Mani Kaul, John Abraham and Kumar Shahani were truly the Young Turks of India’s avant-garde cinema of the ’80s. Proteges of Ritwik Ghatak, they blazed new paths in India’s cinema, demanding that the audience and their actors engage with films in a new way. As a 24-year-old actress studying at the National School of Drama, Mita Vashisht’s first film was with Shahani. Vashisht acted in three of Shahani’s films, Vaar Vaar Vari (1987), Khayal Gatha (1989) and Kasba (1990). Excerpts from a conversation after Shahani’s demise on January 24:
A scooter model with Bajaj or a first film with Kumar Shahani was the choice you were faced with as a young actor out of the NSD.
I walked out of my final viva at the NSD when my dean said can you do the makeup for a play for Kumar Shahani. Alaknanada Samarth, an actor from Bombay who was his leading lady, was keen that an actor should do her makeup…. I did it of course. What better way to get a front-row view into the process of a director with whom there was already some talk of acting in his film? I listened to everything he told Alaknanda. Once, Alaknanda said she was walking a curve he wanted on stage, but he said what I want is an ellipsoid.
It told me you can give him more, you can surprise him, but you can’t give him less than what he wants. At the end of my two days, he told me he was in talks with an actor for his film but hadn’t met her yet, would I be interested? So, he ended up offering me the role twice. Yes, at the time I was offered the Bajaj ad and in 1997, Rs 30,000 was a lot of money. But something told me those two days were going to be among the most important days of my life in connection with my craft.
What were your initial conversations with Shahani on your first film together like?
I asked him questions that we actors have been taught to ask at the NSD. The first shot was on the bank of a river. I asked who my lover was across the river. I got back a strange reply. A black swan was his answer. In my young mind, I realised that a realistic question wouldn’t do with Kumar. He does not want ordinary ways of thinking about love. I was a student of literature, so I thought of Yeats’ Leda and the Swan.
That’s what he would do. He would suggest to you a number of possibilities of how you could think and feel and leave it to you to enter your deep imaginative self and come up with an answer of your own. Till date, whenever I have had a conversation with him, he has opened inside me numerous thoughts, feelings and ways of thinking that very few can.
In what ways did working with Shahani prepare you to work with Mani Kaul’s Siddheshwari [a portrait of the legendary Hindustani classical singer from Varanasi]?
Siddheshwari had no characterisation, the character had no high points, it wasn’t plot driven, it had no beginning, middle or end. “Don’t try to be Siddheshwari,” said Mani. “You have to present her spirit, not play her. If I wanted someone like Siddheshwari Devi, I would have cast a plump girl.” Mani called me after watching Vaar Vaar Vari. After working with Kumar, and to pick up what it was to work with intangibles, I was certainly ready for anything, and prepared for Siddheshwari.
Satyajit Ray, however, observed that actors in films of Shahani and Kaul had not much to do. What do you think each film with Kumar Shahani taught you?
The first film is of course special. With each film, I realised there was going to be no repetition of the old space, Kumar wasn’t going to repeat himself, so I would be called upon to be a different me each time.
To be an actor in Kumar’s or Mani’s films..you had to have an understanding of the spectrum of all the arts to be able to enter their worlds. Mani, for instance, told me I should get some ideas about thumri and kathak for Siddheswari. In the film, I may not have danced kathak much, but I needed to move as if my body knew its rhythm.
To be able to portray Tejo in Kasba [the daughter-in-law of a small-town entrepreneur married to his mentally challenged son], who actually runs the business, Kumar made me walk almost two hours [every day] for a week in his drawing room untill I cracked the walk of a female panther. He said: Think of her as a leisurely tigress, be someone who is alert, and is waiting for her chance…or he said: Think of Marc Chagall and his paintings where the figures float…. That walk ultimately influenced everything, the way I moved, the way I sat, the way I said my dialogues. Kumar’s frames were so elegant. So, as an actor, even if you feel you haven’t done anything, the frames have done a lot.
What did Kumar Shahani teach you that you still carry in your work today?
That a human being is part of the cosmos, not something you place in an environment, and that you are not the centre of everything, and that the actor’s job is to understand the director and consider it a beautiful challenge. Kumar was never dismissive of an actor’s craft.