Statist Realism And Its Discontents: Another Optics for Shyam Benegal's Ankur (The Seedling, 1973)

Abstract

This essay engages critically with the dismissal of Shyam Benegal's films as representing instances of “seeing like the state” (to use James Scott's resonant terms) because of their deployment of a realist aesthetic often tagged as “statist” or “developmental” by film scholars like Madhava Prasad. It argues, instead, for a different spectatorial position that locates the subaltern female subject oppressed by (patriarchal) feudal ideologies at its center. In so doing, it seeks to complicate over-determined understandings of the (Indian) state as necessarily coercive and a realist aesthetic as necessarily dedicated to reproducing conservative ideologies.