Synopsis
Darakeshwar is the village postmaster.
He lives with his only daughter Anjana who becomes
the only girl in the village to graduate from
high school and take admission in the city college.
The doting father waits at the bus stop every
evening to fetch his daughter as she returns from
the city. One evening, Anjana does not come back.
Just as the villagers climb onto their gossip
machine, the body of the girl is fished out of
the Keleghai river that runs along the village.
Darakeshwar’s first reaction is to refuse
to accept the truth. When he actually sees his
daughter’s body, he decides, in the face
of the scandalized villagers, to give the girl
a river burial. “She is not dead. She will
come back to life,” he says, mainly to himself.
Instead of filing a FIR that could bring the culprit
to book, he makes it his life’s mission
to change the name of the river from Keleghai
to Anjana, after his dead daughter. He forgets
about his job, about his basic needs and trots
from pillar to post, trying to find out how the
name of the river can be changed. For the officials
he visits, it is an appeal they have never heard
of before – changing the name of a river
– who has ever heard of this? They find
it strange that a father whose daughter has been
gang-raped, murdered and her body dumped in the
very river whose name he seeks to change and she
loved so dearly, does not care about bringing
the culprits to book. They think he is a nut case.
Little boys pelt stones at him as he canvases
his cause from village to village, laughed and
ogled at, made the butt of jokes and given up
as a lost case. At the end of the day, he sits
on the riverbank and talks to his dead daughter.
A young and honest police officer begins a manhunt
for the killers of the young girl on his own.
He catches the gang of rapists who killed the
girl but Darakeshwar is unmoved. He finally decides
to solve his problem on his own. The sympathetic
district magistrate, unable to help him officially
or legally, helps in his personal capacity. As
Darakeshwar tries to dig a hole on the riverbank
to put in a wooden post with a banner with ‘Anjana’
written on it, the DM tells him, “I will
dig the hole and you put in the post.”
Is strict fidelity to the original literary source
possible? Or is it even necessary? Should we,
as viewers, take fidelity as a methodological
principle to be followed by the filmmaker who
chooses to adapt a literary source to make his
film? All these questions get raised as one watches
production designer Samir Chanda’s entry
into direction with Ek Nadir Galpo. Based
on a story Ekti Nodir Naam, authored
by the noted Sunil Gangopadhyay that haunted Chanda
from the time he was in college, Ek Nodir
Galpo moves beyond the limitations of the
written word. It defines grief as an overwhelming
emotion that can change the life of a man, less
than ordinary, radically and irreversibly for
an extraordinary and unique cause.
Ek Nodir Galpo is a poignant celluloid
document that throws up an extraordinary perspective
on the dedication of a human being towards a cause
that may seem crazy to most. Through what may
seem a simple story of love between a father and
his motherless daughter, the film subtly but steadily
covers other areas such as, our losing link with
nature presented metaphorically through the river;
the casual negligence of officialdom when the
person approaching it is either thought to be
nutty, or poor, or both; the value-centric integrity
that still sustains among a few officers; the
empathy that sometimes peeps out of the steel
exterior of a strict DM; the river presented as
a physical reality, as an integral part of the
lives of those who live near it, the river as
a metaphor for the anger presented through high
tide, as a vehicle of death, as a soother of the
mind, as a carrier of dead bodies, as an indirect
upholder of the human spirit; and finally, the
river as a symbol of Darakeshwar’s dead
daughter if only through its imaginary new name
– Anjana. The river is an omnipresence that
carries ambivalent meanings throughout the film.
True to its name, symbolically speaking, the film
is more the story of a river than of a father
and his daughter.
 At
the heart of the film, its life and soul is the
superb performance of Mithun Chakraborty as Darakeshwar.
As he struggles to get the river named after his
daughter, he changes his looks, his body language
and even his voice. He stops shaving or going
for a haircut becoming oblivious to the tattering
clothes on his body, or the strange stares of
people as he stands up on a makeshift podium to
make an impromptu speech asking the people to
sign on his signature campaign, or, to the boys
who pelt him with stones as he walks by. Contrast
this to the scenes with him as the smiling father
laughing away at his daughter’s pranks,
or making plans for her future and you see one
of the most memorable performances come alive
on screen by any actor in any language in the
history of Indian cinema. This is perhaps Mithun’s
best performance ever, Mrigaya (1976)
and Tahader Katha, notwithstanding. Shweta
Prasad as the adolescent daughter Anjana is a
natural performer who does not betray any awe
about acting with one of the best actors Indian
cinema has ever produced. Krishnakishore Mukherjee
as the kindly but stern DM and Jishu Sengupta
as the conscience-ridden police officer are very
good too as are Bulbul Choudhury as the concerned
neighbour and Rahul Prasad as her grandson.
Nachiketa who has done the musical score for
the film, revives an old folk number sung by young
brides and marriageable girls. The song offers
a point of relief in the tragic story of love
on the one hand and the strength of the human
spirit on the other. The music has a gentle flow
to it, in harmony with the river flowing along.
Rajen C Kothari’s cinematography is low-key
and subtly captures the village ambience with
its browns and ambers aesthetically. Shot almost
entirely on location along the banks of the river
Bhagirati, in a village called Naliapur in Burdwan
district, the film is a rich visual experience.
Anup Mukherjee’s sound design flows like
the soft and soothing waves of the Keleghai river.
Sanjib Dutta’s editing does justice to the
dramatic changes in the mood of the film from
innocent joy, to a bonding between two individuals,
through shock, grief, moving from the village
to the neighbouring town into government offices
to village market places and streets only to come
back, like the proverbial bad coin, again and
again, to the banks of the Keleghai river. Chanda’s
dialogue retains the local inflections of the
Bengali dialect spoken by the region the film
portrays.
There are three National Award winners sharing
the credits of the film. One is director Samir
Chanda himself who, as production designer, has
won several National Awards, Mithun Chakraborty
is another National Award winner several times
over and the third is Shweta Prasad, who won the
National Award for the Best Child Artiste in 2003.
But these hardly count in a film where the contribution
of every single member of the team speaks for
itself. One hopes Chanda sustains the spirit of
excellence and dedication he reveals in his first
film, much like his protagonist’s single-minded
dedication to attain an incredible goal. In a
film like this, you can cheerfully forget the
story it has been adapted from. For Ek Nodir
Galpo, the film is the story.
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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