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South Asian Review, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2015

Strikethrough Calcutta: Poetics and Politics of Interruption in Satyajit Ray’s and Mrinal

Sen’s Calcutta Trilogies

Torsa Ghosal

Ohio State University

[Abstract: While Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta trilogy is often studied for the manner in which he uses the cinematic media to depict urbanization and its discontents, Mrinal Sen’s trilogy is contextualized within the filmmaker’s leftist politics. In discussing the cinematic idiom of the Calcutta trilogies, Ray’s and Sen’s use of formal strategies, identified as integral to international cinematic movements like the French New Wave, emerge as a point of departure. However, this article argues that Ray’s and Sen’s adaptation, rejection, and modification of such strategies remain intertwined with their attempts to historically trace the world in which they and their characters lived.]

he first film club in Calcutta was formed in 1947, the year in which India obtained political independence from British rule. It is not as

if one led to the other, but this coincidence suggests an overlap of cinema’s rise to cultural prominence in Calcutta with governmental epochs in the country. This film club, known as the Calcutta Film Society, was found by Satyajit Ray, Chidananda Dasgupta, and Bansi Chandragupta among others. The club included artists and critics who proactively engaged in transnational cultural exchanges. They screened international films and reputed international filmmakers like Jean Renoir and John Huston participated as speakers in some of the sessions of the club. This cultural interface activated by the film society in the late 1940s and early 1950s evinces a conspicuous intellectual

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investment in understanding films within their varied social and aesthetic contexts at a time when Calcutta was crystallizing its post-independence political and cultural identities.1 Consequently, unlike European modernity that engendered celebrated city novels, post-independence Calcutta found its cultural expression in two parallel city film trilogies: Satyajit Ray’s and Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta Trilogies. Ray’s trilogy comprises Pratidwandi or The Adversary (1970), Seemabaddha or The Company Limited (1971), and Jana Aranya or The Middleman (1975), while Sen’s includes Interview (1970), Calcutta’71 (1972), and Padatik or The Guerilla Fighter (1973). The period between the formation of the Film Society and the making of Calcutta trilogies was marked by struggles to find adequate means and modes for articulating the problems of a society in transition on celluloid. Ray and Sen, among others, were making films to develop and explore their own cinematic idioms. Calcutta, as a city, was struggling to accommodate an ever increasing population,2 interests of the different classes of this population, and accompanying urban industrial problems. Simmering tensions came to a head with the mobilization of rural and urban populations of Bengal in the armed uprising of the Naxalites from 1967 to 1975.3 Spanning several years, the Naxalite movement had different phases:

The first was the Naxalbari revolt itself.4 The second began after the revolt collapsed and continued up to April 1969, when CPI (ML),5 the third Communist Party [in Bengal], was formed. The third phase covered the period when the Naxalite participated in several rural uprisings, the most notable of which was in Srikakulam district in Andhra Pradesh. An important feature of Naxalite policy in this period was the adoption of annihilation of class enemy as the only tactic of the armed struggle. The fourth phase began in April 1970 after the movement moved into urban areas and Calcutta became the center of activities. In Calcutta, it first took the form of the ‘cultural revolution’ involving attacks on educational institutions, but soon afterwards the annihilation tactics was implemented in the city. The fifth phase, beginning in July 1972, marked the end of the Naxalite movement. (Dasgupta 26)

Both Ray and Sen located and directed their Calcutta trilogies in the period when Calcutta had become the epicenter of the Naxalite revolt. As inhabitants in the city faced continual threats of death, violence, and destruction, the contradictions and anxieties that had been latent in Calcutta ever since independence were exposed during the Naxal period. Thus, the trilogies engage with a fragmented and formless society exploding with the violent energy of the masses. The nascent societal scenario also posited challenges to Ray’s and Sen’s crafts.

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Examining cinematic techniques used in the Calcutta trilogies reveals the manner in which both filmmakers sought to find a form amidst the formless violence of the city. International cultural transactions that had been central to the development of cinematic aesthetics in Calcutta offered an eclectic repertoire of narrative tools to articulate the processes and consequences of the breaking down of societal infrastructure. Thus, Ray’s and Sen’s search for the appropriate narrative mode for these films can be understood in relation to the broader issues concerning the representation of an “everyday” that is spatially and temporally trapped within a violent interregnum.

While Ray’s trilogy is often studied for the manner in which he uses the medium of the film to depict urbanization and its discontents (Dissanayake and Sahai; Chaudhuri), Sen’s trilogy gets written about in the context of his leftist politics (Montage 127). Taking a cue from such erstwhile research, a comparative study of the formal issues that surface in their trilogies drives home the point that both directors in fact endeavored to represent the exceptional everydays of 1960s-70s Calcutta. Thus Ray’s and Sen’s trilogies reflect on the nature of everyday life in the light of the socio-political turmoil that remains at the forefront through the Naxalite period and the biopolitical foundations that provoke such turmoil. First, I analyze the use of representational techniques engendered in foreign historical and geo-political conditions, carrying definite ideological connotations to different cultural ends in the trilogies. I open my discussion with Ray’s and Sen’s engagement with narrative techniques adopted (and indeed adapted) from the French New Wave. Also, though French New Wave as a movement had eclectic ramifications, I delimit my focus to the stylistic devices of “interruption” employed in the French New Wave films that include freeze frames, jump cuts, and other techniques to interfere with the audience’s immersive experience. Second, I connect the two filmmakers’ approaches toward “interruption” as a narrative mode with their divergent takes on the unfolding history through the Naxalite era. In doing so, I argue that the complex relation that underscores the aforementioned oxymoron, exceptional everyday, remains the formal and the thematic core of the Calcutta trilogies. The thematic overlaps in Ray’s and Sen’s trilogies are further borne out by the struggles of the characters who populate the storyworlds, and a closer look at their shared quests for the “good life,” in the final section of the paper, reinforces the shared history underpinning the films.

French New Wave and its Aesthetic Regime

The first film from Mrinal Sen’s trilogy, Interview, was released in 1970. It opens with the story of an ordinary young man, Ranjit Mullick, and follows him through one day as he prepares himself for an

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interview for a job at a foreign firm in Calcutta. The name of the actor Mrinal Sen cast for the role is also Ranjit Mullick. Sen incorporates a sequence where a girl aboard the same public bus in which Ranjit is travelling to his office notices his photograph in a film magazine. Star-struck, the girl keeps looking at Ranjit, which makes him uncomfortable, and he bursts into a monologue looking at the camera:

The photo that you are looking at, in the magazine, is mine….Look, I am not an actor. I am not a star, not at all. My name is Ranjit Mullick. I work in a weekly newspaper’s office….Mine is quite an uneventful life. And Mrinal Sen, the person who makes movies, liked it and said that he will follow me with camera from morning to dusk

This sequence destabilizes the role of the camera that mediates objects, people and events. With the transgression of diegetic levels that interrupt the contract between the spectator and the film-text, freeze frames, and intertextual references to other films, the disjointed narrative of Interview unapologetically draws upon the right bank French New Wave. In A History of the French New Wave Cinema, Richard John Neupert writes: “New Wave stories tended to be loosely organized around rather complex, spontaneous young characters. Importantly, unpolished, sometimes disjointed film styles fit these rather chaotic, good-humored tales of youths wandering through contemporary France” (xviii). The same can be said of Interview. However, irrespective of the overlaps, the socio-economic and political impetuses behind the French movement—like the search for an expression to oppose the Left Bank’s “cinema of quality” that relied on narrative modes of pre-war France—cannot be conflated with the 1970s Calcutta that Sen’s character, Ranjit, traverses.

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[Ranjit’s photograph in a film magazine and Ranjit in a crowded public transport in Sen’s Interview]

French New Wave’s stylistics capitalized on certain technological aspects of the film medium and were labelled anarchist and “right-wing” by their critics. While such criticism of the New Wave continues to be contested, whether particular cinematic techniques can in themselves be connotative of an order of experience also remains debatable. Are aesthetic and political implications of a form of art deducible from its technical properties? On one hand, Walter Benjamin, in his oft-quoted essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” observes that aesthetics can be predicated on the technologies of their production and dissemination when he remarks that “the enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story….Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life” (72-73) and further opines that “a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye” (78). On the other hand, Jacques Ranciere believes that the aesthetic regime does not have a direct correlation with the techniques used to represent them. Ranciere argues that depiction of the commonplace, which has been central to the evolution of the mechanical arts, including cinema, is part of a larger aesthetic revolution wherein symptoms of an epoch are deciphered in the minute details of ordinary life (31-34). Ranciere’s and Benjamin’s positions are both extreme. It is true that aesthetics do not solely hinge on techniques as Ranciere observes, but, nonetheless, as Benjamin propounds, technologies and the stylistics those technologies afford signify. Thus, when filmmakers like Ray and Sen borrow from the

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French New Wave, the techniques bring with them their own realm of signification. Thus, the trilogies’ thematic focus on everyday life of urban youth is in some sense inextricably linked with the vocabulary of the French New Wave. However, techniques and idioms like self-reflexivity that this particular cinematic style affords, as demonstrated in the exemplary sequence where Ranjit talks to the camera in Sen’s film, also draw attention to the filming and production values of the particular films (in this case, Interview), reinforcing the film’s embeddedness in the crises and contradictions of its culture.6

Ranjit, the protagonist of Sen’s Interview, is looking for a financially rewarding job but this search is necessitated by 1960-70s Calcutta. Rampant unemployment and political unrest was prompting individuals to try and escape the vicious cycle of underpayment and dissatisfaction. Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organization reported: “Census data shows that at the very minimum 170,000 people were directly unemployed in 1961. It has been further estimated approximately 330,000 recorded as employees were actually employed on a marginal, part-time basis” (Banerjee 32). Industrial recession through the 1960s considerably deteriorated the scene. JP Bulsara, writing for India’s Planning Commission Research Programmes Committee, found that the majority of the unemployed in urban India fell within the age group of 16-40 and those within the age group of 16-24 formed the largest single group amongst the unemployed.

Further, Ranjit’s simple project of turning up for an interview is thwarted when his only suit (and he has to wear a suit in place of traditional clothes because he is interviewing to join a foreign firm), he remembers, is in the laundry while the workers’ Union at the laundry have called for an indefinite strike. Striking interrupts the everyday life in the city, essentially a non-event for it suspends all productive action, becomes the central event around which the narrative is conceived. The strike in Interview is metonymic of a broader cultural situation. Writing about Calcutta in Into India (1973), the British Journalist John Keay observed: “There is always a good enough reason for not going there. The city is ‘bandh,’ on general strike… or students are rampaging through the streets” (143). In Interview, Mrinal Sen recovers the self-critical ethos that accompanied the culture of Leftist strikes in 1970s Calcutta: strikes, at the time, despite their regularity, were still conceived of as interruption. After all, Ranjit’s smooth narrative of social ascension through job-hopping is disrupted by the strike.

The opening title cards of Sen’s other film, Padatik or The Guerilla Fighter, enumerate the multitude of problems in 70s Calcutta including strikes, inflation, and riots. The titular captions are transposed on the footage of newspapers emerging out of printing machines, thereby visually referencing newspaper headlines. “Kerosene

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Disappears from Market,” “Thousands of Ghost Ration Cards Seized by Police,” “Death out of Starvation Reported,” “Factionalism Inside Political Parties,” “Exams Disrupted,” “Government Pledged to Restore Law and Order” report each of the title cards. The background score captures the loud noise of mobs on the streets of the city. Presenting information without formally weaving them into a seamless narrative, Padatik’s exposition establishes the socio-political scenario as a key player in the film that follows the life of a Naxal activist, Sumit, after he takes refuge in the apartment of a Naxal sympathizer, Mrs. Mitra. That Sumit is in hiding, grounds the film in the fifth phase of the Naxalite movement, characterized by the state’s crackdown on the Naxalite activists.

In 1970s Satyajit Ray was also grappling with the same topos: Calcutta, and life in Bengal in general, amid a multitude of crises. However, Ray’s films seem to maintain that crisis does not necessarily imply a radical break with the past or coming of age. With respect to the search for a cinematic mode to represent such everyday crises, he writes: “The modern idiom [of cinema], unless backed by a genuinely modern attitude to life and society, is apt to degenerate to gimmickry and empty flamboyance” (98). Therefore, Ray’s style of telling the story of a man looking for a job in 1970s Calcutta in Pratidwandi makes for a productive comparison with Sen’s Interview.

Released in 1971, Pratidwandi goes for conventionally fleshed-out characters and a more or less temporally coherent storyline. Siddhartha, the protagonist of Ray’s Pratidwandi, is a well-educated, middle-class youth looking for a suitable job. Unlike his brother, who is a Naxal activist, Siddhartha hones bourgeoisie aspirations at the outset. Ray’s film is focalized through Siddhartha and foregrounds his experiences and struggles. Historical references are either evoked in terms of memories or conveyed through the props that are assimilated as part of the mis-en-scene. For instance, the work of Sen’s expository title cards in Padatik is carried out by a sequence of dialogues where Siddhartha and his friend discuss problems plaguing Calcutta in Pratidwandi.7 At the final job interview, when Siddhartha cannot reconcile with the inhuman treatment meted out to the interviewees by the interviewing company, he barges into the interview cell and lashes out against the authorities. The camera pans across the walls of the building covered with posters declaring the workers union’s slogans and strikes. Ostensibly, Ray has narrativized those elements that Sen projected as jarring interruptions in his film.

Yet there are sequences in Pratidwandi that interrupt the narrative’s flow in their own right, subverting the perceived schism in Sen’s and Ray’s aesthetics. In a short sequence that does not tie up neatly with the narrative ends of the film, after a day of futile job

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hunting, Siddhartha enters a movie hall and falls asleep in the dark theatre. The sequence is interrupted when a bomb blasts outside the theatre and everyone disperses. Given the year in which Ray’s film was released, it would not be far-fetched to assume that the experience of a blast outside the theatre could interrupt the screening of Pratidwandi as well. So, the sequence bears the self-referencing qualities akin to Sen’s Interview. However, what makes the sequence in Pratidwandi remarkable is that there is no shock value attached to this blast. Siddhartha is not bothered by what happened and goes out of the theatre and carries on with the usual pace of his life. While recounting the incident to his friend, he mentions his irritation at having his sleep interrupted by the blast, which underplays the political repercussions of the incident. Reviewing Godard’s trivialization of the scene where a young woman kills a young man in the opening sequence of Masculine Feminine, Ray had remarked:

At a cursory viewing, it would be easy to dismiss the scene as pointless and incoherent. But on second thoughts (or perhaps second viewing), it might begin to dawn on one that the scene not only presents actuality in a more truthful way than one is used to in the cinema, but it also makes some valid comments on our life and times (88).

Violent interruptions when relegated to the background in the cinematic narrative reveal that people have been conditioned by that violence over a prolonged period.

The essence of film lies in continuity, or “flow of life,” argues Siegfried Kracauer. Employing different aesthetic tools from the French New Wave, Sen interrupts that flow, breaking the illusion of continuity while Ray highlights the inability of interruptions to affect in states of disorder. However, Ray’s and Sen’s different takes on the efficacy of interruptions is not so much about their faith or distrust of certain cinematic techniques as it is about their distinct understanding of the milieu they portray.8 Cinematic techniques act as resources to read, make sense of, and interpret the state of emergency in Calcutta. Ultimately, Ray’s and Sen’s divergent aesthetics ask whether persistent violence through an era ought to be understood as a continuation of a decadent society or as a radical break that anticipates a new one. Further, is violence itself an extension of the everyday life or an interruption to everyday and the ordinary in the sense of being an exception?

Naxal Movement: State of Exception or State of Continuity?

In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin observes that we need a conception of history that acknowledges, at par

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with the oppressed, that the “state of emergency” is not an exception. According to Benjamin, “[t]he awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes… [but] it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance” (261). Thus, through interruptions like strikes and blasts the internal temporality of the revolution and its logic is repeated and this interrupted life establishes its own everyday rhythm.

The montage that follows the expository voiceover in Sen’s Calcutta’71 juxtaposes trams and buses, mobs of street dwellers and poverty-stricken population walking across the city, racing horses, the movement of the type writer, printing press, fingers strumming stringed musical instruments, firing of guns and so on. Sequences intercutting one another establish a unique rhythm of repeated interruptions in Calcutta’71. On the other hand, instead of a rhythmic montage built on fragmented sequences, Ray builds his Calcutta trilogy in a manner such that the rhythms of everyday life assimilate interruptions: Siddhartha’s (Pratidwandi) academic journey through medical college has been interrupted by his father’s death, and he is compelled to look for a job; Somnath’s (Jana Aranya) academic success story is similarly interrupted by the vagaries of an apathetic education system. By contrast, Shyamalendu’s (Seemabaddha) narrative of social ascension remains uninterrupted because of his shrewd manipulation of a factory strike—an interruption in its own right—even as Shayamalendu has to suffer long term repercussions of his actions.

The political establishment in Bengal, and in India, faced with the Naxalite movement dubbed it a state of exception. This political perspective stipulated a crackdown on Naxalites. As Giorgio Agamben observes:

Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment [that], by means of a state of exception…allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system (States of Exception 2).

Both Ray’s and Sen’s films foreground such citizens, who are at odds with the political system for several reasons, most of which relate to their sensibilities—symptomatic of the sensibilities of a “generation.” Indeed, in the words of the historian Ranajit Guha, through the Naxalite movement the youth (he calls this generation “Midnight’s Children” after Salman Rushdie’s eponymous novel) called “age to account” (xiii).9

Siddhartha (Ray’s Pratidwandi) has just dropped out of medical college, Somnath (Ray’s Jana Aranya) has graduated from college, the

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anonymous young man from Sen’s Calcutta’71 is said to be 20 years old and hence, evidently belongs to the student population; Ranjit (Sen’s Interview) does not seem to have been out of college for too long either, and the same goes for Sumit and Biman (Sen’s Padatik). Most of these characters are explicitly identified in the films as “brilliant students.” And, Ray’s Jana Aranya highlights the many pitfalls of the prevalent education system including student unions that supply their supporters with cheat sheets, which account for the frustration of such brilliant students.

Jana Aranya’s protagonist Somnath becomes a victim of the system as his university’s final examination’s (B.A Honors’) answer scripts are handed over to an underpaid examiner who does not even have the patience to read them. Consequently, Somnath does not obtain satisfactory marks in his papers and loses his honors. In a job market saturated with educated unemployed youth, Somnath’s difficulties multiply. Even Shyamalendu in Ray’s Seemabaddha, though older than the other characters and more aligned with the oppressor class than the oppressed, is said to have been a bright student hailing from a family of academics. However, Seemabaddha’s representative young revolutionary student character is not the protagonist Shyamalendu but his sister-in-law’s love interest: a character who never appears on screen but is alluded to multiple times in conversations among on-screen characters and emerges as a foil to Shyamalendu.

In Calcutta and Bengal more broadly, where the class system has partly relied on education and culture has continued to be used as capital, as Rabindra Ray observes in The Naxalites and Their Ideology, the characters’ affiliation to the student populations is significant:

Student activism, or, as it has been called student unrest, has been a feature of Indian life (unlike the situation of the West where it was non-existent earlier) since the early part of the twentieth century nationalist agitation . . .

. . . As heirs of middle-class parents they are proletarian…Their education forms in most cases the most obvious and significant form of their inherited ‘capital’…Their future lies in the corporate establishments that demand this ‘capital’—guarantee of applicants for their white collar jobs. And yet it is not the future …that students are thinking of when they rebel. And certainly not in the case of the rebellions of the sixties, and the Naxalite revolt in particular, which drew into its ambit students of elite institutions who had remained politically inactive since nationalist agitations. (73-75)

Neither Sen’s Ranjit (Interview) nor Ray’s Siddhartha (Pratidwandi) take part in political activities, yet both characters are rejected by their interviewers because they are perceived to be sympathizers of Naxalites. Siddhartha’s answer at the job interview, where he says he

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considers the tolerance and fortitude of the Vietnamese through the Vietnam War more significant than man’s landing on the moon, upsets the interviewers comprising the bourgeoisie elite, and they ask him to leave. Ranjit’s Bengali traditional costume, which he has to wear because his suit is in the laundry, is interpreted as a sign of resistance against the bourgeoisie sustained by the investments of foreign firms. Thus, owing to the active involvement of some students like Sumit, Biman (Padatik) and the anonymous young man of Calcutta’71 in the Naxalite movement, a paranoid establishment arbitrarily identifies other young men as enemies even as they (Ranjit and Siddhartha) aspire to integrate themselves with the system. Sen’s Interview, with its interlocutions and stylistics, reinforces the idea that this is exceptional and specific to the Calcutta of the 1970s, and accordingly voices the hope that this system ought to change. Ray, on the other hand, by narrativizing the interruptions acknowledges the exception as the rule, because the revolutionary fervor of the youth and the state’s apathy is not specific to the 1970s or Calcutta of the Naxal era.

Furthermore, the continuity of political and social turmoil are underscored in Ray’s films through the presence of aged characters who reminisce their history as participants or close observers of the fight for independence. Somnath’s father in Ray’s Jana Aranya mentions that he had been actively involved in the Gandhian revolutionary politics and, unlike his sons who are more interested in climbing the bourgeoisie ladder, he articulates his desire to read the literature of the Naxalites. In Ray’s Pratidwandi, Keya’s (Siddhartha’s love interest) father, who has himself never taken part in the political struggles, draws a comparative picture of the youth “then” and “now”: two generations of youth fighting against the establishment refer to the freedom fighters and the Naxalites.

It is not as if Sen’s films remain completely oblivious to the threads of continuities either. Calcutta’71 most notably traces the process of a society’s submergence into poverty and squalor over decades. The film’s five parts are dated 1933, 1943, 1953 and the opening and the ending sequences are dated 1971. However, despite the seeming trajectory of continuation, the dating of the episodes and their segmentation into parts fractures the sense of seamless continuity. They project these dates and decades as exceptions. It is only in Padatik, the final installment of Sen’s trilogy, that the continuity of oppression and struggles is narrativized. In Padatik, Mrs. Mitra who shelters Sumit, the Naxalite on the run, mentions that her brother had died while fighting for the revolutionaries in Punjab. Sumit’s father had been active in the freedom struggles and the film ends with Sumit’s father’s support for his son’s cause. Compared with Sen’s two earlier films, Interview and Calcutta’71, Padatik even generally registers fewer moments of self-

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reflexive interruptions, though this does not imply that Sen was moving away from the aesthetics he had cultivated for he returned to disjunctive narration in Chorus (1974).

[Sumit (Dhritiman Chatterjee) and Mrs. Mitra (Simi Garewal) in Sen’s Padatik]

The cinematic language of interruption, of course, has a transhistorical and transnational association with class antagonism. While discussing the French Surrealist director Bunuel’s narrative style with its own version of interruptions, Jonathan Rosenbaum asks, “[h]ow does a sworn enemy of bourgeoisie keep his identity while devoting himself to bourgeois form [narrative cinema] in a bourgeois industry [film industry]? Either by subverting these forms or by trying to adjust them to his own purposes” (22). Coherent narration in twentieth-century films and literature has been consistently equated with the preservation of the status quo. However, the equation among class based politics and narrative strategies is not as straightforward. Accordingly, solely emphasizing Sen’s and Ray’s formal strategies—one that overtly emphasizes interruptions and another that seemingly underplays it in favor of relatively coherent narration—even if those strategies lead to the filmmakers’ divergent takes on states of exceptions and continuity, polarizes their projects, ignoring their overlapping interest in recording the predicaments of living in a historically contingent “everyday.” So, in the final section of this article I turn to the characters who populate the world of their films and their shared quests.

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Fight for the Good Life

Calcutta of the Naxalite era appears to break away from a normative (or ideal), albeit ahistorical, everyday. Through this seeming break, an absolute “conditio inhumana” or inhuman condition surfaces. Even as this inhuman condition appears anomalous or exceptional, Agamben argues that this condition has persisted as the nomos or hidden matrix of the political space (Homo Sacer 12-13). Faced with the “conditio inhumana,” the narratives of the six films manifest the protagonists’ quest for what Agamben distinguished from bare life as the good life.

Bare life is politicized “natural life,” and Michel Foucault explains modernity as the integration of the natural life of the living being into a political system that harnesses productive life forces. Foucault understands this political system as an epoch, an interruption in the paradigm of classical politics, and a decisive moment of rupture that engenders western modernity. But Agamben deviates from Foucault in arguing that such apparent moments of rupture expose what had already been determined through history: the political experience of modernity constituted through a biopolitics that capitalizes on bare human life, rather than limiting its jurisdiction to legal subject positions, is a culmination of a process that was erstwhile merely hidden in the Western political tradition.

India’s and Bengal’s colonial history overtly marks an interface with Western political discourses, and its trace lingers through the post-independence political culture. Sequences from the perspective of Siddhartha in Ray’s Pratidwandi betray his awareness about the encroachment of the political on bare life: when Siddhartha discusses his brother’s involvement with the Naxals, he reminisces a scene—which Ray shows—when the two brothers watched a man killing a hen. Notably, Agamben envisions humans with animal heads (The Open 2)—humanity’s form stripped to bare life. While Siddhartha does not derive any decisive conclusion from the memory, his brother relates it to the historical instances when homicide became a public spectacle: he cites the custom of sati, wherein widows were burnt to death with the bodies of their dead husbands in India, and the beheading of aristocrats during the French revolution. Both instances, despite their geo-political distance highlight that human life, is the topos of modern politics. At this point in Pratidwandi, in a non-mimetic scene, Siddhartha is beheaded by a guillotine—though Ray embeds this interruption to the diegetic plane in the narrative as Siddhartha’s dream. As if to further insist on the entrapments of modern biopolitics, Siddhartha often reflects on the anatomical sameness of human beings, a hangover of his

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education in western medical thought through his two-year tenure as a student at the medical college.10

[Siddhartha’s nightmare in Ray’s Pratidwandi]

However, this bare life—the capital of modern biopolitics—is distinguished from the “good life.” Good life according to Agamben is the form or way of living proper to an individual or group (Homo Sacer 1). It depends on the premise that a man ought to be more than a bare life: “a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a man” (Arendt 180). Arguably, it is the search for the good life—a project of overcoming the bare life and individuating the self or the group—that directs all the protagonists through Ray’s and Sen’s trilogies. The quests, in turn, lead them to reconsider their ethical and political positions.

As discussed earlier, only a few of the protagonists from Calcutta trilogies involve themselves in political activism. Of the protagonists in Ray’s trilogy, Siddhartha, despite distancing himself from revolutionary politics, turns out to be ethically uncompromising. Leaving the city, Calcutta, is the price he pays for his idealism. After having protested against the interviewers at the firm where he was seeking a job in Calcutta, he of course can no longer get that job. So, the final sequence of Pratidwandi shows Siddhartha settling in a small town outside Calcutta. Somnath in Jana Aranya and Shyamalendu in Seemabaddha, however, are more ethically ambivalent than Siddhartha. Trapped in middle-class aspirations for bourgeoisie life, their ascension to what they value as good life is based on optimizing the productivity of other lives: Somnath becomes a middle man for supplying orders to

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other businesses and charges commission for the exchange. Shyamalendu leaves his job as a teacher to become a sales manager in a corporate firm and confesses his ambition to rise higher up in the firm even as he betrays his awareness about the plights of employees at lower rungs of the corporate ladder.

To ensure that both Somnath and Shyamalendu recognize the magnitude of their ethical compromises, Ray incorporates moments when his protagonists realize their ethical flaws through the eyes of other characters in the respective films. Somnath becomes aware of the consequences of his choice when he finds his friend’s sister to be the life at stake for realizing his own ambitions.11 However, in Ray’s telling of the story Somnath’s ethical compromise is a culmination of numerous everyday negotiations: from living with amenities that do not work to the callous underpaid examiners who seal the fates of the examinees, the world of Jana Aranya presents its middle-class characters with situations seemingly beyond their control, and they routinely survive by negotiating those. Bhombol—Somnath’s brother—points out early on in the film that “[w]e have to accept things as they are, father.” In this storyworld, good life, entailing the “proper” distinction of the self amid others, presents itself as a fundamental challenge. The narrative insists on the multitude, the sameness and standardization characteristic of the modern life in the city: the images of piles of answer scripts from Calcutta University and the stacks of applications that make their way to the offices advertising jobs in Jana Aranya foreground such indistinguishable homogeneity.

[Shyamalendu (Barun Chanda) and his sister-in-law Tutul (Sharmila Tagore) in Ray’s Seemabaddha]

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Similarly Shyamalendu’s narration in Ray’s Seemabaddha reflects on the corporatization of elements necessary for bare life: light and air. Shyamalendu says “our business is with light and air—Peter’s fan and Peter’s lamp.” This corporate world in which Shyamalendu forges his quest for good life has reduced its workers to numbers, and, taking a cue from the practices of his company, Shyamalendu observes that the business is sustained by “1200 factory workers.” And akin to the camera’s focus on the piles of papers and envelopes in Ray’s Jana Aranya, the camera zooms in on the visually similar machineries churning out visually similar products in Seemabaddha. This assembly line of industrial production metonymically reinforces the assembly line in which human bare lives stand hoping to transcend their conditions, to reach the ever elusive good life. As in Jana Aranya, where Somnath’s ethical compromise is witnessed by his friend’s sister, in Seemabaddha Shyamalendu’s sister-in-law, who looked up to him earlier, observes his repugnant dealings. When he is unable to deliver a consignment, Shyamalendu incites a strike at the factory in order to undermine his own failure and secure a promotion. The watchman of the factory is brutally injured in the process.

Seemabaddha’s significance in the Calcutta trilogies also rests on the fact that its protagonist, from the very outset, has the socio-economic privileges to which some of the other protagonists of the trilogies aspire. He has a job, is socially respected, and economically successful, which represent the fruition of middle-class values. Residing on the eighth floor of a multistory apartment building, Shyamalendu offers his wife and his sister-in-law a life and view of Calcutta far removed from the political tensions that plague the city. His sister-in-law, who is a visitor to Calcutta, from the moment of her arrival asks Shyamalendu about the political scenario in the city and whether he knows the people involved in the repression of the Naxalites, but Shyamalendu continues to insist on his distance from the unfolding chaotic history of the city, focusing instead on his ambition of becoming the director of Peters’. And yet, as the narrative demonstrates, this insistence on distancing himself from unionization and revolt make him culpable in the cycle of exploitation without gaining him the prize of “good life.”

Sen’s Ranjit, the protagonist of Interview, dreams of joining a “better” firm and thereby suggests possibilities of filling Shyamalendu’s shoes in the fight for the “good life.” However, the rest of the protagonists through Sen’s trilogy struggle for “humanity,” broadly conceived. In Calcutta’71 the protagonist is dead by the time the narrative begins but hopes that his death can trigger the changes that his life could not. He asks the audience:

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Are you listening? … Do you know why I’ve come here? I’m here to tell you that I know who killed me. But, I won’t tell their names. I want you to find them. Why are you without worry? Why are you so idle? Why are you so numb and dull? Aren’t you citizens of this country?

In both Interview and Calcutta’71, such scenes of interrogation—a French New Wave-like narrative strategy—that interrupt the diegetic plane also manifest faith in transforming the “conditio inhumana” or inhuman condition. In addition, Sen’s narrative, with its flow interrupted by the interrogation, self-reflexively invites the audience to join the quest for good life.

In Sen’s Padatik both Sumit and Biman are caught within an understanding of history which pre-supposes a political order that guarantees good life to the educated middle-class youth. However, in this instance, Sumit recognizes the limitations of his understanding before Biman does and, as I have mentioned, Padatik remains the only instance in Sen’s trilogy without jarring diegetic disruptions. Sumit asks Biman a flurry of questions pertaining to the efficacy of their mutual involvement in political activism that they had previously thought to potentiate good life, and Biman reacts to them as violently as Ranjit reacts to the extra-diegetic spectator’s interrogation in Interview. Yet, none of Sen’s films openly discard the faith in good life; the notion eludes the protagonists but seems to be available on the other side of the historical epoch. In this sense, the political philosophy that surfaces through Sen’s narratives aligns more closely with the Foucauldian understanding of history as comprising moments of radical discontinuity and rupture. By contrast, the narrative journeys of Ray’s protagonists gradually force them to recognize the impossibility of good life. Irrespective of where they reach in their journeys of social ascension, Ray’s protagonists, particularly Somnath and Shyamalendu, recognize themselves as accomplices who ensure the continuity of the political economy that capitalizes on their (and others’) productive life forces.

Conclusion

A comparative study of Ray’s and Sen’s Calcutta trilogies enables us to grasp the contesting and the complementary modes each used to interpret and represent the everyday struggles characteristic of 1970s Calcutta, with its interruptions, repetitions, and repeated interruptions. When their respective corpus and their cinematic idiom in the Calcutta trilogies are discussed, especially in the context of world cinema, their engagement with formal strategies identified as having been developed through international cinematic movements like the French New Wave emerge as a point of departure. However, as this article argues, Ray’s

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and Sen’s adaptation, rejection, and modification of such formal strategies make way for their meditation on immediate local issues. Ray’s and Sen’s monumental significance within the international, Indian, and Bengali cinemas, remains intertwined with their attempts to historically trace the world in which they and their characters lived. The spatio-temporal coordinates that locate the Calcutta trilogies, in particular, underscore the dialectical relations between states of exception and states of continuity, between bare life and the impossible promise of good life.

Notes

1. Exploring the relation of post-colonial Bengali modernity with cinema will remain outside the scope of this article. Sharmistha Gooptu’s Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation (New York: Routledge, 2001) undertakes a detailed analysis of the interstices among Bengali film industry, nationalism, and modernity.

2. Apart from the migration of rural population to urban centers, the increasing population during the period also resulted from an ever growing number of refugees from Bangladesh who crossed the borders to settle in Calcutta and adjacent regions. Through 1970-71, the Bangladesh liberation movement added urgency and impetus to the migration from East to West Bengal, from Bangladesh to India (Mukherjee 52).

3. These dates are rough estimates based on historical records. In 1967, Naxalbari in West Bengal witnessed a peasant uprising. 1975 coincides with the declaration of Emergency in India.

4. The revolt in Naxalbari protested against the oppression of bonded laborers and share-croppers by the landed gentry of rural Bengal. Almost 50% of the laborers in the Naxalbari region ploughed lands that were held by agencies that empowered jotedars to evict them. This peasant uprising lasted for only fifty-two days but it assumed symbolic value and initiated a series of revolts fought on various other grounds (like unemployment in the cities and corruption in bureaucracies) against the political establishment in various parts of Bengal (Singh).

5. CPI (ML) that is the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) was formed by leaders who had earlier been affiliated with CPI (M)—Communist Party of India (Marxist). The newer party endorsed armed revolution in place of an electoral process. The Communist Party of India (CPI) out of which both these latter parties, CPI (M) and CPI (ML), were formed was founded in 1925, before India became politically independent.

6. Interview, like most of Sen’s other films in the trilogy, opens with a sequence that references the contemporary history of the city. The exposition shows statues of erstwhile colonial rulers being dismounted. The camera also explores iconic colonial spaces within Calcutta. The audience are initiated to recognize the irony in the film’s plot where the protagonist Ranjit endeavors to fit in with the “Sahibs” from Scotland, who are at the helm of a firm that promises more than twice the salary he has been earning from his current job. Thus, even as Sen borrows the non-narrative montage technique that

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characterizes his films’ opening sequences from the French New Wave, he employs it to explore the lives and experiences that are local to 70s Calcutta.

7. Ray’s and Sen’s trilogies not only portray similar social scenarios but also cast the same actors at times, as is the case with Padatik and Pratidwandi. Dhritiman Chatterjee played the revolutionary activist in hiding in Sen’s Padatik as well as Siddhartha, the young man seeking a job, in Ray’s Pratidwandi.

8. The three films in Ray’s trilogy are adaptations of Bengali novels written by Sunil Gangopadhyay and Mani Shankar Mukherjee. Therefore, analyzing Ray’s cinematic techniques becomes a necessary means of unpacking his understanding of the histories encapsulated in the storyworlds of the three novels.

9. Ranajit Guha writes,

Born to citizenship in a sovereign republic, they [those born on or after 1947] had their nationhood with all its promise already constituted for them. It was a promise that relied on the nation-state for its fulfillment. Since that failed to materialize even two decades after Britain’s retreat from South Asia, the despair that seized the younger generation in the 1970s could truly be ascribed to a disillusionment of hope…The critique addressed to the rulers of the day extended far beyond them to all incumbents of authority within the civil society. Insofar as these were identified largely with the older generations, the revolt of the 1970s amounted to youth calling age to account. (xii)

10. Interestingly, Siddhartha’s bookshelf carries a copy of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (1945), where Russell charted his version of social history and philosophy of logical analysis.

11. Supriya Chaudhuri in her take on Ray’s trilogy in “In the City” notes the strain of sexual tension that surfaces in the Calcutta trilogies. In Pratidwandi, Siddhartha’s family suspects Sutapa, Siddhartha’s sister, of having an affair with her boss, which is symbolic of the discomfort of the family and the society with women’s emergence as a substantial work force. As Somnath escorts his friend’s sister to appease a client and obtain a lucrative contract in Jana Aranya, this anxiety about females treading spaces beyond the threshold of domesticity gets interwoven with the problems of unemployment that force lower-middle-class women into prostitution. The roles of upper and lower-middle-class working women in these films, contextualized within 60s-70s socio-economic scenarios, further reference the presence and emergence of women as active participants in the transgressive actions carried out in the political realm. Alka Kurian’s Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas argues that the Naxalite movement as depicted in Ray’s and Sen’s films privileges “elite urban masculinities” (34). Ostensibly, Kurian’s critique is borne out by the narratives but it is equally important to remember the roles women, even if not explicitly cast as Naxalite militants, play in challenging the social status quo in these films.

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