QUEEN’S ROAD: At 80, Shyam Benegal is as zesty as ever while talking about subjects close to his heart. The filmmaker is the handloom ambassador of the country and one can see he is really concerned about weavers getting their due.
Says he, “I was forced to weave and wear khadi at a young age as my father was into the Swadeshi Movement. It was rough and uncomfortable, and I realised its significance only when I got much older. The fact that the fabric is created by hand is incredible. We must value it.”
Remember the scene in Junoon where Shabana Azmi looks at her husband Shashi Kapoor with mixed emotions as he goes away to fight for the country? Or the girl Zubeida who does not want to play second fiddle to the first wife anymore? These are scenes among many others that convey the exquisite sensitivity of the filmmaker to the viewer. That is what Shyam Benegal is used to doing.
He takes us on a journey through different terrains, be it the rural countryside teeming with characters that look at women as property as in Nishant or film sets where a leading lady is just a prop as in the biography of Hansa Wadekar - Bhumika. He takes us on a mad journey of love and longing as in Junoon and as he is such a knowledgeable guide and has mastered the art of emotions, there is never a dull moment in the journey. Even in the longish Suraj Ka Saatvan ghoda.
What inspired him to make Zubeida? Was it a conscious effort to make a film different from the stark realism of Ankur and Bhumika? His answer is crystal clear. “It was one of those organic things. If you look at my films, they are all very different from each other. Bhumika and Manthan were very different from the films I had made before. There was no conscious effort to make Zubeida differently. It was based on true stories of a friend, Khalid Mohammed, a former film critic. Mammo is the story of his grandmother; Sardari Begum was his aunt; and Zubeida, the tragic story of the girl who is loved by the Raja of Jodhpur but cannot really be happy with him, was about his mother who had to leave him. Her son wants to know what his mother was like in real life.”At the moment, Benegal is working on a Punjabi docu-drama that tells the story of our freedom struggle from a Punjabi’s point of view. It has 95 speaking parts and some talented people are working with him on it, he says.
So does he know Punjabi? “No, but it is very similar to Hindi,” he thinks. His scriptwriters are the ones who are writing the screenplay.
Considering how many actors of great repute he has worked with, how was it working with Karisma Kapoor in Zubeida? How different was it compared to directing a Smita Patil or a Shabana Azmi?
“Shabana is a formally trained actress and knows how to move in a role. Karishma is an extremely capable actress and took the role of Zubeida in her stride. There was no problem at all directing her. She brought out all the inner subtleties of the role beautifully,” he says.