Shyam Benegal (1934-2024), who has died at 90, was a scholar of life, and a philosopher connected to the human heart. As an auteur, he showed India in all its contradictions, its flaws, its beauty, and its pain
The news came like the first abrupt cut of a film reel gone silent. No music. No crescendo. Just the hard, unrelenting blankness of an end title card: Shyam Benegal (1934-2024), gone. And like that, the world tilted slightly off-axis, the shadows falling differently, the light suddenly colder. Cinema, as Benegal saw it, was perhaps not about the light at all. It was about what the light revealed and, more importantly, what it chose to hide. In Benegal’s films, the camera was less an observer and more a conspirator, shifting, adjusting its lens to overhear whispers, peering through doorways at fractured lives, lingering on faces too tired to mask their truths. His passing feels like the shutter of that lens has closed forever — a frame left incomplete, the movement within suddenly still.
When I last spoke to him in September 2023, ahead of the release of Mujib: The Making of a Nation, his biopic of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Bangladesh, he was fighting his failing health. He had suffered kidney failure and was reliant on regular dialysis sessions, but remained remarkably undeterred in his enthusiasm for storytelling. He spoke with the excitement of a first-time filmmaker, as though he was just starting out, even though his body of work already stood as a towering monument to the art of socially conscious cinema. He had lost none of his vitality, and his ability to connect the personal and the political remained as sharp as ever.
A new lexicon for Hindi cinema
Born in 1934 in Trimulgherry (Secunderabad), Benegal’s father was a nationalist and a Gandhian. He grew up immersed in the ideals of a free and equitable India, values that would later permeate his films. His father, a still photographer and amateur filmmaker, unknowingly laid the foundation of his son’s future career by introducing him to the world of moving images. While his contemporaries might have gravitated toward the opulence of Bollywood, Benegal’s vision was rooted in the deeper, often overlooked, realities of Indian society. When he arrived in Bombay (now Mumbai), he first honed his skills in advertising, making hundreds of films, which proved to be an apprenticeship in storytelling, visual language, and the human psyche.
The 1940s saw the Parallel Cinema movement take root, with films by auteurs like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Bimal Roy, Mrinal Sen, Tapan Sinha, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Chetan Anand, Guru Dutt and V. Shantaram seizing the imagination of viewers with their distinct cinematic vocabulary. The 1950s, often hailed as the ‘Golden Age’ of Indian cinema, were dominated by filmmakers like Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, and Bimal Roy, who balanced popular appeal with a degree of social consciousness. However, by the late 1960s, there was a perceptible shift in Hindi cinema; the Film Finance Corporation (FCC) was established in 1960.
Also read: Shyam Benegal interview: ‘Why I made Sheikh Mujibur Rahman biopic in Bengali’
It was in this milieu that Benegal burst on the scene with his debut. He changed the grammar. Ankur (1974), his first feature, which seeped in our consciousness, quietly, like water finding cracks in concrete, marked the beginning of what came to be known as the New Wave Cinema, a movement characterised by its commitment to realism and its rejection of the melodramatic excesses and formulaic storytelling of Hindi films. Directors like Mrinal Sen, Mani Kaul, and later Govind Nihalani (Benegal’s frequent collaborator) were also part of this movement, which sought to articulate the lived experiences of ordinary Indians.
Ankur was a bold statement of intent. While many of his contemporaries in the Parallel Cinema movement adhered to a strictly anti-commercial ethos, Benegal managed to create a narrative space that was both artistically rigorous and commercially viable — a feat that would come to define his work. The story of Lakshmi, a happily married Dalit woman seduced by the son of her landlord, was a tale of oppression and a piercing meditation on power, morality, and desire. Shabana Azmi, in her debut role, brought Lakshmi to life with a finesse that still lingers in the memory of anyone who has seen the film.
A mosaic of voices
Benegal was an auteur whose body of work reflected the social, political, and moral fabric of India with a precision and clarity that few could match. In film after film, Benegal taught us to listen, to see, to feel. In his world, nothing was ornamental. Every detail was loaded, every silence heavy with meaning. His cinema was mosaic-like, assembling fragments of lives into something larger, richer, and infinitely complex. With Bhumika (1977), the life of an actress became the life of every woman caught between marriage and love. Smita Patil’s face in that film — luminous and haunted — became a landscape of its own, shifting between longing, rage, and resignation. Then came Manthan (1976), in which a single village’s fight to form a milk cooperative unfolded like an epic battle. The film, funded by contributions from 500,000 farmers, blurred the lines between art and activism.
An autodidact with a deep appreciation for the works of Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Karel Reisz, Benegal brought a formal rigour to his filmmaking that was as much a product of his eclectic influences as it was a reflection of his unique perspective. The Indian epics — the Ramayana and Mahabharata — provided him with a reservoir of archetypes and moral quandaries, while the techniques of magical realism and European art cinema allowed him to imbue his narratives with a layered complexity. However, his films never succumbed to pedantry or self-indulgence; instead, they remained deeply moral and political, resonating with audiences across spectrums.
Ankur was a bold statement of intent. Benegal managed to create a narrative space that was both artistically rigorous and commercially viable.
Kalyug (1981), his reinterpretation of the Mahabharata, was a story of corporate greed and familial betrayal; it showed how myth, history, and modernity could be all variations of the same human failings. Benegal refused to confine himself to any single mode of storytelling. While he drew from the traditions of New Indian Cinema, his work also engaged with the tropes and idioms of Bollywood, albeit with a critical eye. This dual engagement is evident in his later films like Zubeidaa (2001) and Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008), in which he explored the intersection of fantasy and reality, tradition and modernity, with a deftness that belied the profundity of his themes.
A scholar of life, a philosopher connected to the human heart
Behind Benegal’s work was an intellectual curiosity that could not be quelled. He was a scholar of life, of politics, of the world around him. He was deeply invested in the history of India, in its culture, in its people. His work was a meditation on the country’s past, but it was also a critique of its present, a reflection of how the country had evolved — or not — over time. He never sugarcoated the harsh realities of Indian society. But neither did he demonise it. He showed us India in all its contradictions, its flaws, its beauty, and its pain.
For those who worked with him, Benegal was a mentor, a guide, a teacher. He took young filmmakers under his wing, helping them understand the deeper meanings of cinema, showing them that filmmaking wasn’t just about the mechanics of telling a story but about the intellectual engagement with the world. He was instrumental in shaping the next generation of filmmakers, helping them understand the importance of content, of substance, of depth.
For all his intellectualism, Benegal was deeply connected to the human heart. He understood the importance of emotion in storytelling. His films were not cold, detached exercises in humanism; they were deeply emotional. He captured the tenderness of human relationships, the bonds that tie us together, even as they unravel. He understood that at the core of every human story is emotion — the drive to love, to survive, to make sense of the chaos around us. His films resonated with this emotion, quietly, profoundly.
“As a philosophical filmmaker Benegal animates the existential crisis of the downtrodden Indian, the ‘subaltern’, the serf, the peasant and the woman, in modern India’s continuing political and social becoming. By privileging these gazes, by providing them an articulate voice, by allowing his viewers a measure of participation in their lives, Benegal’s movies contribute to a deeper understanding of a highly dynamic polity whose most characteristic feature is continued conflict and contestation across its social hierarchies; his works, which are highly specific to Indian regions in their depiction of local mores, traditions, languages, festivals and rites, do not permit glibness in speaking of Indian culture, which emerges on the screen as a rich and deep body of historical practices, attitudes and moral sensibilities,” writes Samir Chopra in Shyam Benegal: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2021).
Also read: Shyam Benegal at 90: 12 films by the auteur who gave Indian cinema an alternative idiom
“Benegal thus emerges as a serious philosopher of culture in enabling a critique and appreciation of the ‘highest’ artistic and cultural expressions of a complex polity like India; most prominently, he allows for an inspection of a ‘local politics’ that emerges where Indian cultural and social forms — the family, the Indian film industry, classical music and dance, rural social hierarchies — intersect with the balances and variations of power that accompany them,” Chopra adds.
The final cut
To watch a Shyam Benegal film was to stand in front of a mirror held slightly askew. The image you saw wasn’t perfect, but it was true. He never flattered his subjects or his audience. He asked hard questions without providing easy answers. Off-screen, Benegal was the opposite of his work’s intensity — a soft-spoken man whose presence didn’t demand attention but commanded it nonetheless. He was an ethnographer, and a chronicler of the textures of Indian life. His process was meticulous, almost meditative. When we last spoke, we discussed plans for a follow-up conversation, in which he would talk at length about his craft. That conversation will never happen now. His voice, measured and thoughtful, has joined the silence.
Benegal’s passing feels like an abrupt fade to black. Not a slow dissolve, but a hard, uncompromising cut despite the fact that we had a swelling score that should have prepared us: his long-standing ailment. He leaves behind a void that feels as vast and unknowable as his body of work. But perhaps that’s fitting. Most of Benegal’s films never offered closure. They ended, but they never truly resolved. They left you with questions, with discomfort, with the gnawing sense that life is far messier than the stories we tell about it. His death is the same. It leaves us grappling with the weight of his absence, with the enormity of what he has left behind.
But the frame isn’t empty. His films remain more relevant than ever, like time capsules and mirrors, like windows and walls. They challenge us to look closer, to think deeper, to feel more acutely. Benegal was a cartographer of India’s soul. He mapped the contours of our struggles and joys, our failures and triumphs. And though the map is now complete, the journey it charts will continue for as long as there are eyes to see and minds to understand. As the credits roll on his life, I can’t help but imagine him behind the camera one last time, capturing this moment from some unseen vantage point. The light falls just so. The shadows illuminate. And in the stillness, there is meaning.
