Childhood in Faridpur—an Unknown Little Town

"My childhood was an ordinary one, it was neither colourful nor retarded". Mrinal is well known for his reticence to talk about his childhood. He grew up in Faridpur during a fertile period of Indian history. He remembers vividly his first encounter with Netaji Subash Chandra Bose. Young Mrinal was howling with a toothcahe, when this extremely handsome 'doctor' came up and comforted him. Later, he sent an ointment for application on his swollen gum and assured him that he would be alright in no time. Sen did not know the name of the ointment, but remembers that he had read "Made in Germany" on the tube.

Dineshchandra's unstinted support to the young militants and rebels brought him close to many such leaders. In a year after Mrinal was born, Faridpur hosted the All Bengal Conference of Peasants and Ryots with Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das as president. Dineshchandra was the unanimous choice for the chairmanship of the reception committee. A large portion of his speech was devoted to the praise of what he called "The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia". The fact that Dineshchandra, a Congress affiliate, eulogised the October Revolution of 1917 in an opening meeting, amused Sen to no end later in life. Thus growing up, young Mrinal was politically conscious. Barely at seven or eight—he shouted 'Vande Mataram' at the colonial police and was confined at the police station for a few hours.

Communalism in Bengal and at Home

As the War of Spanish Liberation was on full swing, Hemingway, Auden, Spender and the literary community took up arms against fascism. Mrinal, a voracious reader, was consumed by their writing on a classless society and equality of men. Much to the chagrin of his father, he was in the constant company of Subodh Sen and Bagala Guha, who would go on to be distinguished theoreticians of the Communist wing in Bengal. However, Mrinal was disillusioned about his father's greatness when he began to observe a streak of militant Hinduism in him everytime communal tensions were reported in East Bengal. Dineshchandra would stockpile bricks, stones and other projectiles on the terrace to be used in case of exigency and break into arguments with his Muslim friends and colleagues, even his sons' classmates. Mrinal's brother's close friend Sadhu would take up the cudgel on behalf of his community and sometimes the verbal battle would stop just short of blows. Sadhu became the famed Bengali poet Jasimuddin. When Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, a known proponent of the Hindu Mahasabha had to come to Faridpur to address an assembly, Mrinal recalls that the crowd was in a furor and people were divided into communal factions. Mid-way in his address, the audience had broken into a fistfight. Mrinal's brother was in a brawl with their school history teacher and Mrinal took the opportunity to land a blow on the man's head with his umbrella.

A Touring Cinema Company Comes to Town

Mrinal was in his early teens when a screening was organized in a make-shift auditorium, a big room with a tin roof. The film was Naresh Mitra's 1928 silent-era adaptation of Saratchandra's Devdas. Mrinal observed as the pitter-patter of the rain on the tin roof matched the footsteps of the characters running on screen.

Mrinal Comes to Calcutta

Mrinal passed his intermediate exams in 1940 in first divison. It was decided that he would study in Calcutta, take admission in Scottish Church College with Honours in Physics.

"I don't know what came over me suddenly. My last night at home. Making certain my father was within earshot, I asked my mother, 'Ma, have you ever noticed any exceptional quality in me? Have there been any signs? You know … like great personalities have displayed in their childhood? Any flash of genius?" Mrinal was given the benefit of doubt. At the age of 17, he had left Faridpur behind for a time when the tensions would settle down and a time for return would come. As a result of this distancing, the partition did not directly wound him as it did his other contemporary Ghatak. "As soon as I came to the big city, I was seized with a kind of fear. I confronted a crowd— an anonymous, self-absorbed, indifferent sort of crowd, even menacing and monstrous ... (i was) suffering acutely from a depressing sense of emptiness. Till things proved different, I remained an outsider". In his words, after the tides of homesickness started waning, he began falling in love with Calcutta for a variety of reasons—social, political, and cultural. "Right through the days of famine and violence and war. Terrible days. Awful days. (it was the time of World War II— bombscare, blackouts, riots) But memorable ones all the same".

Scottish Church College

Scottish Church was the alma mater of luminaries like Subhas Chandra Bose and Vivekananda. After joining his classes, Mrinal got actively involved in the Stuent Federation of India or SFI (the youth wing of the Communist Party of India). In 1941, he spent a week's jailtime in Lalbazar police station for being a member of the banned political outfit (The CPI was banned in 1939).

An active member of the student union, Sen soon became a part of study circles where Marxist ideology was much discussed with theoreticians like Prof. Hirendranath Mukherjee and Gopal Halder. Kamalalaya, a departmental store on Dharmatala street was the host of these addas. However, despite his proximity with the party he did not see eye to eye with the partyline particularly in issues of artistic expression and the fact of banishing texts based by camp deserters.

Mrinal and Memory of Rabindranath Tagore's Death

Sen remebers distinctively, the day on 7th August 1941 when Tagore passed away. Alongwith his friends, he followed the procession from Jorasanko Thakurbari to the creamtorium in Nimtala. All other cremations were stopped for the day. Sen and his friends saw a man waiting with the body of a dead child wrapped in a towel. Caught in the midst of the surging crowd, the man lost his grip and dropped the towel wrapped body— and it disappeared under thousands of rushing feet. The shocking incident stayed with Mrinal forever.

IPTA

From his study circles, Mrinal got easy access to the activities of the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA). As an unempoyed student-activist, he was in regular attendence at their drama readings.

In one such session, Mrinal vividly remebers a lanky man, almost of his age, was reading out his new play with great passion. At one poignant moment of the play the hero was going off when the heroine came to bid farewell. She said in a tearful voice, "We shall meet again in spring, when trees and bushes will sport new leaves and buds -" "No!" thundered the hero, "Spring will come only when, not your leaves and buds, but severed heads of exploiters will hang from each tree! Only then we will meet again - otherwise, goodbye!"

There were nods of approval all over the room. This was the real stuff, the theatre of the revolutionary people, some exclaimed. Only Sen remained unconvinced. The image of severed heads sticking out of branches of a tree seemed ridiculous to him.

So after the session was over, he quietly called the youngman away and asked him. "Do you really think that this idea of severed heads hanging from treetops is a good one?"

The dramatist looked at him and said, "Why, you feel something is wrong?"

Sen was confident, "Yes. It just won't do."

The dramatist was a little pensive. He said, "May be, I have overshot it a bit. I will change it. Thanks, anyway."

The young dramatist was Ritwik Kumar Ghatak.

Gita Shome and A Case of Communism

Gita, Mrinal's wife to be and Gita Shome at the time, was involved with Ritwik Ghatak's small theatre group, Natya Chakra, a satellite organisation of the IPTA. Initially introduced on the set of Dudhara, a film that never released, Gita was an actor and Mrinal an assistant to the director. Gita acted in plays. Besides Ghatak in their circle there was Bijon Bhattacharya, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Salil Chowdhury, Nripen Ganguly, Tapan Sen and others. Bijon Bhattacharya was married to the writer and activist Mahashetwa Devi, who was also Ghatak's niece.

One day while coming to Calcutta from Uttapara, Gita and Mrinal were walking on the Bali bridge. In a first attempt of intimacy, Mrinal held Gita's hand. In the process, he lost his grip on the book 'A Case for Communism' that he was reading at the time, and it dropped straight into the river below.

The Imperial Library: Mrinal's Authors and Aueturs


It was the time of the great famine when Mrinal would kill his appetite for hours on end with a lump of "chhatu" or gram flour and invest the day light hours in the reading room of The Imperial Library, reading everything from 13 volumes of Firdausi's Shahnama translated by Fitzerald, to Milton and Brecht, and the complete works of Bernard Shaw first without the prefaces and then with them. He read the old masters of Bangla literature to the modern stalwarts of his time, Tarashankar, Manik and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. Mrinal learnt about cinema not by frequenting the theatres but by reading books. His steppig stones were Rudolph Arnheim's The Art of Film published in 1931 and Cinema as a Graphic Art by Soviet Cinematographer Vladimir Nilsen, who was associated with Sergei Eisenstein. He read Spottiswood's Romance of the Movies, Auden's Poems of Spain, Ralph Fox's Novel and the People., Christopher Caudwell's Illusion and Reality, the book on the French Commuist Party by Maurice Thorez and the works of D D Kosambi; Sen's perceptivity was inspired by the colour palette's of T S Eliott's The Wasteland and the cynicism of Aldous Huxley and how his narratives imploded in a startling way.

Amongst contemporary Bengali novelists, Mrinal admittedly enjoyed the writing of Samaresh Majumder, Nani Bhowmik and the short stories of Ramesh Sen. He had a penchant for Manik Bandopadhyay's Padmanadir Majhi.

Karel Kapek!

Sen came across Karel Čapek, early 20th century Czech authort, who wrote numerous novels, plays, belles lettres and essays. Sen was floored by his play 'Mother'. He made it a point to find and read everything by him. They were all Chatto & Lindus publications who admittedly made no money out of them but they loved his work and had it translated anyway. Mrinal translated one of his posthumus publications 'Cheat', in Bengali for $7. Capek was introduced to India through Mrinal Sen and the translation was also Mrinal's first publication. Erroneously, he had spelt the 'Ch' in Čapek as K, with no knowledge of Czech alphabet, and that error continued till it was corrected in later publications.

Sen was taken with Capek's R.U.R or Rossum's Universal Robots, a 1920 play that literally introduced the word 'robot' to English vocabulary. A futuristic science fiction, R.U.R had three hundred living human beings left on Earth, ignorant about how to sustain their species. The managing director of the factory that conducts wholesale business of Robot soldiers for war, across both sides of the enemy line is the symbolic ruler of the capitalist class. The robots are an extended metaphor for the 'perfect worker' defined only by function- hard work and honesty. But they get crushed in machines and topple down buildings; they have no self consciousness or sense of fear or pain. The director introduces the mechanism of pain in them so that they would prevent themselves from harm. But with pain, came the obvious corollary of feeling pleasure. A librarian unites the robots of the world against their systemic suffering. They revolt, overthrow the director and establish their dictatorship. They take over the world. When the engineer realizes that the robots dream, and they feel empathy and love, he decided that "Adam and Eve" do not require him anymore. Sen wondered why was their cinema not reworking this literature.

Cinema, cinema and armed revolution

Nabanna (witten by Bijan Bhattacharya and staged by Shombhu Mitra in 1944) has fuelled the flames of the newly minted film-making enthusiasts. Mrinal says, "My entry to cinema was very accidental. I travelled a long and difficult way — difficult, because I did not know how to walk. I learnt through experience." Hem Ghosh's Pradise Café near Kalighat tram depot became the new adda for the group consisting of Sen, Ghatak, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Tapas Sen, Salil Choudhury and occasionally Bijan Bhattacharya or Kali Banerjee. Sen worked on and off as an assistant on the set of Dhiren Ganguly, primarily in sound recording.

"I began to watch films in 1946 … the films however filled me with deep distaste. This distaste for Indian films and my passion for the cinematic medium which was cultivated and sustained through my reading. "

Nirmal Sen!

Mrinal admittedly never liked 'Indian Cinema'. He watched everything that was being made and he despised all of it. He wrote a piece 'Cinema and the People' (inspired from Ralph Fox's 'Novel and the People') In the article, he extensively critiqued Prathamesh Barua (prominent director, actor and screenwriter most known for his 1935 adaptation of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's Devdas). It was published in a bi-monthly Indo-Soviet journal edited by Hiren Mukherjee and Snehangshu Acharya. But the article was attributed to a Nirmal sen! Mrinal had somehow been transformed to Nirmal. The journal issued a public notice correcting the typographical error in their next issue. Therefore poor Mrinal bought both and showed both issues in case he wanted to show his first publication to anyone.

Of the handful of 'Indian' films that he liked, two were K A Abbas's Dharti Ke Lal and Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar. The latter though deeply flawed, found a resemblance with Pushkin's 'The Bronze Horseman'. Looking back at it, Mrinal admits to not liking the film at all. Put in his own words '… the politics, the aestheics of the IPTA too were no longer valid"; the IPTA, according to him, believed that enemy of the Indian people were the English and their lackeys. In this context, he brings up Premchand's 1935 'Mahajani Sabhyata' where the author predicated the struggle for independence on the new class of brown usuers who would replace the white oppressor.

"Well! I thought I too could make a film.": Jamir Ladai

Kakdwip, a place south of South 24 Parganas district in west Bengal was declared a red area by the police. Indiscrimate police violence on rebellious peasants and the brutal murder of a pregnant peasant woman Ahalya had stirred the tide against the government. "All this while, Ritwik, Salil and I, without the slightest knowledge of cinema, had been planning to go to Kakdwip to make our film. We had managed to get hold of an ancient camera, and even decided on a place to process the 1mm film. I prepared a script Jamir Ladai. Ritwik was to be the cinematographer and Hrishi [Hrishikesh Mukheree] was to edit. The whole thing was planned in utmost secrecy. Everything was fixed, when we were suddenly told that we could go no longer. We were saved!" Letters had been smuggled in by a commision of scientists (Physicist and Nobel Laureat Fredric Joliot-Curie and Irish crystallographer J D Bernal) from the Communist headquarters of England that the militant struggle was taking Communism in India towards the wrong direction, especially in Bengal. The partyline was to immediately abandon the armed struggle.

However, the film eqipment and the script stayed with them. At this time, Mrinal's Park Circus house was raided by the police. The local shopkeeper who sold Mrinal his cigarettes was the police informer who had flagged it to Mrinal and he set the script on fire in a nic of time. It was replete with mentions of Nilsen and Eisentein (Soviet film theorists)

Bhawal Sannyasi with a Marxist interpretation

When the front was desperate to find financers for their debut, a friend came to them willing to make a film about 'Bhawal Sannyasi' or Ramendra Narayan Roy, the 'mejokumar' or second Prince of the Bhawal zamindari of the baro-bhuyians in Dhaka district. The mysterious death of the rightful heir of the zamindari, followed by transfer of power to the British administration and the Prince's return in the garb of a sanyasi had entered the mythical annals of Bengali folklore. Ritwik jumped at the idea. "Let's do it! We shall give the whole thing a Marxist interpretation!" The rest couldn't be convinced and the idea was unmade.

The story was appropriated in film twice in Bangladesh in 1966, and later in 1975 with Uttam Kumar as the Bhawal Sanyasi in Sanyasi Raja directed by Pijush Bose; again remade in Telegu as Raja Ramesh in 1977.

The first International Film Festival in Calcutta

The first International Film Festival took place in Calcutta and a Soviet film delegation had arrived with it. "The delegation spent most of their time with us", Assamese singer and composer, Hemango Biswas recalls. "Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak and Utpal Dutt were already involved in very serious thinking about cinema though they hadn't yet been able to make one."
They were bent upond reducing the gap that existed in cinema and reality; more succintly put, they looked forward to the possibility of cinema working on the documentation of lived history, of the refugee encampments, of hunger marches, mill workers' strikes, unemployed youth crowding the streets and young guerilla fighters being hunted down by cops, of the impoverished dying like flies in Calcutta streets. Mrinal had ignored his medical representative's job and dedicated the time to screenings amongst which he has noted Rossellini's Open City Rome, Jour de Fete by Jacques Tati, and Miracle in Milan by Vittorio de Sica in his diary.

When the adaptation of Bedeni Kanyar Kahini was aborted, Ghatak moved to Bombay to work at Sashadhar Mukherjee's Filmistan Studios and Mrinal became a medical representative, without knowing anything of medicine. To bid him farewell for the job that entailed travelling in the UP-MP belt, artist Gopal Ghosh of the Calcutta School presented him with his portrait and Niren Roy surprised him with a copy of Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain'.

Sen tied the knot with Gita Shome

Mrinal had been assistant on sets of known Bengali filmmakers but hadn't enjoyed those experienecs in the slightest. He was assistant director on the set of Dudhara, a script he wrote. He saw a long line of directors come and leave while nothing became of the film. However, he met Gita who was an actress, on the set. Right after mariage, Mrinal and Gita moved into a 'chilekotha', a rented room on the rooftop. In the biography of his father, Bondhu, Kunal Sen remembers the story of his parents having nothing suubstantial to eat for a couple of days after moving out of the joint household. Mrinal decided to borrow some money to buy rice. Gita set up the coal fired stove and let a pot of water boil, but there was no sign of his return. Meanwhile, Nripen Ganguly dropped by asking about him and Gita got to know that he had been chatting with friends in the park all this time when she was worried. She burst into tears. When Mrinal retuned, she told him Nripen had stopped by. Mrinal exploded, 'Shala!' (bastard!). It's both funny and sad. From the perspective of a family, it might even be selfish that the addas and the passion of his initial days took precedence over the family's needs. Kunal admits that his maternal uncle Anup Kumar (actor) was more of a father figure to him growing up than Mrinal.

Raat Bhore (The Dawn)

Actress Sunanda Banerjee wanted to produce a film and entrusted Swaraj Bandopadhyay's story on Sen whom she likely got to know from the sets of Dhiren Ganguly. Banerjee mustered an impressive cast- Chhabi Biswas, Uttam Kumar, Sabitri Chatterjee, Jahar Ray, Chhaya Debi, Kali Banerjee and Shobha Sen. Sen absolutely refuses to talk about the film.
"It was so humiliating for me to watch the film. It was a big disaster, the biggest of all big disasters. I hate to talk about it. Having made it felt terrible, I felt humiliated." Raat Bhore was released in the same year as Satyait Ray's first feature film Pather Panchali that got international acclaim and Ritwik Ghatak's second feature film (although his first commercial release) Ajantrik.

Raat Bhore featured megastar Uttam Kumar in its titular role and Mrinal had cut out a nearly villanous character for him."I would often think to myself, what on earth am I doing? There were far too many borrowed elements which crept in. I seemed to have become temporarily devoid of all intelligence whatsoever. It was so humiliating for me to watch the film, finally. I refused to leave home and meet people. And for the next two years, I didn't do anything. I had made this film after quitting the medical representative job. I was living in extremely strained circumstances."

Neel Akasher Neechey (Under the Blue Sky)

Two years later, Hemanta Mukherjee produced Neel Akasher Nichey.

Mrinal says, "Neel Akasher Nichey was my second film. The story dates back to the 1930s. It was over-sentimental, technically poor, visually unsatisfying. But the one aspect of the film which I still stand by and find relevant even today is its political thesis which upholds the notion that the struggle for national independence is inseperably linked to the liberal world's crusade against fascism and imperialism. That was perhaps precisely why, despite my own reservations about it, someone like Nehru appreciated the film. President Rajendra prasad sat crosslegged on the floor and watched the film, with Indira Gandhi in attendance."You have done a great service to the nation", Nehru said but refused to write it down when Hemanta Mukherjee had requested the same. It was a rather grim time for Nehru, whose secretary John Mathai had quit the same day. However, a week later at a Congress meeting, he introduced the film as an inspired work on Mahadevi Varma's story 'Chini Pherioyala' and requested party workers to watch it.

Kali Banerjee plays the chinese hawker Wang Lu who sells silk, refusing to get involved in peddling opium that was the trade of immigrant Chinese population in Kolkata at the time. He befriends Basanti who is a political activist involved with a Nationalist party. Basanti gets arrested and Wang Lu gets involved with the party. He retuns to China to join the resistance against Japanese invasion of China in 1931.

Neel Akasher Neechey was the first film to be banned in India, after the Sino-Indian War broke out, in February 1966. The ban lasted for two months.

Baishey Sravana (Wedding Day)

Literally translating to the 22nd of Shravana, or 7th August 1941, the day the greatest polymath India has ever had and the most revered bard of Bengal Rabindranath Tagore died. Coupled with the travesty that was the Great Famine of Bengal in 1943, Baishey Sravana is the first film in Sen's oeuvre of work that doesn't embarass him.

"Baishey Shravana, my third film— in English it was called The Wedding Day— made in 1960, made me feel great. Not really a great film, but I felt so. Baishey Shravan dwells primarily on exploring the relation between a middle-aged man, ugly by Indian standard, and his pretty young wife, difference of age being embarassingly wide. This is the story of birth, growth and decline of relationship with no 'third man', no catalyst, so to say, to heighten and accelerate the reaction. The first quarter of the film is the story of the three; the mother dies and, it remains till the end, the story of the two. It describes many situations, all planted in a distant village, and finally captures the ruthless fact of the terrible famine in 1943. From here to the end of the film camera moves inside the family and goes out only once to capture the famished villagers moving away to the city— that too in a long shot. Outside, by inference, is the famine growing uglier — and this the camera deliberately avoids, and inside the family all is quiet but oppressive. Till the end, it remained the story of a bitter husband and a bitter wife, both of whom, unable to endure the harsh reality of the famine, hurl against each other in impotent fury and hatred. They breathe stink. There is nothing to salvage them, to pull them out of the filth; and that is what the film focuses on."

My intention was not to capture the physical details of the famine, not to represent statistics of the afflicted people who just starved and dropped dead. To suggest the slow but inevitable liquidation of even the last vestige of human decency was what I aimed at. Yet the man was no villain, and the woman was all grace. It was a cruel time and a cruel film.

Understandably, such a film as this can hardly be a financial success. even though a popular failure at the box office, Baishey Shravana, because of its interior strength, strengthened my case in cinema. I became a regular film-maker. And, for reasons of my own, I made a point to break new ground, to break the shackles of conformism and more often than not, to evolve new modes of expression. All risky propositions, all very risky, even now— in all spheres, in any discipline."

After Baishey Shravana was selected for the Venice and London festivals, Sen was told by an officer of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry that the ministry was not happy about one sequence of the film: the way the couple was eating their food. Their manner of licking their fingers would be particularly nauseating for the Western audience. So, Sen was requested to change the offensive sequence. Sen politely pointed out that according to the story, the couple were having that meal after three days of starvation and they could not be expected to eat with great delicacy or perfect table-manners; moreover, he could not also provide forks and spoons to two poor villagers just to make the necessary impression on the foreign audience. But the ministry stuck to its view and refused to send the film abroad till the necessary changes were made. Ultimately, Sen himself had to become an exporter and send the print out on his own. As a result, he could not go abroad at the moment of his international exposure as a film-maker. He made his first trip abroad as a delegate to the World Peace Congress in Helsinki in 1965, although he confesses that he spent most of the time in the state film archives than in the conference hall. On his way back, he also had a glimpse of the Moscow Film Festival. But he had to wait till 1969 to go abroad with his own film.

Punashcha (Over Again)

Sen's camera eventually into the middle-class household, in an awkward and intrusive position inside the living room where- family relationships, the individual, new values coming in and getting resisted, are at an uncomforatbly close distance for the audience who feel exposed. "I was trying to shake up the prevalent and somewhat stagnant middle-class values. … startle. Surprise. Contest them, if necesaary."

Protinidhi (The Representative)

Based on the story by Achinta Kumar Sengupta, Protinidhi starring Soumitra Chatterjee features him in the titular role of an engineer who marries a young widow with a child from her previous marriage. In a society where taboos play a dominant role, the marital life, despite the best intentions, grows increasingly difficult and finally collapses.

Akash Kusum

Akash Kusum marks a watershed moment in Sen's filmic career. The film is organised in a manner that breaks away from the structure Sen had followed from Baishey Sravana tilll now. The concept of an elliptical narration is forefronted over the run-of-the-mill flat structure with a beginning, a middle and end. For Sen, realism is the subjective perception of time and time can be streched or compressed in film. There is a conscious break from bourgeois realism and entry into a hybrid culture created by a dialectical transaction between ideas and technology with a certain shock effect which throws the viewer off the trappings of realism, and moving towards an abstraction in terms of film language.

Akash Kusum

In the early 60s, Pramod Pati, regarded by some as the bearer of the New Wave, joined India's Films Division. Trained in puppet animation under Czech puppeteer Jiří Trnka, Pati introduced a completely new "collage-like style of juxtaposing contrasting, associative images with loose thematic connections, with an Indian sensibility." His "sensibility" defied the principles, norms and laws that prevailed on the board and unplugged a truck-load of maddness on screen with docu-films like Claxplosion (1968) and Six Five Four Two One (1968) which pioneered the use of avant garde audio-visual techniques like electronic music, pixilation and timelapse photography on the Indian screen. It was also the time for India's introduction with the French New Wave, a barage of highly innovative, self-conscious cinema with on-location shoots and use of natural lighting.

Sen smelt a certain madness in the air. "Madness and freshness. I felt an irrestibilte urge for a change." It was a good enough time to playfully and meaningfully defy the existing barriers that the mainstream would seldom cross. "I made Akash kusum in 1965. It was all about the 'exploits' of a modern youngman in a desperate bid to cross the wealth barrier. It was broadly a comedy. "

"Any noticable change that one can find in Akash Kusum was mostly done out of necessity, partly out of sheer playfulness and, true, at times, to shock the conservatives among my spectators. A minority audience liked the film, some thought it was self- indulgent and quite a number of people found it pointless - all gimmicks. I did not allow myself to be cowed down. I continued to go my own way steadily, happily, clumsily, desperately."

In July-September 1965, a series of at least fifty letters were exchanged between Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and his co-writer Ashish Barman and published in The Statesmen, after Ray's letter to Chidananda Dasgupta ( film critic and founder of Calcutta Film Society) mentioning a few lines of criticism on Akash Kusum were 'leaked' on the daily. Ray wrote about the bungler of a hero whose 'naive perversity' in the film and its Quixotic world was so close to fantasy that Mrinal had to emphasize on the juxtaposition using photographs which seemed out of place; that Sen overworks every device in the dictionary of the 'French New Wave' that does not sit well with the 'Roman Holiday-ish' sentimental ending of a flight of fantasy. In the exchange, Sen defends his contemporary Chaplinesque hero which Ray further refutes as Sen's misunderstanding of the tramp figure. "The Tramp in fact, is not Aespo's foolish crow at all, but a wise crow who has learnt Aesop's lesson and yet wears the peacock's tail as a constant reminder of the inherent absurdity of status symbols. It is his worldly cynicism which makes Verdoux a figure of our times."

"Today, Sen admits that there was an overdose of freezes and jump shots. But he expresses no regrets as he feels that such shock therapy was required. Those days, he feels, Indian cinema was dominated by conformists and some amount of 'madness' was necessary to bring a little freshness in the atmosphere. As Sen is never tired of affirming, film-making is not a sacred duty for him; as a child plays with his Legos, he plays with his shots on the editor's table, mixes and matches them as he pleases, and something always comes out at the end. He did it deliberately for the first time in Akash Kusum".

Sen also looks at those overused French techniques as his protest against the Establishment. Masters of the French New Wave, like Truffaut and Godard, were not professional film-makers; they were writers and film critics. Like them, Sen was also an outsider in the industry. By their unorthodox style of film-making, by placing the camera where the purists felt it never should be kept, by juxtaposing and editing sequences erratically, the French masters wanted to defy the established laws of filmmaking. In his own way, Sen also wanted to register his protest through the medium. The youthful buoyancy of the movement affected him tremendously and he wanted to capture some such moments of thrill and excitement on celluloid.

Matira Manisha

After a series of commercial flops when financing became a mammoth problem for Mrinal, Babulal Doshi, a Gujarati businessman and an art-theatre activist domiciled in Orissa met him. A newcomer in the industry, he was very keen to produce a 'quality' film, and for that, he was ready to give a blank cheque to Sen. He had two conditions—the film had to be made in Oriya and it had to be an adaptation of Matira Manisha, the Sahitya Akademi award-winning novel by Kalindi Charan Panigrahi.It features two brothers from a peasantry household. The younger defies the elder's wish and with his wife wants to move out with his share of the inheritence. Sen interprets it amlost as Chakkadi's rebellion on patriarchy and an open support for individualism.

"I invaded a village in Orissa and made an Oriyan film, Matira Manisha. A simple story of a peasant family in a remote village, where the rule of the patriarch and that of the village mahajan play equally dominant roles. Having made Matira Manisha in Orissa, I thought I had done a good job. But, as always wont to happen with me, Matira Manisha raised a controversy. A group of hardcore academics felt that I had taken undue liberty with the text. This, according to them, was nothing short of sacrilege. I must confess that I am genuinely unaware of having done anything that can be construed as libellous. Without commiting any offence to the social milieu of the 1930s—the era in which Kalindi Charan Panigrahi located his novel—I had merely invested the story with contemporary sensibilities. My questions, I believe, are pertinent enough: is it obligatory on my part to treat the text as a fragile artefact, preserved in a glass case in some museum? As a person not unaware of the contemporary situation, it is not my prerogative to recreate the story? To redefine it, to reinterpret it? And, in the process, to provoke, to criticize and to challenge? I think thease are issues of great importance to the activists in the areas of social anthropology and aesthetics."

Mrinal was never one to limit his films to the text of his scripts. His characters took flights of imagination, which were as contemporaneous as his techniques. The younger brother in Matira Manisha fancied himself to the mythical Garuda while looking at the aeroplanes that raided the skies during World War, with the twin metaphor of crossing limitless skies and unkowingy being destructive bomb-carriers. The film is replete with sequences of folk dance and fertility rituals, suggestive imagery of the erotic, even a sarkari-messenger who looks like Hitler, and has come with news of war.

Academics who believed in the sanctity of Panigrahi's text, launched a hate campaign. The producer had no choice but to reshoot. Mrinal was affronted enough and wanted his name to be taken off the credits. But the controversy refused to die, as Sen discovered, even after a decade. In 1975, he went back to Orissa to acquire the rights of a story 'Shikar', written by late Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi, the founder-secretary of the Orissa unit of the Communist Party of India, and incidentally the younger brother of Kalindi Charan. Again the same academicians created complications as they launched a whisper campaign that Sen would use the story to propagate Naxalite ideology. Ultimately, Sen approached the
author's widow directly, bypassing Kalindi Charan and other relatives, and acquired the rights. 'Shikar' was duly adapted to Mrigaya.

Moving Perspectives

Till Matira Manisha, which was also doomed by controversies, Sen had a total seven flops out of his eight releases. There were no private financers willing to work with him when help came from the Films Division, headed by Pramod Pati. Through Pati, Sen was offered an opportunity to make a four reeler documentary on Indian history, with a script by K A Abbas (dir. Dharti Ke Lal) The documentary, Moving Perspectives allowed Sen to deal with colour in his film for the first time and allowed him to travel inside India. It earned him a Silver Trophy in the Phonm Penh Film Festival of Cambodia in 1968.

Manifesto of the New Cinema Movement : Composed by Mrinal Sen and Arul Kaul

1968 was one of the most significant periods across nations, especially in India following the 1967 Naxal uprising, the time of Moplah and Tebhaga movements. Arun Kaul, Kashmiri screenwriter who directed Diksha (1991) and assisted on the script of Gulzar's Ijazat, Yash Chopra's Chandni, produced Mrinal Sen's Ek Adhuri Kahani composed the New Cinema Movement manifesto with Mrinal to provide legitimacy for artistic expression and creative freedom, no more to be limited by the state program of "aesthetics" and for a conscious cinema that exists outside equations of studios and production houses.

“New Cinema seeks the clues to mankind's riddles in men's personal relationships and private worlds. New Cinema encorages film-makers to bring to their work improviasation, spontaneity and youthful enthusiasm ... New Cinema stands for a film 'with a signature.' New Cinema engages itself in a ruthless search for 'truth' as an individual artist sees it. New Cinema lays stress on the right questions and bothers less about the right answers. New Cinema believes in looking fresh at everything including old values and in probing deeper everything, including the mind and the conditions of man”.

Bhuvan Shome

Bhuvan Shome was conceived at the behest of Arun Kaul, inside Kaul's own office. The S K Patil comiittee was assigned by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1948-49, for an investigation into the film industry, to enquire about film financing, taxation and more or less as a Nehruvian intervention to make cinema a medium of state aesthetics and force of mass-edifictaion. Two important figures in the committee were B N Sircar and V Shantaram. Sen had read Banaphool's (Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay) story, 'Bhuvan Shome' in 1959 and wanted the rights for the script. Made with the assistance of the Film Finance Corporation after the committe report's suggestion to fund projects was declared, a shoe-string budget of less than one lakh rupees was granted (when filmstars in Bombay were payed ten times the amount just for acting). Shot at Saurashtra (Gujarat) Bhuvan Shome was a critical and commercial success which kicked off the Indian "New Wave".

"To my shock and surprise, Bhuvan Shome was liked for, I believe, very wrong reason. It is a popular belief that the film is all about the taming of a hard-core bureaucrat But, honestly, it was far from my intention to tame my central character for the simplest ever reason that this community of bureaucrats can never be corrected, tamed or brought to senses. My job in the film was to go in for big fun and taking a cover, to ridicule the business of bureaucracy and, going a step forward to punish the man, the bureaucrat by using his own coin. At the end, the man was outsmarted and "corrupted" — the one who, all his life, was steeped in a kind of Victorian morality. All that happened to the man at the end was his tragic realisation that he would remain the same as he had been all these years — a duty-bound tough bureaucrat — a lonely prisoner trapped within four walls of his office with heaps of files to come and go and with his telephone ringing unceasingly. And all that I did at the end was to grant the man a touch of insanity and allow him to temporarily escape into a kind of burlesque and 'inspired nonsense'.

A Feature on 1/4 inch Tape!

Bhuvan Shome revolutionzed the Indian concept of filmmaking by introducing a Brechtian social satire to the art of nonsense and opening up a whole new possiblity of style.

"I wanted to bring in Chaplin. … I succeeded in bringing this in towards the end of my film. It's there throughout in snatches, but in the latter half I've deliberately tried to force events towards an impossible conclusion. Since the man works for the Railways, in one instance when he laughed, I deliberately added the sound-effect of a hiss of steam emitting from the engine." Bhuvan Shome is full of tongue in cheek humour and flippant situations. Starting with the imagery of 'Sonar Bangla', Sen shows Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, political processions (in which Basu Chatterjee and Bansi Chandragupta appear in the crowd), slogans, bombing, lathi-charges; a charter of demands pasted over a hoarding of Evening in Paris showing a partially clad Sharmila Tagore.

"Sadhu (who plays the corrupt officer in Bhuvan Shome) was aghast. 'Mrinal-da, what on earth are you doing?" I reassured him. Just wait and watch. He was both actor and my assistant in those days. It was all thought of in Chaplinesque terms and interpreted by those very same terms too.

(Shome Sahab) was imprisoned within those four walls. And we deliberately created that effect. (with animation) ... when he wanted to be an ornithologist, we showed him with birds circling his head!

Vijay Raghav Rao, the music director, said, 'Everyone, start laughing very loudly'. He recorded our laughter at very slow speed. When we played it back, at normal speed, it sounded just like the chirping of a passing flight of birds! I believe there should be a release of madness on the Indian screen. And it was really a mad, mad, mad time that we had, while making this film. We went completely berserk. Did every crazy thing that crossed our minds. We needed this. Especially because we were imprisoned within the suffocating walls of a very rigid tradition."

You Need An Utpal Dutt

Bhuvan Shome was the first Hindi stint for Mrinal Sen, Utpal Dutt and the first film for cinematographer K K Mahajan fresh out from the film school.

"I told Utpal: Let me tell you a story. It was about the time when I used to be a medical representative. Without knowing anything about medicine. I had decided to make a film. Irrespective of the fact that I would perhaps make an absolute fool of myself, in the trying. I had travelled to Jhansi, from Kanpur. I was visiting the doctors in Jhansi, riding here and there on a bicycle, supplying medicines. One day, there I was, riding down a deserted track. Nothing but green fields of paddy on either side of me. For miles around. As far as the eye could see. Suddenly, a girl in a red ghagra stood up amidst the rows of green paddy. Oh! What an extraordinary moment! What a sight! I was alone there, then. I got off my cycle, propped it up against something and began yelling to no one in particular, 'You son-of-a-bitch you! Oh my God, I haven't spoken Bengali in three days. I can't stand it any longer!" There was a little boy staring at me, giggling. I tucked a ten or twenty rupee note into his hand. He was dumbfounded, and sped off, clutching the money in his fist. I got back on my cycle and returned to where I was staying. I felt tremendously relieved. Back at the hotel, in my room, I began to take off my clothes. Peeled off every layer, and stood before the mirror stark naked. That was in 1951. I screamed at my reflection, 'Bloody hell, Mrinal Sen! Weren't you the one who wanted to be a director? And make a film? And this is what you've become? A peddler? Bloody ass.' And then I broke down. So I explained to Utpal, 'Do you understand me now? You are a prisoner within this office. You cannot leave. But within these walls, do whatever the hell you want to do.' 'Mrinal, may I? Are you absolutely sure? What if I mess things up?' he asked. 'Don't worry. That's where I come in. I'll fix the mess.' And so we improvised to a great degree. For example, he would be shooting imaginary birds with his ruler. I made sure that when he actually shot one, the action coincided with the sound of a gunshot. I put in a sudden shot of a line of birds scattering at the sound of gunfire. Or perhaps, suddenly, just a group of village women dis appearing into the distance. That's how I punctuated the shots. I allowed him to indulge in this kind of burlesque. I consciously wanted the inspired nonsense to show through. There too Hrishi [Hrishikesh Mukherjee] said, "You have made this fellow out to be a mad man' the same way that he had dismissed that last scene of La Notte as 'pure pornography'. I was at a loss to explain the tremendous agony below the surface and that this madness was the only way of release "

"He [Utpal] had understood me. Recognized what I was all about. and he always claimed that the role had been his best. ... Utpal had a tremendous sense of proportion. A profound sense. He would thereby deliver a great performances even in the worst of films. He was a master of traversing the entire gamut, from the sublime to the ridiculous."

"Mrinal-da, ami Bangla jaani. Ami Kolkatay Chhilo"

One morning I visited Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, who lived next door. 'Abbas-saheb, I said. I'm making a film.' 'Yes, I've heard. 'And everyone in it is new. If I go to the Films Division, I know I will get plenty of people-Pratap Sharma and the like-whose voices I can use. But I don't want to. We are all such old friends. I want a new voice. Since everyone else is new, I would like this person to be an unknown figure too. There was a young man there, amongst many others. Tall. Thin. 'Mrinal-da, aami bangla jaani. Aami kolkatay chhilo,' he said. ['Mrinal-da, I can speak Bengali. I used to live in Calcutta.'] I told him, "Your Bengali is lousy but your voice is great. And for your information, my film is a Hindi one. The name is Bengali and the protagonist is also Bengali, but it's a Hindi film. I need your voice for a few words a little after the movie begins and then a little bit again, towards the end. Are you willing?' I had to trade with his director. This young man was working in a movie called Saat Hindustani, at that point. His director, Abbas, said the chap was being loaned to me on condition-that I would get him Utpal in return. I agreed. I took the young man to Jagadish Banerjee's house- he had done some work for the Films Division-who agreed to do the recording. We had a budget of only one and a half lakhs and so had to skimp at every turn. Oh, what a trial that was. The sound of fish being fried next door and then the smell of that same fish wafting past us. It was impossible. I said, 'What the hell! Let's spend some money anyway. So off we went to Blaze, where we finished the recording in twenty minutes. There was a Hindi translation of Sonaar Bangla. The young man asked me, 'Mrinal-da, shall I say "sonaar bangal"?' I agreed. When I went to pay him, he refused. 'This is my very first work in films. I simply cannot accept money for it. I reasoned with him. 'Look, all of us are accepting payment. You cannot insult us like this. Take it professionally. Is this your profession?' 'Yes,' he replied. 'Well then, make a start with this. So those three hundred rupees were his first earning in the world of films. When I asked him for his name, for the credit line, he simply said, 'Amitabh.' At that point he was still undecided about whether he would keep the Bachchan part of it. Amitabh Bachchan had contributed his voice for the commentary for Bhuvan Shome.

Beginning of the "New Wave"

In 1969 when Bhuvan Shome had released and become a hit, two producers from Bombay came to Calcutta, put up at the Grand hotel and waited to meet Sen with an offer to produce a film if he directed it in the Bhuvan Shome style. “I refused… And that was a terrible time for Calcutta, 1969-70. I was arrested. There were killings and murders around every other corner. I could hardly step out of the house. It was the worst of times for the country and yet the best of times for me to carry out experiments like this.”

Almost forty years later, leading lights of an entire generation of film-makers—people like Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani—have acclaimed it as the harbinger of the Indian New Wave. Much to the bewilderment of its maker, Bhuvan Shome became a watershed movie.

The country was having its first signs of political upheaval; the Indian National Congress, the monolith of a political party, suffered its first electoral reverses in 1967. In cinema also, one witnessed the old order yielding place to the new. The 1960s saw the death of some of the leading film-makers of Bombay—Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt—and other stalwarts became unsure of themselves. V. Shantaram went into his own groove and in the early 1970s, the box-office rejected Raj Kapoor's little Indian tramp, Raju, so vehemently, that the movie moghul hastily brought down the curtain on his acting career and never played that role again. The writing on the wall was clear: people wanted something different.

It is here that the relevance, or rather the irrelevance of Bhuvan Shome comes up. It became the manifesto for new film-makers, as Sen flouted all the carefully set conventions of film-making. He went for location shooting, a non-star cast and an offbeat story, which nobody, including its author, thought was filmable.

It ran housefull for thirteen weeks in Calcutta and incidentally hapened to be the first film shown as a noon show in Bombay.

As 1969 came to an end, Sen had reasons to be happy. He was invited by the Venice and London festivals—almost a decade after Baishey Shravana — and he knew that in addition to the aesthetic achievement, he had also become commercially viable. At last the jinx of flops had been broken. That is why Mrinal Sen has always privately joked that two Shomes saved him from ultimate ruin—Gita, his wife, and Bhuvan.

Interview

(For Interview) "I was about to introduce a card in my credits, the last one, reading 'Screenplay, Direction and Gimmicks by Mrinal Sen'.

"To make an honest statement, Interview, for what it was worth, called for a very different treatment. There was hardly any plot driven calculated story in the film. It is all about a youngman in his day-long search for a pair of suits in an urban set-up which he will need for an interview in an Indo-British firm. His own suit and he has just one, has been lying in a laundry for three months and on the day of the interview, all the city laundries are on a strike.The search is a mad hurry in the metropolitian milieu. The film is a variegated blending of a touch of fictional narrative — and newsreel coverage and near-cinema-verite type documentation and, finally, ending with a provocative dialogue-session between the youngman and an invisble 'me', followed by a sudden flight into quixotic fantasy. Not certainly a storyteller's cup of tea. And cinema being a continuously growing phenomenon — a hybrid art, always growing on cross-fertilisation, I made use of it to the extent possible within the format offered by the subject."

Dayashankar Sultania purchased the rights to Interview from Sen. On its second run, it was quite a success. It also did fairly well at the Karlovy Vary festival in the Czech Republic.

Debutant Ranjit Mallick, a non-actor at the time, becomes the everyman 'subject' of the film. Sen tried a number of devices, beside using a cast of non-actors (apart from Shekhar Chatterjee and Karuna Banerjee), like breaking the fourth wall, making Mallick use his own name, using frontal address in which the subject reveals that director Mrinal Sen is following him for the day while he goes about looking for a suit to attend a job interview that might change his otherwise poor life; Sen divulges K.K. Mahajan filming Mallick with the movie camera inside a packed tram car on the streets of Calcutta. The film proceeds to show marches, of tribals and film technicians demanding labour rights, police chases, bomb blasts and barricades, in order to establish itself as a living document of the turbulent 60s and 70s. After a chaotic day of hunting for the suit, Mallick appears before the board in a flowing, white dhoti-kurta and the sartorial inadequacy predictably fails to secure him the job. In Ray's Pratidwandi (The Adversary), Dhritiman Chatterjee's protagonist also sits for an interview where he's asked, what is the most significant event in the last decade to which his response is- the courage of people in the Vietnam War. He is branded a communist and not given the job. In Interview, Ranjit is asked the same question, to which Mrinal makes a conscious shift by making his protagonist reply, the most significant event of the day is the interview itself. Ofcourse, he too doesn't get the job. Ranjit hits back. The shattering of the glass window and stripping the mannequuin of the suit sets the tone for an incumbent will for revolution rather than Ajoy's timid submission in Akash Kusum.

Ichchhapuran (The Wish Fulfilment)

Made for the Children's Film Society of India, Icchapuran is a Bengali comedy-drama film based on a short story by Rabindranath Tagore, of the same name. This happens to be the only literature by Tagore that Sen adapted into a film. ​The young boy Sushil wishes to switch roles with his father- the village school master Subal, and the wish is granted for a trial period. Starring Shekhar Chatterjee, Sobha Sen, Nemai Ghosh and Surajit Nandy, the film is a comedic exposition on how wish fulfiment can go wrong and haunt desperate people.

Ek Adhuri Kahani (An Unfinished Story)

Produced by Arul Kaul, Ek Adhuri Kahani is a Hindi black and white feature film adapted from Subodh Ghosh's Gotrantar. In his debut film, Vivek Chatterjee plays the role of a city bred clerk who comes to a village in the vicinity of a sugar mill. As the economy nears the year of depression, the peasants and workers organize against the millowner, Ratanlal (played by Utpal Dutt) but the defection and betrayal of the clerk kills the uprising.

The film was a commercial disaster and producer Arun Kaul couldn't recover his money. Mrinal did not feel quite like himself during the whole filming, incapacited by his lack of understanding on how trade unions functioned. He felt like an imposter, making the film despite having very little relevant knowledge on the subject at hand.

Calcutta 71


"I made Calcutta 71 when Calcutta was passing through a terrible time. People were getting killed everyday. The most militant faction of the Communist Party, the Naxalites, had rejected all forms of parliamentary politics. At the same time they had a host of differences with the other two Communist Party factions. These in turn led to many inter-party clashes and invariably all of them ignored the main issue of mobilizing forces against the establishment. This was the time when I felt I should spell out the basic ills of the country, the fundamental diseases we were suffering from and the humiliations we had been subject to. This was the time to talk of poverty-the most vital reality of our country, the basic factor in the indignity of our people. I wanted to interpret the restlessness, the turbulence of the period that was 1971 and what it is due to. I wanted to have a genesis. The anger had not suddenly fallen out of anywhere. It must have a beginning and an end. I wanted to try to find this genesis and in the process redefine our history. And in my mind this was extremely political. I found a continuing link in the film-a young man of twenty, uncorrupted. He has lived this age of twenty for the last thousand years or more. He has been passing through death and squalor and poverty, and for the past thousand years or more he has bridged despair and frustration. For him the history of India is a continuous his- tory, not of synthesis but of poverty and exploitation."

Structurally, Calcutta 71 is probably Sen's most complicated film. It has a beginning divided into three parts—the opening statement of a twenty year-old boy, a courtroom burlesque and another brief fantasy involving an innocent, charming girl; a middle, consisting of the film versions of three Bengali short stories representing three decades; and a conclusion which starts with a party scene and ends with another fantasy. These parts and their segments are unrelated to each other, yet as we approach the end, a pattern slowly emerges and pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall into places. All the parts are linked by a statement made in the beginning by a youth, who functions like the Greek Chorus. The statement comes back again and again, like the refrain of a song:
I am twenty.
For the last one thousand years, I have been living this age of twenty.
For the last one thousand years, I have been passing through terrible times.
I have walked through poverty, squalor and death.
For the last one thousand years, I have been breathing despair and
frustration.
And now, as I stand before you, I see:
Ours is the history of unceasing poverty.
Running through one thousand years and more.
But before depicting life in Calcutta in 1971, Sen argues, one must know how and why it reached that stage. The anger and turbulence that gripped the city had a history, it just did not happen one fine morning. So, he
decided to go back, decade by decade, to find out the roots of anger.

"Tell me the truth: when did you make this film?"

In the long queue outside Metro Cinema for the premiere of Calcutta 71, Sen remembers two young boys running up to him. "When? When did you shoot this film?" "I started sometime in the September of 1971''. "You lie! It's all lies. You're a liar!". The film was full of protests, p[rocessions, speeches and demonstartions and the boys had seen one of their friends in those corwds who had been shot dead by the police. Sen had been shooting these live demonstrations from 1969, without the particular intent to put them together in a film. Some spectator would see their son in the film who had been shot dead by the police and scream at their sight on screen.
For the last five decades, this ten-year cycle has indicated a new artistic dimension for Sen. As Calcutta 71 stands at the midpoint, its conception played a vital role in the subsequent development of Mrinal Sen as a filmmaker.

When Calcutta 71 was specially screened in Switzerland at the closing ceremony of the Nyon Festival of 1972, the former Air Chief Arjun Singh, who happened to be the Indian Ambassador, was so annoyed that he attacked the film and its maker publicly, alleging that the film did not present a correct picture of the country. The government must have been aware of his reactions, yet Calcutta 71 had been sent abroad as India's official entry to a number of foreign festivals.

Padatik (The Guerilla Fighter)

In the late early 70s, Kolkata was fuming. Armed revolt, factional dispute, four coalition governments and three President's rules later when Siddhartha Shankar Ray took to the Vidhan Sabha; a general consensus against the Indian National Congress and Indira Gandhi's Government was boiling over. Political activists, under the blanket ban of Naxalism, were hunted in the streets, abducted from their homes and murdered by police and vigilantes alike, in broad daylight. Sen writes, "That was the time when we asserted that our condition was rebellion. True, all this sounds like a pamphlet and that was it."

"Around this time, Sen got hold of a major political document which left a standing imprint on his metamorphosis. One of his friends in Europe sent him an open letter by Elio Vittorini, a leading Leftist intellectual of Italy, who was also the editor of a magazine Polytechnique. The Italian Communist party, led by Palmiro Togliatti, had called him 'anti-Marxist' and had attacked him for his essays on aesthetics. In that letter to Togliatti, the persecuted Vittorini came out with a comment which became a gospel for Sen for many years: 'The problem with fanatics among the members of the communist party is that they feel they have pocketed the truth; but the point is not to pocket the truth but to chase the truth.'
Sen found a strange similarity between his situation and the situation which had forced Vittorini to write the letter. It further convinced him that he would have to chart a new course."

Padatik, the third of Sen's Calcutta Trilogy, was thus different from Interview and Calcutta 71.
" . . . without losing our focus on a consistent fight against all kinds of social, political and economic oppression the characters involved did a bit of soul searching. The questions that were raised: Is everything okay in the anti-establishment front? Isn't it the time to examine and question the validity of the mandates of the leadership? Isn't it proper to challenge the establishment and sectarianism in the leadership? And, if nescessary, 'to go against the tide' ?

In the luxurious apartment of the advertisement executive (played by Simi Garewal), an urban militant-activist Sumit, (Dhritiman Chatterjee) whose allegiances are never explicitly revealed but unanimously recognized to be Naxalite, takes shelter to escape police-arrest. In a long period of isolation, though comitted to the cause of revolution, he begins to reassess the party's internal workings. The dilemma of the renegade, hunted by the police and now disowned by the party on illegitimate allegations of adultery with the mistress of the house, encapsulates the contradictions of the radical Left during the Moscow-Beijing split of the 60s leading up to the dissolution of the USSR in 90s. Sumit's letter to the party-leader almost becomes Sen's own message that dissent cannot be regulated and the cause has no unanimous leader. The letter cheekily includes a relevant section from Chairman Mao Tse Tung's 1926 Speech at Canton: The Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society- 'All our Revolutions have come to naught, because we have not been able to distinguish our friends from our foes, something we must have done right at the beginning' ; and excerpts from Joris Ivens's film on Vietnam as well as parts from The Hour of Furnaces by Solanas.

"Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of
foremost importance for the revolution. The basic reason why all
previous revolutionary struggle (in China) achieved so little was
their failure to unite with real friends to attack the real enemy."


Sen concocted the perfect balance to criticizing the Left leadership without strengthening the arms of the Right or giving any benefit of doubt to the Centre.

Joley Kumir, Dangay Baagh [The waters are infested with crocodiles, the banks, with tigers]

"These words have haunted me for a very long time". Sen records in his interview that Niranjan Sen, the General Secretary of the IPTA was being pursued by the police when the CPI had been banned and all members had gone underground. Mrinal along with his parents, took Niranjan to an Assamese zaminder's safe house in the ruse of a false identity, that of a mathematics teacher from Delhi. An accusatory letter had arrived against him along with news of his suspension from the party and Mrinal had smuggled the letter to him. Wearied of the party members and police alike, Niranjan lived in isolation for days on end, often without food. 'On one hand the police are after me, and on the other, the Party which refuses any protection. where am I supposed to go?' Informed by the sectarianism within, Mrinal Sen's cinema did not henceforth toe the Communist party line. Up until Interview, his films had been often realist portrayals of what he calls the spectre of poverty and exploitation, or satires of the Indian political situation but from Padatik onwards, there is a marked shift to pull inwards, 'retrospect and try to fathom where we had reached'.

"An understanding between the father and the son"

Poet and editor of the Frontier magazine, Samar Sen found Padatik tantamount to a "police report on Naxal politics ". In his response, Mrinal expresses sheer disappointment in the editorial. "When I screened this film abroad, I have noticed ex-students of Presidency, in Chicago, identifying with it completely, with Soumya [Soumya Chakraborty (b. 1950), young physicist and musicologist, a friend of Sen's son, Kunal] and so many of them saying to me, 'Mrinal-da, we are reliving those days.' There was a prevalence of demonstrations in those days. Chairs and tables would be broken by students who refused to sit for examinations, decrying the bourgeois education system. These used to be common occurrences."

"I never made this film for anyone or any party. I merely wanted to arrive at a certain conclusion, if I may call it that. An understanding of the father and the son. That was my priority. And everything else took second place."
Sumit's father, played by IPTA veteran Bijan Bhattacharya, is displeased with the anti-nationalist stand of his son and the position he toes as an underground guerilla-communist. Being a anti-colonial activist himself in pre-independence India, the father assumes certain ideals and cannot conform with the ways of his eldest son, who is unemployed and practically a dead weight on his parents who are accosted by the police from time to time. Perhaps when the offices downsize and the old father marches the streets, when the mother dies wanting to see her son for the last time, he undergoes a change of heart. It is uncertain when, but in the end he finally understands the young man; tells him to be brave, tells him, "I haven't told your mother anything. So that she may die in peace."

Chorus

Chorus is another relentless experiment in the non-narrative form where Sen tries freestyling with the camera. A company, designed like a fort and surrounded by barbed wire, houses a board of directors who announce a hundred vacancies. Hoards of unemployed people, the young, old, men and women alike crowd the gates to buy application forms. The media begins to record the phenomenal size of the crowd, people are interviewed, bombs are set off, police is deployed and people get arrested from the queue, but the board remains unharmed. Meanwhile, on the rural front, a local Brahmin voted as the Panchayat head continues being the usuer who extracts hefty interests on small loans given to local peasants. In case of non-payment, he manipulates them and buys off their land, reducing them to sharecroppers. The rot within the economic system is shown in the bodily form of the Panchayat-pradhan in the village and the director of the board in the big city. The uproar in the city spreads across the country-side. The poeple's slogan becomes "30,000". Thirty thousand of who knows who! The director (Utpal Dutt) who plays the representative head of the capitalist order is harrowed by the leaflets of 30,000. 30.000 peopel up in arms, he thinks are going to storm his bastille. He summons the police and starts a man-hunt for the applicants. But the movement reaches a juncture which promises to upend his rule.

Mrigaya (The Royal Hunt)

After a series of experiments with non-narrative forms in filmmaking, Mrigaya is an uniquely told allegorical film on the Santhal revolution set in the 1930s. A tribal hunter Ghinua (debut role of Mithun Chakravarty which earned him national award for Best Actor) forms an uncommon kinship with the local British administrator of a forested land somewhere in present day Jharkhand-Orissa border, over their shared love for hunting. Based on the story by Bhagbati Charan Panigrahi, Mrigaya locates the contradictions of tribal life with the exploiative laws in India headed by the twin adversary— the mahajan (the usurer) and the colonial administration— enforced by the police, judicial system and detractors from their own community. The British administrator in his admiration for the primitivity and skillfulness of Ghinua, acts out the white-gaze in which Ghinua and his wife Dungri are sketched by his wife, and Ghinua is rewarded for his game-hunting. Unknowingly, he sets of a chain of reactions in which Salpu, a rebel in hiding acts as the catalyst. When Ghinua kills the cunning usurer for abducting Dungri, and presents his head to the British Sahib as the most dangerous predator in the jungle, he is jailed and sentenced to be hanged.

Oka Oori Katha ( The Outsider)

Premchand wrote two stories. One in 1923— 'Shatranj Ke Khiladi' about two affluent idlers and in 1924— 'Kafan' two idlers in absolute poverty. Satyajit Ray adapted the first while Sen based his first and only Telegu film Oka Oori Katha on the latter.
In Mrinal's own words, it is Premchand's last and perhaps cruellest story. Although set in a village in Uttar Pradesh, Sen imagined a typical village in West Bengal while writing the script, but the film itself was ultimately shot in Telengana.

"Not an easy job, at all! My unit and I had to familiarize ourselves with an alien lifestyle and culture—outfits, food-habits, local customs, rituals, modes of physical expression and so on. Not so simple a task—there was so much to get to know and fall in love with—unless you can develo0p a kind of respect for the circumstances in which your characters live, love, desire, and ultimately perish. The problem of the language and its nuances remained with us till the end. But what I found strikingly similar—whether with North, South, East or West—was the spectre of poverty and exploitation. Which was what the story was all about. And that was why, even though we had plenty of foreign elements to encounter and come to terms with, we never felt that we were working in an altogether alien milieu. The culture of poverty and exploitation is the same everywhere, and there too, we did not fail to do justice to the characters and the locale."

Parashuram (The Man with the Axe)

Parashuram is a fictionalized documentary, based on a report of a sociological survey. ​Carrying an axe on his shoulder and haunted by the strange memory of his encounter with a tiger, a rural migrant arrives in the city, where he finds temporary refuge with an elderly beggar in an abandoned graveyard. Like many others, a large group of rural migrants scatter across the vast city, enduring lives of extreme hardship and deprivation.

Then, a girl appears seemingly out of nowhere. She is a wandering soul, abandoned by her husband, deceived by another man, and now searching for a "home." She joins the man with the axe in the graveyard, and together they forge a new existence. But eventually, the girl vanishes into the night, perhaps in search of a better place to call home. Left behind, the man is engulfed by a profound loneliness. In a surreal and intense moment, he battles the darkness, where he confronts his unseen enemies.

Ekdin Pratidin (And Quiet Rolls the Dawn)

The Left had a landslide victory in the West Bengal state election of 1977. The ruling front had much less self-criticism and much more self-complacency. Sen read in a paper at NIAS, Bangalore in 1994, that in a letter to to Palmiro Togliatti (leader of the Italian Communist Party from 1927-64), Elio Vittorini whom Sen calls 'the foremost creative Marxist in Europe' wrote, "The point is not to pocket the truth, but to chase the truth". Sen thought it right to now point towards the enemy within, felt rather compelled to combat that self-complacency.

Exactly ten years after Bhuvan Shome, and twenty years after Baishey Shravana, Sen changed his style, both in form and content, to launch a new film. One of his friends suggested a short story to him—'Abirata Chenamukh' (The Continuous Procession of Known Faces) which Sen converted into Ek Din Pratidin. In that, Ekdin Pratidin is a watershed moment for Mrinal's career in two ways— to move inwards and point the finger at bourgeois duplicitousness itself on one level, and to go back to the litereary narrative on public demand. The experinmental form adopted from Akash Kusum and developed till Parasuram weren't exactly welcomed by the masses for the simple reason: they needed a story, a beginning and an end. Sen doesn't think of it as a compromise or surrender but his attempt as a communicator to reach out to as many people as he can. Even then, in Ekdin we see the flashes of him moving out of the story, for instance in the hospital identification scene of the accident victim, where he captures larger society, or moves to a sequence of newspaper headlines, far beyond melodramatic storytelling.

"Ek Din Pratidin marked the beginning of a new phase in my career as a filmmaker and this phase lasted for quite a few years thereafter. My main aims and concerns are remarkably unchanged even today. I am always trying to delve into the interior, into that realm which lies hidden behind the façade of the outside world; to discover mysteries, frustrations, confusions, contradictions; to identify the terrible sense of isolation, even emptiness and, of course, the hidden strength which lies behind this apparent despair.

Ekdin Pratidin

Middle-class women joining the workforce outside the household was more of a necessity at the time than a choice. At a time when the city is submerged in economic depression, which always seems to be the case with Kolkata, the 'well-bred', educated working woman devoted to her filial piety was an inspiration for some. But one night, she doesn't return home, without any prior intimation. The father and mother, brother and sisters, even neighbours who are tenants in the same house, are contemplating in an uncomfortable silence. What if she is some danger, has met with an accident, in a hospital or in an emergency, or worse, what if she is with a man! The absence is a more pressing concern than the missing daughter herself. Submerged in the culture of shame, women are always under suspicion of defecting the order of carefully contrived social respectability. The working woman is as much a resource as she is a threat- her will to exercise her autonomy and submit to her own will is always a danger held at the bay. The absence lays bear the hypocrisies underlying the city and state machinery- the police station, hospital and mortuary, and the family that acts as its microcosm.

The final eruption comes out of the mother, who blames the father, a patriarch who has been incapacited by age and unable to provide for the family. The family is undoubtedly a parasitical environment, the gerbil eating away at women's existence is indeed everywhere in society. On the outside, the cases of women missing, dead, murdered, raped or simply lost does not elicit any sympathetic concern, the police apprehends the problem with derogative humiliation, the hospitals treat it as indiscreet routine. The landlord threatens to oust the tenants as he assumes himself to be the custodian of social respectability. All are silenced when the missing daughter returns home. She feels pelted by their lowering gazes. But, reason for her absence isn't disclosed, perhaps because it doesn't matter. The absence creates a small hole that tears apart the provisional bliss of middle-class life.

"The film reveals a different Mrinal Sen and it is amazing how, within a year of Parashuram, he could transform himself totally. Gone were the high-decibel performances, the philosophical dialogues or the cosmic anger; no Brechtian alienation, no clarion call to stand up and know thyself. It is a simple film with actors playing natural, true-to-life roles, but it is impossible to miss the profoundness of the theme. [...] Ostensibly, Ek Din Pratidin is a feminist film, but it goes much beyond feminism. Whenever we think of a film made on a working girl, we invariably think of Ray's Mahanagar or Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara— Sen's own Punascha also belongs to the same genre. In those films, the spotlight is always on the girl. In Ek Din Pratidin, Chinu makes her first appearance at the end of the ninth reel of a ten-reeler movie, and speaks barely for a couple of minutes. The film grows out of the interactions of her family members and the neighbours."

The film had a couple of triumphant screenings at the Bangalore Filmotsav from where it went to Cannes as a competition entry. In between, Sen picked up a handful of national awards, including that of best director and best Bengali film. At Cannes, it did not win any award, but was tremendously received by the press and the delegates, so much so that the film came to be known as 'The Cannes' Silent Winner'. The French press hailed Sen as a master of modern cinema. The film went to at least half-adozen festivals, and everywhere the success story was repeated. Sen had not bargained for the ovation he received in the Scandinavian countries, because in such permissive societies, a girl not returning home at night was
hardly an issue. But even there, the film was appreciated because of its bold stand against male chauvinism.

"I made a mistake. I cultivated no distance between myself and the history I sought to portray"

"The response in the domestic circuits was good, but the militants among my long-time admirers felt that I had mellowed considerably and that I had been receding from the political scene. They were extremely unhappy that the films did not carry 'messages'. They found Ek Din Pratidin much too despairing, Akaler Sandhane utterly defeatist, they discovered in Khandhar the story of feudal hangover. And in Kharij they expected that, on his return from the crematorium, the father of the deceased boy-servant, would slap the young employer across his face."

Sen did not liken his films to the reductive category of propaganda or political cinema, so to speak. [...] The inspiration that has worked behind my film is to a great extent political and I have politically reacted to our history, to our past and to the contem-porary period. Now, whether that makes it political or to what extent is for you to judge." "Considering his work environment, it was not possible for him to be more overtly political. In May 1968, immedi-ately after the student uprising in Paris, Godard and his followers could stand up before the giant screen of the main festival theatre at Cannes and chant, "M-A-O! M-A-O!" Could Mrinal Sen do any-thing like that in Calcutta in spite of his well-known 'softness' for the Naxalites?

Sen's detractors maintain two points: he never identified the enemy or even his protagonist and he had never come up with a solution. His definition of the enemy as "those who are responsible for the present injustice in society" sounded too vague and did not satisfy most of his critics. He has even remarked that it is not necessary for the film-maker to identify the enemy, because the audience should do it from its own experience. His heroes, Interview onwards, go through various phases and in the end, Sumit realises that the need of the hour is to fight against all reactionary forces by organising all like-minded elements. This is the point where the Trilogy ends, but it is difficult to pinpoint what school of ideology he represents. When somebody asked him whether the young boy in Calcutta 71 was a Naxalite, Sen had shot back: "Do you mean to say that only Naxalites are being killed by Police?"

Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine) :

On 7 September 1980, a unit of filmmakers — consisting of technicians, actors (who identify as themselves, Smita Patil plays herself in the film) and other workers invade a remote village at the margins of Bengal to recreate the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 when millions of people in united Bengal starved to death, and in order to do so they do things that tantamount to disruption of the rural landscape. The unit stays at an old feudal mansion, alomost a ruin, inhabited by an aged impoverished couple; the husband being a descendent of the feudal family is now paralyzed. The historical famine and the present in which the unit and the villagers are living are shown in a continuous interaction.

Sen says, "The film tries to work on many levels. It tries to suggest that the famine of 1943, which killed five million people in one year, continues. The conditions which contributed to that famine are just as valid today. But something else happens when the filmmaker walks into the village attempting to recreate the past. He is not prepared for the manner in which the past becomes the present. As long as the reality can be kept at a distance, for the purpose of filming, as a kind of museum piece, he is fine, he feels safe. But at the moment the past becomes the present, the contemporary reality, he tries to run away."

Responding to criticism of urban, elite, upper-class filmmakers' rampant tendency to film the "rural" in its pristine condition and on question of self-examination, he says, "Yes, but I don't want to make the mistake of walking into someone else's world and being misunderstood. So I take the burden upon myself to criticize myself-something I have tried to do all my life. Many of our directors have found a very favourable and fertile ground for their films in rural areas. They invade the villages with their cameras. Indeed, there are some very important directors who have made films on the 1943 famine. So, my comments apply to them as well as to my own film on the famine, Baishay Sravan, which I made in 1960."

The film is a self-referential exercise. It is a film within a film and made from the collusion of experience and artform. In a letter to his wife Gita, Mrinal records this parallax. The old and paralyzed descendent of the estate (the owner of the crumbling mansion) is a biographical image of the half-dead owner of the old mansion in Baishey Sravana, in Mankor, Barddhaman. When Mrinal visited the man in his bedroom, he distinctly remembers the solemn words of his wife 'You know baba, I am the only one who can understand what he is tryimg to say". Mrinal uses these words as the introductory dialogue for the decrepit's wife (played by Gita Sen) in Akaler. In fact another resident of the Mankor Rajbari, remembered as Dulal Kabiraj had been pacing up and down looking for a rickshaw when Mrinal got to now that the man's wife was in labour. Like he arranged for the unit's car to drive Dulal and his wife to a hsopital fourteen kilometers away, the director in Akaler (played by Dhritiman) sends his car to bring the dead home owner's daughter to her father's funeral from her in-laws' house 60-70 miles away. Incidents from a shoot twenty-years ago came back in improvised shots of the 1980 film. "How spontaneous! How close to life! Hown compassioate!", Mrinal exclaims.

"In Akaler Sandhane, I tried to bring together all my feelings about film. At the same time, I have tried to get away from painting pretty pictures-pictures of poverty, pictures of rural life. It is very important for me to make things look un-pretty, to keep the rough edges. I don't want to remain a perfectionist or a traditionalist. That's not my intent. My intention is to communicate as effectively as I can, to provoke the audience. The filmmaker has to be an agent provocateur-one who disturbs the spectator and moves him to action"

What Happens after the film?

“We put the poverty and the whole thing into the cans. And then we go back to our places. And then the films will be shown to different areas, even to the foreign countries where it would perhaps bag an award. It did, eventually. And then I will forget all about these people. But if you ask me this question whether I got involved or not during the shooting, I would say of course I did. I developed a respect for the circumstances in which these people live. But after that, what happens? After that, I keep on telling the stories very respectfully but I forget all about them. In a way, we exploit these situations.”

Chalchitra (The Kaleidoscope)

A enthusiastic young man (Anjan Dutt) meets the editor of a daily newspaper (Utpal Dutt) and gets assigned to write about the vicissitudes of middle-class life. As he begins to take stock of the contents that sustain this life, from domestic nuisance, to quckery of a swindling palm-reader, it appears to him that despite his contrivations, life is a complex cascade of interconnected events and a singular perspective cannot contain the chaos of the big city, much less make it a "cosummable" article as the editor demands. His subject becomes the coal fired ovens of the city. "How many coal ovens are there in the Calcutta?" Sen travels into the man's dreamscape where hundreds of women light their ovens. The place gets rife with smoke. A battalion of fire fighters, headed by the editor, arrive to contain it. We delve into the realm of surrealism. But the editor wants to make it a climate issue- about coal crises and air pollution. The young man cannot agree but he has to compromise in-order to secure a position in the paper. And so he does.

Chalchitra encapsulated the dramatic tension and rhythm of Calcutta that takes precedence in Sen's ouevre of work. Sen says, it was a film about a film. "So, I have gone into several situations trying to capture the humour, frivolity and frustrations of a city arising out of, for example, the problem of taking someone to the hospital, or through a glimpse of another world, the world of a good man forced to become a cheat, with a direct bearing on our central theme of a youngman unknowingly changing his lifestyle. ... I use the smoke in a certain context, as Gandhi used salt to fight against the British. Churchill asked the question, 'How does it matter to the British Empire if a half-naked fakir boils saline water on the Indian shore?' But it mattered. as Churchill realized later. I use smoke in the same manner- in my own way, depending on my experiences. ... Symbolically. I do not accuse the young man. i only tell him, warn him, 'You are changing your lifestyle, mind you.' ... To establish that, I had to bring different worlds together, bring in a lot of people. The spectator is required to make a cerebral effort, to make the necessary integration of the fragments I offered to build a story out of them. Chalchitra remains the search for a story. We do not find it at the end, but we arrive at certain conclusions, certain facts of life, certain new experiences, though they are not necessarily very palatable ones."

Tripura Prasanga (Documentary)

Documentary on the Eastern Indian state of Tripura, funded by the Tripura Government.

Kharij ( The Case is Closed)

Kharij is about a servant boy named Palan, more so it is about the gap he leaves behind with his untimely death. Palan is just Palan, without a last name or an address where the news of his sudden death could be sent to. He is a servant boy just about of the same age as the child in his masters' house- an upwardly mobile middle-class calcutta family for whom Palan works for two meals and some extra cash - echoing the poverty of the countryside. Palan sleeps in the kitchen and with doors and windows shut in the winter, he dies from the fumes of carbon monoxide coming out of the coal oven. A whole day unfolds and ends with Palan's grieving father departing, without a police case for neglect or abuse and death, but with hands folded in a namashkara. It is resouding of the fact that nothing happens to the privileged and the poor are conditioned to not raise their voice in a system that prefers the privileged.

In Sen's own words, Kharij despite having the opportunity, restrains itself from having a confrontation. There is an unrelieved tension at various levels between characters and bewtween situations. But the film does not allow the confrontation to take place. There is a subdued threat of confrontation between the master class and servant class, hanging over a considerable part of the film, almost on the verge of explosion but supressed by our social relationships and social behaviour patterns. Palan's death virtually exposes everyone. No one is clean. The death is a catalytic agent. as much as the neighbour's servant boy whose mute appearences put the middle class protagonists to embarassment, to disturb them and reinfornce guilt. The faceless population of menials who go unnoticed sleeping under the stairs in utter neglect, assert their presence only to beguile the audience that something dramatic might happen but nothing happens, because nothing happens in reality.

"I am not one of those who take full advantage of the middle class existence and then condemn it outright. I believe the middle class plays a vital role in our social and political structure. I try to concentrate on the middle class to which I essentially belong. I try to show them in their state of crises, in their playacting, in the way they get caught at playacting - and I am interested in them because they are not insensitive. They face a moral crisis only because they are not so."

Mrinal Sen was the first Indian to be invited to the jury of Cannes Film Festival, in 1982.

Khandhar (The Ruins)

Khandhar is an adaptation of Premendra Mitra's 1930s short story 'Telenapota Abhishkar'. The phase that begins with Ektin Pratidin, ends with Khandhar. Mrinal makes direct use of a physical place to provide density through a well-knit structure. The story itelf has a heady atmospheric depth to it. The protagonist, instead of a stray anglar, becomes a modern day photographer. Purnendu Pattrea made a Bengali adaptation of the story in 1960s, in which Sen's favourite actress Madhabi Mukherjee played Jamini—the role Sen offered to Shabana Azmi, in spite of Smita Patil's yearning for it. Featuring Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapoor and Shobha Sen in titular roles, the film chronicles the memory of the photographer's short sojourn in the ruins of a feudal mansion where he has to play the charade of being the expected groom of a forlorn girl, in front of her blind mother.

"Sen calls Subhash his alter ego, the extension of himself. As Sen looks at the world through his viewfinder, Subhash does the same, and like Sen, he also represents the urban middle class. His refusal to honour his
commitment to Jamini's mother or blaming his friend for his predicament is, as we have seen in other Sen films, a typical middle-class trait. But the camera in his hand elevates him to a special status, as Samik
Bandyopadhyay observes: There is inherent in the operation of camera a strategy for self-defence. The camera lens placed between the self and the reality is a mediator that distances one from the other and gives at the same time to the man behind the camera a false sense of possession and power. Sen seems to identify the middle class liberal with the cameraman, bent on observing and recording, but escaping the involvement. But the wounds they open up in the process in the lives they penetrate may never heal and yet would never affect their conscience. "

Tasveer Apni Apni - Portrait of an Average Man

Mrinal's first made-for-television movie produced by Calcutta Doordarshan, Tasveer Apni Apni is a Hindi language drama on an average Joe, an employee (K.K. Raina) in a large office who is suddenly facing unemployment because his bosses have found him guilty of negligence. He is devastated, but he cannot lose his job since he is the only support of his family. Interspersed with the employee's efforts to convince his boss, in several different ways, that he cannot be fired are direct dialogues with the author (Shyamanand Jalan) who created the character of the employee. In these latter conversations, the employee berates his creator for giving him an impossible, no-win situation -- he has no control over his fate, period.

Genesis

Starrinng Shabana Azmi, Nasseruddin Shah and Om Puri, Genesis was a multinational production involving four countries, France (Scarabee Films), Switzerland (Cactus Films), Belgium (Les Films de la Dreve) and India (Mrinal Sen Productions). The content, and issues dealt in the film are global however shot in India, with an Indian cast and in a major Indian language- Hindustani. A farmer and a weaver start desiring the same woman they have established a commune with, in a village tucked away in amidst ruins on a desert. It works under the framework of a parable - trying to present the growth, development and decay of a civilization only to have it catch up with another.
In Gensis, Mrinal agreed to work with the sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar. The film was edited in Brussels, and music recorded in Paris, but Mrinal fell in love with the atmospheric sounds of the dessert in Rajasthan. He, with insistence from the European Production team, decided to not rerecord the ambient sound of the film in a dubbing studio. During rerecording, Mrinal made limited use of Ravi Shankar's music. When the film was released in Paris a year later, Shankar who had gone for the show with a couple of his musician friends, was furious with Sen over the phone for most of his compositions were gone. They perhaps severed ties after this.

Kabhi Door Kabhi Paas (omnibus of 13 forty-minute short films) was created by Sen for the state broadcasting channel, Doordarshan. The episodes were broadcasted nationally once a week. Eleven of these films were adaptations from stories by various authors like Achintya Kumar Sengupta, Narendranath Mitra, Dibyendu Palit, Moti Nandy and others besides two stories (Swayamvar and Aparajit) by Sen himself. The episodes feature an extraordinary cast of actors, from Anil Chatterjee, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Girish Karnad and Aparna Sen to Deepti Naval, Neena Gupta and Dilip Dhawan. Unforseen situations bring people from the past close to each other to establish a temporary togetherness till they go back to their own ways.

So the limitations of the small screen do not inhibit you?

"No, not at all. At school they told us, necessity is the mother of invention'. whenever I see that I can do this much and cannot go beyond it, it becomes a challenge to me. you have seen my Do Behen. It is full of words. The story is wordy. Yet it can be equally valid for cinema. [...] The point is to have the medium in your grip. If I know the limitations as well as the advantages, I don't feel there should be any problem in tackling it. I keep it all in mind when I select a story for the small screen. I'll have problems, say, regarding the contrast factor in tonal compositions, which wouldn't be more than 1:2 in video, whereas I look for much greater latitude in my films. At the same time, human experiences, relationships and interactions offer enough material for treatment. As a matter of fact, finding the right stories has been quite a task.

Ekdin Achanak (Suddenly, One Day)

Ekdin Achanak unfolds around the sudden disappearence of a man, the professor (played by Sreeram Lagoo) and his family's dialogue with links in the past that would help them piece the man together. The absent presence of the man gives the family an impetus to actually see him for the man he is.

City Life: The International Period Film

Calcutta My Eldorado

This twelve part episodic film was directed by twelve international film directors. Each director created a short film on theirown city. The directors included Penell, Kieslowski Bela Tarr, Guenil and Sen among others.

Mahaprithibi (World Within, World, Without)
In 1979, he changed direction again: he gave up the direct agitprop style of film-making, became more introspective and returned to his favourite middle-class milieu. The backdrop for this change was also a major political event of the day—the victory of the Left Front in West Bengal in 1977. In 1989, the whole world was shaken by events in the Eastern Block —the integration of the two Germanys and the withering of communism in the Soviet Union. These events left Sen totally shattered. The political philosophy which he believed to be the ultimate truth since his adolescence had suddenly become invalid. There was a vacuum he did not know how to fill. It was this confusion that goaded him to make Mahaprithivi (World Within, World Without)—a new phase in his creativity.

Antareen (The Confined)

Starring Dimple Kapadia and Anjan Dutt, Antareen is a Bengali adaptation of Sadat Hasan Manto's Badshahat Ka Khatimah starring Dimple Kapadia as the woman and Anjan Dutt as the writer who forge a relationship over telephone calls.

After Antareen (The Confined) was screened at the Calcutta International Film Festival in 1993, Sen held his regular press conference. According to the credit title of the film, it was 'on an idea based on a story by Sadat Hasan Manto'. A film journalist from Delhi, who obviously knew Urdu, asked Sen the title of the Manto story that gave him the idea of the film. Sen smiled mysteriously and said, 'Instead of answering your question, let me put it back to you; please go through the collected works of Manto and tell me the title of the story that you think has served as the basis of my film.'
The journalist was flabbergasted; but Sen had made his point. He made it clear that the film was so different from the story that nobody would be able to identify the source.

And The Show Goes On: An 18 episode-series was produced by the British Film Insitute to celebrate the 100 years of cinema, collaborating with directors like Godard, Oshima, Scorsese and Sen amongst others, in which Sen traces the development of filmmaking in india.

Amar Bhuban (This, My Land)

Mrinal last release, Amar Bhuban is adapted from the novel Dhanjyotsna by Afsar Amed.The film is loosely based on the lives of its characters, Sakina, Nur and his brother Meher and can be simply called a narrative of love, kinship and egotism. Critically and commercially, it received a very lukewarm response.

Where am I, now?

Having watched and made so many films over the years, I realize now that a passionate cineaste capable of responding to modern sensibilities does not necessarily, unlike his literary counterpart, have to speak only of his anxiety to change society, of his protest, of the challenge he faces from an unsympathetic world, but must also include the confusion, the anguished questing, the inherent contradictions which are beyond easy solutions.

Under Ray's Shadow

"The largest body of cinema in India is still the traditional cinema, a cinema that has nothing to do with art or Indian reality. Then came Satyajit Ray as a great revolutionary figure. Not that there were no flashes before Ray, there were, but they weren't part of any whole, and were not strong enough to evolve into a movement. Ray was the logical extension of a certain awareness which was developing in various art media.

Those of us in the New Cinema have been categorized as people developing under the shadow of Satyajit Ray. But by now, Ray has become a demigod, a sort of holy ghost, and, as you are aware, a ghost doesn't cast a shadow. Frankly, very few of us have grown under Ray's shadow. I, for one, was very much inspired by the fact that his films became successes all over the world, but I have my own view of reality which is quite different from Ray's. That's true for others, as well. We all have our own ideas, our own attitudes towards cinema and to the world."

"K.K is dead, I am alive"

K K Mahajan worked with Mrinal, as his cameraman since their first film Bhuvan Shome. In his memoir of his father, Bondho, Kunal Sen remembers the stark difference between the two. Mahajan spoke very little, had an austere and somewhat rough exterior. yet their relationship was tender and joking. He could always deliver what Mrinal was looking for. In the crowd sequences of Mrinal's films, they would let the actors go into the crowds before the shots and then get off the car with equipment so that the crowd wouldn't realize a film a being shot. There was little planning, no light measurement, only natural light and no reflectors.
Mrinal dedicated his 2013 publication My Chaplin to his friend and teammate Mahajan, who had passed away from advanced cancer in 1989. When he helmed the camera for the first time for Mrinal, while shooting Bhuvan Shome, Mrinal quoted Neils Bohr to him: Confidence comes from not always being right, but also from not fearing to be wrong. Mrinal was friends with Ray's cinematographer Subrata Mitra and often toyed with the idea of making a film with him but backed out realizing that subrata was too much of a perfectionist. In his subsequent films, Mrinal worked with Carlo Varini (Genesis), Sashi Anand (Antareen) and Avik Mukhopadhyay (Amar Bhuban).

Adoor Gopalarishnan on Sen

“In the trinity of Ray-Ghatak-Sen that defines Indian cinema, Ray was the artist, a brilliant disciplined mind,” said Adoor Gopalakrishnan, the Malayalam language auteur whose meditative, languorous sequences have led some critics to call him Ray's legatee in Indian cinema. “He chose film as his medium but he could easily have chosen any other art form. Ghatak was highly theatrical, both in his personal life and his work. He was highly original in the way he raised melodrama to a high art form. Mrinal da had the qualities of both of them. Some people call him political and he did have a brief political phase, but he came out of it soon. A political film is defined by certainty. The beginning is the end because it is all a message. But Mrinal da has a lot of questions in his work. The opposite of certainty.”

Personally, Mrinal da never stopped believing in the ideals of Communism,” Gopalakrishnan said, on the phone. “He used to say, I'm a private Marxist. How simply he lived! It is hard to believe that a director who has been on the jury of every major European festival lived like that. He would joke, 'I see the lifestyle of a filmmaker and I can tell what quality of film he will make.

Suhasini Mulay on Sen:

“If a spot boy had an input, Mrinal da would listen to it. He might even incorporate it,” said Suhasini Mulay, winner of five National Awards—four for documentaries directed by her and one for acting. “That was the kind of open space his set was. It was very different from a Ray set, where everything was planned down to the last detail. And I think people were scared of Ray too. If you look at his filmography, you see Ray gradually taking over departments—music, camera, more. Mrinal da was also planned and knew what he wanted. But he thrived with an exchange of ideas.” Mulay first acted in film in a stellar turn in Bhvan Shome. She assisted Ray on Jana Aranya (1976) and Sen on Mrigaya (1976).

The director himself has been a subject of many documentaries, That includes Reinhard Hauff's Ten Days in Calcutta A Portrait of Mrinal Sen (1984), Supantho Bhattacharya's A Man Behind The Curtain (1998), Sanjay Bhattacharya and Rahul Bose's With Mrinal Sen (1989), Romesh Sharma's Portrait of a Filmmaker (1999), Chidananda Dasgupta's Mrinal Sen Revisited (2001), Nripen Gangopadhyay's Mrinal Sen: Self and Cinema (2013) and RV Ramani's A Documentary Proposal (2014). Hauff's documentary was a dialogue berween two filmmakers from two different continents but with similar problems and concerns, While shooting tor Dasgupta's documentary, the veteran director had himself differentiated it from the other projects made on him saying: "Dasgupta is a longtime friend, so I was not just a marionette in his hands".

The 44-minute-long A Documentary Proposal was photographed, edited, directed and produced by Ramani. The genesis of this documentary was interesting. Ramani was in Kolkata in 2013 when a few officials from the Films Division of India under Virender Kundu, had decided to make a documentary on Mrinal Sen, They were visiting his Padmapukur residence to discuss the proposal with him, Ramani, a big fan of Sen, went along with his camera, At the end of the meeting, he realised that he already had a film with him!

A four episode documentary titled Celebraring Mrinal Sen, primarily based on conversations berween the director and renowned film critic and analyst Sameek Bandyopadhyay, was made in 2013. The project was directed by Ananya Banerjee, a senior programme officer of the Doordarshan Directorate in New Delhi, It included excerpts from Sen's films and comments from his son Kunal and the actors featuring in his films, Soumitra Chattopadhyay, Madhabi Mukhopadhyay, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Dhritiman Chatterji, Annu Kapoor, Suhasini Mulay, Mithun Chakraborty, Nandita Das, Ranjit Mallick, Mamata Shankar, Aparna Sen, Anjan Dutt, Bibhas Chakraborty, Arun Mukhopadhyay, Pankaj Kapur, MK Raina, Govind Nihalini, Shyam Benegal, Jwahar Sircar and Suman Mukhopadhyay.

And the Films Not Made:

Sen had decided on adapting Bengali modern classics of literature, few of which being Anubartan by Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay, a novel on the lives of school teacher, Dhorai Charit Manas by Satinath Bhaduri on the various phases of the anti-colonial struggle in Bengal, Mahakaaler Rather Ghora by Samaresh Basu chronicling the life of a Naxalite leader. He was also keen on taking up Subodh Ghosh's Jatugriha which already had its first cinematic adaption by Tapan Sinha in 1964, starring Uttam Kumar and Arundhati Devi. Sen wanted to compress the time of the film, reducing it to ninty minutes when the estranged couple waiting for their trains at the station realize that they still like each other. In the 80s, Sen was engrossed with a story by Ramapada Choudhury with two women in their 50s and 20s respectively, living in a large feudal mansion, who have different social lives but meet at a common juncture while rehearsing for Ibsen's The Doll House. The film however wasn't finalised. Sen liked for his films to be logical extensions of each other, and for this he was bent upon making a sequel to Gensis, featuring a tea stall run by an old woman, amidst a no man's land where truck drivers would make a stop once in a while. A young woman walks a long way from the debris opf Genesis, in the last stage of her pregnancy. The baby is born in the old tea-shanty—another Genesis! Another sequel that Sen had hoped to make was to be an extension of Akaler Sandhaney, where the film director goes back to the village a good twenty years later, as a solitary traveller and encounters the changes that have taken place. Thus the cycle that started with Baishey Sravan would reach a completetion.

As years passed, the crowd of fans, friends, interviewers, and colleagues gathering for adda in Mrinal's living room slowly thinned. The cups of tea streaming out of the kitchen from eight in the morning to eleven at night got less and less busy. Mrinal confined himself to his typewriter, and occassionlly engaged with the computer to write and answer mails. Gita's health was slowly failing and she got bedridden. Mrinal stayed in her company at their Bhawanipore house. When Gita passed away in 2017, Kunal Sen recalls in Bondhu, that it were as if Mrinal had lost purpose in life. On 30th December 2018, he succumbed to his ailing health at the age of 95.