Mani Kaul - Where Art Stands Alone, Pure And Unblemished

Cinema in India has been seen as an alternative to an evening at the circus. Or a visit to the zoo. The audience is a passive observer, constantly being told when to laugh, when to cry and when to feel excitement. Over the years, this prescriptive manner of telling people what is meant to be funny, beautiful, repulsive or sexually attractive, has largely shaped perspectives of the masses on such matters. But in complete contrast to this, cinema evolved in certain other parts of the world as a potent medium of reflection, leaving it to the audience to decide what they make of it. 

Inspired by this school of filmmaking and its immense possibilities, a whole generation of Indian filmmakers burst into the scene in the mid-20th century. They identified themselves as artists, and they swore by realism. To them, what was more important than anything else was to portray realism in their work, often showcasing social ills and the struggles of the “common Indian man”. These were spearheaded by the likes of Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, later followed by others of their ilk - Shyam Benegal, G. Aravindan, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Girish Kasaravalli et cetera. By the 70s, it begun to be labelled as the “Indian New Wave”.

But even within this tribe, there were outliers. They were rebels amongst the rebels, if you will. These were people who didn’t care so much about realism or narrative. For Ritwik Ghatak and for Mani Kaul, film was not a storytelling medium. It was a tool to express themselves, to use archetypes and indigenous traditions to throw light on the human condition. While they did find inspiration in some artists and philosophers of the west, their primary fuel was Indian philosophy and schools of thought. As a child, Mani Kaul was afflicted with acute myopia. Life was like a weird, blurry dream. When he was given a pair of glasses to wear, his whole perspective was transformed, quite literally. 

For the first time ever, he could see the beauty of the world in a way that was sharp and vivid. He would wake up at the crack of dawn everyday, just to see the riot of colours and light that his city was. And the first film he saw with those clear glasses was Helen of Troy (1956). 

Like any other child growing up in a small town, Mani was enamoured by the world of mainstream cinema. As he grew older he may have been introduced to Guru Dutt’s cinema because of his uncle Mahesh Kaul. Mahesh was a banker who quit his job to work in the movies, eventually directing and acting in a plethora of films throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

It was Mahesh Kaul who portrayed Guru Dutt’s father-in-law in Kaagaz ke Phool. Mani was quite taken in by Guru’s films, and ended up watching Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam 17 times. Every single day, he found himself in the cinema hall, watching a movie. It was decided: he wanted to be an actor. Or so he thought. A chance viewing of a documentary in a theatre gave him his first shock. It was Chidananda Dasgupta’s Portrait of a City (1961), a documentary about Calcutta. Mani had never seen a film like that before and he couldn’t believe a film could be made without actors. Despite the objections of his family, Mani found his way to the Film and Television Institute (FTII), and it is there he found his inhibitions and preconceived notions about cinema getting stripped away. He found a teacher and a mentor in Ritwik Ghatak.

“The capacity of this man to make his work against all odds”, Mani later told Nasreen Munni Kabir in an interview, “was the greatest thing that I think I inherited…I could then fantasise about making a film without money, without equipment, without actors…”. Mani shadowed Ghatak everywhere and became his errand boy. The other boys were rather scared of this temperamental man, and Ghatak instilled in him, amongst other things, a penchant for alcohol. In one instance, Ghatak was blasting his students because it was reported that they were found piss drunk. He was screaming at each one of them but when he came to Mani Kaul, the boy quipped, “I can stomach my drink!” and that seemed to calm him down. It turns out he didn’t have a problem with the students drinking, but he did take it as an affront that they got drunk! One of the lessons Mani took away from his days with Ritwik Ghatak was that it wasn’t realism but reality that one should pursue.

In order to achieve an honest reproduction of that reality, one needed to go beyond the so-called “realism” in cinema. He realised the distinction between the dramatic form - where the idea was to have a linear narrative which was used to emotionally move and engage the audience - and the epic form, where the narrative is non-linear and the objective is to force the audience to think critically and make their own judgements.

But despite these inspirations, Mani believed he betrayed Ghatak when he leaned more towards another master who had a very different view of making films. Robert Bresson’s uncompromising austerity and minimalism attracted him immensely. Bresson wasn’t interested in structure, and he only worked with non-professional actors. He didn’t believe the age-old convention that the face is the centre of the human body, as far as expression is concerned. He would shoot different parts of the body, and sometimes his human subjects would be positioned away from the camera rather than near it. These principles influenced Mani’s own filmmaking, and austerity and minimalism pervaded his work.

Mani Kaul made his first film Uski Roti in 1970, a startlingly sophisticated debut. This was unlike anything that Indians had seen before. Although “based on” Mohan Rakesh’s short story, the film - if one could call it just that - was Mani’s experimentation with all these ideas that had been growing inside of him. Soon after the film, a buzz developed. There was this gentleman who invited him for lunch and having introduced him as a bright new filmmaker with a lot of talent, proceeded to explain to his wife that his film was about a woman waiting for her husband at a bus stop. The wife interrupted, “Don’t tell me the whole story! I want to watch it.” Mani smiled impishly and said, “But that’s it. That’s the whole story!”

In a career spanning three decades, Mani Kaul directed a little more than 20 films, which included features, shorts and documentaries. But his films, often acclaimed for their artistic excellence, were never accepted by Indian audiences. Being used to a form of cinema which existed to press their buttons to make them laugh or cry, the concept of making an effort to appreciate art was alien to them. And what seemed more shocking to him was the rejection of his colleagues. He told film historian Thomas Waugh in an interview, “All my life I have faced this problem of a rejection from the audience, and a rejection from most of the filmmakers in India…I have been rejected right from the beginning, from my first film onwards.” They believed his cinema is over-indulgent and disrespected the audience. Whereas the truth is just the opposite. Mani Kaul’s cinema assumes a certain intelligence on the part of the audience, and requires them to actively participate in the process of dissemination of his art. A lot like classical music - another field he devoted a lifetime to studying and teaching - the audience is expected to reach halfway, and be open to accept what is being communicated.

Mani Kaul learned Dhrupad under the tutelage of his guru, Ustad Mohiuddin Dagar. He was deeply entrenched in the musical traditions, and even made films about it. But he was probably the only filmmaker who was never interested in using any music in his fiction films. “I keep it (music) very separate from film”, he said, “I almost don’t use music in films, because I really believe I want to make films that have images and sound, words, and the soundtrack - and I am not so interested in using music, you know.” The nature of film, and the nature of communication through filmic art, was an eternal obsession with him. There was a point when he made it his mission to convey that cinema was no longer a visual medium (a function of space), but a temporal one (a function of time). The obsession with the idea of time is reflected in his work in Duvidha, in which past, present and future get enmeshed together. “Suppose (there is) a static guava on a static table”, he would say, “and the camera is static - then the only thing that is functioning there is time. The moment there is a movement, the idea of time is alienated.” 

A certain awareness of the Upanishads also pervades his work. To Mark Cousins he once said (as part of Cousin’s famous Story of Film), “The self is described (in the Upanishads) as indescribable, unreachable, unknowable, unavailable to the senses. So it is never experienced, but is always there. This affects very deeply, the question of art. You really cannot make that sense of self a subject of filmmaking. It is in fact the one who is making that film.” In essence, the truth about Mani Kaul’s own cinema lies somewhere in those lines. It is probably unknowable and not to be “understood” in the conventional sense. It is to be experienced “with an open mind”, as he once said one should approach the cinema of his master, Ritwik Ghatak.