Standing by a boulder on a TV set inside Bombay’s Film City studio, “Jawaharlal Nehru” seemed shorter in real life than what he appeared in pictures and newsreels. That was because he was not the real Nehru but the actor Roshan Seth portraying him in 1987 during the shoot of the iconic television series "Bharat Ek Khoj” based on the first Indian prime minister’s celebrated book ‘The Discovery of India’.

“Panditji, can you move a couple steps closer,” said the bearded man in a khaki Panama hat, blue denim shirt and black trousers. That was Shyam Benegal, one of India’s most celebrated filmmakers, who passed away at age 90 on December 23 in Mumbai.

I was waiting for him to finish the scene. He had been told that I was on set. Once he okayed Seth’s nearly two-minute-long opening narration to one of the series’ 53 episodes, Benegal walked up to me with a warm smile, stretched his hand and said, “Shyam.”

‘Bharat ek khoj’

“Shall we have some lunch?” he said more as an invitation than a question.

As we sat down on two plastic chairs, he said, “I came of age during the Nehru era. Panditji (that is how Nehru was popularly addressed) was a very important political and intellectual reference point for those of my generation.”

By the time Nehru became India’s first prime minister in 1947, Benegal was only 13 years old but considering that he remained in office until his death in 1964, the filmmaker’s late teens and early 20s were “deeply influenced” by him.

“I always thought that ‘The Discovery of India’ was a book that all Indians must read,” Benegal told me. Nehru wrote the book while imprisoned by the imperial British rulers in the Ahmednagar Fort between 1942 and 1946.

“The way Nehru wrote it was quite filmable. Many of his descriptions were quite cinematic,” Benegal said.

‘Bharat Ek Khoj’ was broadcast weekly on India’s state-owned TV network Doordarshan and became a very popular series. Some of India’s best-known actors cut their teeth on this series as young, upcoming artists.

‘A consummate filmmaker’

Seth, whom I interviewed some years later in Delhi, said this of Benegal. “Shyambabu was a consummate filmmaker with a complete grasp of the medium. For me playing Nehru in his series was a great privilege,” he said. There was a time that many viewers thought that Seth was indeed Nehru.

As the maker of ‘Bharat Ek Khoj’ Benegal was already riding a formidable reputation as an auteur having made such iconic films as ‘Ankur’, 1974, ‘Nishant’, 1975, ‘Manthan’, 1976, ‘Bhumika’, 1977,’Junoon’, 1979, ‘Kalyug’, 1981, ‘Mandi’, 1983, ‘Trikal’, 1985.

I asked him about how it was for a filmmaker, who had already made such pathbreaking movies and emerged as a defining figure, to make a television series, he said, “It is essentially the same except that the cinematic canvas is smaller. Also, the visual construction of scenes is different since I am shooting with so many actors.”

Benegal came across as a man of refined sensibilities and great empathy for the human condition, which clearly reflected in his cinema. He asked me if I had read ‘The Discovery of India’ to which I said I had a few times. He was visibly pleased to hear me say that.

“Do you think I am doing justice to Nehru’s vision?” he asked me to my surprise. A filmmaker with eight superbly crafted movies under his belt had no problem asking a 26-year-old journalist who he thought.

“You have given it a second life, brought it out of the pages of the book and created a remarkable legacy,” were my exact words. He seemed overcome by my response.

(The writer is a Chicago based journalist, author n filmmaker. Views expressed are personal. By special arrangement with Indica)