From revolution to realism, the multifaceted legacy of Mrinal Sen

When conformity and obedience to the state become the norm, his dissent stands out as a beacon of inspiration.

Mrinal Sen’s films could be angry, bitter, satirical, gloomy, dark, even terrifying in their bleakness, but they uttered universal truths about human conditions, exploitation, and injustice. | Photo Credit: From Sen’s Family Collection

There is a scene in Mrinal Sen’s 1969 classic Bhuvan Shome, where a montage of Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, and Pandit Ravi Shankar is projected on the screen, and a voice-over says: “Bangal! Sonar Bangal! Mahan Bangal! Vichitra Bangal! (Bengal! Golden Bengal! Great Bengal! Unique Bengal!)” Juxtaposed with this, introduced by the sound of a bomb blast, is a scene of unrest, violence, and protest. Cut to 54 years later; West Bengal 2023: The same names—Vivekananda, Tagore, Ray, and Ravi Shankar—are repeatedly invoked from various political platforms as cultural and historical symbols of the State; Sonar Bangal is still an electoral promise; and Mahan Bangal continues to be a reminder of the State’s past heritage. Bomb blasts are part of the ambient noise, especially during elections, and violence and unrest are inseparable from politics. More than half a century later, this scene from one of Sen’s least political films resonates with truth and a tinge of dark, ironic humour.

Sixty-eight years after the release of his debut film, Raatbhor (1955)—the film he himself described as the “biggest of all big disasters”—and 54 years after the huge success of his masterpiece Bhuvan Shome, Mrinal Sen’s legacy is more relevant than ever in the socio-cultural-political world of India. Throughout his career, the general public has found it convenient to slot him as a filmmaker in one or another category. He has been variously hailed as the chronicler of his time, the artist of his age, the pioneer of modern Indian cinema, the first political director, and so on; but such sobriquets serve only to limit his genius and legacy and restrict him either to a period in time or an ideology.

Mrinal Sen looks at a digital handycam in 2019. | Photo Credit: PARTH SANYAL

True, Mrinal Sen was a chronicler of his times; it is evident in the way he punctuated his scenes with montages of current events. He and his cameramen would often be present at scenes of political strife and social unrest and record the events to “characterise the period effectively”. True, very few filmmakers wore their ideology on their sleeves the way Sen did. Also true, he was probably the first to introduce European techniques, thereby revolutionising cinema in the country. But his legacy is not these alone.

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In his centenary year, a tribute to the maestro who led India’s new wave with panache. | Video Credit: Frontline News Desk

Veteran actor Dhritiman Chaterji, who starred in two of Sen’s movies—Padatik (1973) and Akaler Sandhane (1980)—pointed out that much more needs to be done to study Sen’s films. As his admirers celebrate the master’s centenary year with seminars and discussions, Chaterji asked: “Do these celebrations reignite interest in Mrinal Sen and his works? I have to admit that when I was invited to these centenary celebrations, I had a sinking feeling that it would be the same old show that has been going on for so many years—how great a political filmmaker he was; the difference between him and Satyajit Ray; in other words, no fresh ground broken or new understanding of his work.”

Mrinal Sen with Satyajit Ray. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

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The fact is that in an age of conformity and obedience, where it is more convenient for the artist to bend his knee to the establishment and pay obeisance to the box office than to remain faithful to his vision and beliefs, Sen’s legacy stands as a beacon of light. His films could be angry, bitter, satirical, gloomy, dark, even terrifying in their bleakness, but they uttered universal truths about human conditions, exploitation, and injustice. He made films in different languages, amid different socio-political settings—Odia (Matira Manisha, 1966), Hindi (Mrigayaa, 1976), Telugu (Oka Oori Katha, 1977) —and established that the reality of the common people was the same, no matter which part of the country they belonged to. “What I found strikingly similar—whether in the north, south, east or west—was the spectre of poverty and exploitation,” he once observed.

At the 28th National Film Festival ceremony in New Delhi in April 1981. Mrinal Sen got the awards for best direction and best screenplay, while Smita Patil got the best actress award for Akaler Sandhane. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES

One of the words that come immediately to mind in association with Sen is “realism”. Not only did he have an acute sense of realism, which he skilfully and often brutally thrust upon his audience, but he was also painfully aware of the reality of life and that being presented on the screen. Nowhere is that conveyed more powerfully than in Akaler Sandhane—a movie about making a movie. It was as though he was almost painfully aware of the impossibility to capture the intangible elements of reality in cinema.

In one scene, the old village schoolmaster, who represents sanity and conscience, explains to the film director played by Dhritiman Chaterji why he never liked the “talkies”: “It cannot capture human faith or belief... I don’t believe in religion, sin or virtue, but I believe in human faith.” The words disturb the director. Reality shatters illusion, and Sen, who dealt in illusion, constantly sought that level of reality so as to shatter it.

Unembarrassed honesty

In an industry or artform where the “chaos” of existence is slickly sidestepped, or at best superficially touched upon, Sen embraced “chaos”, tried to present it in all its violence and madness, and dared the audience to not turn away. As filmmaker Shoojit Sircar said, it was often with a “sense of dread” that he watched a Mrinal Sen film and yet could not tear himself away. Realism has been the subject of many filmmakers, but few dared to handle it in all its complexities the way Sen did. Even as the world progresses through technology and science, famines still exist, he once said. By famine he meant not just the shortage of food, but also the drying up of dreams and the fading of decency and dignity.

Cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay, who worked with Sen in his last film, Aamar Bhuvan (2002), said that Sen’s films show first-hand how the great director saw life. The very contradictions within Sen that made him a fascinating personality in real life were reflected in his reels with an unembarrassed honesty that made them unique and timeless.

Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen take a look at a commemorative volume on Charlie Chaplin brought out by the West Bengal government in April 1989. | Photo Credit: PTI

He never made a secret of his leftist leanings, yet never became a member of any party, left or otherwise. He was a ruthless realist for whom it was important to “make things look unpretty”, and yet he constantly pursued through his art, the ideals of truth and beauty. He was an inveterate optimist, who yet hated rosy endings; an iconoclast for whom certain traditions remained sacred (he vehemently opposed the renaming of Calcutta as Kolkata). He was a young man in the body of a nonagenarian.

It may be recalled that when the political upheaval over Singur and Nandigram had split Kolkata’s intellectual circle sharply down the middle, Sen had lent his presence to rallies of both sides. While his sympathies would never lie with the state and its machinery of suppression, he would nevertheless question the cause and methods of the rebel. In Padatik (1973), the protagonist, a formidable revolutionary on the run from the law, questions the supreme authority of the Party, and describes his young comrades as “unquestioning, unthinking cannon fodder”. Sen used the film to explain the possible reasons for the failure of the extreme Left. “They say we have not been able to convince the people to be on our side,” one young revolutionary tells his dogmatic leader. In questioning the party’s views, the protagonist alienates himself from the party and, in his solitary state, becomes a true revolutionary, ready to start from scratch to create a new movement.

Padatik could well have been a “1970s’ Naxal movie” but Sen’s handling takes it beyond its historic confines. The ideological questions raised in the film are still posed by foot soldiers in every revolution—violent or otherwise. “What is true of me is also true of my characters,” Sen had once famously said.

Highlights

• Mrinal Sen’s legacy is more relevant than ever in the socio-cultural-political world of India.
• In an age of conformity, where it is more convenient for the artist to bend his knee to the establishment and pay obeisance to the box office than to remain faithful to his vision and beliefs, Sen’s legacy stands as a beacon of light.
• Sen’s aversion to ideological rigidity remained till the end.
• The best way to serve your audience, Sen said, was to serve your own conscience.

Nobody’s man

Sen’s aversion to ideological rigidity remained till the end, often to the discomfiture of his leftist admirers. In 2001, when Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov’s film on Lenin, Taurus, ignited violent reactions from the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal, Sen voiced his support for the film and Sokurov. The party, which had claimed Sen as its own, learnt an important lesson that day. He was nobody’s man but his own. In 1960, when the government offered to take his third film, Baishey Shravana (1960), to the Venice Film Festival if he would edit out a small sequence which they did not like, Sen refused. A struggling Sen needed the break but turned down the offer anyway.

A scene from Mrinal Sen’s Kharij, which won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival, 1983. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Ten years later, after Bhuvan Shome’s success, a film he made on a shoestring budget of Rs.1 lakh, he would turn down huge offers from Bombay and instead make the quirky, experimental Interview (1971), about a young man’s mishaps and trials on the day of his job interview, presented in a semi-farcical manner under the shadow of larger social problems. The late Buddhadeb Dasgupta once told Frontline, after Sen’s passing, “He never sold himself for small gains and always made films according to his own beliefs. This attitude is very rare.”

The Indian delegation, led by Nandini Satpathy, Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting, in Delhi airport prior to their departure for Tashkent on May 23, 1972 to participate in the Second International Film Festival of Asian and African countries. (From right to left) Mrinal Sen, Nargis Dutt, Nandini Satpathy, Simi Garewal, and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. | Photo Credit: HINDU PHOTO ARCHIVES

Provoking the audience

Sen said more than once that his intention was not just to entertain or tell stories. “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,” he had said in a 1981 interview. In Padatik, as an advertisement for baby food is screened in a corporate office, Sen presents a montage of starving children in the streets.

The best way to serve your audience, Sen said in the interview, was to serve your own conscience. In the 1970s, films like Interview, Calcutta ’71 (1972), Padatik, Chorus (1974), and Mrigayaa established Sen as one of the most powerful, outspoken political voices in Indian cinema. His outraged sensibilities, his indignance at social inequality; his contempt for “fragile optimism” and compromise came through in one film after another. In an article on Mrigayaa, the thespian Utpal Dutt wrote, “I hail Mrinal Sen for having raised high the banner of revolution in an era of rank cowardice.”

Veteran film actor Shashi Kapoor and Mrinal Sen at a seminar on women, cinema and society organised by FICCI Ladies Organisation in New Delhi on April 9, 2003. | Photo Credit: PTI

Sen, like his hero Charles Chaplin, never lost sight of the little person, who in his hands became the most ubiquitous, complex, and fascinating figure in human history and not just a screen prop. The metaphysical poet John Donne (1572-1631) wrote, “I sing not siren-like to tempt, for I am harsh.” Sen showed society for what it is. The allegorical Genesis (1986) tells the tale of how two men, toiling in the desert, resist the might of an empire through cooperation and friendship, but lose it all when they fall out over a woman; Chaalchitra (1981) tells the story of ordinary people who time and again overcome their pettiness to support each other in times of distress or celebration.

In Ek Din Pratidin (1979), a dark film about an endless night of anxiety and social paranoia when the eldest daughter of a middle-class family does not return home from work one night, he raised issues on gender norms and bourgeois double standards. In Kharij (1982), a little boy, working in the house of a young middle-class couple, dies of carbon monoxide poisoning while sleeping next to a coal stove. The couple’s reactions and desperate attempts to save their skin expose their petty and conscience-less existence.

Contrary to popular perception, Sen was a maker of humanistic films, rather than political ones. While making his last film, Aamaar Bhuvan, he told the film scholar and art critic Samik Bandopadhyay in an interview, “In these days of wanton killing and devastation, if I can say something about human compassion, then that is the only way perhaps to combat the horrors we are being forced to live with.”

Mrinal Sen told the story of life, in its worst and most hidden aspects. And as long as there is a need to understand life and human behaviour, his films will continue to shock, disturb, and enlighten.