New Delhi, July 9 -- Hindi cinema films Central India most readily when it turns violent. Raja Bundela has spent a career refusing that image.
When Hindi cinema goes looking for central India, it finds the ravine. From Shekhar Kapur's 'Bandit Queen' and Tigmanshu Dhulia's 'Paan Singh Tomar' to Abhishek Chaubey's 'Sonchiriya', the Chambal ravines reach the screen as dust and dacoits. Bundelkhand, beside them, is drawn into the same picture. The best of these films, Dhulia's and Chaubey's, are grave and sympathetic works that blame the state rather than the outlaw. Even so, the region seems most filmable when it turns violent and the 'baaghi' is its passport into the frame.
I have been thinking about one filmmaker from that land who did the opposite. Raja Bundela, an actor and director from Lalitpur in Bundelkhand, grew up on the outlaw mythology the movies love. I sat with him recently on 'The Second Seat' and one line stayed with me. He calls his own life a current, not a climb, which is perhaps why he never romanticised the men who climbed out of these ravines with guns. It matters beyond one man. A region the camera keeps reducing to violence loses the right to be imagined otherwise and its people are the last to shape the picture.
In 2002, he directed 'Pratha', casting a young Irrfan Khan as the priest who anoints a village girl as a living goddess, a decade before 'Paan Singh Tomar' made the same actor the face of the Chambal dacoit. Bundela's camera went not to the ravine but to the temple. The girl is worshipped in public and used in private, the crime hidden below the shrine that sanctifies it. Where the dacoit film aims its suspicion at the state and the police, 'Pratha' turned it on the religious power of Bundela's own society. He was assaulted at a Bhopal screening for it, then accused of staging the assault and the film was buried twice over. It remains one of the braver unseen films of that decade.
The refusal didn't stop at 'Pratha'. The film festival he founded at Khajuraho, the 'Tapra Talkies' he carries into villages and the 'Ram Mahotsava' at Orchha all insist on a Bundelkhand of temple, river and devotion rather than ravine, revenge and rupture. He remembers village women in one of those tarpaulin huts weeping through an English film about a trafficked Nepali girl and he took it as proof that the hut was not a compromise but the whole point. He isn't nostalgic about the old defiance, only clear-eyed about its cost. Burn a bus today, he told me and the bulldozer comes to your house. The fight is now a war of ideas, waged over what a region may see of itself.
That's the real subject of his work. The outlaw's image flatters the outsider's camera because a place is easiest to film when it is on fire. Bundela's cinema makes the slower claim that the people of a place should get to author its picture. Masterpiece or not, it's an argument his part of the country rarely gets to make in its own voice.
Darshim Saxena is a screenwriter and film analyst. She is the founder and host of 'The Second Seat', a long-form conversation platform dedicated to cinema's craft, memory and authorship beyond box-office narratives. Her platform crossed 100K subscribers within 56 days of launch, proving an audience for depth
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.