The Impossibility of Love: Three Films of Tapan Sinha

Her remarkable, luminous eyes are fixed upon a man on horseback below

On a moonlit night, a woman stands, only her face visible over the ramparts of a fort. Her remarkable, luminous eyes are fixed upon a man on horseback below, outside the fort-walls. The man looks up at her, silently takes leave, and rides away. The film ends with a pair of lovers parting forever. For many audience members, a film with their favourite stars Uttam Kumar and Arundhati Devi ending in separation was a departure from the usual practice of films ending with the promise “…and they lived happily ever after.”

The film in question is Tapan Sinha’s Jhinder Bandi (1961). In it, Kasturi, the princess of Jharoa, is captivated by Gourishankar impersonating Shankar Singh, the crown prince of Jhind. They have so much in common. He is handsome, dashing, and well-educated; so is she beautiful, graceful, humorous — and educated. Both are strong and determined, generous and truthful; they are equal in wit, courage, and charm. He is also trained in horse-riding and sword-fighting; she, in music and art. Both characters reflected certain ideals and aspirations dear to middle-class audiences of the time. The film is set in the previous century, but the hero and the heroine are endowed with qualities the present viewer would recognize and identify with. Also, the protagonists speak in a contemporary urban-literary Bangla; the audience might think they are watching some period piece but what is unfolding in front of them is a reflection of their dreams and desires.

He is handsome, dashing, and well-educated; so is she beautiful, graceful, humorous

Without breaking moral codes, the princess and the commoner convey their fascination for each other. But a class code is broken, as a commoner and a princess fall in love in a clandestine manner. This is not at all new; fairy tales and folktales often break social codes: the wood-gathering girl marries the prince or the son of the washerman, the princess. But the difference is that, here, the commoner belongs to the present times. The princess by comparison is timeless, iconic. It is as if the film demonstrates love as something between the real and the imaginary. She belongs to the genre of recreated past narrative of medieval India made popular by innumerable stories, plays and paintings.

Soumitra Chatterjee and co-actor in Jhinder Bandi (Source – Abesh Das, Pic Courtesy – Sukumar Roy)

Jhinder Bandi mixes past and present, as it shows the past as a repository of romantic love, but unavailable to the contemporary man. The woman in this discourse is more iconic, belonging to the past, ill at ease at becoming modern. In Jhinder Bandi and two other films in discussion here, it becomes obvious that Tapan Sinha is remarkably aware of what he is doing while working on the inter-relationship between present and past and while repeating a theme: the impossibility of love.

The models of womanhood that were put before girls in the 50s and 60s often emerged out of palaces and forts, where the contemporary upper classes belonged or believed they once did. The training was to be high-born; the most common middle-class practice was to emulate the ‘high-born’ even when in a dire economic state. Girls were trained to become a ‘queen’ in someone’s heart and household. “Hamari beti raaj karegi” could be a latter-day Hindi film song, but it is also a centuries-old popular desire that parents pass on to the girl child. On the other hand, many men grew up being addressed as or named ‘Raja’, ‘Raja-babu’, or ‘Badshah’. Young boys were filled with the deep desire of getting a princess for a wife someday. The birth of modernity is peppered with the rudiments of the monarchical.

The middle-class Gourishankar has been raised in such a way as to be totally prepared to act as a proxy prince as if he has been groomed to play that role. Romantic and adventurous, he agrees to the plan without any idea how he would get attached to the affairs of Jhind. Now, true to his promise, and despite his growing love for Kasturi, he finds Shankar Singh after fighting the evil Mayurvahan and his men. Horrified to find Shankar in an inebriated state, he realises Kasturi cannot be happy with this man.

However, now that the true heir to the throne has been found, he must keep his promise to Jhind’s Prime Minister. So, he prepares to leave as quietly as he had come. Kasturi too cannot oppose the court and her people. She chooses the happiness of the collective over that of two individuals. So, on that fateful day, she watches her lover disappear into the dark of the night. She must now marry a duplicate, a fake – a man whose physical features only resemble that of her beloved.

Kasturi chooses the happiness of the collective over that of two individuals

When as young girls we saw Jhinder Bandi, it wasn’t as if we completely identified with Kasturi because of the perfect feudal configuration. Surely this was a familiar model of femininity provided for the self-construction of a girl child in Bengal. But feudal/colonial models were not the only ideals in front of girls of that period. This figure of the woman comes out of the historical novels that recast the past for nationalist reasons; but she is also modern in certain ways, as she is created in modern times. It was not important that she goes back to a man belonging to the past – a man unworthy of her – and that she would now be forever confined to a palace. What is important is that she leans towards a more suitable man, choosing him for herself. This character clearly favoured the contemporary over the past. We were haunted by Kasturi’s eyes looking out of her fortress home, at her lover and beyond.

The novel ‘Jhinder Bandi’ ends on a happy note; deciding how the film would end was not simple. Sinha writes how worried he was about changing his end from that of the novel. Uttam Kumar was the reigning superstar and audiences were not used to seeing this actor meeting with a sorrowful end. Moreover, in this film, ‘matinee idol’ Kumar does not become intimate with the heroine – he does not embrace her or sing a song together. However, the film became a runaway hit.

He sees an old palace and is mesmerized (Soumitra Chatterjee in Kshudhita Pashan)

Perhaps Sinha’s previous film Kshudhita Pashan (1960), made a year earlier, had given him this confidence. In it, he’d introduced the motif of romantic love as an illusion or impossibility. A young Bengali government officer arrives in a coastal town somewhere in Gujarat. He sees an old palace and is mesmerized. The place is said to be haunted and despite everyone’s warning, he decides to take up residence there.

At night, a painting of a woman in an alcove comes alive and he begins to follow her. The hero is completely enamoured with the past, and with the woman who emerges from the painting. It is as if the film is an essay on the thesis being discussed in this article: the source of love is the medieval romance; love is impossible, and the woman, a mere symbol. Arundhati Devi once again acts as a beautiful, graceful, enigmatic woman. She embodies the chimera men run after. The hero (Soumitra Chatterjee) swings between reality and illusion-imagination, which turn out to be his past and memory.

She embodies the chimera men run after (Arundhati Devi and Soumitra Chatterjee in Kshudhita Pashan)

But this memory does not belong to him alone; there are those who have also seen and heard the ghost and have been fascinated. There is one who has lost his sanity; at the same time, he goes around crying out with the warning, “Yeh sab jhoot hai.” (“All this is a lie.”) And there is one who has grown wiser; he studies history and knows that ghosts emerge out of real pasts in order to make some claims on the present that they cannot fulfil. The past beckons to us, but it should only serve to make us stronger and wiser. Then, we need to ride away just as Gourishankar does at the end of Jhinder Bandi. The hero of Kshudhita Pashan becomes so physically ill that he must be sent away.

Uttam Kumar and Arundhati Devi in Jatugriha (Source – Abesh Das, Pic Courtesy – Sukumar Roy)

But women are not mere symbols; they are not to be enclosed within photo frames, tucked away within palace walls. Nor are they to be banished to desolate ruins. Three years later, Tapan Sinha set a film Jatugriha (1964) in contemporary Calcutta. The protagonists are a modern couple: Satadal (Uttam Kumar) is an architect and Madhuri (Arundhati Devi once more) used to teach in a school, when they meet, fall in love and get married. They planned to have a home, and he gets busy designing a perfect (but not too expensive) house.

But this idyllic marriage between two ‘perfect beings’ begins to turn sour. She says she feels guilty because she cannot bear him a child; her guilt turns her into an aggressive woman, touchy and easily aroused. Gradually, she begins to turn cold towards him. He says not having a child is not a problem, but he cannot explain why he is so irritable, why he cannot be sympathetic to her mood swings. His professional life is not going as he desires. That could be a reason, but that is not something that he admits to himself or offers to her as a reason.

They belong to the upper-middle-class strata. Their house is filled with all the things the middle class requires and covets. But they seem attached to nothing; there is not an item in the decorated rooms that mean anything to them. We see the couple touching objects and using them as if those did not matter or did not exist. This is exemplified in the breakfast table, the one time the husband and wife are always together (we do not see them partaking of any other meal together). But he hardly looks at what he is eating.

He hardly looks at what he is eating

A marriage is a gain, but in the modern period, it often does not endure as a gainful experience. One has lost the past; the present perhaps is attainable, but only for a while, and then it slips out of reach. This is because all the materialism involved in life and marriage never adds up to a complete experience.  It is quite interesting how much materialism is related to the institution of marriage. It had always been in ancient times, during the medieval era and now in modern capitalist days. But it seems that today is the age of plenty and not plenitude. So, when Satadal and Madhuri begin to think back on their marriage, the first thing they remember is the house they wanted to build for themselves. And at the end when the marriage collapses, Satadal wants to offer it to a junior colleague Supriyo (Anil Chatterjee).

Satadal wants to offer it to a junior colleague Supriyo

Supriyo is poor; he can hardly make two ends meet. But he is happy because he still belongs, in his mind and spirit, to that generation that was not acquisitive, that was ready to share whatever little one had. It is quite significant that the family seems to have a song by Rabindranath Tagore as the family motto: “I know I must give my all – wealth, my impoverishment and flaws.” So, when Satadal makes his offer, Supriyo can, without any hesitation, refuse a gain he has neither worked for nor desired. Many Indian films of that period paint such pictures that might seem a romanticization of poverty but take a closer look, and one can see this as a sign of acute discomfiture about the new age, with its sudden proliferation of materialism. It can also be that the filmmakers saw through the fact that the changes were imposed from above. Nehruvian development was no doubt necessary for the country; but the models of development were imported from outside and not adequately worked upon indigenous situations and needs. People like Satadal were swept away by the dream; but the dream causes crises in their private lives. The first to suffer were the women.

When life is banal and petty, it is time again to seek pleasure in the past. Satadal visits Bardhaman with his juniors and is thrilled to see the terracotta temples. He has not been so happy and lighthearted for a long time. The past immediately is a repository of happiness and plenitude, the present is empty from within.

Satadal and Madhuri meet after many years

Jatugriha ends with the famous scene in the railway station, where Satadal and Madhuri have met after many years. They realise that they still bear a lot of what they had started with. After they have gone through the full gamut of reminiscing the past, Madhuri asks, “How did we lose all that?” And Satadal answers almost too eagerly, “Not everything is lost. We could start again.” It is the woman who has fully borne the brunt of the dystopia of the present and so she is gripped by fear. “But the problems we had then are still not all lost (erased).” That is more than apparent to the audience. Each had blamed the other for their ‘emptiness within’. Now that they are alone, they have not been able to fill that earlier void. They have met with their incomplete fractured selves – nothing has changed. Madhuri realises quite wisely that two incomplete halves cannot complement each other. They are going to different destinations – their respective trains have opposite vectors – visually. And so, as the trains pull out of the station and each look out of the window (the trains are on adjacent platforms), they look with such longing at a past that once held such promise that to them, represents the last opportunity to be happy. Their lives have come full circle: the present is dovetailing into the past without any possibility of a meaningful future.

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