TRIBUTE TO MRINAL SEN
Mrinal Sen made his first film in 1955, the same year his contemporary Satyajit Ray made his illustrious debut. Pather Panchali made Ray an instant sensation. Overshadowed by other popular films, Sen’s Raat Bhore sank without a trace.
It took Sen until 1959 to make a second movie. Neel Akasher Neechey, about an immigrant Chinese peddler’s bond with a nationalist Bengali woman, was a hit, garnering praise from both Jawaharlal Nehru and the Communist Party. Though he later expressed embarrassment about its sentimentality, it launched a remarkable career. Between 1960 and 2002, Sen directed 25-odd features, films as various as the devastating Akaler Sandhane and the cheeky Bhuvan Shome. He handled adivasi colonial drama (Mrigayaa) as comfortably as Naxalite politics (the Calcutta Trilogy) or middle-class morality (Ek Din Pratidin). He was avidly political but toed no party line, and though inspired by literature, was more interested in the episodic form than in narrative.
Born in 1923 to a lawyer in Faridpur (now in Bangladesh), Sen moved to Calcutta in 1940 to attend Scottish Church College. His subject was physics, but politics and literature drew him more. Jobless, he discovered the Imperial (now National) Library, where he spent 10 hours a day for five years, teaching himself many things, including cinema. He engaged in the vibrant Marxist addas of the time, watched plays at the Indian People’s Theatre Association (meeting Ritwik Ghatak there), and became a regular at the Calcutta Film Society formed in 1947 by Ray and Chidananda Dasgupta, though he couldn’t afford the fee.
Sen’s career had a lifelong openness. New routes excited him more than the well-trodden path, even if this meant losing his way occasionally. Inspired by watching The 400 Blows in Bombay in 1965, for example, Sen adopted the French New Wave’s jump cut, voiceover, stills and freeze frames into his next film, Akash Kusum—triggering an infamous public spat with Ray. His politics could be fearlessly direct. He was thrilled with a German critic’s words about Calcutta 71: “This is a film which is not afraid to be taken as a pamphlet.” But he would never do it because it was expected of him. In later years, when asked why the dead servant boy’s father never slaps the callous, casteist employers in his masterful Kharij, Sen apparently said, “He did. He slapped all of us. Didn’t you feel it?”
We did, Mr Sen, we did.