Buddhadeb Dasgupta: The filmmaker who received more int'l acclaim than at home

Wide cobbled roads, trams crisscrossing each other as if they would never meet again. There is hardly any light in the frame, just some traces of a dull dawn. Onscreen Kolkata wakes up to the news of death of a Labour Officer named Sudhangshu Ghosh. Twenty minutes into the film, another massacre happens, a political murder along with some haunting escapes and the story rolls.

This is how Buddhadeb Dasgupta's Grihajuddho (Crossroads, but literally ‘civil war’, 1982), a film that firmly planted him along with his peers Goutam Ghosh, Aparna Sen and Utpalendu Chakraborty in late 70s Bengali cinema, begins.

My sojourn with Buddhadeb Dasgupta's cinema did not begin in chronological order of his filmography, neither was it at tandem with the release of his films. I met his work by chance, unplanned on a rainy day; when torrential rain in the city had resulted in water logging. To while away time. I had stepped inside Nandan, the state run premier cineplex, where all of Kolkata would turn up with or without any film screening.

Somebody said, they are screening Dasgupta's Grihajuddho. I had not watched it earlier and the July rains of Kolkata would not stop any time soon, so I decided to go for it. This was 1991, nine years after he had made it. Hardly did I know that those 98 minutes would compel me to watch him thereafter.

Such had been the power of Dasgupta's unconventional storytelling.

On June 10 this year it was yet another day of torrential rain when I was confronted with a news of death, this time the filmmaker's. With him he took away Mondar, Anjali, Hemanto, Jaya, Uttara, Ghunuram, Lakhinder, the guard of the train with short height but a big heart, masked dancers Probir, Bijon and so many others. I doubt if they will appear again.

His cinema was real and lyrical at the same time and none of the two attributes clashed with each other like the trams of Grihajuddha. The stories had a complexity to them, and this is what clutched me in. Dasgupta began his filmmaking when West Bengal still hadn’t healed from its wounds of stormy radical Left movement of early 1970s. This impacted him much, setting the premise of stories for his early works, begetting tales of shattered utopias, trapped souls and their relentless trials to escape, that’s hard to define in a template.

Now with many obituaries written the world over, I realised that my mind had already made its selection over years.

Of all his works Durotwa (The Distance, 1979), Grihajuddha (Crossroad, 1982), Bagh Bahadur (The Tiger Dancer, 1989), Uttara (The Wrestlers, 2000) had occupied a significant section of my hippocampus, though not in that order.

While Durotwa and Grihajuddha have similar backdrop of disillusioned men tangled in their own broken dreams, what makes me fall for these two very different stories are its lead women. Interestingly Mamata Shankar, who I think can be best defined as a vernacular foil to Deepti Naval, acted in both the roles. Anjali in Durotwa and Nirupama in Grihajuddha are resilient women but the nature of their resilience is contrasting.

That said, in 1980s Kolkata, it was almost next to impossible to tell their tales ; of a middle class single mother with a son from a relationship out of marriage or of a woman who rejects the prospects of a cozy stable life with her long standing boyfriend, an erstwhile political worker, because she does want to conform to idea of a metaphorsed good life were ‘social justice’ has any meaning. These were unfamiliar portrayals of Bengali women. In hindsight, I find them multifaceted, progressive, authentic and thus relatable to the core.

For Dasgupta the filmmaker, being a part of resistance was important. It was felt his stories weren't empathetic enough to male characters in his early films, who had quit political movements, and were perhaps a bit biased about his women characters. But delved deep he was kind to the men, his cinematic treatment of their contradictions was sensitive making them nuanced, a chauvinist Mondar and or an ambitious Bijon or Hemonto (Andhi Gali, 1984) .

In the winter of 1992, I recall watching Bagh Bahadur, sweepingly different from any of his earlier city based works. As a viewer it wasn’t easy to sense the paradigm shift that Buddhadeb Dasgupta displayed for the first time. He surprised the audience to no end, then weaned them in; into Ghunuram's world, a male performer who paints himself as a tiger and entertains rural audience. And one day his competitor arrives.

I was eager to watch the film for Dasgupta hadn’t made any feature film between 1984 (after he made Andhi Gali) and 1988. The audience was expectant and so was I. He had set his story away from Kolkata in a remote rural village that was cut off from urban ‘development’.

This would be the beginning of his famed lyricism and surreal phase, signature that his works now stand for. The passionate dance moves of Ghunuram performed by Pavan Malhotra is so embedded that it is hard to imagine someone else in his role even today. And the credit goes to Dasgupta as well. For years I wondered, if I will ever meet a Ghunuram dancing like a graceful animal god, in any of my location recce in villages.

After 98 minutes of glued in viewing that evening, I was sure that Dasgupta's explorations would now on be less direct, more individualistic and yet like a fine muslin cloth, somewhere the world or larger society will spread over in all his storytelling. From Bagh Bahadur to Uttara in 2000, Dasgupta's works had transformed much in its cinematic aesthetics. His search by then had become more inward, breaking away from realism giving surrealism a lot of room.

The vast barren lands of Purulia with monadnocks out of nowhere, two men who are deeply intimate bordering homoerotic, unknown masked dancers, a bride who believes that letters when dropped in a mailbox become friends inside as they wait for the postman to pick them up is distinct from Bijon's escape.

The symbolism and metaphors had become layered with each film he made and yet I never felt that situations which seamlessly work for a Bergman film cannot happen in an isolated village of Purulia or Odisha. In fact, the tiny lone church of Uttara made me think how Buddhadeb straddled between Tarkovsky and Bergman with such ease and yet retained the local elements so recognizably Bengal and the subcontinent.

Over the next decade and half, Dasgupta's works were not to be missed. I watched them often. All those characters who stood somewhere in the twilight zone of real and unreal, relatable and imaginary and their stories that could be many of ours. I hope my hippocampus will not let them wither away now that the storyteller is gone.

(Nilosree Biswas is an author and filmmaker)