Representation is a tricky word as there can never be an authentic representation. Any act of representation conceals a lot and only offers a timid glimpse of reality. Cinema is well known for such deception. It often claims to be a reflexive comrade that would showcase.
More than a cinematographer extraordinaire, Shyam Benegal is a phenomenon, an institution of sorts. So strong is his influence on the parallel or new cinema of contemporary times that one may easily speak of the Benegal school of film-making. It is another matter.
The three plays, introduced with a skilled and analytically detailed discussion, rise above parochialisms of time, space, culture and language. They resonate with universal themes and emotions like love, duty, guilt and the sheer tedium of existence that saps one’s soul of vibrancy and one’s life of joy.
This novel is really a chronicle, like Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, of a time, and characters who lived in that time, kings, nobles, knights and wizards; what happened to them, the events of which they were part, and how they survived or were destroyed. But that’s where any resemblance fades.
Benyamin’s latest novel in English, Body and Blood, unravels a new kind of politics that interweaves faith and crime as the author deals with the influence of religious dogmatism in the lives of faithful believers. The setting of the novel spreads over a group of Indian cities and the narrative is shaped.
Lockdown. Isolation. Social distancing. Cases. PPE. These are but fragments of the vocabulary that have entered our lives with the onset of the pandemic. Now that ‘the new normal’ has been set and the countless deaths slowly become cold numbers that we scroll past on .