As the 1970s wound down, Bengali cinema entered what would be its darkest phase. Mainstream cinema would go into an extended slump with the passing of Uttam Kumar. The best of Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen were behind them. Ritwik Ghatak was gone.
The stage was set for a new crop of filmmakers – Buddhadev Dasgupta made his first feature Dooratwa in 1978, while Aparna Sen debuted as director in 1981 with 36 Chowringhee Lane – to take over the mantle. And while their films may not have been the commercial successes that Bengali cinema enjoyed in its heyday in the 1950s-’70s – and it was still a while before Rituparno Ghosh would bring the crowds back in the 1990s – these filmmakers made Indian cinema proud at an international level with an aesthetic that differed from both mainstream Bengali cinema of the golden age and that of the celebrated troika.
Of these, Goutam Ghose came closest to being an auteur, not only directing his films but also writing the screenplay, doing the cinematography and composing the music. Another aspect that set him apart from his contemporaries was his engagement with the documentary as a format.
He started off as a documentary filmmaker with New Earth in 1973 and followed it with Hungry Autumn, a distressing look at the food shortage in Bengal in the autumn of 1974. It is a stark film of great anger and a series of disturbing images. One unforgettable shot shows a malnourished, emaciated girl, almost on the verge of collapse, with Aparna Sen’s voiceover saying, ‘This girl is 16. Sweet 16.’ Oh, the irony of it, the shame of it. It was an anger that would inform his films, particularly in the first 20-year phase of his 40-year career so far.
As he mentioned in an interview, “It was perhaps the first independent documentary produced in those days… a different kind of effort – we wanted to show reality. But when we completed the film, it was the period of the Emergency in India. Sukhdev, a friend and a great documentary filmmaker, said, ‘If you give it to the Censor Board for certification, they will ban the film.’ So it was not cleared, though it won awards in major festivals like Oberhausen and Leipzig.”
It’s a tragedy that so many of his documentaries – Ray, for example, or Impermanence (on H.H. The Dalai Lama) – are not available on any platform.
He has also been acclaimed as an actor, making a mark in Buddhadev Dasgupta’s Grihajuddha. A trained actor, he learnt the basics of acting from Prithwis Bhattacharya, an associate of well-known actor Shekhar Chatterjee. Dasgupta was at the time looking for an actor to enact a journalist, who has a major role in the film. As Ghose mentioned in an interview, “One evening, Buddha and Mamata Shankar came to my residence and cajoled me into accepting the role. It was all Mamata’s handiwork. She had acted in my second feature film Dakhal and informed Buddha about my acting skills. Yes, acting in Grihajuddha was a milestone in my career. I told Buddha about a nightmare I just had. I had dreamt I was driving a bike on the wrong side of Red Road and everything turned dark soon after. Buddha got excited and said, ‘Good. We are going to keep that sequence in the film.’ There was no way I could backtrack.”
In recent years he has enacted memorable characters in two Srijit Mukherji films, Baishe Srabon and Chotushkone. In the former, he is brilliant in an inspired bit of casting as Nibaron Chakraborty, a ‘failed’ poet whose work is time and again rejected and consigned to the margins and who raves and rants at ‘Rabindranath’ – another of the film’s many plot aces – and at the putrefying society around him.
His oeuvre as director is too vast to make a detailed analysis of in one feature. Here’s a look at some of his most important works leading up to the dawn of the new millennium which marked a change in his cinematic language with Dekha (2001).
Maa Bhoomi (1980)
Based on Krishan Chander’s story Jab Khet Jage, Ghose’s first feature film, a pioneering work in Telugu (the offer came from Hyderabad, the producer who had financed Mrinal Sen’s Mrigaya saw his documentaries and asked him to make a feature), has been described as ‘the most authentic and realistic showcase of the Telangana Peasants Armed Struggle’ leading up to and immediately after India’s independence.
It tells the story of a peasant named Ramayya (Sai Chand) from Siripuram, Nalgonda, which is governed by the Nizam on behalf of the British. When the girl he is in love with gives in to the sexual coercion of the rulers, Ramayya leaves his village. He drifts in and out of jobs as a hired hand and then a rickshaw puller before he comes under the influence of a trade union leader and joins the communists, eventually taking up arms in guerrilla warfare against the oppressors.
Maa Bhoomi traces his journey right up to the Indian government’s police action and the liberation and integration of Hyderabad state in the Indian dominion. The director’s political leanings come through in the film’s narrative, and its telling dialogues by Partho Banerjee and Praan Rao. Sample this, where a comrade from the village narrates his ordeal of being branded with hot iron on his head. ‘We are laying the road to Moscow on your head,’ the tormentors tell him. ‘Where’s Moscow?’ asks one of his avid listeners. ‘A place where the poor fought and won. The poor are ruling there now,’ answers Ramayya, having picked up the history of communist Russia from his mentor.
In the backdrop of his experience as a documentary filmmaker, Ghose gives Maa Bhoomi a docudrama feel, punctuating the narrative with voiceovers that introduce the viewer to the history of the peasant struggle in Telangana. Given his feel for music, Ghose managed to integrate two classic songs in the film: Bandenaka bandi katti, performed and sung by the balladeer Gaddar; and Palleturi pilla gaada, written by Suddala Hanumantha Rao and composed by Seeta Vinjanuri, the first woman music director for a Telugu film. Despite eschewing all tropes of mainstream cinema, Maa Bhoomi became a major commercial success and remains a landmark of Telugu cinema.
Dakhal (1981)
For his first film in Bengali, Ghose adapted a short story by Sushil Jana. Andi (Mamata Shankar), who belongs to the nomadic Kagmara clan, leaves her community to marry Joga, a farmer belonging to a higher caste in south Bengal. The couple make a life working hard to convert saline wastelands leased from a landowner into fertile productive lands. However, after the death of Joga from a snakebite while tilling the land, and as new ceiling laws come into effect, the landowner covets the land which is now highly productive.
Towards this end his henchmen intimidate Andi, falsifying her marriage, setting fire to her hut and tricking her tribesmen into testifying against her. However, Andi is determined to fight for her rights and her land. Fresh from the success of Mrigaya, Mamata Shankar gives a riveting performance in this hard-hitting and starkly visual commentary on the exploitation of tribals by those in power.
Paar (1984)
The masterpiece and the filmmaker’s most well-known work. No one growing up in the 1980s will have forgotten the evening the film was screened on Doordarshan. Even 40 years later, friends from that era still recall it with an awed ‘Do you remember?’, such was the impact of this visually stunning and merciless expose of poverty, feudalism, exploitation and human fortitude in the face of the most degrading odds. Based on Samaresh Basu’s story, Paar remains one of the finest expositions of acting in Indian cinema ever with two unforgettable turns by Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah, and includes one of Indian cinema’s most iconic and harrowing sequences.
There is little that has not been said about the film in the many eulogies to it. Let me just quote one statement about its influence on a future generation of filmmakers. In his book Soumitra Chatterjee: A Film-maker Remembers, Suman Ghosh writes: ‘In the 1980s, Doordarshan used to show award-winning films on TV. Somehow, we found those boring, not necessarily because of the subject matter but because they were always dark (visually) and made intentionally difficult to grasp – or so we thought. One afternoon, while casually watching TV, a scene caught my attention. A poor villager comes to Kolkata for work. He loses the only contact address he has on a chit of paper in a crowded railway station. His frantic search, his helplessness, his anxiety were being brilliantly portrayed by the actor. It bowled me over. I sat down to watch more. The film just gripped me and what I saw subsequently – the river-crossing scene with the pigs – impacted me so deeply that the first seeds of understanding the power of cinema were permanently etched in me. The film was Goutam Ghose’s Paar.’
A still from Paar (1984)
Antarjali Jatra (1987)
It would be impossible for any filmmaker to match the highs of Paar, and no wonder Antarjali Jatra doesn’t measure up. However, it says something about the filmmaker that even something that is not his best was much better than the best most other filmmakers of the era had to offer. Once again, Ghose trains his camera at the marginalised and the oppressed, this time addressing the status of women and the lower castes in 19th-century Bengal.
Based on the novel Mahayatra by Kamal Kumar Majumdar, it tells the story of a nonagenarian who is brought to the banks of a river on his deathbed. An astrologer suggests that in order for the man to find eternal happiness in heaven, his wife needs to commit sati on his pyre. A poor Brahmin, who is burdened with an unmarried young daughter, is convinced to give her hand in marriage to the dying man.
The riverbank, which also doubles as a cremation ground, thus becomes the stage from which the filmmaker declaims about the condition of women. And he does so through the character of a lowly chandal who makes pyres and burns the dead, the only character in the narrative who finds the whole premise wrong and tries his best to prevent it.
For the role of the chandal, the director made the surprising choice of opting for Shatrughan Sinha, one of the reasons the film copped a fair share of criticism. Though it needs to be mentioned that the star gives a brilliant account of himself in the most atypical role of his career. As Ghose said, “Getting Om Puri would have been a cliché. To have Shatrughan Sinha in the role of a chandal was interesting.”
The filmmaker was also accused of making the film with an eye on the foreign festival circuit and on the grounds of portraying the country in a poor light. However, it says something about us that the very same year Antarjali Jatra was made, 1987, Roop Kanwar committed sati in Rajasthan. As for oppression of lower castes, things have not changed much in a nation where the Rohith Vemulas still die by suicide and lower castes are still urinated on.
Setting the narrative almost entirely on the riverbank allows the filmmaker to frame the film against the distant horizon with long shots that “sometimes bring out the bare truth along the muddy banks of the Ganga, and sometimes they have this brooding, lingering feel”.
Sang-e-meel Se Mulaqat (1989)
Ghose’s documentary on shehnai legend Bismillah Khan is another example of his mastery of the art form. It starts off with a glorious sequence of the sunrise over the Ganga on the ghats of Benares, followed by glimpses of life on the ghats slowly awakening before exploding into the cacophony of temple bells and making its way through the narrow alleyways of the city of light to the temple of music, the home of Ustad Bismillah Khan.
Interspersed with soul-searing renditions of ragas at regular intervals, the film has the maestro talk about his life and times and his journey with music, providing glimpses of his singing prowess too. In one heart-warming moment, Khan describes playing marbles as a child while reproducing the sound of the shehnai through his voice.
Aided by masterful commentary by Ain Rashid Khan and Ghose’s cinematography which captures the ghats in all their mystical and resplendent beauty, Sang-e-meel Se Mulaqat is also a documentation of the ustad’s love for Benares as he says, with his disarming smile and demeanour, ‘Kahin banta hain yeh ras, ya pehle se hi ras bana hua hain?’ All his life, he says, he has known nothing more fulfilling than a bath in the Ganga, followed by prayers at the nearby masjid, and then hours of practice at the Balaji temple. So much so that when a rich American offers to pay for his entire family and entourage of musicians and artists to teach in the US, he asks, ‘Will you be able to set up a Benares with its ghats and temples for me?’
And when in the end he describes his interaction with a fakir who tells him, ‘Bismillah Khan ka shehnai, Bismillah Khan ka haath, Bismillah Khan ki phook. Par Bismillah Khan kaun hai?’, providing him a lesson in the grace of Allah who has made it all possible, one can only marvel at the greatness of the man, and the brilliance of the filmmaker.
Padma Nadir Maajhi (1992)
Probably the gentlest film in the first phase of his career as filmmaker, Padma Nadir Maajhi is a gloriously shot tapestry of life in a fisherman’s community on the banks of the Padma. Based on a Manik Bandopadhyay novel of the same name, the film narrates the life of a fisherman, Kuber (Raisul Islam Asad), and his family comprising his crippled wife, his children and the extended community.
Among these are Aminuddin (Rabi Ghosh); Rasu (Sunil Mukherjee) who wants to marry his daughter Gopi; Kapila (Roopa Ganguly, a fine performance), his sister-in-law, with whom he has a tempestuous relationship bordering on the amorous; and the successful businessman Hossain Miyan (Utpal Dutt in one of his finest acts), who sells the community the dream of a utopia named Moynadeep, an island in the Padma delta where he offers them a better life. But is Moynadeep truly the promised land?
The film moves to the lilting cadences of the local dialect and the changing rhythms of the Padma, both terrifying and beautiful, bountiful and merciless, giving life and uprooting it in the same breath. Ghose’s camera captures the many hues of the river and the despair and fortitude of those who inhabit its banks, creating an unforgettable kaleidoscope of man and nature. The river, an integral part of Goutam Ghose films, is as much a character here.
As the director said in an interview, “Govind Nihalani once joked that I must have been a fish in my earlier birth. As a child, I had heard riverside stories of our ancestral village, now in Bangladesh, from my grandmother. I was also fascinated by the songs of the boatmen. The river seeped into my being. And as I grew up I realised it is a fantastic metaphor for life – the ripple of the river is akin to the mind with its changing current. In many of my films I have used the river as a metaphor for life. The flow of a river is an integral part of the human civilisation. We all remain in the liquid in our mother’s womb. Perhaps that is why when you grow up, you seek the touch of a river. I heard stories of great rivers from my grandmother because our ancestors came from East Bengal, which is full of rivers. Unconsciously, the flow of the river, the sound of the ripples, comes into my system.”
(Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film and music buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer)
