Learning with Mani Kaul: ‘He unlocked something you did not yet know you knew’

It would have been mid 1981 when I first heard about Mani Kaul. The following summer I would complete my undergraduate studies in English Literature, and I was toying with the idea of becoming a writer, without quite knowing where to begin. Mani was in Madras at the time to make a print of Satah se Uttha Admi at Prasad Labs and the Hindu ran an interview with him.

When Palghat Mani Iyer plays the mrdangam, Mani said in that interview, he is not simply playing the notes, he is constructing the silences between them. I decided immediately to apply to the Film Institute, as we referred to FTII then because I wanted to study in a place that helped me think like that. How I persuaded my parents is its own story.

I would meet Mani sometime in my first year when he visited the Institute, as we also referred to it, as if it were the only Institute on earth. I walked up to tell him my story and he laughed. You didn’t want to meet me, you wanted to join the Institute, he said, and took some of us out for lunch to a place Ritwik Ghatak used to take Kumar Shahani and him, he said, showing us laughingly how Ghatak would request for the cheque with a flourish.

I told him then about the musician MD Ramanathan on whom I wanted to make a film. MDR is still unique in the Carnatic tradition for his ati vilambit rendering and extraordinary originality. Silence was integral to MDR’s being and reflected in his music. He did not need to construct it, he began from and persisted in it, the notes just punctuations to notate its expanding contours.

Mani understood what I was saying immediately. In the You Tube clip below he speaks of the Self in precisely this way. As a Tam Brahm, I had grown up with Carnatic music, learning it from childhood, but Mani gave me a new perspective on it that became my entry point into cinema at 20.

I think the next time I met Mani was when he visited campus for a lecture at the National Film Archives’ summer film appreciation course. He came bearing Robert Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography and Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1 & 2 and for a while xerox copies floated everywhere.

I remember walking into the classroom theatre for his lecture. The small room was already packed and I had to enter through the projection chamber. Peering from between the others already standing at the back of the room, I heard Mani discussing how Bresson shows violence on screen. Does one actually need to show/recreate violence to evoke it, he asked. No, you can show it just from the way a door bangs, I piped up.

He turned with a touch of surprise, locating me in the crowd with a gleam in his eye, followed immediately by his characteristic lopsided grin. As I write now parsing the memory in hindsight, I remember the heavy spring door that connected the projection chamber to the classroom. I would have shut it carefully not wanting to disturb the class. As a matter of fact it shut fairly silently, with just a dull thud, but because of its sheer weight it always suggested/threatened to bang, at least to my active imagination. My answer must have come from that immediately preceding experience, but I didn’t make the connection then, and was as surprised as him that I knew the/an answer.

It has occurred many times since, and others will surely attest to this too, that he would listen so attentively to what you said, and ask precisely the right question, to unlock something you did not yet know you knew.

Deleuze speaks of this, not in the cinema books but in his very first book Bergsonism. A speculative problem, says Deleuze, is solved as soon as it is properly stated. I discovered the line only around 2015-16 when I taught the text for the first time, and I immediately remembered/recognised Mani in it.

It is a moot point whether Mani too had read that book. More to the point may be that cognition is a more unconscious process than scientists recognise, and indeed for both Bergson and Deleuze, intuition is a legitimate cognitive method.

More personally, this was the moment in that FA classroom as I recall, that I became really focused and receptive to Mani. He brought a certain coherence to my thinking, that was also a psychic coherence. I learnt to trust not just my unconscious, but the unconscious in general, and still watch student films in particular in this way. Sometimes fortuitously others watch my work too with similar attention.

I think this is what film pedagogy and criticism can do best – not psychoanalyse the filmmaker reductively but identify nascent growth and nudge it into the light. I still see myself in some part in/as that gleam in Mani’s eye, which for all its powerful affirmation did not attempt to possess, restrict or inhibit. It allowed and in fact nurtured flowering.

Svabhav, or as we would say in Tamil svabhavam – immanence, was a concept very dear to him. I remember too in this dense cluster of memories, Mani laughingly saying once that you just had to add the ‘um’ sound to Sanskrit and you arrived at Tamil.

Another memory imprinted in my consciousness is from Bombay. I had completed my course and returned home to Madras when I heard that he had visited the Institute, watched some recent diploma films, and liked mine a lot. He would go on to mention Gulmohur Kaal as an “event of the year” in the Times of India poll the following year, along with Ghatak’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, the print of which was also rediscovered in 1985.

I mention this dutifully in my CV, but what really touched me was something else. He organised screenings of my film in Bombay and had invited me to one, and spoke for a fairly long time to initiate the discussion post-screening. I listened as if he were speaking of someone else, or even just an idea of cinema, for that was really the register of his speech.

I’ve tried my best to remember what he said, but remember only that even then it was not just the words. He spoke directly to some deep part of me – and everyone else in the room – and something awoke in me that day, that has remained alive and flickering through the darkest of times. Even when wantonly smothered it has always sprung back to life.

And in that peculiar way that the world has, I remember a young boy, one of my juniors from FTII, getting up to ask a question soon after Mani finished. There was something in his tone and perhaps also in what he said, and the mood was immediately shattered. I could see that it disturbed Mani’s deep concentration and he answered quite sharply, and it developed quickly into a heated altercation. I sat silent, hugging and protecting what I felt to myself.

But after the session I went up to the boy and tried to open conversation and maybe put things in context. But he was not open to it. So I left in search of Mani and found him already in the lift. I rushed up and said Mani, it is strange how I understood literally every word you said. You must be the only one, he replied, adding, Now get in, I’ve been holding the lift open long enough already.

Despite this date which happens to be his birthday from 1944, Mani was no martyr. He may have come frustratingly close to it many times, but he had too much of a sense of humour and just a basic joy in life to ever remain one. I would go on to assist him in his 1989 film Before my Eyes, and our conversations would continue in as staggered a fashion as long as he physically could, but those are stories for another day.

Soudhamini is a filmmaker (Thalarndhadhu – It Rested, 1989; Pitru Chayya, 1991; Saga of a Poet, 2000; Meditations on the Tiger, 2006; Vac or What the Lightning Said, 2009; The Temple Nagaswaram, 2014; Nadhi Smriti – Memories of a River, 2017, Ode to Uśas: This time let’s get the Dawn right, 2023). She has also taught film and immersive media in India, USA and Australia. She is currently engaged in converting her doctoral dissertation into a book titled VR and the Virtual Self: Ātma or Avatar (Edinburgh University Press).