OBITUARY – Kumar Shahani (1940–2024):The Epic Structure and the Resistance

It wasn’t a radical film by any definition of radical that existed at the time.

The maker himself was clearly a radical figure. The first impression of  Kumar Shahani was always that of frailty. A pronounced limp, sharp eyes and a shock of hair, a Marxist, it would be said in whispers in the form of the time, with an intellectual genealogy that had European roots that also spoke to histories of Indian materialism. He had returned from Paris, and had all the hallmarks of an active participant in the events of May 68. As a student at the IDHEC in Paris, however, he had chosen to work with the decidedly antediluvian Robert Bresson, as against the far more attractive figures of soixante-huitard cinema: Jean-Luc Godard and the rest.