Satyajit Ray’s world of trains

My column for Mirror/TOI Plus, the fourth in my series on trains in Indian cinema:

On the filmmaker’s birth centenary, a look at how the train is a motif in many of his films, including the Apu Trilogy, Nayak and Sonar Kella

A still from Satyajit Ray's Nayak (1966), starring Sharmila Tagore and Uttam Kumar.

Satyajit Ray, whose 100^th birth anniversary was May 2, is associated with one of the most famous train sequences in all of cinema: The children, Apu and Durga in Pather Panchali, standing in a field of fluffy, white kaash flowers, listening for an oncoming train. I've always thought that what makes that sequence unforgettable is the rural Bengali landscape ruptured by the sound of the machine before the sight of it. The children hear the train's vibration in a pillar before the great beast rumbles past.

The train remained a motif throughout the Apu Trilogy, acquiring more layers of darkness with each film. What Ray had originally framed as the link between the village and the city became, in Aparajito, a marker of the distance between the two, and then in Apur Sansar, a site of potential death.

The eternal train scene in Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray's 1955 debut feature

But there are two other films in which Ray put the train to less melancholic use. The first of these was Nayak, released on May 6, 1966, in which he cast real-life Bengali matinee idol Uttam Kumar as a film star called Arindam Mukherjee. When we meet Arindam, there are two items about him in the day's papers: One, a National Award he's being given in Delhi, and two, a brawl in which he was involved the night before. It's a succinct if simplistic summary of the film actor's life -- popularity and critical achievement, but alongside infamy.

Some mention is made of Arindam having left it too late to get a seat on a plane, and Ray thus successfully places his famed and shamed hero on a long train ride that exposes him to a microcosm of the Indian upper middle class – which, 55 years ago, was snootier about film stars than it is now. From the corporate head honcho who sniffs at the brawl to the old gentleman who disapproves of films on principle, the train isn't exactly filled with Arindam fans.

But what really feels completely unreal in 2021 is the degree of unguarded interaction that the train affords between the film star and his public. Arindam is kind to little girls, signs some autographs, and then gets drunk in a train toilet. When he stumbles back to his compartment, the upper middle class housewife in it is humane enough – and female enough – to help him to bed rather than, say, take a picture of his disarray. Even the snarky journalist (Sharmila Tagore) that Arindam ends up confiding in over a long pantry car conversation, decides he is deserving of her humanity and tears up her notes. The train serves, in many ways, as a filter – Arindam is on display and yet somehow he isn't quite out in the open.

On the sets of Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress), 1974.

But by far the most sprightly use of the train in Ray's cinema is in Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress), the first film adaptation to feature his famously-popular detective, Feluda. Released in 1974, the whole film practically unfolds as a series of overlapping train journeys.

The very beginning of the adventure in Calcutta involves Feluda, played by the late Soumitra Chatterjee (who died after a battle with Covid in November 2020), silently removing from his bookshelf a hardbound copy of the Railway Timetable for November 1973. On the other side of events, we are introduced to the film's villains by being shown their names on a railway reservation chart: M Bose (Lower) and A Barman (Upper). Bose and Barman are hot on the trail of the originary set of train travellers – a six-year-old child constantly making crayon sketches of a past birth, and a parapsychologist taking him to Rajasthan in the hope of identifying the golden fortress of his drawings.

The train is also where Feluda and his nephew Topshe first meet the man who will become the third member of their trio: The mystery writer Lalmohan Ganguly alias Jatayu. He boards their compartment at Kanpur station with his red 'Japani suitcase... imported', and proceeds to speak several sentences in rather grandiloquent Hindi before realising that his companions are Bengalis, too.

It is a remarkably orderly world that Ray maps out, in which precise calculations can be made based on train timings. If a set of people hasn’t arrived at Jodhpur in the morning, they can be assumed to arrive by the evening train instead. And if the expected villains haven't shown up on the day they should have, Feluda speculates that they may have failed to get a train booking.

Trains in The Golden Fortress are the route to excitement, transporting these parties of Bengalis into the 'dacoit-infested country' of western Rajasthan. But trains are also the possible way back to order and civilisation: In one pre-climactic moment, Feluda offers Lalmohan Babu the option of getting off at Pokhran, from where he can catch a train back, rather than proceeding to Jaisalmer with them.

In one of Sonar Kella's most memorable scenes, the intrepid Bengalis get on camel-back, and try to wave a train down across the desert. It's the one time in the film that Feluda's plan doesn't succeed. The train keeps on going.

Published in Mumbai Mirror (9 May 2021) & in TOI Plus (8 May 2021).

The Bong Disconnect: the new Bengali cinema

A new Bengali cinema — cosmopolitan, urban and sanitised — now whets the appetites of a hip, globalised audience.

SOMETIME IN the 1990s, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, then a maker of ad films, went to visit an acquaintance on a Kolkata film set. “The film’s characters were meant to be modern, contemporary,” Roy Chowdhury remembers. “But the room had a palonko-style bed, of the sort that Ray might have used in Ghare Baire!” Roy Chowdhury was appalled at the filmmakers’ garbled attempt to signify modernity, which represented no contemporary Bengali he knew: behind the palonko were posters of: Subhas Chandra Bose, Sri Aurobindo, John McEnroe and Michael Jackson.

In 2007, Roy Chowdhury released his first feature film, Anuranan – The Resonance, about a London-based Bengali couple who return to Kolkata and find their relationship slowly unraveling. Anuranan ran for over 100 days all over West Bengal, bringing middle class audiences back to the cinema after several years. It also became the first Bengali film to have a US release. Roy Chowdhury had finally created a non-cringeworthy onscreen version of Bengali modernity – something that wouldn’t embarrass people like him. “For the first time, there was a Bengali hero drinking Tropicana juice and driving a Mercedes,” says Indranil Roy, a friend of Roy Chowdhury’s. His second film, Antaheen (2009), a romance in the You’ve Got Mail mode, ran for 10 weeks in Kolkata and its soundtrack by Shantanu Moitra topped Bengali charts for 21 weeks.

Roy Chowdhury is seen today as one of a handful of filmmakers who have spearheaded the rise of a new Bengali cinema, something that belongs neither in the auteur-driven, critically-acclaimed tradition of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, nor among the low-brow romances and family dramas made for the mofussil market. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Bengali middle class had a cinema to call its own: films by directors like Tapan Sinha and Tarun Majumdar. Often adapted from Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay and Sharadindu Bandopadhyay and starring matinee idol Uttam Kumar, these were well-crafted films and box office hits.

The cinema of Ray and Ghatak spawned successors like Buddhadev Dasgupta and Gautam Ghosh, but since the 1980s, their films have circulated largely on the festival circuit. Barring a few notable exceptions, “these films seemed more to keep Europeans happy,” says Suman Mukhopadhyay, director of Herbert (2005) and Chaturanga (2008). Meanwhile, the tradition of Sinha and Majumdar dissolved into low-budget mass-market films mostly rehashed from Hindi or, recently, Tamil and Telugu hits, and no production values. Bengal developed what Rahul Bose calls “a schizophrenic film culture”. “On the one hand, you had four of the country’s top arthouse filmmakers — Gautam Ghosh, Aparna Sen, Buddhadev Dasgupta and Rituparno Ghosh — living within a single square mile radius,” says Bose. “On the other hand, you had the out-and-out commercial cinema. It is the huge space in between that is now being filled.”

The target audience for this new middle-of-the-road cinema, Bose argues, is the “new urban upscale demographic” of 18 to 35-year-olds who “don’t necessarily have the artistic sensibilities demanded by great literature or great cinema, but who have a modern outlook honed by cable television and the internet.” 

Some of the changed expectations were met by an improved infrastructure of film-watching in multiplex cinemas that have appeared all over Kolkata in the last decade (and more recently in towns like Durgapur and Burdwan): plush seats, good projection, stereo sound. “But because the films were so crass, Bengalis would go to watch English films or Hindi hits,” says Roy Chowdhury. Despite the huge commercial success of family dramas like Swapan Saha’s Baba Keno Chakor (1998), or more recently, romances like Paran Jaye Joliya Re (2009), based on the hit Namastey London, the mainstream Bangla film industry is something that literate, urban Bengalis are still quick to disown. “There’s absolutely no chance I’d go to see a Paran Jaye. That’s what maids watch,” says Royona Basu, a Kolkata-based graphic designer.

This new Bengali cinema, then, is often closely tied to the aspirations of a new class: one that feels more connected to the US than to the rural hinterland that surrounds them. In it the West features again and again, as actual locale and dreamland. The most iconic of these films is perhaps Anjan Dutt’s The Bong Connection (2006). Dutt, who started out as a singer-songwriter and actor, turned director with Bada Din (1998), a Hindi film set during a Kolkata Christmas and Bow Barracks Forever (2004), an English film about the Anglo-Indian community. But it was The Bong Connection that established Dutt as someone who had successfully reached out to a post-globalisation generation. The first sign was the film’s title, which incorporated the colloquial name for Bengalis among English-speaking Indians. The film, a parallel unfolding of the lives of two young men — one a Kolkatan starting work in the US and the other a second generation NRB who decides to spend a year in Kolkata. And a new Bengali hero: upper middle class, cosmopolitan, someone with a corporate career who switches easily between Bangla and English. No longer clad in Uttam Kumar’s starched dhotis or tailored suits, he wears collared shirts, t-shirts, sometimes a kurta with jeans. Most importantly, he is young. If Anuranan’s Rahul Chatterjee was in his 30s and Bong Connection’s Apu in his 20s, Dutt’s Madly Bangalee (2009), about a Kolkata rock band, has 19 to 21-year-olds as protagonists. As 23-year-old Tanaji Dasgupta, who played a band member, points out, “Even that is big for Bengali cinema.”

BUT THE GREATER coolness quotient of these films has resulted in sanitised settings and flattened characters. Wooing upper middle class teenagers or their parents into cinemas required the on-screen world to only contain people like them. Not just the village, even the multi-layeredness of a city like Kolkata has largely disappeared from these films. There have been brave attempts to buck this trend, like Sudeshna Roy and Abhijit Sen’s charming Teen Yaari Katha (2006), an endearingly honest tale of three lower middle class boys who dream of making it big while ogling an attractive neighbourhood boudi through a hole in the wall. “Today’s autowalla too dreams of a honeymoon, or a house with a verandah where he can have evening tea,” says Roy. The film, unfortunately, never got released. The street slang and frank discussion of sex appalled many, even festival audiences.

But Roy insists that censorship had nothing to do with the film not releasing; Dutt proudly proclaims that Madly Bangalee deals with teenage sex and unmarried pregnancies; while Roy Chowdhury claims the pishimas loved his film and wanted to know why Rahul Bose and Raima Sen “didn’t actually do anything”. Filmmakers may sound optimistic, but Bengali cinema is still a long way from breaking bhadralok taboos. Roy and Guha’s Cross Connection (2009) shows its young lovers holidaying together, but steered clear of sex.

The only recent challenge to the unspoken rules of this babuana has perhaps been Suman Mukhopadhyay’s Herbert. Based on Nabarun Bhattacharya’s acclaimed novel, the film is an eerie history of the Bengali present, viewed through the prism of the strange death (and even stranger life) of one Herbert Sarkar. This is a world far removed from starched dhotis, but also from branded jeans. Mukhopadhyay explores a North Kolkata of galis dark with sewage and memories, where English is heard either as a threat or a stream of gibberish. But Herbert, a huge festival success in India and abroad, ran into controversy even before release. It was finally shown only at the arthouse Nandan cinema, and ran for five weeks.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Mukhopadhyay’s next film, an adaptation of a Tagore novel, Chaturanga (2008), ran for five weeks in 10 Kolkata theatres. The new Bengali may now aspire to corporate success, but he clings to the idea of a ‘sensitive’ inner self. Anuranan’s ‘bad husband’ has no interest in literature, while the good guy recites poetry while admiring the mountains. Even in the much younger Cross Connection, one is meant to identify with the couple who share a love of the sea and of poetry – not the ones who are starry-eyed about IT. The Bengali middle class, it seems, will take its time to shed its old self image.

Published in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 33, Dated August 22, 2009