Acid Rock, Mrinal Sen and The Seventies
Sharmadip (Toy) Basu The Bengali Marxist film-maker Mrinal Sen’s Kolkata Ekattor, or Calcutta ’71, is celebrated in the genealogy of Indian New Wave cinema as an exemplar of dialectical storytelling. Released in 1972, it comprises four discrete short stories by different authors. In, and through, these narratives, Sen’s directorial gaze seeks to render apparent the ‘lie of freedom’—a powerful ideological orientation vis-à-vis 1947 that grounded Marxist criticism in India at the time. And like artistic productions emanating from this ideology, Calcutta ’71 is a scathing class-critique of the Indian nation-state’s diseased underbelly, during its immediate pre-natal past, and in the first two decades of its post-natal being. For someone unfamiliar with this second installment of Sen’s famous Calcutta Trilogy, the pedigree of the film would make it appear an unlikely point of departure for an essay that seeks to pursue the subcultural life of Sixties’ American music in the city. But Calcutta ’71 helps me enframe a couple of my concerns. How are the class relations worked out in which American music is represented to be embedded in mid-seventies India by a Marxist-Realist filmmaker, who claims a high degree of correspondence between representation-of-reality and reality-of-representation for much of his oeuvre? In the process, can we also chart a certain new cultural-musical subjectivity animated by re-articulations of Sixties American music in the city during the 1970s? Positioning Rock Music in a Realist Narrative: Each of the four constituent stories that comprise Calcutta ‘71 is grounded in a different decade, sequentially, from 1930s onwards. Each story follows disparate denizens of the erstwhile imperial capital, caught in different stations in life. Nonetheless, voluntarily or by ascription, the characters are also subjects of that of much fraught category: the genteel bhadralok class Training its critical lens on subjects of this entropic category, Calcutta’71 begins with a depiction of the dehumanizing compulsions of urban poverty in colonial Calcutta of 1930s. The second story addresses the utter vacuity of this genteel moral apparatus against the backdrop of the 1943 Bengal Famine. Sited in a compartment of a 1950s Calcutta-bound suburban train, the third narrative concerns food-crisis and the ad-hoc violence unleashed on the under-classes by self-appointed protectors of bourgeois civility. And then, follows the closing movement of Calcutta ’71. Set against the backdrop of far-left political tumult, brutal state-repression, and abject living conditions in the city at the close of the Sixties—something that would putatively find its democratic resolution with the election of the Left Front coalition government to the state legislature in 1977—it is this last story that sets my reflections here. Here, one is made to confront the total disjunct of the urban elite—of the corrupt politicians that this class yielded—from the life-worlds of the people that they supposedly represented. To set the tone of this narrative at the very outset, Sen deploys a signal audio-visual maneuver. If the day-train headed towards Calcutta provided the spatial and sonic setting for the third story in the film, the fourth begins abruptly on the downstroke of electric guitars in unison, enveloped by a 4/4 backbeat being pumped out of a drum-set, and flashing strobe-lights against the night sky. Thus, at the drop of a single frame, the audience is yanked out of the local-train and its concatenated rhythm, out of the 1950s, and launched straight into Calcutta of 1971, into the sprawling gardens of an elite hotel. In terms of the city’s present-day spatial layout, the hotel could be located anywhere on Park Street and its adjoining areas: once the heart of colonial Calcutta’s ‘White Town,’ and now the preeminent site of postcolonial desire and colonial nostalgia. There, an evening party is underway. The sonic cue of drums and guitars on which the film’s final movement begins is sourced to a four-man Rock band, in situ. From a corner-stage on the lawns the band churns out a stirring up-tempo jam (composed by Ananda Shankar). Its sound invokes similitude with that of the San Francisco bands of the Sixties’ Haight-Ashbury milieu: the sound of Acid-Rock music; typified by bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, etc.; replete, with their characteristic improvisation techniques, mediated by modal Jazz and the influence of Raga music on the latter. Yet, it is striking that no one in the party pays the band any mind; there is no active audience for their music. The cynosure of all eyes, and ears, instead, is Mr. Bannerjee—the industrialist-politician who, we are informed, secured his upward mobility in the class and political ladder by black-marketing food-grains during World War II. In fact, the only time the presence of the band is acknowledged explicitly in the narrative is when Bannerjee, facing the band, claims to his acolyte the credit for having hired them. In the film, Bannerjee is the manifest embodiment of the ‘lie of freedom’ that Mrinal Sen sets out to unmask. He is representative of the anglophilic, postcolonial urban bourgeoisie—that, in Sen’s gaze, merely replaced the British at helm of political power in 1947, while the exploitative structure of the colonial state remained intact in its postcolonial guise. Comfortably sequestered from the blighted everyday life of the masses, the field of power that Bannerjee defines cannibalizes everything in its ambit. It renders human relationships hollow and evacuates all revolutionary potential from art. It is an ideology critique. Hypocrisy of the urbanity and other concomitant sins drip from almost every statement that Bannerjee and the other partiers utter. Their crudity gets gratingly heightened against Sen’s pivotal use of montages over events at the hotel. Apposing documentary-stills and moving-images of malnourished bodies, of political protest and State-violence, frames with only verbal text and communist iconography, these montages act as the mottled mirror of reality to the phantasmatic world that the party defines. Its worth noting though that each time such a montage takes off, and then returns to back to the party, it does so via the Rock band. The camera cuts to exclusive shots of the stage and tight close-ups of the