After The Circus Tent and Ishanou, Second Run once again partners with Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation for another restoration of a classic Indian film made outside the country’s mainstream industry. Few further outside, I reckon, than Shyam Benegal’s Manthan. Benegal had made a couple of documentaries about Operation Flood, a government programme that led to India becoming the biggest milk producer in the world. Benegal rightly realised this was a seismic social change, one that could easily form the basis of an Emile Zola-style proletariat epic. He also rightly realised that this was far too unsexy a choice of subject matter to capture any studio’s interest, so he needed to think radically in order to get his film made.
The result is a film that, as its opening credits announce, was produced by 500,000 farmers. Each paid two rupees in order to finance the film, and when it was released they flocked to see it. The booklet accompanying this Blu-Ray contains a deeply moving interview with the late Benegal, who remembers seeing farmers’ carts and wagons making their slow way from tiny villages to the nearest cinema showing their film. The twenty-first century has made Benegal’s achievement even more noteworthy: it may well be the birth of crowdfunding. Equally, focusing too much on how Manthan was made can lead us to overlook its other accomplishments.
A committed Left-winger who had, as noted above, been present at the birth of Indian farming’s “White Revolution”, Benegal knew exactly what his film was about, and the result has a ground-level authenticity. He’s clearly on the side of his hero, Girish Karnad’s Dr. Rao, as he tries to establish a worker-run farm. He’s equally clearly alert to the problems inherent in his mission. Dr. Rao is an outsider who comes into the film’s unnamed village full of near-evangelical belief. The resistance he faces is not entirely, or even chiefly, the result of rural insularity and suspicion. The establishment of a worker’s co-op would be enough of an issue for most film-makers, but Benegal smuggles in an exploration of one of the most volatile issues in Indian society; caste prejudice, particularly as it faces the Dalit class.
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“Dalit” is a term commonly translated as “untouchable”, but this is a misnomer. The subplot in Manthan about Rao’s ally Chandavarkar exploiting a young Dalit girl shows they were regarded as very touchable indeed by the classes who saw themselves as superior to the Dalit. Officially, such discrimination was forbidden by India’s founding constitution in 1950; unofficially it persisted, and criticism of the caste system is too often interpreted as criticism of Hinduism itself by followers of the religious-nationalist Hindutva ideology whose current figurehead is Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Manthan is extremely sympathetic to its Dalit characters, affording them lots of screen time to educate the ostensible hero Dr. Rao on his blind spot to their plight. It’s even more sympathetic in retrospect, now that the two actors playing the main Dalit characters have gone on to be legends of Indian cinema.
The Dalit activists Bhola and Bindu are played by Naseeruddin Shah and Smita Patil, respectively. Of Shah, all that can be said is that he’s developed into the Indian equivalent of a Willem Dafoe or a Tadanobu Asano, one of those actors who can turn up in any film, made for any budget, in any country and give it a little lift just from his consummate skill and professionalism. Patil tragically died in childbirth aged just 31 ten years after making this film, but that was easily enough time to cement her reputation as the feminist conscience of Indian cinema. Unlike most Indian actors, she rarely appeared in mainstream films, preferring to work in independent movies with a strong social conscience – including several other movies by Shyam Benegal.
Of those films, which range from the children’s fable Charandras Chor to the incisive sex work satire Mandi, it is to be hoped that the Film Heritage Foundation and Second Run have plans for those as well. For now, this is more than enough. Working with independent funding allowed Benegal to make a film without compromise, but it also meant Manthan tended to be seen in low-quality prints, often bootlegs. The accompanying booklet sees Benegal, Dungarpur, Shah, cinematographer Govind Nihalani and film curator Omar Ahmed talk emotively about seeing the restoration, how it makes Benegal and Nihalani’s labour of love as glowing, lustrous and sun-baked as it always should have been. It’s clearly a very personal thing for them, but it’s something that newcomers to the film can very easily share in just by watching the disc. It really does not look like a film made in straitened circumstances – it’s a Technicolor epic of work and poverty, and it is near-impossible to resist its charms.
Aside from that very full booklet, the extras also include a short featurette on the restoration of Manthan, plus a very entertaining interview with Dungarpur and Shah at the Cannes premiere of the Film Heritage Foundation’s restored print. It is easy to look at the making of Manthan and get the impression there was no limit to the cast and crew’s identification with the farmers who inspired them, but Shah reveals that wasn’t quite true. Initially, he said, he was determined to refuse the standard accommodation for lead actors in favour of living out in the country, side by side with the people he was portraying. Then he found a scorpion in his tent, and decided, in his words, that this was enough method acting for now.
MANTHAN IS OUT NOW ON SECOND RUN BLU-RAY
