Prism of His Writings
De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) is amongst the works that motivated Ray most deeply. In 1951, he describes this film as a triumphant rediscovery of the fundamentals of cinema.
When Satyajit Ray, as a child, went with his mother to Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a short poem for him, the last lines of which translate as ‘But I failed to see with my eyes, just two steps away from my home/ On a sheaf of paddy grain, a drop of dew.’ Attracted by the obvious – the mountain or the ocean – we often fail to notice the beauty in the ordinary. Tagore’s influence on Ray would only grow with time. Much later, Ray would quote his teacher Nandalal Bose ‘Draw a tree, but not in the Western fashion. Not from the top downwards. A tree grows up, not down. The strokes must be from the base upwards…’ But it took a student of his sensitivity to appreciate ‘This was basic – the reverence for life, for organic growth.’
Despite being India’s most original and composite artist after Tagore, whose oeuvre in cinema, literature, music and graphic design is acclaimed all over, his impact on the common people – outside Bengali speaking areas and some Western countries – has been rather limited. Is it because of the language barrier? Is it because of his style and method? Evidently, one has to immerse in his films, read his literary outpourings and observe how his diverse talent coalesced to produce some of world’s most memorable movies.
Ray’s writings on cinema – direct, authoritative and unpretentious – often provide the key. In his first book of collected essays titled Our Films, Their Films, his mind gets revealed in an amazing manner. Although more reflections on the history, art and craft of cinema would come out of his pen later, and Ray himself would make films belonging to different genres, OFTF remains a source book for understanding Ray’s work.
Noting the complex process of the ‘triangular relationship between the maker, the machines and the human materials that is deployed’, Ray cites an example during the shooting of his first film Pather Panchali. On the first day when he was planning to take a shot ‘of the girl Durga observing her brother Apu – who is unaware of her presence – from behind a cluster of swaying reeds’, his friend, a professional cameraman, suggested ‘an enormous close-up of Durga’s face, backlit by the sun and framed by the swaying, shimmering reeds…’ The irresistible shot was taken, but was rejected later at the cutting room. ‘… the scene simply did not call for such an emphatic close up. For all its beauty, or perhaps because of it, the shot stood out in blatant isolation from its companions, and spoilt the scene.’
He learned that ‘a shot is beautiful only if it is right in its content, and this rightness has little to do with what appears beautiful to the eye…’ This discipline, which may appear rather austere in our cinematic tradition that revels in ‘letting loose of emotions’ or portraying sheer prettiness of face, has been a hallmark of his creativity. He had once lamented ‘It is incredible that a county which has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the film maker.’ That was his preparatory phase.
Ray has often been criticised for the lack of anger in his films, even in the Calcutta trilogy set against the backdrop of a turbulent Bengal of the left radical days. Shatranj Ke Khilari was also criticised by some as having been meditative and not harsh enough against the vile colonial power. ‘Consider the Fujiyama. Fire within and calm without. That is the symbol of the true oriental artist.’ is what his professor at Santiniketan once told him. This statement provides an insight into Ray’s mind. Angst, if controlled or internalised, can be creatively metamorphosed.
He wrote on directors he had admired – Chaplin, Renoir, Ford, Hitchcock, Kurosawa and discussed about Griffith, Wilder, De Sica, Bergman, Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni, and the like. Most of them made films markedly different in style and content from Ray’s. Yet there were creative aspects that made an impress on Ray. For example, he opines ‘… that in a Ford film the camera is a sensitive observer, always sure of the best view point, while in (Orson) Welles, it is a dexterous participant, exploring all manners of viewpoints.’ Those who know how Ray ‘wrote’ cinema with his camera would appreciate the significance of this comparison.
But were his ideas of what constitutes the ‘cinematic’ too subtle for the common viewer? In exemplifying the ‘mysterious, indefinable quality of poetry’ in the best of Ford’s Western films, Ray writes ‘Let me describe one such moment from the film Fort Apache. Two men stand talking on the edge of a deep ravine. There is a bottle lying alongside. One man gives it a casual kick and sends it flying over the edge. A few seconds later, in a gap in the conversation, the soundtrack registers the faintest of clicks. That’s all. This is the sort of thing that belongs uniquely to the cinema…’
De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves is amongst the works that motivated Ray most deeply. In 1951, he describes this film as a triumphant rediscovery of the fundamentals of cinema. ‘The simple universality of its theme, the effectiveness of its treatment, and the low cost of its productions make it the ideal film for the Indian film maker to study… The Indian film maker must turn to life, to reality. De Sica, not De Mille, should be his ideal.’
In 1966, outlining the odds against film making, he wrote ‘It is the bareness of means that forces us to be economical and inventive, and prevents us from turning craftsmanship into an end in itself’. Eight years later, he would praise two films made by debutants, M.S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa and Shyam Benegal’s Ankur. By then Ray has silently changed the course of Indian cinema.
When Jean Renoir came to Calcutta in 1949 to shoot for The River, the young Satyajit came close to him. Renoir advised ‘If you could only shake Hollywood out of your system and evolve your own style, you would be making great films here’. How prophetic his words turned out to be!
During the birth centenary celebration of Ray (1921-1992), would it not be worthwhile to revisit his films that have made our world so very luminous?
Ritwik Ghatak
The Bengali director’s films are one of the most powerful artistic articulations of the trauma of displacement after the Partition.
India’s moment of liberation from the British was also a moment of rupture: with independence came partition on August 15, 1947. Partition did not mean quite the same thing for Punjab and Bengal – the two provinces that got divided on the eastern and western borders of India – but there was one aspect that was common to both: most ordinary citizens found it difficult to accept the fact of partition and their lives changed beyond recognition once they became refugees.
And yet, as far as Bengal was concerned, Partition hardly had any immediate thematic impact on film or literature. The first Bengali novel to deal with partition came out only in 1955 – Narayan Sanyal’s Bakultala P.L.Camp. But it was highlighted on celluloid much earlier, in the 1950 classic, Chinnamul (The Uprooted), by Nemai Ghosh. This landmark film, which ushered in Bengali cinematic realism, relates the story of a group of farmers from East Bengal who are forced to migrate to Calcutta because of Partition. Ghosh used actual refugees as characters and extras in the film, but there were some seasoned theatre actors in the cast as well. One of them was Ritwik Ghatak – who would soon turn director himself and make the partition theme his own.
Ghatak’s films are one of the most powerful artistic articulations of the trauma of displacement after the Partition. The cultural unity of the two Bengals was an article of faith with him. He never accepted the Partition and it became an obsessive theme with him.
In a cinematic career that spanned over 25 years until his death in 1976 at the age of 50, Ghatak left behind him eight feature films, 10 documentaries and a handful of unfinished fragments. But he is remembered mostly for his feature films. Recognition came his way very late, as he had the misfortune of being largely ignored by the Bengali film public in his own lifetime. This was particularly unfortunate; as Ghatak was one of the most innovative of Indian filmmakers, developing an epic style that uniquely combined realism, myth and melodrama in his films.
Before he came to films, however, Ghatak had been involved with the Indian People’s Theatre Association, the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India, which, since 1943, led a highly creative movement of politically engaged art and literature, bringing into its fold the foremost artists of the time. IPTA had a profound influence on Ghatak. True to its credentials, he strongly believed in the social commitment of the artist; hence, even when he left theatre for cinema, he always made films for a social cause.
Cinema, to him, was a form of protest; and more than any other artist of his time, he used this medium to highlight the biggest contemporary issue in India – the Partition and its aftermath. As he once said: “Cinema, to me, is a means of expressing my anger at the sorrows and sufferings of my people. Being a Bengali from East Bengal, I have seen untold miseries inflicted on my people in the name of independence – which is fake and a sham. I have reacted violently to this – and I have tried to portray different aspects of this in my films.”
Ghatak was, however, averse to the term “refugee problem”. In one of his interviews, he said, “I have tackled the refugee problem, as you have used the term, not as a ‘refugee’ problem. To me it was the division of a culture and I was shocked”. This shock would give birth to a trilogy on the Partition – Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-capped Star), 1960; Komal Gandhar (E Flat), 1961; and Subarnarekha (The Golden Thread), 1962. In them, he highlighted the insecurity and anxiety engendered by the homelessness of the refugees of Bengal; tried to convey how Partition struck at the roots of Bengali culture; and sought to express the nostalgia and yearning that many Bengalis felt for their pre-Partition way of life.
Meghe Dhaka Tara, based on Shaktipada Rajguru’s Bengali novel of the same name, is one of Ghatak’s best-known films on this theme. It also has the distinction of being the only film by him that had been well received by the audience on its release. The narrative centers round Nita (Supriya Chowdhury), a refugee in a colony in Calcutta, who struggles to maintain her impoverished family – at first, giving private tuitions to school children; and then, as the financial situation worsens at home, by working full-time in an office, giving up on her own graduate studies. She is the exploited daughter, taken-for-granted sister, and betrayed lover – and ends up being just a source of income for the family. She is the victim not just of the Partition, but of familial pressures, and her life ends tragically fighting tuberculosis – though not before she cries out her desire to live to her brother (Anil Chatterjee) in a hill sanatorium and admitting that she had wronged in accepting injustice, that she should have protested for her rights.
Komal Gandhar revolves round the progressive theatre movement in Bengal in the early 1950s, set against the memories of Partition. The protagonists, Bhrigu and Anasuya (Supriya Chaudhuri and Abanish Banerjee), belong to two rival theatre groups; but they come close because of their shared passion for the theatre and their shared longing for the homes they had to leave behind in East Bengal. This film was one of Ghatak’s own favourites because of the challenge of operating at different levels: in it, he drew simultaneously on the divided heart of Anasuya (who is torn between Bhrigu and Samar, the man she was betrothed to years ago, now living in France), the divided leadership of the theatre movement, and the pain of divided Bengal. But his audience was not prepared for such a complex film and rejected it out of hand.
Subarnarekha, once again, is about refugees from East Bengal and centres around a brother and sister pair (played by Abhi Bhattacharya and Madhabi Mukherjee). In search of a better living and a secured future for his sister, Seeta, Ishwar (who is more of a father than a brother to the little girl), leaves their refugee colony in Calcutta and takes up a job in an iron foundry in the remote, rocky district of Chhatimpur, in neighbouring Bihar. But his sister ironically faces the same grinding poverty that he wanted her to avoid when she elopes with and marries a penniless writer, Abhiram (Satindra Bhattacharya), her childhood playmate and a low-caste boy whom Ishwar had adopted while leaving Calcutta.
Brother and sister meet again in exceptional circumstances: she is the prostitute he comes to after a night of mad abandon with his friend in Calcutta; and he is her first client, when Abhiram’s sudden death in an accident leaves her with no other option but to turn to this trade. Ishwar is devastated by the encounter and Seeta kills herself, watched by her son. At the end of the film, an aged Ishwar leads Seeta’s child to the promised ‘new house’ in Chhatimpur by the river, which forms the leitmotif throughout the film.
Nita, Sita, and Anasuya, the three heroines of Ghatak’s Partition trilogy, are flesh and blood women of his times, but Ghatak gives their contemporary tales of suffering a timeless appeal by giving them a mythic dimension. In their own unique ways, they represent the travails of Durga, Sita and Sakuntala respectively – parallels that has been brilliantly analysed byAshish Rajadhyaksha in his book, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (1982).
No other Bengali filmmaker had the kind of deep engagement with the theme of Partition as Ghatak had. In fact, in all the four decades since his death, partition seems to have been significantly absent from the very imagination of directors. However, in the last few years there has been a slight change: 2013 saw the release of Meghe Dhaka Tara, a theatrical biopic of Ghatak directed by Kamleswar Mukherjee, with Saswata Chatterjee in the lead role. In 2015, after decades, a Partition film was released: Srijit Mukherji’s Rajkahini, with Rituparna Sengupta playing the lead. It’s about how a brothel keeper, Begum Jaan, and her 11 inmates defy the Radcliffe Line that passes through their brothel, refusing to budge from their ‘home’. Let’s hope that this film will start a new trend of Partition films.
Ghatak and Partition
Cinema, by Ghatak’s own admission, was nothing more than a means of expression. After using literature as a tool, he had joined the CPI and the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in 1951 to get his point across. However, he soon realised the limitation of the medium and recognised the potential of films to reach millions of people. And films he chose.
“It (cinema) is a means of expressing my anger at the sorrows and sufferings of my people,” Ghatak had said in one of his interviews as quoted in his book, Cinema and I. His films do bear his anger as the director, unlike his contemporaries, placed Partition and the sense of loss it created on the foreground of all his films. He obdurately refused to present a unified picture of Bengal or look at the jubilation of Independence. Instead, he focussed on the price one had to pay for it and compelled the audience to do the same. While this sense of loss created by displacement engulfs all his films, it is most palpably felt in Meghe Dhaka Tara (1961), Komol Gandhar (1961) and Subarnarekha (1962), also known as Partition trilogy.
Infuriated by the “clamour” of Independence, Ghatak populates his films with characters who were forcibly uprooted from their motherland. Almost all of them share the director’s insouciance and disenchantment towards Independence, if not rage. In Meghe Dhaka Tara — a searing tale of a family with bourgeois aspirations who inadvertently end up exploiting one of their members — a song celebrating Independence is sung at a school next to the colony in which Nita, the protagonist, resided with her family. It not only pronounces the struggle they were going through but also shows how ironic the verses were. In Subarnarekha, Ghatak undercuts the optimism of the refugees as a patriotic song sung by them is followed by a man exclaiming in horror, “We’ve been duped. Somewhere, we have been duped.”
The decadence of the physical habitat the characters resided in, owing to being “duped” by the promise of Independence, forms the crux of Ghatak’s narrative. Having left their land behind and posited in a new city they know little about, the filth of Calcutta enters the very bones and souls of these characters. His narratives are unified by their moral degradation as the perpetual state of loss and penury metamorphose them into a grotesque version of their past self.
In Meghe Dhaka Tara, the grief of losing all that they had transforms the family into predators as they feed on Nita. The mother blames her apparent cruelty to their perpetual poverty. And when Nita coughs blood, her father screams out loud, “I accuse,” only to recoil and add, “Nobody”. He is as guilty as the rest in exploiting her.
The refugee family in Meghe Dhaka Tara gives way to two lone figures- Ishwar and Sita in Subarnarekha. The grime that was restricted to a house in the first film of the trilogy expands and overwhelms the entire city by the time Ghatak arrives at the final film. Relics of the war lay scattered as Ishwar leaves the colony and takes his sister with him to give her a new lease of life, a house that would perhaps resemble the one they had left behind. He joins a factory and earns the epithet of being a traitor from others. Later, the same Ishwar, in a singular moment of dramatic co-incidence, arrives at the doorstep of his sister on a night of drunken stupor as a patron. Sita’s husband had passed away in an accident, leaving her alone with her son to fend for herself. Sita, who used to sing krishna kirtan, was forced to sing for people in exchange of money. The degradation of the city not only “corrupts” Ishwar and his sister, but also irrevocably tarnishes their bond leading Sita to kill herself.
Komol Gandhar, the second film in the trilogy is perhaps the most hopeful. Narrating the story of two theatre groups, the film might be free of some of the oppressive despair of Meghe Dhaka Tara, but the love between the protagonists is unable to triumph over the irrevocable sense of loss they suffered from. “We lost everything. Father died like a beggar, Mother died of starvation,” Bhrigu, the protagonist tells Anasua, the woman from the rival theatre group he was in love with, as he points towards what was one his home. The serenity of the river Padma accentuating the claustrophobia of the smoke-filled, dingy Calcutta.
Knowing too well that people were already numb with the violence, Ghatak refrained from introducing gore in his narrative. He documented the pathos and struggle of his characters to come to terms with their reality by resorting to language and nostalgia, and in turn, reconstructed the identity of the land they had left behind. The land they were forced to leave assumes an idyllic status the moment it is contrasted with the murk of Calcutta they were abandoned in.
Women in Ghatak’s films
Standing at the heart of his tempestuous Partition trilogy are the women Nita, Anasua and Sita. Ghatak weaves the tales of loss around them till they begin personifying it. Women being used as a metaphor of a motherland has been a tried and tested practice. “During the days of anti-colonial nationalism, the images again gathered importance as they were used to symbolise the Motherland, race, language, nation, etc,” Anindya Sengupta, Professor at Jadavpur University writes in the article The face of the mother: Woman as image and bearer of the look in Ritwik Ghatak’s films. But Ghatak destabilises this. The women in his films do not present a picture of abundance, rather they mired in poverty. “Ghatak’s use of the images differs largely from the nationalist use by opening up the hitherto closed significations. He was using the images somewhat against the official nationalist discourse, commenting on the betrayal of the promise of anti-colonial struggle of Independence in the subsequent transfer of power in 1947,” he writes.
Sengupta makes a pertinent point here. Ghatak does depart from the common practice as the women in his films — betrayed, tortured, and ultimately sacrificed, resemble the land they had behind. Women serve as his voice of protest and also as the objects through which he vents his anger. They are that part of Bengal others are carrying with themselves and as they perish so does the identity of the land.
Even though living in a family that is struggling to make ends meet, Nita is the only person who is defiant to not let her brother and suitor undertake the sundry jobs. She knows that doing that would eventually rob them of their identities. She struggles for them and also suffers. And as she gets more embroiled in it, her frailty gets more pronounced. Nita emerges as no hero even though she is likened her to Uma, the goddess of fertility through the songs. She succumbs with a feeble cry, “Dada, ami bachte chai.” (Brother, I want to live), perhaps echoing the cry of the left-behind land itself. Ghatak follows a similar practice in Subarnarekha. Sita, unlike her mythical counterpart does not return to the earth, pristine. Abused, commodified and ravaged by the city, she kills herself. In the post-Partition world, even the goddesses do not survive.
Ghatak and his unique position as a director
“One doesn’t notice any influence of other schools of filmmaking on his work. For him Hollywood might not have existed at all.” Satyajit Ray had written about his contemporary Ghatak in the forward of the latter’s book. Moinak Biswas, Professor, Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University echoes Ray’s opinion, “Ghatak was indeed a solitary figure so far as filmic conventions are concerned. It is difficult to find a school that he would fit into,” he says.
Partition forever haunted Ghatak and the “refugee problem” that arose out of it became a much broader issue for him — a division of culture. The films he made, the techniques he used can all be read as reaction against it as they stood out significantly among those made by his contemporaries.
At a time when others were experimenting with neo-realism style of filmmaking, Ghatak had fallen back on the much-abused genre of melodrama. He sought to use this genre —so popular during the 1950s and 60s— as a political tool to convey his message. He believed that “a truly nationalist cinema will emerge from the much abused form of melodrama when truly serious and considerate artists will bring the pressure of their entire intellect upon it,” and he duly acted upon creating some.
“Something had to be done,” the character Neelkantho Bagchi said in the director’s last film Jukti Tokko Goppo just before his death. It is not incidental that Ghatak played Bagchi in the film. The cry is familiar. If one listens closely, one can hear each character in Ghatak’s film say this, sometimes in rage, sometimes in exasperation, sometimes letting the words out as an incomprehensible sigh. They might not use similar words but the tongue with which they are uttered remains the same.
From one filmmaker to another: the magic of Bimal Roy’s cinema explained
In edited excerpts from a reissued book of essays on Bimal Roy, Shyam Benegal deconstructs the renowned filmmaker’s cinematic approach and themes.
Shyam Benegal
The film which hit me between my eyes was Do Bigha Zamin. I was a schoolboy then. It had struck me as different from anything I had seen before. No film had ever made me discover its maker until then. Do Bigha Zamin was the film that made me look for the name.
Later, I saw some of his earlier works—for example, the Hindi version of Barua’s Devdas in which he was the cameraman—when I was well on my way to become a film-maker. It was more of a professional interest for me then to see how Bimal Roy had progressed and developed from cameraman to author. During his time, the Bombay film industry had people like Mehboob Khan on one side and film-makers like V. Shantaram on the other—these two were big names—and most people went to see their films not because there were stars in it but because it was a Mehboob Khan or a Shantaram film. The third big name was Bimal Roy.
The Pioneer
Bimal Roy’s works stand out for their photography. He took great care to reveal the light source and introduced a sense of time. More importantly, it connected one to reality. You could tell what time of the day a situation was taking place.
His experience as a cameraman was a great asset to him as a director. There had been other cameramen as well, but they had never paid attention to the source of light in photography before him. This brought in a new element in telling of a story. The time of the day was important to him, which gave the audience a better idea. I must admit though that some of the early films that came from Prabhat, in Pune, of that period, had a similar quality, more because of the way they made the sets or the kind of costumes and make-up they used. Fateh Lal and Damle’s works were marked by sets that were realistic. Costumes and scenarios were realistic and the performing style was different from that of Bengali films. The formal style of acting in Bengali films was much more theatrical. When I say theatrical, I mean theatre as practised in Bengal. And theatre as practised in Bengal of that time was greatly influenced by European and British theatre—especially urban theatre. So the very concept of realism came from late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century theatre, while in Prabhat it came directly from life.
Do Bigha Zamin (1953).
As long as Bimal Roy made Bengali films, they were a part of a certain kind of Bengali tradition. It was only after he came to Bombay that there was a change. Do Bigha Zamin in this context is a watershed, especially in terms of performances. A certain tradition of acting becomes less and less theatrical, when you suddenly find that people are natural and are involved with life rather than in performing a role. All these elements came to my notice. And I think that must have also been due to the kind of environment he found himself in Bombay. Bombay itself had a different kind of tradition. It was more akin to Parsi theatre. Remember Sagar Movietone Productions and all the others of that time. There was a certain kind of tradition here but Roy appeared distinct from all that was around. And therefore he seemed to be on that route where eventually you saw Satyajit Ray make the greatest leap.
The Human Module
When I say he was connecting to reality, and using the human module, I mean that Bimal Roy was making human beings seem as human beings. This was quite unlike what you can do with the camera lens; like create a ‘hero’ or give them ‘heroic proportion’ making characters look larger than life, or reduce them. These were some of the expressionist devices of cinema. German cinema did a lot of this. I do not know how Bimal Roy evolved all this. My knowledge of him is entirely through his works.
I imagine that he was part of the New Theatres tradition. It had a humanizing tendency that was mainly because of the kind of liberal background from which Bengali cinema had emerged, particularly in the 1930s. It was intellectual and liberal, both in the Western and Indian sense. In their approach to cinema there was a kind of ‘reform-mindedness’ that came from their liberal attitude, which was against orthodoxy.
Selection of Themes
And this humanism was manifest in his selection of themes, like in the film Sujata, which is about a Harijan girl. Most of his films are consciously concerned with reforms or with social morality of one kind or another; he was not an escapist in any sense of the term. The family was the social unit through which were dealt issues like economic inequality and social oppression. His films are more from the viewpoint of a sympathetic outsider. Do Bigha Zamin is a deeply sympathetic portrayal of a rickshawpuller and peasant Shambhu. The trend of ‘participant view’ came much later. But for Bimal Roy’s time this was remarkable.
Kali Ghata Chhaye, Sujata (1959).
A ‘Compromised’ Film-maker?
I can tell you what had happened to give rise to this allegation. His liberal views after the 1940s in India was being replaced by radical views in painting or other arts. We did not see radical films though. But the whole critical atmosphere started to turn very radical at the time of Independence and soon after it. And those who held essentially liberal views, including film-makers, were seen as those who did not go ‘far enough’. That is exactly what happened. If critics started to say things about Bimal Roy’s compromise, it was because of that feeling; of people like him, not having gone far enough.
On hindsight you can at least see Bimal Roy’s viewpoint as not being invalid. He represented a certain kind of evolution of the urban middle class or what I would call the evolution of the middle-class intelligentsia. He represented the point of view of the urban intelligentsia. I do not see that as invalid at all. Now, it is historically important for us to know how he evolved in the context of the radicalism of the 1950s or 1960s and how this kind of radical ideas developed. The radicalism eventually crystallized only in the 1970s. It rarely showed itself in films of the 1950s. Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak were in Bengal, representing to some extent these radical views through their works. Satyajit Ray of course holds a distinct Jungian, liberal view of the world. Ray crystallized in a more defined way these ideas than Bimal Roy, but this was because Bimal Roy was not working in Bengal but in Bombay. Bimal Roy’s working atmosphere was neither helping nor nurturing him. He tended to get isolated here. As for the subject for his films Bimal Roy took them from Bengali literature or Bengal. Guru Dutt, strangely enough, did the same thing. He chose his subject matter from Bengal though he did not work there. But having spent his early years there, Guru Dutt too responded more easily to currents there than in Bombay. Take Pyaasa for instance or Sahib Bibi Aur Gulam. These are films that are much more representative of the Bengali ethos than of Bombay’s, but that is not the case with the works of Bimal Roy.
Zumli Sang, Madhumati (1958).
What was inevitable did happen in the case of Bimal Roy and also Guru Dutt—constraints in selecting subjects. To get the social content they believed in and also make contact with the audience became extremely difficult for both towards the end of their careers. This eventually brought personal alienation and confusion in works. And making films they believed in became less and less easy, I am sure. This struggle, as you said, was inevitable. In that sense I see Bimal Roy’s confusion parallels Guru Dutt’s. He was never certain of what was going to be his next film and whether he was indeed going to make another and whether he felt excited about it or not. It is true for all film-makers.
Excerpted with permission from Bimal Roy The Man Who Spoke in Pictures, edited by Rinki Roy Bhattacharya and Anwesha Arya, Penguin Random House India.
desire, disease, and domesticity: a photo essay on bimal roy’s “bandini”
In the slim canon of Indian Women-in-Prison films, Bimal Roy’s acclaimed Bandini (1963) stands out both for its technical artistry and thematic complexity. The penultimate entry in the Bengali filmmaker’s famously female-centric filmography, Bandini explores the psychological state of Kalyani (played by a stunning Nutan), a woman incarcerated for murder, and the events that lead her into committing the depraved crime. Roy intertwines the classic themes of women’s melodrama—sacrifice, hysteria, and romantic dilemmas—with the political concerns of pre-independent India, staging a sprawling film where jail is just one of the many spaces in which women’s desires and freedoms are strictly regulated. As Kalyani navigates patriarchal domesticity, prison, and heterosexual love, she exemplifies Oren Shai’s assertion about Women-in-Prison films: “Rather than being set free, the incarcerated woman passes from one form of oppression to another.” Roy’s richly symbolic visual compositions and his inventive use of songs add further layers to the film, both undercutting and underlining his narrative in interesting ways.
“Roy intertwines the classic themes of women’s melodrama—sacrifice, hysteria, and romantic dilemmas—with the political concerns of pre-independent India, staging a sprawling film where jail is just one of the many spaces in which women’s desires and freedoms are strictly regulated.”
DISEASE AND DESIRE
In The ‘Desire to Desire’, Mary Ann Doane’s writes that the American women’s films (or “weepies”) of the 1930s and 40s are structured around “the impossible position of women in relation to desire in a patriarchal society” (96). Female desire is coded as a dangerous and impermissible excess in these films, and is systematically denied through various narrative scenarios until the woman is restored to her proper place as the passive object of male desire. One such scenario is represented by the “medical discourse” film—a type of melodrama in which a woman’s desire manifests itself as disease and must be cured by the clinical/erotic gaze of a male doctor. Populated by ill, manic, and masochistic women, Bandini—although part of a cultural and cinematic tradition entirely distinct from Doane’s field of study—embodies this template perfectly.
I. The transgressiveness of Kalyani’s desire for Bikash (Ashok Kumar), the radical freedom fighter held under house-arrest in her village, is evident from the fact that her first meeting with him involves a literal (and physical) transgression: Tasked by a friend to pass on a note to Bikash from his Party, she lies to a police officer to make it past the barbed fence surrounding Bikash’s house and then slips the note through cracks in the wall. When she first sets eyes on him, her face is framed—tellingly—behind the jail-like bars of a window. Kalyani also speaks of secret trysts and transgressions in “Mera gora ang lai le,” the song she subsequently sings about her infatuation with Bikash: “Take away my fair complexion/make me dark-coloured/so I can blend into the night/and be with my lover.”
II. “The clinical eye is a most masculine eye” writes Doane (225). It represents two drives that patriarchal society assumes as male prerogatives: desire and knowledge. It is Kalyani’s appropriation of this gaze—both erotic and epistemological—that leads to her downfall in Bandini. Bikash arrives at her doorstep one night; sensing Kalyani’s coyness at receiving him at such a late hour, he turns to leave. But she stops him, noticing that he has a high fever, and insists that he wait inside until the rain subsides. She fans him as he sleeps, and eventually falls asleep herself. When they awaken, their arms intertwined, a group of villagers are gathered at the door, chastising them for their impropriety. Bikash attempts to resolve the issue by announcing his intentions to marry Kalyani and thus legitimize their affections. However, Bikash is forced to leave town suddenly for an emergency, and he never returns. Months later, unable to bear the public dishonor of being spurned, and the rumor-mongering of the villagers, Kalyani runs away in the middle of the night.
III. Hysteria, derived from the Greek word for uterus, is the “paradigmatic female disease;” it blurs the line between the mind and body, between character and corpus, and between subject and object (Doane 226). In the women’s film, hysteria has historically been the manifestation—and invalidation—of a desiring female subjectivity.
Having run away, Kalyani finds work as a nurse in a hospital, where she is assigned to a hysteric prone to irascible bouts of mania and rage. When Kalyani first meets the woman, Roy frames them together in a mirror, foreshadowing Kalyani’s eventual devolution into hysteria herself. A few days later, Kalyani receives the devastating news of her father’s sudden death. While still in a grief-stricken daze, she is summoned rudely by the hysteric and receives another crushing blow: the woman’s husband turns out to be Bikash, the unrequited object of Kalyani’s desire. Overcome with rage and jealousy, Kalyani kills the woman by poisoning her tea. When Bikash comes to inquire about his wife’s death, Kalyani confesses to the murder with manic screams, sobbing and tearing at her hair in the textbook image of a hysteric.
IV. It is a doctor’s gaze that finally recuperates Kalyani and leads to her release from prison, both literal and mental. When we first meet Kalyani, she is wracked by masochistic guilt and volunteers to nurse a tuberculosis patient at risk to her own health—atoning, in a sense for her previous two attempts at tending to the sick, both of which end in disaster because of her desirous and hysteric impulses.
Right from the beginning, Kalyani’s relationship with the doctor is carefully regulated within the active/passive binary of onscreen heterosexual desire; in fact, as Doane writes, “the doctor exercises an automatic power and mastery in the [doctor-patient] relation, which is only a hyperbolization of the socially acceptable ‘norm’ of the heterosexual alliance” (226). Unlike her interactions with Bikash, Kalyani is never seen looking at the doctor through the bars of the window; instead, she is framed in profile, her gaze averted from him.
Although Kalyani is not his patient per se, the doctor, desiring her, concerns himself with both her physical and mental health. He sends her special meals to prepare her body to withstand exposure to tuberculosis; when she resists his advances, reminding him of her sins, he says that he is determined to “save her” in spite of her past. “Don’t ruin your future in penance for your past,” he advises her. Elsewhere, he tells her that he believes even C-class convicts like her to be deserving of respect. He interprets and psychoanalyzes her, becoming a “site of a knowledge which… controls [her] female subjectivity” (Doane 210). His clinical mode of wooing her by “reading” her is literalized in the scene that marks their first erotic exchange: When he insists on checking her pulse, the camera closes in on Kalyani’s face, which winces with both excitement and guilt in response to his touch.
The doctor’s insistence on forgiving and marrying Kalyani leads to her recounting her life’s story to the prison Inspector (i.e., as in the case of psychoanalysis, an “inducement to narrate” is used as a means of extricating her from jail, as well as her own self-imposed debasement) (Doane 217). Pitying the tragedy of her life, the Inspector appeals for her early release and sends her off to unite with the doctor, who becomes, through his medical/erotic gaze, both romantic partner and moral guardian. The Inspector’s parting words to Kalyani are, however, cautionary: “You are now rid of me, but you’ll be a prisoner of the household for the rest of your life.”
LIBERATING THE MOTHER/LAND
Set in 1934, fifteen years before India achieved independence from the British Raj, the events of Bandini take place against the backdrop of the Indian independence struggle, imbuing the film’s themes of imprisonment and freedom with a double valance. Specifically, the film offers a glimpse into the complex ways in which questions of women’s liberation were negotiated within the emerging discourse of nationalism and sovereignty.
I.
The particular political context of Bandini is made clear in the first act of the film, which devotes a long song-sequence to the execution of a freedom fighter. As he is led through the prison towards the noose, he sings “Don’t cry, mother / You have many sons.” He addresses not just his own biological mother, who weeps at the gates of the prison, but also the nation, which by then was—and continues to be—envisioned in maternal terms as “Mother India” (Bharat Mata). The sequence alternates between the freedom fighter and his mother right up to the hanging, at which point it cuts to the latter, allowing her agonized face to signify the death of her son. It’s a great metaphor for the way in which women are often privileged as symbols, but not necessarily as active participants in the national discourse.
II. This double standard is driven home forcefully later in the film, when Kalyani asks Bikash if he, like her father, believes that women are good for the kitchen and nothing else. Bikash replies that he used to, until three years ago, a police inspector’s wife discreetly helped him escape from prison in the middle of the night. The “mother’s love” shown to him by that woman made him realize, he says, that “women don’t need to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with men, because they can just as easily help them from within their homes.” Bikash thus imagines women’s freedom and equality in a very limited sense, as necessary only to the extent that it is advantageous to the men leading the larger anti-colonial struggle. This is in line with the attitudes held by even the more progressive leaders during the Indian independence movement. As Sadhna Arya writes in Women, Gender, Equality, and the State, Gandhi’s influential “idealisation the image of women as the embodiment of sacrifice… helped to strengthen the prevailing oppressive stereotype of women as selfless companions and contributors to a social cause defined by men” (20).
III. Moreover, even as the independence movement brought women out into the public sphere, it often involved a re-entrenchment—rather than reformation—of their domesticity. In Women in the Indian National Movement (2006), Suruchi Thapar-Bjokert describes how the public domain was “domesticated” during the freedom struggle, so that middle-class women could enter it “without disassociating themselves from domestic ideology” (46). Women were encouraged to fulfill household duties and secure permissions from their guardians before joining protests; moreover, their participation in the struggle was tied to “familial symbols, household dynamics, and nationalist symbolism,” as exemplified by Bikash’s anecdote. In his flashback, the woman’s liminal positioning—right at the threshold of her house, neither outside nor inside—is reflective of this idea of women being unable to fully leave the private or home-sphere even as they entered the public sphere. We also encounter these themes and framings earlier in the film, when Kalyani is tasked by her friend to pass on a note to Bikash from his Party. To convince the security guard to let her in past the barbed fence surrounding Bikash’s house-arrest, she invokes domestic duties (pretending to need special flowers from within the compound for a home ritual) and her relation to her father, the town’s well-beloved postmaster.
I AM A PRISONER OF MY LOVER
I. By the end of Bandini, Kalyani—having paid dearly for her desire for Bikash—has been redeemed by the doctor and given an opportunity to reintegrate into society as his wife. However, as she is escorted to Deven’s town by the jail warden, a surprising turn of events (somewhat) undermines the film’s patriarchal discourses, allowing Kalyani the agency that is systematically denied to her in the preceding course of the narrative.
While waiting for her steamer at the local ship harbour, Kalyani realizes that the ailing man behind her—separated, of course, by a barrier—is Bikash. She crosses over to his side to come to his aid, giving him water and medicine in a shot reminiscent of the earlier incident that led to Kalyani’s eventual downfall. Soon after, Bikash’s companion narrates the man’s tragedy to Kalyani, revealing that Bikash had been forced by his Party to marry the mentally ill daughter of an important government official as a means of spying on the administration. “[Bikash] sacrificed his own love for the love of his nation,” says the friend. In an ironic reversal of the gendered roles imposed on men and women during the freedom struggle, Bikash is trapped into an undesirable domestic arrangement for the sake of the country’s liberation.
II. Her sympathy for Bikash renewed by this revelation, Kalyani is torn between the original—and transgressive—object of her desire and the more “proper” and socially acceptable partner represented by Deven, while the song “Oh Re Maajhi” underlines her dilemma: “Oh boatsman/my lover is on the other side/take me across to him.” When she hears Bikash’s ferry departing, she suddenly makes her decision and starts running towards him. Her warden tries to stop her, saying “Our path is the other way.” Kalyani, no longer content with being a prisoner of destiny, responds: “This is my path.”
However, the film is careful to situate Kalyani’s agency of choice within the strict bounds and limited freedoms of heterosexual love. As she defiantly runs across ship’s plank and falls at Bikash’s feet, the film’s title song plays melancholically in the background: “I am the prisoner (bandini) of my lover/I am the companion of my beloved.”
WORKS CITED
Arya, Sadhna. Women, gender equality and the state. Deep & Deep Publications, 2000.
Doane, Mary Ann. The desire to desire: The woman’s film of the 1940s. Georgetown University Press, 1987.
Thapar-Bjorkert, Suruchi. Women in the Indian National Movement. New Delhi, Sage, 2006.
Shai, Oren. “The Women in Prison Film: From Reform to Revolution, 1922–1974.” Bright Lights FilmJournal 79 (2013).
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