Kumar Shahani
| Photo Credit: Special association
With Kumar’s passing, the dialog has been disrupted.
A protean dialog whose theme dealt, in a single sitting or name, with your entire civilisational sweep of cotton — and embrace it, and make which means and artwork of it, in celluloid.
In one other, with the lambent edifying articulation of the Indian Constitution — and what fascinating type it may well tackle the display.
In yet one more, with how ellipsis sublimates a filmic movement, a lot as a contact of pitch imperfection, a notice of ‘besur’ brinkmanship, provides a Hindustani classical vocal rendition the ineffable contact.
Or, with the pressing concern in regards to the subjunctive temper changing into endangered in language and literature.
Or once more, most lately, with the strike by scriptwriters in Hollywood evoking euphoric reminiscences of 1968.
And repeatedly, via all this, invoking the genius of Marxist historian and polymath D.D. Kosambi to buttress a level.
These weren’t a lot separate conversations as a persevering with discourse, every engagement as if choosing up the thread from the place we had left off the final time. His probing, inventive creativeness was without delay charming and formidable. The light smile that lit up his face and contaminated his voice was an invite to share his stressed passion, to really feel responsible about complacence.
Breaking floor
The conversations, for me, started in actual earnest about 16 years in the past, though I knew Kumar from a lot earlier. Around 2008, there was this grand and daunting thought — grand for Kumar, daunting for me — of organising an institute of aesthetics in Kerala. In our brainstorming, Kumar would unleash a torrent of distinctive ideas, which I needed to harness into a self-discipline that lent itself to additional inventive exploration in an institutional framework. I sought and obtained the assistance of artwork and tradition author and critic Sadanand Menon in shaping the fabric we had into a proposal we might undergo the federal government of Kerala to arrange an institute. ‘School of Higher Learning in Art, Aesthetics and Culture’ was Kumar’s working title for it.
M.A. Baby, who was Kerala’s Culture Minister then, was supportive, which helped the proposal acquire preliminary traction and transfer ahead. We stayed with it for a few years, attempting to navigate it via the paperwork, earlier than our resolve petered out.
The sheer scale of the venture was maybe its undoing. But, considering again now, there was in all probability one other factor that labored towards it. Kumar, it appears to me, unbeknownst to himself, had this innate rebelliousness towards institutionalising artwork. If this may be known as a paradox, it wasn’t the one one, as I found in the course of the years we had been grappling with this formidable venture.
Digital fanatic
For one whose cinema has typically been described as ‘epic’ in its idiom and formal construction, Kumar had an intuitive understanding of digital know-how, its liberative impulse and aesthetic potentialities. Lateral considering and hypertext-mode leaps from thought to thought took him throughout and into areas as seemingly far-fetched as drugs, biology and sport. It would appear that in his urge to maneuver past the ‘unidimensionality of the signal’ and previous the ‘multivalency of signs’, the attract of the dispersed, pixelated digital realm was sturdy. He was fascinated by the brand new age techno-aesthetic ready to be tapped. But on the identical time, he was appalled by the impermanence, the truncation of continuity, the erasure of reminiscence, even identification, that digitisation augured. The digital appeared to him without delay apotheosis and apocalypse.
I have no idea if he reconciled these paradoxes in his personal thoughts. We didn’t have the chance to delve into this at size these previous couple of years earlier than he left us. The dialog has been disrupted. But we proceed to be in communion.
The author is a journalist, filmmaker, media entrepreneur and Chairman of Asian College of Journalism.