Kumar Shahani’s unique cinematic language

He used the human body, silence, architecture, and sound as interconnected elements to tell stories, rather than relying on dialogue and plot.

On the set of Kasba with K.K. Mahajan.

I am no film critic. I have had the privilege of being Kumar Shahani’s friend for over 20 years and have seen almost all his well-known films. I also had the privilege of talking to him about his films. He was deeply interested in the nuances of language, its sounds and words, its phrases, and its syntax. He was sensitive to the use of sibilants and regretted the disappearance of the subjunctive from human languages. He regarded language as constitutive of his commitment to his unique cinematic idiom.

Multiversal in its articulation, his cinema is equally sensitive to the visual and the auditory, to the human body, dance, drama, spectacle, painting, architecture, sculpture, nature, poetry, and music. Since his demise on February 24, 2024, I have watched most of his films again, sometimes several portions frame by frame. As December 7, his birthday, approaches, I reflect on his work.

It is not easy to watch Kumar’s films. They are not entertainment, action, or romance movies. Most people apologetically remark, “It is good. But very slow. I do not really understand the film. There is no story, no action. It just does not move.” His films move frame by frame like a series of paintings connected at a level of abstraction that is not easy to grasp; one must watch a Kumar film with the patience, dedication, and commitment it demands. Each shot is carefully crafted, and the motifs keep returning during the course of the film, becoming an essential part of its movement and narrative.

The symbolism in ‘Maya Darpan’

In his much-talked-about debut, Maya Darpan (1972), as the credits roll up, the camera carefully introduces us to the lacklustre discoloured walls of the feudal mansion where a substantial part of the film is located with an incredible mixing of sound in the background; it is impossible to figure out what the sounds are or their source: maybe trains screeching and puffing, handloom shafts moving in a rhythm (in a greater part of the film, the sources of sound will remain separated from the sound itself), yet the sounds in different pitch and intonation keep returning. The camera moves carefully around the decayed feudal building as Vani Jayaram sings aa jaa rii nindiyaa.

One notices the clothesline (where, in a crucial sequence, Taran’s bua [aunt] will be seen spreading out clothes for drying later in the film), the windows, the walls and corridors, and the switchboards, with the camera finally focussing on the black patches on the walls and taking the viewer to the window and door covered with bamboo blinds (Dewan Sahib’s room as we learn later).

All these images have specific, nuanced associations with the narrative and the interplay of the feudal with the industrial, and indeed with the life of Taran, the central character. Taran’s bua is introduced, sitting on the bed in a white sari, the camera focussed on her back as one gets a fleeting glimpse of Taran, who in a shot few seconds apart, wakes up, moves towards the window, and then outside to the tap to wash her face.

Note that this shot could have been taken from any angle to show Taran, the tap, and the water, but it is shot with the camera focussed on Taran’s back. One neither sees the tap nor the water; one only hears the sound of water. The sources of the birds’ songs are also hidden. Taran’s straight-spined walk, her bua, the tap, the corridors, the walls, the room with the bamboo blinds will all return again and again.

Kumar Shahani, who died on February 24, 2024 is described as a self-consciously avant-garde filmmaker.

There is a formalism here, not just of symbols and structures,, and not just of colour, sounds, and movement but almost the kind one associates with geometry. When I use the term multilinguality in the context of Kumar’s films, I do not simply mean fluidity among human languages and paralinguistic features, which is indeed central. It has three parameters: the innate universal cognitive and aesthetic space we are born with; its articulation in a diversity of forms, including language, music, dance, painting, architecture, sculpture, spectacle, and the erotic; and thirdly a fluidity among these that is sometimes carefully crafted and sometimes just left open to the viewer’s interpretation. What binds these together is Kumar’s concern for the human condition, where violence and oppression betray his anxieties.

Multi-dimensional approach

Not just Maya Darpan but Tarang (1984), Khayal Gatha (1989), Kasba (1990), Bhavantarana (1991), Char Adhyay (1997), and Bamboo Flute (2000), among others, also show the formal magic he could create through abstract negotiation of the four dimensions mentioned above.

To the best of my knowledge, Kumar’s articulation, for example, of the multilinguality of the movements of different parts of the body and the total body as a unique creation of nature remains unparalleled in cinematic history. Very often in his films, the camera focusses on just the arms and hands or legs and feet of an actor. He delivers speech, sometimes subtle and quiet, sometimes loud and clear, through the movement of different body parts, as well as with colours and music. Bhavantarana, which is a tribute to the finest exponent of Odissi, Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, opens with the sounds of rock being cut, and one soon watches the dedication to the Guru followed by a frame showing A.K. Ramanujan’s translation of the Kannada poet Mahadeviyakka’s lines:

Breath for fragrance,

who needs flowers?

The camera zeroes in on yellow rocks and a moving shadow on them before one sees a bent knee, the focus on the back muscles of the thigh and tibia. The hammer and chisel are still not visible; the story of stone-cutting is told through the contraction and release of the hamstring and thigh and calf muscles. It is the movement of these muscles that conveys to the viewer the rhythm of the hammer and chisel. This short sequence brings to life Kumar’s synaesthetic control on the visual and the audible; shapes and shadows, colour and space, stillness and movement.

Poster of Maya Darpan.

This visual language is carried on through the muscles of the arms; finally, one sees the back moving against the rock back and forth before, through a shot that pans across lush nature, one sees a sculpture-like shape (focussed on the ear) on a tree-trunk, and finally a short Odissi performance with music and poetry. Kumar’s genius brings together sculpture, music, poetry, and dance, and the oral and the written through the multilinguality of the human body, its parts, and nature. Kumar was intensely in love with the human body and mind, and equally worried about the precarious human condition.

Taran is the only one who has a name in Maya Darpan. The others we see are her father—the Dewan sahib (always in white, authoritarian), her bua (always in white, loving), her brother in Assam (never seen in the film), and the young engineer for whom Taran has an intense but unarticulated longing. She walks statue-like through the corridors of the decaying feudal mansion—straight, speechless, the camera often focussed on her back. Her suffocation and repression in the patriarchal world are articulated through both her silence and the music, sounds, and poetry in the background.

The intense poetry in the background tells us that she walks lonely across the sun and soil. She makes several attempts to talk to her father about her loneliness, but she is scared and aborts the dialogue each time (the bamboo blinds return in a telling fashion). Finally, she enters the room and with great hesitation and effort manages to seat herself on the edge of the sofa.

The short dialogue is at cross purposes. Her father says: “You don’t like it here, Taran.” For Taran’s response, the camera focusses on her hands and feet, her fears and restlessness expressed through her wringing hands and nails, and the dragging of her feet under her saree, an action she repeats throughout the film. Dewan sahib tells her not to worry about him and go to her brother, saying it will make her feel better.

A still from Khayal Gatha.

She turns to her bua, who is hanging up clothes to dry. The aunt starts a long monologue; she also tells Taran to go wherever she wants, realising her frustration and the indifference and arrogance of the Dewan sahib. She tells Taran: “What are you doing here anyway, day and night, night and day?” Taran is quiet throughout this monologue. The aunt is the one talking, but the camera is focussed on Taran, her response captured through her bangled arms, which she keeps pulling up and down, lost in deep thought; the sounds of her bangles clicking becoming the background of bua’s monologue.

Once again, one notices the subtle multilinguality of the limbs. Taran seems to have taken a decision to free herself, as she pulls her bangles up and down. Dressed in deep purple, she runs towards the railway track as if to embrace liberty, her body saying what no words could. This celebration of silence and speech, stillness and movement, the lyrical and earthly, colour and whiteness, and dance, music, and sculpture is seen in most of Kumar’s films.

Conveying meaning through trans-cultural grammar

Trains, trams, tracks, buses, and carts appear in many of Kumar’s films; they are integral to the characters and the narrative. Taran often walks along the railway tracks, walking across the sun and soil. Through the engineer’s literacy classes and the walking along the tracks, the film announces the beginnings of what the arrival of literacy, industry, and a road network is likely to do. There is not much that can be called “dialogue” in the traditional sense; it is the expressionless and speechless movements that speak through the frames.

Kumar’s films are integral to the characters and the narrative. 

Stylised walking does most of the talking. There are no facial expressions, even during conversations in the courtyard, there is no sustained discussion, just comments passed on the old and present situation. Taran’s helplessness and her struggle with nothingness is seen in her dusting the chairs again and again in the film. It is never explicitly stated but the contradictions between decaying feudalism, sustained patriarchy, and industrialisation are played out through the mind and body of Taran. She finally reaches out to the engineer, but their yearning and fulfilment is again captured mostly through a focus on their feet and slippers. The Chhau dance coda in the film remains the most memorable statement of multilinguality in cinematic history.

A still from Bhavantarana.

Maya Darpan was a lyric in which Kumar had to “counterpoint the demands of the metrical structure to the fluidity of life”. The syntax of colours had a trans-cultural grammar for Kumar. The red and the green symbolised fertility while the orange and the blue encapsulated fire and water.

Kumar’s characters are often framed against doors and windows, with trains passing by behind or in front of them. There is a synchronisation of the dimensions of aesthetics, multilinguality, and social concerns in most of Kumar’s films. The formal and the fluid merge effortlessly. The world would soon see it again in Priye Charushile (2019), a film Kumar could not himself see in its entirety.

Slip between the cup and the lip

Around 2002, Kumar began to plan a film on the Constitution of India in association with his partner Rimli and me. That film was spelt out in detail. The aim was to make a 35 mm epic-musical of approximately 90 minutes, with the focus on the making of the Constitution, its premises, and the highly civilised and scholarly discussions that took place in the Constituent Assembly debates to ensure that the individual and institutions function in harmony with each other to maintain India’s cultural and linguistic diversity.

Poster of Char Adhyay.

This film was to enable the people and landscapes of India to speak for themselves—without being trapped inside polarising ideological dogmas—using the cinematic medium, which brings together oral and visual elements of democratic discourse. The proposal was submitted to the European Union in 2003 through the Vidya Bhawan Society, Udaipur, Rajasthan. When, after several months, Vidya Bhawan was asked for its account number, we thought we had got the funding. Why the project slipped between the cup and the lip, we have no idea.

We turned to it again in 2022, when Hariharan Krishnan and Vasantha Surya also joined us. More than ever before, Kumar said, a film on the values enshrined in the Constitution is urgently needed.

We helplessly watched the oppression of social movements not only in India but across the world. We watched several activists, including Stan Swamy, Sudha Bharadwaj, Varavara Rao, Anand Teltumbde, Gautam Navlakha, Rona Wilson, Arun Ferreira, Hany Babu, and Shoma Sen, get arrested. When Gauri Lankesh was shot dead on September 5, 2017, we looked at each other with empty, blank eyes.

Across the globe too, the dignity of the individual was in a precarious state as both freedom of speech and freedom of assembly were being increasingly denied. But the film did not get made. Kumar left us in February this year, and with his passing, all hopes of having a Kumar film on the Constitution disappeared.

Rama Kant Agnihotri retired from Delhi University and is currently Professor Emeritus with the Vidya Bhawan Society, Udaipur.