Shyam Benegal (1934-2024): The conscience keeper of Indian cinema

Shyam Benegal, the conscience keeper of Indian cinema who reflected the complexities and contradictions of Indian society like few other directors, died on Monday evening in Mumbai. Benegal had been hospitalised following a stroke a few days after celebrating his 90th birthday on December 14.

He is survived by his wife, Nira, and his daughter, the costume designer Pia Benegal.

Between 1974 and 2023, Benegal directed 24 features, many of which are now considered classics. Films such as Ankur, Nishant, Manthan, Bhumika, Junoon, Kalyug, Mandi, Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda, Mammo and Sardari Begum explored potentially dry subjects in a manner that was unadorned, relatable and engaging. His themes included the warped nature of power structures, the challenges of creating social change and the repression faced by women.

In the process of standing up to injustice, something shifted for his fictional characters – and for viewers too. You often came out of a Benegal film informed or even transformed into thinking about the ways in which India was, is and will perhaps always be.

“Being a filmmaker is like being a writer or a painter,” Benegal told Scroll in a 2021 interview. “It has the precision as well as the worldview. It is local and universal at the same time. Which other profession can give you that? You are like a person in a laboratory who is looking through a microscope as well as a telescope.”

Benegal also made television serials and documentaries. His subjects included Jawaharlal Nehru and Satyajit Ray. Among the gifts he cherished as a young man was a copy of Nehru’s Letters from a Father to His Daughter and Discovery of India, he told his biographer Sangeeta Datta.

Not suprisingly, Benegal’s films were imbued with the Nehruvian spirit of cosmopolitanism, humanitarianism and a vigorous intellectual engagement with society. In 1988, Benegal directed Bharat Ek Khoj, a landmark 53-episode television series based on the march of Indian history documented in Discovery of India.

Benegal’s works were probing and open-ended, rather than didactic or prescriptive. He told Sangeeta Datta, the author of Shyam Benegal: “It would be ridiculously dogmatic and simplistic to think in terms of simple solutions. There are no simple solutions to complex problems…But it is important to explore the problems in Indian society, so that one can at least become aware of the forces that are at work and the way those forces combine and interact.”

His career spanned the most important phase of Indian New Wave cinema, which lasted between the 1970s and the 1990s. Indian New Wave films differed from mainstream entertainment in formal technique and theme – they examined the struggles of disenfranchised Indians, were often without songs and were unafraid of unhappy endings.

Benegal was one of the most committed, proficient and successful representatives of this movement. He created flesh-and-blood characters out of social archetypes, giving audiences unforgettable figures of cruel landlords, proto-feminist women and progressive rebels.

Some of India’s finest actors were introduced or became famous in Shyam Benegal films. They included Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah. Others delivered their most nuanced performances under his careful direction: Om Puri, Amrish Puri, Anant Nag, Mohan Agashe, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Ila Arun, Neena Gupta and KK Raina were among them.

In Bhumika (1977), Benegal directed Smita Patil in one of her greatest performances, as an actress navigating a series of troubled relationships. In the rumbustious comedy Mandi (1983), Benegal directed a minor army of performers and ensured that every one of them stood out. Kalyug (1981) assembled a large cast for an imaginative retelling of the Mahabharata as a war between two business families.

About Benegal’s talent for changing the way audiences looked at actors, Girish Karnad told Sangeeta Datta: “Shyam said ‘buzz off’ to the star system and took the new actors – he created his own star system and his technical crew.”

Apart from actors, Benegal formed long-standing associations with writers, among them Satyadev Dubey, Karnad, Shama Zaidi and Atul Tiwari. Cinematographer Govind Nihalani contributed lyricism to 11 of Benegal’s features before himself turning director. Music composer Vanraj Bhatia was another frequent collaborator, becoming a household name entirely because of his association with Benegal.

“He had his quirks, but we worked well together,” Benegal said about Bhatia in in the 2021 Scroll interview. “I had no problems, although he always complained about me to everybody. With every film, he would say, I am never going to work with you again. Then promptly, I would call him for the next film and he would come.”

Debating differences, weighing the pros and cons of things, acknowledging opposing viewpoints – these characteristics defined the man as well as the filmmaker. For instance, Manthan (1976), loosely inspired by Verghese Kurien’s experiences in setting up the Amul dairy co-operative, acknowledges the difficulties involved in building consensus between inimical groups.

Manthan is neither puff piece about Amul nor a hagiography of Kurien, instead sensitively exploring the challenges of bringing change to a community from the outside.

In 2023, Manthan was re-released in cinemas. Several of Benegal’s movies ran well in theatres, proving the existence of paying audiences for alternative cinema.

Working in the advertising industry possibly sharpened Benegal’s skills as a communicator. He became a feature director relatively late.

Benegal directed scores of commercials starting from the late 1950s . While working at the Lintas advertising agency in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he assisted his boss, Alyque Padamsee, in Padamsee’s stage productions.

Benegal made a few documentaries even before his feature debut Ankur in 1974, notably Child of the Streets (1967). He was 40 when he directed Ankur, a blistering account of a low-caste woman’s exploitation by an upper-caste landlord in her village. In the iconic final scene, a young boy throws a stone in the general direction of the oppressors, signalling a rebellion that has begun but has no obvious outcome.

Ankur was based on a story written by Benegal while he was pursing an economics degree at Nizam’s College in Hyderabad. Before Benegal moved to Mumbai, he had been exposed to cinema, politics and progressive values while growing up in undivided Andhra Pradesh.

Benegal was born on December 14, 1934, into a Konkani-speaking clan that included Guru Dutt as a cousin. Benegal’s father, Sridhar, was a professional still photographer as well as an amateur filmmaker.

“Family films were Benegal’s childhood entertainment,” Datta says in her biography. “He remembers after-dinner screenings on a three-gauge projector, when family members and friends would watch his father’s films on festivals, fairs, picnics and army parades.”

Sridhar Benegal was a Gandhian who encouraged his 10 children to spin khadi at home, Datta writes. Other influences on Benegal during his formative years include Guru Dutt and Satyajit Ray, a cousin who was a member of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Forward Bloc party and relatives who indulged the young Benegal’s growing interest in cinema as well as his voracious reading habit.

“I grew up a time when there were major turning points in political history – for instance, I was a boy when India became independent,” Benegal told Scroll in the 2021 interview. “It wasn’t an easy independence, of course. There was the birth of the Telangana movement, the troubles in the former Nizam state. I was at the intellectual centre of the ferment at both my school and college.”

Benegal’s interest in the intersection of personal beliefs and political leanings found expression on and off the screen. He was one of the petitioners in the case to decriminalise homosexuality, as well as a vocal critic of communalism and attacks on the freedom of expression.

“He looked at the evolution of a young nation and questioned the paths it was taking, especially its responsibility to the less fortunate, marginalized and the subjugated,” Arjun Sengupta writes in Shyam Benegal – Film-maker of the Real India. “This gave his films a broader vision, one that was rooted in the greater march of time. It also made Benegal something of a cinematic historian, who expertly juggled the focus on the individual with the larger currents of the past and society.”

Alongside the features, Benegal’s television serials included the 15-episode serial Yatra (1986), which celebrated the Indian railway network by following passengers on journeys from the southernmost to the northernmost tips of India. There was Samvidhan (2014), about the making of the Indian Constitution. (Benegal was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, where he served between 2006 and 2012.)

Benegal’s most well-regarded films were made during the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, the Indian New Wave that nurtured him had run aground.

Much changed in India in the 1990s. The country embraced market economics over socialism. Marginal caste groups were asserting themselves poltiically. Hindutva was inexorably moving from the fringes to the mainstream.

Benegal’s style and concerns changed too. The meta-narrative Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda (1992), based on the Dharamvir Bharti novel of the same name, has an unreliable narrator and differing viewpoints on the same experience. In the trilogy Mammo (1994), Sardari Begum (1996) and Zubeidaa (2001), all written by Khalid Mohammed, Benegal explored Muslim lives in the past and the present.

Both Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008) and Well Done Abba (2010) skewered the contempt the Indian state often has towards its citizens. Sobriety had given way to farcical comedy – the only sane response in volatile times, the veteran director seemed to be saying.

Though Benegal had an abiding interest in history, his period dramas were among his weaker movies. His final project was the listless Sheikh Mujibur Rahman biopic Mujib: The Making of a Nation in 2023.

More enduring is Benegal’s understanding of history as it is lived by ordinary people. His ability to refract larger historical churnings through individual stories makes some of his films appear fresh and relevant even though they are a few decades old.

“His cinema looks at the history of our country from the perspective of the dispossessed and the forgotten – how in its struggle to reconcile the need for modernity with centuries-old tradition, it has dealt with those at the margins,” Arjun Sengupta writes in his biography. “His breadth of vision and sympathy make him a film-maker whose greatest subject is India itself.”

Despite the numerous awards, the fame and the prestige, Benegal remained courteous and accessible, even to students. Since 1977, he had been following a routine that involved sitting in his office in Mumbai between 10am and 6pm, with a short break for lunch – whenever not shooting or travelling.

Benegal’s cabin had a telephone (but no computer), book-lined shelves and a desk with scripts. His reputation for politeness, attentiveness and generosity charmed nearly everyone who met him.

Naseeruddin Shah was among the actors who benefitted from Benegal’s empathy. “His guidance was gentle, firm and caring, his craft at his fingertips and his knowledge of the milieu impeccable, but what affected me most was the trust he reposed in the actors, the assurance in dealing with them and his compassion for every character,” Shah writes in his memoir And Then One Day about working in Nishant (1975).

In his autobiography Adman-Madman: Unapologetically Prahlad, advertising filmmaker Prahlad Kakar says about meeting Benegal: “There is something to be said for the man who does not patronise or diminish the presence of another, is gifted with the ability to understand contexts with compassion and can speak with perspective, insight, courage and conviction. Signature Shyam Benegal. His work is proof.”

Shyam Benegal was proof of something else – that nice guys can finish first.

Also read:

Interview: Why filmmaking for Shyam Benegal is both ‘a microscope and a telescope’

Book excerpt: Shyam Benegal’s greatest subject is India itself

The Karnad-Benegal-Dubey trinity that transformed theatre and cinema