WHY MAHABHARATA? EPIC FORM AND CINEMATIC REALISM

Over the course of Shyam Benegal’s long career, Kalyug (The Mechanical Age, 1981) quite understandably holds a uniquely intermediary significance. This is not surprising because the film certainly marks a radical departure in the treatment of subjects in Benegal’s cinema. This was not Benegal’s first endeavour collaborating with a big studio. He had already worked successfully with Shashi Kapoor’s production in Junoon (The Obsession, 1979), which enjoyed equally good critical response and perhaps greater commercial success. Though one could argue that Junoon as a period piece was more experimental in its choice of casting, in many ways, despite the same RK Films banner, Kalyug is much more decisively expressive in its status as a multi-starrer. In addition to the choice of actors, the implications of itemised and locational uses of song-and-dance sequences reveal an unprecedented attention on Benegal’s part to a specifically urban middle-class populism. At the same time, Kalyug’s complexity cannot be bounded by a narrow definition of commercial agenda. Rather, it is perhaps a very self-reflexively mainstream attempt on Benegal’s part, and thereby tellingly representative of his larger reflections on the intellectual and professional milieu that informed Benegal’s professional work in the preceding two decades.

On the one hand, Kalyug’s naming is well located in the heavily industrialised landscape of post-Nehruvian India’s commercial capital, Bombay, with the opening credits establishing the mechanised rhythm of progress in the ever-moving factory setting. This is a movie of the machine age because the dispassionate and precise utility of relationships takes precedence over integrity of filial bonds. In this regard, the film reflects on a conflict between mechanistic inevitability of outcomes (the cause) and preordained integrity of biological bonds (the kin). Thus, the sense of foreboding and an almost prophetic inevitability of dehumanised subjects loom over the film from the very beginning. Yet, the epochal sensibilities and idiomatic use of the epic form also refers to a deliberative projection of disrupted temporalities. In epochal discourse, Kalyug indicates an infernal and terminal state of crisis, reaching a point of saturation. Thus, Benegal’s attempt is not merely to adapt the epic form to manifest how it travels well across time, but rather to underscore the anxieties that arise out of this time-travel of medium and narrative.