A new feature film by Kumar Shahani is a welcome event. His 1972 debut film Maya Darpan (PFA, March ‘82), with its exquisite drama of finely calculated colors, secured his position as one of the brightest and most radical figures in the New Indian Cinema; Tarang, only his second feature in more than a decade, reaffirms this reputation. Deeply influenced by the work of the late Bengali director Ritwik
Ghatak (his teacher at the Film Institute at Pune), and the author of widely read papers on myth and cinema, Shahani weaves these influences into Tarang, a modern epic of urban India which embodies, as it redefines, the intimate, the historical, and the mythological proportions inherent in the epic genre. The story is a kind of Indian Diary of a Chambermaid in which a young working-class widow, Janaki (Smita Patil), whose husband has been killed in the factory, is taken in as a nursemaid in the home of an industrialist, Rahul (Amol Palekar), whose pretensions to liberalism actually facilitate an enormous greed. Thrown together by Rahul's withdrawn wife, Janaki and Rahul play each other for their own ends--hers, the cause of uniting her divided worker-comrades who live in the nearby shantytown; his, the manipulation of these workers to overthrow rival family members for control of the business. From this historical and personal power play, filled with fascinating incident, only Janaki emerges constant: she is what she is, both strong and exploited, and, as the film's lyrical ending implies, she will live on as myth.
Kumar Shahani writes, “Filmmakers from Eisenstein to Godard to Jancso have worked upon the epic form with certain resolutions that are important to their history and life. For me, the individuating of a tradition is a central concern. In Tarang, there are many characters, from different social classes. With every individual, I have sought a series of perspectives, so that after the figure and placement of the person you see beyond and ‘return' to examine yourself.... I am not interested in the idea of a ‘peep' into reality.”