Tapan Sinha: The Humanist Filmmaker

Tapan Sinha was the least celebrated of the renowned directors in West Bengal, but he occupied a place in the hearts and minds of the people who admired his craft and who resonated with the emotional core of his films. They understood the language of his cinema and accepted him as their own.

Critics, however, were hard put to slot Sinha – the argument implicit in their disapproval was that his films were loved by the masses and therefore could not be ‘art’. Even his films that received National Awards have not been critically acclaimed or academically reviewed.

Perhaps it was because my uncle was a humanist and had no hesitation in calling a spade a spade. Perhaps it was because his films juxtaposed stark reality with pristine beauty, and showed the beauty of life amidst its strife. Perhaps it was because he could capture Bengali society, both contemporary and from the days gone by.  As the late Rituparno Ghosh remarked: “Tapan Sinha was denied the throne he richly deserved. Perhaps because his movies were popular. The overwrought Bengali audience considered mass appeal the enemy of art. They believe that the artist who can relinquish the seduction of popularity is a real artist. They then take upon themselves the august task of taking that art to the audience. Tapan Sinha never cared for such pieties.”

For my uncle, as it was for Satyajit Ray, films were only ‘good’ or ‘bad’. He did not care for the demarcation between ‘art’ and ‘commercial’; the language of his film-making helped him communicate easily with his audience, and that is all that mattered to him.

Early influences

Young Tapan Sinha

Perhaps this was because of his childhood spent in Murshidabad and Bhagalpur where he spent many happy years. My uncle found rhythm and lyricism in everyday life, focusing on the simple joys and sorrows of people; this helped his films connect with the viewers in a way that surpassed that of his contemporaries.

His primary influences were predominantly his parents’ – his literary roots were strengthened thanks to his father, Tridibesh Sinha, who studied Sanskrit literature and explained the essence of the great literary works in a simple manner. His mother, Pramila Devi, revered Rabindranath Tagore, and knew many of his poems and songs by heart. Her maternal grandfather’s family were close to Tagore’s family, and had, in fact, donated the land for the establishment for Santiniketan. Pramila Devi had witnessed the establishment of Viswa Bharati and took great pride in Tagore winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

She was also my uncle’s biggest supporter and was instrumental in helping him realise his potential. Despite the family’s insistence on my uncle becoming an engineer, Pramila Devi quietly helped him pursue his desire to work in films. He was also indebted to her for sending him abroad to learn film-making. Having assisted Jean Renoir earlier, he would hone his craft at the Pinewood Studios, London.

My uncle also loved Calcutta. It was the city in which he lived and worked for more than five decades. His faith in the city with its unique socio-cultural identity expressed itself in verse:

Unpredictable is my journey
Life moves towards light
Heaven knows its eternal bliss
Stars observe all at night

The journey begins

Booklet cover of Ankush

My uncle’s first film was Ankush, a film that was based on Narayan Ganguly’s story, Sainik.  Unfortunately for the fledgling director, the film with an elephant as the central protagonist was not a commercial success. Neither were his next two movies. Failure may have sapped his morale, but his mother’s unconditional support stood him in good stead. [The film is ‘lost’ to the public, since there’s no known print available.]

Despite the failure of his debut film, Sinha still believed in making films on a variety of subjects. He was equally adept at adapting literature to film as he was in filming his own stories. Not many people know that Sinha, acting upon V Shantaram’s request, wrote children’s films (in all Sinha wrote ten stories for his films). It is a measure of his craftsmanship that even children who had never faced the camera before, ‘acted’ brilliantly in them.

The Tagore effect

Tapan Sinha’s awareness of Tagore stemmed from his complete devotion to Tagore, and by understanding his philosophy and the literary work emerging from it. In Atithi, for instance, we find the character of Tarapada an exact manifestation of Tagore’s creation on celluloid. In an article in Caravan, he said, “Tagore was a mind-wanderer, and in his many works, he has pined for being the child of pure nature, the wanderer, even in the midst of the fortuity he was born into and bread in. I have often felt the same, I have often felt like breaking free from norms and forms.”

Kshudhita Pashan was an even more difficult project to conceive from Tagore’s story, almost impossible to transfer intelligently to celluloid. Tapan Sinha carefully built the story, brick by brick, in such a way that the audience experiences the past as if they had travelled there, and comes back to the present with the protagonist. It was his deep understanding of Tagore’s literature that enabled my uncle to recreate it on screen. He had once told me that in order to understand Tagore, one had to read between the lines. It is unfortunate that a deeper analysis of  Kshudhita Pashan has never been attempted. What analyses have been made are mostly shallow and do not reflect upon the craft of filmmaking.

Embarking on the journey to make Kabuliwala was an act of deep courage. Apart from the fact that the audiences preferred the easier entertainment that imaginary worlds could provide, it was also difficult to get clearance from Vishwa Bharati. But producer Ashit Choudhury was a rock-solid support.

Chhabi  Biswas and Tinku Thakur transported the audience to a world in which the audience could experience the filial relationship between an Afghan trader and a little girl. It was an enviable feat.

The effect of music

Tapan Sinha with the Dwarkin Harmonium (Pic: Filmmaker’s Filmmaking – A Documentary by Raja Sen)

Tapan Sinha’s love for music was his mother’s legacy. A good singer herself, Pramila Devi’s father was a classical musician. My uncle, therefore, grew up with an instinctive understanding of music; his maternal grandfather could play many instruments and in later years, had a music room in his house. My uncle loved to sing and continued to learn as and when the opportunity presented itself.

I remember an incident in my maternal grandfather’s house in Murshidabad. During the Pujo celebrations, after the deity was immersed, the villagers gathered to sing and dance in front of the family’s Chandi mandap. As they performed, they continually requested my uncle to sing. That is when it dawned on me that the villagers were well aware that my uncle could sing very well. To many, it might seem that the cultural environment in a village is insignificant; yet, look at the popular songs in his films – they were born out of his exposure to rural Bengal in his childhood. A casual estimate puts the number of songs that he wrote and composed at thirty-five, more than any other director of repute.

His London sojourn had exposed him to Western classical music. It led him to appreciate chamber music, and composers like Bach, Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Chopin and Strauss. His exposure to European and Hollywood films also introduced him to the different facets of filmmaking and the relevance of appropriate background music.

Satyajit Ray discussing with Tapan Sinha (Coutesy: Abesh Das, Photograph: Sukumar Roy)

My uncle was always closely involved with the music in his films. Fellow filmmaker Satyajit Ray encouraged him to compose the music for his films. Like Ray, my uncle also used highly acclaimed classical musicians to create the background music for his films during the initial years of his career. Perhaps his (and Ray’s) transition to composing the music themselves is because it was difficult for them to transfer their imagination to a musician to the extent that each frame becomes relevant to the viewer.

Tapan Sinha’s extraordinary ability to use music suitable to the situation unfolding on screen has been experienced by the viewers of his films, even if critics devalue his contributions. However, it won him the Golden Crown for Best Music (for Harmonium) at the Seoul International Film Festival.

He improvised his music to avoid being trapped into set patterns and used background music to enhance the viewing experience. He was one of the first to use ‘theme music’ effectively; in Jatugriha, for instance, music played a definitive role in delineating the lives of the three couples from different classes in society. In Atithi, he had matured as a music director and the music expresses Tarapada’s mental ecstasy and anguish perfectly. “I do not know if Atithi is my best film,” he had said once, “But I enjoyed making every bit of it.”

In Kshudhita Pashan, he made extensive use of Indian classical music and maestro Ali Akbar Khan’s immense talent to create an auditory experience that conveyed the emotions underlying the story to the viewer.

As he became more comfortable composing music, my uncle melded western classical music with the vast resources of Indian classical music and Rabindra Sangeet.

Tapan Sinha’s multi-faceted talent and skills as a complete filmmaker is evidenced by his vast oeuvre – films based on classic literature, social issues, personal identity, human struggles, and children’s films. His vast body of work, created over five decades of filmmaking, not only brought him audience acceptance and popularity but also fetched him national and international honours and acclaim.  The visionary filmmaker’s legacy has left a lasting impact on Indian cinema and continues to influence contemporary filmmakers.

Kaise kate rajani (Kshudhita Pashan, 1960) Ustad Ali Akbar Khan / Pt. Bhushan / Ustad Amir Khan, Pratima Banerjee

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