‘The Killing of Meghnad’: Ashish Avikunthak’s epistemic reinvention of Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s epic
The aesthetic politics of literary adaptations have always posed a fundamental challenge for cinema, one that even the most celebrated filmmakers have grappled with throughout the seventh art’s relatively young history.
It’s a problem that violently manifests itself especially when one attempts to transplant canonical literature like Valmiki’s Ramayana onto the screen, thereby severing the narrative frameworks required to house an epic of such magnitude in search of alternate forms of expressions that are capable of reverberating just as forcefully.
In the case of the Ramayana, therefore, it’s not surprising that the majority of these attempts have been largely unsuccessful in an artistic sense, since they have either veered off into animated projects primarily designed for children or sensationalised TV dramas that neatly fit into manufactured categorisations. Of course, such unidimensional versions of the epic that’s teeming with seemingly infinite multiplicities have only helped not only fringe fascist groups but the Ideological State Apparatus as a whole to exploit and weaponise an idealised image of Ram as highly effective agitprop.
The Killing of Meghnad (Meghnad Badh Kavya), the latest film from Ashish Avikunthak – a filmmaker who has consistently rallied against the terrifyingly rapid appropriation of Hinduism by conservative political parties in India, is a giant leap in the other direction, the right direction. A transmutation of sorts, Avikunthak uses Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s already subversive eponymous poem to reimagine a minor section of the Ramayana, one that’s almost always glossed over because it doesn’t cater to the grand narratives of heroism and valour, and in fact, is an antithesis to the political messaging that is codified in most modern interpretations.
For those who are familiar with Avikunthak’s endlessly enigmatic oeuvre, this is, of course, not the first time the filmmaker has handled such a transmutation. In fact, in an interview, he said, “Meghnad Badh Kavya is the second work in what has gradually taken shape as my trilogy engaging with religious texts through contemporary cinematic language. The first film in this trajectory was Katho Upanishad,” referring to his 2011 metaphysical contextualization of the source text, which does highlight a particularly interesting cinematic genealogy.
The Killing of Meghnad is a starkly metaphysical ablation of an incredibly dramatic moment – not only in Dutt’s poem but also other projects based on it, like Goutam Halder’s famous stage performance – where the entire structural integrity of the traditional mores of Hindu masculinity and moralism that is intrinsically linked to the Ramayana comes crashing down. Dutt used a hybrid poetic form that owes as much to Milton as it does to other pioneers of Bengali literature to be able to lay bare the stratified ambiguities, and Avikunthak goes one step further.
Finessing the brand of infra-realist cinema that he has worked on for decades now – most brilliantly in The Glossary of Non-Human Love, perhaps there is no other work that is as visually stunning as The Killing of Meghnad in his filmography. Set against the breathtaking landscapes of the Spiti Valley, Ladakh, the salt marshes of Kutch and Jim Corbett National Park, there is a jarring contrast between the scope of the ancient world these gods and goddesses inhabit, the profundity of the words that they are vessels for, and the post-Bressonian stolidity that is woven into the core of the performances, all facilitated by the infra-realism that Avikunthak has transformed into something almost impossibly singular.
“Infra‑realism, as I envision it, produces a deliberate emotive austerity through which the philosophical weight of the text can be felt directly in the cinematic form. This approach stands in conscious contrast to the history of the Indian mythological genre,” Avikunthak notes, which makes it all the more exciting to view The Killing of Meghnad as the second part of a trilogy undertaken by the filmmaker to bring about a much-needed renaissance in the way Indian directors approach some of the foundational mythologies in literary traditions, much like Dutt’s epic itself had a seminal impact on the Bengal Renaissance.
By reimagining the poem’s explosive force in an infra-realist framework and giving shape to the philosophical and metafictional ruptures, evident in actor Sagnik Mukherjee’s appearance as Rama as well as Michael Madhusudan Dutt himself, Avikunthak creates a narrative void of sorts and invites the audience in. The result is a compelling and rigorous cinematic experience that is both refreshingly innovative and exigent for the evolution of this vitally important section of Indian cinema that can be traced back to its very conception.
However, I also see The Killing of Meghnad as a continuation of the urgent political statement that Avikunthak made with 2024’s Devastated (Vidhvastha), which also used a core religious text – the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita – to launch a visceral examination of the dubious ethical foundations upon which the Hindu religious conservatives base their politics, just like the Nazi regime infamously did during the Holocaust. Dutt may have gloriously dismantled the laughably childish good-evil dichotomies within the Ramayana that scholars and religious leaders insisted upon back in the 19th century, but Avikunthak’s film finds itself in a perilous political and artistic landscape with an equally crucial anti-authoritarianist role, if not more so.
While Avikunthak’s status as one of the most important thinkers of the global cinematic avant-garde was already cemented, it is now unimpeachable with The Killing of Meghnad.
