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Ethics and Moral Lessons in Tapan Sinha’s Apanjan

October 22, 2024 | By

Apanjan, released in 1968, raised questions regarding the role of the older generation in a rapidly changing India. What makes Tapan Sinha’s Apanjan a must-watch today is that it is a means of waking up and remembering a time when human faults were forgiven in the light of ‘one’s own.’ Michelangelo Paganopoulos writes on Apanjan  focusing on the moral tale of the film and its relevance in today’s society.

Apanjan lobby card

Apanjan lobby card (Pic: KL Kapoor Productions)

Introduction

Apanjan (or ‘One’s Own People’) was released in 1968, winning several Bengal Film Journalists’ Association Awards and the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Bengali in 1969. The film’s narrative was based on a story written by Indra Mitra, author of Mere Apne, later remade by Gulzar in 1971. Both Apanjan and Mere Apne raised questions regarding the role of the older generation in a rapidly changing India afflicted by violence and poverty. Both films reflected upon motherhood projected onto the ideal sacred face of the old archetypal ‘mother’ (as most famously brought down to earth in Devi (Satyajit Ray, 1960) and Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1958)), among other films of the time. They showed how motherhood enjoyed a special status in Indian society. Traditionally, in ritual life such as the celebrations of Kali depicted in Ray’s Devi, the Jungian archetype of motherhood or ‘Devi’ is both revealed and exploited. This central sacrificial role given to motherhood both formulates and emerges from the Indian collective consciousness in rituals and plays, often projected in the role of the elderly widowed ‘auntie’, such as the role of Indir Thakrun in Satyajit’s Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), or the roles of Anandi Devi in Mere Apne and Anandamoyee in Apanjan, respectively. This article offers a film analysis of Apanjan in three parts, following the film’s structure in which each thematic unit begins with a song. The article is written in honour of Tapan Babu, focusing on the moral tale of his most famous film and its relevance to today’s world society.

Song I

Give us your offerings
And help some lives survive
God will give you His blessings
He will fulfil your wishes

This is a traditional village offering song sung by the husband (comedian Chinmoy Roy) of the main character, ‘Auntie’ Anandamoyee (Chhaya Devi). Cut to a middle shot of Latika, looking focused, as if she is preparing herself for a performance before walking onto a theatre stage. She is the young wife of Montu. He has just brought his ‘Auntie’ Anandamoyee from the village to the big city.  The moment Montu enters the room with Anandamoyee, Latika’s serious look immediately changes to that of a welcoming hostess. “Please come in, Auntie. Please come in. How could we have let you stay alone in the village,” she asks rhetorically, smiling. She then immediately begins her prepared performance. She shows respectful, but distant politeness to Anandamoyee, offering her welcoming sweets to enjoy after her long trip from the village, and acknowledges her authority by symbolically touching her feet. But she notices that the ‘Auntie’ does not wear any shoes. Later in the scene, she does not forget to instruct Anandamoyee, among other things, to wear sandals in Kolkata and not walk barefoot. The reason she gives is to protect the baby from germs picked on the street. “God won’t get upset with you, Auntie,” she exclaims.

Following Latika’s opening performance, the middle-class couple get into real business. As the film unfolds, it becomes apparent that they do not offer hospitality because of traditional family values, or because they honestly care about Anandamoyee. Rather, they invited ‘Auntie’ to their home to use her for free babysitting, the new occupation of the time. Like any busy modern couple, Latika and Montu are always engaged elsewhere and have little time for family matters. Latika may have an MA in Economics but has little time to educate her own child about life itself, which Anandamoyee finds strange. Although Latika gets offended when Anandamoyee shows her amazement, she needs auntie to care for her child, and so, she continues with her performance. Anandamoyee realises that she must also change to keep up with the times. She asks for a salary and to eat separately from the family from now on. If any other family comes with a better offer, her nephew should know that she will move out according to the rules of the bargain. After she receives her first salary, she thanks her nephew and tells him not to worry about her moving in with another family. “After all, you are my near ones, son,” she ironically responds, whilst gracefully accepting the 20 rupees.

Song II

The eyes are in search of light
The heart is in search of the light
There’s no light and hope near me
The heart and soul waiting for that ray of light
The heart is in search of the light

A song by a gang of kids can be heard in the night streets of Kolkata. Latika complains to her husband about the noise from the street and the trouble these youngsters make. Her husband, who can’t sleep after the uncomfortable confrontation with his auntie over her salary the previous evening, complains (hypocritically) “Only God can help this country.” Meanwhile, Anandamoyee, lying awake in her small bedroom, listens to the song through her window. It brings back memories of when people were honest and humane to each other. She is even reminded of her late husband, a theatre actor who kept running away with the charity money. He was not a bad man but had the heart of a child, she thinks. She feels nostalgic lying in bed, alone in the big city, listening to the words of the song coming from the street.

The following morning, she breaks out of the imprisonment and isolation of the ‘safety’ of the middle-class house she was taken into and, like a child, begins exploring the neighbourhood. The first two people Anandamoyee meets are children (‘shishu’), a brother and a sister, wandering around the neighbourhood in search of food. She asks them where their parents are and if they have food or shelter. Anandamoyee offers them all the food she has on her. Instantly, she becomes a granny to them. From this moment on, until the very end of the film, the children keep following her. They are like lost children, or orphans who have finally found a home. Anandamoyee is more than happy to take care of them, rather than being a paid nanny to her nephew’s family. On the streets of modern Kolkata, Anandamoyee is astonished at the manner young men talk to each other as well as to her; she even witnesses a street fight. She calls for help, but no one comes. So, she investigates herself and becomes close to a gang leader called Rabi (played by the charismatic Swarup Dutta). She learns about the law of the street and moves in with the two orphaned siblings and Rabi’s gang in a shelter in the slum. Gradually, she becomes a granny to the gang, a gathering of misfits, thieves, thugs, and petty criminals. They are all orphaned and abandoned just like the two siblings who keep following her. They are all in ‘search of the light’, as their song goes, wandering the streets of Kolkata at night in search of a home that is never there. It’s long gone, swallowed by modernity. These are Anandamoyee’s ‘own people’ as the film’s title suggests.

Song III

When your beloved one looks at you
The world looks beautiful
Love has made many people famous/ Many people famous
You look at me and blush
Love has made many people famous/ Many people famous
On these wild paths hearts just wander
Flowers blossom in the garden and there is a carnival in the sky
Waking away all night came to an end
Look at me, O blushing wife
You blush and cover your face with the veil
Love has made many people famous/ Many people famous

Anandamoyee makes homemade ghugni for the young men of Rabi’s gang. They all sit down by the fire to share it. The abandoned shelter in the slum suddenly feels like a home, it becomes one. The gang members finally find the light they have been searching for. Like brothers, they sit right next to Anandamoyee, listening enchanted to her stories of the past as if she were their grandmother. She tells them the story of a child who asked his mother where he came from, and the mother replied, “From my heart.” One of the gang members, an educated but unemployed young man, explains that this story is from a Rabindranath Tagore poem. They all stare at each other showing a mutual understanding beyond words and appearances. The young men can feel the words of Rabindranath’s poem. Anandamoyee remembers one of the songs sung to her by her long-gone husband.  In a moment of enlightenment, in the homely light of the fire, Anandamoyee tells them: “Really children, when I see your angelic faces, I wish I had children like you.”

Apanjan lobby card

Apanjan lobby card (Pic: KL Kapoor Productions)

Anandamoyee finds sanctuary in the nostalgia of songs of a long gone past when people were honest and innocent despite their faults, a time when relationships were an instinctive everyday matter of belonging. Belonging to each other and effortlessly taking care of each other; not a calculated matter of modern duty, but an ethical matter of truly caring. In the film, Tapan Sinha juxtaposes the oases of these songs of a lost home with narrative images and sounds of violence, the political manipulation of youth, poverty, and abandonment of children on the streets. The songs are like islands of happiness despite the poverty of village life. For instance, “Love has made many people famous” is juxtaposed against the calculations of professional modern politics which hijacked Nehru’s vision of modern India.

Although not as angry as Satyajit Ray’s and Mrinal Sen’s respective ‘Calcutta Trilogies’, or Tapan Sinha’s own Sagina Mahato (1970) and Ekhoni (1971), all of which reflect upon youth unemployment and political corruption leading to explosions of police violence and student protests throughout India in the 1970s, Apanjan focuses on the impact of modernity on human relations – the dissolution and fragmentation of the traditional family unit, which results in the widespread abandonment of the ‘shishu’ of all ages: from the two young siblings who follow Anandamoyee throughout the film, to the young men of the two rival gangs.

swarup dutta

Swarup Dutta in Apanjan (Pic: Facebook)

As the film unfolds, it becomes apparent that these youngsters are manipulated by local politicians and their interests (in the same way Anandamoyee was taken advantage of by the modern couple who claimed they were her ‘real’ family in the first part of the film), who take advantage of their poverty and social isolation to provoke them into acts of violence. Human relations are calculated and manipulated according to political interests and economic profit, which results in the loss of the collective natural aura of belonging. The cruelty of this loss becomes true to the viewer and the characters at the very tragic end of the film showing Anandamoyee’s accidental death following a fight between the two rival gangs.

Tapan Sinha envisions the two politicians earlier in the film, and later in a foretelling nightmare by the young boy, as two demon caricatures, fake and hypocritical, who control and play the youth as in a marionette theatre, the public realm. The sacrificial death of the ‘auntie’ in the end freezes and counters this manipulative violence. It exposes the two politicians for what they are: demons of modernity.

The final scene dissolves into one of the most heartfelt and hurtful images of neo-realist cinema, as emotionally strong as the ending of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) or Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1956). In tragic irony, the film ends with the image of the orphaned brother and sister, running behind the ambulance that carries the dead body of their adopted granny to the hospital to affirm her death. Few scenes are as heartbreaking as the ending of Apanjan. It is an image of (post)modernity that haunts the viewer beyond the screen.

Chhaya Devi and Swarup Dutta

Chhaya Devi and Swarup Dutta in Apanjan (Pic: Facebook)

Conclusion

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt unfolded the evolutionary patterns in the relationship between the private and public realms, the family household and the polis, respectively.

“Under modern circumstances, this deprivation of ‘objective’ relationships to others and of reality guaranteed through them has become the mass phenomenon of loneliness, where it has assumed its most extreme and most anti-human form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world, and where, at any rate, even those excluded from the world could find a substitute in the warmth of the hearth and limited reality of family life.”

Chhaya Devi in Apanjan

Chhaya Devi in Apanjan

One of the arguments posited by the book is that social alienation may result from the replacement of the family unit with the emerging new bureaucratic social structures of professional life. As portrayed in Apanjan, Bengali films released towards the end of the 1960s and through the 1970s portrayed the modern condition and the rise of professionalism and bureaucracy resulting in the breaking of human relations. Since then, ‘modernity’ has long been replaced by a newly emergent hi-tech world society based on emerging networking and communication technologies. Humans have replaced the act of touching with that of ‘safe’ distant viewing. They have replaced feelings and emotions with a globalized form of conduct and contact; the family with an emerging image of a ‘World’; the light of the fire with the neon light of a screen. The new means of social interaction via emerging technologies have eliminated any distinction between the private and public realms. It may be argued that they have enlarged the company-gang world society with its dog-eat-dog mentality in which true human relations have no place, onto a virtual world stage governed by impersonal AI laws of conduct and contact that leaves no forgiveness for human faults. It is an unforgiving robotic space and time where Anandamoyee and her songs of the past have no place, no home. This is what makes Tapan Sinha’s Apanjan a must-watch today – a means of waking up and remembering a time when human faults were forgiven in the light of ‘one’s own’.

 

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Michelangelo Paganopoulos, a scholar with a Film & TV Studies background and a PhD in Social Anthropology, has delved into intriguing topics related to social anthropology and its intersection with film & technology and the broader world society. Currently, he is a member of the ‘Global Inquiries and Social Theory Research Group’ Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang University.
All Posts of Michelangelo Paganopoulos

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