Bancharamer Bagan: Between Parable and History in the Postcolony

Tapan Sinha’s location in Bengali film history is often ascertained, almost mysteriously, as the director who always followed, but never accompanied, the holy triumvirate of Ray-Ghatak-Sen. If the French distinction between the auteur and metteur en scène is accepted with a pinch of salt here, then the triumvirate would definitely be classified as major auteurs of global art cinema by critics and fans alike.

Sinha, on the other hand, given his industrial training in London’s Pinewood studios, began his life as a technician before moving on to the director’s chair. Neither does his realism have the lyrical quality that Satyajit Ray assimilated from the poetic realists of French cinema, nor did his oeuvre aim for the political effervescence of Mrinal Sen. If anything, Sinha remains what Andre Bazin would call a metteur en scène, an in-between figure who dabbled in faithful adaptations of Bengali literature, for whom textual description always found precedence over authorial vision.

In the absence of the formal bravura typical of an auteur, perhaps a method of tracking Sinha’s interests can be through his literary preferences, given how he relies on such sources to supplant a sociohistorical reality and its attendant moral crisis. Moinak Biswas has argued that, unlike Ray or Sen in the late 1960s, Sinha’s realism, while responsive to the tremors of Bengali society, was an “incomplete engagement” with the contemporary political landscape, evident in his emphasis on individual moral failures over analytical dissections of the social.

It is perhaps for these reasons that Sinha seems most comfortable with the form of the parable. The emotive power of the parable, as Erich Auerbach famously pronounced in his monumental work on realism in Western Canon, rests on the “pendulation of the soul,” where the common virtues and vices of people produce the most transformative moments of spiritual anxiety in human history. Auerbach, needless to say, had in mind the parables of the New Testament, but his formulation remains useful across contexts. For Sinha, the parable can take the form of a domestic comedy, e.g., Galpo Holeo Satti (1966) or children’s adventure, e.g., Safed Haathi (1978). However, in these films, Sinha’s moral predispositions are somewhat transhistorical, tinged with a lament for tradition — a common danger of resorting to parables. Indeed, if greed and renunciation, selfishness and solidarity, oppression and resistance forge the lessons of a parable, they are often silent about the historical subjects in whom these virtues and vices come to reside. Without history, analysis disappears in thin air in favor of universal moral judgements.

This is where Bancharamer Bagan (1980) should be seriously considered an anomaly in Sinha’s oeuvre. Of course, one can find a shadow of Sinha’s Harmonium (1976) in Bancharamer Bagan, where an object travels across history to narrate tales of moral decay and redemption. Yet, Harmonium is perhaps more interested in creating dramatic hyperlinks than a critical consideration of historical time. The singularity of Bancharamer Bagan comes from this tryst with history. It is a comic parable that genuinely locates itself within a ‘Bengali’ history.

The film tells the story of an average farmer, Bancharam (Manoj Mitra), who has meticulously crafted an Edenic garden of vegetables with the help of his grandson, Gupe (Bhisma Guhathakurata). The tyrant zamindar, Chakari (Dipankar De), wants to usurp the garden forcefully for his private pleasure, but a fortunate intervention by the British magistrate proves to be a double blow to Chakari. The magistrate’s public rebuke proves too much for Chakari to bear. As he dies of heart attack, he passes the mantle of oppression to his cunning son, Nakari (Dipankar De in a double role).

Nakari, a firm believer in nonviolent expropriation, manipulates legal loopholes for his land-grab schemes. He plans to avenge Chakari’s death by coaxing an aged Bancharam to sign a monthly pension agreement of Rs.400 until his death in exchange of his land rights after his passing. Unfortunately for Nakari, Bancharam displays an inexhaustible life force. He continues to survive beyond anybody’s wildest imagination while Nakari starts to show signs of cardiac dysfunctions. A significant portion of the film shows how Bancharam, despite his apparent intention to die, only seems to get better while Nakari and his family plan and pray for his death. After coercing him to commit suicide as an emergency measure, Nakari finally goes to Bancharam’s house the next morning to discover that Bancharam is still alive. As Bancharam narrates how the birth of his great-grandson prevented him from taking his life, little does he realize that Nakari had already breathed his last even before he started his story, bringing justice and closure to a multigenerational saga.

Evidently, a parable on greed, oppression, and the common man’s resistance, it is narrative time in Bancharamer Bagan that provides a critical engagement with history. Although the historical markers are blurry (and intentionally so), the movement of time has clear spatial and historical signifiers of a specific region. We move from the 19^th century colonial period to an unspecified late colonial period, but it is not the homogeneous empty time that Sinha is interested in. It is not a coincidence that permanent settlement is specifically invoked by the British magistrate in his decisive chiding of Chakari, or an industrial township briefly appears in the story as Nakari assumes power. Sinha also wastes no time in signaling this is also a Bengali history, not merely through the rural plenitude or the language itself, but also the use of numerous Bengali dialects (which ironically hints at an unspecified place as Bancharam and the village doctor speak completely different dialects). It is this grounding in history that almost inadvertently turns the process of land expropriation from a universal articulation of human greed to historical machinations.

While Chakari’s despotic, feudal measures of forceful seizure prove unsuccessful, Nakari recognizes how colonial law is an ally for the zamindars. Most of his activities involve legally leveraging transactional documents in a society where transactions were dominantly informal. It is no coincidence that Ranajit Guha, in his groundbreaking study on peasant insurgency, noted how rebel peasants often burned the paper documents once they took over the zamindar’s possession, suggesting an intuitive understanding of colonial power.

The osmosis of historical time is not limited to the temporal arc of the story but permeates at the granular level of the diegesis. A recurrent aspect of Sinha’s invocation of a social milieu is to assign significant meaning even to minor characters. In this context, the character of Pala is a typical example, who habitually steals his food supplies from Bancharam’s opulent garden. This descriptive detail of village life suddenly acquires historical meaning when Bancharam’s desire to die puts Pala’s life in jeopardy; after all, the garden’s excess produce provides Pala’s family with the necessary means of sustenance. The plentiful garden takes on the appearance of a village commons, where the porous boundaries of property rights have not yet succumbed to the rigid rules of capitalist enclosure. Similar is the case for the village doctor, a character entirely missing from Chakari’s regime but is prominently present during the tenure of an ageing Nakari.

Needless to say, from Phani Majumdar’s Doctor (1940) to Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anuradha (1966), the village doctor appears in Indian cinema as an out-of-place figure of modernity. Here, deployed for comic purposes, the benevolent doctor (Rabi Ghosh) is clearly caught between a rock and a hard place as he can neither ascertain the source of Bancharam’s vitality nor treat Bancharam’s occasional sickness under Nakari’s watchful eyes. The idealism of the profession, often deployed in melodrama to resolve historical tensions between a feudal rural space and a modern sensibility, here becomes comic material.

The otherwise secular time of the parable, however, gets ruptured by the figure of the ghost (Bramhadaitya in Bengali). Chakari, upon his death, is shown to be roaming in Bancharam’s garden, observing his son’s sly moves and lamenting Bancharam’s survival. He even manages to appear in material form in front of Bancha to scare him for a brief few seconds. If the ghost reminds anyone of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969, Satyajit Ray), it would hardly be a surprise because Ray’s influence on this film is further palpable in some of the rhyming dialogues, asserting a comedic lineage.

However, there is a fundamental difference. In Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, the ghost appears only when Goopy literally rides out of history to enter the realm of the fairytale as he is banished on a donkey from his village. In Bancharamer Bagan, the ghost has little influence on the narrative. Its more important function is to open up a temporal portal in the narrative through which enchanted time can enter and shape the telling of history. This is where the parable reveals its postcolonial nature, where secular and enchanted time coexist in fiction without blending into each other. It only affirms “the heterotemporality” of the postcolonial world. As Dipesh Chakraborty reminds us, it is postcolonial fiction, and not secular historiography, that has the temporal malleability to dwell in “immiscible temporalities.” The ghost in the film is the irruption of another time, an enchanted time that modernity has not been able to subsume. This particular temporality only grows to be more prominent as Bancharam’s vitality approximates a super-human quality, suggesting that we are perhaps now dealing with what Tithi Bhattacharya calls “uncanny histories,” a history rife with heterotemporality.

The irruption of enchanted time is never far away from Sinha’s other parables, legible in the servant’s figure in Galpo Holeo Satti (who literally appears and disappears out of nowhere like a guardian angel) or the awakening of the animals in Safed Haathi for the final revenge. But those irruptions are often firmly integrated into the time of the story as well as its causality- particularly evident in the servant’s central role in solving the family’s many-pronged feud in Galpo Holeo Satti. The ghost in Bancharamer Bagan, however, is a constant reminder of a time out-of-joint, which becomes more obvious when it is read as a figural reworking of the ghost in Hamlet. Instead of a tragic cipher, however, here it serves a comic intention in its hilarious incompetence. If there is a hint of deus ex machina in Nakari’s sudden heart attack, it is still firmly within the framework of heterotemporality, where such interventions do not seem incompatible with historical justice.

If parable was Sinha’s preferred form of storytelling, Bancharamer Bagan is perhaps the apogee of that process. It is Sinha’s attention to a historical time that only fiction can bring forth that makes the film worthy of distinction in his oeuvre, an achievement perhaps never to be repeated, despite his later excursions into similar territories like Ajab Gayer Ajab Katha (1998). It is also a kind of cinema that has forever disappeared from the Bengali scene, sporadically resurfacing as pastiche in films like Bhooter Bhabisyat (2012, Anik Dutta) or Ballabhpurer Roopkatha (2022, Anirban Bhattacharya). Much like the Ghost of Chakari, Tapan Sinha, remains at present a spectral observer of a cinematic tradition’s slow demise.

References:

Bazin, Andre. 1971. “De Sica: Metteur en scène.” In What is Cinema? Vol. II. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 61-76.

Biswas, Moinak. 2011. “Incomplete Testimonies: Tapan Sinha.” Journal of the Moving Image 10, 115-121.

Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2024. Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal. Durham: NC: Duke University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Guha, Ranajit. 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

 

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