'I HAVE A HUGE PROBLEM WITH INDIAN MEN'

Screenplay writer, costume designer, art director and theatre personality. SHAMA ZAIDI takes FARHANA FAROOK down memory lane as she revisits Garm Hava, Bhumika and Shatranj Ke Khilari

- FARHANA FAROOK

It was a destined happenstance that Shama Zaidi’s sensibilities matched those of the parallel movement that gave Indian cinema an earthy alternative in the ’70s. Beginning her career as art director and screenplay/ dialogue writer with Shyam Benegal, their synergy celebrated milestones and decades, with Mujib: The Making Of A Nation being among her latest works with the filmmaker. Remarkable also was her stint with auteur Satyajit Ray for Shatranj Ke Khilari, which unravelled how addiction check-mated the political legacy of jagirdars in pre-Independence Avadh.

If her alliance with her husband, filmmaker MS Sathyu, resulted in the critically acclaimed Garm Hava, Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jaan remains an elegiac screenplay in her prolific roster. An empath and a feminist, Shama’s writings may have expressed female angst and oppression, but she herself was not spared patriarchy and gender bias either. The spirited Shama fought for parity in a male-dominated industry to finally win her due. A cheerleader of women’s individualism, she maintains it’s the men who need to do a rethink. “Women are naturally feminists. The problem is not with Indian women but with Indian men. I have a huge problem with Indian men. They’re living in a different century. Women are in the 20th century, while men are still in the 18th. That’s the conflict.”

GENESIS