There’s a moment in Suman Ghosh’s Kabuliwala when the protagonist, essayed with a rare empathy and understanding by Mithun Chakraborty, breaks into an Eid song, to be joined a little later by Aurobindo Mukherjee (Abir Chatterjee), Mini’s (Anumegha Kahali) father. I have followed Suman’s films closely and have admired his eye for nuances, in a mainstream aesthetic.
Hence, this sequence in Kabuliwala came as somewhat of a shock. It was so ‘un-Suman-Ghosh-like’ that it made me sit up and do something that I have seldom done in a theatre. Text the director. Here was one of contemporary Bengali cinema’s most understated filmmakers going all out with a variation of an ‘item number’. Suman’s films have had some wonderful music, even if he has largely steered clear of the playback song. His Podokkhep features one of the most beautiful uses of a contemporary non-film classic, Moushumi Bhowmik’s ‘Ami sunechhi se din’, to communicate a character’s state of mind. Basu Paribar is a standout in the way Bickram Ghosh composes the background music, and the use of the song ‘Bhromor koiyo giya’. But ‘Khushi ki Eid’ is unlike anything Suman has ever attempted in a film.
In fact, a lot of Kabuliwala is unlike anything one associates with the words ‘a Suman Ghosh film’. It is his most mainstream film. Here, he is wearing his heart on his sleeve, spelling it out. Is that something he consciously attempted to do?
“Absolutely,” says Suman. “I was clear that this is a subject that should appeal to the heart. It is a strong emotional story. I was conscious of the fact that I needed to convey its emotional pitch. If I didn’t succeed in bringing out that emotional core of the story, it would fall flat. This film did not need understatement. But it is not that there is no nuance or subtlety. Consider Nimai-da’s character, the man on the street, who is probably a dementia patient, a silent observer. That’s a character I have added to the story. But going back to my basic point… the film had to hit the emotional core, the heart of the audiences, and for that it needed a different way of communication altogether.”
Maybe this approach also stems from the fact that in the run-up to the film and later, Suman spoke about how he felt compelled to do Kabuliwala — that he had to do a film like this at this juncture.
“There were two reasons for making Kabuliwala,” says Suman, “one personal and the other sociopolitical. I conceived Kabuliwala four or five years back. I remember telling my daughter Leela, who was six years old at the time, ‘Don’t grow up.’ Leela had responded, ‘I can’t stop time, Papa. I have to grow up.’ I found that very interesting and poignant both for what she said and in the way she said it. And of course Kabuliwala is about a girl growing up.
“As for the sociopolitical reason, I wanted to make a statement, one that was not overt in Rabindranath Tagore’s story. But at the core, what Tagore does is celebrate humanism, ‘manob dharmer katha’, which is there in the film also. If you think about it, it’s a relationship between two people of different religions, different countries, age, language. That does not hinder the wonderful blossoming of love between Rahmat and Mini. I think we are at a juncture when we should celebrate the core human aspects that we have. You see, fatherly love is independent of geographical regions and time. What was a thousand years ago will remain a thousand years later…. I have a line in the film, ‘The times are very bad, Rahmat, people do not believe in each other.’ There’s so much divisiveness. I think we need to celebrate humanism. The core of the idea is there in all of Tagore’s works, not only in Kabuliwala, and that is what I wanted to bring out.”
Was the mainstream approach in any way influenced by having a big producer and distributor on board? This is, after all, his first film backed by a big production house.
“Well, it is a very big-scale film, as films starring Mithun Chakraborty are. We shot in Kargil. We created a set which is unheard of these days in Bengali cinema mainly because of budget issues. I give total credit to SVF, the producer, and Jio Cinema for allowing me to do that…. I knew that when I was adapting a story like Kabuliwala with Mithun Chakraborty and with SVF, who have a wonderful distribution system, I had to do my best to meet some box-office parameters, but it did not influence the way I wanted to tell the story.”
Another aspect in which the film differs from a majority of Suman’s other films is that barring Basu Paribaar (an adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead), Suman has largely worked with his own material. How was this different and what are the challenges for an adaptation vis-a-vis an original screenplay?
“I wouldn’t say Kabuliwala is an adaptation. It is a remake and I have no qualms in saying that. A remake where I have something more to say than what Tagore had laid down in his original story. I did not want to change the story at all. The story is so powerful. Who am I to change the basic story? I changed the premise of course. I situated it in 1965. I wanted to make a larger comment on today’s society. So, Kabuliwala is a remake with my additional inputs in terms of the way I want to use the original story and set it in contemporary times.”
‘Mithun-da said that he has never received such praise before’
A classic Tagore story, a film version that is still spoken of reverentially, Chhabi Biswas and Tinku’s landmark performances. Was he ever daunted by the legacies he was addressing?
“I wouldn’t say I was worried. But, when you adapt a classic literary work which has already been made into a film, and such an iconic film at that by none other than Tapan Sinha, one is always apprehensive… how would the Bengali audience react, particularly because Tagore is involved, and a character rendered by Chhabi Biswas is involved. Mithun-da and I were concerned about that, but our job was to do it honestly. There will always be comparisons. This is an era of comparisons. Particularly in the era of social media. We were not daunted by that. A few days ago, I was having a conversation with Mithun-da who was in the US. And he said that he has never received such praise before as he has for Kabuliwala. We took on a challenge and the audience has gracefully delivered its verdict.”
Also of note is that unlike most of his other films (barring the period piece Kadambari), Kabuliwala is not set in contemporary times. Suman sets the film in 1965. The themes he addresses — the outsider, lack of trust, religious schism — are as relevant today, if anything more so. So, what made him choose 1965?
“First of all, there’s no question of situating it in contemporary times when communication is so easy, with mobile phones and technology. Also, it is no longer as difficult to travel. One of the basic premises that makes Kabuliwala work is that Rahmat cannot visit his country. That would not work in the new millennium.
“At the same time, there are some issues like the outsider syndrome you mentioned, divisiveness, the lack of trust that I wanted to address, and which get highlighted in times of war. That is why I chose the 1965 war between India and Pakistan. During a war, when nationalist emotions run high, countries tend to club communities by their religion – you cannot trust any Muslim because we are at war with Pakistan. Setting it in 1965 gave me the backdrop in which such tension, distrust between people was prevalent and could be explored to comment on contemporary society.”
(Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film and music buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer)
