A contemporary tale about feudalism and female sexuality, Maya Darpan was applauded for its courage and rigour after its first international screening at the Locarno Film Festival in 1973. I believe that its innovations of colour, sound and movement are gifts inherited from my childhood spent on the banks of the Indus where red and indigo complemented the golden desert sands. Its courage is sourced from my gurus – Ritwik Ghatak, Robert Bresson, D.D. Kosambi, the great musicians of India and Europe, the philosophers across the continents and the Sufis, who believed in the sheer magic of enunciation.

The filming of Maya Darpan was a near-impossible task. I had to spend more than half of the budget on getting the raw Kodak stock; it was an ambitious undertaking to make a film in colour on such a low budget. All of this was made much worse since the captains of the film industry and the bureaucrats did not believe in the concept of filmmaking as an art form. Moreover, the film labs were bound by manuals and accustomed to a certain convention of grading and colour correction without the director being present. Whereas we were trying to go beyond the manuals, especially to create desaturation and experiment with colour.

Shot in over a month in Rajasthan, Maya Darpan was lensed by the deeply perceptive cinematographer K.K. Mahajan, a key figure in the radical aesthetic experiments of Parallel Cinema. Mahajan had worked on my diploma film The Glass Pane and we struck up a friendship that would lead to a series of intuitive collaborations including Tarang (1984). When Maya Darpan was finally made, the entire spectrum of ideologies rejected it and the film was never officially released in cinemas. As a matter of fact, the Joint Chief of Controller of Imports and Exports prevented the export of the film. But there was a brave group of individuals who supported the film, allowing it to be shown almost all over India, but only through the film society circuit and educational institutions.

Kumar Shahani