[REVIEW] “An Aesthetic Exploration of the Trials and Tribulations of a Woman: Kumar Shahani’s 𝑀𝑎𝑦𝑎 𝐷𝑎𝑟𝑝𝑎𝑛” by M S Murali Krishna

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Kumar Shahani (director) Maya Darpan, 1972. 107 min.

Kumar Shahani (1940-2024), one of the doyens of Indian parallel cinema breathed his last on 24 February this year. After studying the advanced direction and screenplay course at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, India, he pursued higher studies in France on a French Government Scholarship and got an opportunity to work as an assistant director for the French film Une Femme douce (A Gentle Woman, 1969) directed by Robert Bresson, well-known for his minimalist films. During his stint in France, he was influenced by the filmmaking techniques of directors like Roberto Rossellini and Sergei Parajanov, among others. The auteur was renowned for his offbeat films like Maya Darpan (Mirror of Illusion, 1972); Tarang (Wages and Profits, 1984); Khayal Gatha (The Saga of Khayal, 1989) on Khayal, a prominent form of Hindustani classical music; and Bhavantarana (1991) on the outstanding contributions of the Odissi dancer and scholar, the late Kelucharan Mohapatra.

Many film scholars and critics consider Maya Darpan (its Hindi title for “the illusory mirror”) as India’s first formalist film. A rewatch of this classic film recently gave many insights about the filmmaking style of Shahani. Set in a town in Northern India just after the country’s independence in 1947, the film is based on a story by famed Hindi author Nirmal Verma, with the female protagonist in Taran (played by Aditi). She lives with her father, a wealthy landlord addressed as Sahib (Anil Pandya) and a widowed aunt (Kanta Vyas) in an old dilapidated mansion. An engineer (Iqbalnath Kaul) trying to organise workers in the town has a sort of a romantic relationship with Taran. Trapped by a patriarchal society, Taran’s father wants her to get married to a man of the same class and with the same caste privileges. Meanwhile, Taran attempts to join her brother working in a tea estate in Assam, who has escaped from class fixations.

The film starts off with the camera veering into the interiors of the old mansion and also seeming to search the voice of the soundtrack. Finally it rests with a sleeping character. The soundscape has non-diegetic sounds of cars, trains, ox-driven carts and running taps. Also, the sounds of crows, pigeons and sparrows seem to point out the dearth of emotional expressions and also the loneliness of the protagonist. Maya Darpan has the cinematography of K.K. Mahajan, who collaborated with Shahani in other films. Coupled with the soundscape, it deglamourises actions throughout the film. Music by Bhaskar Chandavarkar captures the essence of Shahani’s portrayal of characters and sequences ably. The colour scheme of the film adroitly conveys the cinematic expressions of the director.

There are some repetitive shots in the film—Taran dusting down the empty bamboo chairs in the courtyard, her walking inside the mansion with her back to the camera and the likes. Repeated cleaning of chairs indicate the monotonous day to day life of Taran. The old and the weak mansion and empty chairs are metaphors of the crumbling structure of feudalism and also the power and authority associated with it. The framing of Taran against the mansion’s walls, striking pillars, doorways signifies in a way her claustrophobic existence. By contrast, there are some shots of crossing railway tracks that intend to portray the get-away feelings of Taran. When the engineer-friend and Taran make love on a construction site, the freeze-frame of the alignment of slippers of Taran and her friend on the same line reveals the gender equity.

Shahani depicts Taran’s strained relationship with her father as the tension between caste and class-fixed world outlook of the feudal era and an individual’s consciousness shaped by modern moorings. The tenderness of a father-daughter relationship is absent here. The engineer-friend of Taran highlights the changes that are to take place in the town by mentioning the levelling of hills, the ramshackle dwelling places replaced with pucca houses and also factories. In a scene, he quotes Friedrich Engels’s description of the Hegelian dialectic—“Freedom is the recognition of necessity.” Taran on hearing this asks him, “What is a person’s own necessity?” He replies, “Necessity is not merely passion but the ability to look outside of oneself and be in wide open spaces.”

Maya Darpan has all the hallmarks of a New Wave film and a stamp of Indian aesthetics writ large on it. This film has to be seen and understood in the larger context of the political, social, economic and cultural churnings that took place in India in the 1970 decade. That was also a period when parallel cinema in India began to blossom.

Many consider Maya Darpanto be the most celebrated work of Kumar Shahani.

How to cite: Krishna, M S Murali. “An Aesthetic Exploration of the Trials and Tribulations of a Woman: Kumar Shahani’s Maya Darpan.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 7 Jun. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/06/07/maya-darpan.

M S Murali Krishna is from Bengaluru, Karnataka State, India. He is a writer and a cultural and social activist. His writings have appeared in The Hindu, The Indian Express, Deccan Herald, Alive and also in vernacular language newspapers and magazines (both print and digital). He has also authored some books and booklets. A cinephile, he has written many articles on film. As an active participant in the film society movement, he has served as an executive committee member of the Suchitra Film Society, a renowned organisation in Bengaluru. His vernacular-language videos on cinema are available on YouTube.