From hit movies made by Indian women about Indian women, we move on to celebrate the late Shyam Benegal (1934-2024) whose movies were amongst the first in Hindi cinema to give women agency and to give them – rather than male actors – centrestage. Growing up in India through the 1970s and 1980s meant being taken by your parents to either watch Mr Benegal’s movies at an art house cinema hall or watching them on Doordarshan. As Sanjukta Sharma writes for The Print: “Few Indian directors have tackled the interiority – and the burden and bliss – of the average Indian woman with as much curiosity and depth….
No matter how progressive and clear she is about who she is, nine out of 10 leading women characters in Bollywood changes trajectory when she meets a man. She transforms and adjusts – from wilful to pliant. The multitasker in her gets to work…
Shyam Benegal, who died on December 23 at the age of 90, would be proud of today’s celebrated outliers – the women-centric globe-trotters such as Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (after all, which other director knows women bonding and rallying around each other better than Benegal) or Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies. Few Indian directors have tackled the interiority – and the burden and bliss – of the average Indian woman with as much curiosity and depth as Benegal.”
Two actors had their careers defined by the movies they made with Mr Benegal – Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil: “Benegal made stars out of actresses. The two who burst into the scene and, with his help, shaped the realist acting idioms necessary for Benegal’s cinema, were Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi….
Azmi and Patil got their most memorable roles, of women whose strengths didn’t emerge from being overt rebels or male-bashing or trying to be like powerful men. Despite their past and the cruelties and injustices of their present, Lakshmi (Ankur), Rukmani and Sushila (Nishant), and Usha (Bhumika) had enough agency to make choices and stick by whatever or whoever those choices invited…
Azmi’s debut in Ankur (1974) as Lakshmi, a domestic help who falls in love with the man of the house where she works and gets pregnant, won her such accolades rivalled only by Patil’s equally potent reserves for realist roles. Big forces of feudal power structures and gender oppression play out in Ankur, in which Lakshmi makes her husband believe she is pregnant with his baby.
Nishant (1975) had two fierce women as protagonists: Rukmani, played by Patil, and Sushila played by Azmi. In Manthan (1976), Patil is Bindu, a woman involved with a rural dairy revolution based on Verghese Kurien’s involvement with the Amul cooperative movement in Gujarat.
Mandi (1983) is about sex workers and how politics and a red light district meet in apocryphal ways. Trikal (1985), set in 1960s Goa when Portuguese rule was on its way out, is about three generations of women in a rambling Goa household. Benegal cast Leela Naidu in a comeback role as the wounded matriarch…
Benegal’s women showed the way, with quiet courage and a refusal to look away from difficult choices.”
In this great director’s vast repertoire of award-winning work, one movie stays with us nearly 40 years since one of us first watched it on TV: Bhumika (or The Role). Made in 1977 with a then unknown cast of actors (each of whom would go on to become stars in their own right) – Smita Patil, Amol Palekar, Naseeruddin Shah and Amrish Puri – the movie is a biopic of the Marathi screen & stage actress on the 1940s, Hansa Wadkar. Sanjukta Sharma has the following to say about Bhumika:
“Rewind to the year 1977. India’s only woman prime minister Indira Gandhi is on her way out after subjecting the country to three tumultuous years of civil liberty pillage…Benegal’s Bhumika is released in the same year.
Smita Patil plays the protagonist Usha….
In the film, Usha’s life unfolds from her teenage years to middle age. Throughout the biopic, we see Usha juggling the needs of others along with her own. She hardly shouts but never lets her oppressors rest or look away. Her sexuality and life choices propel the script, and Usha takes responsibility for her own mistakes and frailties) –
This a woman encumbered by regressive traditions. She searches for reprieves from them, but never are her choices either easy or out of her own grasp.”
50 years on from when Shyam Benegal made Bhumika and 70 years on from the era in which Hansa Wadkar graced the Marathi stage, many of the same issues & choices confront India’s women.
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