Popular Cinema in Bengal

Genre, Stars, Public Cultures

Madhuja Mukherjee, Kaustav Bakshi, Madhuja Mukherjee, Kaustav Bakshi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000448924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte asiatica

Popular Cinema in Bengal marks a decisive turn in studies of Bengali language cinema by shifting the focus from auteur and text-based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry.

Thebookcovers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership, gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song-booklets); cinematic spaces; and trans-media and trans-cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geo-political transformations, the bookhighlights the new and persuasive research that has materialised over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding 'regional' cinema as a category, in relation to 'national' cinema models, and trace the non-linear journey of the popular via multiple (media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial change, spaces of consumption, and cinema's meandering directions through global circuits and low-end networks.

Highlighting the ever-changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars offilm studies and South-Asian popular culture.The chapters were originally published in the journal South Asian History and Culture.

A brief introduction to Popular Cinema in Bengal: Genre, Stars, Public Cultures

Madhuja Mukherjee and Kaustav Bakshi

The idea of ‘Bengali’ cinema, we would like to argue, emerged with the advent of sync sound in India; simultaneously, subjects of language and nation became significant within the debates on cinema and its making.¹ Prior to this, as evident from silent films such as Jamai Babu/The Brother-in-law (Dir. Kalipada Das, 1931) as well as from the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report (1927–1928) and articles and advertisements published in popular magazines of the period, intertitles of films produced from Bengal, rather Calcutta, included multiple languages such as English, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, and Bengali. Clearly, such films were circulating across northern, western, and eastern territories of British India. Besides, the scene was intercepted by popular films from Hollywood. The notion of ‘Bengali’-language cinema and its materialization thus had to be contended, explored, and achieved through technology and form(s) which were being tried and tested during the late 1920s and early 1930s.²

The formation of the big studios in the early 1930s, investments in (sound) technology, and the involvement of eminent authors, playwrights, distinguished actors and performers, musicians, as well as of the iconic literary and cultural figurehead Rabindranath Tagore, marked the beginning of a self-conscious positioning of ‘Bengali-ness’ (and the Maha-jati/noble community) in cinema, which was coextensive with the cultural and political discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.³ Indeed, the notion of a definable and ‘respectable’ cinematic form, dealing with bhadralok cultural practices and refined bhasa (language), became pivotal in popular discourses on cinema during the 1930s and continued persuasively to the 1960s through the Film Society publications.⁴ Such problems of institutionalization of cinema in the regions, and the framework of ‘regional’ cinema, have been addressed in some recent scholarly articles, by questioning what Ratheesh Radhakrishnan describes at the onset as the ‘dynamics of unification and difference, aggregation and disaggregation that is central to the production of the linguistic region’.⁵ The development and acceptance of ‘regional cinemas’ as a category, we reason, is also connected to varied processes of political–cultural shifts, as well as to historiography and the changing modes of writing history of Bengali cinema based on periodization. Such periodization (for example, the ‘golden era’ of Bengali cinema during the 1950s–1960s), and the repeated focus on internationally acclaimed art-house films made by well-known directors, namely Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, as well as Tapan Sinha, Aparna Sen, and Rituparno Ghosh, and others, has become – by and large – a benchmark of the scholarship on cinema from Bengal. Subhajit Chatterjee, for instance, points out how:⁶

[t]here is a critical consensus on the observation that Bengali cinema encountered a set of formative ruptures during the 50s, which reshaped the cultural imaginary of the Bengali community, albeit in incongruent ways. The two disparate ‘moments of arrival’, namely the modernist-realist watershed in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali(1955) and the appearance of a ‘new popular-modern’ in the guise of film romances (pronoydharmi chhobi) featuring the star pair Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen, seemed to offer a creative release from the conformist mainstay of popular studio socials dominating industrial landscape during the 40s.

In this article, Chatterjee proceeds to show how the Calcutta Film Society discourses influenced many of the attempts to chart the history of a professed Bengali cinema even when the public domain was criss-crossed by many conflicting ‘tastes’.⁷ However, we will not enter into the debates on ‘Bengali’ cinema histories and narratives of its construction; rather, we will focus on the possibilities of forging new approaches of writing histories of cinema and culture, and explore and assess the processes through which this volume on Popular Cinema in Bengal was shaped, and in what ways this project may be viewed as an intervention and a step towards a revisionist history of ‘Bengali cinema’ and the ‘popular’.

Moinak Biswas in his unpublished dissertation on Indian cinema forms⁸ examines arguments, themes, and formal concerns pertaining to post-independence Bengali-language films, through which he tackles the conventional dichotomy between ‘realism’ and ‘melodrama’. By deliberating on a range of studio ‘Socials’, he illustrates in what way traces of ‘realism’ (location shooting and realistic settings, for instance) were integrated into popular melodramas. His framing of the ‘Social and Beyond’ and ‘Historical Realism’ of 1940–1955, and analyses of a wide range of films, along with the landmark social-realist text, Chhinnamul/The Uprooted (Dir. Nimai Ghosh, 1951), alerted us to the manner in which cinema and public cultures are interlinked, and could be reconsidered. Biswas elaborates on how, by ‘1948–1949, social realism had already produced its own formulaic compulsions in the mainstream “film” ’, and how ‘a sign of the instability of the social of the 1940s is the relative lack of definition of melodrama whose classic contours appear (throughout its history of 200 years or so) in dialogue with realism’.⁹ Thus, as is clear from a close reading of the films, multiple genres circulated in the public domain and there were, in fact, a spurt of quasi-thrillers during the 1950s, which continued to be popular until ‘new hybrid’ melodramas (predominantly starring the star duo Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen) appeared on the scene during the 1950s, alongside the widely circulated comedies. The popularity of the thrillers, which were also partly horror films, was a specific feature of the period and was obliquely speaking to the Hindi thrillers of the same period. Biswas’ method of mapping the scene, through constant referencing of Hindi melodramas of the period, as well as literary, cultural, and political currents (for instance, by alluding to the influences of the Progressive Writers Association (1936) and Indian People’s Theatre Association (1944) etc.), presented an alternative approach of the possible lines of research on the cinema of Bengal. Biswas argues that ‘Pather Panchali [Dir. Satyajit Ray, 1955] was both a culmination to the process set in motion in the 1940s and a break with it’, and examines how the ‘post-Pather Panchali realist film was placed in critical discourse at the polar end to the contemporary melodrama’.¹⁰ By drawing from such critical reflections on continuities, breaks, flows, and complicated networks of history, culture, politics, and historiography, this volume explores new methods and involves interdisciplinary research in an attempt to revisit categories like ‘Bengali’ cinema and its manifold accounts.

While Madhuja Mukherjee’s work on cinema of the 1930s draws attention to public cultures, formation of a big studio like New Theatres Ltd.¹¹ and its formal explorations, industrial history, alongside the complexities of such cultural imaginings, Sharmistha Gooptu’s reading of the formation of a ‘Bengali’ cinema as an ‘Other’ vis-à-vis Hindi cinema was the first critical book-length study on the advancement of ‘Bengali’ cinema and its negotiations.¹² Gooptu demonstrates, for example, how, in the post-independence era, in tandem with the ‘all-India’ socials, the Bengali film industry moved towards the creation of a singular regional cinema. She reads such transformations as a transition, from an ‘aspiration to produce a “national” cinema to its turning “inwards”, into the production of a “regional” cinema which was very consciously distinguished from the “all-India Hindi film” ’.¹³ Analysing the transition from the ‘all-India’ productions (of New Theatres Ltd., for instance), to more region-oriented films, she examines the emergence of the ‘Uttam-Suchitra’ love stories, or the comedies performed by the popular actor Bhanu Bandyopadhyay.

Prior to this, Biswas’ chapter, ‘The couple [Uttam-Suchitra] and their [social] spaces’, examined the melodramatic form and how ‘a feminine space has been opened up, how the 1950s [Bengali] melodrama can sometimes lay a special claim to that space, and also how the spectator has to adopt or even recover a certain femininity to rediscover these movies [in the recent times]’.¹⁴ Furthermore, in the chapter of his dissertation titled ‘Narratives of vernacular citizenship in the 1950s Bengali melodrama’, Biswas deliberated on issues of the ‘city’ and ‘citizenship’, and the changes in the social space (in the 1950s films), as well as the ways in which the persona of Uttam Kumar became the face of emergent modernities and postcolonial deliberations. By presenting a reading of some of the landmark, Uttam-Suchitra hits, Biswas suggested that, ‘[i]n a large number of films, at least in the majority of the classics of the period, Uttam Kumar is someone who has come from the country in search of a career, or someone found living on the fringes of the city’¹⁵; moreover, he contends,‘[t]he new melodrama was quick to respond to the phenomenon of women entering into jobs in substantial numbers. It is impossible to find any other actress being cast so persistently as Suchitra Sen in professional roles – as doctor, lawyer, social worker or teacher’.¹⁶ Briefly, Biswas’ work not only argued for a new mode of reading post-independence cinema in (West) Bengal but also generated many discussions, debates, and contestations.

Emerging from such existing research and taking an interdisciplinary approach, Sayandeb Chowdhury’s chapter in this volume, ‘A postcolonial iconi-city: Re-reading Uttam Kumar’s cinema as metropolar melodrama’, examines the postcolonial city of Calcutta against which a large number of popular Bengali films of the 1950s were set. Analysing the emergence of Calcutta with its exclusive characteristics of a post-independence/post-partition volatile space, Chowdhury argues how the city provided ‘Bengali’ cinema with a ‘habitation’, and also became a metaphor of modernity, a spatial equivalent of a newly independent and partitioned nation.¹⁷ Although studies of the metropolis as a locus of modernity in the films of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak have circulated within wider orbits and have a larger currency, what is revisited through this study are the ways in which post-independence Bengali popular cinema had a significant cultural–historical function in addressing this ‘metropolar’ modernity within the formal configurations of melodrama, exemplified by the commercially successful films starring the matinee idol Uttam Kumar. Chowdhury chooses to present his paper as ‘a cultural history’ that seeks to establish that Calcutta’s ‘cinematicity’, inaugurated by the partition films (produced straight after independence), continued for more than a decade in Uttam Kumar’s films. Exploring the visuality of the city of Calcutta in these films, Chowdhury also argues that the institutionalization of the melodramatic form in the mid-1950s popular Bengali cinema effectuated a scopic interrogation of ‘postcolonial’ Calcutta as a locus primaire. He reinforces his argument by deploying the semiotics of stardom (of Uttam Kumar, in this case), which formalized cinema’s aesthetic institutionalization and narrative function within the broader cultural politics of metropolitan postcolonialism.

Anustup Basu, on the other hand, writes about the dialogic exchanges of the Bengali film industry with other regional industries, as well as with international productions and Bombay, between 1955 and 1965. This was a prolific period in the course of Bengali cinema, when the pre-eminent English-language film magazine Filmfare featured the industry in its glossy pages. Basu focuses on the logic of regionalization of Bengali cinema within the pages of a nationally circulated magazine. During this period, Filmfare was still in its formative stage, and was making a mark in responsible film journalism. Filmfare thus would attempt to subsume the errant flows of regional cinema into a defining mainstream of a nation’s grand cinematic conversation with itself. The discourse of a national cinema, the idea of peopleness which national cinema had to construct and address, and the contribution of regional films within that discourse, marked by their difference with films released for a pan-Indian audience, were consolidated within the pages of the magazine. Basu analyses the critical interventions of Saroj Sengupta and Chidananda Dasgupta who regularly wrote on Bengali film aesthetics, realism, and auteurs. In the process, Basu’s paper contributes to understanding how such discourses constructed a ‘history’ of Bengali cinema which is, however, linked to the networks of national and international cinema.

Therefore, by revisiting the question of ‘regionality’ of Bengal, with all of its historical, cultural, and political specificities, this volume on ‘Bengali’ cinema aims to understand how a particular form of populist cinema was imagined, produced, and circulated across specific geographies and cultural landscapes. Hence, we consider the emergence and passages of certain genres, their heady absorption into one another, and certain types of narrative forms which were often articulated through the dynamics of stardom. We have paid particular attention to practices of film viewing, both in terms of locations (or theatrical spaces) as well as through studies of popular print cultures. This volume, though not necessarily exhaustive in itself, visits certain under-researched areas and brings forth new research. Drawing from multiple sources, such as film and other types of magazines, hagiographies, film, print and visual archives, social networking sites, and personal interviews with stars, film-makers, producers, distributors, theatre owners, site-specific research, as well as detailed textual analyses of film texts, this volume endeavours to capture the pulsating film ethos that cuts across locations and timeframes, and provokes us to rethink cinema’s role in encapsulating Bengal’s modernity marked by several irreconcilable contradictions. This volume comprising eleven papers and four photo essays, and covering eight decades of the Bengali film industry, explores some of the key factors that constitute popular cinema produced from Bengal.

One of the aims of this volume is to shift focus from studies of authors, auteurs, movements, and individual styles to newer analysis of industrial history, genres, its interconnections, function of the stars, and public cultures. Madhuja Mukherjee’s paper,...