Why Mrinal Sen was India's first political filmmaker
The demise of the internationally acclaimed filmmaker Mrinal Sen (1923-2018) on December 30, 2018, marked a watershed event in the annals of Indian cinema.
Sen began his filmmaking career in the 1950s, around the same time as his two trail-blazing contemporaries, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak.
Bengali audiences watched his films and conducted vociferous debates about them well before he came into the national spotlight with his 1969 Hindi film, Bhuvan Shome, widely regarded as the herald of the 'new' Indian cinema. Even a passing familiarity with Bengali film-related publications testify to the spirited discussions around films such as Baishey Sraban, Akash Kusum or Interview.
Looking back, it would be fair to say that Sen’s legacy was as much felt in Bengali cinema as it was in the Indian art film scene.
The latter underwent a radical transformation in the late 1960s and 1970s with the rise of the Indian new wave, an eclectic body of highly original films made by directors who regarded themselves as a post-Ray generation, who aimed to steer Indian cinema into new territory.
Consisting of such significant figures as Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Shyam Benegal, Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul and others, the new cinema movement demonstrated that Indian cinema was at once truly international in spirit, even as it was deeply rooted in the particulars of different regions and peoples.
Sen’s Bhuvan Shome birthed the new cinema movement – his penchant for new themes, new techniques, and a new politics shone through in this film like never before.
Bhuvan Shome, Sen once noted, was about mapping an open-ended journey of what happens to a person when he leaves familiar surroundings for utterly unknown settings. The film’s depiction of experiences that ensue during this encounter with the unknown contributed to its lasting freshness.
There is a humorous tone to the film – "inspired nonsense” is how Sen described it, citing Jacques Tati – much of it accomplished through the use of animation, sound effects, freezes, mask shots and a creative background score. Bhuvan Shome was based on a story of the same name by the Bengali author Banaphool aka Balaichand Mukhopadhyay (1899-1979).
Rammohan, an animation expert based in Bombay, KK Mahajan a graduate of the Film Institute who became the film’s cinematographer, Sadhu Meher, who played the role of Gauri’s husband and also served as Sen’s production assistant, Vijay Raghava Rao, the music director then employed by the Films Division, and Suhasini Mulay were all new entrants to the world of professional Hindi cinema – and their iconoclasm shone through the film. The film was also a Hindi debut for Utpal Dutt, a renowned theater and Bangla film actor who played the titular role.
These innovations in Bhuvan Shome have to be seen in line with ongoing experiments in the documentary-making unit of the government of India, the Films Division, where filmmakers like S Sukhdev, Pramod Pati, KS Chari, SNS Sastry and NVK Murthy worked at this time to integrate the formal approach of Western experimental and independent cinema with the creative atmosphere of the National Film Board of Canada.
Sen himself contributed to a Films Division endeavor entitled Know Your Country. Bhuvan Shome bore the stamp of an institutional ferment in Indian cinema that included the Film Finance Corporation and the Films Division (especially the latter’s animation unit). Sen’s use of animation was likely inspired by animation in FD documentaries that used it to convey civic messages about family planning, public safety or the conservation of water and electricity.
Although he was a bit older than the new wavers, Sen’s works were marked by an iconoclasm and quirkiness that made them distinct from Ray’s Nehruvian spirit or Ghatak’s post-Partition angst.
Sen was the most cosmopolitan filmmaker of the trio.
He made films in multiple Indian languages, numerous movies in Bangla and Hindi, one each in Oriya and Telugu. While films based on works by authors such as Banaphool, Samaresh Basu, Premendra Mitra and Ramapada Chaudhuri would not surprise Bengali audiences, Sen did not limit himself to stories by Bengalis alone.
For example, Neel Akasher Niche (1958) was based on a work by Mahadevi Verma, Matira Manisha (Two Brothers, 1966) and Mrigaya (The Hunt, 1976) on works by Oriya authors Kalindi Charan Panigrahi and Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi respectively, Oka Oorie Katha (The Outsiders, 1977) on a Hindi story by Munshi Premchand, Antareen (The Confined, 1993) on a work by Sadat Hasan Manto.
Even more remarkable, Sen often shot on location in many different parts of the country, Gujarat, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, in addition to small towns all over West Bengal and of course Kolkata, his place of residence that he called his “El Dorado”.
His lengthy career yielded 27 feature films, 14 short films and five documentaries, and earned him innumerable awards and honors. A few notable ones include the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, an honorary membership of the Indian Parliament from 1998 to 2003, the Commandeur de l'ordre des Arts et letters awarded by the French government, and the Order of Friendship by the Russian government.
Sen was the president of the International Federation of the Film Societies and served as a member on the international jury at various film festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Moscow, Karlovy Vary, Tokyo, Tehran, Mannheim, Nyon, Chicago, Ghent, Tunis and Oberhausen.
In addition to his prolific filmmaking, Sen was also a committed film society activist.
In 1968, he authored with fellow film society comrade Arul Kaul a manifesto for a new cinema movement in India. In that text, the duo outlined the need for new production, exhibition and distribution facilities for Indian cinema. A “new” cinema, they argued, had to promote a counter-hegemonic commonsense. That ambition necessitated new methods and experiments and unavoidably ran the risk of rejection at the box office.
True, mainstream audiences found some of Sen’s films difficult and slow. But sometimes, there were moving historical contingencies that drew audiences to even such avant-garde films as Calcutta 71 (1972).
As Sen reminisced, ordinary people streamed into the Metro cinema to catch one fleeting glimpse of a brother or a son who was lost to the family forever during the turbulent political days of the radical left-leaning Naxalite movement of the late sixties and early seventies.
The Calcutta trilogy—Interview (1970), Calcutta 71 (1972), and Padatik (The Guerilla Fighter, 1973) – contained footage that Sen shot on location and subsequently wove into the films. Little did he know that the footage would offer the last sighting to grieving families of their loved ones whose whereabouts would remain unknown to them forever.
Let me conclude with a few observations about this extraordinary artist.
First, Sen himself was his most vocal critic.
It was not “the enemy outside” but the one “within” that he wanted to attack. Thus, even though his political commitments were broadly left-leaning, he openly acknowledged the dogmatism and patriarchy of left political parties.
Moreover, he was an extraordinary critic of his own class – the Bengali bhadralok (the educated middle class) – whose traditions he both embodied and fiercely critiqued.
Films like Padatik (1973) and Ekdin Pratidin (One Day Everyday, 1979) are remarkable feminist interventions into leftist thinking in the Bengali middle class milieu.
Second, Sen’s films can be regarded as historical documents of hunger.
In film after film, Baishey Sraban (22 Sravan, 1960), Calcutta 71, Matira Manusha, Akaler Sandhane (In Search of the Famine, 1980), to name just a few, he returned to the theme of famine – not just the devastating one of 1943 but the grinding food shortages that afflicted postcolonial Indian society well into the 1960s and 1970s. Hunger, he hoped, would give birth to a politics of anger that would shake up the middle class conscience out of its complacency.
Third, despite their rootedness in the Bengali context, Sen’s films exuded a global political ethos.
His was the first instance of an overtly political cinema in this country that placed Indian politics against a wider context of worldwide popular upheaval. Sen accomplished this through his remarkable use of documentary footage from contemporary global events such as the wars in Vietnam and Latin America into his feature films.
The Indian world was already part of a connected globe in Sen’s cinematic imaginary.
Notwithstanding his serious political commitments, Sen’s work was animated with a sense of humor and wonder. Stern contemporaries sometimes commented archly about Utpal Dutt’s antics as the stodgy Bengali bureaucrat, Bhuvan Shome, in the wilds of Gujarat.
But the film named after the eponymous protagonist remains a salutary instance of thinking about the possibility of social and political transformation of the postcolonial Indian middle class through unanticipated encounters with the gendered subaltern.
Like his inspiration, Charlie Chaplin, on whom he authored a book, Mrinal Sen remained throughout his long career a resolutely irreverent, funny – and rule-breaking artist.