Films: Behind the Scenes with Dev Benegal
[Left] Dev Benegal
In An Arrested Moment, Dev Benegal gives us fascinating glimpses of director James Ivory, known for the famed Merchant-Ivory films. But the focus in Benegal’s documentary is more on James Ivory as an art collector. Benegal, a filmmaker in his own right, also shares a few glimpses of his late uncle, the acclaimed film director Shyam Benegal.
The film An Arrested Moment begins with 96-year-old James Ivory facing us, trying to figure out why. Why his attachment to India? “It had to begin with Indian miniatures,” he tells the unseen Dev Benegal. “I don’t know . . . something just clicked. Like falling in love. You don’t know. You either are or you aren’t. It’s good it did because it changed my whole life, didn’t it?”
Dev Benegal’s documentary on James Ivory was screened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in conjunction with the Ink and Ivory exhibit, a selection of South Asian drawings and photographs from the late sixteenth to the twentieth century chosen by Ivory. Recalling a visit to a San Francisco dealer as a young man in search of a Cavaletto etching, Ivory says he was visually waylaid by a display of Indian miniatures another collector had just left behind.
“There was something about the Indian paintings that excited me, that excited my eye.”
Benegal’s respect for Ivory, whom he praised in a talk at the film’s reception at the Met as “a man marinated in art,” is a world apart from his cynical depiction of an Indian civil servant in English, August (1994). The civil servant Agastya Sen, played by Rahul Bose, disrespects an elder as a cross between “Marcus Aurelius and Reader’s Digest.” Benegal, now 64, calls English, August, his directorial debut, an “autocritique” of his post-colonial generation of educated city youths, themselves the unwitting oppressors of poor villagers in places like Madna, the film’s imaginary location in South India.
He has directed two other feature films, Split Wide Open (1999) and Road, Movie (2009). “I first became aware of Ivory, and Merchant-Ivory, when I began working for Film-Valas in Bombay, run by Jennifer Kendal and her husband, Shashi Kapoor. Kendal’s parents had a theater company that toured India doing Shakespeare. Shakespeare Wallah, the film made by Merchant-Ivory, was inspired by their life. I became aware of Ivory as a collector only much later.”
[Right] Maharaja Raj Singh (Ink and Ivory exhibit)
Benegal sought in Arrested Moment to delve into what makes Ivory the man he is: “His way of looking at people and observing life. The kind of compassion he brings to the characters he portrays on the screen. The relationships between people. The characters we see in Ivory’s miniatures intersect with the natural world in wordless, open-ended narratives. And especially, the relationships between men.” The director points to Ivory’s newfound fandom in the gay community. His Oscar-winning screenplay for Call Me by Your Name has resulted in his being stopped in the street by young gays, marginally or not at all familiar with Merchant-Ivory classics like Howards End.
Benegal enjoyed a professional relationship with Ismail Merchant, Ivory’s life partner. “There was a possibility at one point that he would produce Road, Movie. But he died, unfortunately, so it didn’t happen,” Benegal says, referring to Merchant’s unexpected death following surgery in 2005.
The Met approached Benegal with the request that he do a film on Ivory’s miniatures for Ink and Ivory. The director brings to An Arrested Moment an art background. His father, Som Benegal, opened one of the earliest art galleries in Delhi, and he remembers several Indian miniatures on the walls of his home. The period of the miniatures, following the Mughal emperor Babur’s invasion of India in the sixteenth century, was itself a kind of arrested moment in Indian history. The young emperor from Kabul was a cultural freethinker.
In the documentary, Ivory describes it this way: “You had two kinds of subject matter with the Indian paintings. You had pictures which were largely of a devotional nature, which were mainly Hindu, and you had pictures that were mainly portraits and scenes and events in and around the Mughals. Religion didn’t matter very much. It was about who was the better painter. It was wonderful the way all the different subjects of the Mughal emperor got together and created art.”
Benegal’s most extensive documentary work prior to Arrested Moment were the four years he worked as Shyam Benegal’s First Assistant Director on his acclaimed documentary on Satyajit Ray. His work included “trying to source all the original film negatives, marking the selections with threads—what we called ‘threading’ back then—making duplicate negatives of the excerpts,” and collaborating with Ray’s cinematographer, Subrata Mitra.
He came away with strong directorial advice from the legendary filmmaker, who happened to be his uncle: “When you direct, you should have two things in mind: one, you should look for details; two, your work should ring true.” And thirdly: “It should have density.”
[Left] James Ivory
Shyam Benegal died on December 23, 2025. “One of the greatest things about working with him was that there was absolutely no hierarchy,” Benegal says. “It was different from the industrial way of making films you now see. What set him apart was his breadth of knowledge. There was almost no subject he did not have a deep insight into and a perspective which was original. And this spanned across cultures and civilizations. It was astonishing. He was truly a Renaissance man. And Nehruvian to the core. He encouraged us to work on every aspect of filmmaking. Working with him was being in a theater company. Except, we were making a film.”
Benegal’s attraction to Ivory is not surprising. Older mentors, like animator Ram Mohan and Mitra, have dotted his career. As a young boy, his father, with his “encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood cinema,” would take him to curated screenings in Bombay of the great Hollywood directors of that era, like John Ford. “It was like being in a master class at an early age.”
Benegal cites a connection between his father and Ivory dating back to a late-1950s New Year’s Eve party in Delhi, at the home of architect Cyrus Jhabvala, whose wife, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, was later to become Merchant-Ivory’s celebrated screenwriter. Som Benegal was the “martini mixer” at that party, and Ivory a young guest. “I don’t know how well they knew each other. I think Ivory asked my father to design the titles for one of his films. My father was a very good graphic designer.”
His own film’s title dates back to a moment during the shoot. “At one point, Ivory was looking at one of the miniatures and used the term ‘an arrested moment,’” Benegal recalls. “It struck me then that the whole film was about the arrested moments in these miniatures. The idea was that by arresting that moment we could interpret it in a way that allows for an alternate perspective to emerge, allowing us to engage with history in a different way, to bring the past into the present.”
Robert Hirschfield, a freelance writer based in New York, has written for Outlook India, Sojourners, The Jerusalem Report, and The Writer, among other publications.
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