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A masterpiece A still from Shyam Benegal’s “Ankur”.

“Ankur” was a landmark in Indian cinema. It created a new genre of movies apart from propelling Shyam Benegal as the filmmaker to watch. Benegal’s quartet – “Ankur” (1973), “Nishant “(1975), “Manthan” (1976) and “Bhumika” (1977) – set new standards in film-making and gave Indian cinema sterling artistes like Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri.

The screening of the National Award winning “Ankur” was part of Virasat, a cultural festival hosted recently by the Maharaja Agrasen College in collaboration with Spic-Macay. The movie left a mark on the audience but no less significant was the interaction that followed between Benegal and the audience. According to Mona Sinha, a professor of English at the Agrasen College, the legendary filmmaker made some lasting observations.

“Art, literature and society have always been prejudiced against women, who constitute fifty per cent of humanity.” Benegal noted that caste system was not an arrangement for division of labour but a vertical stratification to facilitate the ruling ideologies.

Based on an incident in a village near Hyderabad, the issues fore-grounded in “Ankur” were not consciously a part of the project. It was originally a short story written by Benegal for his college magazine and reaffirmed the status of fiction as a reflection of its theme. The film is a sensitive exploration of caste and gender politics in a feudal society.

Benegal, 73, was keen to know how the film had appealed to such a young audience, most of whom were not even born when the film was made 35 years ago. He observed that entertainment was an engagement. “A perfect entertainment should appeal and engage the audience at the level of senses, emotion and intellect.” He added that there were several ways to express modernity.

A significant point that Benegal drove home was that by choosing the consumerist way of modernity, Bollywood had wiped out rural India from its map. He also strongly disagreed with distinctions such as ‘art cinema’ and ‘mainstream cinema’. He recalled Bimal Roy’s great work, “Do Bigha Zameen”, describing it a mainstream classic. Benegal did not forget to laud new generation filmmakers like Shimit Amin, Anurag Kashyap, Raju Hirani for their daring ventures.

Benegal’s visit and the screening of “Ankur” remained the highpoint of the festival that also attracted performances by santoor exponent Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, eminent qawwals Chand and Shadab Nizami, Dhrupad stars Ritesh and Rajneesh Mishra, sitar artists of repute Ustad Mehmood Mirza and Pandit Kartik and Niladri Kumar. A workshop on Madhubani paintings by Shanti Devi and Bharatanatyam by Priyadarshani Govind made it a memorable cultural week for the young audience of the Agrasen College.

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