I normally avoid Bollywood cinema, but at Tehelka’s persuasion I watched Black. Painterly frames apart, it is the first film I have seen that blocks out insulting pity for the disabled character. I should know. I am Satish Gujral

Shades of Empathy: Rani Mukherji in Black; (below) Exploring the Sound of Silence: Gujral

Shahrukh Khan came to the opening of my show and after a while he said he had to hurry to another opening — of Black. The irony did not strike me then — he had come to see my show and was on his way to see a film based on the story of a girl who was blind, deaf and dumb. I normally try to avoid such films, for I don’t want to look into the mirror. I remember how my wife Kiran almost forced me to see the Hollywood film Children Of A Lesser God in 1986, which had a similar story. This time, I was curious and apprehensive at the same time.

Finally, I decided to see it. It turned out to be very different. It is very difficult to present despair without being sentimental. This was the first time I saw a film that shocks you and yet avoids the slightest bit of sentimentality. You do not feel pity for the character (Michelle McNally, played by Rani Mukherji). Pity is a form of insult. Having lived a similar life I know how the victim feels and am also aware of the attitude of society to such people.

To pick up such a theme shows great courage on the part of the director. Black shows how a human being can rise to great heights: the more dismal it presents the heroine’s state, the more admiration it invokes. I usually don’t see Hindi films, but Black need not be called one. No language was needed to understand it. I did not ask Kiran to translate the scenes because I could understand everything from the visual. The film has a universal appeal. There is nothing in it that pinpoints to a particular place or location.

After seeing the film, I realised that my problems had been small compared to the suffering of Michelle’s character. I had met Helen Keller when she came to India in 1960, and have read her autobiography. But Black seemed more effective than the autobiography. The director has been able to avoid the pitfalls of Hindi cinema, which depends on song and dance and vulgarity.

So powerful is the photography that every frame looks like a painting. The moment when Amitabh Bachchan kisses Rani Mukherji is etched in my mind. It reminds me that no matter how high you rise in life, you are not free from the desire for love. Michelle’s character achieves so much, yet she hungers for love. The psychology of an individual whose life lacks all sound is strange. Sound gives you a sort of evidence of your being, your existence. Without it sometimes you doubt your own existence. Of course, our rishis used to go to meditate in places where external sound was minimal; it helped them listen to their inner voice. But a chosen silence is different from enforced silence.

The moment when Bachchan kisses Rani Mukherji is etched in my mind. It reminds me that no matter how high you rise in life, you are not free from the desire for love. Rani’s character achieves so much, yet she hungers for love

Till the age of 10, I could hear. Six years ago, I had an ear implant. Now some sound has come back into my life, though I still cannot decipher human voices. Yet, it has affected my other senses. All my life I painted the darker shades — so much so that they could be described as black and white. When I partially recovered my hearing, I discovered so many shades between the two colours.

When you can’t see, objects around you take on a different character. Not just that, it also affects your hearing. So intermingled are these faculties that their lack could drive one individual insane and turn another into a genius. I think Michelle’s character turns into a genius. Overcoming extreme odds, to my mind, qualifies an individual as a genius. Her character suffers from such extremes that there’s nothing to link her with the outside world but her quality of genius.

I do not find anything unusual in her family’s response to her situation. When I lost my sense of hearing my father, otherwise modernz in his outlook, began to accept almost every chance of treatment. When I look back now, many of those treatments seem very stupid, and some can be called nothing but torture. When there’s no hope you clutch at straws.

In Black, Michelle’s father seems to succumb easily to the notion that she is a lost case. Looking at her mother’s face I was reminded of what I wrote in my autobiography — it is easy to bear one’s own suffering than the suffering of your child. I thought of the suffering I had caused my mother. The actress who plays Michelle’s mother in the film has shown such mastery that there is no sentimentality in the way she portrays the character.

I think the director deliberately chose an upper middle-class setting for Black to show that so-called educated people can also behave like the father who for a long time fails to accept the reality of his daughter. One can perhaps understand a poor man — unable to feed his children — thinking that a disabled child is a burden.

Five centuries ago, in Europe, deaf people were stoned – it was thought that Satan resided in them because they could not hear the gospel. It was the missionaries who worked upon the idea of lip reading and sign language.

The attitude of present-day society and media in India is not much better than that of Europe 500 years ago. In India, the first school for deaf and dumb children was not started by an Indian, but by Lady Novacy, who was the daughter of the then Viceroy Lord Linlithgow. I went to the school at the age of 10. The school still exists near the Feroze Shah Kotla grounds, in Delhi.

I think this film will help society become more aware of the sentiments of individuals like Michelle McNally than any socially relevant film on the subject. Once, agitated by an insensitive news report, I wrote in a national newspaper that it was only to be expected in our culture. Look at our epics — Krishna’s sermon to Arjuna on the battlefield obscures the fact that the Kaurava king Dhritarashtra had been deprived of the throne because of his blindness. Remember how Draupadi mocks Duryodhana when he walks into a mirror? What else can be expected of a blind man’s son, she remarks. We must remember this caused a war.

Seeing Amitabh in Black has strengthened my conviction that the director is solely responsible for a film’s quality. I particularly liked the close shots where you can feel the tension coming out of the pores of Amitabh’s face.

The films we send to the Oscars are laughed at and rejected. But I cannot think of a single negative point in Black. Every frame is chiselled with craftsmanship. I believe the director is only about 40, and has made another film on a similar subject before Black. It is commendable that he should choose such a dismal subject again despite its high chance of failure.

As told to Chitra Padmanabhan