Aruna Vasudev: Icon. Scholar. Mentor. Friend.

Vasudev, “the mother of Asian cinema’’, brought a much-needed global focus to films of the East by building institutions and supporting future leaders

It was impossible not to be struck by Aruna Vasudev. Her gravelly yet soft voice, no-nonsense demeanour, and air of one who felt at home at all the highest tables in the land was a combination both alluring and intimidating to the young journalist I was when I first encountered her.

Aruna’s incredible journey is made all the more admirable by the fact that she was a woman born in 1936 when professional pursuits by women were rarely encouraged and hurdles were even more numerous than today.

This was the late 1990s. Aruna was already the iconic founder-editor of Cinemaya, a magazine she launched in 1988 to focus on Asian cinema at a time when the worldwide English language media gave primacy to the cinema of the West, and the biggest international festivals were West-centric. We were meeting at an auditorium in Delhi, the venue of Cinefan: Festival of Asian Cinema that she founded in 1999. I don’t remember our exact conversation, but I do recall noticing, as I watched her around people that day, that she could be stern or business-like in one moment, warm and friendly the very next.  

The 1990s were when the Union government took the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) away from Delhi. Cinefan filled a cultural void in the city. It was here that I first dipped my toes into world cinema. Here, I discovered, in particular, the beauty of Iranian films. I interacted with Aruna at each edition. Not long after that first Cinefan, she surprised me by inviting me home for a party. Again, I don’t remember much about that gathering, except that I was awe-struck by the many heavyweights in whose midst I found myself, and that Astad Deboo spontaneously danced for us that evening in Aruna’s drawing room.  

Since her passing on September 5 at the age of 87, while chatting with some of Aruna’s close associates, I’ve been intrigued by the similarities between my earliest memory of her and theirs. 

Bina Paul was interning with IFFI in Delhi during her final year of film school in the early 1980s when she met Aruna. Now a National Award-winning film editor, Bina says: “Because I was a film student, Aruna said ‘come home’. She was warm-hearted and gregarious. So, I went home.” It was an evening party, “and the who’s who of cinema was there. I can’t remember who all, but my jaw dropped,” the veteran recalls. “This was how her house was – always full of people, always warm, there was cooking, and everybody, her accountant, her cook, everybody was part of the family.”  

Between Cinemaya and Cinefan, in 1990, Aruna founded the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC), a worldwide organisation aimed at promoting Asian films and filmmakers. In 1992, she also set up the India chapter of FIPRESCI, the International Federation of Film Critics, with the film scholar Chidananda Dasgupta.  

Through the nearly 30 years that Bina ran the International Film Festival of Kerala, Aruna was generous with her help and guidance. “Aruna carried her achievements lightly,” Bina says. “We would chat and joke. There was never a sense that she was on a pedestal. She was great fun, but she was also very inspiring.”  

Aruna’s long-time associate Indu Shrikent, Cinemaya’s deputy editor, reminisces about their first trip together abroad, for a NETPAC conference in Rotterdam. “She was keen that one should know everyone she knew,” Indu says. “All the Cinemaya contributors were there. It was my first exposure. By the time I left that place, Aruna had made sure I met everybody and got to know them well.” 

This then was Aruna Vasudev: pioneering promoter of Asian cinema, builder of institutions, film scholar, critic, author, mentor, and friend.  

In Supriya Suri’s 2021 documentary Aruna Vasudev: Mother of Asian Cinema, Aruna explained that her primary aim with Cinemaya was to break the monopoly of Westerners writing in English on Asian films. She got local people to write about their own cinemas, “because the interpretation was very different to the articles written by Europeans,” she said.

The Dadasaheb Phalke Award-winning Malayalam director Adoor Gopalakrishnan added: “This was a magazine that for the first time ever brought the cinema of the whole of Asia into our attention by writing about them. Otherwise, the only way to know about Asian cinema was to be discovered by the West at some festival in Europe.” 

Aruna’s incredible journey is made all the more admirable by the fact that she was a woman born in 1936 when professional pursuits by women were rarely encouraged and hurdles were even more numerous than today. She took up film studies in New York when her father was on a United Nations posting in the US. She travelled to France in 1968 where she earned a PhD in cinema and censorship from the University of Paris by the 1970s.

Through those eventful years, she made documentaries and, she told Rajiv Mehrotra in an interview about two decades back, she apprenticed with the legendary filmmakers Alain Resnais and Claude Chabrol. She was briefly married to a Swedish gentleman, but they parted ways. She later married the diplomat Sunil Roy and is survived by their daughter, Yamini Roy.

Throughout her life, Aruna was a prolific writer and editor of books and articles on cinema. Both Cinemaya and Cinefan closed down after they were taken over by an entrepreneur. Latika Padgaonkar, who was on Cinemaya’s founding team, believes these developments “affected her deeply”, but she stayed active till the end.

Aruna was the recipient of many national and international awards. Those who knew her would tell you that she would count among her highest honours these words by Latika: “Aruna’s generosity, open-heartedness and hospitality are all legendary. She always wanted to have a circle of friends, many of them very close. She not only bonded emotionally but also made sure to meet often. People of every kind would gather in her house, and she kept a hold on these friends.”

When Aruna passed away, she was writing a book on the Kathak dancer Uma Sharma. “The mother of Asian cinema”, as she was known, left us just the way she would have liked to, working till the very end.

Anna MM Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. You can reach her on Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad and Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial.