After its global premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in the gala’s classics section last month, a high-definition 4K restored version of Manthan (The Churning) was screened over the first weekend of June in select cinemas across India.
I had always wanted to experience Smita Patil on a giant theatre screen. Her magnetism is too blistering for the tiny black mirrors forever in our hands and on our desk tops. I, therefore, was angry for a long time about her passing before I could. So watching Shyam Benegal’s 1976 directorial feature—India’s first crowdfunded film financed by 5,00,000 farmers of Gujarat who famously contributed ₹2/- each—at a PVR on a Saturday evening felt like a wish fulfilled.
My love for Patil comes from worshipping her feisty, life-altering performances in films such as Mirch Masala (1986) and Bhumika (1977). Hence, I was disappointed in Manthan because although she is the lone woman of any significance in the film, Patil’s Bindu is only a minor character in the movie’s deeply divisive, hierarchical world strictly gatekept by men.
But powered by Vijay Tendulkar’s incisive screenplay, Kaifi Azmi’s probing dialogue, Govind Nihalani’s poetic cinematography, Vanraj Bhatia’s haunting background music, and Benegal’s politically charged storytelling, Manthan throws a lot at the audience to think about and question, making it as relevant and pungent today as it was 48 years ago when it first released.
Benegal made Manthan at the behest of and to honor Dr. Verghese Kurien, the key architect of India’s Operation Flood or White Revolution, the world's largest dairy development movement that transformed the country from a milk deficit nation to one of its largest producers globally. The social fable follows Rao (Girish Karnad), an idealistic veterinary doctor, as he tries to establish a milk cooperative in a nondescript, arid village in Gujarat entrenched in caste and class discrimination.
The film features an eclectic group of young actors who would go on to become some of India’s finest. Along with Patil and Karnad, Manthan also has stellar performances by Naseeruddin Shah as the de facto young Dalit leader Bhola, Amrish Puri as the exploitative, ingratiating private dairy owner Mishra, Kulbhushan Kharbanda as the sly village headman, and Mohan Agashe and Anant Nag as Dr. Rao’s key colleagues.
A minutely observed social drama, Manthan is the final installment of Benegal’s trilogy on rural despotism after Ankur (1973) and Nishant (1975). At a time when the need to be safe and sanitised to play to the gallery has rendered Indian films entirely spineless, Benegal’s 134-minute movie sticks out as a sore thumb, a stark reminder from a time when cinema served as a crucial vehicle for dissent, activism, and did not shy away from its responsibility of driving social change.
In his attempts to establish the milk cooperative as a fair, democratic, egalitarian organisation that transcends class, caste, and gender, Dr. Rao upsets the long-standing status quo in the village, angering Mishra and the Sarpanch. He is framed for rape and eventually transferred. Even though he is forced to leave abruptly and unceremoniously, the uprising that Rao ignites takes root and the film ends with Bhola taking charge of the cooperative with his elected Dalit comrade.
Manthan is not a quintessential Hindi potboiler. True to life, it doesn’t hand out easy gratification. Even though Bhola and Bindu (both socially, economically underprivileged Harijans) try to make a messiah out of Dr. Rao, he consistently refuses to step up on the pedestal. He doesn’t help them, he points them to the road to empowerment instead so they can help themselves.
Or take, for instance, Bhola. Despite being a firebrand advocate of equal rights, it doesn’t occur to him to contest the dairy cooperative elections. For true leaders don’t need a microphone or a throne to do what they need to do. Manthan does not even let Dr. Rao meet Bindu one last time before he leaves. It shows societal change devoid of any filters in all its messy, ugly, frustrating, non-linear ordinariness. It pointedly tells us that the journey to anything of any worth is always one step forward and two steps back.
Manthan, a lot like India’s 2024 Lok Sabha elections, is a terrific testament to the power of collective will to bring about change and instill renewed hope, purpose. Even if it took half a century, it turned out to be Manthan, his second film that finally brought Naseeruddin Shah to the French Riviera.
The massive enthusiasm around its restoration and rerelease has also opened a tiny window that might allow other forgotten cinematic gems suffocating in tins and dusty rooms to see the light of day. Which Hindi classic would you want to see next on the big screen?
I had always wanted to experience Smita Patil on a giant theatre screen. Her magnetism is too blistering for the tiny black mirrors forever in our hands and on our desk tops. I, therefore, was angry for a long time about her passing before I could. So watching Shyam Benegal’s 1976 directorial feature—India’s first crowdfunded film financed by 5,00,000 farmers of Gujarat who famously contributed ₹2/- each—at a PVR on a Saturday evening felt like a wish fulfilled.
My love for Patil comes from worshipping her feisty, life-altering performances in films such as Mirch Masala (1986) and Bhumika (1977). Hence, I was disappointed in Manthan because although she is the lone woman of any significance in the film, Patil’s Bindu is only a minor character in the movie’s deeply divisive, hierarchical world strictly gatekept by men.
But powered by Vijay Tendulkar’s incisive screenplay, Kaifi Azmi’s probing dialogue, Govind Nihalani’s poetic cinematography, Vanraj Bhatia’s haunting background music, and Benegal’s politically charged storytelling, Manthan throws a lot at the audience to think about and question, making it as relevant and pungent today as it was 48 years ago when it first released.
Benegal made Manthan at the behest of and to honor Dr. Verghese Kurien, the key architect of India’s Operation Flood or White Revolution, the world's largest dairy development movement that transformed the country from a milk deficit nation to one of its largest producers globally. The social fable follows Rao (Girish Karnad), an idealistic veterinary doctor, as he tries to establish a milk cooperative in a nondescript, arid village in Gujarat entrenched in caste and class discrimination.
The film features an eclectic group of young actors who would go on to become some of India’s finest. Along with Patil and Karnad, Manthan also has stellar performances by Naseeruddin Shah as the de facto young Dalit leader Bhola, Amrish Puri as the exploitative, ingratiating private dairy owner Mishra, Kulbhushan Kharbanda as the sly village headman, and Mohan Agashe and Anant Nag as Dr. Rao’s key colleagues.
A minutely observed social drama, Manthan is the final installment of Benegal’s trilogy on rural despotism after Ankur (1973) and Nishant (1975). At a time when the need to be safe and sanitised to play to the gallery has rendered Indian films entirely spineless, Benegal’s 134-minute movie sticks out as a sore thumb, a stark reminder from a time when cinema served as a crucial vehicle for dissent, activism, and did not shy away from its responsibility of driving social change.
In his attempts to establish the milk cooperative as a fair, democratic, egalitarian organisation that transcends class, caste, and gender, Dr. Rao upsets the long-standing status quo in the village, angering Mishra and the Sarpanch. He is framed for rape and eventually transferred. Even though he is forced to leave abruptly and unceremoniously, the uprising that Rao ignites takes root and the film ends with Bhola taking charge of the cooperative with his elected Dalit comrade.
Manthan is not a quintessential Hindi potboiler. True to life, it doesn’t hand out easy gratification. Even though Bhola and Bindu (both socially, economically underprivileged Harijans) try to make a messiah out of Dr. Rao, he consistently refuses to step up on the pedestal. He doesn’t help them, he points them to the road to empowerment instead so they can help themselves.
Or take, for instance, Bhola. Despite being a firebrand advocate of equal rights, it doesn’t occur to him to contest the dairy cooperative elections. For true leaders don’t need a microphone or a throne to do what they need to do. Manthan does not even let Dr. Rao meet Bindu one last time before he leaves. It shows societal change devoid of any filters in all its messy, ugly, frustrating, non-linear ordinariness. It pointedly tells us that the journey to anything of any worth is always one step forward and two steps back.
Manthan, a lot like India’s 2024 Lok Sabha elections, is a terrific testament to the power of collective will to bring about change and instill renewed hope, purpose. Even if it took half a century, it turned out to be Manthan, his second film that finally brought Naseeruddin Shah to the French Riviera.
The massive enthusiasm around its restoration and rerelease has also opened a tiny window that might allow other forgotten cinematic gems suffocating in tins and dusty rooms to see the light of day. Which Hindi classic would you want to see next on the big screen?
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