Nishant

I’m not a film critic, nor do I aspire to be one. My solitary foray into the business of appraising a film happened six or seven years ago, when I took on the formidable Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, extended my critique onward to Kaaghaz ke Phool, and in the impetuousness of youth, sent it by post straight to The Hindu, which had only the preceding week published an atrocious (as it seemed to me then) review of the same movie by the eminent writer, Meenakshi Mukherjee. As if this was not enough, I was cheeky enough to enclose along with my essay a covering letter that in its tone hovered dangerously over the thin line that sometimes separates would-be-smartness from impertinence. Had I rummaged through the rubbish-bins of Kasturi Building, 858, Anna Salai, Chennai, a few days later, I might have found material that looked distinctly familiar (unless of course, someone in a fit of disgust had taken the trouble to reach for the shredder). The only gain from the whole exercise came from the bit of looking-up that I did, mainly some insights from Nasreen Munni Kabir’s biography of Guru Dutt, which was yet to hit the bookstands at the time.

It is therefore with some trepidation that I choose to record some of my impressions of Shyam Benegal’s Nishant. This 1975 film is the second of what is considered his quartet (the others being Ankur (1973), Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977)), which, as I understand, met with reasonable success in breaking ground with mainstream cinema without suffering an undue discount in terms of viewership. The occasion for watching Nishant came about through my discovery of the Konangal Film Society, a group of cinema-lovers in Coimbatore that holds regular movie-screenings. The discovery was reinforced by the draw of the authorship of Nishant’s screenplay, which rests with the fiery Vijay Tendulkar who passed away recently.

Nishant may loosely be translated as ‘the end of the night’ (निशा + अंत) or better still, in the context of the movie, ‘the end of darkness’. For it is indeed the darkness of debauchery and terror, flowing from the haveli of the zamindar, that engulfs the village in which Nishant is set, and which is seemingly dispelled when the village turns against the zamindar. However, while the end of the zamindar may mark the end of darkness for the village, such a luxury is not available to the central character, a violated woman who is solidly restrained by the fetters of social norm that rule out her return to a respectable existence. A question-mark as a suffix to the film title may not have been out of place.

The film is nourished by the splendid performances of the cast, which includes Amrish Puri as the zamindar, and Anant Nag (of later-day Malgudi Days fame) and young Mohan Agashe as his villainous brothers. Naseeruddin Shah is cast in an uncharacteristically tentative role as Vishwam, the youngest of the zamindar’s brothers, although his character is pivotal to the way the story unfolds. Girish Karnad is slightly wooden as the schoolteacher. Shabana Azmi as Sushila, the schoolteacher’s wife, delivers a fine performance. Smita Patil, as Vishwam’s wife, shows promise.

It is interesting that in exploring the complexity of relationships and the bearing that social mores have on them, Nishant seems to completely overlook the complexity of societal make-up in rural India. The film presents us with bipolar opposites with the diabolical zamindar on one side and the rest of the village on the other, ignoring the heterogeneity of caste and class divisions that typify an Indian village and pose a daunting impediment to any attempt at mass action. This neglect is enhanced by the uneven temporal balance of the film. While the first half proceeds at a leisurely pace dwelling at length on minutiae, the call to rebel and its execution is accomplished in double-quick time.

The choice of the elderly temple priest as the medium that incites the village to revolt is curious. As was perceptively pointed out by one of the viewers in the discussion following the film, the priestly class, particularly the practising priest, has scarcely gone down in history as a bugler of incipient radical change, and is more often than not found on the side of the reactionary.

On the whole, however, Nishant does sufficient justice to a lay-audience – among which I count myself - that seeks out the film in the hope of a compelling experience. Backed by some excellent cinematography and Benegal’s ciné-vérité, the film is a remarkable product of its time. Its refusal to dumb down the viewer makes it deeply provocative and rouses one to think along not-so-comfortable lines. Which, at least in part, is what good cinema should be about. Isn’t it?