Guerrilla fighter: Derek Malcolm on Mrinal Sen

Mrinal Sen has been making films for almost as long as Satyajit Ray – his first, Raat Bhor (The Dawn), was released in 1956, some two months after Pather Panchali. He has now made eighteen, the last of which, Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine), won a Silver Bear at this year’s Berlin Festival.

Sen has taken many more years than Ray to achieve an international reputation and has more than once described his career as ‘uncertain, erratic, desperate’. It is doubtful, for instance, whether he would have been able to pursue it at all without the example of Ray, his fellow Bengali; yet the two men could scarcely be more different in personality and outlook. While the superficially aloof Ray is often treated in India like some living monument, the ebullient, witty and occasionally flippant Sen is regarded as all too human – an unpredictable spirit whose radicalism, though not skin deep, is tinged with a constant awareness of the possibilities for hypocrisy. ‘The moment you become a celebrity,’ he has said, ‘that is the time to defend yourself.’

Sen has often crossed dialectical swords with Ray, though they remain friends who agree to disagree. But, unlike Ray, whom he much respects and honours, Sen has never quite come to terms with the uncomfortable fact that it is foreign, and particularly British, criticism that makes an Indian director’s reputation, not just in the world at large but especially within India itself. He genuinely regrets this while having to feed on it. ‘If I start making films for Europeans, I shall automatically cease to make them for Indians,’ he argues.

As a Marxist, with no party affiliations and a marked distaste for party games, he knows there is a delicate balance to be struck between the admiration of the world and success in drawing a wider circle of Indians to his films. He has, in recent years, become more philosophical about that, recognising that, in a country as argumentative and fragmented as India, whatever he does will be criticised. Desperate he may still be after all his years of experience, but it is not the same desperation as before, when recognition was slow to come and the shadow of Ray over all other contemporary Indian film-makers was greater. ‘I am now uncomfortably comfortable,’ he says, ‘and my desperation is to avoid being somehow defused.’

All Sen’s films, even his most lightweight, have attacked, with undisguised horror and anger, the poverty, exploitation and inherent hypocrisy of Indian society. That is why he has remained a hero for so many of the young, who criticise Ray for a lack of overt political commitment and wish to see a truly revolutionary Indian cinema undiluted by European classicist and humanist sympathies. Yet, like Ray, he is certainly not a specifically Indian director whose films show no outside influences at work. In fact, it is almost impossible to talk with him – and he is an indefatigable talker – without constant reference to European, Russian and particularly English culture, often literary rather than cinematic. In some ways he resembles a kind of Bengali George Bernard Shaw, loquaciously defending his right to make jokes of serious things and serious things out of jokes.

Throughout his career he has unashamedly hopped from one outside influence to another in an attempt to clothe the content of his films in a form which will surprise and shock. He has sloganised, fantasised and parodied as well as presenting us with neo-realism, documentary and even Chekovian pastiche. But that is only the half of it. His films also show the seminal influence of a great deal of Indian popular and folk culture. He will beg, borrow or steal from anything to form an appropriately striking style and, for all that, still remain resolutely his own man. Latterly, the urge to confound and surprise has calmed somewhat – ‘I now know how simple a good film can look, and how difficult it is to be simple.’ But he still adds: ‘Let there be a little bit of madness and flippancy there too. Let there be a release of it up there on the screen.’ Sen would absolutely loathe to be predictable, even predictably good. There is a perpetual smile on the face of this particular tiger, but those who might fear that it is toothless are badly mistaken.

As for content, Sen remembers Zavattini’s words: ‘It is untrue that we can’t find reality. We are just afraid of it.’ This, he says, is truer of India than of most places. ‘People have always known what is happening. But they have always run from it. They don’t ask questions for fear of the answers. I hate that eternal façade.’ Nobody could accuse Sen of it. It is how he asks the questions that is controversial, and how he frames the answers. The madness up there on the screen is sometimes as difficult to contemplate as Ray’s logic and sanity. Nevertheless, Sen is a remarkable director and one whose films even now have received too little recognition in the West. Last year’s retrospective at the National Film Theatre, supported by a Guardian Lecture, did something to redress the balance. But it is more a comment on the lack of audacity and perhaps the financial constraints of the British ‘art’ cinema than on Sen’s lack of appeal that the season came only when he was in his third decade of filmmaking.

Sen’s career can most conveniently be divided into three periods, each distinct in tone and capable of being separately analysed but, in hindsight at least, logically interrelated. He has never settled for one way of making films, and the twists and turns his work has taken are the direct result not only of a maverick personality but of a lifetime spent beating against so many brick walls before reaching the more or less secure plateau of general acceptance. It is not easy being a non-commercial film-maker in India and it is too often forgotten that the constant struggle is bound to leave its mark on the films themselves. To see an Indian film out of context is particularly difficult. And Sen’s films need looking at in that light.

The first chapter, which starts with The Dawn in 1956 and ends with Bhuvan Shome in 1969, tells the story of a slow and not always sure development of artistic personality during which Sen not only rejected the conventional concerns of Indian cinema but also forged a style in distinct opposition to those of Ritwik Ghatak and Ray, the two Bengali directors who had also risen above the norm – and whom, incidentally, most concerned Indian film-makers were supposed in some way to emulate.

The second chapter, from An Unfinished Story (1971) to Chorus (1974), is the most dramatic – one during which a by now experienced director threw caution, and orthodox narrative cinema, to the winds in a laudable but finally abortive attempt to aid the makers of a revolution, in the arts as well as in life, which never came about. Sen became, in this period, very much the Indian Godard. And like Godard was finally rejected by many of those who had initially encouraged him.

The third chapter, which may or may not be complete (it depends upon whether one believes that Sen is capable of still further development), takes in The Royal Hunt (1976) to In Search of Famine. During it, Sen finally decided that a gentler kind of persuasion was necessary, that the narrative cinema still had value and that, without abandoning his radical concerns, he could and should appeal to a wider audience.

Sen was born in Calcutta in 1923 of respectable but certainly not rich middle-class parents. In his student days he was not particularly drawn to the cinema, despising Indian commercial films and unaware of much European film-making. More by accident than design, he studied sound technology in a film studio for a few months and then switched restlessly to freelance journalism (writing mostly for radical magazines). Subsequently, he joined the Indian People’s Theatre Association, the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India. This led to an interest in film aesthetics and eventually an apprenticeship within the industry which resulted in his first film. The Dawn he now regards as a disaster, and one which he will neither show to anybody nor talk about, save to say that, after it, he thought he had chosen the wrong profession. Another project was offered to him in 1959, however, and Neel Akasher Neechey (Under Blue Skies), the story of a Chinese hawker in India, made its mark at the box-office. Sen’s own experience as a medical salesman in Uttar Pradesh may have made it ring true, as did the performance of Kali Banerjee in the central part.

This partial success led to Baishey Sravana (The Wedding Day), which looks and feels like the first real Sen film. It also shows the influence of Ray, but its story of a village salesman who marries a young girl and achieves a happiness that is gradually destroyed by the Bengal famine of 1943 is very different from Ray in tone. The film’s characters seem more directly derived from a reality that owes nothing to literature, and rural poverty is shown to be the root cause of the couple’s unhappiness, not their own contrasting temperaments. Famine, in fact, is in many senses the leading character. Punascha (Over Again, 1961) translated the socio-economic criticism into urban terms, as a woman who takes a job after marriage, to make family ends meet, comes up against the traditional concept of the pliant wife.

Sen’s next two films, Abasheshey (And At Last) and Pratinidhi (The Representative) showed him to be still in search of a coherent style, with nouvelle vague influences jostling somewhat unconvincingly for supremacy over a more traditional approach. And At Last’s comic flair was a pleasant surprise but its final sentimentality was not. The Representative – the story of the remarriage of a widow with a child – is simply a little dull.·

It was Akash Kusum (Up in the Clouds, 1965) which caused the first major controversy of Sen’s career. It was made shortly after he had seen Truffaut’s Jules et Jim and its quota of freezes and jump cuts easily betrays the fact. Yet its story of a young man, who tries to break into the business world of Calcutta by dint of a good marriage, is gentle, charming and lively in turn. After a vaguely deflating review in the Calcutta Statesman, there followed a sharp passage of arms in the letter columns between Ray and Sen which eventually widened into a debate about form and content that excited much argument. Ray called Up in the Clouds a ‘crow film’ but Sen was unabashed. His next project, Matira Manisha (Two Brothers), which was shot in Orissa rather than Bengal and used the Oriyan language, did not abjure the nouvelle vague but built upon his practical application of it with frequent symbolism and even a dream sequence in negative. Panigrahi’s novel of village life, in which two brothers quarrel over different attitudes to inherited land, was ripe for a typically Indian plethora of rural imagery. What it got was something extra – a fully contemporary view of a conventional story in which sensitive and self-conscious sequences seemed to alternate at will.

Bhuvan Shome was a landmark both for Sen, as his biggest success, and for India’s Parallel Cinema, as the first low-budget film financed by the Government. It encouraged many to think that the path for subsidised ‘art cinema’ would be less stony than it turned out to be. Deprecatingly, and slightly facetiously, described much later by Sen as ‘Big bad bureaucrat chastised by charmer’s cheek,’ the film confronted the educated middle class with the common people in a unique way. It was funny and haunting at the same time. Funny because the tenuous relationship between its two main characters, the high official and the young wife of a lowly clerk, succeeds in proving that education has nothing to do with shrewdness; and haunting because Bhuvan Shome seemed to be the first film since Pather Panchali to reflect the Indian landscape with both magical sensuousness and stern reality. As for its style, the film owed much to the values of story-telling Tagore would not have recognised as his own. Its logic was totally different, its modernism aggressively evident.

I have not seen Ichnapuran (Wish Fulfilment), Sen’s next film. But it soon became clear that, after Bhuvan Shome, he was confident enough to make totally overt the political convictions that underpinned his earlier work. And the form of his films changed to suit the content; the initial inspiration was Eisenstein and Vertov, but the success of Godard in France was perhaps the most potent force. An Unfinished Story, set in the Depression years, depicted with the urgency of a newsreel the confused and violent struggle of workers and farmers against exploitation. It is watched by a middle-class cashier in a sugar mill set in an agricultural area, and the suggestion is that history will be on the side of the weak and the poor.

The Calcutta Trilogy which followed – Interview, Calcutta ‘71 and Padatik (Guerrilla) – has often been accused of crude and derivative political pamphleteering. Yet none of the trilogy is merely that and each exhibits a further advance towards Brechtian rigour of expression. In Interview, a young man who desperately needs a job is prevented from getting an interview because he lacks a suit. Here the mode is satire and the method stylisation and fragmentary narration. The laughter generated, however, can only be bitter and the film ultimately fails because it seems a more liberating experience for its director than its audience (who at one point seem to address the young man in argument). Behind it is an attack on a way of life that clings to the last vestiges of bourgeois respectability and to a colonial past.

Calcutta ‘71 was an attempt in non-naturalist, agitprop terms to spell out basic problems of Indian society and to interpret the turbulence of the period with a proper regard for its long genesis. The 20-year-old central character becomes a timeless figure stalking through forty years of history – Sen says it could well have been a thousand years. Five separate incidents are recounted, all illustrating the debasing nature of grinding poverty, after which the young man explains how in the end change is created only through violence. At the time Sen was making the film the Naxalites of Calcutta had rejected democracy and resorted to social upheaval. But, as the militant faction of the Communist Party, they were at odds with at least two other groups and the violence seemed as much directed against each other as against the forces of the establishment. Sen wanted to force the Left back to first principles and the film’s ‘dialectics of hunger’ generated considerable controversy.

A subsidiary text in Calcutta ‘71 is the way Indian films treat poverty. ‘We have always tried to make poverty respectable, dignified and even holy,’ Sen has said. ‘But this way nothing is disturbed. It is a trait of our films, and even Ray has succumbed to it. Calcutta ‘71 shows how from resignation and callousness people move to cynicism and beatenness and self-destruction. Then comes anger and violence, which is more creative. If you asked me what effect the film had, what effect any film can have, I do not know. But it was my way of intervening.’

Padatik (Guerrilla or The Guerrilla Fighter) took a further step by attempting to analyse the fracture of the Left. It was a particularly brave film since any discussion of the activities of ‘extremists’ that was not wholly negative was seldom given space in the press, and film censorship, though not at its worst, was still a problem to be reckoned with, as much on a political level as any other. ‘We had arrived at a point (1973) when the Left was lying low and in disarray, and at a time when there was a need for unceasing self-criticism,’ Sen has said. ‘That is why the protagonist in the film, a young “extremist” who has escaped from the police and is sheltered by a woman, has unshaken faith in the party even though he questions its leadership and direction. He recognises the fact that, as the Left fights the establishment, it tends to become part of it. I wanted to make a disturbing and annoying film, not an artistic one. And it did disturb and annoy because it told the truth about the Left while remaining firmly against the Centre and the Right. The fact that it was made with establishment money didn’t compromise me in the least – any more than if it had been made by a commercial company. The Government didn’t really mind. There is a kind of repressive tolerance among the bourgeois countries which is a new kind of sophistication. They use you. But you can also use them.’

Chorus (1974) was the last of Sen’s agitprop films and certainly his most liberated in technique. It begins like a fantasy and juxtaposes stylisation, neorealism, documentary. Pudovkin (Storm Over Asia), Godard and Brecht come to mind, but the flavour is quintessentially Sen – demanding that today’s revolutionary fantasies become tomorrow’s reality. The Gods, entrenched in their fortress, create a hundred jobs for the people but the people need a thousand. A chorus of traditional singers (generally used to glorify the status quo) is used to tell the story and provide the message. The film works symbolism and allegory almost to death but it still has life, interest and an anger one can’t deny.

Sen has described this and the Calcutta Trilogy as ‘shock therapy’ and admits that this mode of film-making eventually restricted his public. If the films were tracts for the day, they were also extremely bold experiments in political film-making in a part of the world where there had been no real radical tradition. He had, he says, got the passion to do away with conventional narrative as much from literary and theatrical sources as from the cinema, and cites Aldous Huxley, James Joyce and Peter Weiss as significant influences. He believes that they too were practitioners of ‘aggressive infiltration’ but that the public cannot be ignored – ‘you must talk to them in a language they can understand and at least partly on their terms.’

Sen’s five most recent films have not betrayed what went before. In essentials, he remains the same man – a film-maker willing to try anything to underline his social and political purposes. But as he grew more famous outside India – and it is instructive to note that by the mid-70s he had become better known in France than in England – he seemed less anxious to astound and more aware of the need to please. Mrigaaya (The Royal Hunt) was made in 1976 during the Emergency and, with its luxurious colour photography, certainly did that. But it was also another brave parable, invested with the humour that he had suppressed while making the Trilogy. Dealing with the Santhal Revolt of 1901, during which a tribal hunter became a revolutionary martyr, the film won a host of awards. But its equation of colonialism with paternalist tyranny and lack of understanding could easily be taken as a comment on the excesses of the Emergency too.

The Telegu film Oka Oorie Katha (The Outsiders, sometimes called The Story of a Village) returns more gauntly to Sen’s constant theme of poverty and the exploitation of Indians by Indians. Taken from a short story by the noted Hindi and Urdu writer Prem Chand, the film explores a world of ultimate poverty through the agency of a father and son who live in a village hut but refuse to work for the local landlord. When the son gets married, the pair try to change their ways. But the effort is too much for them. The girl dies in childbirth when they refuse to summon the local midwife, and the last pages of Prem Chand’s story (Kafan, or The Shroud) have the father borrowing money to pay for her burial and then drinking it away in the local liquor shop.

Sen changes the final scene to a shot of the old man under a tree holding fast to the money and shouting a typically angry lament: ‘It is the fools who work hard for the rich. It is the landlord who grows fat like a buffalo. Give us two sacks of rice, clothes instead of loincloths, a house instead of a hut. And give us our dead girl back to life.’ He sees the story not as about a dehumanised animal who refuses to let his son live decently with his wife and then destroys her. ‘It is much more the history of someone who has seen what life is and who fights against it with all the bitterness of long experience.’

The direct appeal of this film, merciless in its realism right up to the final sequence, was not repeated with Parashuram (Man with the Axe), though this was the first film ever to be made about the street dwellers of Bombay. Somehow its blend of fantasy, allegory and social reality proved an uneasy mix for Indian audiences. Parashuram was a mythical hero who avenged his father’s death by raising his axe twenty-one times; but here he is a simple rural migrant, of whom many thousands arrive in India’s major cities every week and who live in fear not only of authority but of the petty crooks who feed off them, often organising them into beggars’ cartels. The migrant tries to scrape a living like his fellows but in the end makes an abortive gesture of defiance which leads to his death. The film is a rather glorious mix of different styles, much more convincingly intermingled than Sen’s earlier Interview, for instance. And the mode of telling its story has intriguing affinities not so much with other films but with the fairground story-telling tradition of rural India.

Ek Din Prati Din (And Quiet Rolls the Dawn, 1979), one of the very few Sen films given a London run, reaches out for a wider audience and seems more subtle the more you know about the frequently poverty-stricken but determinedly respectable Indian petit bourgeois. Set in Calcutta, in a drab tenement that used to be a colonial building, it follows the trauma of one such family whose favoured daughter fails to return home one evening. At first the family believes that she has been abducted or killed in an accident or even murdered (such things are commonplace in Calcutta). Then comes the realisation that she has probably simply spent the night with a man, though we never know. From acute anxiety, the family’s feelings degenerate into outrage and anger before the realisation comes that the girl is, after all, an adult and can do what she likes with her life.

‘When love and compassion finally returns to these people,’ says Sen, ‘a new value is created. That is a value that is diametrically opposed to middle-class prudery and the conformism that so afflicts Indian society. I have spoken about it often: it is in Bhuvan Shome, Calcutta ‘71 and The Guerrilla Fighter. But here I have tried to focus the whole film upon it –virtually the only time we leave the house is when members of the family search the hospitals and morgues. It is a claustrophobic atmosphere into which, at the very last moment, something more healthy breaks in. Many people have asked me – did the girl sleep with a man, or did she not? That I regard as totally unimportant. The fact is that she is an independent woman, and it doesn’t matter. I badly wanted to make a film about the ruthlessness of the lives lived by the lower middle classes, to understand their desire to conform and become respectable. I did not want to condemn them but, if I may say so, I wanted to piss in the face of such decency. And the story had to be as straightforward as possible because I felt that the slightest overstatement would falsify and destroy it. We had twenty-one days in which to shoot the film and I think we all grew with it. It is not a film of which I would claim sole authorship, but more than most a co-operative effort.’

This applies more and more to Sen’s later films. He likes to travel with his cast and technicians to wherever he is making his film and to live closely with them while preparing and shooting. He generally has a prepared script but, as often as not, alters it as the shooting progresses. He feels less need than ever to be the man in command of a project and insists more on teamwork and argument and ‘living the experience of making a film together.’

This is certainly what he did with In Search of Famine, which has a film crew travelling into a rural area to relive with the villagers their experience of a former famine. By the end, the impossibility of doing this without patronising them or engendering hostility strikes even the pofaced and patently sincere director. And the film crew decamps with its corporate tail between its legs. The film within the film was perhaps constructed for Sen to warn himself of the perils of the process of film-making itself, and the need to respect the subjects of his stories. He seems, at any rate, to feel more responsibility than before rather than less. That responsibility is honed by the undeniable fact that he is now regarded as one of the Third World’s most experienced radical film-makers, from whom much is expected yet who has always admitted that film-making for him is a constant experiment and never an even progress.

He is now accused by some of selling out to the Indian establishment, of using its money to gain the applause of all those who would like to see Satyajit Ray joined by another director the outside world can honour. Perhaps there is a little truth in this. Sen has sometimes seemed in recent years to want to be all things to all men. Yet he has never reneged on his fundamental principles, and as an elder statesman of the Indian cinema, he remains a constant provocation to officialdom and to those who seek, in embracing him, to strip him of his more dangerous and incendiary powers. He tends to come out fighting just when they think they are lying down with a lamb. He is also the idol of a great many of the bolder and younger spirits and has not betrayed them. Nor has he ever adopted the pose of a leader who knows better than they what radical cinema should be about.

What comes over from a study of his work is not that he is a director of great films, monuments to world or even Indian culture, but that, often against considerable odds, he has traced the social and political ferment of India with greater resilience and audacity than any other contemporary Indian director. That may be why a knowledge of India is almost mandatory before his work can be appreciated to the full. Without that knowledge, Sen appears a more uneven and less coherent director than he is. With it, his achievement seems very considerable indeed.