My Mirror column:
Mrinal Sen's Chorus, 25 years after it was made, is a chilling reminder of how long India has spent making strides in the fake solutions department -- while letting the real problems fester.
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| Utpal Dutt in a still from Chorus |
Between 1970 and 1973, the late Mrinal Sen made three explicitly political films that together came to be known as the Calcutta Trilogy. Speaking to his biographer Dipankar Mukhopadhyay, Sen later said, “After Bhuvan Shome I found the smell of gunpowder in Calcutta's air something I could neither dismiss nor avoid.” Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik were almost documentary in their realism, with the Naxal-riven Calcutta of the 1970s brought to the screen with real footage of bomb blasts, firings and demonstrations.
Chorus, too, was concerned with the state of the nation, but it took a different aesthetic tack. Right from the opening scene, when Robi Ghosh appeared seated on a high white throne amid a circle of white-clad sages, it was clear that Sen had made a conscious departure from his previous work. Then Ghosh, already a recognisable comedian, broke into a kirtan, a Vaishnava-style devotional song, its deceptively genial rhythms carrying a chillingly sardonic message. “Once upon a time a king sat in his court and said to his wise men, show me a land where there is no want. Replied the pandits promptly, if there were no want, then there would be no God.” The song ends with the darkest line, “Abhaab rochen jini, tini shoktimaan [He who creates want, is the powerful one]”.
Back inside the building, we hear the cigarette-holding executive in a tie and shirtsleeves calmly order large numbers of extra forms to be printed, “Accha, chakri dite na paren, form to dite paren [Accha, you may not have jobs to give, but you can give forms]... And we're earning money from them anyway.” Cut to Utpal Dutt, playing a senior bureaucrat in a Mrinal Sen film for the second time after Bhuvan Shome, though the tenor of the role could not be more different. He seems urbane and benevolent, even reasonable, until he is informed that the crowd is getting restive. Then the camera captures his shrieking transformation in ruthless close-up: “What is security doing? Control!” We hear the sound of marching boots in the distance, an effect that recurs through the film as a symbol of state repression.
Then we see a serpentine queue, in a white expanse outside what looks a lot like the Reserve Bank of India building, with a disembodied voice on the megaphone announcing that the counter will only open at the allocated time of 10am. A wave of disappointment runs through the queue. The murmurs are followed by a sarcastic commenter singling out an oldish gentleman for having lined up. The jostling spirals out of control. Grenades are thrown. The old man falls, his glasses crashing to the floor. The word “Attention” repeats on the megaphone, sounding more and more like “Tension”.
A journalist has appeared to capture the chaos, clicking away, even climbing up and down for better angles. What Sen produces here is an early cinematic indictment of the news media. The journalist witnesses the scene, never intervening. When a man in the queue asks if all law and order has been abandoned in the country, he replies casually: “There's a war on. How can there be law and order? This isn't a game of cricket, is it?”
He does record three different characters at the scene – the old man, a young rural man, and a young college-going woman -- whom the film then follows into the arenas of their individual lives, adapting the documentary form interestingly. The film has other threads running in parallel, all a little surreal. In one, a crafty village pradhan called Chhana Mondol manages to hide his corruption and his rice-smuggling from the powers-that-be, and tells his beholden job-seeking nephew to literally go underground. In another, a millworker called Mukherjee becomes a traitor to his union, drunkenly declaring that it is his administration now.
Meanwhile, having received 30,000 applications for 100 vacancies, the bureaucrats holed up in their fortress start to imagine a countrywide conspiracy to overthrow them. Utpal Dutt's character calls in the police, who randomly start to harass 150 of the job applicants. “We are seated on a volcano. We must do something to survive. But we need some kind of excuse, a provocation.” Dutt yells. “Why the hell don't they provoke us?”
The inspirations for Chorus were many, including an actual queue of over a thousand people Sen witnessed in Dalhousie Square in Calcutta. Sen's fantasy of a tyrannical state disconnected from a jobless people left even his regular audiences baffled, though it won several National Awards and prizes at Moscow and Berlin. In a truly remarkable instance of life imitating art, the Emergency was declared less than a year after Chorus released.
Sen was prescient. But nothing ended with the Emergency. Twenty-five years later, our queues of job seekers remain as desperate. Only the megaphones have grown louder.
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