{"id":10774,"date":"2026-06-05T19:30:34","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T14:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/?p=10774"},"modified":"2026-06-05T19:30:34","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T14:00:34","slug":"haunted-seduced-and-uncertain-the-cinema-of-anik-dutta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/haunted-seduced-and-uncertain-the-cinema-of-anik-dutta\/","title":{"rendered":"Haunted, Seduced and Uncertain \u2013 the Cinema of Anik Dutta"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Anik

Anik Dutta (Pic: Anik Dutta\/ Facebook)<\/p><\/div>\n

From 27 May 2026 till now, for over a week that Bengali film director Anik Dutta jumped to his death by falling from the roof of a high-rise, the media, social and otherwise, is teeming with personal stories, anecdotes, and gossip. Friends, colleagues, common public \u2013 all have risen to the occasion, sharing their proverbial two cents on a director whose claim to fame happened in 2012 with Bhooter Bhabishyat. <\/em>In the next fourteen years, Dutta made seven films, not always with the regularity of a clockwork. Incidentally, his first film happened a year after the erstwhile regime of West Bengal politics ushered in, and his death coincided with the shift in administration along the corridors of power. We know, already, Dutta was vocal about his resentment of the administrative stranglehold that kept West Bengal at bay for many years, so much so that his films were targeted specifically. At least one film, Bhabishyater Bhoot<\/em> was banned immediately after release for its overtly political tune and no-nonsense resemblance with some of the active super-powers of the then-governance of West Bengal.<\/p>\n

\"Bhooter

Bhooter Bhobishyot<\/em> Poster<\/p><\/div>\n

It is not new that the death of a creative person sparks a curious debate in the public discourse. We have often observed that even artists who were at one time considered bootlickers are suddenly looked upon as prophets selling dream quotients to a class of impoverished and hungry middle-class hypocrites. For that matter, even a difficult novelist of the grade of Kamal Kumar Majumder has been retroactively declared a \u2018visionary\u2019 and artists like Ramkinkar, once dismissed as eccentric, are now celebrated as uncompromising. In this mayhem of gooey adulation from critics, colleagues and general audience, in this celebration of laudatory flatulence, what surfaces is a hagiographic tendency where discussion of art, after death, gives way to discussion of personality.<\/p>\n

It took a centenary celebration of Ritwik Ghatak<\/a> to break out of this blind veneration and present us with a number of critical documentations of his work. This affinity is affecting our critical appreciation of Rituparno Ghosh as well, in equal measure. So, it is no wonder that Anik Dutta\u2019s (whose repute as a filmmaker, or even as a rebel is far less than both Ghatak and Ghosh), sayings, gestures, eccentricities, political opinions, and the much-hyped \u2018uncompromising attitude\u2019 begin to overshadow the actual merit and complexity of the canon of his seven films themselves. In the end, he is being transformed into a symbol of the middle-class Bengali\u2019s own wish fulfillment, its failed attempt to rebel against the daily mortification of basic human values. So, it is no surprise that reels and snippets of Dutta\u2019s comments, interviews and anecdotes of his mercurial temperament are now strewn all over social media as an urban mythology. In the most profound philosophical way, it is an irony that death halts the possibility of change, for good or for worse, based on which side of the fence you are looking from. Mortality transcends a creator, or for that matter any individual, from the ignominies of future failures and contradictions. Death, has this peculiar quality, it freezes a figure into a permanence of benevolence.<\/p>\n

If we look to the West, as we always do to support our arguments, and when we fish for compliments from those who barely care for us, or our culture, we can bring up the case of Vincent van Gogh. In his life, he was never considered important; his paintings were rarely sold\u2013an eccentric more than an extraordinary artist. Post his death, the legend of a suffering genius overtook discussions of his technique, composition, perspectives and an absolute riotous use of colour. Popular culture became obsessed with his severed ear, his narcissistic ambition for self-portraits, his mental breakdowns, and his tragic loneliness. Van Gogh, the man, became more famous than his paintings.<\/p>\n

As stories of Dutta\u2019s loneliness make rounds, and the reshuffling of several actors and actresses who testify his loneliness by their farcical account of suspicious closeness with him, van Gogh\u2019s case comes to mind. As does that of Guru Dutt\u2019s whose self-indulgent melancholy never got his due in his lifetime, only to be turned into the archetype of an uncompromising artist destroyed by a consumerist, insensitive and crude industry. Like Dutt\u2019s, public discourse on Dutta\u2019s has also gravitated toward the cause of his mysterious death than toward his biting wit and razor-sharp dialogues in some of his films.<\/p>\n

This tendency of hagiography and posthumous fascination reflects a bigger truth\u2013an abhorrence for any serious engagement with art in its native form. Discussing merit of an artwork, be it a lengthy feature film or even a short poem, requires intellectual labour, critical openness, readiness to disagree and a fearless mind not to cower in front of names that seem daunting. Discussions on any art form, most often not, need to be inconclusive, yet brutal. It is easier to circulate comments and quotes than to sell ideas, or even, notions. Because art remains to be experienced, a far more difficult job than consuming the life of an artist.<\/p>\n

\"Aparajito

Aparajito – film by Anik Dutta (Pic: Facebook)<\/p><\/div>\n

This is exactly where Dutta\u2019s film Aparajito<\/em> fails. A film that aspires to look at the making of Satyajit Ray\u2019s Pather Panchali<\/em>, doesn\u2019t ever try to engage us with emotional, psychological or creative confusions of Ray, the artist. It takes a simpler path, by abandoning critical reassessment of Ray\u2019s frailties and compromises and relying largely on anecdotes which most Ray aficionados already know. Dutta forgets that reverence is not akin to understanding, Satyajit Ray\u2019s art should not be untouchable. Where Dutta lacks is in his unwillingness to discuss the failures of Ray\u2019s first film as Dutta perceives himself, not the ones Ray narrated eons ago, readily available in print and media. Because, for any art form, and for any artist, it is only when we look at the inconsistencies alongside the genius, the imperfections adorning the brilliance that we may respect art and not worship an artist\u2019s personality.<\/p>\n

While mainstream media and bit-sized filmmakers laud Aparajito<\/em> for exactly the elements for which it should be banished, Dutta\u2019s second film, Aschorjyo Pradee<\/em>p (2013), holds a very conspicuously peculiar place within his filmography. Made at a time when Bengali cinema was reeling under the onslaught of the success of Dev (following the box-office conquests of Challenge<\/em>\u00a0(2009), Le Chakka<\/em>\u00a0(2010),\u00a0Dui Prithibi<\/em>\u00a0(2010), Paglu\u00a0<\/em>(2011) and Challenge 2<\/em>\u00a0(2012)), Dutta\u2019s film looks at the moral anxieties of the Bengali middle-class and its hypocritical extensions. It is a film that exposes the ambition of the morally vulnerable, reducing him to be a slave of consumerist practices and habits. It is a mirror to all of us. Unlike many of its predecessors, say the films of Mrinal Sen (Kharij, <\/em>1982 and Ek din Pratidin<\/em>, 1979 for that matter), Dutta\u2019s film is overtly cynical to the brink of near-absurd. Because the protagonist of the film is too recognizable, the film\u2019s symbolic satire becomes overly uncomfortable for popular success. It still remains an important film in Dutta\u2019s oeuvre as it places the Bengali middle-class in the psychological cage it loves to be trapped into\u2013a contradiction between a morally upright self-image and materialistically insecure self-ambition.<\/p>\n

If Aschorjyo Pradeep <\/em>remains, to me, an \u2018important\u2019 film of Dutta, undoubtedly his most emotionally experienced, nuancedly laced one is the first, Bhooter Bhabishyat<\/em>, made a year earlier. It will not be hasty, if we may say that with this film unleashed a whole genre of ghost stories, and creepy satirical humour started surfacing on the Bengali screen. Make no mistake, there had been some of the most delicately palpable humour in Bengali cinema before Bhooter Bhabishyat <\/em>as well, but none so fiercely witty, dipped in Bengal\u2019s favourite nostalgia sauce. Both these aspects, wit and nostalgia, became causes for Dutta\u2019s undoing in some of his later films.<\/p>\n

Then, why does Bhooter Bhabishyat<\/em> become a pioneer in the context of Bengali cinema as a whole, leave aside Dutta\u2019s own slim filmography? It is in converting nostalgia into a political satire without being sentimental. Bengali non-mainstream cinema, name it \u2018parallel\u2019 or \u2018art\u2019 whatever suits you, at that time, was plagued with a certain sluggishness, thanks to a type of film-making that relied on low-placed, slow-paced dialogue delivery, all indoors with the characters dressed all prim and fine lamenting on the good old days, that there were. Bhooter Bhabishyat <\/em>was a complete anti-thesis of that mindset and cinematic aesthetic by playing with the same cards\u2013indoors and fine dressing. In the film, the dilapidated mansion is an abode of ghosts, not as dreadful creatures that mainstream films tend us to believe, but lovable ones, almost lifted from Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay\u2019s many a delightfully crafted novels targeted for adolescents and teens.<\/p>\n

\"A

A still from Bhooter Bhabishyat<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

In Bengali, the word \u201cbhoot\u201d means both ghost and past, and to Dutta\u2019s credit he dishes out the latter in the guise of the former. The mansion becomes a metaphor, not only of the metro city which once happened to be the political capital of British India, but more importantly, it symbolizes the battered, bruised Bengali identity struggling to keep afloat as the currents of urban modernism slowly and surely have taken the wind out of its sails. Where Dutta succeeds as a disciple of Ray is in incubating his film with similar fantasy musicality of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne <\/em>(1969). The ghosts were catalysts in Ray\u2019s film; Dutta brings them to the centre, and yet, like Ray, he succeeds in weaving a carnival of historically archetypical ghosts (from zamindars to Anglo-Indians, theatre actors, revolutionaries, nawabi retainers, and so on), a cinemascope of Bengal\u2019s heritage culture. While Ray\u2019s film is a comment on the perils of war at a time (1969) when the world was brimming with student revolutions all over, Dutta\u2019s film articulates the post-liberal anxieties of the Bengali psyche.<\/p>\n

Why does Bhooter Bhabishyat <\/em>flourish commercially even though its sharp wit is beyond the scope of the average? It is simply because the audience can relate to the trembling undertone of collective fear for a diminishing cultural, social and political identity. In making a Marwari businessman as the prime villain, Dutta hits the right chord that echoes Bengali sentiments for decades. So, even if, at quite a few times, his brand of humour tends to become shallow caricature of stereotypes, Dutta drives home a point so languidly poised in the Bengali mind\u2013the decadence of the \u2018bhadralok\u2019 at the hands of the \u2018baniya\u2019 Marwari. It is precisely for this reason, when in Aschorjyo Pradeep <\/em>the villain is no longer a racial difference but inherent in the genetic paradigm of the impish \u2018bhadralok\u2019 that the audience finds it too hot to handle.<\/p>\n

The biggest asset of Bhooter Bhabishyat<\/em> is the fact that its director doesn\u2019t lecture much, he shows. If one film goes closest in terms of that directorial philosophy, of not being a prophet, it has to be Barun Babur Bandhu<\/em>, though structurally, thematically and culturally it has nothing similar to Bhooter Bhabishyat.<\/em> Like Aschorjyo Pradeep<\/em> here again it focuses on the erosion of social values and ethics but not with an exaggeration of satire, but with a silence of societal discomfort. Here, Dutta\u2019s political signaling is more inclusive, as if, like Sen\u2019s films ,mentioned earlier, he wishes to go under the knife with melancholic restraint. In the protagonist Barun Babu, Dutta paints the last traces of a fading \u2018Bengali bhadralok\u2019 identity, a reservoir of cultural memory, not as nostalgia but as a crumbling artifice itself.<\/p>\n