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The voices of Mrinal Sen and Payal Kapadia
Summary
Mrinal Sen and Payal Kapadia’s experiments with documentary-style techniques in their fiction films have much in common
Kharij, which won the Jury Prize in 1983 at Cannes, was the last film by an Indian to win a competition award at the festival before Payal Kapadia won the Grand Prix this year. Directed by Mrinal Sen, the overlooked middle syllable in the Ray-Sen-Ghatak triad, Kharij too is shaped by absence—of a boy child who worked as a “servant" to an amiable middle-class Bhadralok couple. The couple employ a boy the same age as their beloved 8- or 9-year-old son Pupai to attend to him, and to help the youngish wife, Mamata, around the home. One unusually cold night in Calcutta, the boy sleeps in the kitchen because of the warmth from the coal oven and doesn’t wake up the next morning, dead due to carbon monoxide poisoning in the closed kitchen space. This happens within the first 15 minutes. The rest of the taut 95-minute film is about the investigation into the boy’s death.
In Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, one of the three central characters Prabha (Kani Kusruti), is haunted by the absence of her husband, said to be working in Germany. He has ghosted her—not called in a year, nor does he take her phone calls. She is a quiet person, unruffled on the outside. She has to be, she is a nurse trained to deal with medical crises. She does not let on that her husband’s ghosting is haunting her. Yet when a mysterious, gleaming rice cooker arrives from Germany without a note, she gets up from her bed at night to embrace it alone, unseen.
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Both are city films. Kharij is rooted in the Calcutta of the 1980s ruled by the world’s longest-running Left government. All We Imagine as Light is rooted in Mumbai. Both are alive to the casual cruelty of the city amid the economic opportunities it provides. Sen is more cynical of Calcutta than Kapadia’s more mellow feelings for Mumbai (reflected in the tranquil blue light she has filmed the city in). Both make a startlingly similar point about the working class in the city—that they have no place here. In Kharij, the “servant boy’s designated sleeping spot is under the stairs. Later, it turns out that the couple employing him don’t know his village address, or the address of the help next door who referred them to him. As if, the working class materializes magically, like Aladdin’s genie, to serve the city and vanishes outside of service.
In Kapadia’s film, the character Parvaty (played by Chhaya Kadam) is threatened with eviction from her husband’s millworker accommodation because she has no paper to prove it as her address. In a small warm sequence, Kusruti and Kadam fling stones at a builder’s hoarding with the (giveaway) phrasing: “Class is a privilege reserved for the privileged." The film begins with a set of faceless voiceovers—migrants talking about their relationship with the city. “You can never tell with Mumbai, I am here now but who knows next year!" says a voice at the start of the film. Kapadia has a lovely flair for the voiceover: her first film, A Night of Knowing Nothing, is stitched together with a young woman filmmaker’s voice. “In cinema, when voice and image don’t sync with each other, I find this juxtaposition can create something else… you fill up the gap with your own imagination," she said in an interview with critic Sucharita Tyagi.
And it is in this experimentation with voiceovers that I was reminded of Sen even more. Sen is possibly the first filmmaker in India to make inventive use of the non-diegetic voiceover—narration by someone who is not a character. Indeed, he introduced Indian cinema’s ‘voice of god’, who sees everything and tells us what happened. Bhuvan Shome, Sen’s surprise hit Hindi-language film that is called one of the pioneers of the Indian New Wave movement in 1969, opens with Amitabh Bachchan wryly narrating the persona of the overbearing bureaucrat played delightfully by Utpal Dutt. Bachchan is not a character in the film, nor does he appear visually on screen. This was Bachchan’s first ever credited work on screen, he was listed as “Amitabh" in the opening credits.
Sen is a pioneer, also, of mixing documentary footage in feature films. Bhuvan Shome has a bit of this, visuals of Calcutta crowds protesting and lobbing explosives as Bachchan’s voice speaks of shonar (golden) Bengal with a lovely touch of irony. The opening sequences of All We Imagine as Light has this same element, interviews of migrants to Mumbai whose faces are never shown. It has the effect of establishing the ephemerality of life in Mumbai. The three protagonists are migrants to the city too.
But it was in his Calcutta trilogy—about the city combusting in the Naxal movement—that Sen used documentary footage substantially. This was footage he’d captured walking the streets of the furious city, trying to understand the political sentiment of the moment. But they unexpectedly served to make Calcutta 71 a box-office hit: in the book Montage, Sen told the critic Samik Bandyopadhyay that Calcutta 71 did well because many Calcuttans came to watch their family members, friends, lovers on screen. His footage was sometimes the last time they were seen alive.
Kapadia’s debut feature, the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing won best documentary at Cannes in 2021. Based on the prolonged students’ protest at the Film and Television Institute of India, one of the first prominent Indian campuses to dissent against the BJP government at the Centre in 2015, the grainy black and white (perhaps to project the sense of a student film) footage is held together with an interesting narrative device—the letters of a fictional young woman student to her boyfriend on campus. It won the best documentary at the 2021 Cannes film festival.
It was, in a sense, the opposite of Sen’s Calcutta 71, five stories about Calcutta in the roil of the Naxalite movement with a lot of documentary footage from the streets, braided with a voiceover reading a poem about Calcutta. Despite the real-life footage, Sen’s film is a feature.
Can you call it a documentary if you use letters by a fictional character to frame real life events? But the more I thought about it, I realized that the letters refer to real life news developments—the FTII protests, the death of Rohith Vemula, the attacks on JNU. The contents of the letters were not fictional. Instead of the filmmaker narrating the events straightforward, there was a nice epistolary touch.
Very much, in fact, like Sen. Calcutta 71 is his love letter to Calcutta, like A Night of Knowing Nothing is a love letter to a beloved campus, and a nation that was once felt like a place you knew.
Sohini Chattopadhyay is a is a National Award-winning film critic.
