Remembering Tapan Sinha at 55th IFFI

Sinha is known for such films as 'Kabuliwala', 'Nirjan Saikate', 'Ek Doctor Ki Maut', 'Louha Kapat', 'Hatey Bazarey' and 'Aadmi Aur Aurat'.

Panaji: Sharmila Tagore recalled memories with Tapan Sinha at the 55th International Film Festival of India.

The festival celebrated the centenary birth year of the acclaimed Bengali filmmaker with a panel discussion titled Tapan Sinha: The Spectrum and the Soul. One of the best sessions at the festival, the panelists — actors Sharmila Tagore and Arjun Chakraborthy and film critic and scholar N Manu Chakravarthy — analysed Sinha’s films and spoke about the kind of person he was. It was moderated by journalist Ratnottama Sengupta.

“My first meeting with Tapan babu was when I was 11 years old. He was making Kabuliwala (1957) and my sister Tinku (credited as Oindrila Tagore) played Mini. That’s when I had the opportunity to see him and I called him Tapan kaku,” a nostalgic Sharmila recalled.

Sinha is known for such films as Kabuliwala, Nirjan Saikate, Ek Doctor Ki Mauth, Louha Kapat, Hatey Bazarey and Aadmi Aur Aurat.

Sharmila added: “He was a man of few words but had a great presence. He was fair and good looking. There was a spark that exuded from him that reflected culture, education and knowledge. He was a great listener. I saw him directing my sister who was just five years old. Tapan babu had a lot of patience and he allowed things to flow. That is how he got such wonderful performances out of people.”

Sharmila Tagore

The actor worked in Sinha's Nirjan Saikate (1963) where she played the role of Renu. Detailing the crowded Howrah railway station sequence in the film which shows a mixture of many identities and cultures, she said, “The camera then goes into a crowded coupe and you see one man with an empty bird cage. Now who is this man? He remains an enigma throughout the film. He is a traveller, either running away from something or going towards something — we don’t know but he is in search of something. The empty cage perhaps has baggage in it. Is he running away from it? It’s up to you to decide.”

Talking about how progressive the film was, she pointed to the following scene where a widow in the coupe is applying make up before going to sleep. “When asked why, she says because they’re on a holiday and at home they will not be allowed to do so. They feel free here. In many ways, Nirjan Saikate was a very progressive film,” she added.

Sinha’s films dealt with difficult subjects and had socio-political commentary, and the language was easy for people to understand.

Satyajit Ray’s Charulata was released in the same year and this film (Nirjan Saikate) was completely overshadowed. “This has happened to Sinha many times because he came at a time when the three giants reigned — Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak. If you do a Google search, you will probably find 40 books about Ray, about 30 on Sen and for Sinha, you’ll find one English book and four in Bengali. There is so little written about him. I think it was because film societies at the time had a very intellectual outlook towards everything. They mostly took cues from the international film circle,” Sharmila added.

“It’s an absolute failure of critics,” N Manu Chakravarthy pointed out.

Taking the 1958 film Louha Kapat as an example, Manu added: “It is a prison story. V Shantaram had already made Do Ankhen Barah Haath (1957). The empathy in Louha Kapat comes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and from Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant. How does one look at crime? Sarat Chandra Babu is invoked here. In his words, ‘no human being is so incorrigible that there cannot be redemption’.”

Manu claimed that nobody has made a film like Sagina Mahato (1970). “The film is about tribal struggles during the colonial period and about the emergence of a revolutionary party which is ideological. Ideology becomes so important that people don’t matter to the revolutionary party. This can be related with the Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi’s essay, ‘The Message of the Hungarian Revolution’: This is Stalinism in the making which is brilliantly prophetic in the film Sagina Mahato. Irrespective of the overshadowing performances of Dilip Kumar and others, the film showed the future of Bengal’s politics — the party becomes so important in the film that when the tribals put up a decentralised democratic fight against the colonial masters, the party suppresses them. Sagina is manipulated by the revolutionary party. These are the profound intellectual dimensions in Sinha’s films that nobody (film critics) has talked about,” he pointed out.

Following this up with Atanka which has a brilliant portrayal by Soumitra Chatterjee, Manu added: “There is no federalism, no socialism and no democracy but only hooliganism, in the film. One can find traces of it in Ray’s Pratidwandi (1970). But if you look at Sen’s Calcutta Trilogy, there is an exploration of the collapse of the communist movement. Adoor Gopalakrishnan explored the same in Mukhamukham (1984) and Kathapurushan (1995).”

Manu continued to emphasise, “He worked more on the popular mode and not on the commercial mode which means he was more inclusive. His inclusivity came from his belief that art needn’t be elitist. But to understand him, one needs to have elite consciousness — destroy the social distinctions between the illiterate and the literate.”

The 55th International Film Festival of India concluded on November 28.