Amrit Gangar on Aravindan's Kanchana Seeta/Golden Seeta and the idea of ‘Cinema of Prayoga’ "Kanchana Sita (1977), by G. Aravindan, was made 20 years after Pawan Putra Hanuman and it’s also from the Ramayana. Aravindan was one of the finest minds in Indian or even world cinema, and this film is his interpretation of the Uttara Kanda, the last segment, of the Ramayana, where the Lord Ram after defeating Ravana and returning with his wife Sita from Lanka, banishes her from his kingdom, unknowingly wages a war on his twin sons, and finally surrenders himself to the waters of the river Sarayu. The film opens with Ram and his brother Lakshman travelling through the Dandaka Forest to attend a religious feast, and Ram is acutely conscious of Sita’s presence, even though she’s not there. In fact, in Kanchana Sita, the titular character is physically absent from the film throughout. Instead, Aravindan portrays the mythical Sita of flesh and blood through ripples on a river, through a breeze, through rustling leaves, or through prakriti (nature). Sita is suggested here, not shown. She is suggested through what, in Sanskrit, is called ‘vyanjana’, or the suggestive aesthetics of the film. From this seed of an idea—exploring vyanjana through prakriti—Aravindan goes on to explore the ancient philosophy of purush (man) and prakriti, twin concepts that form the basis of our understanding of our selves. Also, he explores the idea of the relationship of the male, purush, with the female, prakriti. This latter thought is one Aravindan might have gotten from the Sankhya Yog, one of our oldest scriptures. Kanchana Sita creates a spatial as well as temporal environment which envelops the viewer in prakriti, via the wind, the movements of trees and leaves and the river. Spatially, you see Sita who is pristine— as nature, as a gentle breeze, as a bhav (a feeling or thought) of being and becoming. Also, you see her temporally, because you feel her presence all the more in time that she is absent. This feeling is intensified by the fact that there are few words in the film. It has hardly any dialogues, which is another one of its strengths: Kanchana Sita doesn’t need the theatricality of dialogues to create cinema. To shoot this, Aravindan went to Andhra Pradesh in the tribal areas where the Chechu—tribals who believe they are the direct descendants of Ram—live. He didn’t use the conventional imagery, such as regal headgear, to portray Ram and Laxman. Instead, he portrayed them as tribals, something which is unusual for our cinema, and a political statement of sorts. This is how we retrieve from our traditions an understanding of modernity— what I call Prayoga. The Cinema of Prayoga also requires that an artist’s work be in natural or sahaja harmony with his or her svabhāva, or temperament. Here we find Aravindan’s cinematography to be very close to, very congenial with, his svabhāva, like Phalke’s work had been with his svabhāva. The advantage of this is that it imbues the film with an uncanny sense of intuition. The result is an intensely poetic and profoundly contemplative work that is felt like a bandish of a raag— especially the strong sensuality that Aravindan explores in the film through prakriti. In the end, Ram submerges himself in the river Sarayu, to be with prakriti, or to be with Sita. This, I would say, is a Prayoga interpretation of the epic." http://thebigindianpicture.com/2013/06/their-experiments-with-truth/
