Veteran filmmaker Kumar Shahani breathed his last on Friday in Kolkata at the age of 83. He was known for films like ‘Maya Darpan’ and ‘Tarang’, and was a FTII Pune alumni. Throughout his illustrious six-decade career, he directed films like ‘Khayal Gatha’ (1989), and ‘Kasba’ (1990).
His renowned film ‘Maya Darpan’, based on the short story by Hindi writer Nirmal Verma, went on to bag the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi.
Talking about ‘Maya Darpan’ in 2022 when the film marked its golden jubilee, he had said, “What I wanted to do was to take into account the way our traditions are surviving in popular art. Both folk and popular art always have epic elements. Even pulp literature is a distortion of the epic form. When Maya Darpan was made, the Euro-American response was enthusiastic.”
He also helmed ‘Char Adhyay’ in 1997, which was inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s novel, and showed a group of young intellectuals and revolutionaries during the Bengali Renaissance of the 1930s and 1940s.
Born in 1940 in Larkana, Pakistan, his early studies were in political science and history between 1958 and 1962, and he went on to join the film school and received a scholarship to study at IDHEC in Paris. He also studied at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune.
Shahani always had a keen eye on portraying everyday life, and two of his personal films about music and dance remain ‘Khayal Gatha’ (1989) and ‘Bhavantarana’ (1991).
