Mahatma
Gandhi once said, keep your doors and windows
open, let the winds and the breeze come in, but
keep your hut rooted to the earth it sprung from.
How far is this true of Bengali cinema today?
Contemporary Bengali cinema is stretching the
borders of language, geography, people and storyline
to create a new identity for itself. Is the hut
loosening its roots from the soil? Does this augur
well for the Bengali film industry in terms of
commerce, wider audience reach, screening at international
film festivals and discovery of new talent?
This cultural evolution in the identity of Bengali
cinema that is coming out of its regional straitjacket
is a reflection of the evolution and globalization
of the Bengali identity even in Bengal. Bengali
filmmakers, old and new, noted and not well known,
are stepping into the fragile territory of crossing
the language barrier. The average Bengali even
20 years ago, was proud of his linguistic identity.
This is no longer true if one were to take a look
at contemporary films like Aniruddha Roychoudhuri's
Anuranan and Anjan
Dutt's The Bong Connection.
Anuranan is made in Bengali. But it
is set against the landscape of London, Sikkim
and Kolkata. One major Bengali character is a
NRI born and bred in London. When he is transferred
to Kolkata, he and his wife live in an elite neighbourhood
with a predominantly cosmopolitan population.
They socialize with people who are Westernized
in their partying habits. The characters speak
in Bengali heavily peppered with English. One
of the actors, Rajat Kapoor, is a Bollywood import.
Even the books they read (in the film) are English.
So, how 'Bengali' is this film if one were to
label the traditional Bengali as a cross between
one brought up on heavy doses of Karl Marx and
Tagore, or the films of Bergman and Antonioni
and Luis Bunuel, savours his daily quota of maachher
jhol bhaat, takes his newspaper to the toilet
and enjoys his street corner adda?
 The
Bong Connection begins – and ends –
on a global note. The film is in English, written
and directed by Anjan Dutt, an actor-director
noted for his command over Western music, has
studied at St. Paul's, Darjeeling, and has done
theatre in Germany. He sets his story on the theme
of a NRI Bengali boy coming to Kolkata "in
search of his roots" and a Bengali-Bengali
boy who goes to the US to seek greener pastures.
The fact that each finds his way back to his 'real'
roots does not take away from the international
character of the film. Does this qualify The Bong
Connection as a non-Bengali film? Not really.
It throws up the new and evolving Bengali. Shayan
Munshi plays the NRI boy who speaks Bengali with
a pronounced American accent while his counterpart
Parambrato stammers over his English. Shayan's
uncle is the usual, lazy, useless 'head' of a
once-affluent feudal Bengali family anxious to
sell off the ancestral house to promoters to back
his wife-bashing son's alcoholism on the one hand
to keep the bhaat-machher-jhol running on the
other. Both films are selling dreams and aspirations,
not culture or language. The audience may not
identify with the characters, but the films work
on their global aspirations in a materialistic
world where emotions are for sale through Hallmark
and Archie cards.
Raj Basu, a NRI, is readying his Bengali feature
film Piyalir Password,
for an international release in November. The
film has been shot completely in Maryland, Rockville
near Washington D.C and though the main language
is Bengali, there will be a smattering of English.
The actors are mainly drawn from Bengali cinema
but there are a few NRI Bengalis and US locals.
Rituparno Ghosh is making The Last Lear
with Amitabh
Bachchan, Preity Zinta and Arjun Rampal in
English, his first English film to date. His other
under-production film Sunglass with Konkona
Sen Sharma and Jaya Bachchan is in two versions,
Hindi and Bengali. Buddhadeb Dasgupta chose Sameera
Reddy for two of his recent films and the dialogues
had to be dubbed. Why? Gautam Ghosh made Yatra
in Hindi though the producer is Bengali but the
film's cast is mainly comprised of actors from
Bollywood cinema.
Anjan Dutt's Bow Barracks
Forever, focussing on an Anglo-Indian pocket
in Kolkata, is in English, has a mixed acting
cast from Kolkata and Mumbai and is produced by
Pritish Nandy Communications. The music is completely
Western with Usha Uthup belting out a song on
screen. Anjan Dutt's under-production BBD
produced by Joy Ganguly will have a smattering
of Hindi lines though the film is in English.
For the first time, Dutt is handling a political
thriller focussed on corruption and decay. Among
the cast one finds Naseeruddin Shah, Jimmy Shergil,
Kay Kay Menon, Sandhya Mridul, Rituparna Sengupta,
Sonali Kulkarni, Sudipa Bose and newcomer Shouvik.
 To
the question, why she decided to make The
Japanese Wife in English, filmmaker Aparna
Sen says: "It is a story of love that celebrates
the lost art of writing letters. The Japanese
Wife is a story of love that crosses the limits
of language, culture, space and time and I wish
it to have an international reach. So, I decided
to make it in English." Her previous film
Mr & Mrs Iyer (2002) is
also in English and deals with the theme of love
against the contemporary national ambience of
fundamentalism and terrorism. The Japanese
Wife stars Rahul Bose and Moushumi Chatterjee
in major roles, both having their professional
roots in Mumbai. Raima Sen flits among Hindi,
English and Bengali films. Chigisa Takaku who
plays the title role, is a Japanese actress. The
film is based on an unpublished work by Kunal
Bose who is a Bengali teaching management at Oxford.
If that is not globalization of Bengali cinema,
what is?
Journalist-author-turned filmmaker Jayabrato
Chatterjee has recently completed the shooting
of Love Songs – Yesterday, Today and
Tomorrow in English. When asked why he chose
English for his second feature film after a gap
of 22 years, he says, "English is such an
integral part today of Indian languages that it
cannot, any longer be claimed by Queen Elizabeth
of Buckingham Palace as her exclusive property!
My story deals with people who would naturally
speak in English as well as in Bengali. The film
reflects the melting pot of languages that Indian
society is accepting. Also, it is a language that
can claim a much wider audience in India and abroad."
The film features Jaya Bachchan, Om Puri, Mallika
Sarabhai and Chatterjee's daughter Shahana in
major roles with music composed by Usha Uthup.
Statistics show that nearly a quarter of the
world's population is already fluent or competent
in English, and this figure is growing every day.
This amounts roughly to somewhere between 1.2
and 1.5 billion people. By 1995, 320,000 of India's
total population were learning English as the
second language. In 1995-96, over 400,000 candidates
worldwide sat for English language examinations
administered by the British Council. Over half
of these were appearing for English as a foreign
language. At any given point of time during the
same year, 120,000 students were learning English
and other skills through the medium of English
at centres run by the British Council. If the
choice of English for these films is based on
pure marketing and commercial strategies, then
one wishes these films all success because they
will be pitted against lots of English language
films directly from Hollywood. But then, English
is the power language so this could mean the vesting
of Bengali cinema with a power it has hitherto
been stranger to.
But is it English alone that signifies a change
in the identity of contemporary Bengali cinema?
One must concede that the dollar speaks in English
and so does the British pound, the two strong
currencies in the world after the Euro. The word
'dollar' is often used as a suffix for many powerful
currencies such as the 'petro-dollar.' But it
is not English alone that is at the root of this
change. Producers and financiers are willing to
put their money in projects that transcend the
limits of regionality. Actors ranging from Amitabh
Bachchan to Rahul Bose are ready to step into
films made in Bengal. Bengali filmmakers are choosing
English as the lingua franca for their films while
NRI filmmakers are shooting Bengali films in the
US in Bengali. Thematically too, the borders are
stretching out, as exemplified through The
Bong Connection and Pinaki Choudhury's Ballygunge
Court, a Bengali film with Bengali actors
that deals with the loneliness of senior citizens
whose children are away in US and UK is currently
being screened across UK.
Few Bengalis today take their newspapers to the
toilet. Thanks to the massive shopping malls that
puncture the Kolkata skyline every other day,
the street corner adda is on its way out. Karl
Marx and his Das Kapital mean little to today's
Y generation bred on McDonalds and Pizza Huts
and Baristas. Tagore songs, let's face it, are
passé. Bergman and Antonioni are dead.
So, what 'Bengali' identity in cinema, or in real
life, are we talking about? And Gandhi as we all
know, has been reduced to a mugshot in our currency
notes or, to a ghost in Lage
Raho Munnabhai.
Shoma A Chatterji is
a freelance journalist who specialises in cinema
and gender. She has won the National Award for
Best Writing on Cinema twice.
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