IN MEMORIAM: KUMAR SHAHANI (1940-2024)
Prismatic Ground presents a four-film tribute to the late Indian Parallel Cinema filmmaker Kumar Shahani, featuring rare 35mm prints imported from Australia courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
Program text by Ashish Rajadhyaksha.
Special Thanks: Rewati Shahani, Uttara Shahani, Rimli Bhattacharya, Roshan Shahani, Rosie Hays, Irfan Faras, Ashish Avikunthak, Manoj Kumar, Ashish Rajadhyaksha.
Kumar Shahani was born in Larkana, now in Pakistan. His family moved to Bombay following the Partition (the city was the location of his epic film Tarang). At the Film & Television Institute in Pune he met his two mentors, the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak and the historian-polymath D.D. Kosambi. Later in France on a scholarship, he assisted Bresson on Une Femme Douce (1969) while participating in the May 1968 movements and, for all his interest in diverse cultural and civilisational histories, continued to identify himself as a Marxist. Of his eight completed feature-length films, four (Maya Darpan, 1972, Tarang, 1984, Kasba, 1991 and Char Adhyay, 1997) were fictional, and another four (Khayal Gatha, 1989, Bhavantarana, 1991, Bamboo Flute, 2000, and Priye Charushile, 2009) work with a more abstract form combining several genres and performative styles.
Little of this history captures how radically different, even isolating, his career has been from what Indian cinema has seen in the forty years during which he made films. Over the years his work has required a radicalisation of aesthetic practices drawn from ancient Indian materialism, epic structures from the Mahabharata and other classical texts, often from music and, as his career went on, from dance (several major Indian dancers have performed in his films). Politically, his work often invoked a time (as with his adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Char Adhyay) of the crumbling of India’s national imagination, requiring new forms of enunciation and performance, central to what he once called (in a manifesto he wrote on film sound) the need to ‘innovate [and] individuate’.
This imagination of cinema now forms a vast body of writing, teaching, film workshops, some theatre that is being gradually put together by students and former colleagues. The films themselves, resolutely on 35 mm celluloid, are in the process of restoration.
—Ashish Rajadhyaksha
