Raje - Freedom: my story

To my mother, who nurtured in me a love for art, music, movies and unconditional love;

To my father, who inculcated in me values, a love for people and a commitment to empower them;

To my daughter, Gaagi, who taught me courage and compassion and how to live life in the face of adversities

Contents

A utobiographies sometimes tend to be like confessionals. At other times they can seem like self-congratulatory essays listing the authors achievements in a variety of fields through a lifetime. They can be self-conscious, egotistical, self-justifying and often written with a belief that ones life is of interest to other people. Yet it goes without saying that life experiences of each human being has worth even if these experiences are common to others as they often are. A good autobiography is one that is unselfconscious and written with little regard to the kind of profile that would emerge of oneself.

Every life has something in it that is important since each experience is unique and the way human beings react to them are singular and never alike. An autobiography is successful when it evokes not just empathy but transcends individual experiences to make them universal, helping us value life in all its diversity.

Arunaraje Patils autobiography Freedom: My Story is a book that does not merely recount her own life but deals with traumas that could easily have been debilitating. It is a story of self discovery. Of finding the inner strength and self worth that have helped her overcome terrible tragedies of loss and circumstance.

An uplifting story of life and hope.

Shyam Benegal
April 2017

B eing born before Independence to a freedom fighter father, instilled in me a strong sense of freedom and self-reliance. Though I did not know it then, my understanding of freedom began to get better as I grew up, as did my perception of the country in its new form, as one united India.

There were old traditions to be broken, new spaces to be negotiated as I went along, often bungling my way through learning, however, to live a life alongside people I didnt know most of the time but who I was willing to discover, to know.

Girls from supposedly good families did not enter films at the time unless they came from modern-thinking homes or were already a part of that system. Since my family could qualify as neither, being a first-class student at high school, I went on to study medicine though my heart was in films all along. Though the subjects were anatomy and physiology, I studied life instead, preparing myself to get into films through FTII.

I thought, you dont make a film because it is a good idea or you think it will make some money. I was inspired by a breed of film-makers who made films based on their experiences of life past or present, what mattered to them, what called out to them, or what expressed them just like any other artiste. And that for me is cinema, a medium of self-expression like a painting.

Except that it is expensive and a collaborative effort by many diverse talents and needs an audience. And each person, technician or actor, brings their creativity to the central idea or theme that is determined by the director. The director who is understood to be the captain of the ship steers the ship along with the entire cast and crew and creates the narrative. It is this story that ultimately helps the audience understand the film. It is always the directors perspective that makes the film.

There are other kinds of film-makers too, who believe that the film they make is a vehicle to make money. Obviously, if that is the intention, you would need to have a huge audience, which means often catering to the lowest common denominator, given that in India we have a very wide spectrum of people; uneducated, rural, poor, city folk, educated, rich, belonging to diverse regions. These film-makers believe their job is to entertain every kind of person, which means there is bound to be a clash of tastes, values, as also the contexts on which diverse people base their lives. So these films remained superficial at one level, afraid to offend any community or audience type and often ended up being mindless entertainment.

Like all kinds of art and entertainment, there is an audience for every kind of film. Movies get categorized according to audiences: niche or semi-niche, or mainstream or mass.

Bollywood, which has operated mostly on formulae, has changed its plots and characters over time new audience tastes with widespread media exposure have created new whiz kids and destroyed old veterans who did not reinvent themselves. The technological changes that came snuffed out old studios, equipment and even master technicians as business became global.

The more cinematic films are a reflection of their makers their philosophy, their concerns, even their confusions. If you notice, most of the Bollywood films, driven by the formula of song, dance, comedy, action, romance, sex, etc., tell you little about what the film-maker is thinking or feeling their views on life, society, commitments, their questions. Though I am glad to say that all this is beginning to change with the advent of the indie (independent) film.

Whether it was Mehboob Khan in Mother India or Guru Dutt or Bimal Roy they all had something to say blatant or hidden. You experienced the life and emotions of the characters. Later on, it was Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal who made films that you would want to keep in your library like a good book. So often it was a simple love story reflecting the times or circumstances of families, situations, cultural trends, or even country. There were more commercial film-makers too took up subjects that had a soul, if I may say, like B.R. Chopra, and the early films of V. Shantaram or Raj Kapoor.

For me it is not possible to separate my life and my personal experiences from the films I make. It doesnt mean that all my films are biographical. I am interested in life, people, relationships and sometimes disturbing issues in society and thats the kind of films I made. However, I chose to make middle cinema or middle-of-theroad cinema as I wanted an audience for my films. I have also seen how I have felt alienated from my own self when I made a film to meet the demands of the producer or the market and diluted it to a degree that robbed it of its soul.

Such compromises dont work for me and I decided long back that I would rather not make a film if there is no artistic freedom. That explains why I made fewer films than I could have. The other reason was that I was working in a male-dominated, sexist industry and did not want to compromise myself as a woman.

The lack of artistic freedom is also probably why most of the directors from FTII found it hard to create their films in the commercial atmosphere of Bollywood. Though the technicians from FTII got absorbed into the industry even before they had received their diplomas, there were only a handful of directors who found their feet in Bollywood. Stories can be told in various ways, and it is not the plot or even characters but how a writer or director views it that is central.

As a woman film-maker I found myself going against the trend in the male-dominated industry, against the backdrop of where young women found themselves in the 1960s and 70s, facing whatever was available in India for them as a future, which wasnt very much. So my struggles have been both professional and personal.