Benegal Ek Khoj

It’s in the trenches of history and the many episodes of Bharat Ek Khoj that Benegal helped the nation rediscover its faculties of curiosity, discovery and most importantly realism.

Manik+Sharma

Dec 24, 2024

Shyam Benegal's Bharat Ek Khoj, a 53-episode TV drama, was released in 1988.

IN THE LATE 80s the then PM Rajiv Gandhi turned to national television as a tool to entice and engage the masses. Politicians turn to mythology and history when the present appears to be on the verge of slipping out of their grasp; if not the drug of promise, seed them with the drug of distraction and sensual appeal. Out of this frantic rush to create soft tools to enhance the reputation of a flailing regime, came two giant mythological adaptations — Ramayana and Mahabharata. Both ignited the national conscience, inflamed a hidden nerve, and engineered a socio-cultural moment that would instead become the vehicle for Gandhi’s political detractors to come to the fore. But while Gandhi was instrumental in commissioning both religious epics, he was also behind the commissioning of a third one. The one that offered a level-headed, unvarnished and intellectually stimulating profile of India and how it came into being. Of course, the late Shyam Benegal must be remembered for his path-breaking films, but it’s in the trenches of history and the many episodes of Bharat Ek Khoj, that he helped the nation rediscover its faculties of curiosity, discovery and most importantly realism.

The late Benegal was a stalwart. The maker of maladies, the chronicler of an India that most would rather not see. From caste to prostitution, to penury and disillusionment, Benegal’s India isn’t the de-fanged image of a beast coming out of the woods of the past, but that of a crack slowly widening on the surface of the ocean. Like people, nations are driven by myths. Often created to shape its future, but also crafted to hide the past. Benegal the director, therefore, was often unseeded by Benegal the excavator of truth, the one man prepared to dig in places that most gladly walked past.

Understandably, his films like Ankur Manthan and Mandi are institutional specimens in themselves. They aren’t just ‘parallel’ cinema, they are civilisational laboratories that teach you far more about yourself than entire curriculums put together. Benegal never set out to thaw reality with the slickness of song, dance and entertainment. He set out to surgically carve it free, without the administration of either a drug or a political agent.

It made Benegal the ideal choice to make Bharat Ek Khoj the staggering adaptation of Nehru’s Discovery of India. A show that the director often claimed, he knew “wouldn’t be made again”. And it hasn’t and most likely won’t be for a variety of reasons. For its 53 episodes of variable length, the director shot liberally at locations across India, rented a studio lot for two years and recruited a cast made up entirely of theatre actors (Om Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Naseeruddin Shah... you name it). The moniker ‘ahead of its time’ may fit the show well. Firstly, it arrived in the shadow of mythological giants that had swept the public off of its feet with grandiose exhibitions of war, conflict, piety and ultimately, pride. The homogeneity of that first brushstroke, its magical illusions had raised in the midst of the Indian public, a certain yearning for faith. Its freedoms, however, still needed to be debated, investigated and understood. Because not everyone was equally free, or even independent. Not yet. But what shape could that line of questioning and probing even take?

Benegal’s series begins in the Harappan civilisation and culminates in Independence. From birth to rebirth it covers the trajectory of a country tortured, tamed and tarnished by inner turmoil, discrimination, external influences and unceasing prejudice. Nehru’s book was a liberal, at times nosy excavation of India’s difficult realities, but Benegal went one further by offering a counter-narrative to Nehru’s voice — a contradicting narrator. It was debate and discourse in the loose, unwieldy form of a narrative. Unlike anything we had ever seen — history, politics, caste and race sieved through a mesh of stories, opinions and arguments. Consider the fourth episode ‘Caste Formation’ which ends with the declaration that ‘it is impossible for caste system to endure’, or that it must be replaced by another system to make sure an age-old equilibrium isn’t toppled. Or the two-part portrayal of Aurangzeb, his rise to power, the corruption in his court and the political origins of some of his most infamous decisions. Far removed from the sweeping, bit-sized takedowns of today’s social media generation.

More than the craft, the astute production and the performances (including the late Irrfan Khan, by the way) Bharat Ek Khoj espouses the one quality that has made it impossible to approach history today, with a degree of trust and credibility. Not because Benegal’s work wasn’t flawed or had its fair share of omissions. It missed, for example, the opportunity to classify Babasaheb Ambedkar as the one man who may have shaped, and in some ways even trimmed Nehru’s legacy as a warrior for equality, justice and freedom. But these omissions, highlight the neutral and unmotivated manner in which Benegal carried out the open heart surgery of a nation which wasn’t quite sure what was beating underneath its chest, its wrists or the base of its progressive feet. After all, we were still a young country trying to understand the implications and influence of this wild new technology that suddenly became the centre of every living room in the country — the television. Considering how the internet has been used to rip through the sociological mould of the nation, and erect new divisions, Benegal’s intervention supplied a sense of grace, intellect and curiosity. Qualities that look increasingly remote and inaccessible now that he is gone.

Benegal Ek Khoj

Manik+Sharma

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