provided no sense of discovery (o them. Communication of ideas, then, and a form that reveals conditions and situations instead of dramatising them; showing the world as • evolving instead of static; viewing the human being as a process instead of a given. These not only dictated my own search but I feel they become important for any filmmaker today who wants to make a significant film. To attempt the epic, only a genuinely open-ended and evolving structure can suffice. In Pune, at the Film & Television Institute (FTII), my preoccupations continued, with film how providing new possibilities. My Diploma film was based on Brecht's Exception & The Rule, That taught me a lot, I . think, because I was already focussed on the need to relate to the people who go to the cinema—but to address them differently. Also, was the form to be contemporary or a more timeless one? I chose to be immediate. In Ahmedabad, working on television programmes, I got acquainted with the Bhavai form, a form that was evolved in the 14th-15th century when the times were already turning turbulent with the invasion of the Muslims. Local traditions and institutions were breaking down, caste-system was in a strange flux—the varna vyavastha breaking into the Joan-system. The Bhavai was then an extraordinarily free form, which drew from various traditions that existed then, of mime, dance, drama, and it left enough scope for improvisation right through and into today. The gesture in it, the music, the performance was very much of a Brechtian nature. I found a story, an original Bhavai story, called Achoot No Bhavai Vesh. Having worked out its traditional means of performance I brought to it a whole lot of my other concerns, with the cartoon-form and the comic-strip, with theatre and mime, and story telling, and worked out the form that the film uses. I don't claim that is is a complete form, but then that is also a process of learning. I decided to go ahead with what I had because the subject-matter synthesised so well with the form, and because of the enormous relevance of the subject matter. Arun Khopkar: Can you tell us specifically what elements in Bhavni Bhavai are directly from the Bhavai? You mentioned the story. What about the music the other various elements? KM: I think the film is a mixture of two msyor forms. The first is the kathakar (storyteller) form, the second the Bhavai form. The basic steps of the dance, the notations of the music, the freedom of moving from dramatic to satirical and caricatural acting, the fact that you can actually change roles, all the^e are Bhavai forms. Then there are things that are 54 October-December 1983