The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani

By Laleen Jayamanne

Laleen Jayamanne examines the major works of leading Indian film director, Kumar Shahani, and explores the reaches of modernist film aesthetics in its international form. More than an auteur study, Jayamanne approaches Shahani's films conceptually, as those that reveal cinema's synaesthetic capabilities, or "cinaesthesia." As the author shows, Shahani's cinematic project entails a modern reformulation of the ancient oral tradition of epic narration and performance in order to address the contemporary world, establishing a new cinematic expression, "an epic idiom." As evidenced by his films, constructing cinematic history becomes more than an archival project of retrieval, and is instead a living history of the present which can intervene in the current moment through sensory experiences, propelling thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9780253014146

Book preview

THE EPIC CINEMA

OF KUMAR SHAHANI

THE EPIC

CINEMA

of

KUMAR

SHAHANI

LALEEN JAYAMANNE

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bloomington & Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© 2015 by Laleen Jayamanne

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jayamanne, Laleen.

The epic cinema of Kumar Shahani / Laleen Jayamanne.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-01407-8 (cl: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-253-01410-8 (pb: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-253-01414-6 (eb) 1. Shahani, Kumar – Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PN1998.3.S4518J39 2014

791.4302’33092 – dc23

2014022236

1  2  3  4  5  20  19  18  17  16  15

For Kumar Shahani

Once Claire was asleep again, the professor removed a chunk of her brain – the epileptogenic part – and dropped it into a bin. What do you think that patch of cortex was responsible for? I asked him. He shrugged, perhaps a little defensively. No idea, he said, we just know it’s not eloquent.

Will she notice any change?

Probably not, the rest of the brain will adapt.

There was a scar like a lunar crater by the time we’d finished. With her brain and mind once more anaesthetized, we cauterized the severed blood vessels, filled up the crater with fluid, and then sutured up the dura with neat embroidery stitches. We reattached the disc of bone by inserting little screws through strips of titanium mesh.

Don’t drop them, the professor said as he handed me each screw. They cost about fifty quid each.

GAVIN FRANCIS

Diary (London Review of Books, January 24, 2013)

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

1.   To Arrive at the Station: Trains of Thought

2.   To Leave the Factory: With Cloth and Film

3.   To Derail Thought: Of Infinity as Motif or Walking

4.   In the Beginning Was Sound: Tarāng (Wave)

5.   Lapidary Dynamisms: River, Stone, Icon

6.   A Second Nervous System: Acting and Thinking

7.   Shahani and Baz Luhrmann: Directing as Choreographic Act

8.   Modulating Cinematic Avatārs: Shahani’s Unit

9.   Memory of the World: Archive Fever

Notes

Bibliography

Filmography

Index

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Kumar Shahani’s response on hearing that I had just completed this book was Is there something of yourself in it? I laughed and changed the subject. The singularity of the self (swabhāva) of each actor is an abiding concern of Shahani as a director. As for myself, the exploration of the multivalent selves of the actor has excited me for as long as I can remember, and for a one-time performer turned cinema studies lecturer and critic, it was not a question that could be answered directly. Indirection was one of Shahani’s methods of guiding me as a guru during the long gestation of this book, which explores his epic cinematic practice and a philosophy of cinema and politics. The enlightening pedagogy of the civilizational Indian epic awakens dormant faculties one didn’t suspect one had by posing riddles to the neophyte rather than by giving the right answer to a stale question. This pedagogic process takes time, because one gets lost on the way, tangled up in blue, and has to learn to unlearn and then to sense, see and hear, and find modes of articulation that are not readily available within one’s own discipline.

I now understand this process of teaching and learning as an apprenticeship in the exploration and articulation of intensive signs of cinema. To be given a chance of such an apprenticeship this late in life is a huge gift, and it is my privilege and joy to be able now to thank those who have guided and sustained me through these heady years of a belated adventure. If I have been able, like those resourceful souls in Agnes Varda’s Gleaners and I, to glean some nourishment from here and there in a variety of disciplines that are quite new to me so as to assuage my hunger for cinema and thinking about it and with it, then I am happy. And if you, gentle reader, find a little nourishment and enjoyment here, I shall be very happy indeed. If this book, by some chance, encourages the government authorities to issue a box set of Shahani DVDS, it would allow new generations who have seen his films only on YouTube to view them in a more satisfactory format.

I am grateful to Kumar for his faith in me and for having nurtured my intellectual and spiritual well-being tirelessly while also arguing and disagreeing at times as friends must. Paul Willemen introduced me to Shahani’s thought and cinema and impressed on me their value in the early 1980s. Vivan Sundaram encouraged me to write on Shahani and assuaged my fear of knowing so little about Indian culture by saying that I could think of his films in terms of modern cinema and the avant-garde. Geeta Kapur, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Madhav Prasad, Rimli Bhattacharya, and Kumar all spent a week with me at the National Film Archive in Pune in 1998 viewing and discussing Shahani’s work, in the original 35mm prints, within the context of the New Indian Cinema. It was a most memorable week (of food, film, hearing them sing Hindi film songs, dancing, and talking), and it was my first introduction to Shahani’s and Ghatak’s cinema and to the vitality and rigor of debate among argumentative Indians, even among the best of friends. It was a bit scary for a former Ceylonese from Australia. I did so want to be one of them!

Geeta Kapur had innumerable long-distance chats with me on Shahani’s practice for well over a decade whenever I needed clarification of an idea, an image, or a link to contemporary debates on art, politics, and culture. She and Vivan coaxed me to come to India for the very first time in the 1990s after I met them both at the Edinburgh Film Festival’s Third Cinema Event of 1986, organized by our mutual friend Paul Willemen. Both of them were loving hosts in Delhi who helped me to get to know India a little bit during this project.

Roshan Shahani, who has worked on the majority of Shahani’s films, discussed the music in them in a most illuminating manner as only a specialist can. Roshan, Uttarā, and Rewathi Shahani welcomed me to their home in Mumbai with warm hospitality during my numerous research trips to India.

I was able to undertake the research in India in a systematic way through an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant for 2005–07.

Dr. Richard Smith, lecturer in film studies in the Department of Art History and Film, has been a friend and colleague with whom I have shared many of the ideas in this book. He has actively encouraged me to explore the textiles-and-cinema link, and for his passion for thinking cinema in its complexity and for the rigor of his thought, generosity of spirit, and friendship I am most grateful.

My students over the years have been interested in this work, which strengthened my confidence in it, some of which has been tested in the courses I teach. The decision to bring the Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s practice into this book so as to make a divergent connection with Shahani’s work was made possible by the collaborative thinking we did in my courses on silent cinema and cross-cultural perspectives on cinema.

My husband, Brian Rutnam, has been an unfailing source of support and help in all aspects of writing this book, as well as in everything I write. He listens to my wild ideas, goes through them with his logical mind, and makes me clarify material by alerting me to the structure of sentences. His knowledge of Western musical theory has also been invaluable for me in thinking through the idea of sequencing in Shahani’s practice, derived from Indian music based on different principles.

My daughter, Anusha Rutnam, saw this work to completion in several crucial ways. She has enriched my thinking especially through her professional knowledge of textiles and design, which has been an immense intellectual and sensory resource for the work in this book. If now I see a costume’s line and silhouette and feel its details as movements or gestures, it is thanks to her.

Professor Meaghan Morris came to my rescue in the nick of time, true to her activist-oriented, creative scholarly practice, by inviting me to be part of the Gender and Modernity in the Asia-Pacific Research Network of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney (2010–12). The two international symposia organized within this network by Professor Catherine Driscoll and Meaghan enabled me to offer papers based on this book, thereby providing the much-needed addressee to test my ideas on during a particularly difficult period within the university. This network, created by the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, certainly restored my faith in collective feminist practice and collaborative work. Subsequently, Meaghan astutely edited a piece for publication and helped me to understand the wider implications of Shahani’s thought within a globalized intellectual ethos. She pulled the needle out of the haystack, so to speak. To her as the editor of my previous book, as a friend and neighbor since the late 1970s, when cultural politics in Sydney was quite a rowdy scene, as a visionary teacher and an activist scholar, lately a coauthor of a hilariously razor-sharp, programmatic manifesto addressed to the neoliberal academy, as my unofficial Australian guru in these truly scary and exhilarating times for intellectual work, I say (as one girl to another), Thanks, mate.

The epistemophilic instinct of this book is integrally linked to the institution of the Australian Cinémathèque, in the Gallery of Modern Art at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (QAGOMA). This is a book that shuttles, spins, and turns between at least two institutions, the university and QAGOMA. The visionary team of curators there – Suhanya Raffel, head curator, Asian and Pacific Art, and lead curator of the Asia Pacific Triennial; Kathryn Weir, head of cinema; and Rachel O’Reilly, assistant curator – have all sustained this work by archiving Shahani’s work at the newly founded Australian Cinémathèque at the museum. All of them have supported my work in numerous ways, and their creative energy, imagination, and institution-building vision are a model for Australia’s future cultural connections with the Asia-Pacific region across media.

The pluripotent signs, conceptualized as cinematic avatārs (incarnations) of Shahani’s epic idiom, in their powers of activating transversal links, can guide cognition if only we would let them. They have the power (not unlike stem cells in the organic realm) to create, differentiate, and thereby vitalize the nonorganic life of thought.

Infants thus appear to have an innate general capacity, which can be called amodal perception, to take information received in one sensory modality and somehow translate it into another sensory modality. . . . Like dance for the adult, the social world experienced by the infant is primarily one of vitality affects before it is a world of formal acts.

DANIEL N. STERN

The Interpersonal World of the Infant

It is chronology, not narrative, that we have to abandon.

KUMAR SHAHANI

1

To Arrive at the Station

TRAINS OF THOUGHT

Ever since that fine day in 1895 when the Lumière brothers’ train arrived at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris and people got out and walked, walking hasn’t quite been the same.

Walking, our birthright as a species, frees our arms to swing in the air, relaxing the prehensile hand. Arms, freed from locomotion high up in trees, swing, creating a dynamic equilibrium as we raise one foot at a time to walk. The swinging arms harness kinetic energy in a cross-diagonal movement linking the latissimus dorsi muscle of the upper back with the pelvis. Banal movements, and yet we are astonished when we watch a child take her first steps (with arms held up for balance, as in an orant gesture of prayer). To the dear ones who scream in astonished delight, those first steps appear as nothing short of a miracle.¹

As a film student, Kumar Shahani, with his guru, Ritwik Ghatak, would repeatedly screen the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at the Station at the Indian Film School in Pune. They would find themselves laughing each time in jubilation at the miraculous arrival of the train, signaling the mechanization of time, the regularization of movement, and the birth of an eye without an I; perception freed from the ego and hence from human prejudice, privilege, and social hierarchy. It would appear, then, that the arrival of the train at the station is also the greeting of one machine by another, the cinematograph greeting the train, recognizing their secret affinity in the creation of modern time. This rapport between these two machines of equalized movement and framed, mobile perception endows a strange visibility to spaces, objects, bodies, and rhythms without privileging the human. This nonanthropomorphic eye shows us the railway platform emptied of the people who have arrived and departed with as much care or indifference as it does the reflective surface of the train carriage on which the shadows of the people flicker as they walk past. An any-instant-whatever becomes perceptible and eventful, or not, making the spatiotemporal playing field level because of the mechanization of time, either at sixteen or twenty-four frames per second. Therefore, despite the effect of convergence built into the perspectival geometric bias of the optics of lensing, this mechanical nonorganic eye looks at the world in a manner foreign to our organic eye, attached to our body and its necessarily limited interests and prejudices. Shahani’s and Ghatak’s jubilation in the 1960s is remarkable in that the very first viewers of this pioneering film, scholars tell us, felt not only the thrill of the encounter (screaming in delightful terror) as the train came toward them but also the sinking feeling that it was freighted with emptiness, an instant enchantment and disenchantment, both in one long minute or so.²

And closer to home, at our workstations in cinema studies classes, the Arrival of a Train is also one of the essential first films screened each year (no longer on 16mm or video but on DVD) as a matter of academic routine to signal the beginnings of cinema both as technological invention and institution. New generations of Australian students who have grown up with CGI wonder what all the fuss is about, though some do go into slow motion and watch it again and even again, once the historical ramifications of the early films are elaborated with a theoretical orientation. But for the Indians Shahani and Ghatak, the cinematograph, a mechanical instrument with a metaphysical dimension, harbors a potential to reveal an epic facet of the world. Hence, as for Robert Bresson, Shahani’s other mentor, it is a machine with powers of divination, understood as revealing that which is unknown.³ To give this notion a South Asian ontological texture, the camera is a machine with powers of manifestation (avatār), which are those attributed to notions of divinity in many religious traditions, including paganism. The root of the word manifest is hand. Homo faber manifests powers of divination by creating gods, understood as incarnating dynamic forces. Icons and idols, crafted with the hand and eye, and mind, have tremendous materiality in all traditions, but what is specific to the Hindu tradition is that both creation and destruction are perceived as dynamic forces, neither good nor evil – beyond good and evil, one might say, thinking of Nietzsche.

As Godard says in his epic Histoire(s) du cinéma, the hand and the eye (once very intimate) are now very far apart, and he impels us, lures us, to think their distanced connection even as he sits at his desk hammering away at his typewriter (remember the typewriter? remember to remember the typewriter!), producing a machine-gun pulse in his history of cinema as also story/ies of the relationship between hand, eye, and brain.⁴ The cinematograph, an iconophiliac and iconoclastic, idolatrous machine harnessed to the power of capital, has both marked and exacerbated the growing distance between the hand and the eye while also offering a chance to think this process in excited reverie or in a flash at the movies or in the classroom. Certain films at least enable us to think this distance as an interval – might one say, as a synaptic gap of sorts? The Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield mapped the human brain by drawing, with electrodes, a little man, or the sensory homunculus, in whom the face, hand, and thumb occupy a disproportionately large share of the cortex. The cognitive neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran says of this map that the area involved with the lips or with the fingers take up as much space as the area involved with the trunk of the body. This is presumably because your lips and fingers are highly sensitive to touch and are capable of very fine discrimination, whereas your trunk is considerably less sensitive, requiring less cortical space.⁵ In the Penfield map of the brain the area activating the hand is adjacent to the area of the face, evidence of an intimate rapport, in evolutionary terms, among Homo erectus, Homo faber, and Homo sapiens – a walking, talking, tool/weapon-making/wielding sensory thinker, a social animal. The operations of the human nervous system and those of the cinematic apparatus when thought through together (as Gilles Deleuze has suggested) may provide a manner of formulating productive problems.⁶ Such a move necessitates thinking cinema in relation to an idea of an ecology of the human senses within the technosphere that is our abode. This idea of a mental ecology that refuses the separation of aesthetics from an ethical sensibility (derived from Felix Guattari’s therapeutic work and writing) in turn necessitates the yoking together of two terms usually unrelated: cinema and civilization. This gesture refuses the familiar couple cinema and modernity the exclusive rights to determine terms of reference for thinking the human sensorium within the rapidly changing cinematic public sphere.⁷ The idea of civilization with attendant notions of technologies will be mobilized from a cinematic point of view by exploring Shahani’s conception of epic cinema, the epic itself being a civilizational legacy of human culture.

This book is an attempt to explore the historical and theoretical ramifications of the modern epic aesthetic idiom Shahani has invented on the basis of his perception of the cinematic apparatus (an orifice, as he calls and thinks it) as one with powers of epic manifestation and revelation. My inquiry will be guided by the question of how exactly he invests this magical mimetic apparatus of Western modernity with civilizational values. These values might schematically be signaled by the names of three ancient cities, Athens, Jerusalem, and Taxilā, sites of cohabitation of ideas of reason and revelation. Athens and Jerusalem are of course two cities at the heart of Western civilization based on both Judeo-Christian (the site of the three great monotheisms, including Islam) and Greco-Roman (Dionysus-Apollo, republicanism, and empire) legacies. Taxilā, less well known in the West except to archaeologists, was a city on the northwest frontier region of Gāndhāra, of ancient India, now in Pakistan’s western Punjab region, and is listed as a world heritage archaeological site by UNESCO. In ancient India it was the name of a famous city situated at the crossroads of three major trade routes, including the Silk Road, linking India to the Far East, Central Asia, Asia Minor, and farther west. It was a center of learning famed for its Buddhist scholarship and good governance where Hindu and other religious practices coexisted. Skepticism and debate, central to Buddhist notions of reason and enlightenment, flourished in Taxilā. It is also the region to which Alexander the Great brought his armies in 327 bc when it was still a part of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Romila Thapar says that earlier this Indian province provided mercenaries for the Persian armies fighting against the Greeks in the years 486–465 bc and adds that Herodotus described them as dressed in cotton clothes. According to Thapar, the movement of the Greek army starting from mainland Greece, across western Asia and Iran to India, opened up and reinforced a number of trade routes between north-western India via Afghanistan and Iran to Asia Minor and to the ports along the eastern Mediterranean. This accelerated east–west trade and no doubt the Greek population in India must have had a large part in it.⁸ The subsequent Greek influence on the region is attested to by coins as well as the Gāndhāra Buddhist sculptures, the most spectacular of which were the giant Bamyan Buddhas recently destroyed by the fundamentalist Islamist Taliban. It is also said that the Mahābhārata, the Indian epic, was first recited at the court in Taxilā: If the Mahābhārata is to be believed, Janamejaya sometimes held his court at Taxilā, and it was at Taxilā that Vaisampayana is said to have related to him the story of the great conflict between the Kurus and the Pandus.⁹

This historical city with its pragmatic trade routes creating contact zones of diverse cultures (Persian and central Asian tribes too) offers an image with historical depth and mythic and epic resonances with which to situate the Indian Shahani’s epic oeuvre heuristically. I am not dreaming of what might have happened if Alexander stayed on in India (the possibility that incited Claude Lévi-Strauss to write his last two chapters of Tristes tropiques, one of which is called Taxilā); instead, I am trying to situate Shahani, for whom the permeability of the subcontinent to a multiplicity of cultural forces is the contested dynamic site of his filmmaking practice and will to art.¹⁰ And the distant memory of the cosmopolitanism of historical and mythical Taxilā, with its rich commercial, artistic, and intellectual life and diverse religious practices, still excites him as a virtual image might, virtual understood in the Bergsonian sense of a non-psychological, non-chronological past as such that subsists and insists, with great amplitude and potential.¹¹ While Shahani’s films and his ideas will be the main generative focus of this book, he is surrounded in my mind by a virtual community of international filmmakers who may have a certain affinity, as I see it, with the ideas he articulates. This community, being a cinematic one, will not be homogeneous. And a ruse of this book is to invoke members of the community when necessary through the mediation of the idiom and optic Shahani has invented and the movement of thought his cinema provokes across filmic thresholds. It is my task to construct, make audible, visible, and sensible from time to time as the need arises, an international fraternity among visionary filmmakers through the mediation of Shahani’s thought. It is not a usual move in cinema studies to refract cinematic thought through the master filmmakers of Asia. This book is a contribution to such a project, which requires collective work. It is not an attempt at synthesizing the heterogeneous as a homogeneous theoretical brick to throw at an imaginary opponent. The source of the affinity among the filmmakers I call upon and invoke here, as I see it, is a fervent conviction of cinema’s synesthetic capabilities – cinesthesia, one might call it. This is a belief that requires an act of spirited faith conceived energetically as a leap between a rock and a hard place. This is so because the film image is lined with money, so much money for a minute of film – and yet, heroically, filmmakers resist this very equivalence with full awareness as they make the image catch fire with a collective labor of love. This book is also an attempt to work out why the cinesthetic means invented by Shahani and others might matter now, in the early twenty-first century (the century of digital cinema and thereby the vastly accelerated transnational circulation of film economies and new libidinal economies of the image), even as we are witnessing the obsolescence of celluloid cinema. By the historical ramifications of Shahani’s work I mean an untimely history of our senses as much as a certain history of the cinematic institution and its technology. He believes in an intimate rapport between cinema and the evolution and vicissitudes of human sense perception. The material Shahani works with to explore these concerns has a civilizational duration and a contemporary resonance within postcolonial Indian culture in particular. The other directors to whom I refer when necessary are also those invested in thinking with celluloid as perishable, textured, light-sensitive material, even as they may or may not operate within the newer regimes of image production.

Shahani was born in Larkana, Sind, in 1940, and his family moved to India as refugees with the partition of India after independence from Britain in 1947, when his natal province became part of the newly established state of Pakistan. The political frontier violently established between India and Pakistan cannot obliterate the cultural practices connecting this region, which according to historians of world trade such as Fernand Braudel constituted a major zone of trade (with links to the Silk Road) prior to European colonialism, entailing exchange of goods, skills, and technologies and the mingling of peoples and ideas over a long duration. Also, Larkana is the archaeological site of Mohenjo-daro, the ancient Indus Valley civilization of India circa 2000 bc. There is a fascinating link between the small bronze dancing-girl figurine found at this site (now in the National Museum in Delhi) and the main character, Tarān, in Māyā darpan, Shahani’s first film, which I will discuss later in terms of Shahani’s iconic conception of the actor’s body.¹²

THE EPIC MODE: AN EPIC IDIOM

What India does have in terms of its civilizational legacy are its epics, myths, and legends rather than chronicled history. One of Shahani’s mentors, the Marxist historian of ancient India D. D. Kosambi, has made him attuned to the sedimentations of time and human praxis in myth and the epics as well as in archaeological artifacts, even the most humble and mundane, such as microliths readily found beneath the earth in Pune. Shahani tells me that Kosambi’s decoding of myth and metaphysical expressions has had a lasting influence on him.¹³ Shahani’s cinematic project entails a modern reformulation of the ancient oral tradition of epic narration and performance in order to address the contemporary, and he says that his task is made easier by the fact that epic forms are still performed and therefore alive in India, unlike, say, Europe, where Bertolt Brecht, heroically diverging from avant-garde theatrical practice of the 1920s, developed an epic theatrical idiom in the absence of a living epic tradition. Walter Benjamin, who wrote eloquent commentaries supporting Brecht’s unfashionable formulation of epic theater, describes epic duration, albeit in a spatial image, in his essay The Story Teller thus:

One must imagine the transformation of epic forms occurring in rhythms comparable to those of the change that has come over the earth’s surface in the course of thousands of centuries. Hardly any other forms of human communications have taken shape more slowly, been lost more slowly.

Memory is the epic faculty par excellence.

Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation.¹⁴

Here, as elsewhere in his work, one of Benjamin’s most pressing concerns was the problem of the transmissibility of experience in modernity, where what he calls the chain of tradition has been brutally severed, perhaps lost irretrievably. Memory, both epic memory and that linked to storytelling, has been dismembered through the loss of the rich technicalaesthetic productive means for its sustenance in craft practices. For Shahani too, there is no pristine intact tradition after colonialism, nor is retrieval of a pure precolonial tradition an option. Invention on the basis of what remains, in a modern, decolonizing context, is his problematic. To further this end Shahani researched epic forms cross-culturally on a Homi Bhabha Fellowship (1976–78). He studied Indian theatrical forms, including Kutiyattam, Tamāsha, and Indian epics (the Mahābhārata in particular), Buddhist iconography, classical Indian music, and the Bhakti movement.¹⁵ He also traveled to study the films of European directors who worked in an epic mode, such as the Hungarian Miklós Jancsó and the Soviet Eisenstein, as well as Brecht. Shahani’s terms of reference in his own films are therefore both national and international, inflected by the great modern European historical avant-garde traditions of political cinema and theater (which were also vital points of reference for Ritwik Ghatak).

The splendor of the Benjaminian image of epic duration, illuminating like a flash of light, is, however, insufficient to work out how exactly time is invested with supple performative power in the epic mode. The Aristotelian typology of literary forms is instructive here as a first move in making distinctions among the lyric, the dramatic, and the epic in his Poetics. Traditionally, the lyrical mode, accompanied by the lyre, expresses subjective, intimate feelings; the dramatic, entailing action, involves dialogue and requires at least two persons. As Shahani says, the epic as an oral mode of narration, as storytelling, can in its temporal expansiveness incorporate both the dramatic and the lyric and thus has a greater structural flexibility with which to vary its mode of enunciation and address. This is possible because the epic mode is not wedded to a dramatic, chronological mode, obedient to the three Aristotelian dramatic unities of time, place, and action, nor is it limited to the sensuous expressivity of the lyrical I. It has a demonstrative power beyond an anthropocentric point of view precisely because it can vary its mode of address through flexible mechanisms of enunciation. Hence the epic image is not limited to an anthropomorphic scale and rhythm. The idea of epic cinema to be formulated here is a technical and aesthetic concept (though it does have ethico-metaphysical dimensions as well) pertaining to a particular organization of time and narration where time acquires a maximum freedom from chronological unfolding: let’s call this freedom time as rhythm.

Most Hollywood films produced, marketed, and distributed as epics are in fact technically dramatic in conception (true to the three dramatic unities of time, place, and action, well honed in the late nineteenth-century commercial genre of the well-made play), not epic. These films structure time chronologically and subordinate it to the discursive matrix of past, present, and future, or time enchained – let’s call this metrical time.¹⁶ Also, the Hollywood conception of epic is a matter of large scale: lots of money, a cast of thousands, lots of everything, for example, horses, chariots, weapons, firepower, technologies of speed, big themes. One may place D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), rather than his Birth of a Nation (1915), somewhat polemically, as the prototype of this conception because the latter dramatically unifies all the lines of action, whereas the former consists of uncollatable lines of historicomythical magnitude. While the Hollywood form of the epic film, because of its overall dramatic inflection, has become very nearly a universal language of film, actualizing Griffith’s global dream for American cinema, Shahani’s avant-garde formulation of a cinematic epic idiom seems foreign to some, even within India, where the popular epic-melodrama of the Hindi cinema does employ certain epic devices. With Shahani, however, the epic mode is not subjected to an overall dramatic treatment, nor is it a matter of the application of a set of devices deemed epic, such as, for instance, songs and dances in direct address. Dramatic epic films structurally lack temporal freedom because the commodified mode of the dramatic must of necessity connect everything into one causal, linked, central narrative line, like the carriages of a train. In contrast, the epic has the power to create differential rhythms, multiple centers and lines, and series, which do not have to converge. Divergence and disjunction are ethico-aesthetic values actively sought by the inclusive epic impulse possessing the ontological and technical amplitude necessary to attest to and compose a multiplicity of forces and rhythms. Epic composition, however, eschews perspectivalism predicated on the primacy of the knowing subject, to whom I see, at least in the vernacular, also means I know. The clarity of such an arrangement of knowledge is also based on the clarity of spatial organization and a clear distinction between subject and object, a properly constituted grammatical subject who can receive a sign as a signal and move smoothly through space and thought.

The epic optic is not anthropomorphic. It has multiple foci, it is not centered; that is to say, it is not enamored of linear perspectival vision and is neither anthropomorphic nor anthropocentric. As Benjamin said, the epic is about the cosmos and the earth, of which humans, animals, plants, and minerals are a part. Shahani adds that that epic perception is not centripetal but rather centrifugal, and, true to the monstrative pedagogical method of the epic itself, he provides a parable from an Indian legend to demonstrate his point. Yudhistira, one of the warriors in the epic Mahābhārata, is about to engage in a contest of archery with his brother Arjun. Arjun hits the bull’s-eye, but Yudhistira hesitates, unable to draw his bow. When he is asked why he does not let his arrow fly to the target (given his exceptional skill at archery), he replies that he sees everything. He sees everything in equal focus. Shahani uses this epic tale as a parable of his own perception of the cinematic apparatus as one with the potential to confer value on all things equally. It follows, then, that targeted perception is a reduction of this virtuality, as all else must be obliterated to hit the dead center. The hesitation before action also seems a value-creating moment between a perception and a possible action. Shahani’s cinematic project invents aesthetic means adequate to his perception of the apparatus as an orifice, but in using an organic image to describe a nonorganic aperture, he does not specify the orifice; he uses the word orifice