Why an evaluation of Bengali auteur Tapan Sinha is overdue

“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. I have often felt the same, I have often felt like breaking free; from norms and forms.”

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 link 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 his cinema. All of the above, including the stories of the three films, he happily took on loan from the man he considered his God: Rabindranath Tagore. 

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, hummingbird-like 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. This is his best gift to cinema – to have engaged with the most complex of issues in an accessible, agreeable and enjoyable way. And perhaps, as he later realised, this came to be his most formidable flaw as an artist. 

Tapanbabu did not particularly burst into the scene. He learned his art, first as a sound engineer in Calcutta and then as an observer at Pinewood Studios in London, before he ventured into making cinema. The conditions for good cinema, in his time, as it is always, were trying. In the mid-1950s, middle-of-the-road cinema was largely unheard in the catalogue of Indian cinema. The “art cinema” movement was fledgling and popular cinema was haunted by an elusive logic of socially committed entertainment. That there was the Middle Path between these two recalcitrant forms was somewhat inconceivable. But who knows, the young Tapan Sinha, while studying Physics in Calcutta must have become aware of the rewarding juxtapositions of opposite forces. A lesson, he must have judiciously applied to his films. 

His first job was a sound engineer at New Theatres. Later, he worked for the newly founded Calcutta Movietone before going off to London for a year and a half. It was because of mixed tutelage that Sinha’s first screenplay turned out to be an adaptation from Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, which a well-meaning friend had termed atrocious. But that was not enough to pull Sinha away from Hollywood greats — Carol Reed, Billy Wilder and most importantly William Wyler and John Ford. 

In his one of his many barbs at himself, Sinha later said: “After three months in New Theatres, I became a ‘cinephile’. I must have read a bit of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and I was arrogant enough to believe that no one knows anything here. It has do to with the natural rebellion of my age. Young blood is like the compass whose needle necessarily leans to the Left. With years, the needle, unknowing to oneself, straightens its position. In the next thirty-odd years I have proved repeatedly that I know nothing about cinema. But not then.”

Tapan Sinha’s first three movies Ankush, Upohaar and Tonsil went unnoticed but he cracked the code with Kabuliwala, that had released to huge commercial and critical acclaim. Before long, the discerning Bengali audience, waking up to the pulse of the Ray-Ghatak New Wave as well as to the emerging cult of Uttam Kumar, realized that popular Bengali cinema had got its first artist, and art cinema its first unrepentant entertainer. A magical union of liberating art and critical populism made Tapan Sinha’s films the talisman of what came to be known as middle-of-the-road Bengali cinema. The audience flocked to the theatres and came out rewarded; again and again. Sinha’s range boggled their minds, tickled their tastes and warmed their hearts: “I was following Hollywood in my resolution to give good, honest entertainment to my Bengali audience. After the first seven or eight films, I did stop to think once if I should try to develop a style of my own, but then I thought better and decided to let my subject matter, my themes determine my style for me.”

Sinha’s candour is in keeping with his larger credo of telling a good story in a nice way. As film-maker Rituparno Ghosh writes: “Tapan Sinha was denied the throne he richly deserved. Perhaps because his movies were popular. The overwrought Bengali audience consider mass appeal as an enemy of art. They believe that the artist who can relinquish the seduction of popularity is a real artist. They then take upon themselves the august task of taking that art to the audience. Tapan Sinha never cared for such pieties.“

The affable nature of his films fetched him mass adulation but has confused and beleaguered the critical reception of his cinema. In spite of his deep devotion to his craft, he remained a lonely traveller on a road he had largely helped engineer. Because popular films were viewed with a deep sense of suspicion of having a soul that was sold to the devil of commerce, Sinha has always found himself systematically dismembered from the elite artistic trio of Satyajit Ray-Ritwik Ghatak-Mrinal Sen. Unlike his illustrious peers, no cult grew around the man. 

But Sinha was embedded to the cause of good and meaningful cinema no less than Ray and Ghatak, though naturally and expectedly, their styles varied widely. All three of them, in turn, warmed and soaked themselves with the holy water of Western Enlightenment and Tagorean humanism. Then they went their own ways, towards authoring their own universe. Ray burst into the scene with Panther Panchali, Ghatak, though virtually an outsider all his life, emerged as a maverick, New Realist Nietzsche. Sen, for that matter, rejected Tagore’s Brahmo lineage and gradually turned more viscerally and visually left-leaning than any of his contemporaries. 

With his filial affection for Tagore and his passion for American cinema, Sinha bought two forms of divergent but ingenuous internationalisms to bear upon his own work, which perhaps without much irony, belonged, doubtlessly to a quintessentially Bengali taste. Sinha never felt this union so acutely because he belonged to a cultural domain where people were equally at home with both the baul and Bergman. His worldview was big enough to make space for his varied influences, his wide spectrum of interests and his devotion to Modernist literature. Most importantly, Sinha’s uniqueness lies in his relentless formalistic adventurism, his effortless juggling of genres and, as mentioned, his brave engineering of a middle-of-the-road form. But even then, his virtuosity was perhaps the least self-referential of the three and for obvious reasons, the least celebrated. As he said: “I knew I just couldn’t stick to a style and under pressure, I could just become repetitive. And then there was the example of Hollywood again. A Hollywood director would be making a crime thriller one day, a Western immediately after that and then How Green Was My Valley, opening up new horizons continuously. I thought: Why don’t I try to do something similar? Let me try out in several directions, keeping that one consideration in mind, that I had to reach out to the Bengali audience…I was also resolved at the same time never to take advantage of any of the weaknesses of my audience.“

For 40 years or so, Sinha has put together a remarkable repertoire of films straddling across the spectrum of genres, styles and narratives — costume drama (Jhinder Bondi), thriller (Sobuj Diper Raja), whodunnit (Boidurja Rahashya), pubescent fables (Aj Ka Robinhood, Safed Hathi), comedy (Tonsil, Golpo Holeo Shotti), satire (Banchharamer Bagan), sci-fi fantasy (Ek Je Chilo Desh) social drama (Hatey Bajare, Sagina Mahato, Kabuliwalah), social realism (Adalat O Ekti Meye, Aponjon), etc. His urbane take on estranged couple-hood in Jotugriha, the seduction of wanderlust in Atithi, the poignancy of early widowhood in Nirjan Saikate, of epic resistance against natures demonic destructiveness in Hansuli Banker Upokotha and the philosophical moorings of a brooding poltergeist in Khudito Pashan are outstanding examples of cinema that eschews the mythical boundaries of art and populism. In Harmonium, he explored the portmanteau form with the travails of a peripatetic harmonium, through class and glass ceilings — from faux middle respectability to the joie de vivre of boudoir bohemianism. 

Sinha used a variety of lesser-known actors and literary influences to his great advantage as much as he has tapped into Rabindranath Tagore’s endless humanist exchequer or Bengali screen idol Uttam Kumar’s iconic popularity, without getting trapped into characteristic bhadrolok excess. Perhaps that is the reason why in spite of his films having a great run at the box office and at festivals, Tapan Sinha the artist remained somewhat elusive, untraceable. A prospect that has been eloquently put to words by Bengali littérateur Nabanita Dev Sen: “Every corner of our society received the light of his keen observation. For the last fifty years, his cinema has become entrenched into Bengali middle-class life. We the audience have remembered his movies but have probably forgotten the man behind them. We go to see a Satyajit Ray movie, but we go to see a Tonsil, a Jotugriha, a Sagina Mahato, a Atonko, a Golpo Holeo Sotti. Then, as if as an afterthought, we ask whose film is that? One who is not seen, one who hides himself and loves, is he Tapan Sinha?“

This dementia on part of his audience is even reflected in critics of yore. Even the very eminent Chidananda Dasgupta, arguably India’s most admired film critic, has not found much to mention about Sinha’s oeuvre. In his valuable collection of essays Seeing is Believing: Selected Writings on Cinema (Penguin, 2008), where he dedicates full chapters each to Ray, Ghatak and Sen, he mentions Sinha only in passing, and that too unflatteringly, while analyzing Indian cinemas unpredictable tryst with national awards: “Tapan Sinha’s Haatey Bazarey (1967) was a more complex presentation than the unidirectional dramatic propensity he had exhibited in his Kabuliwala (top prize winner, 1956), where the delicately woven magic of Tagore’s short story had come in for some heavy-handed traditional dramatics, overstretching its credibility in spite of Chhabi Biswas’s great presence. Sinha’s lack of appreciation of photographic values, and generally of a cinematic vision, was better compensated in the construction of his later prize winner (Haatey Bazarey) than his earlier (Kabuliwala).”This is all that is there in his book that is virtually an intellectual biography of Indian parallel cinema.

Dasgupta, articulate, thoroughly learned and unfailingly insightful in his art, could dismiss Sinha’s presence in Bengali and in turn Indian cinema in no more than a few lines, it was perhaps because Sinha did not follow any trail, any grand narrative, and evolved as one who was never demonstratively inviting for critical reading, as one not fit to be studied for knowing what cinema is all about. Dasgupta’s banishment of Sinha from the high tables of cinema is endemic of an entire generation who considered Sinha’s uneven repertoire as too indulgent about popular tastes and too compromising on the profundity of high-brow art. 

But even by the high standards of Indian art cinema Sinha’s Khudito Pasan (The Hungry Ghost) Jotugriha (The Burning House), Harmonium, Atithi (The Guest), Aponjon (The Kins), Ek Doctor ki Maut (Death of a Doctor), Haatey Bazarey (The Marketplace), Adalat O Ekti Mey (The Court and that Girl) are resplendent examples of cinema at its technical and narrative best. But even then, such acts of surrender to the vague, simplistic and accepted differentiation between popular and art cinema is disagreeable. And none other than Dasgupta is best suited to know so. In his book, he first argues in favour of reinstating the divide between popular cinema and parallel cinema. For him, the dichotomy of good and bad cinema is simplistic and evades the composite demands that cinema makes of its audience. In the essay ‘How Indian is Indian Cinema?’ he writes: “The inability or unwillingness to differentiate popular and high culture in terms of values, particularly in cinema, arises from the unawareness or disregard of the vast manipulative forces at work in mass-produced cultural commodities.”

But later he mentions how Indian modernity can make palpable demands out of Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoors cinema and how they are as much claimant to the glories of Indian unpopular cinema, as are the masters of European New-Wave. Dutt or Kapoor were by no means artistic filmmakers. Hence contrary to his own argument, but somewhat true to his subliminal conviction, popular cinema (at least some forms within it) and art cinemas divide, for Dasgupta is not in its values but the factors of their production. In fact, in whatever ways Dasgupta tries to defend the divide in cinema, his critiques show how tantalizingly inter-dependent rival forms in Indian cinema have been and continue to be. The interconnections of populist and artistic cinema at various levels, as Dasgupta somewhat grudgingly mapped, are unique and magical. 

And that is why, a reinstatement of Tapan Sinha’s films for an audience familiar with his work as well as those not as much, is overdue. And in doing so one realizes that in spite of Sinha’s creative vulnerability and adventurism, his cinema has three connected but independent movements, like a fully realized music score. 

In no chronological order, and perhaps completely unknown to this gentleman filmmaker, his films falls neatly into three distinct moods: childhood or return, middle-age or response and old age or resignation. 

Between Safed Haathi in 1979 and Anokha Moti in 2000, Sinha has gone back repeatedly into making films for children, including Sobuj Diper Raja and Aj Ka Robinhood. The films gave Sinha a chance to revisit, to return to the elemental and simpler norms of existence that made up much of his childhood, like all of us. But Sinha carried the gaze of his childhood into the cinema he made for adults, a tendency that must have prompted Dasgupta to talk about his lack of cinematic vision. But simplicity is, mistakenly, never a simple endeavour and Sinha’s sunny vision carried much of his early cinema into Indian cinemas hall of fame. If Kabuliwala was indeed marred by its simplicity, then Atithi, Safed Haathi, Harmonium or Arohi was emboldened by it. 

But in his cinema of response or those in which his character and protagonists act out of the courage of conviction, or are put into situations where they must act or respond, Sinha is never caught wanting. Jotugriha, Golpo Holeo Sotti (A True Story), Banchharamer Bagan (The Enchanted Garden), Ek Je Chilo Desh (A County Far Afar), Haatey Bazare, Sagina Mahato, Nirjan Saikate (The Empty Beach), Adalot o Ekti Meye, Aadmi aur Aurat, Ek Doctor Ki Maut, are brilliant examples of narratives where the tragi-comic reality of real and unreal situations make great demands of the people who populate them and how they rise or fail in their feat. These films mark what is the best in Sinha: his realist imperative, his control over the medium, his capability in adapting complex literary works into serious celluloid set pieces, his range of storytelling mechanisms and most importantly, his kaleidoscopic humanism.

Ironically, it is this all-encompassing humanism and as mentioned before, a keen sympathy with the audience that made his films uneven and often deficient artistically. And hence even with such a stellar assemblage of films, Sinha turned into a somewhat bitter man late in his life. In a late interview he said: “Much of what we want remains unfulfilled. For me, what has remained elusive is that good, that ideal film. Have I ever made that ideal film which I have spoken so loudly about?”

This self-effacing judgment is concomitant with the gradual abandonment of his seriocomic critiques for more straightforward stories about righteous individuals pitted against collective apathy fighting a lonely and bitter crusade against the system(s) that have failed them. Atonko, Antardhan, Wheelchair are significant departures from the tender chronicles of embattled social orders that Sinha excelled in. Here the gradual, embattled but inevitable resignation of old age is palpable. A resignation that finally claimed the filmmaker in Sinha as well. 

Last July, Sinha received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, a much belated but nevertheless worthy recognition of his contribution to cinema. This was perhaps a rare award that saluted him as an artist rather than saluting one or more of his films, which were feted in endless festivals and exhibitions here and abroad. 

Doubtlessly, Sinha, the filmmaker, will be remembered. But if he has to find a more fitting place for him in the annals of Indian cinema, we must learn to make way for the wanderlust, the juggler and the troubadour amongst us; because cinema verity, if we can use that word, is not bound by text or textuality, not measured by commercial devices and is not really incumbent upon the derivative doctrines of populism and high art.