Mani Kaul

Mani Kaul is an Indian film director.

Mani Kaul is undoubtedly the Indian filmmaker who, along with Kumar Shahani, has succeeded in radically overhauling the relationship of image to form, of speech to narrative, with the objective of creating a ‘purely cinematic object’ that is above all visual and formal.

Mani joined the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune initially as an acting student but then switched over to the direction course at the institute. He graduated from the FTII in 1966.

Mani’s first film Uski Roti (1969) was one of the key films of the ‘New Indian Cinema’ or the Indian New Wave. The film created shock waves when it was released as viewers did not know what quite to make of it due to its complete departure from all Indian Cinema earlier in terms of technique, form and narrative. It was violently attacked in the popular press for dispensing with standard cinematic norms and equally defended by India’s aesthetically sensitive intelligentsia.

Duvidha (1973), Kaul’s third film, was also his first in colour. The film is a very finished and polished product and one of Kaul’s best known films, shown widely across Europe. Recently Amol Palekar did a less than satisfactory adaptation of the same story as Paheli (2005) starring Shah Rukh Khan and Rani Mukherji.

Mani Kaul, along with K Hariharan Saeed Akhtar Mirza as well as other filmmakers set up the Yukt Film Co-operative (Union of Kinematograph Technicians) in 1976. This led to a remarkable avant-garde experiment in collective filmmaking as the group made Ghasiram Kotwal(1976), one of the most celebrated plays in Indian Theatre. The play was staged by the Theatre Academy Pune in 1972 and its members participated in the film’s cast as well. The film, though commenting on Maratha and Indian history, has more contemporary ramifications as it explores metaphorically Indira Gandhi’s reign and the period of ‘Emergency.’

In Mani Kaul’s cinematic conception, fiction and documentary films have no clear demarcated dividing line. Films like Dhrupad (1982), Mati Manas (1984) and Siddheshwari (1989) have a rare cultural intensity where the two different genres have been successfully fused together. With Nazar (1989) and Idiot (1991), Kaul turned his attention to the writings of Dostoevsky. Mani Kaul’s last feature to date has been Naukar ki Kameez, made in 1997 but released in 1999. The film looks social hierarchy within an Indian village in the 1960s and, in particular, how the structure affects a fairly low-paid clerk and his wife. To most viewers, it is easily his most accessible piece of work while to hardcore Mani fans, his most disappointing for precisely the same reason!

Currently, after a stint in Netherlands, Mani Kaul is the Creative Director of the Film House at Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art, Mumbai.