Kumar Shahani
| Photo Credit: Special arrangement
With Kumar’s passing, the conversation has been disrupted.
A protean conversation whose theme dealt, in one sitting or call, with the entire civilisational sweep of cotton — and how to embrace it, and make meaning and art of it, in celluloid.
In another, with the lambent edifying articulation of the Indian Constitution — and what fascinating form it can take on the screen.
In yet another, with how ellipsis sublimates a filmic movement, much as a touch of pitch imperfection, a note of ‘besur’ brinkmanship, gives a Hindustani classical vocal rendition the ineffable touch.
Or, with the urgent concern about the subjunctive mood becoming endangered in language and literature.
Or again, most recently, with the strike by scriptwriters in Hollywood evoking euphoric memories of 1968.
And repeatedly, through all this, invoking the genius of Marxist historian and polymath D.D. Kosambi to buttress a point.
These were not so much separate conversations as a continuing discourse, each engagement as if picking up the thread from where we had left off the last time. His probing, artistic imagination was at once captivating and formidable. The gentle smile that lit up his face and infected his voice was an invitation to share his restless ardour, to feel guilty about complacence.
Breaking ground
The conversations, for me, began in real earnest about 16 years ago, although I knew Kumar from much earlier. Around 2008, there was this grand and daunting idea — grand for Kumar, daunting for me — of setting up an institute of aesthetics in Kerala. In our brainstorming, Kumar would unleash a torrent of exceptional thoughts, which I had to harness into a discipline that lent itself to further artistic exploration in an institutional framework. I sought and got the help of art and culture writer and critic Sadanand Menon in shaping the material we had into a proposal we could submit to the government of Kerala to set up an institute. ‘School of Higher Learning in Art, Aesthetics and Culture’ was Kumar’s working title for it.
M.A. Baby, who was Kerala’s Culture Minister then, was supportive, which helped the proposal gain initial traction and move forward. We stayed with it for a few years, trying to navigate it through the bureaucracy, before our resolve petered out.
The sheer scale of the project was perhaps its undoing. But, thinking back now, there was probably another element that worked against it. Kumar, it seems to me, unbeknownst to himself, had this innate rebelliousness against institutionalising art. If this can be called a paradox, it wasn’t the only one, as I discovered during the years we were grappling with this ambitious project.
Digital enthusiast
For one whose cinema has often been described as ‘epic’ in its idiom and formal structure, Kumar had an intuitive understanding of digital technology, its liberative impulse and aesthetic possibilities. Lateral thinking and hypertext-mode leaps from idea to idea took him all over and into areas as seemingly far-fetched as medicine, biology and sport. It would seem that in his urge to move beyond the ‘unidimensionality of the signal’ and past the ‘multivalency of signs’, the allure of the dispersed, pixelated digital realm was strong. He was fascinated by the new age techno-aesthetic waiting to be tapped. But at the same time, he was appalled by the impermanence, the truncation of continuity, the erasure of memory, even identity, that digitisation augured. The digital seemed to him at once apotheosis and apocalypse.
I do not know if he reconciled these paradoxes in his own mind. We didn’t have the opportunity to delve into this at length these last few years before he left us. The conversation has been disrupted. But we continue to be in communion.
The writer is a journalist, filmmaker, media entrepreneur and Chairman of Asian College of Journalism.
