Vivek Agnihotri’s ‘The Bengal Files’ tells the story of an IPS officer investigating the murder of a Dalit journalist against the backdrop of the 1946 Calcutta riots or the great Calcutta killings, which broke out between Hindus and Muslims.
During the investigation he meets an old lady who was a survivor of the riots. The role is played by Pallavi Joshi. The story shuttles between the present and the past with a single-minded focus — the majority Hindus are in trouble and are facing annihilation from Muslims. The film aims to show that nothing much has changed in the last 78 years.
The filmmaker has taken a lot of cinematic liberty, but to subtly indicate that Mahatma Gandhi only asked the Hindus to surrender their weapons in Noakhali is nothing but mischievous.
Agnihotri is no innovator of propaganda cinema. Cinema has always been used as a political propaganda tool — by priests, capitalists and communists. However, the craft required to make an impactful propaganda film is not in the skill set of the director. The screenplay is a combination of viral WhatsApp forwards of how India will become a Muslim-dominated country by 2050! Places where visual storytelling devices could make a difference and move the audience, are ruined by long monologues that offer no new perspective.
The cast of ‘The Tashkent Files’ and ‘The Kashmir Files’ — Mithun Chakraborty, Anupam Kher and Pallavi Joshi — feature in ‘The Bengal Files’ as well.
‘The Bengal Files’ is a fairly thick file! The length of the movie, at three hours and 25 minutes, I suspect is not an artistic choice, but a dilemma emerging from incoherent writing and poor editing. The film is a double-edged disaster – neither will it find new converts to the cause of the director nor is it a worthy cinematic documentation of a cruel chapter from Indian history.