Mahasweta Devi’s death is a personal loss for me, says Govind Nihalani

KOLKATA: Critically acclaimed director Govind Nihalani has one regret. The film-maker, who had famously adapted the critically acclaimed “Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa”, was supposed to gift some thrillers to Mahasweta Devi when the duo had last met in Kolkata some years back. When news of Devi’s demise reached Nihalani, he realised he will have to live with this regret forever.
A shocked Nihalani said, “This is a personal loss for me.I shared a very good relationship with her.” The director went back in time to the days when he had first met the author. “It was in connection with ‘Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa’. I had read her work in Hindi translation,” he recalled. Mahasweta Devi’s work deals with the life of a woman who loses her son, a Naxalite, to the violence that is a result of his adopted ideology.
When he decided to adapt the work, he was apprehensive. “I had a certain amount of trepidation. I was told that she was really strict about her works and wasn’t an easy person to work with!”
Though Nihalani was caution, he was in for a pleasant surprise when he first went to meet the author. “The situation was quite the reverse. She was very affectionate. During the shooting, she was in Mumbai too,” he recalled.
Nihalani even took the liberty of him requesting her to write scenes when he went to meet her in Kolkata. Initially, the author was a little apprehensive. But Nihalani managed to convince her. “I told her that she could write them as dialogue scenes. All I wanted was the scenes to come from her,” he said.
Dead in the night, around 11.30 pm, his phone rang. “I was staying in a Kolkata hotel and remember receiving a call from her saying she had written a scene and wanted to read it out to me!” Nihalani recalled, remembering the enthusiasm of the author.
The next two or three days, such calls came every evening. “She is perhaps one of the best writers that we have had. Her works on tribals are extremely fascinating,” he explained.
Pleasing a writer, Nihalani insisted, is a rare experience for a director. “When she saw the film, she was quite happy about it. She had applied strict standards to her own work and hence it felt good to know that she had found my work to be OK,” the director of ‘Drishti’, ‘Ardh Satya’ and ‘Akrosh’ said. The film also went on to win a National Award for the Best Hindi Feature Film.
Some two years ago, Nihalani was in Kolkata. “I met her when I had come to give the Satyajit Ray lecture. Back then, she was recovering from a health issue. She was mostly silent during that visit.”
During that meeting, the film-maker had asked her what she was reading. “She said – thrillers. I had promised to choose some thrillers and send them across to her. However, the ones that I had on me weren’t worth reading by her then,” he explained.
The unfulfilled promise will now remain a regret that Nihalani will have to live with forever.