Seedling of the Caste: Subject-Object Ideologue of Shyam Benegal’s Ankur

Shyam Benegal’s Ankur (The seedling, 1974) stands as one of the foundational works of Indian parallel cinema, inaugurating a new cinematic realism that sought to represent rural India with honesty and moral complexity. Set in a small Telangana village, the film tells the story of Lakshmi, a poor Dalit woman married to Kishtayya, a deaf mute potter whose poverty and humiliation compel him to flee the village after stealing toddy, left alone, Lakshmi works as a maid in the house of the village landlord. The household soon welcomes Surya, the landlord’s educated son and recently returned from the city with his new wife. When his wife goes back home due to illness, Surya becomes increasingly drawn to Lakshmi’s presence and labour. What begins as apparent kindness turns into sexual exploitation masked as affection. Lakshmi becomes pregnant and while Surya’s desire turns to guilt and denial, Lakshmi faces the crushing weight of social ostracism. Her caste and class leave her with no resource of justice. The film ends not with redemption but with rebellion; a village boy hurls a stone at Sury’s window- a symbolic gesture of defiance and awakening.

Caste, Labor, and Extraction

Benegal's choice of setting and subject matter was deliberate. In the early 1970’s, India was grappling with the failure of land reforms and the persistence of feudal caste relations, Ankur reflects this reality, presenting the village not as a pastoral idyll but as a space where modernity, feudalism, and patriarchy coexist uneasily. The story becomes an allegory for postcolonial India where independence had changed political structures but left social hierarchies largely intact.

At its core, Ankur is not just about one woman’s suffering, it is about the everyday functioning of caste and power. Laksmi’s body and labour become metaphors for the rural economy itself; both are sites of extraction and control. She cooks, cleans, and nurtures, her work sustaining the comfort of those who exploit her. Benegal refuses to romanticise her resilience; instead he explores how compassion itself becomes a mechanism of oppression. When Surya offers her sympathy, it is never divorced from the entitlement of his caste and class position. Laksmi’s oppression is intersectional. Her gender renders her sexually vulnerable; her caste renders her socially disposable. Her silence though often read as submission is also a mode of survival. Benegal's camera lingers on her gestures drawing water, sweeping sitting by the hearth transforming domestic acts into political commentary. Through these unspoken moments, the film foregrounds how inequality is reproduced through routine not violence alone.

The Fragility of Benevolence

Surya’s character on the other hand embodies the contradictions of postcolonial masculinity, educated and urbanised, he represents the new India - modern, rational yet deeply rooted in feudal privilege derived from caste location and positionality. His moral crisis after Lakshmi's pregnancy is not born of empathy but of fear, fear of social exposure and the erosion of his superiority. His wife's absence and Lakshmi's presence only expose the fragility of the moral codes that structure caste relations.

The landlord's family provides the ideological scaffolding that legitimises this exploitation. Their "benevolence" towards lower caste labourers mirror what Ambedkar called the 'graded inequality’ of caste society, where every act of generosity maintains hierarchy rather than dismantling it. When Lakshmi is punished for defiance, the violence feels ordinary because the social order depends on its normalisation.

The Politics of Realism and Authorship

We might also situate the film within the politics of authorship by asking how Benegal’s position as an upper-caste, upper-class Saraswat Brahmin from Hyderabad shapes both his authority to narrate this social world and the constraints it places on him, opening up a wider debate about whether filmmakers can critically represent structures of power they themselves inhabit, and how such insider critiques are always marked by their own limits and blind spots. The film however, departing from the melodramatic excess of mainstream Hindi cinema, employed realistic aesthetics - natural lighting, on location shooting, non professional actors, and minimal background music to evoke a sense of authenticity. The absence of spectacle forces the viewer to engage with the politics of space and silence. The camera often frames lakshmi in confined spaces; kitchen, courtyards, fields mirroring her social entrapment. When Surya appears, the camera angle subtly elevates his position, visually encoding hierarchy without overt dramatisation. The soundscape of Ankur, the clinking of utensils, the rustle of crops, the call of birds heightens realism while symbolizing the quiet persistence of life beneath oppression. The rural landscape functions as both backdrop and metaphor, its fertility contrast with the barrenness of justice, its beauty concealing deep rooted inequalities. Benegal's realism is not neutral, it is a moral intervention. By resisting melodrama, he denies the audience the comfort of emotional catharsis. There is no heroic savour, no climactic justice, only the slow recognition that inequality is structural, not incidental. The film restrains and forces viewers to confront complicity, the oppression we witness is not exceptional but ordinary.

The Germination of Resistance

The title, Ankur (literally “seedling”), carries profound symbolic weight. On one level, it refers to fertility and continuity – the seed of life growing in Laksmi’s womb. Yet more deeply, it signifies the germination of resistance. The final act of the village boy throwing a stone at Surya's window breaks the film’s quiet rhythm. That single sound of shattering glass becomes a metaphor for social awakening. The child, an observer until now becomes an inheritor of rebellion. The seedling thus becomes both literal and political; it hints that oppression inevitably sows the seeds of revolt. Benegal does not offer closure because the story is far from over. The structures that silence Lakshmi continue to shape India's villages even decades later. Yet the gesture of defiance, small, fragile but undeniable, suggests that resistance begins with the recognition of caste.

"Benegal transforms the intimate into the ideological; the kitchen, the field and the bedroom into battlegrounds of power. His realism is not about showing life as it is but revealing the forces that make it so."

Ankur endures because it redefines what political cinema can be. Without slogans or speeches, it exposes how caste and gender hierarchies structure desire, labour and morality. Through Lakshmi's story, Benegal transforms the intimate into the ideological; the kitchen, the field and the bedroom into battlegrounds of power. His realism is not about showing life as it is but revealing the forces that make it so. In its quiet devastating honesty, Ankur remains not just a film about rural India but a meditation on how injustice sustains itself under the guise of order. The final image, a shattered window, a startled oppressor, reminds us that every social hierarchy carries within it the possibility of its undoing. The seed has been sown.

References:

“About Shyam Benegal.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Shyam-Benegal.
Ankur: The Seedling (1974). letterboxd.com, https://letterboxd.com/film/ankur-the-seedling/. Accessed 5 Dec. 2025.