Kolkata turning

This article reads trends of contemporary political change in Bengal through some of the new Bengali cinema circulating in its public domain. ¹ Can we find in it a sense of the entangled nature of the new groups of voters and sympathisers who voted for poriborton (‘change’) in Bengal? What are the aspirational values of the so-called cultured middle class in Bengal at a time when they have rejected a particular kind of official and ossified leftist politics in order to embrace a party and a platform which seems to be nationalistic and sentimentalist on the one hand, while at the same time trying to play by the rules of liberal India? There may not be any direct connection between the new films that are being made and the kind of politics that is being played out, but there could be an interesting plotting of the political mode in the new kinds of films.

It may be possible to frame a contemporary Indian urbanity through the story of the city of Kolkata (‘Calcutta’), reflecting a nation which has been changing since the 1980s, with emergent new media and cultures. Some tier-one and tier-two cities were nurtured as hubs, with Kolkata increasingly falling into a kind of limbo because of continual ‘brain-drain’ and travel – the exodus of younger dynamic generations to richer pastures in other parts of the country and abroad – and the leftist government sporadically changing policies to keep pace with a changing world order, especially China’s, building a synergy with a revisionist capitalist Marxism and no longer branding the market as anathema. However, vestiges of a strong, if residual, moral Marxist framework and culture were always clashing with the new ethos, finding the new developing India to be crass, uncultured, and anti-Left at its ideological core. The two existing paradigms for the city of Kolkata are those that we do not subscribe to – one, that it is a ‘living city’, throbbing, resilient, the once-and-always cultural centre with significant colonial residue, an idea promoted by those invested in framing the city in a Renaissance mode, later sometimes politicizing that spirit in an officially leftward direction; and two, that it is a ‘dying city’, festering with the sores of Dominique Lapierre’s ironic ‘City of Joy’, crippled, wounded, surviving on borrowed time, as the fleeing hordes from the city would like us to believe. The second is the assessment of the liberals in search of a better life elsewhere, who are able to separate the economic from the political, who are as distressed by communism as by the ‘refugee problem’ in Bengal created by the historical realities of India’s partition in 1947 and the Bangladesh War of 1971.

In the changed global political conditions since the 1990s, there has been a resurgence of a populist, cultist politics in Bengal as a reaction to both these perceptions, taking advantage of an underlying but seething discontent with what had deteriorated into a mostly upper-middle-class phenomenon and a social life infused by ‘party’ politicking. It was this limbo that was exploited by both Mamata Banerjee, the current Chief Minister, and the nascent right-wing forces lurking in the margins of this long-leftist state – one that created a growing support for this idiosyncratic, charismatic, volatile leader of the party ambitious enough to dream of de-throning the long-entrenched Left, enhanced by repeated, spiralling, crises – the killing of rural people for development projects, the case of Taslima Nasreen, the murder of a young Muslim man Rizwanur by a business mafia family ² – which led to a crescendo of demands for ‘change’. City intellectuals and small town rural Bengali radicals began to speak in the same voice, largely as a reaction to the official Left rather than what the alternative offered, or meant. It apparently translated into a move towards what might be called a different intellectual and popular culture – the cult of ‘Ma-Maati-Maanush’ (Mother-Earth-People) created around the new female leader.

This mother cult, which was earlier missing in leftist discourse, marks the resurgence of a sentimental nationalist rhetoric – old humanist, amorphous but important, as opposed to the morally-vacuous Left leadership that was seen as the growing bane of Bengal, or so the new political winds wanted to whisper as they blew in ‘change’. But in this process, there emerges the increasing danger of a wiping out of the spirit of debate, confrontation, inquiry and any sort of resistance to the safer, happier championing of a blended nationalism and internationalism, a watery sentimentalized mode that operates at a level far lower than celebrating a ‘living city’ but dreams of a new birth for it emptied of strife and commotion.

The cultural fulcrum of Bengal – centred in Kolkata – has always been the skin of the politicized state, reflecting its transitions and conflicts in a variety of media, of which theatre was the first. Early plays by Bratya Basu (currently the state’s minister for higher education in the new regime) and Suman Mukhopadhyay brought, on the one hand, a programmatic critique of the Left and on the other a more irrational, magic realist take on crumbling political machinery and its effects and affects in late 20th-century West Bengal. A spate of cultural and intellectual icons (both pro- and anti-Left) began to come together in the city – Shaoli Mitra (theatre), Mahasweta Devi (writer), Shuvaprosonno (artist and sculptor), Sunanda Sanyal (columnist, teacher), Nachiketa (singer-songwriter), Kaushik Sen (theatre), Aparna Sen (filmmaker and actor), hitherto belonging to different political persuasions or considered a-political, joined with Congress/Trinamool to protest and record their distress at events like Nandigram. ³ In cinema, a continuity may be traced between the later films of Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, which begin to look at subjectivities and the ‘inner turmoil’ of their middle-class protagonists, and the films that emerged as middle-brow art at the turn of the present century. There is a marked shift from ideological moorings of the Left – let us say from stark documentation to conversational personalized exchanges, from the mutinous to more negotiational, even reconciliatory, modes of filmmaking.

We need to track more precisely the exact changes in Bengali cinema that have taken place over the last two decades in order to make sense of this shift in sensibility. It is not possible to write the history of our own generation, so at best we can only identify some broad tendencies and types. First, there is the kind of cinema that shows the inner workings and aspirations of a new and emerging class of urbanites – upbeat about the development of the city and new lifestyles but also acutely conscious of the nuances of sexual politics, rights discourses and imagination. The films of Rituparno Ghosh, Srijit Mukherjee, Kaushik Ganguly and popular shorts (telefilms) made for television are symptomatic of this new nexus between development and rights consciousnesses. Ghosh’s Dahan (Crossfire, 1997) and Ganguly’s Shunyo e Buk (Empty Canvas, 2005) bring into genteel living-rooms fiery discussions of the politics of the domestic and the bedroom, never before heard in Left bhadralok circles. ⁴ While this is a positive change at one level, often they are into desire but certainly not into jouissance. Imaginative fantasy in films (gay, transsexual, uber-sensitive, metrosexual) is, unfortunately, distinguished from heterosexuality as problematic. Labour too is absent. More importantly the relationship between labour and work vanishes. Sexuality then becomes more a question of probing relationships merely as transgressive and therefore punishable, rather than as serious and complex with tension, frisson, desire, roughness and pain. And there is no sociology of desire.

Other effects also become visible due to massification, like the re-emergence of the figure of the cult hero in the actor Prosenjit, ⁵ re-fashioned for the times by film directors like Rituparno Ghosh and Srijit Mukherjee – and with it, the return of charisma, just as its parallel in the political arena is found in the meteoric rise of the loud-mouthed maverick female leader Mamata Banerjee. The emergence of deviancy, a sharp radical deviancy, is mostly missing in all his films, though it is gratifying at least to see attempts at such practices of cinema which were, by and large, absent till the 1980s. This is new. Mainstream communist, nationalist and other modes of asceticism are being challenged by these films even though these are still relatively circumscribed and genteel forms of experimental cinema. However, even within circumscribed parameters, they have begun to bring uncomfortable questions of adventurous, transgressive, mutinous behaviour (sexual or otherwise) to an audience hitherto largely unexposed to any such explorations on the screen without a moral framework of guilt, punishment or penance being attached to them.

This space of bodily encounters and a new kind of materiality is being explored in two other kinds of Bengali cultural representation. For the first kind, Q (Quashik Mukherjee)’s experimental, over-the-top black-and-white film about sexualities, Gandu (2010), is a case in point, as is singer-songwriter Chandril Bhattacharya’s film ‘Y2K, othoba Sex Krome Aasiteche’ (2000): heterosexual to the core, privileging the male gaze and a stag sensibility. ⁶ Its politics is uncertain, though certainly there is angst about one’s inability to (re)invent oneself and escape from vacuous social and political alternatives. This is also reflected in songs by Rupam Islam. While a secret, cultist ideology and a sense of robust piracy gets manufactured, it never penetrates to the roots of the times. For the second kind, there is an old Bengali journey into colonial nostalgia: Anjan Dutt, singer, songwriter, filmmaker and actor, tries to merge with the new liberalized generation while struggling to hold on to a world and politics of sentimental romantic angst at the same time; he flexes his fingers with old detective novels too and attempts to contemporize them in films. This is also the USP of the hugely successful, straightforward and bland storytelling of Satyajit Ray’s popular detective stories on celluloid by his son Sandip Ray: all middle-class paraphernalia with no politics but with a sharp eye on the market. Colonial bureaucracy/‘babudom’ rather: a kind of nationalist vanguardism that tries to relate to the times in which a liberal coolness quotient is to be fused with nostalgia for a simpler lost past.

The threat to these newer, cautious but bolder visual experiments with Bengali life and its concerns is their supposed obverse, what might be identified as the Mithun Chakraborty cult – the working-class hero who is quintessentially macho and heterosexual, who knows the pulse of the people and how to make them get up and dance. Incidentally, this particular cult was first exploited by the official Left party which had its own populist moments in the 1970s and ’80s. This Left populist approach takes a sudden quasi-right-wing turn now. He is the son of the soil, springing from the ‘maati’ (earth) to offer vigilante justice in reaction to the party in power, representing the ‘popular anti-Left’ and set to make inroads into the pan-Bengal psyche. Deb, the new young hero of the Bengali screen who flaunts a realpolitik of brawn, slides straight into a similar spot, offering at the regional level the muscle-and-sinew potency of a Salman Khan at the national. ⁷ The intellectual Left feels the pull of the soil but also an overwhelming discomfort at shadows of the Enlightenment brooding over a near-obsolescent leftist ideology. In the spaces between, Bangla rock band Chandrabindoo writes songs which are sometimes sharply and inversely intellectual and critical, Anjan Dutt has a finger on the middle-class pulse, Sandip Ray wanders the colonial landscape in lambent nostalgia – and they make both Banerjee and her ousted opposition, the Left Front, shudder delicately in their seats of power.

The question that arises at this point is: who are the cultural intellectual vanguards of cinema today in a rapidly-changing urban Bengal? We suggest, in a tentative hypothesis, that the work of Moinak Biswas (along with Arjun Gourisaria) and Suman Mukhopadhyay may offer two new coordinates in a fresh map that helps us to track an emergent political-cultural scenario. There are some cities that have always generated a fraught aesthetic engagement with its cinema, even if the city’s cinema has not necessarily boasted of a very remarkable range of aesthetic experimentation and achievement with film. Kolkata – or Calcutta – being one of those cities which inspires extreme responses in its citizens and its visitors (a city which the late journalist Desmond Doig had called ‘much loved, much abused, and always interesting’) has been, not surprisingly, a marked presence in its indigenous Bengali-language cinema, its familiar buildings, streets, markets and lifestyles emerging as signifiers to aid and effect cinematic reverie and argument. Particular neighbourhoods and historical landmarks have contributed to unfolding deeper layers of meaning and context to urban visual narratives: while waltzing in a chiffon sari at the Grand Hotel on Chowringhee implicates the westernized ‘elite’ woman in a specific temporal and social framing, the pulling down of old houses and factories to make way for new developmental projects (like that of South City in the past decade) often freezes a film’s concerns into discernable political grooves. ⁸ This is of course an intrinsic part of the spatial and affective economies of city cinema, and in some senses Kolkata participates in this de/construction as other dynamic urban locations do.

Anne Schober (2007: 25), reading the ‘cinema-space as a cave of politics’, writes of cinema in the 20th century:

different social and political groups constituted themselves around cinemas and handled them euphorically as spaces which seem, more than other city-spaces, suited to making ideological interventions – to educating ‘the people’ and deconstructing dominant myths. By using the cinema these groups were transforming it – into a space that became connected with the abolition of injustice and the establishment of equality between the sexes and classes; a space where one could redefine and celebrate one’s own identity, or where one could deconstruct dominant stereotypes.

Bengali filmmakers have, since the late 20th century, played fitfully with the city’s enormous visual and emotive potential. Art-film-makers Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen all made city-trilogies that exploited the city’s loved and abused status. Two of the films of Aparna Sen – who is Kolkata’s actor-turned-first-woman-film-director, a ‘humanist’ rather than a ‘feminist’ by her own description – bear titles that are evocative of the city’s streets, 36 Chowringhee Lane and 15 Park Avenue. Rituparno Ghosh is that ebullient Kolkata personality we talked of earlier, whose films explore a certain milieu and persona of the city in thin fictional disguise. A new crop of young Bengali filmmakers have been toying with the representation of the city’s youth or young professionals, in films that seek to carve a niche for themselves in a more liminal space between specious B-grade popular cinema and sombre art work, a space created in some sense by Aparna Sen and Rituparno Ghosh.

However, interestingly enough, Kolkata, which has long been a fraught urban centre of extreme political consciousness and activity, has eschewed – except for the odd film or filmmaker – a lineage of intense engagement with the darker, sustained unfolding of the instigations and repercussions of politics and its visceral impact on the city. Post Ray’s, Sen’s and Ghatak’s bitter early explorations of encounters between the machinations of the state, rogue citizens and outlaws, and civil society in Kolkata (then Calcutta), some of their own later work constitutes the bridge to what emerged eventually in the new ‘humanist’ cinema that Aparna Sen and Rituparno Ghosh have inspired, dealing – in the main – with relationships between people and the various crises, existentialist and otherwise, that these are periodically bound to generate, and a range of dilemmas about identity – class, caste, sexual, professional – that they invariably throw up.

What is intriguing is that this increasingly popular genre of the Bengali film seems to emphasize the absence of a city-cinema conscious of other burning issues of land and development, education and health, construction and demolition, political intrigue and violence, while these are, in fact, often explored in the flashy no-holds-barred unsophisticated ‘subaltern’ cinema of Bengal like MLA Phatakeshto, starring the irrepressible and aged hero Mithun Chakraborty, whose mass appeal is ostentatiously exploited for box office gains. There appears to be a sense of squeamishness that the intellectual middle class of Kolkata has been demonstrating against the infiltration of discombobulating hard home-truths about the state of the state, so to speak, into its thinking cinema, choosing almost to avoid the radical challenge of realpolitik as it plays out on the city’s streets, in the rundown colonial redbrick of Writers Buildings (the governmental hot seat), and in all the dark alleys and land-and-property holdings in between. This is particularly astonishing in the context of the past decade or so, which has witnessed an escalation of in-your-face political activity on these very streets and offices and lands as communist rule in West Bengal has teetered and floundered and finally lost its way.

This void in cinematic representation, of how the nuts and bolts, the muscles and sinews, of political ideology and activity do not filter easily into thinking cinema in Bengal perhaps raises the question that Jacques Ranciere has raised: ‘Are some things unrepresentable?’ If they are, it is only because we might presuppose a singular correspondence between the form and content of art, and harbour an idea that there is a total intelligibility of the forms of human experience, even the most extreme – notions that Ranciere goes on to reject, because appropriateness is no longer a criterion we need to entertain in representation. He concludes: ‘In order to assert an unrepresentability in art that is commensurate with the unthinkability of the event, the latter must itself have been rendered entirely unthinkable, entirely necessary according to thought’ (Ranciere, 2010: 138).

The state of West Bengal, headquartered in Kolkata, on 13 May 2011 voted into power a centrist party after 34 years of leftist governance. They were tumultuous years, politically and socially, this slow freefall out of an entrenched ideology and a wary installation of ‘change’ (the newly-elected party came sloganeering in on its Bengali word, poriborton). Bengal’s intellectual and cultural life has always enjoyed a mythic aura, some would say disproportionate to its achievements. The reductive dimension could be seen as particularly true of its urban cinema in recent decades: even as Bengal has churned and spurned and turned politically, its cinema has been largely impervious to the bristle and punch of its daily existence, mostly snug in an absurd world of song-and-dance, melodramatic, meaningless excess. Pitted against this B and C grade excess, the emergence of a class of cinema that reassures the timid Bengali middle classes of possessing the right mind and spirit to introspect has cleared a significant space for itself. Srijit Mukherjee’s Autograph (2010) is one of the most popular recent ventures in this successful and expanding genre.

It is in contrast to this successful liberal-humanist, middle class feel-good genre of domestic visual drama that a new cinema has just begun to emerge in Bengal, we suggest, one that is poised on the urban knife-edge of Bengal’s transitional, kaleidoscopic politics: while it provides no easy answers for Bengal’s fraught conditions, it poses urgent questions about a variety of political trajectories and agendas that could well be inimical to the state’s present and future. Moinak Biswas and Arjun Gourisaria’s Sthaniya Sambaad (Spring in the Colony, 2009) and Suman Mukhopadyay’s Mahanagar@Kolkata (2010) are important cinematic interventions in the current political ferment of Kolkata. Are these contrasting trends in contemporary Bengali cinema indicative of a fruitful cultural fracas? Are there lands and locations at which their sentimental and/or critical concerns overlap? With the decline of ‘the Left’ as it had once been, will a more complex, self-conscious, self-critical leftist thinking evolve? Where does the left liberal meet the centrist in his/her critiques of Bengal’s fault lines? Is there a critical Left? Can any of these nascent battle lines be mapped through its city cinema?

It must be noted here that even in filmmaking so vastly divergent in intent and production, the lineage of Bengali cinema is easily identifiable and there are inter-textual echoes and interrogations which are crucial to understanding the evolution of cinematic thought and praxis. It is not merely coincidental that Mukherjee’s Autograph (2010, of the sentimental drama genre) and Mukhopadhyay’s Mahanagar@Kolkata (2010, an edgy political satire) are both talking back directly to two films of the legendary Bengali film director Satyajit Ray. Autograph is a contemporization of Ray’s Nayak (Hero, 1966), which starred the iconic Bengali star of popular cinema, Uttam Kumar, as its protagonist who played himself, so to speak – an angst-ridden, alcohol-dependent movie star who is surprised by the chord of empathy struck with a young female journalist in the course of an interview she conducts with him during a train journey. Mahanagar@Kolkata gestures at Ray’s critical tribute to the city when it was not yet Kolkata – Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963) – and so the title of Mukhopadhyay’s reprise marks both the internet age and the city’s enforced transformation from colonial Calcutta to postcolonial re-indigenized Kolkata, mocking the idea that history can be erased thus easily. In another provocative linking, Autograph is landscaped on the new upwardly-mobile high-rise community of South City in Kolkata, boasting of a glitzy mall with a multiplex, a school, a club and a hospital within its secured precincts for complete comfort and safety; Biswas and Gourisaria’s Sthaniya Sambad (2009)’s cinematic eye approaches the city, in contrast, from its east end where agricultural and fallow land has been acquired in recent decades for new ‘wannabe’ developmental projects that are still seen as somewhat suspect and sinister.

Mukhopadhyay’s films and plays will prove particularly significant for any future evaluation of contemporaneous urban Bengal, where the aesthetic collides furiously with the political. Without adopting any overt ideology, he is able to propel the film forward in a curiously adversarial mode which is shot through with an irrationality that perhaps signifies a contra-Left-rationalism, at best. Regular, periodic irruptions of violence are intercepted with black humour, recalling the sedimenting of bullets and bombs across the city and deep into its hinterland for over 30 years. Interweaving three short stories from cult-Bengali-writer Nabarun Bhattacharya, Mahanagar@Kolkata gathers up a storm of urban angst, desire, despair and rage that sits strangely well with the frothing, fomenting underbelly of political convulsions that has actually characterized life in the state of Bengal over the past few decades. At its still centre there is Biren, a quirky, jobless middle-class man whose constant paranoid mutter, ‘Amar kono bhoy nei toh?’ (I don’t have anything to fear, do I?) slithers like a refrain through the film and becomes, almost, its Joycean imperative, ‘Signatures of All Things I am Here to Read’.

Biswas and Gourisaria’s 2009 film Sthaniya Sambad (Spring in the Colony), mapping the diurnal workings of a refugee colony in contemporary Kolkata, also places itself squarely in an emergent world of land-grabbers and fly-by-night investors. The narrative tracks how the bemused young and old, apparently outside of this world in a refugee colony on the fringes of the city, gradually get sucked into their machinations. Early in the film, the realist narrative mode enters a delirium of sorts. Two wandering, absurd thieves shear off a girl’s plait in order to garner money for vocational education, and a criminal visionary builds high-rises, devoting his life to providing education to youngsters. The job that he finds for the ludicrous thieves looking for vocational education is of shanty-demolition. Chit fund (small moneysaving schemes), fishery and construction mafia have become leading vocational-institute-builders in Bengal. It is exactly this utter inanity and nakedness of a mode of developmental violence, collapsing political differences across party lines, which had begun to bewilder its citizens, especially those who remained undecided about change and continuity. The real merges with its excess and overflow.

The political dimensions of the film unfold in this conflicted border space; it comments, lampoons and shows puzzlement all at once – without venturing a verdict – and yet is quite categorical about a seething, in-built violence as the story of new India unfurls. Vignettes and split narratives in both films disrupt the idea of universality and illusion of the developmental therapy of new India. Both Mukhopadhyay and Biswas/Gourisaria take the psycho-geographical route, an unplanned drifting through the cityscape, where individuals travel and the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and topography subconsciously direct them to an entirely new and authentic experience. But that experience refuses to provide a blueprint for lay voters. It jolts them. It nudges them into deciding on an ethical-political position – one that can hardly be arrived at through logic and reason alone.

Mahanagar@Kolkata and Sthaniya Sambad have, of course, different approaches to the challenge of representing the urban dynamic of Kolkata. Mukhopadhyay’s quixotic character who believes that spectral powers of protection are invested in a bit of bloodied hangman’s rope that he carries around in a frayed plastic pouch is in contrast to a far-more-grounded (if enigmatic) filmmaking – invoking the political documentary – that Sthaniya Sambad exemplifies. But it comes closest to Mahanagar@Kolkata in what appears to be a shared visceral understanding of a city that thrives on ‘the boredom, the horror and the glory’ of its complex conflicted trajectories.

What brings these two films together then? Is it in their concrete constructions of the momentary ambivalences of life and their transformation wrought by a supreme passional quality? The implications of their importance in the contemporary life of Kolkata came full circle in the final week of April 2011, as Kolkata simmered in the political apprehension, anxiety and excitement of its enormously significant hustings. Even while cinema pirouetted into reality, the polling booth did not allow artistic licence enough to frame ambivalence into a freeze-shot. A choice for change was made, something that the new political cinema was perhaps pointing toward, not as an obvious option but as the possible outcome of a long and arduous season of degeneration and destruction in the life of the state, microcosmically and theoretically represented in the intricacies of its urban desolation. Schober (2007: 25) says:

Here, enlightenment and the collective awakening to consciousness should happen, and the beginning of a new and more democratic life can start. But besides this we can also find disseminations of the myth of the ‘good cave’, that is the cave as a space for corporality, safety, equality, justice, refuge. Here, the cinema is transformed by emphasizing desires for security, equality, a better world, sensuous gratification and the erotic: and making them narratable.

As Ranciere (2010: 138) avers: ‘The Logic of the Unrepresentable can only be sustained by a hyperbole that ends up destroying it.’ Recent political events in Bengal have shown that the seemingly impossible happens – nothing is unthinkable. Nothing, therefore, is unrepresentable, and a new urban political cinema is perhaps not really powerless to be born.

Biswas and Gourisaria’s film Sthaniya Sambad, therefore, takes on a completely new form in order to attempt what had not really been attempted before: an archiving of the city while dealing with two political issues – land grabbing and vocational training. Employing a quirky narrative, playing with the ludic and advancing through ruses, but mostly using a kind of realism in the documentation of the city in which intellect is priority, Biswas as scriptwriter produces a hardboiled film which is a paean to the vernacular tropes of Bengal, its alleyways and to three Kolkatas. Most importantly, it makes subtle use of the local vocabulary, which is a testament to its investment in the vernacular modern. This is related to the rise of mass culture in India in the late 1980s and then to a globalized mass culture in the 1990s. In Bengali cinema of the 1980s, with the rise of new media, a local vernacular culture started getting ‘lumpenized’ (this is a culturally-laden term used by Marxist ‘bhadralok’/gentlemen to refer to an anti-intellectual culture of brazen brawn). Films made by Anjan Chaudhury had no local investment in charting the social and vernacular values that were witnessed in the films of Ajoy Kar or Agradoot. ⁹ There was no popular language in this new mode to relate to literary traditions, for instance. In place of writers like Nemai Bhattacharya, we see the rise of Suchitra Bhattacharya. ¹⁰ It is a radical and daring move that can also be read as a mechanism to conserve and chart things that are fast losing their sheen.

What we notice in films like Sthaniya Sambaad is an effort both to redefine and hold on to a certain kind of political and urban idiom, the markers of which are: a classical-Marxist-progressive sociological entity, which goes by another name, ‘critical’, and a holding on to a vernacular modernization by trying to tell us that story. These are hallmarks of a left liberal middle class culture; a sharp non-sentimental intelligence, reticent and low-key, intensely local but framed by an internationalist mind. Along with that, though not in the mode of the popular, it does with intelligence try to understand the shift in sensibility in the urban upwardly mobile class. This is an interesting and sharp move but could also quickly turn into conservatism and a male kind of paternalism at that. Sthaniya Sambad is not a popular film but an ironical film about urban angst and aspiration trying to capture a political-economic angle which provides a mirror to the soul of the city – that despite everything might surprise one nameless flicker of possibility which may then suddenly, partially, reverse the rot.

Suman Mukhopadhyay’s film Mahanagar@Kolkata is predicated on the irrational, on the disparate threads that make up an almost macabre urban existence in contemporary Kolkata that is at once morbid, violent, ironic and romantic. The film gestures at its own cinematic lineages quite obviously, and is yet also invested in the canons of literature, Tagore and Shakespeare. Very deliberately, very consciously, it does not affiliate itself to any particular tradition or even discursive course but tries to map urban and semi-urban angst, in what is an entirely new syntax of thinking cinema in Bengal. Indeed, Suman Mukhopadhyay’s Herbert (2005) and Mahanagar@Kolkata have both been discussed in this context of searching for a new language of cinema that all at once speaks of, and to, the chaotic and the meaningful in Bengali contemporaneities.

There is no doubt that the map for new trends in Bengali cinema is yet a mess, much the same as the two films in particular that we have chosen to discuss here. But it is still a productive time for mapping, for trying to capture forays and little adventures and pitting them against the wider canvas of cinema with larger appeal. It is probably true that practitioners of the arts in Bengal have been inward-looking of late, where sharp political questions or pronounced antagonistic gestures have been rare. It is not true, however, that filmmakers and singers and poets have been linguistically and symbolically non-political throughout the last two decades. We have, of course, seen the rise of a counter-revolutionary, reactive side to creativity (as in Sunil Gangopadhaya’s signboard and television campaigns), but at the same time we have also seen seriously political and self-reflexive moves – in singer/songwriter Kabir Suman’s morphings, in folk-music archivist, songwriter and singer Moushumi Bhowmik’s renditions, in some inversely-intellectual and critical songs by the ‘Bangla Rock’ bands Chandrabindoo or Dohar, in the later poems and literary criticism of Joy Goswami, Sanjam Pal, Prasun Bandyopadhyay, Sumanta Mukhopadhyay and others, in the novels of Nalini Bera, Shopnomoy Chakrabarty or the reworkings of innovative forms like the new ‘Mangal Kavya’s ¹¹ through fiction. All these have solidified the vernacular modern in recent times. Suman Mukhopadhyay and Moinak Biswas/Arjun Gourisaria with their experimental, quirky new cinema have, we suggest, added not entirely insignificantly to this collective of widely-divergent political art.