Kumar Shahani (1940, India) makes films of great integrity. His cinema is complex, demanding, uncompromising and avant-garde. Shahani has worked on the language of cinema through a continuous exploration of the traditional art forms, such as classical music and dance, the classical Indian epic, the modern epic and contemporary literature. His ‘cinematic construct’ is based on a reclamation of Indian cultural history and also on a reconsideration of iconographies, forgotten and then found by a post-colonial anthropology. Kumar Shahani is a survivor in an environment which is becoming more and more hostile. Increasingly in India, as in the rest of the world, genuine culture is having to yield to market pressure. Despite this, Kumar Shahani still holds on to his idealism and on his own honest views on modernity and globalisation.
