Meeting Kumar Shahani

The maker of Maya Darpan who was here on the special invitation of Bangalore Film Society was relaxing in his room at Hotel Gautam after the somewhat stifling ardours of an inauguration. We were a small group, expecting fully to be overawed by Shahini’s formidable reputation.

But, as it turned out, he wore his learning lightly, leaning neither to the gravely ponderous or the willfully ridiculous. He was simply himself, a man who had made an imperishable masterpiece several years ago and had lived unbitterly in the shade of that ‘Heraclitan’ grandeur.

Yes, he liked Heraclitus and when he had quoted him, a western critic had been disappointed at the absence of definitive Indian wisdom. Some others had expressed surprise that an Indian ate beef (frog legs too) while others made searching enquiries about Tarun’s tikka in ‘Maya Darpan’.

Didn’t it hold any metaphysical significance and so on. “Western critics just don’t understand our films. They are very dishonest. They can be bribed, you know. They are sometimes willing to be patrons. But one wants to be taken for what one is,” Shahani said.

Rossellini

Were there any critics he admired? “Yes. Andre Bazin. He was an idealist but, within that frame, he was very good.” And who were his favourite filmmakers? “Eisenstein, Rossellini.” Shahani was very effusive about Rosselllni whom he met last year when he had gone as member of jury for a Festival in a French provincial town.

“Rossellini too was spiritual but there was a movement towards the material base in his films. He had after all fathered a kind of naturalism in cinema but he repudiated the neo-naturalism in recent French cinema. France had given birth to the New Wave and now you have this neo-naturalism,” Shahani observed.