After paying his dues to the state Films Division with a few nonfiction shorts, Kaul was granted money for a feature. Released in 1970 when he was twenty-five years old, Uski roti (“His Bread”) is a freakishly sophisticated debut—and a landmark of Indian cinema. The script is based on a Hindi short story by Mohan Rakesh, though Kaul plays fast and loose with the source material, much to the movie’s benefit. The original sticks close to Balo, a rural Punjabi housewife who from morning to evening waits by the highway to hand over dinner to her husband, bus driver Succha Singh. Kaul places this pen portrait, now richly textured and shaded, against a wider canvas, sketching in relatives and neighbors, while keeping one eye on Succha’s visits to nearby towns.

The film gathers its power from a central formal constraint. From start to end, the compositions are strikingly flat, with space compressed by long lenses and perspectival lines cut off by the frame. Women tend to be seen in cramped close-ups, lost in inner struggles, while men perform some or other action with blank intent. In a marvelous shot, Succha and another man roll across an open field, locked in a messy brawl. They are observed from a distance, as if by a bystander, their legs slowly rising and falling, dry leaves cracking underneath—the whole motion charged with a strange intimacy. In moments like this, the film approximates the effects of Mughal miniature painting, which Kaul cited as an influence. In the brilliant essay “Seen from Nowhere,” he observes that miniatures, like those in Emperor Akbar’s graphic biography, “abstract the physical to the extent where it may both anchor the viewer’s sensuous attention as well as absorb the so-called distortions, enabling him to enter into the picture.”

From the close-ups of hands to its use of offscreen sound, Uski roti takes a lot from Bresson. Kaul’s style of editing is his own, however. His films abandon chronology, moving backward and forward in time, often revisiting the same event from different perspectives. (“All my life I have tried different ways to do away with a linear narrative,” he told Vajpeyi.) They are more fluid than Bressonian constructions, in which meaning is made through the repetition and counterpoint of discrete images. Shooting out of sequence, with little regard for the script, Kaul assembled—rather, discovered—his stories on the editing table, piecing together extended, apparently self-contained sequences, each governed by an internal logic of its own. The approach owes something to Hindustani music, about which Kaul made two documentaries. “Meaning in dhrupad seems to reside in the specificity and clarity of every individual note,” the critic Mantra Mukim astutely writes. “This is what prompts Kaul to also see cinematic meaning as a continuous process, which ends and is reborn with every scene.”

This idea is well illustrated by a sequence at the half-hour mark. It begins with an exchange between Balo and a passing villager, who alludes to Succha’s notoriety in the next town, without elaborating further. As he moves away, Balo is seen frontally, leaning against a tree trunk, open fields visible in the background. Kaul cuts to the man, now walking between the fields, away from the camera, slowly, hardly moving it seems. Meanwhile, the pistons of a train are heard gathering speed. When we return to Balo, she is seen again in close-up, this time from a slight angle, with her eyes downcast, the very image of disquiet. Kaul cuts back to the reverse angle as the engine grows louder, and presently compartments cross the frame, barely visible on the horizon through mist. The slow steps, the mounting engine, the train passing: these have taken on the aspect of Balo’s racing thoughts, which have nowhere to go. The sequence as a whole does not inflect the story or develop character in a specific way. It could have been placed elsewhere. The crisis passes and Balo returns to waiting.

Kaul’s next two films are also about women trapped in relationships with absent men, forming a sort of trilogy. Both are based on literary texts. One Day in the Rainy Season (1971) is adapted from a historical play, again by Rakesh, inspired by the life of Kalidas, the fifth-century poet and dramatist who towers over Sanskrit literature. In the first of three acts, Kalidas is offered the position of court poet at Ujjain, a distant royal seat. His muse, Mallika, convinces him to accept, knowing it will separate them. Over the next two acts, which are spaced years apart, she falls deeper and deeper into a pit of listlessness, growing distant from her mother, letting their house go to pieces, rejecting suitors—and pleasure of any kind. What explains her behavior? One clue is to be found in the way she pores over Kalidas’s new epics, while ignoring the gifts he sends back. Her own literary talent stifled, Mallika is living through his creations, an aspiration that has gotten mixed up with love.

This time around Kaul sticks close to the source material, with its archaic, Sanskritized language, which the actors deliver in a haunting monotone. The story plays out as a chamber drama set in a drab hut, where Mallika, her mother, and a few neighbors deliver grave, increasingly desperate monologues. Most shots are close-ups, though not always on the person talking. A key image, drawn from the figures in ancient Buddhist cave paintings at Ajanta and Ellora, is a double portrait: people seen side by side, sometimes with minimal lighting, as if swimming in blackness. This composition is most poignant when Mallika stands beside Kalidas, her bursting with emotion, him steely calm. “I know your leaving will fill my inner world with emptiness,” she tells him, both looking just offscreen. “Yet I do not fool myself. I tell you from the heart, you must go.”

The camera at last leaves the hut in a gorgeous closing sequence, which recalls the final minutes of Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star. Kalidas has returned to Mallika, abandoning his governor’s post in Kashmir. “Our ties cannot be broken so easily,” he says, as if they had not broken her. “You once said we were very alike . . . In these past years, I have not let that closeness grow any less.” These words are part of a long, affecting speech about art and desire. As it’s heard over the soundtrack, Kaul cuts to a series of static shots of the surrounding mountains, which are caressed by monsoon clouds. Here the title’s meaning reveals itself. In Sanskrit aesthetics, the two rasas, or essences, of the monsoon are vipralambha shringara and sambhoga shringara—the erotic thwarted and the erotic fulfilled.

Kaul traded monochrome for color with Duvidha (“The Dilemma,” 1973), based on a Rajasthani folktale recorded by the author and folklorist Vijay Daan Deta. The plot is as simple as it is tart. A child bride is abandoned on their marriage day by her husband—a baniya, or merchant. “Perhaps you do not know,” he tells her. “But such an auspicious time for trading will not return for seven years,” which is how long he plans to be away on business. Meanwhile, a spirit, referred to simply as a bhoot, or ghost, takes the baniya’s spitting form and comes to live with his wife, it seems in happy matrimony. Matters come to a head when she becomes pregnant, news of which reaches the miser, who returns to confront his double. Kaul commits wholly to the folktale’s logic, without straying into exoticism, which cannot be said of the story’s Bollywood remake, Paheli (“The Riddle,” 2005).

Satyajit Ray was foul on Duvidha when Films Division released it. In “Four and a Quarter,” an essay on contemporary Hindi directors, he laid into the film’s experiments, from the patterned colors to the stylized gestures, concluding that “Kaul’s impatience with conventional narrative leads him to a visual style replete with clichés of another sort.” The Bengali master, who took his cue from neorealism, was appalled by Kaul’s distaste for “strong situations” and “full-blooded characters,” which revealed a “plain lack of interest in human beings.”

As this essay has hopefully shown, Ray was quite hopelessly wrong in his assessment. Kaul’s quiet leads might not resemble the “full-blooded” bourgeois heroines of Charulata and The Big City, or for that matter the female saints of Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star and Subarnarekha. Yet they retain a sense of dignity under trying situations, and bring grace to routine, apparently mindless tasks—cooking, eating, walking, resting, and above all, waiting. More mysteriously, they possess a sense of inwardness, which the director does not pry on, affording them a privacy usually denied to women in Hindu society. That restraint is one lasting feature of Kaul’s legacy. Another is the sensory world he evoked, which in turn enriches our own.

The story of his reception is less consoling. A decade after his death, Kaul remains largely unknown outside art-house circles in India, where he was revered by artists and left a mark on younger directors as different as Amit Dutta and Gurvinder Singh. None of his films were widely released. Retrospectives have been few and far between, and mostly held abroad, where some critics found him “impenetrable” and “incoherent” (both adjectives come from the New York Times). In Uncloven Space, he speaks, longingly, of Hindustani classical concerts, where the audience notices each shift within the scale. “The greatest challenge is to create an audience who can see it in this way,” he says. “Just like people would do in a music concert, they might exclaim, ‘Wah! What a pan!’”