Death of a master filmmaker: Kumar Shahani

He was far ahead of his time in his cinematic imagination and his understanding of techniques needed to realise that imagination. Ironically his cinema was, at the same time, the finest realisation of tradition in modern times.

Kumar Shahani, one of the greats of Indian cinema, died on 24 February 2024 in Kolkata, the city which loved him—and loved to question him and his films. Especially the film he made based on Tagore’s 1929 novel, Char Adhyay (1997), which investigates—deeply—questions of nationalism, violence, swadharma (one’s inherent ethical sense and vocation) and swabhav (one’s inner disposition).

Amongst all his contemporaries in world cinema, perhaps his was the only cinema where each shot or piece of sound and music was endowed with a kind of singularity which could reflect not only its own subjectivity but could also unveil a vibration of the divine for us to sense inside ourselves.

I am trying to suggest that, in his films, even a pebble is bestowed with a subjectivity that remains un-subsumable within any kind of generality. It was the way this master of cinema could make us feel—in the depths of our being—our irreducible singularity and thereby open the doors for the unfolding of our freedom and deliverance. Not only the freedom of our being but also the singularity of our possibilities.

Kumar Shahani studied in the Film Institute of India, Pune (now known as the Film and Television Institute of India) in the mid-sixties. His classmate was Mani Kaul, and both students—who would go on to make masterpieces of their own—were taught by the filmmaker’s filmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak, who was then vice president of the institute.

During his institute days, Kumar found another genius in Pune. That was D.D. Kosambi, mathematician, historian, polymath, who also wrote a remarkable, pathbreaking paper on genetics.