Infernal Encounters: Streets and Interpretation in Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta Trilogy
Somak Mukherjee In the middle of 1971, when the city of Calcutta according to official figures were witnessing about 200 political killings a month, Mrinal Sen released Interview in some of the prominent movie theatres in Calcutta for commercial viewing, the most prominent of all: Globe, where it ran for three weeks. There was a private screening exclusively for the press before this, where the response was rather subdued, although some critics were quite intrigued by the novelty of the subject matter and the constant interplay between fact and fiction with a surrealistic treatment of the narrative. Public response, however, was overwhelmingly good. Sen claims in his biography that the admiring audience enthusiastically chased the cinematographer K K Mahajan, who was mobbed and subsequently rescued after begging for help in horror[i]. The film ran successfully for two weeks at Globe, one of the most prominent movie theatres in town. After the third week, with the waning enthusiasm, it was withdrawn. The public opinion too was polarized. Some praised the treatment and cinematography, but it received criticism from some quarters as well for being an “anti-social” film. The story, written by Ashish Burman, centred around a young unemployed man called Ranju and his futile attempts to seek a proper suit for an important job interview in a prestigious British company. Ranju, who comes from a lower middle class family with a widowed mother and a sister already has strong recommendation from a friend of his late father. His prospects of getting the job look very bright in the beginning but it goes downhill from there. When Ranju goes to the laundry shop to collect his prized suit (the only one he has) he finds the shop is shut due to a laundry workers’ indefinite strike. He manages to get another suit but even that one gets stolen on the bus. Finally, desperate Ranju goes appears in front of the stunned interview board ( The scene was shot in the IBM office in Calcutta, the American corporate giant had a vibrant marketing presence in the city even then. The interview board members played themselves, asking questions) wearing dhoti and kurta. In a quirky reference Ray’s classic Pratidwandi (The Adversary) here too a board member asks the protagonist “What is the biggest event of the decade?”. While Siddhartha’s serious and ideologically charged reply in Pratidwandi was “The Vietnam War”, here Ranju answers with a sheepish yet sincere smile “My interview, Sir!”. Ranju did not get the job. But this essay is not an exploration of individual anxieties and their transition into reckless abandon. Rather, I will try to concentrate on the spaces that Sen explores with K. K. Mahajan’s handheld camera roaming in the street of Calcutta inside public vehicles or through narrow lanes with garbage heaped on the side. Our first proper introduction with the protagonist too happens on the street:on a tramcar, to be precise. Tram was Calcutta’s most iconic and identifiable public transport during this era. The introduction was something revolutionary in Indian cinema, both formalistically and narrative wise: combining elements of Brechtian alienation, Cinema Verite style and effortless breaking of the fourth wall by the hero. This is what happens: Clip 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLD2zts6BIs We see that while the protagonist stands in the tram, the camera zooms on a magazine a female passenger is reading, and it displays a photo of Mullick himself. The young passenger recognizes Ranjit, annoying a fellow male passenger. Mullick comes forward, looks directly at the camera and says with a shy smile: “It is all my fault. You must be curious, so let me confess. It is indeed my photo. But I am not a star. By any means. My name is Ranjit Mullick, I live in Bhawanipur, and work for a weekly magazine. I go to the press, correct the proof and do other tasks. I have a very uneventful life, you know? Yet that is precisely what attracted Mrinal Sen..yes, yes, the filmmaker, you know? He said, ‘My camera will just chase right through the day’. (The camera shows Mahajan shooting the scene on the tram). I am not supposed to do anything special. I just have to be myself. I told Mrinal Sen that today is going to be something special. Today I have a chance to get a much better job. He said ‘fine!That would be really dramatic!” Just see how he is chasing me! To make profit exploiting my experience, of course!” After Ranju gets down from the tram the male passenger who was irritated moments ago, exclaims with genuine bemusement “You call it cinema? But it is my story—your story!”, but suddenly this celebration of everydayness is disrupted by sequences of street protests and demonstrations, many of them newsreel footages underscoring Sen’s ideological leaning towards documentary realism in his work. Deepankar Mukhopadhyay in his admirably well researched biography of Sen writes, “ Ranjit’s statement before the camera is the first example of Brechtian alienation in Indian cinema. But Sen has always insisted that he has never been influenced by Brecht, the only modern European dramatist who cast a deep impression on him happened to be Peter Weiss. What stands out in Interview is Sen’s attempt to contrast reality and surrealism”[ii] Now, apart from the obvious metavisual significance what I find most intriguing is not what or how of the action but rather, where it happens. Sen has a lifelong enchantment for a comment by Elio Vitorini, one of the foremost creative Marxists in Europe: The point is not to pocket the truth, but to chase the truth. This seemingly enigmatic statement, I feel, sums up one of the central paradoxes of the contingency of image: that is to say, what counts as an authentic interpretation of experience is often that depiction which is considered to be least vulnerable to the tests of subjectivity. Space and spatial dimension has the revelatory potential of stripping that safe interpretation off and opening it up to the possibilities