Synopsis
Sumit (Dhritiman Chatterjee), an ideologue
of an extremist left-wing party, escapes
from police custody. Thanks to his party
boss Nikhilda’s (Jocchon Dostidar)
connections he gets refuge in the high-rise
apartment of Shilpi Mitra (Simi Garewal),
a divorcee, who is a hot-shot executive
in an advertising agency. Biman (Provash
Sarkar) remains Sumit’s only contact
with the outside world. Isolated in his
comfortable refuge, Sumit begins to question
the actions of his party and its consequences
and also develops a friendship with her
benefactress. Sumit sends a letter stating
his misgivings and asks for an open dialogue.
Sadly his party bosses retain their hard
line positions. Sumit is forced to leave
his shelter. When he returns home he finds
his mother has just passed away. His father
(Bijon Bhattacharya) asks him not to worry
about social niceties and flee his home
in order to carry on with his struggle.
The Film
 Padatik
is the final film in Mrinal Sen’s
Calcutta Trilogy – Interview
(1970) and Calcutta’71
(1972) being the other two – films
which are deeply rooted in the social, cultural
and political milieu of the city of Calcutta,
which the film’s prologue describes
as “an intimidating and infernal
city, unredeemed and probably doomed ”
- during the period. Employing innovative
and often daring cinematic compositions
Sen in these films attempts to chronicle
and analyse those turbulent times within
a broad Marxist ideological framework. These
films also established Sen’s reputation
as one of the most politically conscious
and stylistically avant-garde filmmakers
of the Indian New Cinema movement. Padatik,
made in the time when the violent left-wing
movement (Naxalism) was losing its steam
under the tremendous onslaught of the Indian
state and ideological dogfights among the
various factions, is Sen’s cinematic
critique of the excesses of the extreme
left. The isolation of the extreme left
is best portrayed at its sharpest in Padatik
when a scene consisting of a montage of
a political rally attended by a huge number
of people is juxtaposed with a scene showing
Nikhilda – the chief ideologue of
the extremist party – working alone
in a dingy underground press writing dense
prose about the demerits of the bourgeois
educational system. Even here Nikhilda behaves
like a petty autocrat with the impoverished
workers of the dilapidated press –
thus betraying his failure to integrate
with the working class despite his self-professed
“identification with the proletariat.”
Padatik is a film with an extremely
minimalist story-line – the film uses
the travails of the fugitive Sumit to string
together a diverse range of cinematic elements
– documentary and archival footage,
still photographs, speeches of political
leaders, newspaper clippings and text inserts
– to present the director’s
critique of left excesses and its failures.
This breaking down of emotional continuity
and realistic representation is heavily
influenced by the aesthetics of the German
playwright Bertolt Brecht and the adaptation
of the techniques of alienation in cinema
by filmmakers most notably Jean Luc Godard.
The influence of Godard in Padatik
(and in the films Sen made in the late 1960s
and early 1970s) extends not only in the
overall narrative framework but also in
the extensive use of hand-held camera, on
location shooting and freeze frames and
text inserts – all of which hinder
the build-up of melodrama and force the
audience to get involved not with the characters
but with the polemics of the film. In fact
all the characters of the film are deliberately
made devoid of any subjectivity –
even Sumit, the protagonist, with all his
memories of family and his conflicts with
his ex-terrorist freedom fighter father
– remains a typical example of the
Bengali middle class youth and there is
no attempt in the film to endow him with
subjectivity of thought and action. Nikhilda,
the party boss and Provash, the brain-washed
activist are created as ‘cut-outs’
– they personify certain ideas and
do not develop into well-rounded characters
with a definite emotional/psychological
curve. The only exception is Shilpi Mitra
– the film exposes her psychological
and emotional vulnerabilities that hide
beneath her sophisticated and ice-cool veneer.
Her breaking down after a harassing call
from her bully of an ex-husband and her
expression for her love for her son who
studies in a hostel creates a some of the
most engaging moments of the film, but in
a typical example of undercutting the possibilities
of emotional empathy between the audience
and the film’s characters the scene
is juxtaposed with a series of interviews
(shot as a part of an opinion survey being
conducted by Shilpi for her ad agency) where
eminent women such as the writer Leela Majumdar
and the singer Suchitra Mitra expound their
views on the politics of male domination
and the futility of women’s liberation
unless all exploitative relations /equations
are eliminated. It is Shilpi, who is also
responsible for the most memorable sequence
of the film – her confession that
she is a secret sympathiser of left extremism
caused by the death of her younger brother
who left a life of luxury in order to ‘live
his life with all the freedom seeking people
of the world’ and his subsequent disappearance
in the killing fields of Punjab (incidentally
Punjab was another state where Naxalism
was rampant in the early 1970s) definitely
adds depth to her character otherwise portrayed
as typical rich ice-maiden.
Padatik is also a clinical study
of isolation and in the sequences that depict
Sumit’s stay in Shilpi’s apartment
before she returns from her sojourn in New
Delhi wonderfully capture the sense of boredom
and fear that overwhelm his every moment.
The film is able to convey the sense of
fear that every ring of the doorbell or
the telephone that is created in the mind
of fugitive Sumit. The sense of boredom
is best captured in the manner in which
Sumit chain smokes packets of Charminar
cigarette and his desultory reading of the
works of Lenin which ironically theorise
about choosing the ‘true friends of
the revolution’. And in one of the
films finest moments which also demonstrates
the director’s immense control over
the medium of cinema Sumit plays the role
of the docile servant and ceremoniously
serves bed-tea with ‘one and half
teaspoons of sugar’ to himself in
the role of the master! But, despite these
phases of wit and sarcastic humour the film
remains shorn of dramatic emotions and is
deliberately constructed as an essay on
the mental state of the political activist
and thus Sumit’s trials and tribulations
fails to raise any empathy.
Padatik generated a lot of flak
from both the rightist forces and the Marxist
ideologues of all shades after its release.
While the more conservative sections of
the audience (and critics) attacked the
films obvious leftist ideological positions
many hard-core Marxists would attack the
film’s analysis and criticism of extreme
Marxism as ‘petty-bourgeois revisionism’.
Mrinal Sen, in a later interview would defend
himself from the attack of the Marxists
by quoting the Italian Marxist theoretician
Elio Vittorini who once theorised, “The
problem with orthodox Marxists is that they
always feel they have pocketed the truth;
the point is not to pocket the truth, but
to chase it, to run after it…”
However the film won much appreciation
among hard-core cineastes for its innovative
structure and its attempt to create a different
narrative style in synch with its overtly
political content and message. Although
it must be admitted that many of the films
innovations now look jaded and have become
a part of the mainstream cinema, Padatik
retains value as a chronicle of those violent
and chaotic period of India’s history.
Padatik won the National Award
for the Best Screenplay in the year 1974
and was also screened at various international
film festivals in both India and abroad.
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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