With master filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, Bengali cinema has had its own presence, producing some of the country’s best films. Has it become a thing of the pastIJ Or, can the new generation of Bengali filmmakers strike backIJ
As Indian cinema celebrated its 100 years, attention, for a large part, was centred on Bombay, where Dadasaheb Phalke’s mythological Raja Harishchandra — the first full-length Indian film — was released in 1913. However, Calcutta, till 1911 the capital of British India, already had a nascent film industry in the 1900s and 1910s, and was at par with Bombay in the silent and first talkie eras — a history that is often forgotten. Over the years, Bengali cinema has had its own presence, producing some of the country’s best regarded filmmakers and the best of Indian cinema, with masters like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen. Also, it has had a vibrant mainstream cinema, which up until the early 1970s was able to build a niche market catering to the bhadralok middle classes, and effectively survived in the face of growing competition from the Bombay Hindi cinema. Bengali cinema’s ‘golden years’ were the 1950s and 1960s, when it was principally signified by the star duo Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen. In addition, this popular cinema banked on its key components of a derived literariness or ‘good story’, drawing upon the celebrated oeuvre of Bengali writing, bhalogaan or good songs and certain connotation of decent or clean entertainment as opposed to Bombay’s more commercialised — and hence somewhat ‘vulgar’ — cinema.
These by then well-identified constituents of Bengali cinema had coalesced in the first talkie era in the 1930s most evidently in the oeuvre of films produced by Bengal’s pioneering film studio New Theatres ltd. New Theatres produced such iconic films as Debaki Bose’s Chandidas (1932) and the first talkie version of Devdas (1935) directed by Pramathes Barua with Kl Saigal starring in the film’s Hindi version. New Theatres films which epitomised the Bengal cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, drew heavily on the works of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee (Bengal’s best-selling popular novelist), established a degree of technical excellence, and also popularised the hitherto elitist Rabindra Sangeet, to establish the connotations of a ‘cultured’ entertainment which became Bengali cinema’s apparent marker. New Theatres and other Bengal studios of the era produced both Bengali and Hindi-Urdu films, often the same film in a double version to simultaneously cater the Bengali and ‘all-India’ markets. It allowed the Bengal studios to establish a greater ‘all-India’ presence, and compete with Bombay on the parameters of a ‘cultured’ Bengali cinema versus a commercialised one and hence a relatively low-brow Hindi cinema.
Though Bengali cinema lost its ‘all-India’ market in the 1950s following a growing competition from Bombay’s studios, it held its own in the regional market through the 1950s and the greater part of the 1960s, largely building on the established paradigm of a cleaner and more ‘cultured’ entertainment. The latter 1960s however also marked the beginnings of the Bengali industry’s economic downturn, which turned almost irreversible in the 1970s. Many cinemas switched to screening Hindi films in place of Bengali, and through this period the Bombay film industry multiplied its returns in the regional market. Bengali audiences were also showing a marked preference for Bombay films, made in colour and with superior technical qualities than the Bengali films that were now being made on the tightest of budgets. From the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bengali cinema also lost out on a sizeable proportion of its audiences with the proliferation of television sets in middle class homes. The industry had also received a dramatic setback in 1980, when its iconic star Uttam Kumar died after a heart attack on one of his sets. For a few years thereafter, the industry teetered on the brink of a collapse, or stood poised for a complete changeover. The latter happened in the mid-1980s, when the mainstream popular cinema underwent a profound transition making way for its comeback, though in a remarkably different avatar.
The industry was at an all-time low, when a new director Anjan Chowdhury released his first film Shatru (Adversary, 1984), which though apparently based on a Bombay ‘formula’ was significant for making room for a new orientation of the mainstream Bengali film. Shatru was the story of an honest police inspector who is transferred to a village that is corruption-ridden, and where he fights the oppressive agents to bring justice to the poor. By this time, this was a common enough ‘formula’ of the Bombay cinema: The figure of the police inspector, particularly, had gained iconic proportions in the films of Amitabh Bachhan. Shatru and the later films of Anjan Chowdhury were also liberally spiced with other ‘formula’ elements of Hindi cinema, fights, the song-and-dance and racy dialogues. What was most significant, however, was that in Shatru, Anjan Chowdhury, for the first time, brought to Bengali cinema a configuration of elements that overturned the industry’s middle-class bhadralok orientation, and related to the more subaltern groups, creating an entirely new audience base. A key figure in the films of Anjan Chowdhury was the honest police inspector, who gets justice to the underprivileged. Interestingly, there was, till the time of Shatru, no such stock figure as ‘hero’ in Bengali films. Actor Ranjit Mallick, who played this larger-than-life figure in these films became, by virtue of it, an icon of the post-Uttam Kumar Bengali cinema, and it was only from the 1980s that Bengali films started to have action heroes, making stars like Chiranjeet and Prosenjit.
Other important themes in the films of Anjan Chowdhury and others of his school were the domestic servant’s romance and marriage with his employer’s daughter (or generally a woman above his own class), and the aged domestic help as the father-figure who keeps the middle-class family together; themes which were relevant with reference to Bengali cinema’s crisis of viewership as it had emerged in the 1980s. With Calcutta’s urban middle-class public favouring Hindi films, or turning away from the film theatres to television, the industry had started to look at other audiences for its primary viewership. It reached out to the lesser sectors of the film market, and aggressively targeted the rural hinterland, with films now opening in smaller theatres in the districts. To find a niche market in these parts, the industry had to offer a product that targeted specific constituencies of filmgoers there, and the 1980s Bengali cinema accordingly focused on mufassil and lower middle-class milieus, with greater emphasis on issues of social equality and social justice. Though Shatru, and some other films of Anjan Chowdhury as well as the others of his school of thought, did good business in some Calcutta theatres during these years, their audiences were now more appreciably made up of a class of patrons who differed from the erstwhile middle-class patrons of Bengali films.
The industry’s new orientation was doubly confirmed in a departure from Bengali cinema’s signature social realism into the realm of folk and fantasy. In 1991, the industry had its biggest hit of the time, Beder Meye Jyotsna (Jyotsna, the Snake Charmer’s Daughter), which was an India-Bangladesh joint venture, and was based on a folktale of the love-story of a prince and a girl brought up among snake charmers. The film drew heavily on the cult of snake worship prevalent in rural Bengal and the related folk culture, and was severely criticised for being like the jatra or indigenous theatrical performance popular in both rural West Bengal and Bangladesh. For many industry persons, it was a non-film, generally considered Bengali cinema’s lowest ebb for its theatricality and high melodrama. Yet, by the end of its first year, it was declared the industry’s biggest success of the time. Chiranjeet Chatterjee who played the film’s male lead, said in an interview, “Millions of people over the years have thronged cinema halls to see this film over and over again. I have met hundreds of people who told me that they had seen it more than 25 times”. Beder Meye spawned a whole genre of folk in Bengali films, which was a significant departure from the industry’s established ethos of social realism.
At the other end of the spectrum, a line-up of ‘middle’ films — Aparna Sen’s Parama (1985), Tapan Sinha’s Atanka (Terror, 1986), Saroj Dey’s Koni (1986), Prabhat Roy’s Swet Patharer Thala (The Marble Plate, 1992), and then the films of Rituparno Ghosh in the 1990s and 2000s periodically drew back to the cinemas the middle-class public saw in the 1960s and 1970s. Depicting the urban middle-classes, these films such as Parama (about a married woman’s love affair with a younger man) or Rituparno Ghosh’s Dahan (Crossfire, 1998), which showed how middle-class society deals with sexual harassment/rape, raised questions about gender and sexuality, marriage and motherhood which fragmented Bengali bhadralok complacencies. Rituparno’s films in particular emerged as a genre of sorts, signifying the ‘good story’ of the quintessential Bengali film, a degree of technical excellence and transforming bhadralok sensibilities.
The Bengali ‘middle’ cinema saw a resurgence with the coming of multiplexes in the 2000s, with a group of young filmmakers addressing contemporary urban themes, issues of sexuality and even re-interpreting a ‘classic’, Satyajit Ray’s Nayak (1966). This body of films has largely catered to the new Bengali middle-classes, who are the products of a globalising India. There is also a notable strand of independent filmmaking, as in Qaushik Mukherji — Q’s Gandu (Asshole, 2010), which made its presence in the international festival circuit but did not premiere in India. An online summary of the film states, “Gandu hates his life. He hates his mother. Gandu raps out his hate, anger, dirt and filth of his existence. He and his rickshaw-puller friend enter the world of smack, rap, porn and horror. Reality and fiction, surreal and bizarre come together. Can Gandu surviveIJ” Q’s next film was a radical reworking of Tagore — Tasher Desh (2013), a rendition clearly much more eclectic and broad ranging than being definable as ‘Bengali’. Q’s Tasher Desh was virtually unrecognisable as a Tagore creation with its post-modern creation with accent on sexual liberation and queer sexuality. Both Gandu and Tasher Desh show the distance travelled by Bengali filmmakers since the golden years of the 1950s, and the Bengali film’s set paradigms of good story, songs and its connotations of ‘clean’ entertainment.
The mainstream industry itself was able to get corporate backing and new finances post-2000 and produced close copies of Bombay’s and the South’s ‘masala’ films. Several mainstream films of the period were remakes of southern hits, and film budgets grew significantly through the decade, though they remained lower than the budget for an average Bollywood film. These films used more advanced technology, and top Tollywood (as the Bengali industry is referred to) films have had song sequences shot on overseas locations such as Bangkok, Singapore and Europe. More recently, filmmakers have experimented with new genres in the period adventure film Chander Pahar (2013), set in South Africa, and Jatiswar (2013), a reincarnation saga connecting 19th century and contemporary Bengal. Both films were box-office successes.
A new generation of Bengali film stars like Jeet and Dev now model themselves on Bollywood stars like Salman and Shah Rukh Khan, rather than as Bengali icons. A recent film Paglu (2011) singularly mirrored this transition of Bengali films, its lead song having the Hindi catch-line ‘Paglu thoda sa kar le romance’ (Paglu make a little bit of romance) and being sung by Bollywood singers Mika Singh and Akriti Kakar. A vestige of an earlier brand of quintessential ‘Bengaliness’ sporadically resurfaces, as in Sandip Ray’s Feluda films, based on his father Satyajit Ray’s famous Feluda stories, where the iconic Bengali detective Prodosh Mitter undertakes missions to assert the bhadralok Bengali’s acumen and superiority.
