Mani Kaul’s Extraordinary Philosophy of Life
Those who view Indian cinema as a clash of two
diametrically opposed streams—on the one hand, the frivolous gimmickry of
Bollywood, and on the other, the classical narrative gravitas of Satyajit Ray
in his Hollywood-inspired idiom—forget that there was also a third, vitally
important current. That was India’s avant-garde, the New Cinema.
The evolution of the avant-garde in cinema was itself part of a global pattern, a celebrated aesthetic mode that defined experimental twentieth-century filmmaking. It was, in essence, an assault upon tradition—an artistic rebellion that broke apart the ancient conventions of cinema. The term “avant-garde” was first employed in the 1920s by a small band of theorists. French visionaries such as Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, and Jean Epstein attempted to fashion an avant-garde cinema.
This was a cinema that was not merely about stories but about the form of stories—a polyphonic structure that invoked theoretical methods to interrogate realism versus naturalism, to reframe the viewer’s relationship with the screen, to reinvent montage, to emphasize subjectivity, and to explore the psychoanalytic depths of cinema, the doctrine of auteurship, and the semiotics of film. Out of this ideal of a “complete cinema” arose the impulse toward experimental filmmaking, a call to arms for young directors.
And in India, Mani Kaul stood among the first rank of avant-garde pioneers.
The sixty-six-year-old filmmaker recently passed away after a struggle with cancer. He was an uncompromising craftsman—one who never sought popularity, but instead followed the rhythm of his own instincts. His Bengali mentor was Ritwik Ghatak, and Kaul was by nature a melancholic lover of Ritwik’s fierce passion for social justice. His restless, unyielding quest for truth drew him inevitably toward the giants of film history.
He was especially influenced by Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky. Upon seeing Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Kaul declared it one of the most formative experiences of his life, a film that entered his bloodstream like a revelation.
Yet Mani was profoundly rooted in his own country’s cultural soil. He sought to transcribe into the language of cinema the eternal rhythms of Indian art, music, literature, and theatre. He was a harsh critic of Bollywood’s gaudy myth-making and shallow heroics. “If cinema shows us only that which no one has ever experienced in life, what purpose does it serve?” he once asked, balancing the question between dream and reality, between vision and lived truth.
Kaul’s personal vision of cinema made him bolder, for he feared neither the market nor the immature psychology of mass audiences. For this rare integrity he was admired by European critics, who sensed in him the spirit of an artist untainted by commerce. At a time when directors of every stripe calculated the desires of the public before lifting a camera, Mani Kaul was one of the very few who upheld the banner of art for art’s sake—with a sense of social responsibility.
To his students of film he taught a difficult credo: one must make films for the people without pandering to what the people want. This, he said, was a nearly impossible task, for the masses seldom embraced it. And that is why this world-class director remained unknown beyond the narrow circle of art cinema. It is our misfortune, he believed, that people fear seeing their true reflection on the silver screen; they prefer instead the consoling fairy tale.
Most of the time, Mani Kaul had to finance his own films. He never had the luxury of wealthy producers. His opportunities were few, and within those constraints he crafted his masterpieces. Fighting illness in his last years, he began directing a film on the Indian journey of the Italian maestro Roberto Rossellini in the 1950s. The script was based on Dilip Padgaonkar’s essay Under His Spell. But Kaul’s health collapsed during shooting, and he could not complete the work.
Born into a Kashmiri family in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, Mani was nephew to the actor-director Mahesh Kaul. He first studied acting, then directing at the film school. His debut feature Uski Roti (1970) became one of the foundational texts of India’s “new cinema.”
The story was stark: a woman waits each day with food for her truck-driver husband. When he does not appear, suspicion gnaws at her, and she discovers he has a mistress in another town. But the film was never about the plot. Instead it sculpted silence, imagery, and social gesture. Its release caused a storm—even a legislator rose in parliament to complain that it was so “boring” he could never forget it. Mani Kaul received the insult as high praise: he had sought to construct a reality that would provoke boredom, and in that sense, he had succeeded.
His most famous film was Duvidha (1975), based on a Rajasthani folktale. It drew visually from the miniature art of Rajasthan, weaving cinematic frames as if they were painted manuscripts.
The story is deceptively simple: a merchant’s son returns home with his bride but must soon depart for trade. Left alone, the bride encounters a “ghost”—perhaps a projection of her own fertile imagination—who takes the form of her absent husband. When the real husband returns, the ghost is trapped in a leather sack, intensifying the woman’s tragedy.
The film played widely in European arthouses but failed in Indian theatres, for by then Bollywood spectacles had numbed the national imagination. Kaul, his comrade Kumar Shahani, and many others of talent never made a true dent in India’s mainstream consciousness. It remains a shameful reality. Even though India’s Film Finance Corporation (FFC) supported parallel cinema and Doordarshan promised broadcasts, such films never reached the people.
The contrast was stark: Satyajit Ray, who balanced seriousness with commerce, released Pather Panchali in 1955 with government aid from B.C. Roy, then Chief Minister of Bengal. That same year, Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 was released. Ray’s film failed commercially; Kapoor’s film made the equivalent of ₹450 crores today. Notably, both Pather Panchali and Duvidha earned far more abroad than at home.
The truth was that India’s new wave films were not technically extraordinary—they were often low-budget, patched together with borrowed resources. Their survival owed much to European audiences and film festivals. Yet, because of them, Indian cinema gained international recognition.
Meanwhile, Bollywood’s epics lured Sunday crowds into grand theatres for three-hour orgies of delight, while art films were branded “abnormal” for daring to prod thought and explain social reality.
Kaul’s body of work was as distinctive as his temperament. Perhaps he is best remembered for Dhrupad (1982), an experimental documentary on Indian classical music in its purest form.
The film revealed music as a celebration of nature itself, a mirror of the human heart’s yearning, refined over two millennia of folk and classical synthesis. The final shot—six minutes long—showed Mumbai’s skyline under the spell of dhrupad’s austere notes, as the camera gazed from shanty to skyscraper, seeking meaning in the chaos of the city. For any student of cinema, this is essential viewing: proof that without words, without characters, with only music and image—the twin pillars of cinema—an audience can be shaken to the core, lifted to near-revolutionary intensity.
Kaul adapted Dostoyevsky twice—in Nazar and Idiot. At a time when no one in India dared attempt such works, Mani did. His films became a laboratory for students across India, Europe, and America. No European film school graduate could claim mastery without studying his method.
A devoted disciple of Indian classical music, Mani Kaul not only studied it but became an accomplished singer. He believed music was cinema’s most profound instrument to stir the soul. He proved that cinema’s rebellion itself was inseparable from music.
Though he chose the hardest path—telling stories without telling them in conventional narrative—he bore it like an ascetic. To make such films was akin to the Buddha meditating beneath the Bodhi tree, resisting temptation and illusion. Cinema, unlike poetry, is no solitary act at home; it is a vast enterprise, demanding crews, money, and machinery. To recognize the commercial truth of cinema yet remain free of it—this was the near-impossible challenge. To triumph over it was, in his eyes, the director’s true nirvana.
We gave him far less recognition than he deserved. His influence on students of film in India was profound, but outside, he was often misunderstood. Once, it was said that Kaul had refused to carry India’s national artistic tradition and instead, with narrow intent, imposed Western aesthetics. That judgment has since been discarded. Today he is revered for having revived ancient Indian art through a modern medium. And now that he is dead—as so often happens in India—we finally begin to praise him, to study him, to give him his rightful place.
One cannot forget the anecdote of a famous Bollywood producer who once went to meet Mani Kaul to discuss a script. Years later, he confessed: “I did not know what to say to him. So we never spoke about the script at all.”
That was Mani Kaul—so utterly, so fiercely committed to the art of cinema that ordinary conversation seemed inadequate, and commerce seemed irrelevant.
The evolution of the avant-garde in cinema was itself part of a global pattern, a celebrated aesthetic mode that defined experimental twentieth-century filmmaking. It was, in essence, an assault upon tradition—an artistic rebellion that broke apart the ancient conventions of cinema. The term “avant-garde” was first employed in the 1920s by a small band of theorists. French visionaries such as Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, and Jean Epstein attempted to fashion an avant-garde cinema.
This was a cinema that was not merely about stories but about the form of stories—a polyphonic structure that invoked theoretical methods to interrogate realism versus naturalism, to reframe the viewer’s relationship with the screen, to reinvent montage, to emphasize subjectivity, and to explore the psychoanalytic depths of cinema, the doctrine of auteurship, and the semiotics of film. Out of this ideal of a “complete cinema” arose the impulse toward experimental filmmaking, a call to arms for young directors.
And in India, Mani Kaul stood among the first rank of avant-garde pioneers.
The sixty-six-year-old filmmaker recently passed away after a struggle with cancer. He was an uncompromising craftsman—one who never sought popularity, but instead followed the rhythm of his own instincts. His Bengali mentor was Ritwik Ghatak, and Kaul was by nature a melancholic lover of Ritwik’s fierce passion for social justice. His restless, unyielding quest for truth drew him inevitably toward the giants of film history.
He was especially influenced by Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky. Upon seeing Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Kaul declared it one of the most formative experiences of his life, a film that entered his bloodstream like a revelation.
Yet Mani was profoundly rooted in his own country’s cultural soil. He sought to transcribe into the language of cinema the eternal rhythms of Indian art, music, literature, and theatre. He was a harsh critic of Bollywood’s gaudy myth-making and shallow heroics. “If cinema shows us only that which no one has ever experienced in life, what purpose does it serve?” he once asked, balancing the question between dream and reality, between vision and lived truth.
Kaul’s personal vision of cinema made him bolder, for he feared neither the market nor the immature psychology of mass audiences. For this rare integrity he was admired by European critics, who sensed in him the spirit of an artist untainted by commerce. At a time when directors of every stripe calculated the desires of the public before lifting a camera, Mani Kaul was one of the very few who upheld the banner of art for art’s sake—with a sense of social responsibility.
To his students of film he taught a difficult credo: one must make films for the people without pandering to what the people want. This, he said, was a nearly impossible task, for the masses seldom embraced it. And that is why this world-class director remained unknown beyond the narrow circle of art cinema. It is our misfortune, he believed, that people fear seeing their true reflection on the silver screen; they prefer instead the consoling fairy tale.
Most of the time, Mani Kaul had to finance his own films. He never had the luxury of wealthy producers. His opportunities were few, and within those constraints he crafted his masterpieces. Fighting illness in his last years, he began directing a film on the Indian journey of the Italian maestro Roberto Rossellini in the 1950s. The script was based on Dilip Padgaonkar’s essay Under His Spell. But Kaul’s health collapsed during shooting, and he could not complete the work.
Born into a Kashmiri family in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, Mani was nephew to the actor-director Mahesh Kaul. He first studied acting, then directing at the film school. His debut feature Uski Roti (1970) became one of the foundational texts of India’s “new cinema.”
The story was stark: a woman waits each day with food for her truck-driver husband. When he does not appear, suspicion gnaws at her, and she discovers he has a mistress in another town. But the film was never about the plot. Instead it sculpted silence, imagery, and social gesture. Its release caused a storm—even a legislator rose in parliament to complain that it was so “boring” he could never forget it. Mani Kaul received the insult as high praise: he had sought to construct a reality that would provoke boredom, and in that sense, he had succeeded.
His most famous film was Duvidha (1975), based on a Rajasthani folktale. It drew visually from the miniature art of Rajasthan, weaving cinematic frames as if they were painted manuscripts.
The story is deceptively simple: a merchant’s son returns home with his bride but must soon depart for trade. Left alone, the bride encounters a “ghost”—perhaps a projection of her own fertile imagination—who takes the form of her absent husband. When the real husband returns, the ghost is trapped in a leather sack, intensifying the woman’s tragedy.
The film played widely in European arthouses but failed in Indian theatres, for by then Bollywood spectacles had numbed the national imagination. Kaul, his comrade Kumar Shahani, and many others of talent never made a true dent in India’s mainstream consciousness. It remains a shameful reality. Even though India’s Film Finance Corporation (FFC) supported parallel cinema and Doordarshan promised broadcasts, such films never reached the people.
The contrast was stark: Satyajit Ray, who balanced seriousness with commerce, released Pather Panchali in 1955 with government aid from B.C. Roy, then Chief Minister of Bengal. That same year, Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 was released. Ray’s film failed commercially; Kapoor’s film made the equivalent of ₹450 crores today. Notably, both Pather Panchali and Duvidha earned far more abroad than at home.
The truth was that India’s new wave films were not technically extraordinary—they were often low-budget, patched together with borrowed resources. Their survival owed much to European audiences and film festivals. Yet, because of them, Indian cinema gained international recognition.
Meanwhile, Bollywood’s epics lured Sunday crowds into grand theatres for three-hour orgies of delight, while art films were branded “abnormal” for daring to prod thought and explain social reality.
Kaul’s body of work was as distinctive as his temperament. Perhaps he is best remembered for Dhrupad (1982), an experimental documentary on Indian classical music in its purest form.
The film revealed music as a celebration of nature itself, a mirror of the human heart’s yearning, refined over two millennia of folk and classical synthesis. The final shot—six minutes long—showed Mumbai’s skyline under the spell of dhrupad’s austere notes, as the camera gazed from shanty to skyscraper, seeking meaning in the chaos of the city. For any student of cinema, this is essential viewing: proof that without words, without characters, with only music and image—the twin pillars of cinema—an audience can be shaken to the core, lifted to near-revolutionary intensity.
Kaul adapted Dostoyevsky twice—in Nazar and Idiot. At a time when no one in India dared attempt such works, Mani did. His films became a laboratory for students across India, Europe, and America. No European film school graduate could claim mastery without studying his method.
A devoted disciple of Indian classical music, Mani Kaul not only studied it but became an accomplished singer. He believed music was cinema’s most profound instrument to stir the soul. He proved that cinema’s rebellion itself was inseparable from music.
Though he chose the hardest path—telling stories without telling them in conventional narrative—he bore it like an ascetic. To make such films was akin to the Buddha meditating beneath the Bodhi tree, resisting temptation and illusion. Cinema, unlike poetry, is no solitary act at home; it is a vast enterprise, demanding crews, money, and machinery. To recognize the commercial truth of cinema yet remain free of it—this was the near-impossible challenge. To triumph over it was, in his eyes, the director’s true nirvana.
We gave him far less recognition than he deserved. His influence on students of film in India was profound, but outside, he was often misunderstood. Once, it was said that Kaul had refused to carry India’s national artistic tradition and instead, with narrow intent, imposed Western aesthetics. That judgment has since been discarded. Today he is revered for having revived ancient Indian art through a modern medium. And now that he is dead—as so often happens in India—we finally begin to praise him, to study him, to give him his rightful place.
One cannot forget the anecdote of a famous Bollywood producer who once went to meet Mani Kaul to discuss a script. Years later, he confessed: “I did not know what to say to him. So we never spoke about the script at all.”
That was Mani Kaul—so utterly, so fiercely committed to the art of cinema that ordinary conversation seemed inadequate, and commerce seemed irrelevant.
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