Synopsis
A film unit led by its Director (Dhritiman
Chatterjee) arrives at a village called
Hatui to shoot a film on the Great Bengal
Famine of 1943 (Akal, in vernacular).
The units shoots and resides in a semi-dilapidated
zamindari palace which has an old lady (Gita
Sen) and her paralysed husband as it sole
inhabitants. At first all is hunky-dory;
one of the villagers Haren (Rajen Tarafdar),
who was an actor in the rural folk theatre
in his youth, becomes the local manager
and confidante of the film unit. Complications
arise when one of the actors (Debika Mukherjee)
starts throwing starry tantrums and is dismissed.
The director’s attempt to replace
Debika by the daughter of a village bigwig
stirs up the hornet’s nest –
the villagers take this as an insult and
refuse to co-operate with the film unit.
Finally, the unit is forced to pack-up and
leave.
The film
Akaler Sandhaney, is Mrinal
Sen’s most celebrated film, one
which firmly established his position as
one of the leading lights of Indian cinema,
especially of the movement that has been
labelled as the Indian New Wave. The chief
characteristic of these films was to explore
new forms of cinematic compositions both
in terms of content and also in terms of
narrative structures. Sen, with his films
made in the late 1960s and early 1970s –
Bhuvan Shome
(1969), Interview
(1970), Calcutta
'71 (1972) and Padatik (1973)
– had established himself as one of
the more politically and formally radical
filmmakers of this movement. By the late
1970s, Sen abandoned his earlier ultra-radical
filmmaking style and opted for more conformist
narrative structures in order to reflect
and examine the moral, ethical and political
crisis affecting the Bengali middle-class
after the period of extreme turbulence.
Akaler Sandhaney is the stand-out
film of this phase of his career which includes
Ek Din Pratidin (1979), Chalchitra
(1981), Kharij
(1982) and Khandahar (1983).
 Akaler
Sandhaney employs the 'film within
a film' structure (and the trials and tensions
of the film crew) to explore Sen’s
favourite themes - poverty, exploitation
and the ensuing human misery. In the process
of doing so the film also turns a critical
gaze into the politics of artistic representation
of such misery. The film is searing cross-examination
of the ethics and morals of the petit-bourgeois
filmmaker/s who, as one of the villagers
comment at the very beginning of the film,
“invade the village in search of famine”.
Dhritiman Chatterjee, who plays the nameless
film-director – a deliberate choice,
as all other members of the film-crew ostensibly
play ‘themselves’ being addressed
by their actual names – assumes the
persona of Mrinal Sen himself - the concerned
and intellectual filmmaker attempting to
make films that tackle the "real
histories of India’s poverty."
The film begins with the crew arriving
in the old mansion and through their activities
the protagonists are identified. The exposition
also defines the socio-economic conditions
of the village through the dialogues of
the super-efficient production manager (Jayanta
Choudhury) who explains his problems in
arranging the rooms and other amenities
for the unit’s month-long stay in
the village. The other protagonists –
the last of the zamindars, who is paralyzed,
and his wife (Gita Sen), Durga (Srila Majumdar),
a poor village woman burdened with a young
son and crippled husband who works as a
servant and gets employment in a menial
job with the unit, are also effectively
introduced in the opening sequences. The
most crucial encounter is with Haren (Rajen
Tarafdar) - a weaver driven by artistic
passion in his youth had acted in rural
theatrical productions (jatras) based on
lives of “Hitler, Lenin and Stalin”
and whose ambitions of producing a jatra
on the life of Karl Marx, with himself in
the lead role is thwarted by as he puts
it “lack of actors fully devoted to
their craft”. Haren, in his subservience
to the film-unit stands as a symbol of all
villagers who typically curry favour of
rich city-dwellers looking for social status
and economic benefits but his inherent passion
for the arts that makes him understand the
difference between "the reality
of cinema and the actuality of real life"
makes him also the most striking character
in the entire film.
The flashpoint in the film occurs when
one of the actors (Debika Mukherjee), playing
the role of a village woman who opts for
selling her body in order to escape the
grinding hunger of famine, throws tantrums
and the director is forced to expel her.
Following Haren’s advice, he tries
to replace her with the daughter of Mr.
Chatterjee, a village squire. This brings
forth the latent resentment of the villagers
already peeved at the unit for driving up
the prices of commodities at the local bazaar.
They rise-up against this so called dishonourable
act committed by the unit in asking a decent
village girl to play the role of a sex-worker.
But Sen in his sharp critic of rural ignorance
and hypocrisy exposes the deeper cause of
the resentment – the headmaster of
the village school (Radhamohan Bhattacharya),
who is posited in the film as the archetypical
repository of knowledge and wisdom, points
out that the real reason for the anger of
Mr. Chatterjee and is ilk is the fact the
film being shot is brutally exposes the
heinous role of their forefathers who made
immense money exploiting the misery of the
poor during the time of the Great Famine.
This conflict also evokes one of the major
concerns of the film – the overlapping
of personal histories with the actual events
of the past and how little incidents in
the present can bring out memories best
swept under the carpet.
The overlapping of the past and the present
in Akaler Sandhaney is a well-thought
out device to emphasise the pervasiveness
of Famine in the history of Bengal. This
is best brought out pictorial guessing game
that the film crew engages in order to pass
the time. Through randomly selected research
photographs that the director has brought
on location to study the 'face of famine'
- a sketch depicting the second century
Gandhara statue entitled The Starving Buddha,
a 1959 mini famine that ravaged Bengal,
a 1971 humanitarian crisis brought about
by the Bangladesh War - Sen builds-up a
chronology of perpetual suffering. The crew
member’s callous attitude to these
snapshots of malnutrition and misery succinctly
captures the great chasm between the well-meaning
middle-class and the actual sufferers of
hunger. The last photograph of the game
– a totally dark, blank frame - which
the actor Smita Patil (Smita Patil) describes
as a metaphor of “the past, the
present and the future” is ominous
and pessimistic but is also a terse summary
of the mood of despondence latent in the
entire film.
Akaler Sandhaney is also a trenchant
examination of the inter-relationship between
the reel and the real life and the constant
overlapping of the two that creates inexplicable
situations. A shot a villager on a cycle-rickshaw
announcing the screening of The Guns of
Navarone starring “Anthony Queen,
the world’s greatest beauty!!”,
is juxtaposed with the shot – the
harsh sound of the crew’s generator
masquerading as the drone of the bombers
- of the actor Dipankar De rehearsing a
scene where he is to announce the flight
of Allied bombers over his village. The
most poignant overlap between cinema and
reality is depicted through Durga –
the poor village girl whose story is similar
to character portrayed by Smita Patil. The
lines between fiction and reality get extremely
blurred in the memorable scene when Durga
screams out in agony unable to bear the
impact of the assault on the Smita Patil
screen persona by her husband when it is
being canned by the film crew. Durga, the
timeless symbol of poverty can easily identify
her own predicament in the misery of the
Smita Patil’s screen character but
her innocence is responsible for her inability
to distinguish between portrayal of famine
in cinema and her own life of struggle against
unsparing impoverishment. The film is also
full of self-reflexive references to earlier
attempts of portrayal of the Great Bengal
Famine in Bengali arts and literature. The
famous song – “Hein Shamalo
Dhan Go/ Kaaste-te Dao Shaan Go”
set to music by Salil Choudhury (who was
also the music director of Akaler Sandhaney)
from the iconic Indian Peoples’ Theatre
Association (IPTA) production Nabanna is
used over the beginning credits and also
comes back just before the eruption of the
crisis with the tantrums thrown by Debika.
The elaborate ‘planned sequence’
capturing the villagers looking at the sky
searching for Allied bombers and the discussion
they have regarding the War and its consequent
famine is a direct throwback to a similar
sequence in Satyajit
Ray’s film on the same subject
Ashani Sanket (1973). Of course
Ray and Sen are entirely different in their
approach and analysis of the Famine. While
Ray’s is the more artistic approach
infused with a touch of lyrical humanism,
Sen with his more politically loaded approach
tries to present a socio-economic analysis
(within a broad Marxist canvas) of India’s
history of scarcity and the attitudes of
the artistic elite towards its depiction.
Another important aspect of the film which
adds to its greatness is the wonderful performances
by the ensemble cast who seem to merge into
their screen personas. Smita
Patil does a brilliant job in both playing
herself and also the impoverished farmer’s
wife who is forced to sell her body for
the sake of her family’s survival.
Smita’s scenes with the old lady (Gita
Sen) trapped with her paralyzed husband
especially the one in which she discovers
the old woman sobbing inconsolably after
her husband’s demise is an ample illustration
of her immense histrionic talents. Gita
Sen also gives an extremely sober and nuanced
performance while Srila Majumdar is perfect
as Durga, a poor farmer’s wife. The
noted director Rajen Tarafdar however takes
the cake as Haren – his strong screen
presence effectively captures the contradictions
and pathos of a man caught between servility
and his faith in the director’s ability
to capture the essence of the Great Famine.
The rest of the cast led by the bearded
and chain-smoking Dhritiman Chatterjee playing
the alter-ego of Mrinal Sen also do commendable
jobs and add to the overall quality of the
film. KK
Mahajan’s cinematography coupled
with some intricate camera movements wonderfully
captures the contrasts between the lush
green paddy fields and the decaying palace.
Salil Choudhury’s music is minimalist
and is used more as a support to the harsh
soundtrack that often hints to the tensions
hidden beneath the apparent serenity of
rural Bengal. The noise of the film unit’s
generator is often used as a metaphor of
their intrusion into and alienation from
the actual lives of the villagers whose
history they endeavour to capture in their
film.
Akaler Sandhaney remains one of
Mrinal Sen's most approachable and cinematically
competent works. By turning his 'gaze inwards'
and 'indulging in the ruthless business
of introspection' it asks important questions
regarding the causes and consequences of
the Great Famine and also about the morals
and ethics of portraying stories about human
suffering through the medium of cinema.
Akaler Sandhaney won National
Award for Best Feature Film in 1980 while
Sen was bestowed with the National Awards
for Best Direction and Screenplay. The film
also won the prestigious Silver Bear at
the Berlin Film Festival, 1981.
Contributed by Monish K Das, an
alumnus of the Film and Television Institute
of India (FTII), Pune with specialization
in Film Editing, 1992. He now lives and
works as a documentary filmmaker and social
communication consultant in Kolkata.
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