It is difficult to describe Kumar Shahani. As a filmmaker, he objected to people calling him avant garde, because he considered himself a traditionalist — his teachers, including Ritwik Ghatak, D.D. Kosambi, Arolkar Bua, Pandit Jal Balaporia and Robert Bresson, were all traditionalists who were also radicals. His films were never targeted to anyone, not even to the filmmaker. Locating Shahani in a legacy of artistic disruptions allows us to see him as a filmmaker who paved a distinctive path of his own while simultaneously continuing a tradition of connecting with cultural traditions that are deeply-rooted in the past. His cinema, with its layers of poetry and quiet spectacle, makes one pause and think. It was not positivist cinema that emphasised on realism. It never sought to present the world as it was. Shahani believed that it was not realism that could get us very far because reality in an image has to be more than what the single frame could offer. Known for films that often felt like aesthetic encounters that defied easy linearity, Shahani also never believed in the concept of generation gap and consumerism. He believed that when a filmmaker works with a preconception about what an audience can understand or not understand, the scope of art would shrink. In our conversations, Shahani spoke about the importance of not just seeing a film, but making connections: The invisible made visible.
Shahani always stood against the market and the state. For him, both the institutions tend to kill art and so he always tried to do something else than what the market demanded or the state forced, inspired by gurus like Ritwik Ghatak, D.D. Kosambi, Arolkar Bua, Pandit Jal Balaporia and Robert Bresson. In today’s digital world of short-format content and streaming’s binge culture, when the aesthetics of cinema are dying and the audience’s attention span is shrinking rapidly, Kumar’s body of work feels keenly relevant.
The cinema of Kumar Shahani is different and distinctive. Along with his training in filmmaking, he was also drawn to the Gwalior school of khayal music, learnt under Vidushi Neela Bhagwat, Arolkar Bua, and Pandit Jal Balaporia. He was also a philosopher like Kosambi, who loved Sanskrit and used a lot of elements of Indian aesthetics, like from the Natyashastra, in his works.
In the essay titled Notes for an Aesthetic of Cinema Sound, Shahani noted, “BOTH THE SENSES of sight and sound, it may be noted, arose out of the need to perceive movement; to locate an object, and one’s own relationship to it; to gauge the pressures at work; to achieve points of equilibrium and to move in a controlled manner not only from static point to static point, as we seemed to imagine in our classical civilisations, but to find in these different vibrations, and differences of pressure, the vitality of being itself.”
Here’s a companion guide to five films that serve as an introduction to the cinema of Kumar Shahani.