Thinking Screens

Well, the last post quoting Chief Seattle’s speech triggered memories of my MA dissertation on Ritwik Kumar Ghatak’s films. Since writer’s block continues, here is a revised section on one of this great Bengali filmmaker’s autobiographical works. The connection with the earlier post might be evident. The following has been published earlier…elsewhere.

Ritwik Kumar Ghatak (1925-1976)

Komal Gandhar (1961)

Komal Gandhar can be described as Ritwik Ghatak’s thesis-film. The film is a semi-autobiographical account of both the radical theatre movements in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly recalling Indian People’s Theatre Association, an important leftist cultural platform of which Ghatak was an active member and relatively calmer Bengal in the latter half of 1950s. So unabashed it was in its candor that the film landed Ghatak in major differences with the pro-soviet Communist Party of India, from which his distance increased slowly. The dialogue that triggers off the film is from a play which is being staged within the film, describing the effects of the Partition of India: “They have other-ed my mother, my own mother”. The narrative is about a couple of rival radical theatre groups, one led by Bhrigu, and the other by Shanta, of which Anasuya, the heroine of the film, is a member. Anasuya tries to bridge the groups. During the staging of a resultant joint-production of Bhrigu’s version of the Sanskrit classic Shakuntala, Shanta and her cronies deliberately sabotages it. Bhrigu and Anasuya, in between productions and journeys, fall in love. Now Anasuya has to choose between Bhrigu and Samar, her fiancée who lives in Paris.

The Mother and Memories

One can start by recalling a fuzzy area of Komal Gandhar: Anasuya sees her mother’s eyes in Bhrigu’s and addresses him as her mother’s son. The brother-sister relation is always implicit as the ideal one in Ghatak’s films. Ashish Rajadhyaksha says about Ghatak’s “increasingly nebulous, undefined relationships”: “These relationships which negate the surface realism of theme are important because the form itself suggests a return to the realist, at least insofar as the characters and situations are in his later work much more firmly rooted in the contemporary.” (Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic, Bombay: Screen Unit, 1982, p 82). But I wish to emphasize here that reading incestuous undertones between characters as a release of repressed sexual energies, as many would conclude, would be thoroughly misleading in the case of Ghatak’s films, since such a reading considers the characters as autonomous individuals. The incestuous undertones must be read in terms of allegory and ideations, in other words, as being associated to and defined by, the notion of the Mother. The brother and the sister dyad, as progenies, are to be read as the inheritors of the memories of the Mother/Land. Thus, Bhrigu and Anasuya, as characters and also repositories of ideas are children of the same Mother, i.e. the Land or rather the earlier state of the Mother/Land before it was truncated into two halves during the Partition in 1947. You can also read another article on this issue here.

Anasuya’s mother was murdered during the pre-partitional riots in Noakhali in 1946. She remains only as a diary zealously prized by the daughter, a diary where accounts of the successful anti-partition movements in 1905-12 are kept, laced with the political dreams of a mother. The film primarily presents the Mother, un-figured or rather un-personified in the film as we never see her, as an abstract ideation, as a repository of erstwhile values and, importantly, as a repository of memories. Komal Gandhar is an exercise of active remembrance of the historically forgotten, an activity that is almost ritualized. Bhrigu and Anasuya, in the process of falling in love, create an internal space where the Mother is given a domain: the space of memory. One must remember that flashback as a cinematic device retrieving or recalling time seems to be impossible in Ghatak’s films, as he threatens the resultant complacency of the cinematic experience when we ‘totally recall’ the past (The only flashback sequence in Ghatak’s entire career occurs in his autobiographical Jukti, Takko ar Gappo (1974)). Thus, in Komal Gandhar the Mother cannot be visualized in a flashback, as the process of personifying her will rob her of the status of an unrepresentable past. Therefore, the individual memory-spaces of Bhrigu and Anasuya, being the domain of the same Mother, are corollaries of a divided Bengal. Their consummation means the unification of their memory-spaces.

Marriage: ‘this land is my land, this land is your land’

What stands as a wedge preventing Bhrigu and Anasuya’s union? The interdicting ‘Third entity’ is (also un-figured) Anasuya’s fiancee, Samar (also named Ferdinand as he names Anasuya Miranda, alluding to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest). Anasuya – as she says once – is an embodiment of bilateral splits. Samar lives in Paris, a scholarly guy interminably extending his stay in the West while Anasuya is waiting for him to return, when they will get married and the couple will fly away from ‘this land’. She is torn between the memory of a past plenitudinal relation with the Mother and the choice of submission to the interdicting order of a submissive marriage, interestingly of her choice. The split is also figured between Shakuntala, the role she acts out, and Miranda, the name she is assigned. Ghatak has said that he was influenced by Rabindranath Tagore’s essay ‘Shakuntala’ (1802), which, in a critical response to Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s essay compares Shakespeare’s Miranda and medieval Indian poet Kalidasa’s Shakuntala in relation to the spaces they inhabit. Rabindranath explains that Miranda can be easily isolated from the island she inhabits; but Shakuntala is organically linked with the forest that is her abode: passages describing the beauty of the heroine and that of the surrounding natural abundance of which she is the nurturer mirror each other. Probably this observation inspired Ghatak to comment: “The heroine is Bengal’s Shakuntala, Shakuntala is transformed into Bengal to me.” Anasuya’s possible de-patriation would complete the split between the body and the ground, a historical split triggered by colonialism; also a split which has its temporal dimensions, one is split from the past too. The split is again figured through words: her Mother’s diaries (relayed to Bhrigu) and the simultaneous presence of Ferdinand/Samar’s telegrams and absence of his letters for which she is eagerly waiting. So, who is Anasuya: the receiver of the letters from the past, i.e. her mother’s diaries or the receiver of Samar/Ferdinand’s telegrams and unwritten letters of an fuzzy future?

Thus, an array of marks of identification and difference are produced. Anasuya can either be the worthy addressee of her mother’s diaries or she remains the addressee of Ferdinand/Samar’s telegrams. Either, like Shakuntala, she remains organically, existentially linked to her land or she severs the link, like Miranda, in a marriage with the ‘brave new world’. The split selves seem unbridgeable. Her newfound desire for Bhrigu can only be fulfilled by rejecting the interdictions of the patriarchal Symbolic Order, in an effort to regain the lost maternal plenitude.

Ghatak multiplies the notion of marriage, harmony or union beyond the mere formation of the lead couple through the use of diegetic and non-diegetic music. While the diegesis presents stories of rifts, quarrels, failures and alienations, the soundtrack is replete with musical motifs of union. There are songs referring to the politically promising 1940s when radical cultural movements aided with an effective leftist militancy hinted at a possible socialist revolution. There are songs written by Rabindranath during the successful anti-partition movements of 1905-12. Then, as leitmotifs, there is a marriage songs culled from the ancient times. These musical motifs, thus, function in a two-fold way. They recall a buoyant and fruitful past and they also hint towards a utopian future, when radical cultural movements – bridging the past and the present, the urban and the rural – will lead to political upheavals resulting in a union of the split Bengal. So, the couple-formation of Bhrigu and Anasuya is a dream (the only dream Ghatak dreamt of): one marriage means the revitalization of the now-dwindling radical art movements, which will lead to a bridging between the urban sensibilities and rural struggle, leading to the birth of a revolutionary consciousness, which might result in a union of the two Bengals.

Marriages, consummation, union, and the resolution of divided are all ideas which the film tries to present: either of the quarreling radical theatre groups, or of the divided Bengal, or between the past and the present, or between subjectivities. These ideas remain on the plane of abstract ideation i.e. something that cannot to be diegetically worked out in narrative logistics, something which must not bring a cathartic closure, something which must not be a resolution of problems, suturing the loose ends. Otherwise the political purpose of activating the spectator would be defeated. It must be stressed that Ghatak’s cinema is “meant to bring back the moment of rupture to consciousness, a moment that the traumatised do not know how to remember” as Moinak Biswas says. In other words, the narrative must not follow the beaten path of wish-fulfillment. Thus, the evolution of ideas does not take place only through the allegory of the protagonists’ union. Bhrigu is just a catalyst of a process, not a half to be united with the other. His eyes reflect back Anasuya’s desire of the Mother in both the senses. She recognizes her desire for the Mother/Land (thus she rejects the call of the interdicting ‘third entity’) through Bhrigu. She also realises she is the Mother’s desire; she must be what her mother wanted to be: a woman belonging to the land.

The Mother and the Land

The notion of the Mother in this film evolves from the unrepresentable abstraction of Anasuya’s mother to the concrete icon of Anasuya as ‘the Mother’. A Mother synonymous to the ‘land’, not a map but the tangible, experiential, concrete land is iconised as the Mother. This happens with a simultaneous mobilisation of the landscape in the film. The Shakuntala/Miranda binary has established two options to the narrative resolution of Anasuya’s character: either linked with or divorced from the Mother/Land. To Bhrigu and Anasuya, the notions ‘Mother’ and the ‘Land’ is relegated to the past, in the domain of memory. Their memory-spaces comprise only memories about the land across the border. The space of plenitude is rendered inaccessible, like the nourishing past, since it is politically relocated on the other side of the border, in the land of the political ‘other’. The other half of Bengal – which they inhabit now – is never something they nostalgically long for. In one of his essays Ghatak says that in spite of the richness of the Indian half of post-partition Bengal, he can’t work to his full potentials, the other half being inaccessible to him. (from Bengali essays collected in Chitrabikshan, No. 18, 1984, 35-36) Incidentally, Ghatak, made Titash Ekti Nadir Nam in 1974 in Bangladesh. Therefore, the eastern/Indian half of Bengal needs to be functionalised. This happens through a rare discursive use of the landscape. The Land/Mother performs the function of priesthood over the final couple-formation. Before illustrating how let us have a brief glimpse at Paul Willemen’s observations on the use of landscape in particular sequences of several new British films:

[In a new sort of avant-garde film] the use of landscape requires what Raymond Williams, following Brecht, called ‘complex seeing’: the reading of landscape within the diegesis as itself a layered set of discourses as a text in its own right. In these examples, landscape is not subordinated to character or plot development. Instead, it is offered as a discursive terrain with the same weight, and requiring the same attention, as the other discourses that structure and move the text. (Willemen, ‘An Avant Garde for the 90s’, in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory, 1994, London: BFI, 141)

He further elaborates:

In conventional narrative, the diegetic setting (location, décor) is rigorously subordinated to plot and character development. Setting is deployed according to the dictates of psychological realism and motivation. It functions either as metaphor…as a picturesque backdrop… as a symbol for a character’s environment in the sociological sense… or simply as the necessary collection of props required to give a character a realistic space to inhabit.

None of the conventional uses of landscape, for instance, whether rural or urban, insist on offering the landscape as itself an active, multi-layered discursive space demanding to be read in its own right. Invariably, a tourist’s point-of-view is adopted as opposed to the point of view, for example, of those whose history is actually traced in the setting, or for whom the land is a crucial element in the relations of productions governing their lives. (Willemen 1994, 155-56 emphasis mine)

In my observation, while the non-diegetic soundtrack of Komal Gandhar is replete with ancient marriage-songs and the diegesis spells out splits and disharmonies in urban settings, the scenes of harmony take place within the landscapes of Bengal. Anasuya’s epiphanic realization has an important corollary; redemption of the urban spaces takes place. Earlier in the film, Calcutta is described as a “hazy city, filled with dust and smoke”, divorced from the plenitudinal and perennial rural Bengal. Being the dumping ground of the East Bengali refugees, the state of the city is perceived as “fallen”. This aspect can’t be fully explained by clichéd city-village dichotomies. A separate post would be necessary to elaborate how Ghatak’s films are exemplary instances of a discursive use of landscapes.

In Kurseong (a hill-station in North Bengal), we are presented with the elaborate visuals accompanied with a song composed by Rabindranath celebrating the human subjects’ plenitudinal relationship with the land. In following dialogues Bengal is described as a sweet, young girl, intertextual references are made to imagery from poems of Rabindranath and Bishnu Dey, from which the title of the film (literally meaning the musical note E flat) is derived (One can relate this also to poet Jibanananda Das, especially, his poems in Rupashi Bangla, literally ‘Pretty Bengal’, originally published in 1957). In Lalgola and Bolpur, Bhrigu and Anasuya share their memories about the Mother. A composition from the Lalgola sequence is illuminating. In the foreground Bhrigu and Anasuya share their memories. In the background the river Padma flows, the place is located in the border of the two Bengals. In the mid-ground stands an enormous weight-scale, signifying that the place was a marketplace in yesteryears. Similarly, a disused rail track is also shown in the sequence. Bhrigu describes it as a sign of conjunction between the two halves of Bengal in the past and a sign of disjunction in the present. Ironically, its status of a conjunction-marker in the past can only be derived after the track is halted at a buffer in the present (in a famous tracking shot ending the sequence the camera charges towards the buffer accompanied by a choric wail).

Only once is the landscape remarkably used as a site of split: in the Aaj jyotsna raate song-sequence. The song, another composition by Rabindranath, is a lament of an individual separated by choice from the collective, who is in a state of blissful plenitude with nature in a night of a full moon. The shots frontally present the audience instead of the singer (a panning long-shot actually leaves her in darkness), almost leaving the shots unsutured. The spectator’s expectation to see Anasuya singing is consciously thwarted, forcing him/her to hear and contemplate the song and observe the nocturnal nature. The Khowai sequence is a tribute to Rabindranath (whose iconisation of the land in his numerous patriotic songs, <<urghhh! badly described>>, comes closest to Ghatak’s in this film); Bolpur and Khowai being places associated with the poet in Bengali culture. To illustrate, one can quote Rabindranath: “This Bengal sky full of light, this south breeze, this flow of the river, this broad leisure stretching horizon to horizon, all these were to me as food and drink to the hungry and thirsty. Here it felt indeed like home, and in these I recognised the ministrations of a Mother.” (from translation of Jibansmriti, quoted in Rajadhyaksha 1982, 87). The sequence is dramatically important because here Anasuya divulges about Samar/Ferdinand to Bhrigu and gives him her mother’s treasured diaries. A recognizable strain of one of Rabindranath’s swadeshi song is heard (The first two lines of the song, ‘Sarthaka janama amar’, can be loosely translated as ‘my birth is worthy because I am born in this land, my birth is blessed because of your love, Mother’). This is an exemplary sequence where “a use of setting interacts with other elements in the text in the same way that, for example, a written text inscribed in an image would interact with it” (Willemen 1994, 156).

In these sequences (and also in the other films of the Trilogy), whenever the camera records the landscape, the use of the panning movements is marked. Recalling Sergei Eisenstein’s observations that “landscape…is the freest element in [a] film which is liberated from the tasks of narration”, Ghatak’s panning camera renders the landscapes visually musical. The volumes, lines and contours move and change in crests and falls as the camera pans. The graphic limits of the shot, i.e. the frames and the cuts, are transcended as the lines and contours flow and melt into each other across the shots. Characters are located within this panorama.

As the landscape becomes the site of harmony one must be aware of the fact that here the land comprises of only the western, i.e. Indian, half. Thus, one half of the land is activated in the memory; the other half becomes functional in the present. While the city-space is the domain of rifts and splits, when Anasuya evolves to become the Mother, it is redeemed too, in lieu with Bhrigu’s words that Calcutta can become a new idyll for the new Shakuntala. Anasuya’s realization that she belongs to the land renders her act of refusing Samar a political act. In an epiphanic moment a street-urchin pulls back her sari, begging for a coin or two. Anasuya reads the act as her land pulling her back, resisting her de-patriation, recalling the dear calf similarly pulling back the Shakuntala’s sari when she was leaving her parental abode in the play. As the soundtrack is saturated with gunshots and bombings (obviously non-diegetic) a political worker addresses her as “the known one”: the people of Bengal exist because women like Anasuya sustain them. Ghatak’s familiar compositions of his women reappear, enshrining Anasuya as the Mother, iconising her. The final ‘marriage’ between Bhrigu and Anasuya is rendered embedded within a montage of panning shots of all those landscapes of Bengal we have seen so far, even the Calcuttan cityscape find its place here (though one is painfully reminded that this is only half of Bengal, the other half is missing leaving the merging of the landscapes unsutured; the memory-space remains ‘unfigurable’, for obvious political reasons). An aural montage of ancient marriage-songs and the song by Rabindranath featured in the Khowai sequence fills the soundtrack.