A Pedagogy for Cinema: Revisiting Epic through Avikunthak's 'The Killing of Meghnad'

Arjun K

Image source: The Killing of Meghnad

The Killing of Meghnad is Avikunthak's exploration of the Indian mythological genre, one of the oldest genres in Indian Cinema. The film itself is an adaptation, or to be precise, a deconstruction, or, to borrow from Roman Jakobson, an intersemiotic transposition of the 1861 poem by Michael Madhusudan Dutt. The premise of the poem and the film can be understood from Dutt’s letter to his friend Rajnarayan Basu. Dutt admits, “People here grumble that the sympathy of the poet in Meghnad is with the Rakshasas. And that is the real truth. I despise Ram and his ramble, but the idea of Ravana elevates and kindles my imagination; he was a grand fellow.” Avikunthak’s film, being faithful to Dutt, builds on the same vision, with a deeply humane sympathy towards Meghnad, the son of Ravana and the Rakshasas.

Ashish Avikunthak

The Killing of Meghnad is constructed using the epic narrative structure, juxtaposing numerous scenes of philosophical engagements about ethics, morality, violence, war, heroics, pain, and grief among its characters. The film takes a very open form, providing the audience space to think, reflect, and introspect; rather than a closed approach which dismisses any such possibility, as seen in the more commercially oriented spectacle films adapted from Indian mythology. To put it in other terms, the film builds on a pedagogy of equality with its audience, a tradition that can be traced back to the Buddhist school of dialogues, where dialogue is considered a path to understanding oneself. 

Image source: The Killing of Meghnad

The film begins with a wide shot where Madhusudan Dutt is seen reciting lines from his poem, in which he asks the goddess of speech to answer to the deceiving and killing of Meghnad by Lakshman, in order to free Indra from his fear. Shot in stunning landscapes, nature dominates the characters on the screen, who are composed as tableau-like subjects. The film moves through scenes of conversation between Dutt and Ravana, Indra and Tarika, Meghnad and Laxman, Ram and Vibishan, and Sita, in a whodunit approach, exploring the death of Meghnad. 

The film utilises an aural approach to the text rather than a visual narrative style. This aural approach, where characters recite their lines without any emotion or psychological motive in various phonetic variations, emanates an alienated approach for the viewer to the character they play, defies cinematic norms, and moves away from traditional realist and melodramatic approaches, resembling the works of Marguerite Duras and Yasujirō Ozu. Moreover, the film emulates the 'swabav of dhyana' (one of meditative quality), transcending into the realm of cosmic.

Image source: The Killing of Meghnad

The Killing of Meghnad can thereby be understood as a film where Avikunthak undertakes the subversion of the epic tradition through his practice of Infrarealism. This results in the development of a provocative film style by Avikunthak, wherein characters are negated from their telos and hence shots becomes ontological, text or content operates from a metaphysical realm, and hence the cinematic experience becomes an act of retroactivity, where past, present, and future interact simultaneously.

Madhusudan Dutt, himself, can be seen walking through vivid spaces like an avadhooth (saintly man) in his Victorian dress, evoking the mental image of the author reciting phrases from the poem, seeking a deeply existential inquiry, and speaking with characters like Ravan and other mythological personas. The character of Madhusudan Dutt also provides the film with a very interesting and polemical interaction between the past and present, modernism and tradition, heroes and antiheroes, myth and mythology. Quoting Avikunthak, "The presence of Madhusudan Dutt reading his own text, anchors the film in a dialogue across centuries: between colonial modernity and ancient myth, between poetry and cinema. Here, the inquiry deepens: what does it mean to resurrect the oldest Indian film genre, the “mythological,” with a modernist soul? For me, it means stripping away spectacle to reveal vulnerability, replacing divine certainty with existential doubt, and allowing the epic to speak to our fractured present."

Image source: The Killing of Meghnad

The film is filled with references to Indian philosophy and aesthetics, where soundscapes and images are calculatedly designed in reference to the ideas of panchabhootham; where cinematic temporality becomes more of an eternal recurrence, and characters become just particles or what one would call maya, going beyond the physical, formulating a cinema of maya. This approach, what one might call a "subaltern avant garde"(Geeta Kapur) enunciate a very radical approach towards indian postcolonial queries for aesthetics and culture, which is reciprocated through Avikunthak's tantrik undertakings in the film.

The real importance of Ashish Avikunthak’s The Killing Of Meghnad, beyond its beauty and rarity, lies in the fact that although the film is a commentary on Madhusudan Dutt's poem, it is also a brilliant political allegory towards contemporary India. Avikunthak questions the ethics of our own history, which in itself is a foundation of our contemporary political predicament. To put it in other terms, Avikunthak, in all honesty and critical vigor, engages with the idea of civilization, what does civilization become when traditions are sabotaged, histories are mangled, values are falsified, dharmas are lost, truth and false are entangled? What can the past as a tradition speak to contemporary civilization?

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