Illusionary Mirror: An Interview with Kumar Shahani

This conversation took place at Kumar Shahani’s residence in Kolkata on a balmy afternoon in January 2024. Shahani was visibly ailing but the mind fecund as ever. The backdrop of the meeting was a chance encounter at Kala Mandir where both of us were attending a Dhrupad concert by Ustad Bahauddin Dagar. The initial premise was to revisit the context and certain formal-theoretical aspects at play in the making of one of the most significant Indian films from the 1970s – Maya Darpan (Kumar Shahani, 1972), approximately 50 years down the line. However, as one would expect in a conversation with Shahani, different points of inquiry branched out to film history, philosophy, music, and politics. The conversation comprises interesting anecdotes – Bresson’s reaction to watching Maya Darpan, Jean-Marie Straub’s response to the film’s colour in Rotterdam, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s concert in Bombay in 1986, Nirmal Verma’s indifference to the adaptation of his short story. Shahani speaks about his bonhomie with specific ideas of Akbar Padamsee, Sergei Eisenstein, and Ritwik Ghatak with respect to colour, montage, and historical consciousness. Otherwise he reflected on or outlined his thoughts, both while making the film and in retrospect, on specific aspects of the film – the newsreel war sequence, the arrival of the train at the station, the film’s use of music and soliloquy, and the Chhau dance sequence at the end. We concluded by discussing the film’s optimism about the nation-state and Shahani’s revision of that position since. 

– A.S.

Geeta Kapur in her essay, “When was modernism” speaks about the fictive device of epic narration that allows you to keep a hold on history among other things. That is something I am strongly reminded of in the newsreel sequence in Maya Darpan with images from the Vietnam War, the Hiroshima bombings, and the Quit India movement. I was thinking about the impact of that sequence, its mode of addressing history, in relation to the airfield segment in Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha (1965). 

That sequence – Images of violence – was done by Nuruddin Padamsee at the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) of Akbar Padamsee. At the workshop, there was a kind of understanding between all of us that we would be playing around with each other’s material. 

The scene in Subarnarekha you are referring to, is unparalleled in the history of cinema, the meaning in it is really multilayered. Again and again, one wants to be able to evoke that kind of internalisation of history which even the unconscious cannot describe. Marguerite Duras has attempted something similar, but to what extent she succeeded, I still don’t know. It builds up a kind of mythology within and that mythology then has to be interpreted. Myths cannot be very easily opened up and so that sequence of violence in Maya Darpan, in its overall structure and not just as a juxtaposition, actually unravels the myth. One can either use the montage technique and then build through overtones or one can do it the way Ghatak does in that sequence of the airplane field, a site which he had chanced upon. I do believe that one should try and approach that. It is very difficult but one should make an effort.

Maya Darpan

An equally compelling conjuration of Ghatak happens in the last shot of the film. Here Assam’s resonance, where the film’s protagonist Taran has travelled to, with the end of Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) when Nita arrives in Shillong, is hard to shake off. 

Ghatak used to describe what happened during the shooting of that sequence. That is when he began to actually give up on the pathetic fallacy and started speaking of the grand indifference of nature because in pathetic fallacy you’re always projecting your own emotions onto nature. He had imagined shooting that sequence in the same way as any other outdoor sequence in the film. When he went to Shillong and found the whole sky was covered in clouds as he had not anticipated, he abandoned his idea of sharply contrasting the panoramic shots in order to bring forth the pain experienced by Nita. Instead he found that the meaning was self-acquired, nature was indifferent to the human predicament. After Meghe Dhaka Tara, you find that in a lot of his work. In Subarnarekha it’s more prominent than in any other film. 

Maya Darpan is first and foremost a film in colour, like very few others in the history of Indian cinema. Since you mentioned VIEW, can you revisit some of your attitude towards colour at the time and any productive discussions you might have had with Akbar Padamsee about it? 

Akbar and I had discussions on the colour axis and he wrote a little note. I didn’t follow it blindly, I just don’t believe in that, so I changed it somewhat. And in any case it was what intuitively I wanted to do. It was that kind of exchange of notes with Akbar as it always was. He used to speak about every painting that he did, showing them to us and asking for our response. So it was part of that thing.

He referred me to a number of books rather than actual paintings. He made me once again aware, because I became very much aware of it while in Paris, that somehow Western European light and society does not permit the kind of exploration of colour that I was interested in from my childhood. Everything in one way or another was touched by colour. I was born in Larkana which is in Sindh (in present day Pakistan). I recall that the quality of sunlight used to sometimes overwhelm me, that it could be both nightmarish or wonderfully restorative. When I was working with Bresson, after the first 3-4 days of shooting, I had a sort of dissatisfaction about the European muteness around colour. The light in Paris is beautiful in a different way, it has a quality of silver in everything. The books about colour confirmed for me what I had intuited about the inhibitions around colour in Western Europe. 

Akbar told me one day that Matisse’s whole life was signified by colour much more than any other western painter we know of. Matisse had travelled to Arabia to intensify what he found in himself. Arabia had a great old connection with Sindh, Sindh was its first colony. 

Colour has the greatest possibility in the visuality of things, given the qualitative, emotional, and metaphysical content. When I had to conceive Maya Darpan, I conceived it in colour, in spite of the fact that the budget was only 250,000 rupees and everybody thought that I was a bloody fool. They would tell me that you won’t be able to make it, and so thanks to all those people who worked on it, especially K.K. Mahajan that I could make it. I should even thank the then Prime Minister of the country, because Kodak import was banned at that time, and I had to send messages across to somehow find a way out of this impasse. 

Maya Darpan

What film was it? Kodachrome?

It was Eastman Color. 

You had shot on Kodachrome before though? 

Kodachrome is wonderful, before I made Maya Darpan, at VIEW when we used to exchange notes, I made a film with a very close friend called Udayan Patel who was a psychoanalyst, and that was made on Kodachrome, shot again by Mahajan. It was a wonderful print stock, a very slow film. There is a print at NFAI (National Film Archive of India), the film is called Object (1971). 

A number of things pretty early on in the film already point to your affinity for montage particularly in the soundtrack; cutting from the industrial sound of the machine breaking gravel or something in the credit roll to the very melodious lullaby sung just after, the red bedding in the lyrics and the red bedsheet on which Taran is sleeping, the lullaby itself is about putting someone to sleep while Taran wakes up as soon as it concludes. 

The first great thing I had read on Cinema was Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein. I can see through the ideological lies of montage. But in spite of all that has been said against it, those who critique it, Bazin in one way, but also a hell of a lot of others who actually just inhabited a bias, haven’t thought deeply enough about it. They normally try to make it a Bergsonian thought as if the modulatory is against any idea of things clashing – the dialectical. But I had felt, even when I was reading Film Sense, the modulatory and the question of the dialectical shift, which is at the core of Eisenstein’s thinking, can work through musicality together. So we have to think deeply about events of sound and transform them into events of visuality.

But the visual and aural are not the only concerns. 

In the first important article that I wrote called Myths for Sale (1974), I had talked about the temporalisation of space. You collapse the time axis on the space axis and that’s how cinema comes together through movement. The visual and the aural are not the only concerns, they cannot be, the concern is to work towards the synaesthesia of senses which embraces all life without actually releasing perfume in air at the cinema hall. One can activate sensations of touch and smell and even bring forth senses that we have no words for. That was another thing that Akbar and I loved thinking about – all the senses. In my film As the Crow Flies (2004), he talks about Samkhya philosophy where there are not only the five usual senses that allow one to perceive and through which begins cognition, but there are the other five senses they propose, which are active senses, through which we act upon the world. 

Were you reading about senses and Samkhya philosophy at the time?

I had come to think about the senses before I knew anything about Samkhya or art because two of my brothers are neuroscientists and through their work on neuroscience, I have come to this idea that there are multiple senses, multiple ways of perceiving the same object and there are multiple signals which get converted into signs. Our cognitive ability increases as a result of that, we can organise action. I had a discussion with a philosopher, who was in the direct line of Vallabhacharya, about this contradiction between montage and the senses and he did say that in his tradition, which is derived mostly from Taittiriya Upanishad, they need not be considered as opposites. 

Maya Darpan

That in a way brings us back to Eisenstein’s postulate that there is no fundamental difference in the approach to the problems of purely visual montage and to a montage that connects different spheres of feeling.

I have gone back to Eisenstein again and again, as one must, and I get very happy whenever I consider that he actually practiced overtonal montage which is not limited to physical contrast. 

With implications extending probably also to the sphere of music. 

We had a discussion of that sort with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Bombay at a dinner after his performance in 1986. The overall exchange on the table was marred by narrow views of the participants with cultural and ideological differences.¹ Stockhausen was there with his son who was playing the muted trumpet and his daughter was playing the piano. It was all held together by his daughter, who was giving all the space to the overtone to sustain the musical event, otherwise it would have broken apart. It showed that the modulatory and the dialectic are not opposed, the very idea of counterpoint in western music is not a counterpoint in isolation, it’s not an opposition, or if it is an opposition, it is the same as with colours – complementary and harmonic. I like to bring that into every juxtaposition, the ones that you mentioned earlier, but also within a sequence or a shot. 

Briefly into the film, there is the scene with the arrival of the Engineer on the train. We as an audience in some way are compelled to think of the birth of cinema and the link to modernity, Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), something that resonated strongly with Ghatak too, evinced in a film like Ronger Golam (1968).

There are many things that come to mind when one speaks of trains in cinema, Lumières and Ghatak of course but not only. You see the mechanical motion introduced by the steam engine is also the kind of motion that the camera has. On the other hand, Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of horse motion was realised by chronophotography and horsepower is still the unit of such mechanical movements. And of course the American Western genre is all around that. I love a film like The Iron Horse (1924, John Ford), it’s absolutely magnificent. On an autobiographical note, while growing up in Larkana, I was fascinated by locomotives when I visited the train station. 

Can you outline your experience of working with Zarin Daruwalla and Hariprasad Chaurasia for the music in the film?

Zarin’s parts are very strange because I would allude to other films and other things that she did not know about, not in the soliloquies but in the semi-desert landscape shots. We did a few notes intending to evoke Raag Malhar as a homage to Ghatak who was very fond of it and she almost refused to play those notes. Fortunately, Bhaskar Chandavarkar, who is the music director and was as much a student of Ghatak as I was at FTII, told her that I was actually paying homage to my guru, so to let me have my say. 

Hariji’s (Hariprasad Chaurasia) understanding of music and cinema is so much wider, more than most musicians that I have met. He also told Zarin that we should do whatever we can for this person. In the soliloquies I remember at one point when the transitions from day to night happened quite sharply, he came up to me and Bhaskar and asked if he could insert a few notes of Malkauns, just to indicate something else. He did it with such spontaneity, he absorbed the film beautifully. I really value the relationship I had with Hariji’s music and his friendship. My last feature length film The Bamboo Flute (2000) is full of his music. 

Maya Darpan

Could you elaborate on other aspects of sound design in the film which is rather dense? The non-musical segments, the natural sounds. Is any of it sync? 

One of the curious positive responses I got about the film was that I am able to deal with silences very well. But I said there is hardly any silence in the film! In fact it’s very little, less than five minutes of actual silence I think. 

No, no sync sound. I already had so little money, and people would laugh at me that I went out of Bombay to get a particular sound and that I had more sound shots in the film than I had shots with images. There are many transitions of sound. When Mangesh Desai, the legendary sound mixer who was sometimes consulted by Satyajit Ray, saw the soundtracks, he said, what are you up to? Not only is the sound preceding the visuals often, there are so many tracks! The shifts were not very sharp like in the beginning, from the industrial sound to the lullaby. There were many minor transitions which had to be taken care of.

Let’s talk a bit about some of the responses to the film. You once showed it to Bresson, I am curious about what he thought since I presume that aspects of Maya Darpan might have even shocked him.

It comes back to that question of how elements of time and space are used in the two different traditions. No tradition is completely isolated from another but there are big differences. When Bresson saw Maya Darpan, I was sitting next to him. The shot with the nude in the film is very brief and I had to keep it that way considering Indian film censorship. The briefness of that shot intrigued him; he said, Kumar, go into the projection booth and see if they swapped your print for another. All along he was trying to figure out what the rhythm line was, which is a very western idea coming from music. In other forms of music like Indian, there is a rhythm line but the centrality that we give to the melody here and the shruti (the heard sound) cannot be there in any music which depends on several instruments being played together. Naturally, one affects the other and you cannot individuate so much in the shruti as a musician. The rhythm line becomes very important in Western music and you can see how important it is in Bresson’s films, especially in a film like The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962). Also when we were shooting Une femme douce (1969), I could see that. The fixed distances that are there between the camera and the object or the character (or models as he called them) is calculated and returning to that same distance is therefore one of the things that happens throughout. That determines the other shots with different distances from the camera, a rhythm line takes over in such a way that the entire musicality of the film and its characters is anchored through it. This becomes particularly self-evident in The Trial of Joan of Arc because it is shot in closed spaces most of the time and the same faces come again and again more or less from the same distance. When they are juxtaposed in a particular way, it produces a certain momentum which governs the way you sense the acting and the presence of the rhythmically organised words. 

Maya Darpan

How was the film received in India, the asinine comments by Satyajit Ray about it notwithstanding? 

People were kind of shocked by the film. It was conveyed to the Government of India that people like me should not be allowed to make films. So I had to wait 12 years to get another film made. In the film industry itself, what was interesting was that Raj Kapoor’s team liked it very much. How that happened, I do not know. But they used to attend the screenings at schools and film societies in Dadar, the film society members must have opened their minds. 

In general, it made life very difficult for me. I wanted to give cinema a different kind of role to play in the world of art and society in India. I was just marginalised. 

A couple of reviews from the 1980s I thought grasped the film quite well. Arun Khopkar discussed the sophisticated use of the colour red in the film, and Aruna Vasudev noted a certain proximity of the film to the works of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. 

Straub had surprised me, I must say. He saw the last part of Maya Darpan in Rotterdam years later. He came out to the auditorium and said no one makes films as warm as yours. To that I said that people in my country unfortunately think that my films are cold and don’t reach out to audiences. 

How did Nirmal Verma respond to the film, given that you had improvised and elaborated on certain motifs from his short story, in ways unusual for adaptations in India? 

He had to write the soliloquies when I demanded them for the film. He was quite surprised but also quite pleased by it then. He never knew how to respond to the film, he had never seen anything like it. Initially he had come to the film’s screening in Delhi and remarked that it’s marvellous but then later on he was completely alienated by it, I don’t know why or how. The next generation of writers, especially the person who was working with him, Udayan Vajpayee, made him see the film again and realise what its significance was. When he was given an award somewhere in Germany, he requested that I get a print flown over, which I tried but it didn’t work out. Before he died, he felt it wasn’t such a bad film. 

Maya Darpan

It’s interesting to think about the nature of your elaborations in the film vis-à-vis the short story, in terms of colour. For example your use of Red, Black, and White draws from Verma’s mention of the Kali temple and your use of green in the film expands on Verma’s mention of the greenery in Assam as a contrast to the arid landscape of the story’s primary setting in the desert. 

Red and green are complementary, in the colour circle they are at opposite ends. But once again that opposition turned into complementarity, just as a counterpoint is in Western music. A lot of shots are near monochromatic, not entirely, since something or the other always gets registered in a different hue. Anyway when you have this much white as there is in the film, and you have red, you automatically create green as a simultaneous contrast. 

Red itself is such a strong signifier, and it’s often the colour of the garments – of Taran, the mother of the domestic help, and the Chhau dancers. Even though you use it elaborately, you managed to avoid a strong signification of red in the film. 

I am absolutely against that kind of symbolism. I think that the more multivalent any sign gets, the better its chance of finding a resonance according to the individuation within the audience. I get very delighted sometimes when people speak about things that are not there in the film but they have imagined. The multivalence of any sign is more important to me. Even the gesture and the look and emphasis of certain words and syllables etc. It doesn’t have any absolute meaning, it is something that every individual in the audience should be interpreting and making it their own. Additionally there was this thing which I discovered during the shooting, the progression of the emotional field taking place only through colour. Sometimes a colour is so dissonant with its surroundings, you don’t view it as a colour of an object but as the colour in itself. Once I realised that autonomy, I changed some of my shot patterns during the shooting. 

Gestures also find an unusual expressive autonomy in the film. Is that something you picked up from Bresson? 

If anyone, I learned it from D.W. Griffith and that wonderful dance of hands segment in Battleship Potemkin (1925) just before the Odessa steps sequence. 

The juxtaposition between Taran’s internal monologue and the architecture of the mansion is also very powerful in the film. 

The capitals of the pillars have an assertive presence. Any space actually shows the mode of control that the state or an institution exerts over our existence. So I wanted Taran to find her freedom from that space. That’s how it was expressed.

One way of reading Taran’s impersonation of Kali would be that of transgression. 

The epic nature of the film is elusive, the necessity of violence in certain things and the eros are fundamental to all art. I guess the erotic and the violent gets completely sublimated, that was my intention. 

Maya Darpan

What about the Chhau dance sequence that follows Taran’s sexual encounter near the end of the film? 

I wanted to show the continuum between everyday movement and dance, so that when one arrives at the dance sequence, which has an epic significance, they recall every movement in the film. I do not know if people did it. I hoped that when people think of the film in tranquillity, they can interpret mundane gestures as something full of significance. Initially, since I was working with the Bharatnatyam dancer Chandralekha, we experimented with Bharatnatyam but it didn’t work. Then on the suggestion of the dance critic Sunil Kothari, we opted for Mayurbhanj Chhau. 

Given Chhau’s cultural standing, it probably lends a more transgressive nature to the dance sequence than Bharatnatyam. 

Yes it most certainly does. 

Maya Darpan as a film, has yet an optimistic view of the possibilities of the nation-state as an agent of social transformation from the clutches of Feudalism. The film predates Emergency but was contemporary to the emergent Naxalite movement in the late 1960s. One might see this as a problem. Have you revisited your position on the nation-state as it is in Maya Darpan? 

I have been revisiting it all the time and yes, there is that aspect in Maya Darpan about a possibility that a nation-state will come to be but I don’t accept that it is there, that such a thing actually exists. In Char Adhyay, it’s obvious that Rabindranath Tagore himself had given up on the idea. The nation-state hyphenation has to be abandoned, the nation is different from the state, and the state is an instrument of coercion under all circumstances. 

Endnotes