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.

Obituary: Mrinal Sen 1923-2018

FILMS WITHOUT FEAR

Filmmaker Mrinal Sen, who died on Dec 31 at the age of 95, never stopped experimenting.

Mrinal Sen made his first film in 1955, the same year his contemporary Satyajit Ray made his illustrious debut. Pather Panchali made Ray an instant sensation. Sen’s Raat Bhore – competing in the cinemas of Calcutta with Shree 420, Nagin, Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje, two Dilip Kumar films, the Suchitra Sen starrer Bhalobasa, as well as Pather Panchali – sank without a trace.

It took him until 1959 to make a second movie. Neel Akasher Neechey, about an immigrant Chinese peddler’s bond with a nationalist Bengali woman, was a hit, garnering praise from both Jawaharlal Nehru and the Communist Party. Though he later expressed embarrassment about its sentimentality, it launched a remarkable career. It got Sen a producer for his third film, Baishey Shravana. A dark take on the human condition set against the backdrop of the 1943 Bengal Famine, Baishey earned plaudits in London and Venice. It also caused some controversy at home, partly because it used the hallowed date of Tagore's death anniversary— the 22^nd of the Indian month of Shravana—as its title, while being starkly, deliberately un-Tagorean. Mrinal Sen had arrived.

Between 1960 and 2002, Sen directed 25-odd features, winning awards nationally and abroad, from Karlovy Vary to Cannes. Unlike the perfectionist Ray, with whom he had a complicated relationship, Sen remained the eternal experimenter, making films as various as the devastating Akaler Sandhane and the cheeky Bhuvan Shome. He could handle adivasi-colonial drama (Mrigayaa) as comfortably as the contemporary politics of Naxalism (the Calcutta Trilogy: Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik) or middle class morality (Ek Din Pratidin). Sen's films were as likely to draw on the headlines as a personal experience in the city's streets, like witnessing a serpentine queue for a RBI jobs in Dalhousie Square (this was the germ of Chorus).

He was avidly political but toed no party line, and though a lover of literature, could sometimes seem more interested in the episodic film form. Even when he drew on the Indian literary greats, he was unafraid to alter them: in his Oka Oorie Katha, Premchand's chilling tale 'Kafan' became even more nihilistic, while also moving from an Uttar Pradesh setting to a Telugu-speaking one; his hauntingly evocative Khandhar transported Premendra Mitra's classic 1930s story 'Telenapota Abishkar' beautifully into the 1980s—complete with a photographer protagonist.

Born in 1923 to a lawyer in Faridpur (now in Bangladesh), Sen moved to Calcutta in 1940 to attend Scottish Church College. His subject was physics, but politics and literature drew him more. Dipankar Mukhopadhyay's fine 1995 biography suggests a voracious mind soaking up all he could from the city's cultural and intellectual spaces. After graduating, jobless and hard-up, he discovered the Imperial (now National) Library, where he spent 10 hours a day for five years, teaching himself many things, including cinema. He engaged in the vibrant Marxist addas of the time, watched plays at the Indian People’s Theatre Association (meeting Ritwik Ghatak there), and became a regular at the Calcutta Film Society formed in 1947 by Ray and Chidananda Dasgupta, though he couldn’t afford the fee.

Sen’s career had a lifelong openness. New routes excited him more than the well-trodden path, even if this meant losing his way occasionally. Inspired by watching The 400 Blows in Bombay in 1965, for example, Sen adopted the French New Wave’s jump cut, voiceover, stills and freeze frames into his next film, Akash Kusum—famously receiving brickbats in The Statesman, and triggering an infamous public spat with Ray. He dared mix up a Manto story with Tagore's 'Hungry Stones', and then cast the Hindi film star Dimple Kapadia in the resulting Bengali film (Antareen). Even when making a quietly accomplished film like Ek Din Pratidin, in which a young woman's delayed return from work becomes the vortex of social hypocrisy, Sen retained his agent provocateur persona, refusing to answer viewers who agitatedly demanded to know what 'actually happened'.

His politics could be fearlessly direct. He was thrilled with a German critic’s words about Calcutta 71: “This is a film which is not afraid to be taken as a pamphlet.” But he would never do it because it was expected of him. In later years, when asked why the dead servant boy’s father never slaps the callous, casteist employers in his masterful Kharij, Sen apparently said, “He did. He slapped all of us. Didn’t you feel it?”

We did, Mr Sen, we did.

A shorter version of this piece was published in India Today magazine, in the 14 Jan 2019 issue.

Book Review: The Best of Quest

This selection of articles from Quest, a socio-political and literary Indian magazine from the 1950s and 60s, offers perspectives that are still relevant today

The Best Of Quest
Edited by Laeeq Futehally, Achal Prabhala, Arshia Sattar
Tranquebar Press
pp 694, Rs. 695

"To organize a new union between our political ideas and our imagination – in all our cultural purview there is no work more necessary," wrote the American critic Lionel Trilling in 1946, in an essay called 'The Function of the Little Magazine'. Trilling's words were originally written in praise of the Partisan Review, a political and literary journal which began life as an organ of the American Communist Party but broke away after Stalin's rise to power, going on to complete a long and influential innings (1934-2003), with contributors ranging from Hannah Arendt and George Orwell to Susan Sontag and Philip Roth. But they seem oddly and equally suited to a journal that emerged from the other side of the political spectrum, at the other end of the world.

Titled Quest ("a quarterly of inquiry, criticism and ideas"), it was a journal started in Bombay in 1954. Laeeq Futehally, its Literary Editor, describes it as the outcome of a post-World War II resolution by a bunch of intellectuals that "never again should the minds of men be enslaved by evil ideologies and rigid "isms"." The Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in Berlin in 1950, was devoted, in Futehally's words, to "the task of creating a worldwide ambience of respect for free thought and speech". Chapters soon emerged in other countries, many with magazines. Poet Stephen Spender agreed to edit Encounter in the UK. The Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (ICCF) emerged in 1950, and in 1954, Minoo Masani (one of India's first advocates of liberalism) founded Quest, with poet and critic Nissim Ezekiel as editor.

The Best of Quest is a selection of essays, poetry and fiction from Quest's remarkable life of 20-odd years: a life brought to a close by a refusal to bow to Mrs. Gandhi's Emergency diktat that it be submitted for review before publication. Edited by Futehally, Arshia Sattar and Achal Prabhala, the volume gives us a sampling of what was clearly a superbly eclectic body of writing, united only by Ezekiel's injunction that it must be "by Indians for Indians" – a difficult condition, as Futehally points out, in "those days [when] we still glamourised anything foreign, including writers".

The poetry section offers delights both expected ("To force the pace and never to be still/ Is not the way of those observing birds/ Or women. The best poets wait for words," writes Ezekiel) and unexpected (a 1975 poem called 'Dasara' by the well-known academic Tejaswini Niranjana, who only finished her BA in 1979). The fiction section features Keki Daruwalla and Kiran Nagarkar, as well as translations of Kamleshwar and Premendra Mitra (the latter a Bengali classic called 'Telenapota Abishkar' which – the editors should really be telling us this – was made into a haunting Hindi film called Khandhar by Mrinal Sen). My personal favourite here is Arun Joshi's story 'The Gherao': deceptively straightforward and terribly moving.

But the form that really characterises Quest is the long, opinionated essay, with writers of all stripes taking on socio-cultural, political or literary subjects with idiosyncratic ease. Some of these would never get commissioned today – they are not 'topical'. But Claude Alvarez's scathing account of the "fabrication of a new religion" by Aurobindo and his companion Mira (the Mother) and the murky politics of the Ashram's takeover of Pondicherry's White Town, or Roderick Neill's sustained, almost scholarly comparison between sadhus and hippies ("In as much as they all represent channels for social deviants and adventurous individualists...the sadhu sects of India are bodies of 'drop outs'"), for example, deal with things that are very much a presence in contemporary India, and offer a perspective that can still surprise us.

On the other hand, an exchange like the one between Jyotirmoy Datta ('On Caged Chaffinches and Polyglot Parrots') and P. Lal ('Indian Writing in English: A Reply to Jyotirmoy Datta') makes one simultaneously laugh and sigh at how the same debate can carry on for half a century: is it "natural" for Indian writers to write in English, or are their reasons for doing so merely "expedient, even artistically dishonest"? Khushwant Singh provides a different sort of glimmer of recognition, despite the fact that the Delhi he describes has been almost entirely transformed in the 44 years since he wrote: "If you move in the right circles in the Capital, you need not cook any food in your house. It can be one continuous round of lunch, cocktail and dinner parties."

These occasional chuckleworthy moments apart, however, Quest comes across as largely focused on important and high-minded subjects: 'Persistence of the Caste System', 'Reflections on the Chinese invasion', 'The Concept of Justice and Personal Law in India'. "Quest was so far above popular culture and so disdainful in its indifference to the strange and bizarre events of everyday India that it needed at least one regular column that did some lampooning," the poet Dilip Chitre writes in a postscript, explaining why he felt the need to complement his 'serious pieces' on Indira Gandhi or Nirad C. Chaudhuri (written under his own name) with the irreverent pieces he wrote under the pseudonym 'D.'. D.'s columns ranged from a self-described "barbaric comparison" of Raj Kapoor's "chocolate-box love story" Bobby with Satyajit Ray's "saccharinous famine" in Ashani Sanket – where Ashani Sanket is found wanting because it does not even entertain the masses – to the argument that the sexiness of Hindi film heroines depended on their plumpness, "which goes to strengthen one's suspicion that more than one kind of starvation accounts for the female star's appeal in the Hindi cinema".

Some advertisements from the pages of Quest magazine

The editors must be thanked for bringing us a volume of scintillating – if sometimes verbose – writing from an era that seems enormously distant in some ways and not quite over in others. They have provided for those who want the dope on Quest being indirectly funded by the CIA (apparently it was, but the editors didn't know that) and offered much joy by reproducing advertisements from the pages of the original Quest. (Sample: 'When Sol has done his worst/ And really got you down/ Turn on a RALLIFAN and be/ The coolest man in town") But I have one complaint, which is that they have provided no introductions to the essays. There is not even a list of contributors, so that one will forever have to keep guessing about the identity of the wonderful Hamdi Bey who tells us that George Orwell thought of himself as "civilised" as opposed to Kipling who was "coarse", and wondering whether the author of 'The Gherao' is the same Arun Joshi who wrote the marvellous The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. Such a brilliant act of excavation, and an uncurated display?

Published in the Sunday Guardian, 20 Nov 2011.