The Kumar Shahani Legacy

Discussion and Screenings
School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Seminar Room SAA II

7 December 2024, 3 pm – 8 pm

The Kumar Shahani Legacy

Discussion and Screenings

School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University

In collaboration with

Sher Gil-Sundaram Arts Foundation

Grateful acknowledgment: National Film Development Corporation, National Film Archive of India and XPD Division, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India

Kumar Shahani, filmmaker, author, teacher, passed away earlier this year, on 24th February 2024. On the occasion of his birthday, film theorists, practitioners and archivists come together to discuss a remarkably complex cinematic legacy. We also screen his last major released film, Birah Bharyo Ghar Aangan Kone (Bamboo Flute, 2000).

Speakers:
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ira Bhaskar, Iyesha Geeth Abbas, Laleen Jayamanne, Rimli Bhattacharya, Urmila Bhirdikar, Veena Hariharan

Screening:
Birah Bhariyo Ghar Aangan Kone (Bamboo Flute)
Kumar Shahani, 2000, 64 min

Earlier this year Kumar Shahani passed away. He left behind a body of films made in 35 mm celluloid. He also left an archive of writings, notes, recordings of talks and conversations in film schools, Universities and other public institutions. Together they constitute a major cinematic and cultural legacy that scholars, curators and historians are only gradually beginning to comprehend.

Engaging with such a legacy presents formidable intellectual, aesthetic, and archival challenges. In the early 1970s, when Shahani began his filmmaking career, there was little established precedent in the cinema for what he wanted to do. He soon came to be associated with a practice for which there was no prevalent framework of intelligibility, making it necessary for him to teach and to write alongside making films, to create an aesthetic context for cinema itself and even a planetary canon. His writing addresses questions of aesthetics, history, politics and psychoanalysis, often using sources drawn from traditions of performance, visual art, and of course world cinema. In this sense – of filmmaker-teacher-pedagogue – he may well be seen as a direct descendent of Eisenstein. He may also be viewed within independent cinema everywhere, in Europe, and in the global South from the Cinema Novo to nouvelle vague and from Imperfect to Third, across Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia. In India, his framing of his work within larger traditions of practice, often centuries old, open perspectives around narrative and performative modes for the present.

All of this work presents formidable archival challenges alongside aesthetic and intellectual ones. The celluloid films, usually financed by India’s state institutions, pose unique technological and aesthetic problems for their preservation and renovation. Several traces of other work – workshop productions in film schools, recordings of talks both formal and informal, documentary footage of his work, and writings on his cinema in different parts of the world – produce their own archival conundrums.

PROGRAMME

3 pm – 4.30 pm
Kumar Shahani: Context, Text, Pedagogy
Ira Bhaskar
Laleen Jayamanne
Urmila Bhirdikar
Ashish Rajadhyaksha (Moderator)

4.30 pm – 4.45 pm:
Break

4.45 pm – 6.15 pm:
Kumar Shahani: Archival Questions
Iyesha Geeth Abbas
Rimli Bhattacharya
Ratheesh Radhakrishnan (Moderator)

6.15 pm – 7.30 pm:
Screening: Birah Bharyo Ghar Aangan Kone

(The Bamboo Flute/ Kumar Shahani/ 2000, 64 min)

Introduced by Veena Hariharan

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian, and author of Ritwik Ghatak: A Return the Epic (1982), Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009) and John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers (2023). He edited the book of Kumar Shahani’s writings, The Shock of Desire and Other Essays (2015).

Ira Bhaskar retired as Professor of Cinema Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has co-authored Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (2009) and co-edited a volume of essays  Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories (2022). She is currently editing a volume of Ritwik Ghatak’s screenplays – Ghatak’s Partition Quartet  of which the first volume on Nagarik  has been published (2021). She has written extensively on the Indian New Wave Cinema.

Iyesha Geeth Abbas has been engaged in research work in audio-visual archives since 2009. she worked with the Mumbai-based studio CAMP, and collaborated with silent cinema historian Virchand Dharamsey. She currently works at the National Film Archive of India.

Laleen Jayamanne taught Cinema Studies at the University of Sydney). She wrote The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (Indiana University Press, 2015). Recent writing includes Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift: In the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz (2021), and Walk Like an Elephant: The Island Essays 2022-23 (2023). She directed the film A Song of Ceylon (1985).

Rimli Bhattacharya is an author, translator and archivist. She was Script Consultant and Production Coordinator for Kumar Shahani’s Char Adhyay (1997) and collaborated with him for many of his film and writing projects for three decades. She has taught at several national and international universities, traversing different linguistic and cultural worlds. She has published widely on comparative literature, performance history, children’s literature and primary education.

Urmila Bhirdikar teaches Sociology in Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi- NCR. Her teaching and research interests are in the themes of privilege and dispossession, respectability and self respect, translation and sonic cultures. She accesses these themes in print and audio-visual materials in English, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and Gujarati.

Veena Hariharan is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her essays and articles on documentary, the L.A Rebellion, home movies, and non-human ecologies have appeared in journals and edited volumes. She is currently completing a book manuscript on contemporary Indian non-fiction cinema.

About the film: 

Birah Bharyo Ghar Aangan Kone (Hindi and Tamil, 2000)

(aka The Bamboo Flute)

Director: Kumar Shahani

Camera: K.K. Mahajan

Editing: Lalitha Krishna

Audiography: Namita Nayak

Executive Producer and Music Research: Roshan Shahani

Text: Udayan Vajpeyi

Kumar Shahani’s cinematic ode to perhaps the most versatile and also, it is said, perhaps the most ancient musical instrument in the world: the humble bamboo flute. The film might be viewed as one of a trilogy including Bhavantarana (1991) and the as-yet unreleased Priye Charushile. It brings dance together with stone sculpture, combining classical performance with tribal music to tell a civilisational story of the origins of enunciation. ‘Enunciation… precedes all concepts and the word’, he wrote in 2002 in a short essay titled ‘Film and Philosophy’, and now Shahani enunciates through legends enacted through speech, movement and stone. “Both Kalidasa in India and Rumi in Persia…  thought of the bamboo flute as preceding the prana of human existence, that which imbues it with its own being and transmutes it to the Word and the object, unites it with the Beloved other”, he writes. The form continues Shahani’s interest in speech forms drawn from texts both classical and contemporary, placed alongside sequences filmed in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The texts evoke a transformation from the Vedic age to the birth of Vaishnavism, e.g. the confrontation between Indra and Krishna from the Rig Veda. Remarkable performances by dancers Alarmel Valli and Kelucharan Mahapatra, a cameo featuring the legendary flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, a khayal rendered for the film by Jal Balaporia, amid archival scores by T.R. Mahalingam and others are set to K.K. Mahajan’s fluid cinematography.