Synopsis
The film begins with the ‘accidental’
death of the chief labour officer of a private
steel company in Barrackpore following his
detection of serious corruption within the
management. He reports the matter to the
authorities in New Delhi but the management
learns of the secret report. The officer
resigns and soon after dies in an ‘accident’.
Following this ‘accident’, Probir
Dutta, the intrepid young secretary of the
company’s trade union, gets to know
the truth about the officer’s death.
He calls a worker’s meeting where
he intends to expose the management. Before
he can do this, he and his close friend
Bijon are attacked by hired killers. Probir
is killed but Bijon manages to escape. Bijon
breaks the news to Probir’s family
and is forced to abscond. Probir’s
family comprises his aged parents, two grown-up
sisters and a small brother. They are compelled
to leave their suburban home to settle in
a backstreet home in Calcutta. Nirupama,
the elder sister, in love with Bijon, waits
for his return. A young reporter Sandipan
is assigned by his paper to do an investigative
story on the series of mystery deaths and
their links to the company. He doggedly
collects bits and scraps of information
that, when pieced together, provides a likely
answer to the question – who are the
killers? He tracks down one of the suspects,
Sital, who is goalkeeper in a small-time
football team. His conversations with Sital
reveal that the management has lured Sital
with either money or a job and Sital who
now wishes to concentrate on living a normal
life through football backed by a job, is
intent on distancing himself from his criminal
past. In its attempt to compromise the bereaved
family of Probir and the insistently questioning
Nirupama, the company offers her a job.
Though Nirupama is by now aware of what
led to her brother’s death, she is
forced by circumstances to accept the offer
with the hope and confidence that Sandipan
will continue his crusade to discover the
truth. In the meantime, Bijon, who had done
well in faraway Nashik, comes back. Bijon
is now a successful salesman and no longer
cares for the revolutionary ideals he stood
for in the past. His youthful anger against
the Establishment is replaced by the anxiety
to attain material success, leaving him
content on the one hand and cynical of those
who still stood by their faith in radical
social change on the other. He rents a flat
in one of the city’s better parts
and proposes marriage to Nirupama. She accepts
the proposal and requests Sandipan to be
a witness to their registration. As he proceeds
for the wedding on his two-wheeler, Sandipan
is hit by a car and is killed on the spot.
A shocked Nirupama who refuses to accept
Sandipan’s death as a mere accident,
asks Bijon to postpone the wedding. Bijon
is angry at this request. Nirupama, realizing
that this is no longer the man she once
was so deeply in love with, turns him away.
The break makes her realize that she has
an inner strength she was never aware of,
a capacity to defy she never recognized.
The film ends with the elimination of Sital
who gets killed in a deserted playfield
during his workout in the breaking hours
of the day.
The film
 Grihajuddha
(Crossroads) made in 1982, was
based on a Dibyendu Palit story. This was
Buddhadeb
Dasgupta, crossing black-and-white to
step into colour. He uses the format of
a slickly made political thriller to unfold
the story of a family’s victimization
to corporate politics. He goes on to portray
how one member, the daughter engaged to
her dead brother’s runaway friend,
draws strength and moral courage from the
very oppression they are victim to. The
story is built around a few individuals
whose lives are trapped in an urban corner
where all the exit points have suddenly
been closed. Which is tragic considering
each one of them is fighting a war (griha-
meaning ‘home’ and juddha
meaning ‘war’) and is seeking
his/her own way out of this war. If one
is fighting a war for love, another is fighting
a war for integrity, and a third is forced
to wage a war for the very basic reason
of survival. Somewhere along the way, these
separate, individualistic ‘wars’,
congregate and the difference between them
is nothing more than a confused blur.
Buddhadeb Dasgupta gives celluloid credibility
to the low middle class milieu in Grihajuddha.
The inquisitive neighbours leaning out of
the rooftop, the tipsy husband tottering
back home, the distressed family huddling
together in their dingy dwelling reveal
Dasgupta’s commendable concern for
detail. Based on a contemporary short story
called Maach (Fish), structurally,
the film runs along two levels almost like
parallels on a single plane. One consists
of a young and crusading journalist’s
attempt to investigate two murders committed
by the management of the factory. The other
explores the inner journey of Nirupama,
the sister of one of the murder victims,
in her separate search for truth on the
one hand and her love for Bijon on the other.
The two strands meet at one point, move
together for some time and then go their
separate ways after Sandipan is killed.
Sandipan functions as the common link between
these two strands of the story. His death
could have been the climax. But Dasgupta
thankfully saves the film from this clichéd
end. He lets it move on for some more time
to end in a freeze shot of the footballer
against the soundtrack of the breaking of
a glass pane.
Dasgupta’s statement on Grihajuddha
is clear, perceptive and forceful. “In
Grihajuddha,” he says, “my
intention is to portray an average man with
contemporary sensibilities, aware of the
world around him, left with no choice but
to be committed. But the atrocities practiced
by big capital frighten him and force him
to abandon his commitment. Predictably,
he tries to justify his veering away from
his original stance. The metamorphosis is
tragic because it makes him stand up against
his own people. This, to my mind, is the
tragedy of the present times and of many
a sensitive, present-day individual.”
Interestingly, though Dasgupta uses the
masculine pronoun ‘he’ to make
his statement, it is Nirupama who emerges
triumphant, in her own small way, by refusing
to surrender to a man she can no longer
recognize as the one she once loved, though
she is quite aware that with this, she has
possibly signed off all hopes of a marriage
in future. She refuses being made a victim
or even being martyred in any small way.
The victims incidentally, are all men, even
Sital, the pawn who fails to realize his
dreams of a normal life, including Bijon,
the man who has made it good, only at a
price he can never hope to regain. He ends
up being the worst victim of them all, as
his so-called success is tinged with his
failure to make his ladylove accept him
as her life partner.
Mamata Shankar as Nirupama offers a kind
of continuity from Anjali in Dooratwa
(1978), as if Nirupama is a logical
extension of Anjali if not the same woman
in a different time-space-incident setting.
Nirupama is as low profile, as subtle and
as quiet as Anjali is. She changes along
with changes in the social, familial and
political environment of her life. The sudden
responsibility thrust on her turning her
into the sole breadwinner for the family
following the tragic death of the elder
brother she idolized so much is something
she finds difficult to begin with, but learns
to cope in her own simple and unobtrusive
way. Every experience makes her stronger
than she was before, the final turning point
coming with the death of Sandipan and her
acceptance of the fact that the man she
once loved is certainly not the one she
would like to spend her life with. Mamata
essays the same restraint she essayed in
Dooratwa, along with the same silences.
As the only female character of note in
a film almost entirely peopled by men, Nirupama
stands out not by her beauty, her sensuousness
or her seductive qualities, none of which
are even touched upon in the film, but by
her subtlety and her growing strength. Her
strength is wonderfully counter pointed
by the weak Bijon portrayed by Anjan Dutta.
Sandipan, portrayed brilliantly by director
Goutam Ghose, comes across as a strong complement
to Nirupama. Both the men offer two different
kinds of contrasting characterization to
Nirupama.
The most striking element of Grihajuddha
lies mainly in its ‘absences.’
The adversaries in the film are never really
visible but make their presence strongly
felt by the sheer power of their absence.
Dasgupta exercises excellent control by
presenting the murders mostly in ‘absence’
with only one direct confrontation when
Probir is beaten up and dies as a result.
The stylistic presentation of the footballer
Sital at the end of the film is a case in
point.
The precise dictionary translation of the
Bengali word grihajuddha is ‘domestic
conflict.’ Dasgupta widens the horizons
of this meaning to embrace a small world
in conflict, where people meet at a certain
crossroad they have been pushed into, and
are vague about their bearings, about the
risks involved, the lurking dangers, and
about the responsibilities they are circumstantially
forced to take up. This ‘small’
world is a microcosm of the larger world
out there, where moral decay in one group
of people or one individual victimizes another
individual or group. The victimizer, such
as Mandar in Dooratwa, Bijon in
Grihajuddha and Hemanta in Andhi
Gali (1984), evolve into victims sucked
into a vicious circle of their own making,
from which exit seems difficult, though
not impossible.
Dasgupta’s trilogy, namely Dooratwa,
Grihajuddha and Andhi Gali
demonstrates his concern about the social
forces that go to shape the destinies
of individuals rather than trying to explore
the psychology of individual characters.
Yet, he never permits his characters to
be reduced to cliché, cardboard characters
used to mouth his own ideologies or simply
to make a point. The distances created by
Mandar in Dooratwa are sustained,
or perhaps heightened within the inner conflict
in Grihajuddha and stretch towards
an unknown infinity in Andhi Gali.
The inner conflicts of Mandar, Bijon and
Hemant are not identical, but the consequences
they encounter in ideological terms, are.
Is this because these men are lesser than
they believed themselves to be? How
does one explain their moral cowardice and
decay once they have quit their political
commitments in the past? Or, has their disillusionment
with the movement they once believed in
has led to disillusionment with themselves?
Are these three men symbols of the ideologically
fickle middle class of Calcutta in the 1970s?
These significant questions are universal
and timeless. They mark this Dasgupta trilogy
as the most outstanding political and social
statement of the times they reflect.
The most interesting reality of Grihajuddha
is that the Left-ruled Marxist Government
of West Bengal produced it while the WBFDC
(West Bengal Film Development Corporation)
took on the responsibility of distributing
the film. The film is a strong yet very
subtly stated critique of the Establishment.
So, it would seem that the WBFDC developed
cold feet when it saw/heard about the film
and its statement because it held back the
film’s release for two long years.
After this, it decided to release the film
in theatres that previously screened either
Hindi or English films from Hollywood. However,
unlike most of Dasgupta’s films that
do not do well commercially, Grihajuddha
was reasonably well received. Soon after
its release, it picked up six Ultorath
awards. The awards were for Best Story (Dibyendu
Palit), Best Script and Direction (Buddhadeb
Dasgupta), Best Actor (Gautam Ghosh), Best
Actress (Mamata Shankar) and Best Supporting
Actor (Sunil Mukherjee.) Grihajuddha
also won the Fipresci Jury award at the
Venice International Film Festival in 1983.
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. |
