The title-song of Suman Mukhopadhyay's 2010 Bangla film “Mahanagar@Kolkata” assembles a bricolage of grotesque, terrifying images: spine-chilling lovers' encounters in dungeons, a brisk bartering of souls to raise periodic paradises, crepitating pyres in the netherworld, and then a telling line: ‘Here is my collective farm, and I shall continue to extract the final harvest.' Thus does a deep irony stab and pierce a sacred political ideal.
A similar hide-and-seek of excess and silence haunts the Kolkata cityscape at this time: a city in the middle of a historic Assembly election is bewildered and anticipatory. Post-Nandigram (2007), an ominous caesura manifests itself variously through culture wars, by means of artistic productions, in diverse attempts to woo the bureaucracy and the police, in proliferating street-corner prophecies and rumours, and in cycles of revenge that may have just begun, in hesitant op-eds.
Mukhopadhyay's films and plays will prove particularly significant for any future evaluation of contemporaneous urban Bengal, where the aesthetic collides furiously with the political. Without adopting any overt ideology, he is able to propel the film forward in a curiously adversarial mode which is shot through with an irrationality that perhaps signifies a contra-left-rationalism, at best. Regular, periodic eruptions of violence are intercepted with black humour, recalling the sedimenting of bullets and bombs across the city and deep into its hinterland for over 30 years. Interweaving three short stories from cult-Bengali-writer Nabarun Bhattacharya, “M@K” is able to gather up a storm of urban angst, desire, despair and rage that sits strangely well with the frothing fomenting underbelly of political convulsions that has characterised life in the state of Bengal over the past few decades. At its still centre there is Biren, a quirky jobless middle-class man whose constant paranoid mutter, ‘Amar kono bhoy nei toh?' (I don't have anything to fear, do I?) slithers like a refrain through the film and becomes, almost, its Joycean imperative, ‘Signatures of All Things I am Here to Read'.
Arjun Gourisaria and Moinak Biswas's 2009 film “Sthaniya Sambaad” (Spring in the Colony), mapping the diurnal workings of a refugee colony in contemporary Kolkata, also places itself squarely in an emergent world of land-grabbers and fly-by-night investors. The narrative tracks how the bemused young and old, apparently outside of this world in a refugee colony on the fringes of the city, gradually get sucked into their machinations.
Early in the film, the realist narrative mode enters a delirium of sorts. Two wandering, absurd thieves shear off a girl's plait in order to garner money for vocational education, and a criminal visionary builds high-rises, devoting his life to providing education to youngsters. The job that he finds for the ludicrous thieves looking for vocational education is of shanty-demolition. Chit fund, fishery and construction mafia have become leading vocational-institute-builders in Bengal. It is exactly this utter inanity and nakedness of a mode of developmental violence, collapsing political differences across party lines, which will bewilder the voters at the hustings, especially those who still remain supremely undecided about change and continuity. The real merges with its excess and overflow.
The political dimensions of the film unfold in this liminal space; it comments, lampoons and shows puzzlement all at once — without venturing a verdict — and yet is quite categorical about a seething, in-built violence as the story of new India unfurls. Privatised education, speaking serious nonsense, is a running thread in “Sthaniya Sambaad”. As Biswas says in a conversation: ‘We read the parvenu vocational trainer's sermons in newspapers every day. They are there.' Kolkata, like much of India, is unable to process the rapid changes and lure that come at the cost of disregarding modes of vernacular affiliations and cultural expressions. Gourisaria and Biswas have been able to capture this gap between the new modes of urbanisation and community, argot and solidarity. It is this gap that the common voter will gauge in concrete terms in the next few days in Bengal.
Spiritual sharing
Unlike Mukhopadyay, Gourisaria and Biswas are sometimes affectionately-educative and hopeful: as a counterpoint to the criminal Mafiosi, we see a young adolescent boy and a writer of obsolete poetry being educated by a middle-aged intellectual through the borrowing of books. In their loving relationship, the rites of passage are bridged by dialogues and exchanges that are almost Socratic in nature. The boy is learning not through instruction or teaching but by a sort of spiritual sharing — the kernel of forming an ethos. There is also a set of five idlers permanently perched on a bamboo bench, who serve a choric function by commenting on the rapid transformations overtaking their locality. They also constitute an inexplicable excess, not integrated to the logic of the market, as it were. There are things hidden and mysterious on perches and in alleyways. Will the election results testify to that too?
Vignettes and split narratives in both films disrupt the idea of universality and illusion of the developmental therapy of new India. Both Mukhopadhay, and Gourisaria and Biswas, take the psycho-geographical route, an unplanned drifting through the cityscape, where individuals travel and the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and topography subconsciously direct them to an entirely new and authentic experience. But that experience refuses to provide a blueprint for the lay voter. It jolts him. And nudges him to decide on an ethical-political position – one that can hardly be arrived at through logic and reason.
“Mahanagar@Kolkata” and “Sthaniya Sambaad” have, of course, an intrinsically-dissimilar approach to representing the urban dynamic of Kolkata. Mukhopadhyay's quixotic character, who believes that spectral powers of protection are invested in a bit of bloodied hangman's rope that he carries around in a frayed plastic pouch, is in contrast to a far-more-grounded (if enigmatic) filmmaking – invoking the political documentary – that “SS” exemplifies. But it comes closest to “M@K” in what appears to be a shared visceral understanding of a city that thrives on ‘the boredom, the horror and the glory' of its complex conflicted trajectories.
What brings them together then? Is it in their concrete constructions of the momentary ambivalences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality? If so, the irony now comes full circle in the final week of April 2011, as Kolkata simmers in political apprehension and anxiety of its enormously-significant hustings. Except that, even while cinema pirouettes into reality, the polling booth will not allow artistic license enough to frame ambivalence into a freeze-shot.
Brinda Bose and Prasanta Chakravarty teach at the Department of English in the University of Delhi.
brindabose@gmail.com, mrsceptic@gmail.com