{"id":9100,"date":"2024-10-13T06:30:48","date_gmt":"2024-10-13T01:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/?p=9100"},"modified":"2024-10-14T12:52:43","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T07:22:43","slug":"bancharamer-bagan-tapan-sinha-between-parable-and-history-in-the-postcolony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/bancharamer-bagan-tapan-sinha-between-parable-and-history-in-the-postcolony\/","title":{"rendered":"Bancharamer Bagan: Between Parable and History in the Postcolony"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Satyajit

Satyajit Ray discussing with Tapan Sinha (Courtesy: Abesh Das, Photograph: Sukumar Roy)<\/p><\/div>\n

Tapan Sinha\u2019s 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<\/em> and metteur en sc\u00e8ne<\/em>\u00a0is 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.<\/p>\n

Sinha, on the other hand, given his industrial training in London\u2019s Pinewood studios, began his life as a technician before moving on to the director\u2019s 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 sc\u00e8ne<\/em>, an in-between figure who dabbled in faithful adaptations of Bengali literature, for whom textual description always found precedence over authorial vision.<\/p>\n

In the absence of the formal bravura typical of an auteur<\/em>, perhaps a method of tracking Sinha\u2019s 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\u2019s realism, while responsive to the tremors of Bengali society, was an \u201cincomplete engagement\u201d with the contemporary political landscape, evident in his emphasis on individual moral failures over analytical dissections of the social.<\/p>\n

\"Rabi

Rabi Ghosh and others in Galpo Holeo Satti<\/em> (Source – Abesh Das, Pic Courtesy – Sukumar Roy)<\/p><\/div>\n

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 \u201cpendulation of the soul,\u201d 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 <\/em>(1966) or children\u2019s adventure, e.g., Safed Haathi <\/em>(1978). However, in these films, Sinha\u2019s moral predispositions are somewhat transhistorical, tinged with a lament for tradition \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\"Manoj

Manoj Mitra in Banchharamer Bagan<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

This is where Bancharamer Bagan <\/em>(1980) should be seriously considered an anomaly in Sinha\u2019s oeuvre. Of course, one can find a shadow of Sinha\u2019s Harmonium <\/em>(1976) in Bancharamer Bagan<\/em>, where an object travels across history to narrate tales of moral decay and redemption. Yet, Harmonium <\/em>is perhaps more interested in creating dramatic hyperlinks than a critical consideration of historical time. The singularity of Bancharamer Bagan<\/em> comes from this tryst with history. It is a comic parable that genuinely locates itself within a \u2018Bengali\u2019 history.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

\"Manoj

The tyrant zamindar, Chakari (Dipankar De), wants to usurp the garden<\/p><\/div>\n

Nakari, a firm believer in nonviolent expropriation, manipulates legal loopholes for his land-grab schemes. He plans to avenge Chakari\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"Nirmal

Nakari coaxing an aged Bancharam to sign a monthly pension agreement<\/p><\/div>Evidently, a parable on greed, oppression, and the common man\u2019s resistance, it is narrative time in Bancharamer Bagan <\/em>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 19th<\/sup> 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 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

While Chakari\u2019s 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\u2019s possession, suggesting an intuitive understanding of colonial power.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Dipankar De, Nirmal Kumar and Manoj Mitra in Bancharamer Bagan<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s opulent garden. This descriptive detail of village life suddenly acquires historical meaning when Bancharam\u2019s desire to die puts Pala\u2019s life in jeopardy; after all, the garden\u2019s excess produce provides Pala\u2019s 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\u2019s regime but is prominently present during the tenure of an ageing Nakari.<\/p>\n

\"Robi

Rabi Ghosh, as the village doctor<\/p><\/div>\n

Needless to say, from Phani Majumdar\u2019s Doctor <\/em>(1940) to Hrishikesh Mukherjee\u2019s Anuradha <\/em>(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\u2019s vitality nor treat Bancharam\u2019s occasional sickness under Nakari\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"Bancharamer

Rabi Ghosh and Dipankar De<\/p><\/div>\n

The otherwise secular time of the parable, however, gets ruptured by the figure of the ghost (Bramhadaitya<\/em>\u00a0in Bengali)<\/em>. Chakari, upon his death, is shown to be roaming in Bancharam\u2019s garden, observing his son\u2019s sly moves and lamenting Bancharam\u2019s 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 <\/em>(1969, Satyajit Ray), <\/em>it would hardly be a surprise because Ray\u2019s influence on this film is further palpable in some of the rhyming dialogues, asserting a comedic lineage.<\/p>\n

However, there is a fundamental difference. In Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, <\/em>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, <\/em>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 \u201cthe heterotemporality\u201d 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 \u201cimmiscible temporalities.\u201d 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\u2019s vitality approximates a super-human quality, suggesting that we are perhaps now dealing with what Tithi Bhattacharya calls \u201cuncanny histories,\u201d a history rife with heterotemporality.<\/p>\n

\"Tapan

Tapan Sinha and Rabi Ghosh on the sets of Galpo Holeo Satti <\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

The irruption of enchanted time is never far away from Sinha\u2019s other parables, legible in the servant\u2019s figure in Galpo Holeo Satti <\/em>(who literally appears and disappears out of nowhere like a guardian angel) or the awakening of the animals in Safed Haathi <\/em>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\u2019s central role in solving the family\u2019s many-pronged feud in Galpo Holeo Satti. <\/em>The ghost in Bancharamer Bagan<\/em>, 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. <\/em>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\u2019s sudden heart attack, it is still firmly within the framework of heterotemporality, where such interventions do not seem incompatible with historical justice.<\/p>\n

If parable was Sinha\u2019s preferred form of storytelling, Bancharamer Bagan <\/em>is perhaps the apogee of that process. It is Sinha\u2019s 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 <\/em>(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 <\/em>(2012, Anik Dutta) or Ballabhpurer Roopkatha <\/em>(2022, Anirban Bhattacharya). <\/em>Much like the Ghost of Chakari, Tapan Sinha, remains at present a spectral observer of a cinematic tradition\u2019s slow demise.<\/p>\n

References: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Bazin, Andre. 1971. \u201cDe Sica: Metteur en sc\u00e8ne.<\/em>\u201d In What is Cinema? Vol. II. <\/em>Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 61-76.<\/p>\n

Biswas, Moinak. 2011. \u201cIncomplete Testimonies: Tapan Sinha.\u201d Journal of the Moving Image <\/em>10, 115-121.<\/p>\n

Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2024. Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal. <\/em>Durham: NC: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. <\/em>Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.<\/p>\n

Guha, Ranajit. 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency. <\/em>New Delhi: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

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