#Cinema
By: Mrinalini Vasudevan
The same lament is routinely echoed in critiques of contemporary Bangla cinema. Many wonder how the land that gave us the powerful creativity of the likes of Satyajit Ray has come to be stuck in a loop of sentimental, worn-out tropes. While there is certainly truth in these harsh judgements, to frame the current city and its popular culture as static would be to ignore the reality of the sweeping changes that have reshaped it.
T H E W I N D S O F P O R I B O R T O N
In the last two decades, the state capital of West Bengal has witnessed major shifts in its urban geography, economy and socio-cultural landscape. Many of these mutations have been fuelled by the larger forces of globalisation and echo trends seen in other Indian cities. Privatisation, mallification and commodification are some of the most visible symptoms of these transformations.
But local policies, too, have played an important role. In 2011, when Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) put an end to 34 years of Left Front rule, it came with the promise of poriborton or change. But like most regimes with long-standing unchecked power, the initial hope it brought soon faded away. The chinks in its programmes of populism and development have become gaping holes over time, with all semblances of order, fairness and transparency replaced by corruption, hooliganism, autocracy and vote-bank appeasement agendas.
A prime example of this trajectory is Biswa Bangla (literally, World Bengal), a venture launched by the state government in 2013 to revive Bengal’s arts and crafts and attract investments to the state through a rebranding campaign—harping on a name playing on dual references to Bengal’s place in the world, and the world at Bengal’s doorstep. Only partly successful, this initiative has had more of a cosmetic impact on the city, its crude logo of the globe stamped on various state infrastructural projects, which many believe have brought more destruction than progress, as suggested in the opening quote. There has been poriborton then, but not always the good kind.
Sadly, little of this picture has been reflected in mainstream cinema, which continues to rely on safe bets – period pieces, detective stories, thrillers, mindless action flicks, romances, and family dramas steeped in middle-class values and colonial nostalgia. Yet, it would be wrong to claim that nothing is happening in Bengali cinema. The task of disrupting this stupor has largely fallen on independent films. Its stirrings have been deeply felt in three recent gems that offer an alternative gaze, unafraid to hold a critical mirror to Biswa Bangla Land.
These are Indranil Roychowdhury’s Mayar Jonjal (Debris of Desire, 2020); Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Mayanagar (Once Upon A Time in Calcutta, 2021) and Ishaan Ghose’s Jhilli (Discards, 2021). A closer engagement with these filmmakers and their stories, characters, themes and styles reveal the dark underbelly of the state they expose, the intelligent ways in which they shape their political approaches, and the challenges and opportunities that surround independent cinema in Bengal.