When Anik Dutta’s first film Bhooter Bhabishyat (2012), made on a budget of ₹60 lakh, (officially) earned ₹3 crore, it surprised everyone, including Dutta. It was arguably the biggest hit in the Bengali film industry, made by a man who had been trying to make a film for 20 years and failing.
In the film, the plan to tear down an elegant old house and build a jazzy mall threatens the ghosts who live there. They refuse to live in a shiny new place, unlike the more accommodating ghosts in some recent Hindi films. As ever, Bengalis have to be difficult. The intimidation crew tasked to secure the property is made up of goondas on political party rolls, a direct pointer to cadres of the Left Front party (who’ve since been signed up by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress).
More than anything, the film was a cheerful political satire in the tradition of Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969) and Hirak Rajar Deshe (1980). The industry had seen a renewal in the 90s with the intimate and prolific work of the late Rituparno Ghosh. But Ghosh worked in the domain of gender and sexual politics, his films didn’t explore politics politics. Besides, Bengalis have a talent for mon-kharap — melancholia — and the work of the most celebrated filmmakers, from Ritwik Ghatak to Rituparno Ghosh, even the later films of Ray and Mrinal Sen, is suffused with brooding. This is not to say their films are not funny or don’t contain joy, but the overall aura is bleak. In contrast, Dutta, an adman with an affinity for punning, brought to his film something akin to glee. The ghosts win, of course, and so the ulcerous reality of the real estate mafia, their toxic nexus with political parties, the citizens’ powerlessness, feels laughable for a moment.
That was 2012. The previous year, Mamata Banerjee had defeated the Left Front that had governed West Bengal for 34 years straight. It was the year Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani made Kolkata look like never before — an enigmatic, energetic city where insurance salesmen who don’t meet their sales targets make sure to hit their assassination targets. And a sharp political film like Bhooter Bhabishyat was among the biggest hits that year. Somehow, Kolkata felt full of possibility.
A still from Anik Dutta’s first film ‘Bhooter Bhabishyat’ (2012).
In 2013, news broke of the Saradha and Rose Valley chit fund scams. Millions of poor, small investors were cheated of their savings. The Saradha group had a finger in every pie, including media, film production and real estate. And these media houses unambiguously supported the Trinamool. In his next film, Aschorjyo Prodeep (2013), Dutta showed a Kolkata full of jazzy gated colonies, shiny restaurants, lounges and salons. Exactly the sort of ‘development’ the Trinamool had been promising. I don’t know if it was intentional, but the production design of the film was tacky — like the Big Ben replica that’s been constructed in the heart of the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass. At one point in the film, the hero says: “What’s the point of going to London? London is here!” It was a direct dig at the Chief Minister, who had said a number of times that Kolkata would become London.
It’s not that poriborton (change) has not happened. Something does feel different about Kolkata now, and not all of it is bad. This is not the space to talk about other policies, but one of the visible changes is in the Bengali entertainment industry, which now has a confidence that was not there even when Ghosh got Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai and Amitabh Bachchan to shoot Bengali films in Kolkata. The number of film and TV hoardings in the city have noticeably grown in the past eight years or so.
The industry enjoys a close relationship with the Chief Minister. Of the 34 Trinamool MPs in the Lok Sabha, five are actors (Moon Moon Sen, Dev, Satabdi Roy, Sandhya Roy and Tapas Pal). The BJP, with 268 MPs, has seven actors. In 2014, Bengali superstar Dev accompanied the Chief Minister’s delegation on her maiden trip abroad (to Singapore). The Chief Minister’s campaign trail sometimes has filmstars making cameo appearances. At a rally in Murshidabad in 2014, the sisters Riya and Raima Sen popped out of Didi’s helicopter to speak for 45 seconds; 45 seconds of English with a couple of Bengali words thrown in. In September 2018, journalist Indranil Roy pointed to the similarity between Dev’s new film Hoichoi Unlimited and a Pakistani film, and was picked up by the Kolkata police for questioning.
A still from ‘Aschorjyo Prodeep’ (2013).
The closeness between the Trinamool and Tollywood, as Kolkata’s film industry is called, has not resulted in direct propaganda films of the sort Bollywood has made. So far, there’s been no film on Kanyashree, the government’s award-winning girl child education scheme, like the Bollywood films on Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan. Nor a biopic yet on the Chief Minister. Tollywood has instead made interesting, even aesthetic films, on transgender lives ( Nagarkirtan , 2019, Chitrangada , 2012), handsome period pieces ( Ek Je Chhilo Raja , 2018), detective stories, and films on Muslim marginalisation and crime networks ( Zulfiqar , 2016), but has steered clear of present-day politics.
Dutta’s third film Meghnadbodh Rohoshyo (2017), a beautifully-made thriller, is also political. It confronts the complicit silence of the Bengali middle and upper-middle class to the brutal State suppression of the Naxalite movement in the 70s. Films (including those of Ray and Mrinal Sen) and novels have chronicled the romance and restlessness of those years and the tyranny unleashed by the Congress government. What they haven’t spoken of is the disowning of the Naxalites by their own friends and family. Only Mahasweta Devi’s Hajaar Churashir Maa (1974) addressed this guilt. Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Lowland (2013) and Dutta’s Meghnadbodh Rohoshyo are a part of this delayed reckoning.
Dutta is a straight talker. At the Kolkata International Film Festival last year, he was a speaker on a panel about filmmaking. When asked whether the director was more important or the producer, Dutta said the Chief Minister was the most important, given the number of her photographs on the festival promotional material. “Right then, I knew this guy would get into trouble,” said filmmaker Judhajit Sarkar.
Bhobishyoter Bhoot , Dutta’s fourth film, which was taken off theatres last month, is a political satire that indicts all political parties equally. It is believed to have reserved its sharpest barbs for the ‘Chhinnomool Party’. On February 11, one of its producers received a letter from the Kolkata Police’s intelligence branch requesting a private screening because the police had “received inputs” that the film contained elements that may incite “public sentiments”. On February 16, the film quietly and suddenly stopped playing in theatres after running for just a day. Unlike Padmaavat (2018), whose release Chief Minister Banerjee supported, there was no violence around this film, no noise, no threats. Only silence.
The writer is an independent journalist based in Kolkata. Twitter: @sohinichat
