LAHORE: Shyam Benegal, one of the pioneers of parallel cinema in India, who passed away at the age of 90 in December last was remembered on the concluding day of the Faiz Festival on Sunday.

He made 24 feature films, including the standout movies like Mandi, Ankur, Bhumika, Nishant, Manthan and Suraj Ka Satvan Ghora. Indian screenwriter and actor Atul Tiwari was in conversation moderated by filmmaker Sarmad Khoosat. Tiwari has written a book to pay tributes to his mentor in his life, Maestro, which was launched at the festival.

Tiwari said Benegal turned 90 last year on Dec 14 and he was wondering what gift he could give to his mentor who had started decluttering his life as he had donated all his books, all films, equipment, tapes and everything else. He said he decided to write a book on the 36 years that he had spent with Benegal. While warning the readers against taking the book as some scholarly work, he termed it a fan moment of a fan for his mentor. He said a Hindi translation of the book would appear soon under the title, Wah Ustad.

Tiwari remembered the day when he met Benegal for the first time through his theatre guru after the National School of Drama days when he was more involved in theatre. He went to meet Shyam Benegal with a letter from his guru and a bottle of single malt in Mumbai (then Bombay). “Until the last days of his life, Shyam Benegal used to receive phone calls in his office himself despite having a secretary which is unthinkable in the Indian film industry these days. I call him the last gentleman of our film industry.” He said it was a brief meeting as Benegal did not give him much chance for a detailed meeting; however, later on when he was making the Discovery of India, many of his NSD friends became a part of it. He said during the making of Mandi, about 30 people were launched in film and the Discovery of India was a long project with 52 episodes spanning over five years and it looked like all people from the NSD had got together for it. It was during the making of Discovery of India that he went to meet Benegal again who was looking for the writers for the documentary and he had given Tiwari Rs10,000 to do research for writing.

When asked the quality that made Benegal distinct from his other peer filmmakers, Tiwari said it was empathy that made him stand out among his fellows. According to him, Benegal had written the story of Ankur when he was a college student. In Bombay, his maternal cousin, Guru Dutt, was a big name but he refused to work with him as he did not like Dutt’s cinema and decided to come to Mumbai to make ad films. When he made his first feature film, Ankur, he selected a Dalit woman to be his protagonist and empathy could be seen in all his films without any kind of sloganeering, including Nishant, story of a schoolteacher, and Manthan, a film on dairy farmers.

Tiwari said that Benegal’s Mandi was based on a short story (Anandi) of Ghulam Abbas. He said Ghulam Abbas had got the inspiration for his story from Jawaharlal Nehru. Giving details to prove his point, he said in 1920s, the Muslim League and Congress had started taking part in election for the first time and these elections were held for mayorship and municipal corporations. In Kolkata (then Calcutta), Nehru won the election of mayor. When he became the mayor, some members of Congress approached him to complain against an area called Mir Ganj where prostitutes used to live and wanted its “cleansing” but Nehru refused to do that, warning that people would go after the prostitutes wherever they went.

He said he liked Bhumika for its portrayal of present, past and future with different tonality and there was shortage of raw stock and he used different colours for different periods shown in the film. He remembered that Benegal was a vociferous reader and used to read a lot even for doing research for his films.

Published in Dawn, February 17th, 2025