Kumar Shahani in the time of Artificial Intelligence

I heard the news of Kumar Shahanirsquos passing with deep sadness A question confronted memdashwhat have we lost Have we lost a person a filmmaker or have we lost an idea And is it lost foreverShahani was perhaps the most enigmatic figure amongst the brave new filmmakers who rose to prominence during the 1970s and rsquo80s His cinema was fiercely radical and provoked extreme reactionsmdashnot just from the uninitiated viewer but also from practising filmmakers and film theorists No discourse on cinema was complete without a passionate mention of Kumar and his workSince the inception of cinema there have been numerous technological alterations like the addition of sound and colour Yet the medium itself has remained permissive While Bergman could use it to make his cinema Ghatak could too as could Manmohan Desai The medium in what it offered didnrsquot restrict filmmakers to tell their stories in the aesthetic of their choosingThings started changing after the advent of television There was a dramatic shift in what the medium could or could not offer I saw Kumarrsquos Maya Darpan first on the big screen and then again on television The experience was completely different Collaboration between medium and content had been destroyed Television had its own specificity and permissiveness was getting constrainedShahanirsquos 1972 film Maya Darpan explored the conflict between the feudal system and Indiarsquos changing industrial landscape Its protagonist is the daughter of a zamindar who challenges the class system when she has a sexual encounter with an engineerAbout television Kumar wrote ldquoThe electronic image forms itself in front of our eyes disappearing only from itself again The image may not in fact be recorded Here and now before our unblinking eyes the signal takes shape as light source Literally and figuratively it does not illuminate It informs In many ways it behaves like reality It passes you by even if it allows you to store the information or to rejuxtapose it For many lives it has begun to replace reality So much so that the substitute is sought in reality whose richness and ambiguity thwart the facile temperaments created by public transmission of controlled imagesrdquoThis was in 1988 Technology was changing and so was the audience Who was changing whom is a question that can never be answered Perhaps they both were becoming gluttonous and demanded more from each otherThirty six years ago he wasnrsquot to know about a more advanced technological service called OTT that was to be streamed on our digital screens Yet his words remain prophetic While there are millions of films on these platforms one will never find a Kumar Shahani film among those Neither can OTT ever create another Shahani The inherent nonpermissiveness of the medium wonrsquot allow that Neither will global capital that supports such platformsShahani engaged with these very concerns in his films Globalisation in opposition to indigenous cultural identities He spoke about the aesthetic autonomy of an artist rooted in their own milieu celebrating it with joy and not falling for a generic global form that supposedly appeals to everyoneIn the last 10 years the way technology has developed it isnrsquot just a change of medium or tools anymore It is now a biological attack on us Most youngsters are unable to see beyond Reels that run for seconds They may see hundreds of them at one go but each one cannot exceed what the platform can offer technically The entire system is rigged to make us dumb and dumberAnd now as we stand on the cusp of the most overwhelming change that mankind has ever experienced ie AI one is faced with fundamental questions about our existence itself With completely orchestrated realities the lines between the real hyperreal surreal and the unreal will disappear and the very definition of art will have to be alteredThis is exactly where Shahanirsquos vision comes in His was a voice for choice a voice for diversity and a voice for democracy Will these ideals be irrelevant I doubt it And if they are then honestly we are doomed As a civilisationMediums will change of course and they must Forms too New technologies that are relevant to the times are bound to emerge In the initial days they will be expensive and hence controlled by the HollyBollyTollywoods of the world Eventually they will become affordable and young men and women across the world will have access to them Thatrsquos when the real AI artistes will arise The movement in that direction has already begunIn an even older text written in 1974 Kumar said ldquoThe cinema for us is the most important of the arts The mechanical reproduction of physical realitymdashafter centuries of frustrated tentativesmdashshould have once and for all freed us from both its narrow fixed perspective and from the nebulous otherworldliness of art Instead here as elsewhere it has delivered the twin enemies of the people a barely masked elitism and the naked force of an underdeveloped marketrdquoPerhaps the world ahead is shorter I have seen some extraordinary work already being done by VR artists from across the world and if Khayal Gatha is to be told in 90 seconds with manipulated reality then so be it The new wave artists two years down the line will find ways of doing it They will challenge the status quo Just as Kumar didThe person may not be with us anymore but the idea that is Kumar Shahani can never die