Calcutta 71: Critical Cinephilia and Mrinal Sen

The success of his film Calcutta 71 (1972), remarked director Mrinal Sen, was not due to “cinematic excellence,” but “more because of the time in which it was made and released.”[1] Sen was right. Calcutta 71 did not reap profits in the box office. In this it was much like the two other films that were part of Sen’s Calcutta trilogy, Interview (1971) and Padatik [The guerilla fighter] (1973). Calcutta 71 became a phenomenon in its time for the slew of serious discussions and controversies it generated about the meanings of radical cinema in postcolonial India (fig. 1). In what follows, I revisit Calcutta 71 fifty years after its release and analyze these debates as critical cinephilia. The latter, as I understand it, combines a disposition toward films that Girish Shambu has recently separated out as “old” and “new” cinephilia. The intense debates around Calcutta 71 evoked the “new” in their “deep curiosity about the world and a critical engagement with it” and for the way they were informed by a “spirit of inquiry and a will to social and planetary change.”[2] Equally, they bore resemblances to the “old” cinephilia in their tendency to evaluate, rank, and create value distinctions in discussions of films. In thus collapsing the old and new, the world of the film into that of its spectators, political activism with questions of judgment, Calcutta 71 was a media event that is exemplary of filmic modernism in India during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Writing of the Anglo-French context, David Rodowick characterized this period as the era of “political modernism” when the relationship between film and ideology became inseparable elements in a film’s critical reception.[3] The debates around Calcutta 71 portray a similar desire on the part of many critically minded cinephiles to return to “ground zero,” to completely break with the past to demystify cinema. This second film in Sen’s city trilogy demonstrates the indispensability of ideological readings of films but also highlights their inadequacy. We need to turn to both the film’s formal composition and the historical task that Sen set himself of narrating (his unique take on) twentieth century Indian history to understand the relationship between ideology, cinephilia, and political modernism in Indian cinema.

Calcutta 71: A long history of anger

What is the significance of a cultural object whose title consists of a date and place? In England in 1819, a work on British romanticism that takes its title from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem of the same name, James Chandler argues that such a gesture is an act of historicization—the marking out of a distinct position, British in this case, in contemporary world culture.[4] Calcutta 71, too, historicized a particular place at a particular moment in time. But Sen always regarded Calcutta in the context of a world-historical view of the left. The city was for him a “mirror” through which to view the conditions prevailing in India and other parts of Afro-Asia and Latin America. This internationalist perspective on the city as a site that reflected conditions of (what in contemporary parlance is) the “global South” made Sen distinct and distant from both the works of his peers, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak and also a long tradition of Bengali literature, to which both men were deeply beholden. The expression “global South” came into being as the Cold War ended. Sen’s internationalism that situated Calcutta’s vibrant oppositional politics and his own film practice in the context of the third world is an important aspect of the genealogy of the later expression.

“Why 1971?” was also a question raised by many viewers of the film, mainly within film societies. 1971 saw the culmination of the political instability that reigned in many parts of India throughout the 1960s, Bengal the most prominent among them. The Indian government’s role in the Bangladesh war of 1971 and the slogan of “garibi hatao” (remove poverty) swept the Congress Party back to power with Indira Gandhi as national leader. Congress ascendancy was accompanied by a brutal suppression of insurgent movements by peasants and students in 1967–68 in a manner reminiscent of counter-insurgency measures adopted in the colonial period. Taken together with the massive influx of refugees from Bangladesh, shortages in power and food, the rise of Maoism, destruction of school and college buildings by Naxalite activists inspired by the Maoist ideology, widespread strikes, and black-marketeering, 1971 signaled a historical moment whose impact was long-term but whose implications remain understudied in Indian history. In West Bengal and its capital Calcutta, the power of a leftist coalition of political parties continued to grow from the late 1960s despite the setback of the 1971 national elections that favored the Congress party. An atmosphere of fear and suspicion reigned to which extra-judicial killings by the police, murders, and bombings added an element of terror. Calcutta 71, claimed Sen, was his way of historicizing the conflicting passions that culminated in this critical year in the postcolony.

Calcutta 71’s political modernism and the stir that the film created especially in film society circles owed in no small measure to the fact that it did not straightforwardly reflect a political position—left-liberal or Maoist. Many critical viewers misrecognized the film as speaking for one or the other political line. While it drew upon many of the events mentioned above, both local and national, the political worldview articulated in the film was deliberately ambiguous. Sen voiced this ambivalence when he described 1971, in a slight misquote from A Tale of Two Cities as “[T]hose were the best of days, those were the worst of days.”[5]

The film, contrary to the polarized opinions that followed its release, was in effect a critique of its own times. It was expressive of the impossibility of being “partisan” to any political party or line in the face of explicit calls for such partisanship.  It engaged the contemporary condition by, as it were, historicizing it. It was an attempt to understand popular anger—the preeminent emotion in public life—historically, no matter where on the political spectrum one belonged. Anger, argued Sen, was not the monopoly of only those who wished to shake up the status quo. Even those invested in maintaining the established order within family, civil society, and the state experienced anger in equal measure. Anger was a pervasive response of all those who felt helpless in the vice-grip of these institutions. Some details about the film will clarify this.

Calcutta 71 opens with a voiceover and intertitle that recurs at the end of each of the five episodes that make up the film. A disembodied male voice announces,

My age is twenty. During this time, I have been trudging for a thousand years making my way through poverty, blight, and death. I have been witnessing history for a thousand years. A history of need, deprivation, oppression. 

While the sojourner remains invisible until the last sequences of the film leaving his status in the film’s diegesis unclear the revelation of his age establishes: (i) chronopolitics as a central aspect of the film; (ii) the importance of youth functioning as a witness to a seemingly interminable historical condition, at once ancient and modern. The young man has no known antecedents.  Many reviews claimed, perhaps with some justification, that the man was a Maoist student activist. But nothing in the film’s diegesis confirms this. We know nothing of his family, his education, or his political affiliations. In addition, the mention of “trudging for a thousand years” referenced—at least in the hearing of his more literary-minded spectators—one of most famous poems in modern Bengali literature, “Banalata Sen” by Jibanananda Das (1899–1954) that began with the words: “For thousands of years, I have roamed the streets of the world.” We will return to this.

The film has five episodes. The first and last are situated in the present while the three intervening ones each represent a decade, the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In many interviews, Sen emphasized that it was important for him to establish that “our history”—the history of Calcutta, India, and the third world—was one of “exploitation . . . deprivation . . . poverty” (“Interview with Mrinal Sen,” 64). Communicating to viewers this sense of history was the “lead motive” [sic] of the film. Hence a structure that begins in the present, loops back to the past to track history over three decades, culminating once more in the present. 

For the three middle decades, Sen chose three short stories by well-known Bengali, writers Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908–1956), Prabodh Sanyal (1905–1983), and Samaresh Basu (1924–1988) respectively (figs. 2–4). The last episode is based on a loose script written by Sen and Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay, an actor. Each episode is linked to the next through a rolling intertitle and the voiceover of the twenty-year old witness of history.

Sen’s “taste for pamphleteering,” blending “the fictional with . . . actualities, to draw conclusions on [a] propagandist note” are on display in all the episodes, with the first and last being the most open-ended.[6]  The chaotic nature of the narrative, especially of the last episode, confirms his stand that cinema’s only task when faced with a crisis of political conviction is that of witnessing.  It was as if with the arrival into 1971 all that Sen can offer is to unveil the faces of “merchants of oppression” (“Interview with Mrinal Sen,” 66).  Just as we witness multiple oppressors—politicians, socialites, police, party bosses—the screen goes dark, putting a brake on our impulse to hastily label a single entity or group as the sole oppressor.  Instead, the plangent voice of the twenty-year-old slowly becomes embodied as a shaft of light illuminates his bleeding face. He implores viewers to not be frightened by him. “I am not carrying a gun or revolver, or bomb, or pipe gun,” he says, “because I am dead.”  He reminds us that he was killed on a particular spot at the Calcutta maidan (literally “open field”) that morning.  As his profile fades in and out, Sen breaks the fourth wall with an address by the anonymous youth to the audience in the most programmatic last six minutes of the film.

I know who murdered me today. But I will not reveal their names as I want you to look for my killers. Don’t sit placidly . . . until you have found them. . . . Those who murdered me today, hunted me down through the entire country have once again returned, they are now standing behind me to kill me again. My crime is that I reacted; for a thousand years I remained an eternal twenty-year-old and I reacted. . . . Why don’t you react?

A penultimate montage of images—strikes and police firings in Calcutta, massacres in the Biafran war of 1967, and My Lai in 1968—follow the dead man’s appeal to the audience to “react.” The final moments of the film show the young narrator running through forests and mountains ending up in the lanes of Calcutta until unknown assailants shoot him down at the maidan (urban greens, commons). As his dead body lies on the grass face-down, the early morning opening music of All-India radio plays in the background announcing the arrival of a “new” day that Sen’s film suggests is not new at all, it is the same old day of oppression as ever.

A Political Cinema?

Most reviews and analyses on Calcutta 71 agreed that the film established Sen as a “political” filmmaker and distinguished him from Ray who was also engaged in his own Calcutta films during these years. There were however serious disagreements about what constituted the substance of Sen’s politics. Some decried it as the director’s “jihad” against contemporary society. Others described it as a “documentary mode” of retelling the “tired” theme of poverty—a filmic rendering of Indira Gandhi’s election slogan “garibi hatao.” Still others saw it as a piece of motion picture propaganda belonging to “an active, extremist political party,” a veiled reference to the Maoist faction of the Communist Party of India (CPIML). Other reports, while granting that this was a “striking film essay,” singled out the epilogue arguing that “Sen hammers the point” about poverty “through the agency of his young and timeless Chorus” with such force as if “he didn’t trust his audience’s acquaintance with the familiar medium of cinema.”  Despite these shortcomings several of the same critics credited Sen with possessing a sense of a “clear historical dialectic.” He was not a “bourgeois” filmmaker like Satyajit Ray, nor a “ivory tower aesthete” like Mani Kaul, and his craftsmanship was “far too superior” to remind “us of Satyadev Dubey.”[7] 

Critics found Sen’s modernist style pretentious. Here’s a reaction from Nirmal Kumar Ghosh:

Like Godard Sen might feel like saying this about his film “Monsieur, we are going to be simple.” That way, he may also have the smug satisfaction that he may have also been understood, for that alone is his prime passion. But believe me Mr. Sen, Godard with all his virtuous wish for simplicity is neither simple nor understood, whereas you perfectly are: far too well understood and simple, perhaps oversimple at times. That is the great divide between you and Godard.[8]

Others found fault with Sen’s chronicle of the past for excluding the decade of the 1960s from the five episodes of the film. Sen’s historical account, argued Ashok Rudra, was a “falsification” of 1971. “Historically, 1971 was a year of terror. The rich were terrorised; so terrorised that their boring, banal, society activities reached an extremely low ebb.”[9] Protesting against poverty, Rudra argued, did not get anyone in India killed. So, the death of the young boy who “walked through a thousand years of injustice” was not because he had protested. To make the audience think that the police killed him was misleading. The historical complexity of 1971, Rudra reiterated, was that the “first shots were fired not by the police” but by the young revolutionaries in an assault against the state and youth groups belonging to other political factions (Rudra, untitled, 69–72).

Readers should not be surprised by accounts of such impassioned debates about cinema in Bengal. They were a testimony to the growing film society movement and its literary-critical fallout. What made the reception of Calcutta 71 especially striking and a powerful articulation of political modernism were the ways in which understandings of the film were refracted through the lens of global, revolutionary ideologies. Nowhere was this clearer than in an intense exchange in Movie Montage, the journal published by the film society Cine Central. In a defense of the film, Dipendu Chakrabarty, a professor of English and older brother of radical director, Utpalendu Chakrabarty, read the film as a statement of Sen’s disillusionment with parliamentary democracy.[10] The death of the young man, the montage of posters of different political parties, question marks flashing on a blank screen, intertitles that spoke of poverty and betrayal by ancestors were signs of that disillusionment. He reminded Sen’s critics that Calcutta in 1971–1972 was a different political landscape than Cuba, north Vietnam, or the territories occupied by the Vietcong. Sen made a film that reflected his own context rather than one addressed by Jean Luc Godard or Santiago Alvarez. His agitprop style remained true to the basic premise of Marxist and Maoist ideology—that of class struggle.

The figure of the dead youth in Calcutta 71 was a sound repudiation of a literary tradition in Bengali romanticism. The eternal twenty-year-old, roaming restlessly is reminiscent of the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das’s renowned poem “Banalata Sen.” Das’s poem chronicled a thousand-year quest for love of a lone romantic male whose “weary heart” found a moment’s solace in the presence of the eponymous “Banalata Sen from Natore.”[11] Sen’s dead youth was denied such solace; his state of agitated disturbance was an excoriating repartee to Das’s romanticism (figs. 5–7). Chakrabarty regarded Sen as the modernist, filmic inheritor of a literary past of youthful angst immortalized in the poetry of Bengali communist poets such as Subhas Mukhopadhyay (1919–2003). Like Mukhopadhyay Sen also reacted politically “towards our history, to our past, and to the contemporary period.”[12]

Chakrabarty’s articles elicited strong rejoinders. Even as Sen eschewed the developmentalism of Marxist revolution, criticism of his film repeatedly returned to that theme. Calcutta 71 became a battleground for debates about Maoist ideology and the arts. Briefly put, wherever Chakrabarty credited Calcutta 71 with historical dynamism, his detractors read stasis. For them the yardsticks of a political cinema, or of the arts more generally, were those outlined in Mao Zedong’s 1942 address on art and literature in Yan’an. That the film was a sovereign mode of intellection about the present and not a straightforward reflection of a political ideology seemed unacceptable.

Film society critics such as Nityapriya Ghosh, Subhendu Dasgupta, and Shaktiprosad Sengupta invoked Mao’s writings to argue that “Writers and artists should study society . . . the various classes in society, their mutual relations and respective conditions, their physiognomy and their psychology. Only when we grasp all this clearly can we have a literature and art that is rich in content and correct in orientation.” No member of the audience could ever be shaken out of their inertia by watching a film that showed nothing of the actual dynamics of class struggle. Sen, and those who praised Calcutta 71, they charged, were closer to Mao’s description of counterrevolutionary writers and artists, and a “comprador elite” who looked down upon the masses as “born fools” or as “tyrannical mobs.”[13]

In the earnestness of their embrace of Maoist ideology, these critics failed to appreciate Sen’s self-avowed stylistic “flippancy.” The reception of Calcutta 71 was filtered through a strong current of contemporary radical politics in Bengal whose literal embrace of Maoist doctrine dictated its opposition to “both the tendency to produce works of art with a wrong political viewpoint and the tendency towards the ‘poster and slogan style’ which is correct in political viewpoint but lack in artistic power.” Distinguishing a cinema of protest from Sen’s “reformist” cinema, these authors who were active in the film society scene invoked third cinema films by Getino and Solanas, Sanjines, Gleyzer, Solas, and earlier works of Joris Ivens. Yet, it would appear that they failed to register that certain scenes in Calcutta 71 were in direct conversation with Solanas and Getino’s La hora de los hornos [The hour of the furnaces] (1968). In an essay entitled “The Latin American Scene,” Sen reminds readers that The Hour cautioned that “We fear peace more than war.”[14] Or that Solanas referred to his spectator as “the humiliated” and urged “the people to react.” Sen’s agitprop techniques, the use of intertitles, or even of the close-up of the dead youth’s face on-screen are his homage to the Argentinian film that he argued had “universal significance” and “can serve as a model for the whole of the Third World countries” (Sen, “The Latin American Scene,” 113). I have written elsewhere about the complexity of reading Sen's homage to Solanas and Gettino's film in a straightforward fashion. In Padatik, he even used a short clip from The Hour of the Furnaces. That citation, however, cannot be read as Sen’s political allegiance or similarity with those of his Argentinian counterparts.[15]

Critical viewers projected on to Calcutta 71 their own anxieties and expectations about what the right kind of political film ought to be. The gap between the views expressed by the critics and the situation that Sen sought to address in the trilogy are perhaps best captured in some reminiscences by the director. Though the official commencement of shooting for Calcutta 71 began in 1970, Sen had been filming footage of rallies and processions that eventually made their way into the film from 1969. These sequences became “unexpected evidence” of people who (were) disappeared or were suspected to have been killed by the police. Reality was bleeding into the films. “Young boys,” said Sen in an interview, “would keep coming back. Perhaps with their family and their friends. They would watch [the film] over and over again, just for another glimpse of their friend.”[16] Another time a young woman fainted upon catching a glimpse of her son on screen. He had “later been shot by the police” recalled Sen. Many people who were “wanted” by the police were arrested from the “serpentine queues” outside Metro Cinema where the film was exhibited. As he put it in an interview conducted in 2001, “the times mattered a lot” (Sen, “Interview: 2001,” 54). My goal in recounting these details is to establish that an analysis of Calcutta 71 unthinkable without its relationship with contemporary history. As well, it articulated Sen’s particular theory of history that was marked by the context in which the project was undertaken but also sought to understand that time historically. No one who lived through 1971, Sen argued in an interview published in Chitrabikshan, would be a stranger to scenes of young men chased and hunted down by a battery of armed policemen (fig. 8). But he urged readers also to visualize a situation where an angry young man murdered a traffic constable. As the dead man 

lay in a pool of his own blood a few vegetables . . . rolled out of his pocket. Perhaps he was supposed to return home from his duties and cook himself a meager meal. Perhaps in that moment when he lay dead, his wife in some remote village was trying to scrape together her scarce resources to repay the local moneylender. . . . Perhaps the money mailed by her now dead husband had not yet arrived forcing her to pawn the last metal plate in the house. (“Interview with Mrinal Sen,” 62–63) 

The sentimentality and humanism implicit in this imaginary tale inform the ethos of Calcutta 1971. But this was not a celebratory humanism. Instead, it turned its gaze upon the waste land of humanity in postcolonial India to locate therein the wellsprings of political anger that contained the potential of possible futures. Sen would go on to make films that directed his anger toward the middle class of which he was a part beginning with the third film of his Calcutta trilogy, Padatik, and in later films such as Ek Din Pratidin [And quiet rolls the dawn] (1979), Akaler Sandhaney [In search of famine] (1980) and Kharij [The case is closed] (1982), indicting that class for the postcolonial predicament. In Calcutta 71, the anger is more dispersed so that both the constable and the young man who killed him in the above imaginary anecdote were presented as victims of deprivation and poverty. But the modern, postcolonial system of which they were both a part pitted them against one another in a battle of mutual annihilation. Calcutta 71, a mirror of conditions prevailing in many parts of Sen’s contemporary third world, was his attempt—however uneven in its formal execution—to portray the “injustice” that saturated the giant, faceless, sclerotic system. There was no friend or enemy in Calcutta 71 but multiple pathways to anger.