Authorial - Status

Article Copyright © R. Amit Kumar. Do not use without permission.



A Case Study: Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen

This short paper investigates, primarily in the (con)text of Bandit Queen (Shekhar Kapur 1995), how Shekhar Kapur actively secures and promotes his authorial-status, what discursive and working positions he takes, what “artistic-auteuristic-image” he structures of himself, how he proves his authorial-efficiency, how he actively uses his socio-cultural capital to acquire a symbolic capital, how he differentiates from the textual-system of Indian cinema in the film Bandit Queen, how he signatures the film, how he “struggles” with the producers, the censoring state, and the media agents, and how that “struggle” advances the authorial-status of Shekhar Kapur.
The official website of Shekhar Kapur introduces him: “a chartered accountant, a model, a chat show host, a producer, the best director.” Other central features of the web-site are: an open letter to the Indian Censor Board criticizing it for being the custodian of Indian morality, an interview with Mahesh Bhatt, a review and analysis of his latest film Four Feathers (2002), and an article “The Asians are Coming” that appeared in The Guardian (UK). A perfect promotion of the authorial-status: the multitalented daring artist describes his “working philosophy” and takes a discursive position for the East.


Taking Position: A Crossover Commercial Artist

Though Shekhar Kapur, nephew of Dev Anand and Vijay Anand, comes from a family of renowned Indian filmmakers, he was educated in the United Kingdom and took up a “conventional career” in chartered accountancy and management consultancy. Later “he abandoned his profession to pursue his artistic interests;” this transition - from conventional securities to artistic insecurities - has often become a part of discourses around Shekhar Kapur in print media.
He made directorial debut with Masoom (1983). Reviewers and theorists categorized Masoom as a Middle Cinema film - that lies between art and commerce - mixing songs and stars of art cinema with a serious, slow story of an illegitimate child. More than the box-office success, Middle Cinema had thrived on the critical acclaim and Masoom was a successful film in that respect, and so was Shekhar Kapur whose “handling of the theme is considered to be gentle and deft” (Gokulsing 90). Kapur navigated from Middle Cinema to Mainstream Cinema for his next film, Mr. India (1987). Mainstream Cinema had thrived on the Box-office and in that respect Mr. India was a big success. The “multitalented” director proved his authorial-efficiency in mainstream as well as in (semi)art cinema. Once having a reputation among the producing agents that he cannot take a shot and cannot complete a film (he walked out of films and was thrown out of films), by the release of Bandit Queen, Kapur bounced back to the status of a commercial artist. This “darer and fighter” willingly accepted that cinema is a commercial art. He took a position in the league of other commercial artists - mainstream auteurs - of Indian Cinema such as Raj Kapoor. “In India, there is no salvation outside the commercial cinema” (Kapur qtd. in Thoraval 199).

By the time of Bandit Queen, shifting from the Mainstream Cinema, New Indian Cinema and also Middle Cinema, Kapur’s position develops as a Crossover filmmaker, who “crosses” between the East and the West, in the league of Mira Nair [Salaam Bombay (1988) and Missisipi Masala (1991)], Deepa Mehta [Sam and Me (1991)] and Gurinder Chadha [Bhaji on the Beach (1993)]. The Crossover Cinema does not seem to defy the mantra of West-can-sit-through-festival-film. The primary audience of crossover films is in the West. To be precise, an audience whose primary training is via watching films made in the West. Symbolic capital of Kapur’s authorial-status cannot be separated from the cultural capital that he has actively negotiated through media discourses. While dwelling in the West, he takes a discursive position that is anti-colonial and that promotes Indian and Asian Culture.
[Four Feathers (2002)] is one of the most pro-colonial film ever made and one of the most pro-colonial book ever written and one of the things that I tell the studio at that time is that it would be interesting for me to take the same film and make it anti-colonial, now I have had a huge fight over that because everybody is a bit worried about that but I have hung on to that. (Kapur in a BBC Interview)

Kapur pronounces “India to be future superpower” (Kapur qtd. in Deccan Herald) and proclaims a process that he thinks is “reverse colonization.” “I believe the world is going through a point where the Asian Culture is going to be the predominant culture in the world” (Kapur in a BBC interview). Kapur advances a repetitive discourse of his love and respect for Indian culture:

I just need to reinforce my presence in the international scene. …I have that arrogance, the arrogance of a man, you know that comes from a great family [India]. …I keep telling [threatening] them -- I don’t need you, I have a one billion market -- I don’t need you. …I'm gonna go back. …[But, I’ve to actively tell myself]…just be patient, go out there, make another film, establish yourself, come back, because then you can take a year off make a film in India. I am just hoping that the Indian audiences won’t forget me in another year & a half or so. (Kapur in an interview with Bhatt)

In this interview with Bhatt (posted on Kapur’s website), Kapur also asserts that there is a
“[mis]perception that anything made by white is better.” He acknowledges his training through Bollywood, declares his love for the Indian audience and claims that it is the most sophisticated audience in the world as it understands, more than the Western audience, that “cinema is a lie.”


In control of “Truth”

In Bandit Queen, Kapur painted a story that had the backing of factual data. Mala Sen wrote a biography on Phoolan Devi using her meetings with Phoolan, interviews, press reports, and extracts of Phoolan’s written accounts. Phoolan Devi, an “untouchable” woman, was married at the age of eleven. At different times in her life, her husband, cops, village headman’s son, upper-caste-men, and bandits, raped her. She “survived” all tortures and became a protector of the downtrodden, a celebrated bandit in the Chambal Valley in Madhya Pradesh, a state in northern-central India. She came to international attention in 1981 as the leader of a gang who killed 20 high-caste men in Behmai, a village in Uttar Pradesh. She proved difficult to capture, though the police left her with no choice but to surrender. In 1983, she surrendered in a media event before a crowd of 10,000 people. She denied any involvement in the Behmai massacre.
Kapur “re-frames” Mala Sen’s story of this marginalized woman in Bandit Queen, promotes it as a “true and pure story,” and structures a discourse of truth, aesthetics and purity around him. At the premiere screening of Bandit Queen in Delhi, Shekhar Kapur introduced the film with these words: “I had a choice between Truth and Aesthetics. I chose Truth, because Truth is Pure.” (Kapur qtd. by Arundhati Roy)
He chooses non-star-actors to work with, actors who resemble real-life characters and pictures in Mala Sen’s book. He creates a complex neo-realistic narrative far away from, yet in the league of, Satyajit Ray’s neo-realism (New Indian Cinema) and Bimol Roy’s neo-realism (Mainstream Cinema).

Relative Autonomy and the Director in charge

For Bandit Queen, Kapur navigates among cross-cultural producing agents and artists. Channel Four and Kaleidoscope Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. produce Bandit Queen. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Roger White compose the music. Ashok Mehta does the cinematography while Robert Taylor records the sound. This once again establishes his “crossover artist status.” Further, I stress two noteworthy points. First, Kapur strengthens the prevalent discourse of “other-technicians-being-partial-creators” in a film. He rhetorically asserts his aesthetic-control on “component departments.”

…If somebody offered me best picture nomination and best director nomination. I would take best picture nomination. And I guess that…by proxy, if you have a best picture nomination and six other nominations of every technical thin that a director is in charge of, like production design, art direction, costume, photography, acting, then you have been nominated. ( Kapur qtd. by Bhatt)

Second, on being asked where he enjoys working more (in Hollywood or Bollywood), he tells that India provides him “independence and relative autonomy.”

[India] because we still have what we call independent cinema…although there seems a lot of move towards corporatising the whole Indian entertainment business… but yet the director here enjoys the same kind of power that a director enjoys in Japan and Europe where the final cut of the film automatically belongs to the director. For example, in France, by law it belongs to the director. Whereas in the US, the final cut, unless it states in your contract that it belongs to you, will normally belong to the studio. (Kapur qtd. by Gupta)

Living inside the film

First few frames of Bandit Queen announce that the film is not a regular Bollywood fair. Seema Biswas, the actress who plays Phoolan Devi, looking straight in the camera declares, “I am Phoolan Devi, [you] sister-fucker.” A language that was always considered vulgar by the Indian Censor Board finds way through a “true-representation” of Phoolan Devi and her surroundings. Later films like Satya (Ram Gopal Verma, 1999) use similar language for a more “realistic” representation of the underworld. Technically proficient realistic depiction of a “true-story,” frontal nudity, no song-and-dance, 120 minute length, and a rural diegesis are some attributes that differentiates the frame of Bandit Queen from the then existing generic structures of Indian Cinema. This gritty, visceral, political drama has no fantasy elements that are common in most popular Hindi films. It is not the ‘dull’ realism of India’s new wave either. The narrative is episodic, but builds tension with disturbing accuracy. The technical aspects of film, particularly its cinematography and sound, are of high quality and artistry. Although the narrative is not in Phoolan Devi’s voice, the director does not compromise in any way to tell his story about the caste, class, and gender warfare that characterize much of rural India through a celebrated woman who survived it all. (Italics mine, Pendakur 83)
Shekhar Kapur signatures Bandit Queen and promotes his signature in media discourses:
Most of my films are about triumph of human spirit over human body, its kind of belief I have that beyond the body and beyond the mind there is a spirit and ultimately perfection, and triumph, and achievement lies in the realm of the spirit. (Kapur in a BBC interview)
Media at different intervals have highlighted this personal(ity) interest of Shekhar Kapur:
In some ways, all Kapur’s films -- including Elizabeth and The Four Feathers -- tell the same story, his story: of the down-and-out fighting battles with courage and honesty and emerging triumphant (Italics mine, Rana.) Kapur also “stamps” Bandit Queen by doing a cameo in the film, let’s say, in a Hitchcockian style.

Struggle

With the completion of the film’s production, Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen went into an (in)famous struggle: a struggle with Phoolan Devi who found her representation in the film “untruthful;” a struggle with the state, the Censor Board, and the law-houses, because, alongwith Phoolan’s objection, the film was “very political” in its gender-caste conflict (not to mention the frontal nudity and abusive language); a struggle with other “artists” such as Arundhati Roy who found the film “exploitative;” and a struggle with producers of the film who were ready to accept “cuts” recommended by the Censor Board. In sum, the struggle secured and enhanced the authorial-status of Shekhar Kapur.
Kapur screened the uncensored film for Phoolan Devi who claimed that Bandit Queen was not her true-representation. She challenged key scenes in the film including the Behmai massacre (It is noteworthy that she never accepted to be a participant in massacre but the film was showing so). Phoolan fought against the release of Bandit Queen. In wake of this dispute, the Delhi high court banned the public exhibition of the film and its official entry into the Oscars.
The film evoked another hyped battle in the media. Arundhati Roy, celebrated writer and booker-prize winner for The God of Small Things, claimed that Kapur exploited exploitation, that he glamorized the rape. Her accusations were that Kapur did not even feel the need to meet Phoolan before making the film and he overlooked several versions present in Mala Sen’s book. She wrote in an open letter that Kapur and the producers of this film were no better than the men who raped Phoolan Devi.
Bandit Queen developed problems with the Censor Board. The Censor Board refused to certify the film without significant cuts. Producers had no choice but to accept the cuts if they wanted to release the film in India. Kapur refused to let “editors of the state,” and producers of the film, cut “his-creation.”

He made an authorial-statement:
I’ve said I won’t cut, and they said they won’t let the film go if I don’t cut. I don’t have a legal standing. If tomorrow the producer or distributor decided to release with cuts, I can’t do anything. All I will do is take my name off it.
(Roy-Chowdhary qtd in Pendakur 83)

Later the dispute with Phoolan Devi was settled out of court. “Channel Four reportedly paid her USD60000” (da cuhna qtd. in Pendakur 83). Apparently, Bandit Queen was released with few cuts, Shekhar Kapur’s name was on it, and since then that name had more symbolic capital.
Different consumers acclaimed and disclaimed Bandit Queen for different reasons. The State, which once banned the film, later considered it “important” for women viewers and hence segregated shows were organized to “save” women from vulgar remarks of active-vocal-Indian-male-viewer. Some (moral) women activists paraded the theatres and claimed, “Kapur misused the nude scene [in the film] and paraded Seema Biswas as she were a model” (Akhtar). While some other women found the theme “sensitively handled” and the idea of “ladies only” screenings liberating. However, for some male audience the film was a state authorized substitute for the quasi-porn Indian films.
Bandit Queen received rave reviews; it was “an invited entry at the young directors section of the Cannes international film festival 1995. It has since been featured at other major international avenues”(Pendakur 82). Wearing handcuffs, in a Foucauldian moment of prize and punish, Shekhar Kapur accepted the best director award at Filmfare Awards 1996.
Imprisoned without trial for eleven years, Phoolan Devi was released in Feb. 1994, after lower-caste political forces mobilized and the state withdrew all charges against her. In 1996, after the release of the film, she was elected to Parliament as a member of the Samajwadi (Socialist) Party. On 25 July 2001, four men gunned her down in front of her house in New Delhi.

Bandit Queen immortalizes Phoolan Devi and Shekhar Kapur.