with his statement which was most often quoted by those who
wanted to lay the foundations of the neo-liberalist space: ‘Reality is, why change it?’ I had admired his work so greatly
that I could not believe that he meant it!
When I did meet him, about a year before he died, I was confirmed in my opinion. There was a movement
of neo-naturalism rampant in French cinema in the seventies which never aspired to that paring down to the
barest economy the shot’s action, line and movement, as in the best of Rossellini. I asked him whether he would
dissociate himself from these wayward children of his. He was absolutely with me that evening: he had always
wished to show reality in its purity and simplicity, so that it could speak directly, touching you to the core, at the
same time serving the purposes of articulation.
Many years later, some people who had seen Bhavantarana in Italy and the USA felt that I should make a film from
perhaps the last script that Rossellini had commissioned but had not realised – a biography of Karl Marx. I was delighted,
not only with the opportunities that the project would have provided, but also with the very thought that the terms of
our ancient civilisation, between the body and nature and emotion, going back to the Rig Veda and the eroticism of the
Gita Govinda, may find a resonance in a script on Karl Marx, written for one of the founders of neorealism. The manifest
conceits of our sensuousness – and world-view – give body to the rigour of science!
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Sensibilities are of course far more dissociated today than ever before, certainly far more than the time of T.S.
Eliot and the modernists of his ilk: alienation itself, as my students recently pointed out, does not provide a remotely
sufficient or adequate description of our states of relating to the world. It barely begins to suggest the relation between
people and things, people and people, people and nature, phenomena and their inner logic, the harbinger of chaos in
our midst. The text is all around, yes, but instead of activating vivacious interventions, it is often made to retreat into a
blur of indistinguishable events of pain and pleasure in which everyone is made to participate in reiterating the known,
unquestionably conditioned.
The cinema has had the opportunities and the capacity to make of the truths of this world, the subjectively realised
revelations of each spectator whenever it has addressed each viewer free from the perspectives that the State and the
Market force upon us of vanishing points beyond which the individuals do not exist. Readings can link philosophy and
praxis in succinct elaborations, shades of varied colour sustained in simultaneity, complementarities, implicit diachronies
and extensions.. Like conceits, they restore sensibilities, invite reveries that link thought and emotion, leading to sustained
action. Of course, every such formulation is capable of the utmost reversals and abuses. Did not Godard play with the
epigram ‘Ethics is the Aesthetics of the Future’ in his life as in his art?
But the Affect is Anathema to the Capitalist Spirit of Reason.The excommunication of desire is accomplished by
the very forces that affect has brought into being: Science, Technology, Art, including Spectacle. Yes, affect is passion.
It implies aspirations to the depths of knowledge, not a catharsis of itself, nor to wearing it upon one’s skin bearing
sensations devoid of signatures, devoid of the senses’ own infinite capacity to individuate and recognise, discriminate
before restructuring them into great analogues of the imagination. We limit our notes and colours to seven, like our
telephone numbers, only for the facility of remembering. In fact our computers know better, in spite of the rather
strange experiments that wished to prove with the aid of artificial intelligence that there were not more than 22, the
number taking care of the 5 in between and the 10 subsequent!
The imagination is a challenge to the supremacy of order, organisation, any stunting rationality which, instead of
supporting the visionary’s fumbling tentatives, turns technicist, bureaucratic hair-splitting anaemic. The more puritanical
the religions grew, the more they opposed Reason and Imagination.
This has been a disaster which has crept into all secular activity of the mind and body. I believe that Reason,
discovered in the Resistance of reality and its overdeterminations, is born of Desire, expressed by enunciation and
imagination. It is precisely when images proliferate in a non-indexical way that they lose their agency and, in a sense,
even their autonomy. For, then, a certain logic of arbitrary form forces upon them a linearity. This new software is parallel
and symmetrical to its opposite, of the empiricist which was embedded in the dubious nineteenth-century translations
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from the Greek. The great upheavals of thought and action of the twentieth century gave us the glimpses of a new way of
life. The potential and promise of the twentieth century have also to be realised well beyond the digital miniaturisation
of space and time.
The Cinema is a sufficiently open form, as versatile in its logarithmic signals as the world at our fingertips and in the
suggestions of the distant vistas. If we have not the arrogance of Dhritarashtra or Oedipus, nor indulge in the terrified
disavowals that would turn away from genital longing as much as from those figures that are attained in the silences of
music, we may yet learn to make the transgressions that open up the sacred space.
The Cinema can syncopate abstract equations with frankly tumescent jouissance. It can extend the synasesthesia of
the knowing senses to that of the active senses and address the cita, rediscover the bhutas. . . . It can breathe the prana
of the performer into the icon – and let the icon transgress the privacy of the spectator. In a sense, I had seen all this fully
here in Kerala in the traditions of the Nambiars and the Chakyars. The cinema, like them, can transit from one subjectivity
to the other, by treating the bindu as a non-idealised point, locatable anywhere, as is the sadja in music. So also the
image in the word, moving from one narrative to another, changing with the context. It can play with the homonyms of
the Chinese language, bringing both visual and aural overtonality to the most essential roots of image–word–concept
combinations: tien-ch’I ( breath of lightning, electricity), yang ch’I (nourishing breath or air: oxygen), tan ch’I (colourless
air: nitrogen), etc. – quoted from The Way of Chinese Painting.
The Japanese have a way of combining both the alphabetical and the Chinese or Korean systems. Their zen gardens
have the precision and minimality of their cuisine and the bowls of its service. Their lotus ponds have the dream life of
the monks and the merchants who rested at Ajanta and other sites along the ancient trade-routes. The fuzzy logic of their
washing machines has extended the tempered rationality of the West into the delicate differences between one stain
and another, like the facsimile and xerox before them.
The Cinema has to go beyond its own technology and its original social organisation.. It is capable of complete
individuation of the moment, the event, the person, the feeling, the body–mind continuum, specially when people work
together. It cannot do so if it swears by individualism, of competition, of mass conformity through mass miscommunication
and mass marginalisation at an unprecedented scale.
Philosophy and Cinema can reverse the process because the ideation in philosophy is that of purifying discourses
to make them clearer in every context, while cinema restores ideation to the wholeness of experience. In the cinema,
all the elements of all the cultures can become selectively the generators of new meaning: the drop of cold rain in polar
autumns may find a sruti in Indian music, the apabhransha of Persian in the composition of Delacroix, the energy of the
orifices of African art in the structures of exclusion in Anglo-Saxon exclusion. Philosophy will not have to move towards
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poverty if it will align with cinema as it had done with the borders of poetry. When Mondrian’s host and protector in the GIVING, IN CINEMA
Nazi era asked him why he went over a line again and again, he asked in astonishment, ‘Do you not see that I am trying
to stretch it?’ 2010
It may have to do with signs that are marked in their process of formation, from the pre-linguistic to the mathematical,
and of dissolution from the culturally specific generality to the individualised universality, never to be repeated, lived to
the full, suffusing all life with its awareness as also its reified ‘mental’ forms.
The Cinema is young. Philosophy is immortal. If they embrace, the Listener and the Witness may yet celebrate the
birth of Sandhya, more compassionate than Usha and Krishna.
Spech delivered at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai; previously unpublished.
This speech, delivered on the occasion of Shahani’s 70th birthday celebrations, and dedicated
to his daughters Uttara and Rewati, is in the nature of a series of personal musings about the
world today.

When a father sings to his baby, a mother suckles her child, or two pairs of eyes meet in a reverie, all nature begins to offer
itself to the senses for both meditation and action.
Every single take for a film has inevitably the possibility of uniting these ‘once-upon-a-time’ binaries.
Meditation is built into the camera and the sound recorder.
Just as editing takes care of the action, our minds and bodies discover joy in our being continuous with the world.
Like Sanchi.
Sanchi is neither without spectacle, nor without desire. Yet, the
spectator is freed from his condition of being bound.
Instead, there is nirvana.
The inverted bowl of the stupa signifies as much the fullness of
reality as its finite transience.
The serene warmth of its shape contains its own infinite giving.
Even the sky in all its blueness seems to reach out to the stupa for solace, as if the creation were just born.
The first time that I saw Ritwik-da at work was in the old sound studio of Prabhat, introducing the cry of the just-
born baby as it takes the first breath, into the tracks of a film shot at the Karla caves.
Together with the sound of the rain and the two nishads of Malhar, the light floating on black rock, the caesura of
birth with all its pain resonates with meaning beyond layers of love, compassion, delight, opening up sensuous experience

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to language through the desire for expression, for discovering the episteme; for not just one language but all of them
and beyond and before.
To express is to bring forth from within, to give in such a way that the receiver moves to a higher form of
ecstatic being, in thought, word and deed. In every change, sense and synapse of the body and mind, nerve, sinew
and muscle.
It is in that sense that all art is celebratory and, perhaps, within the religious sphere, epiphanic, affirming being itself;
no matter how full of sorrow and bereavement, it is inclusive of moksha, of death as grace, life as shanti . . .
But the industrial age prioritised something else: freedom here and now, without knowledge; the appropriation of
value, not its creation, reducing value to monetary quantities and accumulating them to a fiction.
The great advances in the critical tradition are almost all algebraic, that is, creating equivalences through further and
further abstraction till knowledge itself – in this post-industrial age – loses sight of its referent.
The cinematic idiom can never lose sight of its referents, yet the whole action of the industry is always to try and
deflect us from the referent to the so-called story and to a kind of identificatory stupor in which the ‘other’ does not
exist, thereby giving no room for the self either.
Instead of objectifying through identification and the mechanical illustration of the plot, the cinema can be an
ongoing revelation of the transient, momentary, constantly changing materiality, bringing together different lives, things,
people in sets of relationships that claim no absolute unilinear meaning or duration.
It is in constant immanence that we form ourselves in our bodies, minds, sensations.
Literature interests us because it is made up of aksharas aspiring to cosmic movement. The choice of the titles of
my films was possibly unconsciously governed by the realisation that revelations are to be found au hasard all the time
in reality every day. Like one does with delight in musical riyaz, in painterly praxis, in giving form and shape to thought so
that the word be flesh and let dhwani emerge from light as it does from shabd or a caress.
From all this emerges the idea of love. In its anonymity or universalised form, karuna. But here is an anonymity that
gets individuated, a universality that lets the particular flower, as in the wonderful ending of Buñuel’s films: Viridiana lets
her hair down, Nazarin is offered a pineapple.
Both Ritwik and Luis were expelled from their motherland. Both of them attempted to change history based on
their experience.
Little Luis had a childhood dominated by the Virgin mother. He came into adulthood through the various
manifestations of Marquis de Sade’s presence. In the un-civil society of the world that launched apocalyptic violence
that characterised the twentieth century. The First World War was indeed the first, going beyond the fratricide of all the
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Kurukshetras, devouring skulls instead of nourishing/resting them upon the breast. No wonder, when Gandhi was asked
what he thought of Western civilisation, he said that it was a good idea!
But, let us not forget that our Kali has a garland of skulls around her, and Ritwik was expelled from her arms not once
but several times, starting with the several partitions that have broken us apart – the caste, communal, gender, class, even
linguistic divides which make of every part of contact and communication its very opposite. Look! we seem to say, this
world is full of commands as if ruled by an unmerciful God when the signal has taken over from the sign in all sciences.
Technology needs to work through signals. The more successful and awesome the organisation, the more prone it
is to rigidity.
Entropy changes our perception of the arrow of time.
The possibilities of multiple inflections upon which the classical languages were based have now been brutally
narrowed down. In the universe of signals through which all discourse is being conducted, perhaps with the ‘noblest’
of intentions, the imperative rules the roost. Certainly in terms of speed, exactness and universal availability, the noble
intentions of meeting objectives, we are more efficient than ever because of the compactness of virtual life.
But those very missiles and airplanes that go up into space are now being used by nation-states, not only against
one another, but also by governments against the very people that they are meant to represent.
The virus and its medicine seem both to be similarly and symmetrically constituted when reason, all modes of
address, all interpretative tools, are themselves turning into a fight–flight configuration.
However, the fixing of systems in reduced grammatical options almost completely does away with what the
individual subjectivity can experience as its own motive, its act of choice, its historical being. I would go so far as to say
that the self can begin to feel that evolutionary process is reversing itself.
It is our imagination alone which can give us breath to live, leading us to multivalent meaning, as in Ritwik’s
abandoned airport.
Not through absence of meaning but through multivalences, in which absence is only one constituent amongst many
that appears to be tangential to reality. The swara along with its adjoining shrutis can suggest infinitesmal harmonies –
as the performances of every great artist suggest. I remember a conversation with Hari-ji in which he said that just one
swara can create any rasa.
The classsical forms, for all their appropriation by the ruling classes, privileged the subjective intention. For instance,
the presence of the subjunctive mood gave us all the possibility of realising and sometimes encouraging action which
reaches out beyond the limits of given notions of reality. The media for the last hundred years or so, especially in the
more monetised countries, has played havoc by levelling the subjunctive down and often even evicting it from daily
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discourse. Similarly, contemporary textbooks of Sanskrit are being totally giving up on the dvivachan. Our enunciation is
being over and over again governed by fear, power, injunction, rather than by our emotion, our insight, our contingency.
The alankaras of music and literature, the figures of speech, the chromaticity of any scale, intervals between varied
series of word, tone, sound, note, colour, go beyond absence, displacement, containment, conclusion and elaboration to
individuate in all their resonant splendour the moment, the person, the incident, the not-yet-formed, live and incomplete,
so as to traverse dimensionality itself.
Like every day in our lives, like every scene in Ozu’s films – as in our dreams.
In the rooms accessed by sliding doors of back-lit, textured paper squares, translucence makes the forms float and
morph as much as gesture, even at its most stylised Japanese minimality.
A traditional Japanese producer of the indigo dye says that he works for the bacteria to change the hues, tones and
luminosity, but is not able to predict what exact energy it will have a hundred years from now!
Ozu’s dialogue and mise-en-scène in front of the ever-attentive camera burns itself into the emulsions in the
same way: never reduced to the linearity of plot, motivation, character. In Japan’s interiors, the light spreads like water,
ubiquitous, in all directions, in excess as it were.
Is there any need to harness it when we can instead contemplate it?
Like the oil lamp and its flame with all its transient truths that Ammannur beheld in front of his eyes when he
performed, having mastered the Sanskrit to reach out to the a-sanskrit . . . from Shri Rama to Ravana, from Sita to
bewitching rakshasis, beyond the mortal flicker of the lamp, the audience in milky-white moonlight, fluttering waves of
the sea themselves, as described by Ammannur himself to my wonderful student of former times and now filmmaker-
colleague M.R. Rajan – most sensitive to the divinity of the performing arts.
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FROM STONE AGE . . .
2013
First published in Frontline (Chennai), 18 October 2013.
This essay, written by Shahani on the occasion of the centenary of the Indian cinema, dated
from the time of Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913), produces something of a
personal timeline of the twentieth century: the century of the cinema.
1947
Fifty years after the birth of cinema, the most important of all the twentieth-century arts, India’s Independence brings with
it the Partition of the subcontinent.
It fits in with the age of the nuclear bomb, of splintering and parcelling the earth between militarist powers, of
setting up puppet regimes, destructing all legitimate aspirations of self-determination into narrower and meaner modes
of identification, giving rise to murderous nativisms, infinitely.
Against all this, the resistance put up by Gandhians and socialists and internationalists inspires musicians, artists,
poets, dancers, actors and filmmakers to seek an integration between different languages and idioms.
I do not know how the languages of Gautama Buddha and Jesus went out of circulation.
I only know that image-making and music have been able to preserve the truth, beauty and purity of their thought
as the Quran perhaps records revelation. In my films the iconic dancer and the unrecognised musician have brought that
inscription of their own struggle into the perfection of image.
In the making of a cinematic work, people of several different disciplines, origins and artistic and technical
predilections come together, breathe together and yet continue to be themselves, through all the violence that
filmmaking entails. So it is with the spectators too. In the dream-world of the surrounding darkness, they can either
introspect or give themselves up to cathartic aggression.
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1963
Walking with D.D. Kosambi on the hills behind the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune – 50 years after the first
feature film was made in India – I learnt to distinguish between the marks of erosion on stone and the etched evocations
of experience in spirals, the goddesses becoming conscious of their own terrible splendour.
The microliths that Kosambi wedges out from the rubble would carve patterns out of rock surfaces later to become
the indestructible aksharas of tradition, resplendent language, history, sangeet, the spectral composite arts of cinema, of
installations, of long-distance signals preserved to come alive in another time, another place, with dimensionalities yet
to be discovered within the curves of ornaments illuminating the sky.
Between nature and culture there is an accord in the spaces and temporalities that lie within emptiness inhabited
by light, sound, smell, colour, invisible touch, intangible taste – like jharokhas of knowledge.
1913
Dadasaheb Phalke had with his own hands and eyes, in the look and gesture of his kin, begun to give life to  itihas  as an
interpretation of history. The seemingly real, silent biography of Jesus Christ inspired him to bring legend, myth, icon into
the modernist challenge of representation in as profound a way as Raja Ravi Varma before him.
Amrita Sher-Gil was born in faraway Hungary, opening her eyes to the horrors of the First World War.
That was the beginning of the collapse of a universal order that we continue to witness a century later without the
montage that Sergei Eisenstein proposed, to help us overcome the numbing violence that surrounds us.
Energy, meaning, rasa emerge only through non-linear juxtaposition of colour, swara, overtone with all its depth and
resonance, enunciating the sequence.
For, montage transcended all fetishisms attached to the objects of reality, including human beings. It drew attention
instead to the relationships that lie between one and the other. It took off from D.W. Griffith’s  Intolerance, which had
tried to show civilisational upheavals through a refrain of ‘the hand that rocks the cradle’.
2013
What rules the world today? Steven Spielberg after Madonna. For the rest, wage slavery and corporate governance. A
system where the superstructure is so powerful that even the President of the United States of America says that he can
do nothing about the injustices of the system that he has inherited when it comes to defending an individual.
Entropy?
The state is an overblown bubble about to burst at every human breath blown into it.
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For every nuance of a  rasa, Koodiyattam brings together the gesture in relationship to the eye, to the heartbeat,
the heartbeat to the breath. Will the multiplexes find a suitable acoustics for our being? Or the imagination to flower?
2012
I meet Robert Bresson’s wife, Mylene, after 40 years in a small crêperie in L’isle de Cité, Paris.
I ask her about her efforts at preserving and screening Bresson’s work. She tells me of her ennuis.
She also tells me that the subjunctive has almost disappeared from the French language.
1989
I make a film called Khayal Gatha, and when it had to get subtitles in English, I was told, even as I put across a composition
by Amir Khusrau, that I may not use the subjunctive. It is disallowed. I cannot begin to accept that condition. The exhibition
of the film gets delayed by 20 years and more.
May we not wish or desire or aspire any more?
1997
The centenary of cinema is celebrated with great élan in France. I am in Paris with an Indian delegation staying where the
Lumiere brothers had the first of their exhibitions of the cinematographe at Salon de l’Inde.
When we saw their Train Arriving at a Platform. . . my guru Ritwik Ghatak nudged me and said, ‘What exhilaration it
brings to us each time we see this short snippet of a film!’ But when I walk the streets in Paris again with friends who had
received the stinging blows of the baton in May 1968, they tell me that there is no hope in wanting to change the world.
1968
A couple of months before May, a  satyagraha  takes place at Trocadero, led by Jean-Luc Godard. Amongst those who are
walking with us are not only European filmmakers but also Krishna Riboud, a patron of art, cinema and the festivals of India,
and Dileep Padgaonkar, later to become our outstanding journalist and interlocutor in Kashmir. Godard actually had his
spectacles battered by a baton, recalling the Odessa Steps sequence.
1976
Epic realisations are so palpable and abstract at the same time that one is struck by the wonder and awe of the entire
creation as it were. I happened to be in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on the day Ritwik left us. I went to College Street to
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mourn his death in anonymity. Recalling the scenes from Meghe Dhaka Tara. I had first met him when he had brought his
film Subarnarekha to Bombay (now Mumbai) in search of a distributor. I was one of the three persons at this film society to
see and ‘approve’ of the film!
After the screening, I walked and walked and felt that this wonderful world of ours and the subcontinental
civilisation which contains all the known mainstreams of languages, more than 200 different types of flutes, an infinite
number of shrutis  and as many colours in the dyes that our minerals and vegetables yield, needs a constant epic renewal.
When I saw Titash Ekti Nadir Naam in 1989 along with Mani Kaul and John Abraham and many younger colleagues at
Pesaro, I realised how deeply Ritwik had taken us all along to a realisation well beyond the horizons of contemporary art.

1920s
While Rabindranath Tagore looks to establish a cinematic discourse independent of the word, within parameters which
are at least  pan-Asian, filmmakers such as Franz Osten inspire themselves from the architectural splendour of Shah Jahan to
create balances of light, free of the grim shadows of Expressionist perversion that preceded the Nazi takeover of a country
aspiring to liberty.
If we celebrate the great moments of our culture like  Sant Tukaram, we are likely to go beyond the story to the
underlying aspirations that govern our lives.
With the expanding frame of exhibition and transmission, it is  possible  that the suppressed individualities which
diverse cultures generate can actively free themselves. To mutate into a compassion that matches the awareness of
a Bodhisattva. In international cinema, the performances of Vishnupant Pagnis as Sant Tukaram and Maria Falconetti
in the  Passion of Joan of Arc almost make a promise that every member of the audience can indeed rise to the same
spiritual stature.
We do not think that attention spans of less than four seconds are desirable. For both action and meditation to be
meaningful, to signify and to transform the signified is what perhaps we can begin to do once again. By embracing the
forms of attention in the cinema as in life that exist in our daily world of dhyana.
To make our forms amenable to bring forth the individuated  swabhava, we have to pass through the obscenity of
our globally capitalised markets. Rather than the creative source which transcends any manual for imaging – be it that of
Hollywood or of a manufacturer of a recorder or a camera, or the instruments and logic of digital interface.
It is the unacknowledged contribution of countries like India that liberated themselves from colonial rule, to both
create discourse for the postmodern and at the same time reclaim that which is sought to be erased or inundated out
of existence.

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