In Search of Famine & Revolution: Akaler Sandhane & Rang de Basanti

 

1980, West Bengal: A director and his crew go to a village to shoot a film on the great Bengal Famine of 1943. During their stay in the village for a month at a dilapidated house that was formerly a zamindar’s palace, they discover that there is actually no need to go in ‘search’ of famine – it is an ever present realty in the villages of Bengal.

2006, New Delhi: A bunch of fun-loving, easy-going college kids wake up to a new responsibility of fighting against the corruption that plagues their nation, while shooting a documentary on the Terrorist Movement of the 1920s/early 30s in India. This they do to vindicate the life and ideals of a patriotic pilot friend who loses his life needlessly in a plane crash, but is falsely charged of flying irresponsibly after his death.

The first film, Akaler Sandhane (‘In Search of Famine’), is considered by many the best film of Mrinal Sen, one of the three gurus of Bengali cinema, who also pioneered the ‘New Wave’ cinema in India with his Bhuvan Shome (1967); the second film, Rang de Basanti (that takes its name from a patriotic song), by new-age Hindi film director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, is a recent classic which would never have seen the light of day but for the faith shown in it by actor/producer Aamir Khan, a veritable game-changer of Bollywood.

Though 26 years apart, and in different languages, Akader Sandhane & Rang de Basanti have a lot in common – both are films within films; both examine the relationship between past and present; both start off as projects motivated principally by the idealistic director’s vision, but end up transforming the actors; and both take a landmark event of British India for investigation and end up showing that, in the case of India at least, “history repeats itself”!

Rang de Basanti: A grandfather’s diary; Technicolor & Sepia tone

In this film, it is actually a British girl, Sue McKinley, who indirectly inspires her cast. It is she who comes to India to direct the documentary and changes their bindaas attitude while filming the story of Bhagat Singh and his revolutionary friends. She is herself drawn to the story via the personal diary of her grandfather, James McKinley, who, as a Jailor in British India, had seen some of them from close quarters. The auditions that her contact in Delhi, Sonia, arranges for her, are a mess – but she eventually finds her characters in Sonia and her band of close friends.

Class-wise, they are a mixed group: son of a corrupt businessman, Karan (Siddharth) is filthy rich; while Daljeet or DJ (Aamir Khan) and Aslam (Kunal Kapoor) come from more moderate backgrounds. DJ’s mother (Kiron Kher) runs a dhaba, while Aslam’s family live in a Muslim ghetto: when he is dropped off from a car by his rich friends, the car stands ill at ease in the dingy neighbourhood. We don’t get to see Sukhi (Sharman Joshi) and Sonia’s (Soha Ali Khan) families, but they seem well-off. Ajay (Madhavan), Sonia’s boyfriend (the one whose death they all vindicate), comes from a military background; sacrificing for the nation runs in his blood. As his mother (Waheeda Rehman) tells Sue: “At one point, I had to accept that he (her husband) first belonged to the nation & then to me.” She, in fact, suffers a double loss – her husband to a war and her son to a highly avoidable accident. To this core group of Sonia is later added Laxman (Atul Agnhotri), a passionate political worker who firmly believes in the ideology of his right-wing, Hindu political party. It is he who undergoes the greatest transformation in the film, after the Machiavellian side of his political mentor is exposed.

The terrorist movement comes alive in Sue’s grandfather’s diary in a very interesting and different way – seen from the perspective of a sympathetic and impressionable man, torn between being a British jailor and a devout Christian, and willing to take blame for the wrongs that the British have done in India. Hence, about the famous Kakori Train Robbery by the revolutionaries in 1925 (the principal aim of which was to loot government money to buy arms), he says:

After Kakori, nothing was ever the same again. It was a resounding slap on the face of the British government. But we had only ourselves to blame for it, because what we heard was the echo of our own gun-shots. The Jallianwalabagh massacre had turned peace-loving Indians into angry men. This was the time when Bhagat Singh relinquished his pen & took up arms instead to write his destiny.  

And while torturing Ram Prasad Bismil & Asfaqullah Khan in jail, he confesses:

Killing a man by slow degrees: I was told that with time, this task would become easy, but it didn’t happen so with me. We kept torturing them – but we could break neither Bismil nor Asfaq. It was as if they had made friendship with pain. They didn’t break; in fact, they did something that I had never seen before. When we were breaking their bodies, perhaps it was their poetry that kept their souls alive. When we failed [with physical torture], we adopted a different strategy….

Halfway through the film, there is an unusual twist, when the youngsters are suddenly forced to live out the story they enact in the documentary. The revolutionaries of the 1930s were fighting against an imperialist power and its unjust laws; the college kids in 2006 end up fighting the rank corruption of their contemporary government. 50 years after independence and 70 years after the revolutionary movement, the actual problem in India thus remains the same – the abuse of power by those who wield it. Only the actors have changed!

History is seamlessly interwoven with the narrative present in Rang de Basanti. The revolutionary chapter of India’s struggle for freedom is well-known, but even those who are not familiar with it (India’s Generation NEXT?) will have no problems understanding the film; as history does not sit heavy on it, it simply comes alive! And one of the ways in which the two time-frames are distinguished in the film is by the use of colour. The present is shot in Technicolor and the 1930s in Sepia tone (with only the Jallianwalabagh sequences in black and white). Throughout the film, there are many smooth and beautiful transitions from one to the next. But after Ajay’s death, the past and present coalesce: the group’s present becomes immanent with their characters’ past, to the point that they speak both as themselves and as the characters they enact.

Where Mehra scores: parallels, characterization & music

The sepia-tinted story of Bhagat Singh is something that every Indian (at least of my generation) knows by heart. Mehra does a very intelligent re-telling of its highlights, sans the controversial bits involving Gandhi i.e. – about Gandhi’s withdrawal of the Non-cooperation movement in 1922, post Chauri Chaura, as one of the main reasons for renewed terrorist activity in the 1920s & the debate as to whether or not he pleaded Bhagat’s Singh’s case enough before the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, in 1931. (This controversial part is bravely featured in Rajkumar Santoshi’s The Legend of Bhagat Singh – with Ajay Devgan in the lead role – the best among the spate of films to come out on the Punjabi martyr in 2002).

Mehra does not follow the beaten track; instead he creates two stories. And it is in the ingenious parallels that he draws between them – between the past and the present, between the contemporary lives of the college kids on the one hand with the challenges faced by the revolutionaries on the other – where he really scores. The constant surprise element in the plot that this inevitably results in also successfully sustains the viewer’s interest till the end.

The parallels:

Past	Present
Jallianwalabagh Massacre, 1919 – where Gen. Dwyer’s men open fire on peaceful protestors without warning	Killing of pilot Ajay Rathod & passengers in a MiG plane – that was doomed to crash because of its faulty parts. (100 others already had over a decade, claiming the life of 30 IAF pilots). An instance of ‘high level corruption’ in which the Defence Minister, the head of a political party (Shastriji, Laxman’s mentor) & a businessman (Singhania, Karan’s father) were all complicit.
Demonstration against Simon Commission in Lahore, led by Lala Lajpat Rai, 1927.	Demonstration at India Gate, New Delhi, led by Ajay’s mother & his friends – to vindicate his reputation that was being sullied in the media.
Decision to kill SP Scott to avenge Lala’s death; ASP Saunders killed instead.	Decision to kill the Defence Minister to avenge Ajay’s death & his mother’s fatal condition.
Throwing of bomb in the Assembly “so that the deaf can hear”	Hijacking All India Radio (AIR) station & live radio chat with people across India
Hanged by the British Government, 1931	Killed by paramilitary force

Till today, Bhagat Singh remains the most famous and feted Indian revolutionary of his generation – partly because of his incredible popularity, which, at the time of his death at the tender age of 23, rivalled that of Gandhi’s. Hence, whenever there has been a biopic (the 1965 Manoj Kumar hit, Shaheed, being a case in point), the tendency has been to mainly focus on his life and heroism – while treating the others as more or less satellites. Even in Santoshi’s exhaustive and inclusive treatment of the revolutionary movement, that showed the synergy and solidarity between the Punjabi and Bengali rebels of the time, the spotlight never wavers from Bhagat Singh. Rakeysh Mehra avoids this pitfall. He chooses seven revolutionaries for his plot – Chandrasekhar Azad, Ram Prasad Bismil, Asfaqulla Khan, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Durga Bhabi & Banwarilal – and gives all of them adequate footage in the film. The friendship between Bismil and Asfaq, especially, is delineated lovingly and is of great importance in the film – as their bond rubs off on the actors who play their parts as well, culminating in Laxman’s apology to Aslam for his insulting and rude behaviour towards him all through, just because he was a Muslim. It struck a chord in post-Godhra India, with fraught Hindu-Muslim relations in many parts of the country in its wake.

The other great USP of the film is its music by A. R. Rahman. Rahman had been the composer in Santoshi’s film as well, but in Rang de Basanti, he excels himself. It is hard to choose from the 6 refreshingly new-sounding, widely different tracks, by widely different singers. MY favourite is not a song, but a poem – the famous ‘Sarfaroshi ki tamanna aaj hamare dil mein hain’ that has always been associated with the young revolutionaries and has become a part of their legend. What I like is both the picturization of the poem AND its rendition by Aamir Khan.

It is a poem of fearless patriotism – but also of blood and sacrifice, and ruthless determination. The beauty of a gifted singer’s voice (be it a Mohammad Rafi in the 60s or a Sonu Nigam in 2002) has always done justice to the romantic idealism in the lyrics; but no rendition on screen has ever captured the raw appeal of blood sacrifice that Aamir Khan manages to convey in his low sinister voice, even as the chorus join in a rising crescendo of collective oath-taking. I love the sinister quality of the whole track, so different from the melody we are used to.

Akaler Sandhane: A feeling of Déjà vu

Watching Akaler Sandhane is to be constantly visited by a feeling of déjà vu. The most obvious comparison that comes to mind is of course Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket (‘Distant Thunder’). But there are whole scenes that are reminiscent of others from Sen’s own earlier films – Baishey Sravan (‘Wedding Anniversary’, 1960), Calcutta ’71 (1972) and Chorus (1974). What is common to all of them – whether they are set in rural Bengal or Calcutta – are poverty and hunger.

It is salutary to remember here that all the three greats of Bengali cinema – Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen – have dealt with poverty (as have other distinguished directors). The subject is unavoidable for any serious filmmaker in India. But they differed substantially in their treatment, in the stories they chose to show that poverty. Many of Ray’s films are set in rural Bengal, all of which happen to be adaptations of well-known Bengali novels or short stories. In Pather Panchali (‘Song of the Little Road’, 1955) – the first and most famous of them all – Ray, following the spirit of Bibhuti Bhushan’s novel, depicts a poor Brahmin family without forgetting to portray the dignity of their lives or the beauty of the countryside that surrounds them (seen as they are through the eyes of a child). In stark contrast stands Ghatak’s ‘Partition trilogy’, which unforgettably records the trauma and destitution of East Bengali refugees in the aftermath of India’s partition. Sen was preoccupied with this theme for a long period of time: an earlier phase of passionate indictments against poverty and exploitation (in the films mentioned above and his ‘Calcutta trilogy’) later gave way to more introspective studies of lower middle-class life and morality, where poverty is either a constant threat or intrudes indirectly (Ek Din Pratidin, 1979; Kharij, 1982). Akaler Sandhane, his 19th feature, belonged to this latter phase.

There is however one direct line of continuation between Sen’s ‘Calcutta trilogy’ and Akaler Sandhane – in the character of the director, who is never named in the film. Dhritiman Chatterjee, who plays the director here, had also played the lead in Padatik (‘The Foot Soldier’, 1973, the last part of the trilogy); and his socially conscious filmmaker can be easily seen as a new avatar of the Naxal revolutionary of a decade ago. He takes his art very seriously. Hence he is furious when one of his main leads plucks her brow even after being expressly told not to do so – as she was playing Malati, a destitute village woman who is forced to turn to prostitution because of dire poverty. Debika, the actress, used to the conventions of commercial cinema, where the female lead is always supposed to look beautiful, cannot imagine standing before the camera without at least the rudiments of makeup. “Saddha, sraddha…”, the director hollers at her, when she says this. “Respect, respect… you utterly lack respect for your character. Do you realize your enormous responsibility as an artist? As Malati, you will symbolize the countless wretched women who fell from grace and died during the famine.”

3 Scenes where 1943 & 1980 collapse

Unlike Rang de Basanti, Akaler Sandhane does not use colour to distinguish the two narrative time-frames – the famine of 1943 and a film-shooting about it in 1980. Instead, it effortlessly moves back and forth in time, continually collapsing 1980 and 1943 through the shooting sequences and the lived lives of the villagers. I would like to highlight three such moments in the film.

‘Spot-the-famine’ contest

A few days into their shooting, when sudden rains stall their work, the cast gather in a room of the huge decrepit palace to chill out; and over endless cups of tea and cigarettes and planning the dinner menu, they play ‘spot-the-famine’ contest. The director shows them a series of famine photographs culled from newspaper offices, archives and personal collections, and asks them to date the exhibits. Since the 1943 famine is the most well-known, quite a few err in thinking that all the photographs are from that period – but they are not. Almost identical ones are from 1959 (when there was a Food Riot in Calcutta) and 1971 (when Bangladeshi refugees flooded West Bengal during their War of Independence). Another tricky one is that of the Buddha – as a skeletal yogi sitting in the lotus position – which is actually a photograph of a statue belonging to the Gandhara period!

Sabitri & Durga: For a handful of rice…

In the ‘film-within-a-film’, Sabitri is the wife of a destitute farmer whose family of four (including the old father and the new-born) has been starving for weeks. But the men refuse to yield their last patch of land to the moneylender, who pursues them without success. Sabitri then resorts to the only choice left to her. She spends an evening with a contractor from Calcutta, and brings home rice and kerosene oil – essentials that have long vanished from the market. Malati (whom we don’t see), who has already turned to prostitution, helps her in this. (One is reminded of Sandhya Ray’s character in Asani Sanket – selling herself to an ogre for rice). Sabitri’s encounter with the contractor is not shown: that is irrelevant. What is not is the husband’s reaction when she is back home late at night. Without her uttering a single word, he knows in his bones the story behind that handful of rice and rages in impotent fury, even as a blank-faced Sabitri quietly goes about her task of putting the rice to boil and comforting her sick infant. Unable to elicit any response from her, her husband smashes all the utensils in the kitchen and is about to dash the baby to the ground when Sabitri screams and stops him. Her scream in the shoot coincides with Durga’s in the crowded audience. For the scene Durga saw enacted before her eyes was a slice of her own life; and she would herself re-live the scene only days later.

Her story, though she lives four decades after the 1943 famine, is the same as Sabitri’s: her husband lost an arm in an accident in his factory and has been at home ever since. What she earns as a part-time maid in several houses is not enough for the sustenance of the family. The coming of the film crew has however temporarily increased her income and she has even been persuaded by the director’s right-hand man to play the part of Malati in the film. (Debika, the actress supposed to do the role, left in the middle in a huff out of vanity, and the director was having a tough time trying to find a replacement for her). Though initially extremely shy, Durga decides to take the challenge, and confronts her husband in a situation identical to that of Sabitri’s. But she ultimately doesn’t act, leaving the director in the lurch.

Sabitri & Durga: No end in sight…

The film within the film ends with Sabitri leaving the village alone – after the death of her infant and husband – part of a long line of emaciated beings going to the city in search of food. While the others proceed, she pauses after a while and breaks down in unspeakable sorrow. Sen’s film ends with a still of Durga, rapidly receding in the background, with a voiceover ending her tale in three lines: “Durga is alone. Her infant died. Her husband cannot be found.”

Though Durga herself does not say anything, a poem could stand in for her – the poem that Sen had used as a chorus for the stories in Calcutta ’71; and which begins and ends the tale of a Naxal rebel killed in a police encounter:

I am twenty,

In my twenty years, I’ve been walking for a thousand;

For a thousand years, I’ve been walking – pushing through poverty, destitution and death,

For a thousand years, I’ve been a witness to history – the history of poverty, of deprivation, of exploitation,

For a thousand years… [My translation]

 

Akaler Sandhane is an incredibly complex film that works at several levels: it is not just about the relation between the past and the present, but also about art and reality and the limits of representation. It also dramatizes another great divide in India – that between the village and the city. While the past and present may come together in surprizing and shocking ways, the gulf between the city and the village remains. For the film crew in Akaler Sandhane, this gulf with the villagers only widens after an initial curious encounter. Their alien and seemingly exploitative presence is at first tolerated and then increasingly resisted as an intrusion by the villagers. Consequently, the film unit has to pack up and leave for Calcutta, forced to shoot the rest of the film in the studios. What haunts the viewer, however, is not the fate of the conscientious director’s film, but the fate of Durga in the village.

Both Rang de Basanti & Akaler Sandhane tell stories of people who were at the receiving end of the “white man’s burden” in India – about fearless, selfless, patriotic young men who went smiling to the gallows in the name of freedom; and millions of ordinary, innocent people who needlessly died of hunger, not knowing they were pawns in a gigantic machinery of exploitation. Though both films are partly set in British India, they are not about the British rule. Neither are they about contemporary politics. They are ultimately about moral principles – justice and equality – that always have to be fought for!

 

Gulzaar’s Ijaazat deconstructed

Storyline:

A photographer (Mahender/ Naseeruddin) and a school-teacher (Sudha/ Rekha) get engaged, but not by their own choice. It is brought about by his uncle (Shammi Kapoor) who is also her mentor. It HAS TO BE honoured, even if the man is in love with another woman. When marriage is thrust upon him, Mahinder says it all to Sudha – who asks him to do what he thinks to be right: that he should take his beloved to his uncle and confess his love. The old man would surely relent. Mahinder is all gratefulness and rushes back to his lady-love (Maya/ Anuradha Patel), who is a lovable scatter-brained girl, frequently given to vanishing, a habit begun while trying to fly away from unloving parents. They ‘live together’, but in this instance, just when he most needs her presence (so that he can take her to his uncle), she has vanished again. When she returns, it is too late – the marriage has already happened by then! But a lot of her belongings remain – a perpetual reminder of her former presence in the house. At one point, Sudha tells Mahinder: “I feel as if I’m sharing everything with another woman. There’s nothing in the house that is truly mine”. He reasons: ‘We’re both tying to live without each other. I have you, Maya doesn’t have any one”. Another time, he says, “You can’t forget her even more than me”, and urges her to leave “the past (his past with Maya, ie) behind”. But he is himself unable to do it, partly because of Maya’s constant missed calls and surprises. They go on a honeymoon pledged to begin a new life; they return to a Birthday bouquet sent by Maya. Just when they are poised on a new understanding, a distance grows between them, owing to Mahinder’s secret meetings with Maya, which leave tell-tale signs – “lipstick on a shirt, a pair of ear-rings”. Sudha leaves.

What she does not know is that Maya had actually attempted suicide and Mahender felt obliged to look after her. But he did not want to divulge this at the moment and hence, met Maya secretly. He is cruelly divided between the two women, trying hard but unable to make things work. After Sudha leaves, he has a heart-attack; and Maya returns to the house to nurse him back. It is during this time that Sudha calls him once and Maya answers the phone. The couple had not met or called in between, and Sudha assumes that Maya has come back in Mahinder’s life for good. Sudha now makes up her mind: explaining to the uncle that Mahender has never misbehaved with her, has been honest; and if he could sacrifice his love for his uncle, then the uncle should also give in to him now and let him be with the woman he loves. Besides, this is really the only way out; otherwise, none of them could live in peace – neither she, nor Maya, nor Mahender.

But all this is told, explained, in the waiting room of a railway station – where the former couple accidentally meet after 5 years. Sudha’s mother had passed away in between and she had started wearing glasses. Mahender however remained as unorganized as ever! The biggest shock for Sudha is the news of Maya’s suicide. She comes to know that when Mahender had got the divorce papers from her by post, he went mad… and shouted at Maya. In retaliation, Maya, ever the impulsive one, just took out his bike and rode into the night… and to her own death. So he lost both women – to divorce and to death. Sudha had married meanwhile, just a year before – but this information is withheld till the last moment. The audience is as much surprised as Mahender when this is disclosed; and the utter desolation on his face when he sees Sudha’s husband (Shashi Kapoor in a guest appearance) constitutes the poignant climax of the film.

The first time Sudha had left Mahinder suddenly, without notice. This second time, on their chance encounter in the waiting room, she however takes his ijaazat – permission – to leave, and bids him a tearful goodbye.

Hindi Remakes of Bengali Films:

Ijazaat (1987) was a Hindi remake of a Bengali film – Tapan Sinha’s Jatugriha (1964), based on a story by Subodh Ghosh. Coming 23 years after the original, this film catered to a different generation of audience. The filmmakers were however contemporaries – though they begun their careers in different decades, they were creatively active for a long time together. Gulzaar was not a Bengali, but he was trained in the direct line of great Bengali directors who had made it big in Bollywood – he began his career as an Assistant to Hrishikesh Mukherjee, who in turn, learnt his craft from Bimal Roy. Like them both, he frequently used Bengali stories and actors; and in this case, remade a Bengali classic in Hindi.

Hindi films based on or inspired by original Bengali ones were not a new phenomenon. It happened at regular intervals; and it may be noted that Tapan Sinha was a particular favourite when it came to these remakes – Hemen Gupta remade his Kabuliwala (1957) in Hindi (1961), with Balraj Sahani in the lead; Gulzaar’s own directorial debut Mere Apne (1971) was a remake of Sinha’s Apanjan (1968). Later in the 70s, there was a new development in this trend when Shakti Samanta simultaneously shot Hindi and Bengali versions of his films Amanush (1975) and Anand Ashram (1977), with Uttam Kumar in the lead. Ijaazat broke new ground in this genre in the late 80s by differing significantly from the Bengali original.

Two time-tested Bollywood formulas: ‘Parental opposition’ + ‘The other woman’

The chief difference between Jatugriha and Ijazaat is that, while in the Bengali film, the couple separate/ become distant from each other because of the lack of a child, in the Hindi film, it is ‘the other woman’ that causes the rift. It is the continued presence of his former love in the life of Mahinder – and hence in the life of Sudha – that their marriage breaks. Both try their level best to make it work, but Maya keeps coming back, keeps coming between them. She was never gone in the first place. In a way, it is actually ‘parental opposition’ that is the real culprit in the film. Hence, Ijaazat actually follows two time-tested Bollywood formulas, tying them both in one plot – parental opposition + the other woman. In fact, here, it is because of parental opposition that the beloved becomes the other woman. Just like Silsila, where, due to familial obligation (the man marrying his elder brother’s fiancé after his sudden death), the beloved had become the other woman – but while in Silsila, she comes back accidentally in the married man’s life, in Ijaazat, she is always there, looming on the horizon. (Incidentally, Rekha plays the wife here; she was famously the beloved in Silsila.)

There is actually nothing inherently wrong in the relationship of the married couple in Ijaazat. In fact, they enjoy each other’s presence and laugh together a lot. There is a certain easy familiarity about them that is not common in the depiction of arranged marriages on screen. There is also a certain romance in their relationship, as they live with each other- an easy friendly romance, not heavy with passion. Hence, its depiction is also easy and refreshing: no drenching in the rain or dancing around trees or smouldering passion before a fire. There is the beach and the stream, the woods, and a warm embrace in the honeymoon song; no wet red chiffon, only a luminous Rekha clad in beautiful cottons.

There is also no melodrama – in gesture, word, or song. You don’t expect that in a Gulzaar film, anyway – what you do expect is plentifully there: subtle evocations of complex human relationships, expressed in pithy dialogues and beautiful lyrics. The best song is sung by Maya in the film:
Mera kuchh saman tumhare pas para hain,
Saavan ke kuchh bhige bhige din rakhe hain,
Aur mere ek khat mein lipti raat pari hain,
Woh raat bujha do, mera woh saaman lauta do.

This she writes to Mahinder when he sends her remaining belongings to her by his servant. Can he return everything – wet rainy days, a letter-wrapped night? How could their time together be erased? Memories can’t be returned; they remain.

All through the film, it is difficult to take sides. Like Mahinder, we too oscillate between Maya and Sudha – Maya’s spontaneity, her pain of being betrayed by Mahinder and yet, her inability to let go of him; Sudha’s mature understanding and her hurt pride of always coming second to Maya in her husband’s affections. Mahinder’s predicament, however (as we have seen), is the worst of all – he cannot stop loving Maya, but he also desperately tries to build an honest relationship with Sudha and is attracted to her in a different way.

Three young hopeful lives are thus messed up- and all because the elders had to be appeased! All because an engagement was thrust upon two unwilling people, despite one being in love with another woman and having ‘lived with’ her (by no means a common thing in India of the 1980s).

So, this film is ultimately about love, and not marital discord. More precisely, it is ultimately about the love that cannot be accepted by parents, and the life that is made unhappy due to parental opposition. Individual happiness surrendered to the tyranny of elders! A marriage date is suddenly fixed by elders – and the date has to be honoured, not the love relationship between two adults. It cannot wait a few more weeks, by when Maya would have surely returned. And why do Mahinder and Sudha marry? He marries to appease his uncle; she marries to relieve her widowed mother of her constant anxiety about her future.

By 1987, Gulzaar had already established his signature style of making unconventional films staying within the mainstream (Koshish, Aandhi, Mausam, Namkeen). But in this film, at least, he does not go beyond Bollywood’s time-tested formulas – though this is not apparent at first. It struck me only this time, when I watched it after 20 years!

When I first saw it, I had found the ‘live together’ very bold and the honesty of the husband attractive. And I was just bowled over by the songs. They remain my all-time favourites!

Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara: Immortalizing the refugee woman on celluloid

Ritwik Ghatak & Partition

India’s moment of liberation from the British was also a moment of rupture: with independence came partition on 15 August 1947, in what was one of the greatest ironies of 20th century history. Partition did not mean quite the same thing for Punjab and Bengal – the two provinces that got divided on the eastern and western borders of India – but there was one aspect that was common to both: most ordinary citizens found it difficult to accept the fact of partition and their lives changed beyond recognition once they became refugees.

And yet, as far as Bengal was concerned, Partition hardly had any immediate thematic impact on film or literature. The first Bengali novel to deal with partition came out only in 1955 – Narayan Sanyal’s Bakultala P.L.Camp. But it was highlighted on celluloid much earlier – in the 1950 classic, Chinnamul (“The Uprooted”), by Nemai Ghosh. This landmark film, which ushered in Bengali cinematic realism, relates the story of a group of farmers from East Bengal who are forced to migrate to Calcutta because of Partition. Ghosh used actual refugees as characters and extras in the film, but there were some seasoned theatre actors in the cast as well. One of them was Ritwik Ghatak – who would soon turn director himself and make the partition theme his own.

Ritwik Ghatak’s films are one of the most powerful artistic articulations of the trauma of displacement consequent upon partition. The cultural unity of the two Bengals was an article of faith with him. He never accepted the Partition of 1947 and it became an obsessive theme with him.

In a cinematic career that spanned over 25 years until his death in 1976 at the age of 50, Ritwik Ghatak left behind him eight feature films, ten documentaries and a handful of unfinished fragments. But he is remembered mostly for his feature films today. Recognition came his way very late and he had the misfortune of being largely ignored by the Bengali film public in his own lifetime. This was particularly unfortunate; as Ghatak was one of the most innovative of all Indian filmmakers, developing an epic style that uniquely combined realism, myth and melodrama in many of his films.

Before he came to films, however, Ghatak had been involved with the IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association), the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India, which, since 1943, led a highly creative movement of politically engaged art and literature, bringing into its fold the foremost artists of the time. IPTA had a profound influence on Ghatak. True to its credentials, he strongly believed in the social commitment of the artist; so that even when he left theatre for cinema, he always made films for a social cause.

Cinema, to him, was a form of protest; and more than any other artist of his time, he used this medium to highlight the biggest contemporary issue in India – partition and its aftermath. As he once said: “[Cinema, to me,] is a means of expressing my anger at the sorrows and sufferings of my people. Being a Bengali from East Bengal, I have seen untold miseries inflicted on my people in the name of independence – which is fake and a sham. I have reacted violently to this – and I have tried to portray different aspects of this [in my films].”

He was, however, averse to the term “refugee problem”. In one of his interviews, he said, “I have tackled the refugee problem, as you have used the term, not as a ‘refugee’ problem. To me it was the division of a culture and I was shocked”. This shock would give birth to a trilogy on partition – Meghe Dhaka Tara (“The Cloud-capped Star”), 1960; Komal Gandhar (“E Flat”), 1961; and Subarnarekha (“The Golden Thread”), 1962. In them, he highlighted the insecurity and anxiety engendered by the homelessness of the refugees of Bengal; tried to convey how Partition struck at the roots of Bengali culture; and sought to express the nostalgia and yearning that many Bengalis felt for their pre-Partition way of life.

 

Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960)
Meghe Dhaka Tara (based on Shaktipada Rajguru’s Bengali novel of the same name) is one of Ghatak’s best-known films on this theme. It also has the distinction of being the only film by him that had been well received on its release.

A lot has been written on the mythic dimension of the narrative of Meghe Dhaka Tara and its many innovative technical aspects (especially in Ghatak’s use of sound). My aim, however, is not to analyze the aesthetic achievements of the film – but rather, to use it as a visual text to highlight the issue of women’s emancipation in post-partition West Bengal, especially vis-à-vis its relationship with employment. In doing so, I do not intend to reduce the immense richness and complexity of Ghatak’s art; but only to draw closer attention to a very interesting socio-historical aspect of the film.

Meghe Dhaka Tara centers round Nita (Supriya Chowdhury), a refugee girl in a colony in Calcutta, who struggles to maintain her impoverished family – at first, giving private tuitions to school children; and then, as the financial situation worsens at home, by working full-time in an office, giving up on her own post-graduate studies.

She is the exploited daughter, taken-for-granted sister, and betrayed lover in the film – and ends up being just a source of income for the family. She is the victim not just of Partition, but of familial pressures, and her life ends tragically fighting TB – though not before she cries out her desire to live to her brother in a hill sanatorium and admitting that she had wronged in accepting injustice, that she should have protested for her rights.

The partition connection in Meghe Dhaka Tara is not as obvious as for example, Komal Gandhar, where Ghatak talks about the Partition of 1947 directly, as something witnessed by his protagonists; but to a discerning viewer, the signs are all there – either incidentally or in the background.

At the very beginning of the film, the father (Bijon Bhattacharya) tells the mother of an impending ‘eviction order’ and the closing of the ‘school grant’ that were discussed in the last committee meeting that he attended; soon after, he is reminded by some colony boys that he has not given the colony subscription for three-months and that they would come to collect it next morning; throughout the film, at regular intervals, as part of the incidental noise of the soundtrack, colony school children can be heard naming tables in their makeshift open-air school – the kind that had sprung up like mushrooms in the hundreds of refugee colonies in Calcutta; the father complains to one of the colony boys about the collective insecurity of the refugees – (“Whom are we living under?” he asks, “Why can’t we sleep at night?”); the mother (Gita Dey) regrets, in an intimate moment with her elder daughter, that ten years of poverty and deprivation has made her a different person.

But the most important symbol of Partition in Meghe Dhaka Tara is Nita herself. She is the living embodiment of refugee life – the working woman.

 

Nita: the refugee working woman
Partition and its aftermath affected refugee women in two ways – it either victimized them or accorded them a new agency. But both turned out to be very complex, traumatic processes.

One of the central facts of the partition of 1947 was the sexual violence against women – and it was only appropriate that this aspect should be highlighted, once women became the proper subjects of partition narratives, in both history and fiction. As the seminal works by women historians focussing on the Punjab testify – the narrative of partition violence against women was not a simple one. It told the extraordinary sufferings that women went through at the time of partition – in some cases killed by their own families to prevent them from falling into the hands of the other community; in other cases, raped and abducted (remember Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth?), and then recovered or rejected by their original families; in yet others, settling for a new life with their abductors (remember Pinjar?) only to have their choices overturned by tribunals set up by agreement between the two new states of India and Pakistan.
But there was another important aspect of partition and a number of recent writers and historians have chosen to highlight that – of how partition enabled women; how some of them triumphed, despite their trauma. In the aftermath of partition, refugee women – both in Punjab and Bengal – faced the enormous challenge of rebuilding their lives from scratch. And, to be able to do so, they moved out of their domestic sphere and entered the public domain. For the first time, they joined the work force and became bread winners. For the first time, their education became linked with employment and not marriage.

There was another dimension to this issue as far as West Bengal was concerned. Some of the concerns of the refugee women actually evolved into a new women’s movement. There was already a women’s movement existent in Bengal by the 1940s, of which Chabi Basu, and later, Manikuntala Sen, have written memorably. The Communist Party of India (CPI) had created a women’s wing, MARS (Mahila Atma Raksha Samity), which was very active during the Bengal famine years. Then there was the Tebhaga Andolan, a peasant movement, once again spearheaded by women, who fought to retain 2/3rds of the agricultural produce for themselves. But after partition, this movement took a new turn and brought within its fold the destitute urban middle class as well.

This is a very interesting history in itself. But the point that needs to be remembered here is that, despite the women’s movement in Bengal, there still remained thousands of women who were neither activists nor members of any political party – but whose lives were transformed, nevertheless, by the whole process of forced migration and struggle for survival, like Nita in Ghatak’s film. And, just like the victims of partition, the stories of these women, who became bread-winners, were also not uniform or simple.

An important question in this respect was – though coming out of their narrow domestic sphere was a step towards emancipation for these refugee women, was this new-found agency/enablement really working in their favour? If we are to go by the testimony of Nita’s story, it was not. In many cases, it actually turned out to be yet another form of exploitation by a patriarchal society that now masqueraded as being ‘modern’.
As Ghatak’s film bears out, there were two aspects of this emancipation which were very disturbing. The first was that, the basic attitude of Indian society towards women remained the same – that of exploitation. Previously, they were exploited in one way, now in another. Only the form changed. In a crucial scene of Meghe Dhaka Tara, the father says: “In an earlier era, young Hindu girls were forced to marry dying old men and then burnt along with them [the custom of ‘Sati’]. We called them barbarous. And now, we educate our daughters, allow them to earn, and then suck them dry. Where’s the difference then?” In a later scene, towards the end of the film, when he comes to know of Nita’s illness, in a burst of impotent rage, he shouts: “I accuse…”, but when his son demands, “Whom?”, he replies uncertainly, “Nobody”. Needless to say, through this scene, Ghatak was actually implicating postcolonial society at large for Nita’s tragedy”.

The second intriguing aspect of women’s emancipation in post-partition West Bengal was that, though women were now employed, their essential role remained the same – that of nurturer. Previously, their nurturing duty was confined to the domestic space. Now, that space got expanded, but their roles did not change. Women and their work were still thought of solely in terms of home and the family; and their employment not valued for its own sake. Nita, in Ghatak’s film, is born on Jagaddhatri Day. Jagaddhatri is another form of the goddess Durga, and the audience is left in no doubt of her nurturing role.

In the film, at the height of her relentless struggle against poverty, Nita emphatically declares she does not want to be a mannequin, when she is told separately by her brother and her fiancé – both of whom are financially dependant on her and feel guilty about it – that she has taken on tremendous pressure on herself and she deserves a more relaxed life. She replies that she madly loves her family and has willingly taken up a job to look after her aged parents, take care of her younger brother and sister, and support her elder brother and fiancé. But she does not value it for its own sake. She is basically waiting for two things to happen – for her classical singer elder brother (Shankar/ Anil Chatterjee) to become a performing artist and her lover (Sanat/ Niranjan Ray) to complete his Ph.D. Once that happens, she says, once the men in her life start earning, all her struggles will come to an end and she would happily give up her work. Her attitude to being the breadwinner is thus of a person who is only filling in for the time being. In this, she is representative of her times; as a lot of refugee women in colonies did indeed give up their jobs once their families became financially solvent.

Nita’s fate is different, though. What makes her eventual tragedy particularly poignant is that she faces multiple betrayals from those closest to her, and by life itself. Her hopes for the future are dashed to the ground when she loses Sanat to her younger sister, Gita (an act of treachery that her mother condones, but her father and Shankar protest); and then loses her life fighting tuberculosis. Shankar, however, does not fail her. As an eminent film critic has pointed out, Nita’s most intimate bond is with Shankar, not Sanat; and in this, it is not unlike most of Ghatak’s films “… from the 1950s and ’60s [which] show a compulsive engagement with the brother-sister relationship…. [where] brothers and sisters… appear as exemplars of the pure couple.”

Nita and Shankar’s bond remains intact throughout the film, though it takes an ironic turn after she is diagnosed with TB. True to his promise to his sister, Shankar not only becomes the successful and acclaimed classical singer that he always wanted to be, but with his huge earnings, brings in affluence for the impoverished household as well. His sister’s unshakeable faith in his talent is thus vindicated, but she is herself unable to enjoy its benefits. Shankar also keeps another promise. He takes her to the hills – though, ironically, the fulfilment of this wish of hers happens not for a vacation, but to spend her last days in a hill sanatorium. She is now redundant in the family that she had worked so hard to maintain, sacrificing her own dreams and desires. But in an unforgettable cinematic moment of defiance, she cries out her desire, her will to live – “Dada ami bachte chai… dada, ami bachbo…” – her heart-rending cry reverberating in the hills.

It is an established fact that refugee women played a very important role in the steady emergence of women in the public domain in West Bengal since 1947. Starting with women like Nita, who looked upon their new roles as tentative and temporary, there was a gradual shift in attitude in later years, when lower/ middle-class women confidently embraced their new working avatars (whatever the conflicts it involved in the domestic sphere) and became equal partners/comrades of men in life’s struggle. Arati in Satyajit Ray’s film, Mahanagar (“The Big City”) is one such woman. But there is no doubt that it is the Nitas who paved the way for the Aratis in West Bengal. And it is to Ritwik Ghatak’s credit that he could bring out all the complexities of Nita’s historical time and milieu in Meghe Dhaka Tara, and thereby immortalize the Bengali refugee woman on celluloid.

Jatugriha: A Forgotten ‘Modern’ Classic

Jatugriha literally translates as ‘the burnt home’, and indeed, what is remarkable about the film is the way in which it delineates marital discord. It was a unique Bengali film of its times, and remains so even after 50 years!

Jatugriha was released in 1964 – the same year as Ray’s Charulata – and marks a mature high point in the careers of all concerned: the leads Uttam Kumar and Arundhuti Debi, the supporting actor Anil Chatterjee, and of course the director Tapan Sinha. With such an amazing bunch of creative people coming together in the film, little wonder it turned out so well. It is useful to remember here that by 1964, Uttam Kumar was not only Bengal’s undisputed matinee idol, but also a successful producer with two acclaimed films to his credit. Jatugriha was ‘Uttam Kumar Films Pvt. Ltd.’s third venture and it attested the star’s commitment to quality films; films that somewhat extended the scope of commercial Bengali cinema.

Jatugriha had an ace director and a talented cast, but its chief strength was its story. Subodh Ghosh’s stories had already proved very successful on celluloid – both Bengali and Hindi -among others, in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1958) and Bimal Roy’s Sujata (1959). Tapan Sinha added one more memorable film to the list. Another USP of the film was the lead pair.

When talking of Uttam Kumar, Suchitra Sen’s name is never far behind! Bengalis are prone to talk of ‘Uttam-Suchitra’, the brand, rather than the actors individually. Indeed, they did 27 films together in a span of two decades and left a permanent mark in the history of Bengali cinema. But Uttam did a sizable amount of films with other co-stars as well. Of them, the ones with Arundhuti Debi – including Bicharak (1959), Jhinder Bandi (1961), and Jatugriha (1964) – were a class apart. They were based on literary classics, directed by Tapan Sinha (Arundhuti’s husband) and dealt with unconventional themes. And though they were the lead pair in the films, they did not play stereotypical ‘romantic’ roles in them. Uttam Kumar had once remarked that he changed his acting style with every co-star; with Arundhuti, he adopted a more intellectual style to match hers. It is very much in evidence in Jatugriha, where they play a couple in – and out of – love, without an iota of mushiness.

 

Marital discord

The title-credits of the film open to Supriyo (Anil Chatterjee) negotiating the rain-splattered streets of Calcutta. He is the ‘kerani’ (clerk), doomed to a tough existence in a big city. For the affluent, it is a different matter; they return home in cars – like Shatadal Dutta (Uttam Kumar), a very successful and high-ranking officer at the Archaeological Department of the Government of India. He picks up his friends’ son from the street, walking in the rain because his parents failed to turn up at school. They are too busy fighting, as it turns out, when Shatadal drops the boy home. He is offered tea by the flustered couple, but he refuses, pleading exhaustion. These opening scenes – with the boy (whom Shatadal is evidently fond of) and the acrimonious couple, set the scene for the central theme of the film. We would see another (less acrimonious, though equally painful) kind of marital discord unfold in the next 90 minutes, and that would stem from the lack of a child.

The very first scene of Shatadal with his wife Madhuri (Arundhuti Debi) speaks volumes about their crumbling marriage. After dropping little Samik at his home, Shatadal returns to his own, and in a tired voice asks Ramu, the servant, to give him tea. He has the tea by himself; then calls up his advocate who wants him to bring false charges of infidelity against his wife to make his case ‘stronger’. He refuses to do that, but is quite clear about wanting a divorce. He then sits alone in the dark, with the music of a night club playing outside his window. (This would become a motif in the film – a motif of the loneliness of modern life and alienation in the city). Madhuri enters the bedroom after a while and goes about doing this and that. Asks him why he is sitting in the dark. He mutters something; and so does she, about rains in Calcutta and the inconvenience thereof. They are making small talk, not conversation. He leaves for a film, once again alone – saying, he will be late and have dinner outside. She should not wait for him. She says “OK”, without even looking at him, as if this – his going out on his own immediately after she returns home – is the most natural thing in the world. There is no anger, irritation, or hurt in her voice – only a studied indifference. And yet, she is still the perfect homemaker. After he leaves, she asks Ramu whether his shirts have been given to the laundry; opens the fridge and seeing no eggs and fruit for next day’s breakfast, instructs Ramu to bring that first. After having said, in an emotionless voice, that Ramu can just make something for himself for dinner, as they would not eat. The most common and pleasurable ritual of domesticity – having tea and dinner together, and the sharing of lives and the day over the dinner table, does not exist for them.

They have breakfast together before going off to work, but it is fraught with tension and suppressed anger. He is furious about missing papers; she is eager to maintain a semblance of normalcy before little Samik, who habitually drops by, preferring to be with them than his own parents. Little does he know that the same dynamic of marriage plays out here as well, with the couple he thinks to be ideal! The audience knows better – that Madhuri is bound by duty to Shatadal, not love. She is desirous that he have his medicine on time, but makes it clear that she has absolutely no interest in their new house that is nearing completion.

 

The house that could not be a home

But things were very different when work had begun on the new house. It was to be their dream home and she was full of interest and excitement; he too, with his architect’s sensibility, could not stop thinking and planning about the house. He complied with all of Madhuri’s demands about the house – a kitchen-garden, a bathroom that she would design, a study for him; and also added his own – a nursery for their future child. He even drew in Samik in his plans, telling the boy they would have a huge verandah in their house from where, when they were old, they would see a grown-up Samik whizz by in a big car! The house epitomized their future – their future together – which seemed so full of promise; and yet, in the course of constructing it, that promise fizzled out, and their interest in the house dwindled with the growing distance in their relationship. In the crowning irony of the story, their marriage broke when the house was finally built!

Interestingly, the house gets built even as the film progresses, with scenes of its construction dotting the narrative. The audience thus gets emotionally invested in the house in the course of the film and feel a pang of loss when Shatadal decides to sell it off immediately after its completion. He first offers it to Supriyo (Anil Chatterjee) as a gift, as he had grown genuinely fond of this young clerk and his impoverished family, but Supriyo declines his generosity with great dignity. He sells it eventually, but the audience is spared the sight.

 

Shatadal & Madhuri

What went wrong with Shatadal and Madhuri? Their marriage, like most marriages, (at least in the India of the 1960s) was premised on a future with a child. Sadly for them, Madhuri was diagnosed as infertile; and while Shatadal tried his best to take this reality in his stride, Madhuri was unable to accept it. Thereafter (as Shatadal later tells his friend Nikhilesh), “Madhuri started thinking she is incapable of making me happy, and I too failed to understand her… may be, I didn’t try enough. And then I saw I’ve made the office my home. Life seemed meaningless. So, we wanted to make an end of it.” What started with “poetry and dreams” ended in divorce.

It may be noted that the film is narrated essentially from the man’s perspective. The marital discord is shown to us from the couple’s interaction with each other, but we get more of his side of the story than hers. Though Shatadal tries to initiate the process of divorce, it is Madhuri who takes the decisive step. She just leaves him one day. What the discord was doing to Shatadal, we get to see – his changed attitude to work, his brusque behaviour with his colleagues, his irritation at home, his impatient interactions with labourers engaged in the construction of his new house. And when it is over, we also get to hear his side of the story. Incidentally, he sums up his marriage to his friend in the same darkened bedroom that we see him at the beginning of the film, his loneliness accentuated manifold by the same merry music of the nightclub playing outside his window.

That scene remains in the viewer’s mind long after the film is over. No equivalent scene is however given to Madhuri. We do not get to hear her or see her ‘going through’ the painful process of separation. She is young, beautiful, confident, independent-minded, and forthright; according to Nikhilesh, she is also “polite, patient… an angel” (in sharp contrast to his own constantly bickering wife, ie). She does not lose her temper ever; only once does she raise her voice to Shatadal’s, for which she promptly apologizes. There’s a certain elegant restraint in her personality, which was a welcome relief in the depiction of women in the Bengali commercial cinema of those days, where heroines were mostly drooly eyed and sentimental, either crying or singing romantic songs. Madhuri does not drool over her handsome husband, even in their happy days – even when she expresses her gratefulness to him, for his presence in her life and for gifting her a beautiful house in Calcutta.

She is independent-minded, but very conventional in one aspect. She feels awfully guilty for not being able to give a child to her husband, and joins a school only after coming to know of her infertility. Not before. In fact, she says to her husband (in the longest scene of argument between them in the film) that, like most women, all she had wanted was a home and domesticity. Hence, the lack of a child was particularly painful for her. He being a man had his work, office, and other interests of the outside world to distract him. She had none. Again, when they meet accidentally after seven years and is asked by Shatadal why she did not marry again, she says: “What I couldn’t give you, I won’t be able to give any other man as well. Knowing that, there is no point in getting entangled with another life.” It does not occur to her that marriage can be just for companionship, even without children, though she herself recommends it to her husband: “Please marry,” she tells him as a last request, “a man cannot continue like this.” And a woman can? – one is tempted to ask her. She speaks candidly to Shatadal of her own loneliness, but then, buys into the patriarchal logic of the privileges of men.

 

One wonders whether the particular marital discord showed in Jatugriha was just a problem of conditioning and not relationship per se; that the marriage could have been saved if Madhuri had not internalized gender stereotypes about marriage and motherhood. However, what stays with the audience is not so much the couple’s pain for childlessness as the pain of their growing distance, their increasing lack of communication and separation. This is essentially a film about falling out of love. And its poignant residue, which the couple experience when they meet accidentally in the waiting room of a railway station, seven years after they parted ways. During that short time, as they catch up on their lives, Madhuri effortlessly slips back into the role of the wife, feeding Shatadal and fussing over him. They even share humorous stories of their past and laugh together. All of a sudden, a decade seems to melt away… but the train whistle jolts them back to their reality. They board their separate trains going in different directions, but again face each other across windows. In their final exchange, she says, seeing him after all these years, she feels tempted to go back to him, to try again… but she won’t, as what separated them before would stand in their way again. It was better this way…. Her train zooms past while she says this, tears in her eyes, with the man who was once her husband trying to absorb the finality of their separation. By way of symbolism, we are shown a waiter hanging a pair of perfectly matching cups at two ends of a long line of crockery.

I had started by mentioning that Jatugriha was released in the same year as Charulata. The latter is an internationally known classic, partly due to Ray’s stature in the West; Jatugriha, on the other hand, has almost dropped out of public memory. This post is a humble attempt to resuscitate it.

 

 

 

Chitrangada: The Crowning Achievement of Rituporno Ghosh

 

Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012) is an adaptation of an adaptation; a classic example of how classics live and thrive in our midst, creatingnew meanings in every age.

The original story is from the epic Mahabharata, which Rabindranath Tagore adapted in a dance drama in 1892, which in turn was given a new interpretation on celluloid by Rituparno Ghosh in 2012. From written text to the stage to the silver screen – that is the change it underwent in form; the successive changes in content are,however, even more remarkable. The story of Chitrangada, the warrior-Princess of Manipur, is a digression in the Mahabharata; and there, it is really about Arjuna’s exploits. When Tagore used the story at the end of the 19th century, he gave centrality to the character of Chitrangada, and made her self-assertion to Arjuna (at the end of his tale) a modern statement on gender equality. 120 years later, Ghosh chose to highlight theandrogynous aspect of Tagore’s heroine and treatedthe story as essentially one of wish fulfilment.

 

The story of the film:

Rudra (Rituporno Ghosh) is a choreographer undergoing ‘gender reassignment surgery’ (or sex change operation) in a Kolkata hospital. He has already been through one operation (breast implantation) and is about to have another (vaginal reconstruction). It is during this interim period – in the course of his sessions with a counsellor – that his life unfolds to us.

We come to know that he had recently staged a successful production of Tagore’s Chitrangada. In the new percussionist of his troupe, he had found a lover; and in the drama, a new meaning – that ‘it is the story of a wish’, the wish to change one’s gender. It spoke to him powerfully as he himself had that hidden desire, which he could fulfil only superficially by wearing jewellery and applying kohl. It is strange that though he connects with the character of Chitrangada while staging the play, it is after it was over that he BECOMES her!

As with Tagore’s heroine, in his case, too, the catalyst is the lover. Rudra’s lover Partho is a bisexual and loves children. Rudra wants to give him a child; but as same-sex couples cannot legally adopt children in India, Rudra decides to ‘technically’ become a woman to enable adoption. Ironically, it all turns out to be in vain – in the 6 months that he is in the hospital to ‘become a woman’, his man (for whom he undergoes sex-change in the first place) ditches him for another woman; and, what’s more, is unrepentant about it later. To add insult to injury, he dismisses Rudra as ‘this half-thing’, saying if he had to have a child, he would have it from a real woman, ‘not this synthetic one’, going back on his earlier word that a child was a child, no matter from where it came.

Rudra’s parents, mercifully, are truly supportive. They not only bear their own trauma with dignity, but are brutally honest in admitting their own mistake as parents – that they knew about Rudra’s sexual orientation from the beginning, but always tried to cover it up, adamant that ‘a boy should behave like a boy’. Had they accepted him as he was, then he probably would not have felt the need for sex change.

Ultimately, in a surprising turn of events, Rudra actually calls off his final operation and even decides to undo the breast implants. The film ends with the message, ‘’Be what you wish to be.’

 

Trilogy on Alternative Sexuality/ Filmography /Influences:

Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish is now widely regarded as the third film in the trilogy concerning homosexuality that Rituporno Ghosh was involved with – the first two being Kaushik Ganguly’s Arekti Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story, 2011) & Sanjoy Nag’s Memories in March (2011).

The trilogy was the third and last phase of a brilliant cinematic career that was tragically cut short by death. There were two other major phases before it – in the first, Ghosh predominantly explored middle-class lives and morality in a changing society (Unishe April: 1994, Dahan: 1997, Asukh: 1999, Utsab: 2000,Titli: 2002); and in the second, he worked with a lot of Bollywood actors and also made films in Hindi and English (Chokher Bali: 2003, Raincoat: 2004, Antarmahal: 2005, The Last Lear: 2007, Khela: 2008, Shob Charitro Kalpanik: 2008).

He is considered the ‘best director of his generation’; he also happens to be the most prolific. In a span of two decades, he made 20 features, 1 documentary & acted in 3 films. He was a self-professed Satyajit Ray fan; and like him, came to films from the world of advertising. There were some other similarities, too – as with Ray, Tagore was a great inspiration for Ghosh & he seemed to follow his idol to a fault in this respect. Like Ray, he made 3 features based on/ adapted from Tagore’s stories (though not the same ones) & a documentary on the poet (here again, with different emphases). And like Ray, he bagged awards every year!

If his career had three phases, his narratives also had certain preoccupations, the chief of them being a nuanced exploration of the female psyche – and here the influence of another filmmaker is palpable: Aparna Sen. Sen and Ghosh’s deep personal bond is well-known. Surrogate siblings, she had a hand in making his career possible at an early stage. He imbibed from her a distinct aesthetics of beauty that often became evident in his set decorations, his actors’ costumes etc. But a deeper influence was at the level of theme and characterization. Sen had made the depiction of women-centric subjects her own from the 80s; Ghosh built on that and extended it in his own way.

A fourth influence was his contemporary Kaushik Ganguly, who made his mark in Bengali Tele films in the 1990s before becoming one of the most feted feature filmmakers of the new millennium. Ghosh’s Chitrangada owes an enormous debt to him. I mention him and not Sanjoy Nag because he was the first Bengali director to explore homosexuality as a subject. He did it way back in 2003, when it was only a hushed topic, in a Tele film titled Ushno Tari Jonyo, which depicted a lesbian relationship with Rupa Ganguly and Churni Ganguly in the lead roles. Rupa played a documentary filmmaker who, while working on Chapal Bhaduri, is forced to confront her own ambiguous sexuality. The same story was repeated 8 years later in Ganguly’s feature, Arekti Premer Golpo, this time with a gay couple replacing the lesbian one of the Tele film.

 

Ghosh’s crowning achievement:

Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish needs to be understood in the light of the above ‘back story’ of Ghosh’s career. It is Ghosh’s best Tagore adaptation; it is also his most direct personal statement about alternative sexuality. It is thus a culmination and a coming together of two important strains of his work. In this film, he brought Tagore to the service of his cause, and was immensely successful in his objective.

There are three aspects that really stand out in the film – his portrayal of the anguish of the sexually marginal protagonist, Rudra; his forthright depiction of the suffering of Rudra’s parents and the exploration of their filial bond; and his profound questioning of what constitutes identity.

Needless to say, they are all connected.

While Arekti Premer Golpowas (at one level) a bio-pic of Chapal Bhaduri, it helped Ghosh to ‘come out’, thus making him (to quote a line from the film that described Bhaduri) “… the first self-evident, self-confessed gay actor of the Bengali [film industry]”.Bengali cinema was absolutely mum about homosexuality before Kaushik Ganguly came on the scene.There have been some Hindi films that depicted closet homosexuals (Madhur Bhandarkar’s Page 3, Fashion) – but none that dealt head-on with the issue in all its complexity; none with the kind of bold love scenes depicted in Arekti Premer Golpo& Chitrangada; and certainly none that showed what parents go through trying to come to terms with a gay child. (The only exception is Darmiyaan, where the child is a hijra.)

The pain of Rudra’s parents in the film (played by Dipankar De & Anasuya Majumdar) is as palpable as his own, making this a story as much about anguish as wish – the anguish and pain and trauma that the wish to change gender (or the questioning of one’s identity) inevitably entails.

Rudra has four lovers – Partho (Jisshu Sengupta); a photographer (Sanjoy Nag) whom he accidentally again meets in Puri while holidaying with Partho; Joe Wright (with whom, we are told, he had stayed in New York for three years; who calls him up when he is in hospital and whom he refuses to meet); & finally Shubho (his hospital counsellor, played by Anjan Dutta, with whom we sense a budding ‘usno’ romance, but who turns out to be a figment of his hallucination). The lead female dancers of Rudra’s troupe, Mala (Aparajita Addo) and Kasturi (Raima Sen), are also shown to be very fond of him. But despite his many romantic relationships, we are left in no doubt that the closest people in Rudra’s life are his parents. His mother is his dearest one, the only person in his life to give him unconditional love and understanding; but during the course of the film, we also see his father making a heroic effort to bridge the gulf with his son and love him for what he is.

There are echoes here not only of Arekti Premer Golpo & Memories in March, but also some of Rituporno Ghosh’s own previous films. They attest a bitter truth – that for many, their ageing/old parents are the only steadfast fact of life; that love may not happen, or lovers may come and go, but parents remain loyal and dependable forever.

 

In a commemorative program on Ghosh after his death (Mone Ritu) in ABP Ananda, Aparna Sen paid a rich tribute to him. ‘I’ve been a witness to his suffering’, she said, and also ‘his transformation… He increasingly gathered the strength to be what he was deep inside… and slowly created himself as a clay maker creates a goddess (Nijeke jeno pratimar moto gorlo)… Very few people have the courage to be what they are, and he was one of them.’

Fortunately for him, Ghosh could express his pain as a transgendered person – and also his pride – through the medium of his art.  Starting with Arekti Premer Golpo,films became for him a powerful platform to express/validate himself and the LGBT community, of which he was an icon. In Arekti Premer Golpo & Memories in March, others told his story. In Chitrangada, he told his own. It was the ultimate ‘coming out’ act!

Chitrangada is thus a very conscious film by a very conscious transgender filmmaker, exploring androgyny/alternative sexuality; and using his autobiographical story to convey a message – that of compassion and social acceptance. It is to Ghosh’s credit that the message is internalized in the narrative & doesn’t call attention to itself, as something apart from the story.

This film is Ghosh’s crowning achievement.!

 

 

 

 

 

Ray’s documentary on Tagore

This documentary was Ray’s tribute to Tagore on his birth centenary in 1961.

Ray’s Films in Posters

Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955)

Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956)

Parash Pathar (The Philosopher’s Stone, 1958)

Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958)

Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959)

Devi (The Goddess, 1960)

Teen Kanya (Three Daughters, 1961)

Kanchanjangha (1962)

Mahanagar (The Great City, 1963)

Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964)

Nayak (The Hero, 1966)

Chiriyakhana (The Zoo, 1967)

Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy & Bagha, 1968)

Hirak Rajar Deshe (The Kingdom of Diamonds, 1980)

Shonar Kella (The Golden Fortress, 1974)

Joi Baba Felunath (The Elephant God, 1979)

Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970)

Seemabaddha (A Company Limited, 1971)

Jana Aranya (The Middleman, 1975)

Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players, 1977)

Sadgati (The Deliverance, 1981)

Ghare-Baire (Home and the World, 1984)

Ganashatru (An Enemy of the People, 1990)

Shakha-Prasakha (Branches of a Tree, 1992)

Aguntuk (The Stranger, 1992)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shyam Benegal’s documentary on Satyajit Ray (1984)

This is clip 3.

Murder and Morality in Maqbool

RGV, Bharadwaj & the ‘underworld’ film: It is a stormy, windy Mumbai night. A pander draws a chawk, an astrological chart, on a car’s windowpane – the future forebodes ill. Soon after, someone is murdered and blood spurts and splashes across the window glass and the rhombus of the chart that is now symbolically Mumbai. Saari Mumbai khoon se bhaar di (Look! You have drenched the whole of Mumbai in blood), mutters an irritated constable. Thus begins Vishal Bharadwaj’s powerful and intriguing Hindi film Maqbool (2003), an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606). The title of the film itself is resonant enough of the original, and the early 17th century English play and this early 21st century Hindi film have quite a few parallels. The opening scene itself is a very good instance of one of them. It is set on a windy, stormy night in both the film as in the play. While the witches enigmatically state Fair is foul and foul is fair, thus establishing the atmosphere of the Shakespearean play; the gory future of Mumbai is foretold in the film. Like Cawdor, a traitor is slain in the film; the difference being, while that was off-scene in the play, it is visually represented in the film. With a master-stroke, Bharadwaj, through the chawk, makes Fate and blood come together at the very beginning of Maqbool. And the constable’s response only warns the audience of the inevitability of bloodshed. However, while the opening scene is a brilliant example of Bharadwaj’s ingenious use of parallels, it is not the only one in the film. The whole film, in fact, is replete with many such instances. They are however not the USP of the film. These linkages are obvious and fairly superficial; any sensitive reader of the Shakespearean play will at once recognize the parallels when he watches the film even for the first time. What makes Maqbool very interesting, though, is that it manages to be quite unique even when following a particular tradition of film-making. Maqbool belongs to a sub-genre of Bollywood – the genre that deals with the ‘underworld’ and its nexus with the Hindi film industry. In fact, it came right after two very important releases by Ram Gopal Varma in this field – Satya (2000) and Company (2002). But Maqbool rises above this genre in that it is both topical and contemporary and yet transcendent of them. In the film, Bharadwaj does not simply investigate a contemporary issue on celluloid. While Varma, his predecessor, explores the underbelly of Mumbai in Satya and shows how and why anti-socials are born; and delineates the very corporate-like power-structure of an underworld group in Company and the way it goes ‘khallas’, Bharadwaj takes a very different route. Both of Varma’s films are authentic and competent social documents, being almost celluloid equivalents of reality TV. But while they are very interesting in themselves, they smack too strongly of the here and the now. Bharadwaj very cleverly avoids this. His film, too, is very contemporary, but in it, he transforms and elevates sociology to philosophy. He projects an essentially humanistic vision – that of evil corrupting and finally burning itself out. He universalizes his theme and thus gives his film a timeless quality. Which is why, perhaps, he goes to Shakespeare in the first place. He, however, very intelligently avoids a whole-scale translation, as it would have been almost impossible for him to bring out the nuances of the original. What he does instead is to take the important motifs of the Shakespearean play and re-localize, re-interpret and re-formulate them in his own idiom. Conflict between filial and sexual love Maqbool reveals the lust for power and passion as Mian Maqbool (Irfan Khan), a Muslim mafia lieutenant and right hand man of its don Abbaji (Pankaj Kapoor), falls in love with the don’s mistress and a saga of massacre unfolds. Abetted by this mistress, Nimmi (Tabu), who also loves Maqbool and goads him to usurp the godfather’s place in the hierarchy of the gang, Mian plots and plans to take over Abbaji’s power and fiefdom. He is torn between his loyalty for his mentor and his love for Nimmi. With further aid from the two cops Pandit and Purohit (Om Puri & Naseeruddin Shah), who also provide comic relief to the dark tale, Maqbool unleashes a mayhem of crime and gore, shaking the very roots of the closely-knit mafia family. As circumstances spiral out of control, so does Maqbool’s sense of discretion. At the end, his enemies get the better of him and he loses all – Honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, even his wife and child. At the heart of the film is thus this conflict between filial and sexual love and the way Maqbool sacrifices one for the other. The filial bond between Mian and Abbaji is very strong. Abbaji – Jahangir Khan – is more than a father to Maqbool. He is the one who has brought him up and made a man of him. In Shakespeare’s words, it could be said that He was a gentleman on whom Abbaji had built an absolute trust. And his unshakeable faith in Maqbool – the man’s loyalty, competence and efficiency – comes out in many scenes of the film. When Maqbool is shaky when he is given the charge of the Hindi film industry by Abbaji, and protests that it is too much for him, Abbaji very fondly and tenderly says that he has full confidence that Mian will be able to handle the responsibility. His gesture is really that of a fond father and the look in his eyes, full of love. When Nimmi goes for another mannat (praying for a child)and insists that she will walk barefoot in the scorching sun, Abbaji gives up persuading her otherwise; and when Mian sensing a problem, asks Abbaji’s leave to accompany Nimmi, he readily and gladly agrees. Complains the whole city is under his control but he has to bow down before this woman’s stubbornness. He has no inkling of what is going on between Maqbool and Nimmi (though the audience already knows it). He is so blind in love – both in his love for Nimmi and Maqbool – that he does not suspect anything. Ironically enough, he himself furnishes them with opportunities of being left alone. Apart from the mannat episode, on the eve of his daughter Chhoti’s (Masumeh Makhija) wedding, when Nimmi lies to him over the phone that the wedding arrangements are not satisfactory and she needs to stay over for the night, he again readily agrees. He cannot see what is cooking in front of his eyes with regard to both the women in his house – Nimmi and Chhoti. One of the most touching scenes of the film is when, on Chhoti’s wedding-day, Abbaji arrives on the scene and sees Mian lovingly making biryani himself and giving careful instructions to others. He is moved by that sight and remarks Arre miyan, tum to bare pyar se biryani ban rahe ho. When he is himself arrested, his pride is hurt; but when Maqbool is slapped by the ACP, he cries in humiliation and embraces his son (the only one to receive such a favour from Abbaji). All the above scenes build up to something. They attest to Abbaji’s absolute faith and trust in Maqbool, and consequently, the heinousness of the murder that is committed. That Maqbool is driven to murder this man betrays a sense of desperation. But the desperation is not his – it is Nimmi’s. It is she who goads him into it – just as Lady Macbeth had goaded Macbeth into committing Duncan’s murder in the Shakespearean play. The problem with Macbeth is not that he has ambition, but without the illness should attend it – as his wife thinks – but the fact that his hunger for power and the possible realization of his ambition through murder puts a personal relationship at stake, his relationship with Duncan, i.e. The equation between them is not just that of king and subject soldier. It is a relationship of mutual trust and affection and if Macbeth has to be king, he has to violate this bond. This interplay between power and personal relationship, the interplay of which is one of the important subtexts of the Shakespearean play, is a timeless paradigm. And one of the most interesting aspects of Bharadwaj’s Maqbool is that he draws upon this a timeless paradigm. Like the play, Bharadwaj’s film also depicts that power and personal relationships are inextricably tied up, and a change in one inevitably, invariably entails a change in the other. And we see this interplay, in a most pronounced manner, in two crucial episodes in the film – both, incidentally, through the agency of Nimmi. Nimmi, being caught up in an extra-marital liaison, is forever on the lookout to snatch a private moment with Maqbool. There are just two opportunities which she gets with Maqbool alone and she capitalized them. They are the most crucial scenes in the film – they are the temptation scenes. And both are juxtaposed with happy family episodes – the mannat and the wedding of Chhoti. Together, they will bring about Maqbool’s doom – because Nimmi will be granted her prayer and give birth to a son (Abbaji’s son); and Guddu (Chhoti’s husband/ Ajay Gehi) will mobilize forces against him. On the day of the mannat, while customarily teasing Maqbool about his favourite Hindi film heroine, Nimmi drops a bombshell on him – though jokingly. She calls him a coward – for he does not have the guts to declare his love for her and then goes on to add: as in love, so in work, he will be left behind. Guddu (the son of another trusted aide of Abbaji, Kaka) will succeed Abbaji; for Guddu is having an affair with Chhoti, and once they get married, the reigns will automatically go to him. Bete nahin hone se damaad hi waaris banta hai (If you don’t have a son, your son-in-law is your heir). It is said with studied nonchalance and it has the required effect on Maqbool. The news unnerves him, de-centres him almost. It is a thought that had never struck him. He is outraged – not so much at the affair as at the prospect of Guddu taking over. He had never imagined it possible. Maqbool feels threatened. He had recently been entrusted with the charge of handling the Hindi film industry by Abbaji. But close on the heels of that success comes this threat from a completely unpredictable quarter. He had never imagined Guddu a rival. His future power is now threatened and he even begins to doubt his present position. For the charge of the film industry, as everyone knew, was a very important portfolio as it was almost the post of the heir-apparent in their organization. But of what use would that be if Guddu was to become heir, anyway, by virtue of marrying into the family? His future power is threatened and immediately, we see the equations of his personal relationships change – with Guddu, with Abbaji, with Chhoti. Guddu was never a favourite; but now, he is a sworn enemy. Abbaji is God. Loyalty to him is the basic motto of Maqbool’s life. But his motives are now questioned because it is taken for granted that he will be more favourable to a damaad. So now, Maqbool feels insecure even with regard to Abbaji. Chhoti he loves. But he cannot accept the match – not because it is a bad choice, but because her husband would become a rival and he would be relegated to an inferior position. The obverse of this scenario is found in another episode where we see that to cement a personal relationship, a dirty power game has to be played. On the eve of Chhoti’s wedding, Nimmi manages to spend the day and night with Mian. She argues fairly persuasively and convinces Mian about the desirability of taking some action in the face of his impending threat. When he says that Abbaji is a father to him – the one who has bred and brought him up, Nimmi pointedly answers: Kutte bhi palte hain. This is irrefutable logic, especially since Mian knows that his loyalty to Abbaji has been no less than a dog’s. And after a night together, when Mian sees her praying in the morning, they have this little lethal conversation. Maqbool: Kya maange? Nimmi: Is raat jaisa har din bite. Maqbool: Abbaji ke rehete yeh nahin ho sakta. Nimmi: Aur Abbaji ke baad? [Maqbool: What did you pray for? Nimmi: That we spend all our days together like we did this night. Maqbool: It can’t happen as long as Abbaji lives. Nimmi: And, after Abbaji?] Till now, there was no conscious thought of murder. There was only anger against Guddu. But now the thought enters his mind. And then of course, Nimmi gives her ultimatum – Maqbool has to choose between her and Abbaji. And he chooses Nimmi, against his conscience, against every moral fibre in his being. The two scenes examined above are kind of inverted images of one another. In one, because of a possible disbalance of power, the equations of a set of personal relationships instantly change. In the other, because of a personal relationship (the most intimate of relationships – sexual love between a man and woman) power equations are forced to change.   3 frames of enactment: What can be clearly discerned from the examination of the film so far is Bharadwaj’s systematic use of certain frames of enactment inspired by the Shakespearean original. He uses these frames to energize the narrative outline of the film. Three such frames stand out: 1. Duncan & Macbeth in the play – against Abbaji & Maqbool in the film; 2. Macbeth & Lady Macbeth – against Maqbool & Nimmi; 3. Banquo & Fleance (in relation to Macbeth) – against Kaka & Guddu (in relation to Maqbool) We have already discussed the first. Of the three, the frame that is most important in the film is of course the second one – that of Maqbool and Nimmi vis-à-vis Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. This is where the real drama and conflict lies – with the difference that whatever Lady Macbeth does, she does it for her husband’s sake, while Nimmi basically tries to secure her own future which is at stake. She knows she will be de-throned very soon from Abbaji’s favour as he was already being partial to a new starlet – and if the inevitable happens, she has nowhere to go, and this motivates her to do what she does. It is ironic that neither Lady Macbeth nor Nimmi’s wishes are ultimately met. Both the women degenerate and become insane. Lady Macbeth was sure that: This night’s great business… [the murder of Duncan at Inverness] … shall to all our nights and days to come Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom, And in the film, after a night together, Nimmi had wished, Is raat jaisa har din bite. But that was not to be – for either women. Both wake to a consciousness of their guilt later. As against her earlier facile realism A little water clears us of the deed, we have Lady Macbeth muttering to herself in the sleep-walking scene, Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Again, her earlier fatal commonplace What’s done is done gives way to her last despairing sentence, What’s done cannot be undone. At the end of the film, Nimmi too is consumed by an overpowering sense of guilt. Gunaah kiya hain… na miya, humne? she asks Maqbool, and only wishes that their ishq (love) at least is spared that stain. She who had authored the entire murder plan realizes and admits at the end that it was a sin. Both Nimmi and Lady Macbeth tempt their men into sin, and both the men yield respectively to their persuasion. Both Macbeth and Maqbool are obsessed about progeny, about bloodlines – hence their desperation for the crown. Macbeth is desperate because though he has been promised the crown by the Witches, the same has also been promised to Banquo’s progeny. Though not himself, Banquo would be father to a long line of kings. If that were really to come to pass, then Macbeth realizes that his murder of Duncan had been to no purpose. He murdered the king to usurp his place, to prevent his natural heir from succeeding him. But now it seemed that staying the claim of one son was not enough – there were other contenders too. Duncan had been taken care of, but the Banquo-factor remained. Hence, to make one murder meaningful, he now launches into many more; and the changes within him from this point on are very swift. The man who had to be goaded into his first act of murder now decides to use barefaced power. He is willing to lose all scruple to secure his end – Banquo and Fleance, he decides, are both to be wiped off, for he sincerely believes that with them gone, he would be invincible. He is of course proved wrong; and realizes at the end that he had been deceived into a false sense of security by the Witches and all that his life has amounted to is nothing: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. This sense of futility, waste, the irony of it all – is shared by Maqbool as well and this constitutes the third frame that Bharadwaj takes over from the Shakespearean text. With Maqbool, the chief problem is Guddu. The conflict here is between the relative claims of a son-in-law and an adopted son, Guddu and Maqbool, vis-à-vis Abbaji. The earliest route to avoid this was of course to kill the don (though Nimmi is a greater factor here). But after the don’s murder, things are no easier for Maqbool. Everyone’s suspicions are pinned on him from the very start, chief among them being Kaka (Guddu’s father/ Piyush Mishra). Kaka is fiercely loyal to Abbaji and hence can never accept Mian as his replacement. When Mian and he have a showdown, he accepts Mian’s version – but only half-heartedly. Now, it is Mian’s turn not to trust him. In fact, he can trust no one now. Since he cannot bank on Kaka’s loyalty, he gets him killed; Guddu, (like Fleance in the play) narrowly escapes murder. Just as in the play, where the counter-movement against Macbeth starts after Banquo’s murder, so in the film, the tide begins to turn against Maqbool after Kaka’s murder. In addition to having been already alienated Chhoti, Maqbool now creates a sworn enemy in Guddu. He has to fight single-handedly and more and more hopelessly against an ever stronger enemy force. Everything and everyone turns against him. To add to all this, Nimmi becomes increasingly disbalanced and a source of perpetual worry – to the extent that he neglects a crisis for her sake and hence creates more foes. But his greatest concern of all is the baby in Nimmi’s womb, whose impending birth is fraught with danger. At the end of it all, he is besieged with an overwhelming sense of futility, because he realizes that he has done it all for Abbaji’s son. It was never his in the first place. Nimmi had lied to him. Like Macbeth, for him is left the barren sceptre, and all he had done was mere sound and fury, for he is but A poor player Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. Bharadwaj’s Maqbool is thus much more than a simple story of murder and mayhem. It is not just another run-of-the-mill Bollywood flick on the underworld. The director keeps well within the precincts of his genre of film-making and yet adds depth and profundity to his presentation by his use of Shakespeare. Like the Celtic heroes described in Shakespeare’s source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Maqbool is driven by an irresistible impulse into deeds of treachery and bloodshed but haunted when the deed is done by the sceptres of conscience.

From Guide to 2 States: Bollywood’s sporadic romance with Indian-English Fiction

2 States (Just Released)

Love marriages around the world are simple:                                                                                                         

Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. They get married.        

In India, there are a few more steps:  

Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy.                                                                                    

Girl’s family has to love boy. Boy’s family has to love girl.                                                                                    

Girl’s family has to love boy’s family. Boy’s family has to love girl’s family.                                                        

Girl and boy still love each other. They get married.

Thus goes the blurb of the book 2 States by Chetan Bhagat. The trailer of the film based on it also cashes in on this catch line and rightfully so, as the story is a humorous take on inter-community marriages in India today. A Punjabi boy and a Tamil Brahmin girl – Krish Malhotra and Ananya Swaminathan – meet and fall in love in college, want to marry, but face parental opposition. They overcome this obstacle bravely and their love story becomes a love marriage when their Punjabi and Tamilian parents finally give their consent. In an interview, Chetan Bhagat had once said that true national integration can only happen when there are more inter-community marriages in India. I don’t think Karan Johar got interested in producing 2 States because he wanted to promote national integration; rather, it fitted in very well with one of Bollywood’s time-tested formulas – parental opposition to love.

Though 2 States is based on an autobiographical story (Bhagat’s own tryst with love and marriage), in the context of Bollywood history, the film is actually a cross between Ek Duje Ke Liye (1980) & Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (or DDLJ, as it later came to be known, 1995). Ek Duje, starring Kamal Hassan & Roti Agnihotri, was a Romeo-Juliet story, something that Bollywood never tires of, with every generation having its own version, usually with newcomers (there was Qayamat se Qayamat tak or QSQT, with Aamir Khan & Juhi Chawla in 1989; and the very recent Ram Leela,with Ranvir Singh & Deepika Padukone in 2013). What 2 States has in common with Ek Duje is the inter-community romance & it kind of marries that to the ‘boy winning over his reluctant in-laws’ theme of DDLJ.

The first reviews are already out. To give you a sample of the two ends of the pole, while NDTV Movies dismisses the film by saying “The unabashed shallowness of a Chetan Bhagat book meets the inane glitter of a Karan Johar-Sajid Nadiadwala production in 2 States”;India TV praises it as “… a classic example of the problems evoking prior the marital life of a couple from two different cultures. Abhishek Verman deserves applause for understanding the usual yet non-described feelings and mindsets of two different communities and narrating it with ease.” They (as well as other reviews) however agree on the competency of the actors – both the lead pair and their parents (played by Revathi and Shiv Subramaniam on the one hand & Amrita Singh and Ronit Roy on the other).

I personally think that despite its flaws, the film may score in two respects: with more and more Indians seeking higher education and jobs outside their home states, inter-community romance and marriages are a reality in India in a way they were not till a decade ago; it willtouch a chord with such couples (however sedate their own romance may have been). Also, for many young viewers, this film would be wish-fulfilment of the highest order: Krish and Ananya study at IIM-A, find an attractive partner, secure high-paying jobs immediately after graduation and (after the parents are appeased), most likely, get to live the life of their dreams. This is what every college kid aspires to these days in an India that is incessantly upwardly mobile.

Chetan Bhagat & Bollywood

2 States has understandably high expectations from the audience – not just because it follows soon on the heels of the recent successes (Highway & Gunday) of its lead pair Alia Bhatt and Arjun Kapoor, and is produced by Karan Johar whose films habitually cross the 100-crore mark, but perhaps even more for the fact that it is a Chetan Bhagat story. 2 States is the third Hindi film to be based on a novel by Chetan Bhagat in just 6 years (after Hello in 2008 & the blockbuster 3 Idiots in 2009), and that speaks volumes about Bhagat’s popularity with India’s young. By now everybody knows that the New York Times had touted him to be ‘the biggest selling English-language novelist in India’s history’. Amish Patel might soon change that statistic, but for the time being, Bhagat is still the king of numbers and the current darling of Bollywood to boot!

He has also given a new boost to Bollywood’s sporadic affair with Indian-English fiction. Bollywood has had a lifelong affair with Bengali literature (even apart from Devdas & Parineeta). Umpteen Hindi films have been based on Bengali novels and short stories, just as many have been from Hindi and Urdu fiction, but very few films in Bollywood’s 100-year history have been inspired by or based on Indian-English fiction. That is probably because this literature was not taken seriously in India in general for a very long time. The immediate predecessor of 2 States in Bollywood is of course Raj Kumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots (2009), but its lineage actually dates back to the 1960s and 70s – to Vijay Anand’s Guide (1965) & Shyam Benegal’s Junoon (1978).

Guide (1965)

Vijay Anand’s debut film as a director is one of Bollywood’s greatest hits ever. Based on R.K. Narayan’s Sahitya Academy winning novel, it came to Nav Ketan International (the production company of the famous Anand brothers) in a circuitous way. It was originally supposed to be a joint Indo-American production with Dev Anand in the lead, but that fell through; Dev Anand, however, did not give up on the film and later produced it, with himself and Waheeda Rehman in the lead roles. 

It had a very unusual story: set in Narayan’s imaginative world of Malgudi, it is about the transformation of a tourist guide, Raju, into a spiritual leader – albeit accidentally. The catalyst is Rosie. She is a classical dancer, daughter of a devdasi, who married an archaeologist much older than herself (Marco) to gain respectability. The couple come to Malgudi owing to Marco’s research interest in its Caves, but their already unhappy marriage falls apart when Marco cheats on Rosie with a tribal girl. Rosie attempts suicide but is saved by Raju, who by then had befriended her. They fall in love and Rosie leaves Marco and takes shelter in Raju’s house. His mother is unable to accept this relationship and leaves the house; they are also socially ostracized thereafter, but they take it in their stride and jointly invest in a new ambition – Rosie’s dancing career. Inspired by Raju’s encouragement of her art (which she had been forced to give up against her will after her marriage), Rosie now devotes herself to dancing. Raju becomes her manager, and after Rosie’s initial success, they move out of Raju’s humble abode into a huge mansion of their own. But their personal relationship degenerates – Raju lives off Rosie and she, too full of her own career, drifts further away from him. Matters come to a head when Marco attempts to come back in her life, and Raju, insecure and afraid of losing Rosie, forges her signature to pre-empt further contact between them. He is convicted of forgery and sentenced to two years of prison, but released earlier because of his good conduct. Reluctant to return to Malgudi, he finds himself in the company of wandering ascetics in a small village where he is mistaken to be a sadhu. He takes to this as an actor and then becomes the role. Leaving his past behind him, he now participates in the life of the village as its spiritual guide, so that when it is affected by drought, the villagers naturally assume that he will fast for them. Fast to end the drought and bring rains. He is now caught in a dilemma of his own making and undertakes the fast. 

The film diverged from the book in many ways. The end was open-ended in the novel, whereas in the film, Raju dies in the end. More important, perhaps, is the difference in the characterization of Rosie: Rosie leaves Marco in the novel because she herself is in love with Raju and not because her husband is unfaithful to her. That was too much for a Hindi film in the 1960s, where women had no choice but to be pativratas (devoted to their husbands). Whereas the initial romance of Raju and Rosy and its later wearing away has been dramatized gloriously in the film (both through dialogue and unforgettable songs), the inconsistencies and complexity of Rosie’s character are bulldozed over to make way for a neater narrative in line with audience expectations of that era.   

R.K. Narayan was very disappointed with the Hindi film and devoted an entire chapter in his autobiography (My Days) on it. Indeed, it is perhaps better to enjoy the film on its own, as just a Dev Anand movie! Anand was great in the title role, as was Waheeda as the classical dancer. And of course what worked to the biggest advantage of the film was the dancer character – for here was a story that lent itself most naturally to the song-and-dance routines of mainstream Bollywood! Little wonder that it remains popular to this day.

Junoon(1978)

More than a decade after Guide came Junoon. The backdrop of the film, based on Ruskin Bond’s English novella A Flight of Pigeons, is the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. But the story is about a married Muslim landlord’s (Javed Khan/ Shashi Kapoor) irresistible attraction for an English girl (Ruth/ debutant Nafisa Ali), whom he locks up along with her mother in his zenana (to the impotent outrage of his wife, Firdaus/ Shabana Azmi).The beautiful young girl is terrorized and has endless nightmares of being violated by this strange man whose passion for her she cannot fathom. The mother (Miriam/ Jennifer Kendal) is, however, incipiently grateful for the protection that this man provides in the rising tensions of the progressing mutiny and the violent anti-British sentiments that it unleashes, though she stubbornly refuses his marriage proposal to her daughter. The tide turns, the British ruthlessly suppress the revolt and the English women need not fear anymore. But by this time, the zenana already bonds the women in a kind of unarticulated, undefined sisterhood – and the English girl, by slow degrees, softens towards her captor. Her final moment of release is also the moment of love – she realizes that she does not want to escape from him any more. But by then, it is too late… and an erotic, perplexed, last gaze is all the consummation they have. 

Junoon was a very interesting collaboration between Shyam Benegal and Shashi Kapoor. Both started a new phase in their careers with it. By 1978, Benegal had already established himself as the pioneer of parallel cinema in India with films like Ankur (1973), Nishant (1975), Manthan (1976) and Bhoomika (1977); & Shashi Kapoor had proved his mettle beyond Bollywood by being part of several Merchant-Ivory Productions – The Householder (1963), Shakespeare Wallah (1965), Bombay Talkie (1970) – all of which were English films with Indian content. Their collaboration thus created a unique synergy: Benegal brought the full might of the parallel cinema brigade (Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Kulbhushan Kharbanda) to bear upon this commercial venture; while Kapoor’s involvement ensured that the film was an elegant literary adaptation, which was a hallmark of Merchant-Ivory productions. Benegal and Kapoor were to come together again in Kalyug (1981); and Kapoor went on to produce some other off-beat films in the 80s – Vijeta (1982), Utsav (1984) & the cult English film, 36 Chowringhee Lane (also 1981) by Aparna Sen. But none of them did a Hindi film based on an Indian-English story again. Nor did anyone else for a long time. 

Guide & Junoon thus represent two phases of Bollywood’s affair with Indian-English fiction, separated by more than a decade – one was a Hollywood production gone wrong; and the other was an Indian production with a Raj story, but inspired to some measure by the Merchant-Ivory brand. The time was now ripe for a completely home-grown, mainstream Hindi film by a big banner inspired by an Indian-English story. It was 30 years before that could be accomplished with 3 Idiots in 2009! 

In between, there were several English films adapted from Indian-English stories – Hollywood ventures by a diasporic Indian & independent films by non-Bollywood filmmakers. I’m referring here first to Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth (1998) & Midnight’s Children (2012); and next to Shonali Bose’s Amu (2005) & Aparna Sen’s The Japanese Wife (2010). 

The 30-year gap is a long one; such a gap doesn’t help in the development of a tradition in filmmaking (and it would not in any other art form as well). But Indian-English literature was kept alive in the collective imaginary of India’s cinematic audience in the intervening time with two exceptionally successful TV Series in the 1980s – Shamkar Nag’s Malgudi Days (1986), based on R.K. Narayan’s short stories; and Shyam Benegal’s Bharat Ek Khoj (1988), based on Jawaharlal Nehru’s historical narrative, The Discovery of India.