Can Kharij (The Case is Closed, 1982), one of the several memorable films that immediately come to mind whenever Mrinal Sen’s name is mentioned, be said to be a “hunger film”? Yes, it can be designated thus, for, in a certain invisible way, the film is open to being analysed about the spectre of hunger affecting the lives of an unfortunate father and his doomed little son and, by extension, the lives of generations of deprived people like them.
A small boy died one cold December night in an educated middle-class Calcutta household. The boy, engaged as a servant to carry out varied domestic duties, died in his sleep in an all-barred kitchen. (The expression “domestic help”, currently in use in certain quarters, sounds better to the politically-correct ear, but the fact is that the boy, going by the way he lived and died, was nothing more than a “servant”.) The boy died of carbon monoxide poisoning, for the lady of the house had forgotten, to her undying shame, to put out the coal oven kept in a corner of the kitchen. The motherless boy, named Palan, had been brought to the Senfamily composed of husband, wife and their small son, by his poor villager of a father. Palan was left behind with the family on the understanding that his father would visit him once a month to find out how he was doing, as also to collect his monthly salary. Clearly, hard cash was, and is, a blessing difficult to come by in most families in rural Bengal.
The role of the impoverished village as an unfailing supplier of cheap child labour, with no guarantee of physical safety or moral well-being, is difficult not to notice in this tragic tale of death by suffocation that need not have been. The saga of this readily available supply of human cargo necessary to keep middle- and upper-class Calcutta society ticking, is stated with deep poignancy and a hardly spelt-out anger in Kharij. If the film was invested with the prestigious Jury Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival in competition with Bresson’sL’Argent or Tarkovsky’sNostalgia, it only goes to show how a local, seemingly insignificant story told with the beauty, pain and sadness of truth, carries within it infinite possibilities of universal recognition.
By the time Kharijcame to be made, a radically altered MrinalSen, stylistically speaking, had made friends with a slower pace, a quieter narrative mode, and a nuanced rhythm that did justice more to a born-again philosopher of patience than a dashing practitioner of the agit-prop, which he had been in an earlier stormy phase of his long and distinguished career. And yet, come to think of it, Sen never really allowed the unrepentant dissident in him to die out; the insufferable naysayer whose deep, meditated contempt for his own class, made him what he was. Truth to tell, what Sen did in his new avatar was to eschew the sound and fury of what may roughly be said to be his “middle period”, replacing it with a strangely, more powerful idiom of personal expression on public issues. No doubt, this transformation cost the director the admiration of a section of his erstwhile supporters, but he seemed not to care for this was an aesthetic shift made deliberately and consciously.
The new radicalism of Kharij stems as much from its deceptively simple formal or visual qualities, as from its insightful investigation into bourgeois psychology and behaviour in moments of crisis. The largely selfish, and hypocritical middle class is no longer sought to be whipped with lashes made of nails, but exposed more effectively with subdued gestures and silent accusations. Meanwhile, in the new scenario, the oppressor, perhaps afflicted by a bad conscience of temporary duration, does not know which way to look; which rat-hole could possibly provide him with a safe passage.
MrinalSen never was, and never will be, a darling of the polite, the well-heeled, the well-endowed. This is because he had such impolite things to say about the seemingly polite; about elements, not necessarily of high pedigree, who successfully hid their malevolence behind masks of sweet smiles and words of do-gooding. Be that as it may, it is in the critical (read ‘self-critical, if you must) note of much of his filmography that, at the end of the day, Sen’s relevance to his times and beyond, lies; his permanent status as a self-appointed agent provocateur rests. The moral sense and the refurbished artistic vision that have gone into the weaving of an urban tale of unintended carelessness on the part of an otherwise somewhat sensitive housewife and, conversely, the cruel attempts by her husband to cover up the tell-tale marks of the death, should be enough to crown the director with the thorny epithet of ‘Citizen Sen’, somewhat in line with ‘Citizen This’ or ‘Citizen That’ that we come across in literary or film texts dealing with the French Revolution. But whereas that so-called “mother of all modern revolutions” lost no time in devouring its own children, and thereby creating its own travesty of truths it once staunchly upheld with a certain savagery, ‘Citizen Sen’ may rightly be said to have clung on tenaciously till his last film, to a philosophy and vision of solidarity with those left in the lurch – principally, the solitary subaltern with nowhere to go save limping forward with the paltry resources at his disposal.
In this context, MrinalSen has, mercifully, been saved from any kind of mummification caused in some other instances by excessive enthusiasm on the part of votaries of questionable intellectual and political antecedents. In a sense, his frequently unthinking, unfeeling critics have been Sen’s best allies; for they have shown by their indifference, if not open hostility, to the man’s deeply-focussed involvement in the serial tragedies and occasional triumphs of the popular classes, how necessary he is for our understanding of our times and our trials.
What we are used to calling “storytelling” in cinema, is barely present in Kharij. A boy died for no fault of his … his employer and others of his class immediately got together in an act of “bourgeois belonging” to avert damage of any kind to the wrongdoer … no one suffered any loss save the dead boy’s father who now has no one left to call his own … but the likelihood of many such poor, powerless fathers losing their children in similar or worse circumstances cannot be ruled out – in a nutshell, this is about all that is to be said regarding the film’s visible/imagined storyline. The fact is that it is in the largely minimalistic yet deeply moving telling of the tale that Sen’s genius comes to be revealed. The scripting is so tight, the characters so true-to-life, the aesthetics so deftly moving between the hungry and the well-fed, and the politics so rich in an arrested rage keeping the ruling realities of the day in mind, that there is not a moment for the serious viewer’s attention to drift from the case in hand; a case closed even before it had begun, to the hidden jubilation of the offender and the unexpressed anger of the one at the receiving end. But, come to think of it, such cases are never closed, they are open to repetition again and again, as long as the invisible catastrophes like hunger loom on the horizon or roll on the ground. (The naming in English of the film, namely, The Case is Closed, is ironic, grotesque, accusatory; characteristically Sen-esque.)
The dramatis personae Sen employs in Kharij is formidably large and drawn from different sections of the social milieu, but it is a measure of his munshiana (genius) that he is able to integrate them with an exemplary rigour and an eagle-eye attention to details. This results in a contemporary fable sculpted out of age-old lies, hypocrisies, betrayal of trust and silent acceptance of what, perhaps, cannot be helped. Here is a Calcutta film, a Bengali film, a pan-Indian film made in Bengali, in a sense speaking of universal conditions difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
Children are very often the worst sufferers of adult sins of omission and commission. It speaks volumes about the imperfect society that Man has given himself that the Palans of Calcutta are as easily to be found in Calicut or Kentucky. Certainly, the cultural contexts would be different, sometimes vastly so, but the end result would be the same – blossoms in the dust being crushed underfoot by incontestably superior economic forces actively enjoying the support of all the agencies making for a well-constructed, well-oiled, well-functioning system.
In this connection, the most troubling shots in Kharij are the faces of all the Palans coming from different rural addresses to the big city in search of livelihood. These faces, seemingly drained of blood by fear, anxiety, or a foreboding of what lies in store for them, are seen gathered in a huddle before Palan’s flaming pyre; acting as a critical and inescapable part of a silent narrative of despair and submission to forces beyond their comprehension, let alone control. It is in sequences such as these, at the cremation ground or at the foot of the stairs of the house where Palan used to work, that the proverbial rural-urban divide comes into sharp focus; the village forced to endure the curse of absence of opportunities to satisfy the barest necessities of life, food being the foremost of them. Hordes of teenaged or even younger boys and girls are forced to leave their village homes in order to sustain not just themselves, but also the families they leave behind with promises to send their earnings to keep starvation away from their doors.
As for their parents, is there a father or mother who would part with their tender-aged children, practically pushing them into a kind of exile or banishment, a modern-day slavery, unless forced to? What an irony that even as the countryside grows much of the food on which the city fattens, the growers themselves have to travel to the city in search of two meals a day and a little hard cash! Hunger, like the cruel demon in many a folk-tale, has the last laugh!
While hunger acts like a snake-in-the-grass in Kharij – unseen but, present; unstated, and hence to be visualized – it is the general waywardness of the middle-class and the depths of disgrace to which it can descend to save its skin from being singed, that MrinalSen wishes to draw our attention. The film’s principal claim to being remembered is in its low-keyed yet eloquent critiquing of the conspiracy that is afoot to ensure that AnjanSen (AnjanDutt), or his wife Mamata (Mamata Shankar), or both, do not end up in police lock-up. The owner of the building where the Sens live on rent and his “concerned” family; the well-to-do elderly neighbour, his wife, and their unbelievably insensitive daughter; the doctor, the lawyer, the police officer – each of them is a knowing sinner. They are typical middle-class representatives complicit in a dishonourable arrangement to bail out the wrongdoer who is willing to accommodate even the paradadas (local shady characters) if it will make things easier for him. It is amazing to watch the director’s powers of observation and analysis in full flow as he conducts a soulful post-mortem of the “solidarity of the soulless”.
At the mental or psychological level, this solidarity is perhaps to be understood in terms of a common sense of insecurity experienced by the middle-class in times of real or imagined emergency. The thought that some crisis similar to what has come to visit the Sens, could be in store for them, drives them to cementing a united front against possible public exposure or, worse still, messy entanglements with the law. So, what it boils down to is that the neighbourly protection they are seen extending to AnjanSen and his family is to ensure a similar protection for themselves in the event of being caught in a similar unsavoury situation. Pursuit of self-interest at any cost, so characteristic of middle-class conduct, is at the core of the performance of unity on view.
****
A hungry man is said to be an angry man. But, truth to tell, that is not always the case. How else could fifty lakh Bengalis die, as the director in AkalerSandhaney (In Search of Famine) pointed out, in the famine of 1943 without a single bullet being shot or a single bomb being burst. Even as the prospect of a slow imminent death by starvation stares them in the face, the villagers in BaisheyShraban (Wedding Day, 1960) are not seen reacting in any aggressive manner. They talk among themselves about the war or the scarcity of rice, but that is about all that they do in the matter. There is no physical resistance to the likely prospect of dying from want of food. Just once do we see Preonath (played by Gyanesh Mukherjee) briefly burst into anger whilst queuing to buy rice when, all of a sudden, the shopkeeper says there is nothing left to sell and downs his shutters. But this is an anger that lasts for no more than a moment like a bolt of lightning, gone before it had arrived. This is symbolic of the absence of resistance on the part of the besieged population of Bengal. History has it that, inscrutably, they preferred to die like flies rather than put up a fight like human beings.
As far as Preonath is concerned, his crippled leg, loss of job as a result of the injury, and to cap it all, his growing strained relations with his young wife whose emotional barrenness he is unable to appreciate, all combine to produce a kind of frustration that prevents him from proceeding beyond a point of visible anger. It would seem that even as he is about to say something more severe to the shopkeeper who in all likelihood is a hoarder and blackmarketeer in collusion with the police,Preonath suddenly stops himself in his track and withdraws into himself. Preonath holding himself back at the last moment and the gathered villagers dispersing when the shopkeeper threatens to call the police is an unforgettable part of the bigger picture of popular impotence and submission to a dastardly conspiracy of history.
Talking of meek acceptance by the victims of the Bengal famine, one is reminded of a film by OusmaneSembene, the Senegalese father of modernAfrican cinema who was born the same year as MrinalSen and similarly committed to socialist principles. Emitai (95 mins, 35 mm, colour, made in the Diola language) took its name from a Diola spirit revered and feared as the source of thunder and lightning preceding the coming of rains and, therefore, of rice. Sembene shows us how the lives of the strong and proud Diola people revolve round the cultivation and consumption of rice. In the days of French colonial rule, the Diola tolerated the foreigners as long as they did not cast their evil eye on the rice they struggled to grow. But when the French governor of Senegal tried to requisition the rice to feed his troops fighting World War 2 (notice the similarities between what was happening in Bengal and some distance away from Dakar, the Senegalese capital, at about the same time), the Diola put their foot down, organizing resistance against the European occupiers. Significantly, the local combatants included large numbers of women who gave leadership when at times their menfolk were found wanting. Here, it is necessary to note that the struggle took off not so much from a position of political consciousness, as from an empowering awareness centred on an article of consumption essential to the daily lives of the native fighters. In the Diola uprising, rice became a metaphor for struggle for independence from unjust imposition of foreign will.
For especially the Bengali lover of African cinema in general and Sembene’s distinguished oeuvre in particular, Emitai is likely to carry extra meanings in the context of the manufactured Bengal famine of 1943. While the Diola fought the French, however unsuccessfully, in a do-or-die struggle to prevent the latter from robbing them of their rice, the Bengalis did nothing of the kind and, thereby, paid a heavy price for their failure to rise to the occasion. It goes without saying that the similarities/dissimilarities in the two contrasting narratives of colonial despotism and local response to it should agitate any lover of cinema with a strong sense of history.
It is a measure of the mysteries that often make for history that artists of conviction separated by huge distances have been known to react in a similar or near-similar fashion to events taking place in their respective countries/cultures at, or at about, the same time. Emitai, ending with the massacre of the women and men refusing to part with their rice without a struggle, is based on true events that took place in the Senegalese countryside. Baishey Shraban, on the other hand, is a work of fiction that derives its authenticity from, among other inputs, bits and pieces of animated conversation between threatened villagers. So, in a sense, both these exceptional films encapsulate irrefutable historical truths and popular memories of those tragic events.
****
Regarding the folly of taking things lying down when the need of the hour was, perhaps, to strike an aggressive posture, some months ago, the young author and aesthete, Amitava Nag, and this writer were having a discussion on the manner in which Sendraws the curtain on Kharij. Amitava asked whether, from a Marxist point of view, should not Palan’s father have slapped or given a hard blow to AnjanSen for the unfathomable loss he/his family had caused him; if not, did the film fail from a Marxist perspective.
Ever since the film was made more than forty years ago, there has been no end to discussions in certain circles about the film’s final scenes. Speaking for myself, I would say that if the poor father had taken recourse to the expected physical violence, perhaps even verbal violence, to get the anger and deep sense of loss off his chest, he would in all likelihood have been first thoroughly thrashed by some superior elements in society and then thrown into jail to rot there. It is unlikely that Palan’s father had read Marx, but that would have hardly prevented him from knowing how the societal arrangement works in favour of the babus; how the underdog is always in the wrong, and no effort should be spared to show his place in the fiercely worked out socio-economic scheme of things. Hence, he does what he does, that is, takes leave of the family with folded hands, perhaps wishing it damnation deep within his bleeding heart. Thereby, he no doubt disappoints the predictable type of viewer, Marxist or otherwise, but invests himself with such dignity, nay nobility, as would have been impossible to achieve if he had acted more emotionally which albeit would have been natural but self-defeating. The middle-aged man’s gesture of forgiveness, despite the grievous injury he has suffered, has the potential to administer such humiliation to the mendacious bhadralok that he is not likely to forget it for the rest of his life. The words, “Babu, ashi”, with which Palan’s father takes leave of the nervous man, his visibly penitent wife, and even khoka-babu, their innocent little child, are likely to stick in the couple’s throat like a machher kata (fish-bone) for as long as they live.
True, Marx propagated the thesis of inevitability of armed conflict between opposing classes: between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. But, to my mind, it would amount to a mistaken or inadequate reading of the great philosopher of belligerence if we failed to take into account his insistence on the need for violence in keeping with the hard realities making for a given situation. In other words, the text of a rebellion has to be written, read, understood, or ideally, practised in relation to the context obtaining on the ground. It is only the notoriously myopic among Marxists who claim that the evils of the capitalist system can be eradicated only by raining bullets and blows on the adversary. Sen, valuing his broad Marxian beliefs, cannot be said to have been in favour of a hasty, rigid approach to appreciating individual tragedies or collective traumas. For Sen, Palan’s tragic death or his father’s seemingly tame submission is not the end of the story, rather the beginning of exploration of other stories of a similar kind where the oppressor and the oppressed will be locked in inevitable contests and uncertain resolutions. The struggle to keep the flame of proletarian aspirations alive will continue, as other doomed Palans will appear, as if from nowhere, forcing their bereaved fathers (read parents) to varied acts of resistance, including the one we witness in Kharij, of memorable defiance couched in supposed submission. They will keep coming to the city principally in search of food, very often, if not always, to end up as easy fodder for the shredding machines of upper and middle-class demands.
Mrinal Sen is saying by means of the angry man’s restraint, bordering on a ‘theatrical’ performance of deference to the settled order, that if you allow anger to eat into your soul, your hungry body may land up in the morgue in no time; better to live today to fight another day. Sen is certainly not asking the hungry and the angry, the wretched and the wronged of the world, to be cowards.He is simply asking them to lend an ear to his precautionary tale that operates at as many levels as the stages through which the powerless have to travel till they attain a status of confidence and empowerment to strike. Kharij is one of those rare classics that invite the viewer with open comradely arms to enter a universe of varied philosophical readings even as it is firmly rooted in the daily grind of lives lived precariously and deaths foretold.
Vidyarthy Chatterjee is a veteran writer-critic based in Calcutta.
