[The following piece was published in Film Comment and written for the upcoming edition of Prismatic Ground.]

Prismatic Ground, the New York–based festival of experimental documentary and avant-garde film, is honoring Indian filmmakers Kumar Shahani and Ashish Avikunthak in its upcoming fifth edition. Shahani, who passed away in February 2024 at the age of 83, will be commemorated with a four-film retrospective, while Avikunthak will receive the festival’s Ground Glass Award for “outstanding contribution in the field of experimental media.” The two filmmakers have more in common than meets the eye.

Born in Larkana in current-day Pakistan and moving to Bombay with his family after the 1947 Partition, Shahani studied at the Film Institute of India in Pune, where he came under the tutelage of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960) and Marxist historian D.D. Kosambi. Another influence encountered during his formative years was Robert Bresson, on whose A Gentle Woman (1969) Shahani assisted while he was a visiting student at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris.

His first feature, Maya Darpan (1972), a formally rigorous portrait of a desolate woman wilting in a feudal mansion, was such a radical departure from the intellectually respectable idiom of neorealism that Satyajit Ray excoriated it for “threatening film language with extinction.” With state funding of niche, commercially unviable titles becoming increasingly difficult, Shahani wouldn’t be able to make another feature for 12 years, inaugurating a working life marked by unrealized projects and long gaps between films that he would fill with research, writing, and teaching. Across four decades, he would make no more than seven features, in addition to numerous shorts.

Like Shahani, though a generation younger, Avikunthak was also a child of Partition, born into a Hindu family of Punjabi origin that moved from Pakistan to Calcutta, in India, after 1947. Where Shahani experienced the churn of May 1968 during his time in Paris, Avikunthak credits his political consciousness to living through the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-93 in Bombay. His body of work, spanning eight features and seven shorts including Kalighat Fetish (1999) and Vakratunda Swaha (2010), demonstrates a dedicated engagement with Hindu iconography. Avikunthak’s invocation of vernacular gods, often visceral in its nudity and graphic violence, resists both the perversions of colonial puritanism and the contemporary Hindu Right’s consolidation of heterogeneous religious beliefs and practices in the subcontinent.

Shahani and, to a lesser extent, Avikunthak have both been associated with the Parallel Cinema movement in India. But their high-modernist practice stands far removed from the socially minded but formally conservative works that dominate the Parallel Cinema tradition. Unlike their peers, the two artists present their films primarily as intellectual constructs undergirded by strong philosophical frameworks: a theory of the epic form in the case of Shahani, Tantric spiritual thought for Avikunthak. Not for them the intuitive groping evoked by the word “experimental.”

Above all, Shahani’s and Avikunthak’s films find common ground in their rejection of the psychological realism that dominates classical narrative cinema. A Marxist by persuasion, Shahani framed his rejection in pointedly Brechtian terms: “Realism of detail,” he wrote, “can be a mask for eluding the real problems of society, its class relations.” Denying viewers cathartic immersion in a self-contained fictional world, Shahani instead invited them to arrive at a rational analysis of the relations depicted in his films. For Avikunthak, this rejection is a matter of religious ritual. Emptied of individual psychology, his human figures become metaphysical vehicles embedded in predetermined textual and gestural transactions.

Audiences at Prismatic Ground will have the chance to discover two singular artists whose works, despite their seeming hermeticism, stand in serious dialogue with the politics of their times.