Crossing borders with cinema

It was deep at night when my cousin got a phone call in his apartment in Lansing, Michigan. It was December and an unusually cold night and in those prehistoric days of wired phones he grew numb hearing the news – my uncle passed away a short while back in their Kolkata home. Another instance was that of my friend’s father having had a heart-attack and he had to rush back from Los Angeles, California. After the arduous 36 hours long journey across more than half of the globe my friend arrived too late. He did not get to see his father. These are two fleeting images which sweep my mind every time I see Mira Nair’s The Namesake. It also takes me 12 winters back to the chill down the spine when the phone rang after 11 pm and the caller id showed an Indian number in my quaint Minneapolis home.

Why do I remember these while watching The Namesake’s gamut of emotional situations; particularly the moment when Ashoke breaks the news of her father’s death to Ashima? Probably not because of this singular image, but rather, as a collective whole, it makes me feel haunted, sad and lingeringly unhappy. It awakens me to the fact that one of the several uncertainties in life an immigrant experiences is the possibility of not getting to meet loved ones.

The Namesake changes its narrative down the story-line by concentrating on Gogol, the son of Ashoke and Ashima, and soon enters the terrain of confusion that first-generation immigrants are compelled to live with. This confusion stemming from a lack of identity is probably inherent in all immigrants who essentially migrate to a country that differs largely from their own in terms of culture, religion and most importantly physical appearance. A second generation American friend of Japanese origin once chuckled how his little daughter was all tears when a curator of a museum she was visiting asked an apparently simple question –“How are you finding America, little girl?” It reminds me of Nair’s earlier film Mississippi Masala where Jay’s childhood friend Okelo tells him “Africa is for Africans…Black Africans.” This indeed shatters Jay whose Indian ancestors moved to Uganda and he, born in Uganda thinks himself as “first an Ugandan and then an Indian”. Much later Jay tells his grown up daughter Mina, “people stick to their own kind” which reflects how the Indian community like other migrants tend to ghettoize themselves.

Similar cross-cultural complexities are depicted in other films which deserve mention here – America so beautiful by Babak Shokrian on Iranian immigration to the US; the push-pull of familial bonds and clashing cultures in the comic drama Chutney Popcorn by Nisha Ganatra and Krutin Patel’s ABCD [‘American-born Confused Desi’] or Bala Rajasekharuni’s Green Card Fever about an Indian immigrant who is stretched to all lengths for a green card.

Pietro Germi’s [1914-1974] 1950 film of neo-realistic genre Il cammino della speranza [The Path to Hope] traces the lives of a group of Southern Italy’s mining workers and the abject poverty they are inflicted with. Seduced by a pimp they plan to move to France in search of a better future. It is indeed one of the early Italian films on the emigration theme. In September 2015, when three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body was found in the Turkish shores, the world wept with his father Abdullah. The Syrian family who left the war-torn nation was living in Turkey in poverty and without a valid identity. Thus they had planned on moving to Greece. In a statement to the police, Abdullah had recounted how he had to pay the smugglers twice to take him and his family to Greece but their efforts had failed. They had then rowed a boat on their own which eventually capsized, drowning Abdullah’s wife and both his sons. Doesn’t it seem like Germi’s film is resonating after six decades?

The history of colonialism in many of European countries, primarily France and Netherlands, transpires into immigration from these colonies, mainly from Northern Africa including Morocco. But the film that captivates me with the issues of migration in Europe is German master Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul [1974]. It is a film which showcases how the light-skinned Europeans at times marginalise the migrant other –– notably the Arabs and Africans. And even before this, in 1968, Fassbinder’s Katelmacher deals with a Greek migrant’s unsettled life in a German cityscape.

Migration from “home” to a remote land has been primarily dictated by situations that persuade one to de-anchor  roots and sail away in search or prosperity.

Even in Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece Aparajito [Unvanquished], young Apu sets his feet in Calcutta, in search of a bigger world the city may offer in lieu of the rural existence in his village.

Migrations can often be unfortunate. My father holds director Ritwik Ghatak closest to his heart for the latter’s unrelenting barrage of emotional narratives based on Bengal’s partition of 1947. “The partition was of Bengal and Punjab, not of India as a whole”, my father claims even today. His ancestral homes in Sylhet and Dhaka were abandoned one fine morning when the powers that were, decided to cut the land into pieces and scatter it over the corpse of a wounded Bengali psyche. I am moved even  now, when the opening shots of Ghatak’s sublime Komal Gandhar, show a theatre-within-the-film where an old man asks himself, “Why should I leave my beautiful home by the river Padma?” He goes on and clarifies that to leave home is to leave his mother, whose soul is buried there in erstwhile East Bengal, now Bangladesh. Another character answers his rhetoric – “For food”- he must become a refugee to survive, like millions of Bengalis in 1947.

The life of a migrant in an unfamiliar city is depicted with sensitivity in Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali story Kabuliwala which was made into a beautiful film by Tapan Sinha. Rahmat, the Afghan protagonist Kabuliwala, remains in the margins right through, because of the cultural, religious and physical differences. In another classic film Do Bigha Zameen [Two acres of land] by director Bimal Roy, a debt-ridden peasant, Sambhu, migrates to Calcutta from his village with a hope to be freed from the clutches of heartless landlords. However, it ends with the dream going up in smoke.

In most of such films on migration from across the globe, the underlying canvas is that of a search; a search for a migratory identity. The image of people drifting in the metropolis is so vividly explored that it touches universal chords. People have to deal with dispossession and struggle for a true meaning of his/her identity. Is this identity linked with the patch of land on which one is born or is it with the family album which one identifies as his own? These questions remain, haunt and resonate strongly. Not for anything else but because man is essentially a migratory animal.

[ Published in International Gallerie Vol 19 No. 1, 2016 (Migration theme) ]

The Bengali Mother: Through Filmic Lenses

In 1895 (26th Chaitra, 1302 Bengali Calendar precisely), Rabindranath Tagore wrote the verse Bangamata where he starts of like this –

“Through good deeds and wrong, in sorrow and happiness, downfall and uprise,
Allow your children to flourish and grow, to full human potential realise.

Oh affectionate mother, in your lap most comforting –
As children you must not keep them forever nursing.”

and then ends with the oft quoted:

“Grab your good natured sons and push them out there
The world is theirs for the taking, let them show no fear
This great multitude of children, Oh doting mother
Confining them to a Bengali identity, you have not let them discover the greater in humanity.”

In the context of Bengali psyche, Tagore’s lines are very important to understand the mother-child relationship in the Bengali household and more importantly the mother-son sensibility.

It is not difficult to correlate the decadence of the Bengali ‘babu’ in the social milieu of India since the middle of the last century when the economic and political capital of India shifted away permanently from Calcutta – to Bombay (which was already there in the map as the economic zone) and Delhi (the political capital of the notion of India since the days of the Muslim invaders) respectively.

With this drift over the few decades, the Great Famine of the early 1943 and the partition of India in 1947, the veneer of the quintessential Bengali was cracked. Though many of them migrated to other cities but that was more due to the surplus population after 1947.

Even today, at the end of the day, the average Bengali wishes to remain in his own home in Bengal and within the confines of cultural and philosophical ambit which makes him aloof and cynical of others. It is of no surprise hence to locate only a few Bengalis probably in Bombay who can speak Marathi or the ones in Bangalore speaking Kannad or speaking Tamil in Chennai – almost none of my friends and family living in these cities ever cared to delve into the local culture and language.

Interestingly, almost every Marwari in Kolkata can speak and understand Bengali, just as the most Punjabis in the city do and most South Indians who stay in Kolkata for long. This prudishness, at one hand can be attributed to the Bengali renaissance of the 19th-20th centuries which created such a flurry of moral, philosophical, literary and cultural virtues that generations of Bengali masticated on the same gleefully. On the other, and probably related is this tendency of clinging to the roots even when the surroundings have withered in terms of opportunities. In the context of Bengali cinema, the depiction of mother as the bearer and nurturer is what is expected and rational. We can however look into some of the ‘mother’ characters in some of the important Bengali cinema over the years. It is not often that the character is strong or the film relies on her largely. Yet, they are important portrayals of a time and a society whose moral values have a deep resonance in the position and status of the mother and her inherent bonding with her children.

Sarbajaya in 'Pather Panchali' and 'Aparajito'

Satyajit Ray, to Bengalis is a subtle weak point after Tagore. There is a delicate semblance in the psyche of the two auteurs which is heightened as Ray used Tagore’s pieces for some of his most resonant films. Interestingly, Tagore’s women were, in most of the cases, far ahead of their times. Tagore had kept them individuated, strong and dynamic – equal to men and at times superior in terms of moral virtues and emotional quotient. It is by design, Tagore kept his female protagonists child-less – from Binodini to Charulata, from Bimala to Mrinal.

It has to be noted that Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay whose novels were arguably more popular than Tagore’s at that time had placed the women at the feet of their men, subservient. Ray’s women characters from Charu to Karuna to Bimala have all been childless as well. In 'Mahanagar', Arati had a son but it was not their relation which got precedence in the narrative. Ray, like Tagore, placed his women in relation to their men and not foregrounding them primarily as the mother of the children of the male protagonists.

However, in the first two films, the first two parts of his iconic 'Apu Trilogy', Sarbajaya as the mother of Apu and Durga comes as a very strong-willed village woman. She is firm, stern and in her relation with Indir Thakrun, quite cruel. Indir Thakrun in a sense resembles the soul of rural Bengal whose depravity is all over her body. We find Sarbajaya as a loving mother yet a bit distant at times and definitely the one who wants to keep the reins of her dilapidated family in her own hands.

In 'Devi', which is one of his most political films Ray slants at the religious cowardice that forcibly commodifies the young daughter-in-law as the ‘Goddess’ incarnate based on an ambiguous dream awakening. In a reverse mimesis, the relationship between the old zamindar (as the devoted ‘son’) and the ‘Goddess’ daughter-in-law (mentioned every time as the ‘mother’, though she was childless in reality) was grounded within religious overtones and has definite shades of incestuous inklings. 

The mother in Ritwik Ghatak’s 'Meghe Dhaka Tara'

For Ritwik Ghatak, the entire positioning of identity was different than that of Ray. Whereas Ray’s narration had primarily been based on the male-female coupledom linked on the basis of love or marriage relation, Ghatak’s testament had been mostly on a primordial one. In almost all his iconic films we find Ghatak tearing his heart on the issues of the partition of Bengal and in doing so he puts forth his characters who are mostly siblings and not a couple in the sexual sense. Even in Ajantrik where there is no sister to Bimal, Jagaddal – the car takes up the position of companion as the fellow taxi drivers tease Bimal – “Is the car a woman?” In a later scene Bimal confides to another character that Jagaddal came into his life the year his mother passed away! In the lyrical Subarnarekha, Iswar and Sita, the brother and the sister form the core and Iswar would think Sita to be his long lost mother. Once, Sita would whisper to Iswar that she indeed was his mother. In the climax when Iswar visits Sita’s room for sexual favours unknowingly Ghatak slaps the middleclass hypocrisy as he once commented – “(one) has to understand that whichever woman the brother visited would have been his sister”. For Ghatak, the brother-sister duo is representative of the two halves of Bengal – the East (now Bangladesh) and the West (in India), the offspring of undivided Bengal as he sings “Keno cheye achho go Ma, mukho paane” – a Tagore song in his last film Jukti, Takko ar Gappo.

In 'Meghe Dhaka Tara', Nita’s mother is not only the nurturer of the household but also a manipulator. Finding Nita to be the only successful bread-earner for the family, she puts her weight in a way so that Nita remains the ‘man’ of the house. The father who was old and incapacitated and the elder brother Shankar who became a singer in Bombay films much later in the narrative couldn’t nourish the family. In some deft touches Ghatak again touches the chord of the brother-sister coupledom between Shankar and Nita, a photo when they were primitive and close to nature. Nita’s mother was hopelessly hapless in a situation on which she had no control apart from clinging on to Nita, making her a victim of everyone else’s expectations and prosperity. The character, like Nita’s remains an iconic one in Bengali cinema for being an antithesis of the traditional ‘mother’ archetype in Bengali psyche and culture.

The other mothers

There have been quite a few other interesting mother portrayals in Bengali cinema as well. On the one hand the typical representation of the mother as the trouble-some mother-in-law in popular cinema over the several decades and on the other, the mother as the backbone of the familial structure. In the cinema of Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen, apart from the central hero-heroine bonding, a significant part of the narrative was devoted to the relation between the hero and a mother figure (at times aunt as well). The submission of the hero to motherly love is seen as instrumental in the acceptance of Uttam not only as the most desired man to the women but also as the most desirable son to the mothers of Bengal.

On a different plane altogether we can also find a dancer mother in Rituparno Ghosh’s debut film Unishe April. This is where Ghosh questions the definition of ‘success’ in a patriarchal reference frame where the dancer’s ambition to be successful in her art forced her to be alienated with her daughter and as a result looked upon as a villain. In this derogation, she is held hostage by her own daughter as well. In Ghosh’s later film Titli, the idea of the “mother” as opposed to a desiring woman is significantly poised where the mother almost becomes a rival of her daughter in a triangular sexual tension.

In Mrinal Sen’s urban films, the mother is the silent warrior, the workforce whom no one pays heed to but the family unmistakably revolves around her. Sen’s camera generally holds the lower middle class Bengali family of the 70s and the 80s and the relentless struggle of the working class comes through live.

 In the Indian context, land, mother and the goddess get juxtaposed and play interchangeable roles. The Bengali woman started going out to earn for the family – her father’s or her in-laws’, earlier than most of her counterparts in the other parts of the country. A big reason for this can be attributed to the influx of the migrant refugees after 1947. The liberal Bengali’s rational awakening helped him to accept the working woman besides him. Yet, it is the woman who till today has to manage her multiple roles and deck up her varied portfolios. It is she who has to pay the price – within her home or at her work place. It is she who is always expected to play the role of Durga in the everyday nuances of life. May be, she also believes in her avatar!

(Originally published in News18 - http://www.news18.com/news/movies/most-interesting-mother-portrayals-in-bengali-cinema-1240221.html)