The man who made colours speak

It was in the early 1960s, as a student of political science in the Bombay University, that Kumar Shahani was ‘astonished by the great levels touched by a piece of cinema’. The film was ‘Subarnarekha’, a part of Ritwik Ghatak’s trilogy on Partition, which was being screened there by the Anandam film society, of which he was an office-bearer.

“Ghatak himself came for the screening. He was in a bad state, as he could not find any distributors and his former comrades had also deserted him. After the film, I went for a long walk alone. Next year, I ended up in FTII and fortunately, Ghatak also joined in later,” says Mr. Shahani, who was in the city to deliver the C.P. Padmakumar memorial lecture.

The acclaimed auteur spoke to The Hindu on his influences, friendships, and wide array of interests.

At the FTII, Shahani met many of his contemporaries, including Adoor Gopalaksrishnan, who was his senior and Mani Kaul, another giant of parallel cinema.

“Because of our friendship, people tend to bracket together mine and Mani’s films. But if you look at our films, for example ‘Maya Darpan’ and ‘Uski Roti’, the differences are stark. I worked based on colour, movement and sound, while he depended on the screen time for shot division. We used to discuss everything and naturally we had tremendous fights. We did not speak to each other from 1973 to 1984. The differences in political positions could be one of the reasons,” he says.

Inspiration for films

Mr. Shahani's films have many a time drawn inspiration from literature, music, and dance. He says that his days working under the greats have made sure that he is self-aware about any narrative.

“I tend to use the source material as a kind of a grid and inside that, the dynamism of my medium has to come in. For example, Tagore was moving to painting when he was writing ‘Char adhyay’. So taking a cue from his book, the colour axis I used in the film was shifting from violet to golden yellow.”

His interests are so varied that he used to be seen both at a Hariprasad Chaurasia concert as well as at a Michael Jackson one.

Right now, Mr. Shahani is working on his next film ‘Priye Charusheele’, a film based on an Italian classical dancer,.

This he says ‘will perhaps be the last film on celluloid to be made in India’.