Remembering Mrinal Sen: Filmmaker, Comrade, Humanist

Gourab Ghosh

On a damp, cold wintry Sunday, Ishaan — a young comrade of mine — called me to inform that Mrinal Sen had passed away a few hours ago. I was shocked, and deeply saddened. The winter of 2018 had been harsh on all of us, with the loss of Mushirul Hasan just a few days prior to Sen’s passing. And so Ishaan and I spoke about Sen’s films, sharing memories and anecdotes. Ishaan spoke of his first interaction with Sen, when he was just ten years old. He had auditioned for Sen’s film, Aamar Bhuvan (2002; based on Afsar Ahmed’s novel Dhanjyotsna). He did not bag the role of the little boy, Shajahan, but he learned something about Sen through that experience. He wanted to touch Sen’s feet as a mark of respect, but Sen stopped him midway and extended his hand for a firm handshake instead. Ishaan thinks of that experience now as his first handshake with a comrade who was drawn to the Indian People’s Theater Movement (IPTA) and Marxist ideologies in the 1950s, and remained a Marxist public intellectual until his death.

My own first meeting with Mrinal Sen was when I was much older — in 2008, when he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 10^th edition of Osian’s Cinefest Film Festival in New Delhi. I was volunteering for the festival and was in charge of the screening of the film, Khandahar (1984), which left a lasting impression on me. The title, which means ruins, highlights the contrast between the city and rural life, the thin line between dream and reality, and the fading away of a time that perhaps held meaning and care for humanity. I accompanied him to his car. I admit I could not contain my excitement, and was quite exuberant in my fanboy moment. He was in ill health, but he smiled nonetheless, and shook my hand, firm. The quintessential comrade, Mrinal Sen.

Young Mrinal Sen, a graduate in Physics honours, was drawn to cinema accidentally when he came upon Rudolf Arnheim’s book, Film as Art. Often dubbed as the “Bengali Godard”, Sen was considered as one of the pioneers of the Bengali parallel cinema with his two contemporaries, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak. Sen’s films dealt with existentialism, Marxism, Nouvelle Vague, and Italian neorealism. As a Marxist, Sen developed a new language of storytelling, and he often looked at the middle class and the city through the lens of Marxism. Unlike his contemporaries Ray and Ghatak, Sen looked at the everyday issues and the reality of life as the most important theme for his films. When we look at Mrinal Sen’s films today, we need to also remember the political activism of the 1960s. Sen was not only drawn to the political ideas of the 1960s and Marxism, but also looked at city to understand the history of human civilization and the emotions that were shaped, experienced, and lost in the metropolis of our times.

Bhuvan Shome (1969) established him as a major filmmaker both nationally and internationally. This film also gave him a new direction in his filmmaking. That direction was undoubtedly Marxist, and one could see a politically sharper Sen trying to engage with the conflict of tradition and modernity and the dreams and ambitions of the middle class that echoed across the contours of Kolkata. He, thus, created a space of resistance and solidarity in his films, as opposed to mere surrender.

The citizen of Sen’s city became the voice of his times that resisted the fangs of imperialism through the political clamour that he heard in the university campuses, on the streets of Kolkata, and in the promise of the Left politics. His ‘Calcutta Trilogy’ expressed this political zeal and conviction in films like, Interview (1970), Calcutta 71 (1972) and Padatik (1973), in which he successfully brought out the political tensions and unrest of the 1970s. The city and its denizens become the “proletariat myth” and as well as the reality in his films.

The recent cancellation of the screening of his films in the campus of the IIEST-Shibpur in West Bengal, alongside a documentary on Rohith Vemula, highlights the significance of his films to our times. Sen challenged the very notion of imperialism and highlighted class struggle through his work, and perhaps this is the reason why saffron figures who have recently sought to control campuses like the IIEST-Shibpur fears to remember Sen and his films. But even in death, Mrinal Sen remains relevant, perhaps now more than ever. We need to remember him and his films to fight against the right wing and imperialist forces, and uphold his legacy of humanism and camaraderie.

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Gourab Ghosh is a queer-left activist. He is also a doctoral candidate of Performance Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He can be contacted at gourabghosh.jnu@gmail.com

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