Living in the Ruins

My Mirror column:

Continuing her tribute to Mrinal Sen, our columnist writes about his rarely watched gem, Khandhar (1984).

Shabana Azmi in Mrinal Sen's Khandhar (1984)

Famine, as I wrote last week, was one of the recurring motifs of Mrinal Sen’s cinema. An even more ubiquitous image in his films was the ruins. Since most of Sen’s films drew on modern Bangla literature and were set in Bengal, it’s no surprise that the ruins were almost always those of a zamindar bari. These huge residential mansions that had represented the heights of feudal grandeur in the eighteenth or nineteenth century now dot the Bengal countryside, their colossal staircases and many-pillared verandas slowly crumbling into nothingness.

Sen’s first cinematic ruin was in Baishey Shravana (1960), where it serves as the film’s first marker of the cruelty of time. When his young wife (Madhabi Mukherjee) scampers out of their hut giggling, Priyanath follows her. He watches the spring go out of her step as she enters the ruins of the old family mansion. It is impossible to be anything but grave here, standing in the shadows of what they once were, what they will never be again.

In Akaler Sandhane (1980), the decrepit zamindar bari has managed to survive into the present — not as a home, but as a film set. Its ownership is farcically split among multiple descendants, who live all over the country. The only family members still on the premises are a middle-aged woman and her paralysed husband.

But it was with Khandhar (1984) that Sen really placed the ruin centre stage. Taking a classic Bangla story by Premendra Mitra called ‘Telenapota Abishkar’ (The Discovery of Telenapota), Sen adapted the atmospheric tale of three young men making a weekend visit to a ruined rural zamindari into the 1980s and into Hindi. Dipu (Pankaj Kapur) is the surviving scion who decides to bring two friends to see his crumbling ancestral home.

As in Akaler Sandhane, the city visitors treat the ruins as merely a picturesque setting. The dry, meditative Subhash (Naseeruddin Shah) is lured literally by the prospect of a ‘photographer’s paradise’, while the more talkative Anil (Annu Kapoor) is mainly happy to have a break from the city. The fact that real lives are lived here seems not to percolate into their consciousness; not even when Subhash has an awkward encounter with Dipu’s cousin Jamini (Shabana Azmi), an attractive young woman who is wasting away in the ruins.

Sole caretaker for her paralysed mother, the fine-featured Jamini remains unmarried, half-beginning to inhabit her mother’s delusional hopes about a Niranjan who was once betrothed to her. The figure of Jamini’s mother echoes the bedridden husband in Akaler, both also producing a doomed aura of clinging on to some pride from the past. Meanwhile, the unseen Niranjan, upon whose arrival all hopes seem to be pegged, brings Khandhar into synch with other Mrinal Sen films in which an important character is the subject of conversation for much of the running time but remains unseen: Chinu (Mamata Shankar) in Ek Din Pratidin, Professor Roy (Shriram Lagoo) in Ek Din Achanak, the servant boy Palan in the scathing Kharij.

Naseer’s photographer here is allied to Dhritiman Chatterjee as the filmmaker protagonist of Akaler, both figures making reference to Sen’s own observing, extractive artistic self. The camera is Subhash’s medium of communication with people, but it is also a shield against them: a boundary.

The photograph can be a memory created for the future. It can be a way of offering attention in the present. It can also be a way of enshrining the past — or enshrining the living as if they were dead. When Subhash decides to go along to Jamini’s house, the camera is his ticket. He’ll take a picture of the paralysed aunt, he tells Dipu: “You can use it to hang on the wall when she pops it.”

There is something about Khandhar that feels haunted, without the presence of anything supernatural. Unlike in the famous Tagore tale ‘Khudito Pashan’ (The Hungry Stones), in which a young man in another ruined palace became possessed by the spirit of an ancient dancing girl, the yearning spirit here is human, and very much alive.

And yet all the photographer/filmmaker can do is to frame her through the bars of a window, atop a terrace, or against a crumbling wall covered in cowpats. Whether he picks her out by the light of a torch or a camera, all he succeeds in illuminating for an instant is her loneliness. The ruins are inescapable. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Feb 2019.