Defying the Male Gaze: Shyam Benegal’s Lens Deftly Captured Women’s Inner Worlds

Shyam Benegal, who celebrated his 89th birthday this month, is one of the most outstanding filmmakers in Indian Cinema. He has never claimed to be a “feminist” filmmaker but his films clearly show his regard, respect, and concern for women across caste, class, status, education.

They defy Laura Mulvey’s theory of the “male gaze” framed in 1975 in which she says that women in films are objects of titillation that sensualises their bodies without probing into their minds.

She stated that as the director was male and so were his technicians, with the audience majorly male, the women in their films were reduced to ‘objects’ and not ‘subjects’ of the films they featured in.

Benegal did not subscribe to this theory. Even when he made films centered on sex workers, he saw that they were strong ‘subjects’ and not ‘objects’.

Benegal’s Films Dabbled With Women in Socially Sensitive Contexts

Benegal’s first feature film Ankur (1974) introduced the powerful FTII gold medalist Shabana Azmi. She is the wife of a deaf-mute farmer who is a Dalit wage-labourer played by Sadhu Meher, in the village zamindar (Anant Nag)’s home where his wife works as a housemaid.

The young zamindar manipulates an affair with the maid though he is a married man. Through these incidents, the film defines a sharp critique of casteism, sexual exploitation, silent abuse of the zamindar’s wife played by Priya Tendulkar, and physical torture of the deaf-mute labourer.
Bhoomika (The Role, 1977) was based on the autobiography titled ‘Sangtye Aika’ (Listen to this) penned by a famous Marathi-speaking actress of her time, Hansa Wadkar. For Bhoomika, Benegal based the film on Wadkar’s autobiography and had actress Smita Patil play her on screen.

The film was much ahead of its time when the audiences could hardly be expected to digest a film with a woman protagonist who lived a very controversial life completely on her terms after a stormy and exploitative girlhood in which she was victimised and exploited by her own mother and her lover, financially and sexually.

It explores the invisible and little-known areas of female subjectivity. Although biographical in intent, Bhoomika’s structural complexity seems to suggest that the journey of self-exploration undertaken by Usha (named Urvashi for her screen persona) portrayed by Patil when she was very fresh in films, is circular, full of snares, forever incomplete.

Portrayal of Complex and Conflicting Themes With Ease Was His Forte

Mandi (Marketplace, 1983) is one of the very few films that revolve around an old brothel the existence of which stands threatened because of land-grabbers, including local politicians, and landlords who wished to grab the land on which the brothel stands without offering them any alternative space.

The brothel, located along the fringes of Hyderabad city, is headed by a madam portrayed by Shabana Azmi. Benegal has used burlesque as the mode to explore the dynamics of a whorehouse. He tempers the film with an air of black comedy, allowing for some crude voyeurism in keeping with the social environment in which the women live.

Mandi makes a delightful case of depicting the conflicting and complex aspects of prostitution.

Sooraj Ka Satvan Ghoda (The Seventh Horse of the Sun, 1992): Based on Dharamvir Bharati’s noted Hindi novel of the same name, this film is not only a classic example of the transcription/interpretation of literature on celluloid, but also, one of the few celluloid experiments with the lost art of storytelling.

Characters of one story telescope and move freely in and out of the other two, growing with time, and subtly hinting at the changes in their lives, as seen from the point of view of Manek Mulla played by Rajit Kapoor who grows from a gawky adolescent with a big crush on young girl Jamuna in the neighbouring house to a young man in the second story till in the last episode, he is a fully grown adult trying to cope with the pained and tortured and exploited young gypsy girl Sakti (Neena Gupta), but failing to come to a definite closure in any of the relationships.

Suggested adultery enriches the tapestry and texture of Sooraj Ka Saatvan Ghoda. Of the three women who enter Manek Mulla’s life, one is adulterous purely by suggestion, even before she becomes a widow. Jamuna, forced to marry an old widower, suddenly finds herself pregnant.

But can one rightfully call it adultery? The question is left hanging in mid-air, leaving you to find the right answer which would depend on your perspective on morals underlined by patriarchy.

Zubeidaa (2001) is said to be Benegal’s costliest film before Netaji – comprising four female characters that offers an insight into Benegal’s mastery in understanding and handling the woman psyche from every angle transcending barriers of communal identity, age, background, status, and education.

Apart from Zubeidaa (Karishma Kapoor), there is Fayyazi(Surekhha Sikri) her mother, who is not very educated and is Muslim. She is submissive and never raises her voice against her domineering and abusive husband Suleiman (Amrish Puri) even when he openly flaunts his keep, Rose Davenport (Lilette Dubey) in public.

But Fayyazi takes a critical decision when Zubeidaa decides to marry her Hindu prince of Jodhpur, Hukam Singh(Manoj Bajpeyee) though he is already married to Mandira (Rekha) and has kids. But she does not permit Zubeidaa to take little Riyaz with her.

When Riyaaz comes to meet Rose, she is a ghost of her former self, without work or identity because, post Independence, the Anglo Indian was gradually falling out of favour with the newly formed Indian Government. Mandira (Rekha), the original queen of Hukam Singh, is officially acknowledged by the Royal family, by the Royal family and by the subjects of Fatehpur.

She speaks impeccable English but is always bejewelled and costumed royally like any Indian princess of her time. Her name is abbreviated to the British-sounding Mandy, probably motivated by the sycophantic allegiance Indian royalty bore towards the British.

But she had affection for the much younger Zubeidaa and was pleasantly surprised by her free spirit, her living life completely on her own terms though it brought her not only unhappiness but, a lack of rootedness that finally led to her death in the plant crash. Was the crash a sabotage? Or, was it just a crash? Benegal leaves the question open.

(Shoma A Chatterji is an Indian film scholar, author and freelance journalist. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

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Kanu Behl resides on the 19th floor of an airy condominium tower in Mumbai. A level below is his office, the size of a roomy 3BHK. The complex is located in the far end of the western suburbs; it overlooks, if you can crane your neck high enough from the road, lush swathes of the Versova-Lokhandwala mangroves. For someone whose films are about cramped, oppressive spaces — as evinced by Titli, Binnu Ka Sapna, and the forthcoming Agra — this is a rather pretty patch he has secured for himself.

“We moved in here last year,” says the director, who shares both apartment and work space with his wife, composer Sneha Khanwalkar. “We needed the quiet.” Squarely into his 40s, with a denser beard, Behl looks different from his older interviews on YouTube. That was circa 2014, when Titli — his bleak, coruscating debut feature, about a family of carjackers in Delhi — premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

Filmmaker Kanu Behl

Behl is back at Cannes this year with Agra, set to premiere in the Director’s Fortnight section. We’ll get to the status of his red carpet outfit selection (an embarrassed head shake). For now, let’s rewind and reflect on the intervening years.

In pursuit of intimacy

Titli was one of those breakouts no one could stop talking about. That it was produced by Dibakar Banerjee and released by Yash Raj Films both elevated and confused its indie profile. Enthusiasts such as myself made the mistake of watching it on an empty stomach and instantly regretted it. The film’s first big scene, for instance, begins with preparations for a child’s birthday party and ends with the lead character bleeding profusely from the nose. The stomach-churning violence was in step with the film’s grim exploration of family dynamics. A theme was established: the instincts of patriarchy and oppression that get transmitted, with near-genetic precision, from one generation to the next.

A still from Titli

Unsurprisingly after Titli, Behl came down with second-feature fever. He wanted to make a film about sexual repression in India. “Given our cultural context, I knew it was going to be difficult to find funding for a film like this in India,” he says. In 2016, he was selected for the PJLF Three Rivers Residency in Italy, where his mentor, Danish editor Molly Stensgaard, pushed him to go all the way or abandon the idea. “I kept wondering, ‘ Karna hai kya?’ [should I do it?]”. After a month of introspection, he found his answer.

On the sets of Agra

Co-written with Atika Chohan, Agra has roots in Behl’s adolescence and early adulthood, spent between Punjab, Delhi and Kolkata (he studied filmmaking at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute). A time when grown boys in their 20s wouldn’t discuss sex or girls. In what he shows me of Agra — which was shot in 2019 and took much of the pandemic to edit and assemble — the protagonist Guru (debutant Mohit Agarwal) is desperately on the lookout for sexual contact. He lives with his mother on the lower level of his house; Guru’s father, played by 90s heartthrob Rahul Roy, shacks up with a mistress on the upper floor. According to a synopsis, Guru’s sexual ‘odyssey’ turns a corner when he strikes up a bond with a polio-afflicted older woman. Priyanka Bose, Aanchal Goswami and Vibha Chibber and Ruhani Sharma round out the cast.

Rahul Roy in Agra

Bringing Rahul Roy onboard

Roy was suggested for the role of ‘Daddy’ by the film’s casting director, Prashant Singh. They wanted someone who looked the age but was also, in a way, ‘debonair’. Roy, known for era-defining hits like Aashiqui and Junoon, slotted perfectly into the role. Behl says the 55-year-old actor was seeking an experience like Agra. “Rahul spoke at length about the difficult parts in his life when he thought he had strayed. About certain decisions he regretted making. By the 12th or 13th day, he really opened up to us.”

“The film is about a boy trying to find intimacy,” Behl explains. “But because there are so many other desires that get bared in the sexual act, like the need for ownership, he is questioning whether sex, love and truth can co-exist.” It’s also a film about the spatial makeup of India, and how that shapes and informs our deepest instincts. “China has almost the same population as us, but they also have a huge land mass. We, by contrast, are packed together so closely like a can of sardines. I started looking at the structural, sociopolitical, cultural, and economic landscape of sexuality, and how spaces affect our desires.”

Mohit Agarwal in Agra

Is that the metaphor he was going for by situating the film in Agra, a populous Uttar Pradesh town that also holds humanity’s pre-eminent symbol of love? Another head shake. “The idea came from Agra ka pagal khana. Guru’s home is like a madhouse.”

A sherpa and not an auteur

Behl, as fans of the director might know, is notorious for putting his actors through the wringer. Titli’s Shashank Arora said in an interview that he was told, during the film’s workshops, to practise defecating in the open, to better absorb the grimy world his character hails from. Chetan Sharma of Binnu Ka Sapna was instructed to get in touch with real acid attackers (“I couldn’t,” Sharma tells me over the phone. “They were all in jail.”). It’s safe to presume newcomer Agarwal had to get into character too, for Agra. “Mohit is not Guru,” Behl states. “He is a charming ladies’ man. We had to put him on a no-sex regime for two-and-a-half months. He had to feel the noise in Guru’s head.”

On the sets of Agra

Behl reiterates his philosophy of filmmaking as a collective process — not just in the technical execution of scenes but in their emotional underpinning as well. He dislikes the ‘auteur’ theory, describing himself more as a ‘sherpa’ escorting climbers up a hill. In Titli, he cast his own father, late actor-director Lalit Behl, as the protagonist’s father, a huge move considering how personal the subject was to their past. His former partner Namrata Rao edited the film. He allows — even insists on — all his assistant directors and department heads to contribute to the experiential content of a film. “A film has the possibility of becoming a document of a specific time and space,” he says. “And the filmmaker is not the only person living in that space. It has to be a ripple effect.”

Our conversation is interrupted by a phone call — inquiries about lodging arrangements at Cannes. Behl is attending with his family (he has a three-year-old boy named Dunya). His outfit is not yet ready, he confesses. He plans on staying the full schedule. He is thrilled to catch Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy, the other Indian title premiering at Cannes this year. Meanwhile, his next, Despatch, a sort-of thriller starring Manoj Bajpayee, is awaiting release on a streaming platform.

Kanu Behl onthe sets of Agra

He says he isn’t attached to festival recognition alone; he wants his films to be seen in India, even by the masses whose ordinary lives, familial dysfunctions and psychosexual hangups he so intently charts.

“An auto-rickshaw driver came up to me after seeing Titli and told me it was the truest thing he had ever seen. ‘ Zindagi toh yeh hi hai [this is what life is],’ the man said. So they are way more articulate and perceptive than any of us sitting at the top and infantilising them.”

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