Two Reviews From Syed Badrul Ahsan
Of movies, or aesthetic sensibilities
A Directory of Bengali Cinema Parimal Ray, Kazi Anirban The Colours of Art, Kolkata
The golden era of Bengali cinema may well be a thing of the past. Or perhaps there is more of the good and the enlightening that one can look forward to yet, with people like Aparna Sen around. Be that as it may, everything that one associates with poetry and romance and even politics has over the decades come encompassed within the stories on the big screen. Of course, the big screen was then called the bioscope. And then there were the cinema halls which, till recently, were places where family entertainment by way of movie-watching was positively a delight. Technology, or the successive variations of it, have somehow pushed innocence into the sidelines, to a point where cinema is now almost history in the sense that it now belongs in the past.
And it is precisely this past which A Directory of Bengali Cinema captures through presenting to readers a collage of posters and advertisements, in their originals, related to the movies that have fashioned the history of Bengali cinema. There is a caveat, though: the album, for so it is, focuses on cinema produced in what is today the Indian state of West Bengal, which is one way of informing anyone who picks up this work to be under no illusion that movies made in East Pakistan/Bangladesh form part of the collection. In its totality, the work covers the entire era, beginning with silent movies dating back to 1917 and moving on to times closer to ours, of Bengali movie-making.
And that is how the history behind the movies is put across to readers, indeed to movie enthusiasts in particular. No essays or articles embellish the presentation. There is hardly any need for that. The pictures, containing as they do old posters and advertisements, speak volumes. Besides, there comes through the work a chronology detailing the progression of time through which movies have evolved in Bengal. Begin with the era of silent movies, or 1917. And what you have is nostalgia associated with productions like Satyawadi Raja Harishchandra. Long-forgotten names arise from the recesses of memory. Names such as Rustomji Dhotiwala, the director of that early film, come alive. And the artistes? This is how they are remembered:
'Cast-Ms. Savaria, Mr. Hurmusjee Tantra, Ms. Gaharjan, Behramshaw'
It is chronicle of moving time that comes before you. In that age of silence, there is much eloquence which is symbolized by such movies as Balika Badhu (1921), Aandhare Alo (1922), Chandidas (1927), Bibaha Bhibrat (1931) and Niyoti (1934). While Niyoti may have hit the screen in 1934, the era of sound was effectively inaugurated three years earlier, in 1931, through Dena Paona, Jamai Sashthi, Rishir Prem, Tritiya Paksha and other tales on celluloid. Essentially, these early sound-based movies were marked by brevity, which could be taken to mean that a concentrated, indeed focused approach was taken toward offering the movies to people. As you go along, your sense of movie or artistic history is heightened by a reproduction of early posters geared to drawing people to the halls. And old names of production houses pop up, to your delight. Think here of Indian Kinema Arts which, as we are reminded, was located at 8 Bagmari Road, Calcutta. And what did such posters publicise? Here is an instance:
'Nisiddha Phal or Forbidden Fruit', as the advertisement informs the movie buff, is 'a comedy drama woven round the social problem that is now agitating the minds of Indian Hindus --- Viz.-what should be the age of consent.'
Move on to another advertisement, that of the movie version of Bankimchandra's Krishnakanter Will, produced by Calcutta Talkie Distributors. From G.G. Talkies you have Dwipantar, with New Theatres coming forth with Desher Mati. Fast forward to the future, until you come to such movies as Kalo Bou, Chhoto Bou, Bir Hambir, Upohar and Shajghar. The early Uttam Kumar begins to appear in such movie posters as Brotocharini, Shanjher Pradip and Raat-Bhor. The ad for Shobar Upore, featuring Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen, pulls you straight back into memories of some good times. Suchitra Sen begins to cast her spell on the Bengali movie audience through such moves as the Chalachitra Limited production Mejobou. Images of Ashok Kumar come alive on publicity posters for Haate Bajare; and you spot a relatively early, yet, Soumitra in Ajana Shapath. Remember Bhanu Bandyopadhyay in Miss Priyambada? You get an entire list of the artistes involved, together with the names of playback singers roped in for the move. The year is 1967.
A fascinating aspect of Directory relates to the details which come along with a listing of the films produced over time. And in that ambience come the writer of the story, the scriptwriter, the director, the playback singers, the production house, the actors and actresses engaged in the movie and the date and place where a movie was first released.
Let us call it a day. Before we do that, though, shall we have copies of it for our home libraries? The work is more than a collector's item. It is the history of the evolution of Bengali aesthetic sensibilities. You cannot skirt past history as you course through life.
Stories of courage and integrity
Birup Bishwe Shahoshi Manush
Serajul Islam Choudhury
Jagriti Prokashoni
Serajul Islam Choudhury's preoccupation with history has been an endless source of satisfaction for those who have been reading over the last few decades. His has been an intense series of commentaries on national and global events, with that certain touch one identifies with Left politics. Choudhury's pronouncements on men and events across the diverse patches of the world have by and large been marked by his empathy for those who have less, or have nothing. Briefly, he has considered the world and the history attending it to have been characterized by exploitation and one tends to agree with him. Given that the struggles waged by poor societies have regularly been attempts to free themselves of exploitation, there is the core thought that these struggles have been offshoots of the principled determination some brave men and women have put up through moving time.
And these essays in this work are but the tales of courageous individuals. That of course is what you have an idea of through the title of the book. These brave ones inhabit an inhospitable world. The brave always do that, for it is always a hostile environment that throws up men and women of character and courage. Dwell, if you will, on Ila Mitra. Who would have thought that the new state of Pakistan would so early on in its independent nationhood have resorted to the kind of atrocities that were to turn Mitra's life upside down? Nachol was a seminal happening for her, for those whose rights she sought to defend. But the state of Pakistan, caught in a persecution complex from which it was never to recover in its eastern province (until the province, having become an independent entity of its own, ejected it lock, stock and barrel in 1971), was unwilling to tolerate any challenge to its political authority. Besides, do not forget that Ila Mitra's religious beliefs, at least where the conventional aspects of it were concerned, stood at variance with the faith upon which Pakistan had been prised out of India.
It is the courage in Ila Mitra that Choudhury recalls all these years later. She went to prison, was systematically tortured by the police and subjected to rape. The story has already been told by Maleka Begum in her impressive earlier work on Mitra (and Choudhury makes a necessary reference to it here). Serajul Islam Choudhury zeroes in on the spirit that drives Mitra, that enables her to come forth with her story and so go on with her life. Courage, as it appears to the author, has historically been an integral component of the Bengali personality. Maybe that has been a great reason why the Bengali nation has never been contented with the status quo, with things as they are. Naturally, in his reflections on courage, Choudhury goes back to an assessment of the intrepidity with which Sheikh Mujibur Rahman fashioned a change in the course of politics. Mujib is part of history. The bigger truth is that he built, brick by slow brick, much of that history through his preoccupation, or call it well-meaning obsession, with the place of his Bengalis in the political scheme of things.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is the apotheosis of Bengali resurgence. One can argue with that truth at one's peril. But there are the other personifications of Bengali determination that cannot be ignored. From such a perspective comes the story of Tajuddin Ahmed, the one man whose absence in 1971 may well have meant the difference between life and death for the Bengalis. Choudhury has no illusions about Tajuddin's place in history. The wartime Bengali leader, having called forth in himself the pluck to cobble a government, now must instill an equal degree of courage in the nation he plans to steer to freedom. He does the job well. But Abu Taher? Here too is a soul unafraid to scale the peaks. As an officer in the Pakistan army based in West Pakistan, right at the moment when his fellow officers, non-Bengalis at that, were headed for 'East Pakistan' with the clear mission of sorting out the Bengalis, he was troubled by his own absence from his own land. That prick of conscience that would come to jog all politically aware Bengalis awake was eventually to work in Taher as well. He found his own way of going to the war. Brave, unsullied by anything personal, he fought passionately against the very army he had been part of. And he lost one of his legs in that twilight struggle.
The work here encompasses what appears to be a widening range of experience. Choudhury segments his story telling into the political and the cultural. In the latter category come a recapitulation of the lives and deaths of Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta and Rashidul Hasan, men whom Choudhury knew well as his colleagues in the department of English at Dhaka University. He writes with sadness but with an abundance of feeling on Munier Chowdhury and Ahmed Sharif. There is deep pathos, owing to a deep friendship that death has rent asunder, in a recalling of the man that was Giasuddin, the historian abducted and murdered by the collaborators of the Pakistan occupation army. And then there is the man in self exile, Shamsuddin Abul Kalam. It is Kalam's endless search for a country (and he believed Bangladesh was that country) that defined his life, especially after December 1971. That search, however, only enhanced his sense of disillusionment. The country, he comes to the swift realization, has well nigh been lost. And therein he echoes another expatriate, Mizanur Rahman. A shattering truth shoots out of Rahman's Tirtho Amar Graam: 'The country has not lost us; we have lost the country.'
Shahoshi Manush deepens your sadness. And then it does something better: it rekindles the old, comatose spirit in you, the same that once ignited your sense of pride about your heritage. Read on --- and you will know.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is with The Daily Star
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