Synopsis
Calcutta '71 is a compilation
of 4 different stories on theme of poverty
and its consequences as observed by a young
man (Debraj Roy) who remains eternally twenty.
The three main stories are set apart by
10 years in time leading to the last segment
set in Calcutta of 1971 – a drunken
harangue by a corrupt businessman-politician
– set in the turbulent Calcutta of
the early 1970’s. The young man is
finally killed off in the end of the film
when he incites the audience/people to protest
against the injustices of the system that
perpetuates degradation of human existence.
The film
Calcutta '71 is the second film
in what is generally referred to as Mrinal
Sen's 'The Calcutta Trilogy' –
films which established his reputation as
a 'political' filmmaker with a broadly Marxist
ideology and also as a filmmaker willing
to go beyond established narrative structures
in order set up a more challenging interaction
with the film and its audience. These three
films – Interview
(1970) and Padatik (1973) being
the other two - also stand as the chronicles
of that socio-politically tumultuous period
in history.
 Poverty
and its consequences being the major theme
of Calcutta '71, the film uses
the plots of the 4 stories not to delve
into the socio-economic reasons of poverty
but rather on the human reactions to debasement
and misery. The film begins with a montage
of newsreel shots of Calcutta (now Kolkata)
bound together by a violent acid-rock music
soundtrack that firmly establishes the milieu
and the zeitgeist of the city in the early
1970s. The prologue leads to a journey back
in time. The first story, set in 1933 depicts
a lower middle class family trapped in their
dilapidated hut trying to cling to their
last vestiges of dignity on a terrible monsoon
night. In the end the family is forced to
get out of their hut and seek shelter along
with other wretched of the earth and the
very mongrel the cynical head of the family
(Satya Bannerjee) had some time earlier
kicked out of their shanty. The reaction
of the family to their misery is passive,
resigned – there is no sense of anger
and that is why this segment of Calcutta
'71 is also the most realistic in its
idiom. But as the film progresses the characters'
response to their condition changes and
a sense of protest is becomes evident. The
narrative style of the film too becomes
more and more disruptive – news-paper
clippings, newsreel footage, text-graphics
etc. are inserted within the main plot -
reflecting the mood of unrest that is part
of the character’s psyche and the
spirit of the times in which the individual
stories are set. In the second story, set
during the Bengal famine of 1943, Shobhana
(Madhabi
Mukherjee) - the young woman who along
with her teenaged sister is forced into
prostitution with the active complicity
of their own mother (Binota Bose) - protests
against the terrible injustice by committing
suicide unable to bear the hypocrisy of
the attempt to maintain the pretence of
middle-class dignity. The segment also subverts
the persona of the self-sacrificing mother
so common in mainstream Indian cinema –
it is the mother (Binota Bose), despite
her squeaky clean appearance, who forces
her progeny into a life of misery for her
own material and social comforts. The segment
is devoid of any sense of melodrama nor
there is any overt attempt to draw empathy
– the characters remain true to their
social types and the sparse dialogues convey
nothing beyond the minimum information necessary
for the progression of the story. The structure
is deliberately fragmented by insertions
of newsreel footage of the Bengal Famine
thus providing the backdrop of Shobhana’s
self-nihilistic mode of protest. The third
story, set in 1953, portraying the revenge
taken by a teenaged rice-smuggler on a middle-class
bully stands as a gritty portrayal of the
psychology and anger of children deprived
of the joys of childhood while the final
story of Calcutta '71, which shows
a completely intoxicated political leader
(Ajitesh Bannerjee) delivering a lecture
on the effects of poverty to his sycophants
while attending a high society party, is
also the most jarring and disruptive segment
of the film. The fierce rock music (composed
by Ananda Shankar and played by a band led
by Cyrus Tata) accompanied by psychedelic
strobe lights provides a perfect expression
to the anger and rebellious spirit of the
times. The cut to a wailing newborn street-child
from the politician’s speech about
a new India emerging out of the chaos stands
as the key to the ideological basis of the
film’s discourse. The sequence is
extremely fragmented and disruptive –
the speech of the politician, which is almost
a monologue, is juxtaposed with collages
of still photographs of emaciated victim’s
of hunger, newsreel shots of aggressive
street demonstrations and consequent police
repression, documentary footage of Vietnam
War and other revolutionary movements, political
graffiti proclaiming the politics of annihilation
and even a shot from the iconic mannequin
breaking sequence from Interview! The collage
of diverse materials is an effort to force
the viewer to identify the history of India
as proclaimed by the title-card which links-up
the 4 stories – "the history
of poverty, the history of deprivation and
the history of exploitation"–
a legacy not of peaceful synthesis but one
of struggle against brutal indignity and
hunger.
In the final episode of the film, the young
man - who has been shot dead - reappears
like the chorus in classical Greek theatre.
The sequence is shot in a theatrical manner
with a harsh spotlight illuminating the
young man’s face against a pitch-black
backdrop. The young man – talking
directly to the audience - strives to analyse
the major themes of the preceding stories
and thus explain how at the end hungry people
become violent and the process creates newer
and more potent forms of rebellion. Just
at the crucial moment when the young man
actively exhorts the audience to participate
in direct action against the injustices
of poverty he is killed off again. The sequence
of his death comprising frenetic hand-held
tracking shots chasing the victim through
the dingy by-lanes of Calcutta is a deliberate
evocation of the brutal killings of the
Naxalite students by the forces of the Indian
state that was a very common phenomenon
of Calcutta at that period. The final shot
of the film where the camera tilts up from
the young man’s corpse to a panorama
of the dawn breaking on the Calcutta Maidan
accompanied by the rousing signature tune
of the All India Radio signifies the director’s
belief in the positives that emerge out
of the people’s resistance to the
forces of oppression.
Calcutta '71 in Mrinal Sen’s
own words is a study of "the dialectics
of hunger, the dialectics of poverty"–
the movement from resignation and apathy
to anger and protest and the possibility
of a more equitable social condition emerging
out of such rebellion. The film is devoid
of all pleasures of the narrative and demands
and a great sense of participation, patience
and intellectual erudition in order to appreciate
its cinematic experimentations and its hypothesis
on "poverty — the most vital
reality of our country, the basic factor
in the indignity of our people." The
film retains its value as a chronicle of
the restless late 1960s and early 1970s
and as an exploration to the historical
factors responsible for such anger. However
the film's experiments (both in terms of
story-telling and cinematic techniques)
which sometimes borders on playfulness and
arrogance makes it extremely esoteric and
limits its audience to hard-core cineastes
familiar with these challenging forms of
cinematic compositions.
Calcutta '71 won the Silver Lotus
for the Second Best Feature Film of 1972.
The film was also shown at the Competitive
Section of the 1973 Venice Film Festival
and a host of other major international
film festivals.
Monish K Das is 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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