Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug

This is certainly one of the significant films in Hindi cinematic history. It is to my mind one of the most persuasive representations of a ‘heart of darkness’ in/of contemporary India. Kalyug establishes the locus of the ‘political’ at the heart of the Indian extended family (how many aeons removed from Karan Johar!); it therefore reads the Mahabharata intelligently as opposed to the popular celebratory accounts where the disturbing nature of the epic’s fratricidal struggles are abstracted into ideals of all sorts without a proper understanding of exactly what overused words like ‘karma’, ‘dharma’ and the like really mean. At the same time Kalyug suggests a cyclical structure. The reality of contemporary India represents not just a perversion of the post-Independence ideals (perhaps even chides those ideals for not accurately gauging their own violence) but also in the ‘fatedness’ that the film conveys (not inappropriately if this is a reading of the Mahabharata) returns the narrative to its ancient (genealogically implied, narratively mirrored) site of struggle. Hence it is always the ‘Kalyug’. Such is the lesson to be drawn from this extremely provocative film!