Narratives which make pictures move

Auteurs of Bengali cinema has adapted Tagore’s stories to some of the most memorable films ever made, even if that meant going beyond the written text, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury

While filming Inner Eye, his bio-docu on the blind artiste Binodbehari Mukhopadhay, Satyajit Ray is said to have asked his former teacher at Kalabhavan and the man he deeply admired for his amazing murals, what drives him to create works of such beauty without being able to know what they looked like? Binodbehari is reported to have replied, “Empathy, Satyajit, empathy!”

In a discussion about the films on the works of Tagore, this incident merits mention for two reasons. Apart from the shared connection of Santiniketan, Tagore and Ray were men of extraordinary empathy for their subjects, exactly that empathy that a blind muralist has for his art. And those men of the marquee who have adapted Tagore to the screen have somehow managed to hold on to this sublime disposition. Doubtlessly Ray and Tapan Sinha are the most remarkable of them all but there have been a few other films where the maker has shown an occasional burst of the sublime.

Consider Tapan Sinha, who has made some of the most memorable adaptations of Tagore on screen. In one of his writings, Sinha wrote, “I do not know if Atithi is my best film. But I enjoyed making every bit of it. Atithi is about an adolescent boy Tarapada whose wanderlust makes it impossible for him to remain bound by the ties of family, fraternity and fortune. He is an eternal guest — an itinerant, youthful minstrel. And Tarapada is none other than Tagore. Tagore was a mind-wanderer, and in his many works he has pined for being the child of pure nature, the wanderer, even in the midst of the fortuity he was born into and bred in.”

Childhood, wanderlust, and a hummingbird imagination, not in that order always, warmed the most of Bengali auteur Tapan Sinha’s heart and art. Atithi (The Wanderer, 1965), his better-known Kabuliwala (1957) and under-rated Khudito Pashan (The Hungry Ghost, 1960) most productively links his lifelong preoccupations within the framework of a single narrative. They also most poignantly engage with the idea of release and return, the nucleus of Sinha’s cinema. All of the above, including the stories of the three films, he happily took on loan from the man he considered his God. But Tagore was not a figure of distant reverence for Sinha, much as he might have belonged to a generation of stiff-upper-lip Tagore apparatchiks — the bhadrolok coterie that sought to control public reception of Tagore. Sinha rather let his restive, imagination run free on Tagore terrain, which in turn lend an intuitive lightness of touch to his narratives. This is true as much for his piquant adaptations of Tagore as much for the other films of his most remarkable repertoire. If Ray’s Tagore, as we shall see, was a site for mature meditations on the impossibility of closure in the theatre of life, Sinha’s Tagore was mostly the elderly endearing man next door who always has his door open for discussion and in his own, playful way consoles others on life’s many meanings.

Ritwik Ghatak was perhaps the man most gifted with that intractable but palpable empathy that we have talked about except that Ghatak considered Tagore too much of a universalist, too nuanced for his taste. Ghatak, baptised under the hallowed portals of socialist movements in politics and culture, could never consciously make an effort to find umbrage under Tagore, though in his writings and thought, Ghatak was never away from him, often grudgingly accepting the impossibility of turning away from Tagore.

In fact, in Ghatak, who like Ray, was bred under the Tagore tree, critic Chidananda Dasgupta sees a rare marriage of rationalist, Marxist cultural ethic and indigenous, folksy symbolism, a marriage that Ghatak was deeply and embarrassingly aware of but had never consciously acknowledged. That perhaps is why he never adapted a Tagore story. But Ghatak is to be credited for the finest uses of Tagore’s songs in his films. Nobody could before or since capture in spirit and essence the melancholia, longing and the search for the sublime in Tagore’s songs, as did Ghatak in his films.

For Ray, Tagore was that huge cultural artefact, a Leviathan who could be referenced for life and death as much for the imminent and the immanent. Ray had a shared Brahmo legacy with Tagore, to which Dasgupta blamed Ray’s refusal to naturally sexualise women. That may be the case, but it is because of Tagore that Ray could invest such humanism in his adaptations. Charulata, Ray’s most favourite film and perhaps one of the greatest works of world cinema display a meditative quietude, a genuine appraisal for the platonic and a genteel pause pregnant with the pain of lost love. His Postmaster, part of the portmanteau film Tin Kanya, based on three stories by Tagore, could touch the rawest of chords of a lonely man’s singular pursuit of finding meaning in a life full of banalities. Even Monihara and Samapti could do justice to Tagore’s best gift as an effortless chronicler of life’s amazing riches, that often lay claim to that of the dead. Ghore Baire (Home and the World) was an average film by Ray’s standards because in ways unlike of him, he could not find means to make complete meaning of Tagore’s ambivalence towards Nationalists. 

Some of the other notable adaptations include Malancha and Strir Potro by the very talented Purnendu Patri, Agradoot’s Khokababur Protyaborton with Uttam Kumar in the lead, Chaturanga by Suman Mukhopadhya, Kumar Sahani’s Char Adhay and the much-hyped Chokher Bali by Rituparno Ghosh.

The search for the cinematic idiom for adapting and readapting Tagore continues, but it is unlikely that the heights already scaled by the Rays and the Sinhas will ever be peaked.