INTRODUCTION

The ability to define, demarcate and identify the ‘past’ as distinct from the ‘present’ is a significant way in which history manifests itself. Parallel cinema has often been described, both in journalese and in academic discourse, as social realist; the fictional world created by the films that are identified under this category seems to imperceptibly flow into the present, and meld into the contemporary social world. Parallel films such as Samskara (Funeral Rites, 1970), Kaadu (Forest, 1973), Ghatashraddha (The Ritual, 1977), to arbitrarily name a few, or even Ankur (The Seedling, 1974), do not explicitly mark the events as historical, or demarcate the fictional world as the past or as something that prevailed in the past, which has since ceased to be so in the present (that is, the present when the films were made in the 1970s). This is not to suggest that the issues that they deal with such as caste, the practice of keeping concubines, or feudal land relations, were of the past, and the films erroneously make them seem contemporary. Rather, my point has to do with the method of treatment of their subject, whether it is caste, or feudalism, which is approached and critiqued as a contemporary problem.

It is here that Shyam Benegal’s Nishant (Night’s End, 1975) appears to me to be slightly different from the films named above, or even many other parallel films. Not only in the title does it indicate an ‘end’ (anth in Hindi means end/cessation) to the darkness that it delineates, but in the film too, right at the outset, the time of the film’s action is clearly marked as 1945, that is, some thirty years before the time of the film’s making. To mark out the film’s action world as a specific time in the past is not necessarily to posit a break with the present; as opposed to a seamless, unmarked flow of time, it is to conceptualise a change that has taken place between a ‘then’ and a ‘now’, maybe even drawing from the past to transform the present.