The people versus science

A respected doctor becomes the target of public anger in the uncannily resonant Ganashatru, Satyajit Ray’s 1989 take on the classic Ibsen play An Enemy of the People (1882)

 

In 1989, the filmmaker Satyajit Ray adapted into Bengali one of Henrik Ibsen’s most famous plays, written a century ago in 1882: An Enemy of the People. The original Norwegian text was about a doctor who discovers bacteria contamination in the public baths for which he is medical officer. When he tries to expose the public health hazard, he finds the spa town's powers-that-be arraigned against him - including the mayor, his own brother.

Ganashatru turns the 19th century Scandinavian town into an imaginary 20th century Indian one, while retaining the dramatic device of having brother oppose brother in public: Dr Ashoke Gupta (Soumitra Chatterjee) is pitted against his younger brother Nishith (Dhritiman Chatterjee, no relation), who is head of the municipality. But the change that makes Ray’s 1989 adaptation feel truly Indian – and uncannily prescient 30 years later – is his replacement of Ibsen’s public baths with a popular temple whose bacteria-filled water is directly consumed by thousands each day – as charanaamrit.

The Norwegian play’s Dr Stockmann finds himself under attack for trying to reveal an unsavoury truth that might cost the town its prosperity. But for the good doctor of Ray’s film, the stakes are even higher. Ibsen’s play pitted a potential health disaster against a public panic - and a righteously superior whistleblower against a corrupt cabal of media and bureaucrats. Ganashatru takes that kernel - of one man trying to tell an unpopular truth to a resistant public - and expands it into a full-blown science versus religion debate.

Except, of course, that there isn’t a debate. Hearing that the doctor has tested water samples for bacteria, the local industrialist Bhargava (who set up the temple, and the private hospital that employs Dr Gupta) shows up with a small vial of temple water. “This charanaamrita, and all charanaamrita, is free from germs,” he pronounces, speaking in English for emphasis in the midst of his Hindi-accented Bangla. “Aapni ki jaanen? Ki tulshi pata-e joler shob dosh kete jaaye? [Do you know? Ki all impurities in water are removed by tulsi patta?] It's a rhetorical question, it seems, because Bhargava has no doubt of the answer. “You won't know this, Dr Gupta,” he sneers at the stunned physician. “But Hindus have known it for thousands of years.”

‘Hindus', apparently against all lab-based evidence, 'know' that the water of Chandipur, and particularly the Gangajal-mixed water that temple devotees drink, “cannot be polluted”, so “Dr Gupta is making a mistake”. The local newspaper, having first commissioned the doctor to write about the lab's report, turns tail when it receives seventeen letters from readers – and a not-so-veiled threat to its existence from Nishith and Bhargava. Publication thus prevented, Dr Gupta plans a public lecture. A local theatre troupe pastes posters around town. A large audience assembles - but so do the turncoat editor and publisher and the poisonous Nishith.

What unfolds seems to shock our protagonist, who keeps saying he is only doing his duty as a doctor, that all he wants is for people to hear the facts so that they can make an informed decision, and that surely 'public opinion' - “janamat” - cannot be determined by editors and politicians in advance, to such an extent that they suppress any opinions they believe will be unpopular. But Dr Ashoke Gupta, if he lived in the India of 2020, would not be shocked. For anyone who lives in today's India, there is something completely commonplace about the independent-spirited doctor first being threatened, sought to be suppressed - and when that fails, discredited. While he tries to speak, his brother takes the microphone and asks if he is a Hindu. Suddenly, instead of water and sewage pipelines, the subject is the doctor not having ever worshipped at the Tripureshwar temple – so that whatever he now says is “against the temple”.

And there we have it, all the tragedy of our real-life present already distilled in this admittedly somewhat theatrical fiction from 1989: that faith takes precedence over science; that facts can be disregarded if they go against faith, especially if the source of those facts is somehow not to your taste; the keenness to preserve the image of the ideal city even at the cost of its actual well-being; the nexus between religion, politics, money and the media – and already, even in the left-ruled small town West Bengal of 1989, the quickness with which the needle of suspicion could turn upon a non-religious man.

But Ray's film is also plagued by his own predilections: he makes the doctor a hero. Unlike Ibsen’s protagonist, whose lack of humility and personal excesses ensure that he ends up fighting his battle alone, Ganashatru's Dr Ashoke Gupta isn't lonely for long. By the film's final scene, he not only has the unequivocal support of his wife and daughter, but of some kind of resistance - led by the “educated young students” of the theatre troupe and an ethical journalist who's left his job to report the farce of the public meeting to all the national papers. Hearing the sound of his name on the lips of the students marching towards his besieged house, Soumitra Chatterjee appears on the verge of tears. Watching the unreal optimism of Ray's 1989 ending in 2020, I felt on the verge of tears myself – but not of joy.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Oct 2020