"Mahanagar@Kolkata": Postmodern City Blues

Michael de Certeau in his renowned piece “Walking in the City” writes:

Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinaesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In this respect, pedestrian movements form one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city’.

This is so true of Suman Mukhopadhyay’s Mahanagar@Kolkata: it captures contemporary Kolkata by collecting singularities and merging them together in a dramatic mingling of three short stories by Nabarun Bhattacharyya recalling an outstanding Bollywood flick Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (See review below). The title unambiguously alludes to the 1964 Satyajit Ray classic Mahanagar, the new codicil @Kolkata underlining the city’s ushering into the globalized e-world. Certainly the city has made a long journey since Ray’s Mahanagar; the skyscrapers harbouring offices and commercial centres that crowd the final scene of the film have now become the abodes of estranged relationships, of suicidal men and women, an existentialist angst having crept into their very being. Promoters, an MBA-holder, a night-club regular proficient in Marx, a modern day wife unable to connect with her husband, a corporation officer, a tea-stall owner living in the slum, a superstitious father, and a dark gang having clear connection with political parties: their paths intertwine to make the city and how!

Manmotho (Anjan Dutta) and Jagadish (Biplab Chatterjee) meet on the premises of a government-run hospital and witness a brutal political murder. The hospital has by that time turned into a den where party-backed goondas hide, pretending to be ill, and taking in prostitutes every night. Jagadish’s weird belief that nothing can go wrong with him for he carries with himself a piece of rope used by a maid to hang herself unsettles Manmotho visibly. In a surreal night of wind and the rain, while Jagadish narrates his intriguing story of how he got hold of this exclusive piece of rope, an imbecile murder is committed. Jagadish continuously appeals to Manmotho to blind himself: “Don’t look!” It’s a kind of blindness which all the city-dwellers have voluntarily adopted, for that is the only survival strategy. But the irony of it all strikes in the next story when Biren (Arun Mukherjee), a poor man who thrives on others’ favour, is deeply perturbed by a murder in his locality, apprehending an-eye-for-an-eye war to follow soon. His belittled status makes him a laughing stock. His continuous exercise at acquiring assurance by asking all and sundry “Amar kono bhoy nei to?” (“Should I have anything to fear?”), encapsulates the very absurd condition in which every dweller of the postmodern city is caught. Biren’s character recalls so many others of black comedies. When Biren is really killed in a prank played on him by a party-backed goonda of the locality, the latter reiterates the question − Amar kono bhoy nei to? − which makes you feel a shiver run down the spine. You suddenly feel so terribly insecure, for the well-known city is frighteningly defamiliarized! What danger is waiting for you round that corner, so apparently familiar and safe? Do you really have anything to fear? Certainly you have. Only that you do not know it’s nature. Something continues to haunt you from this point on, and stays with you even after you have safely returned home.

Satyajit Ray wished to call his Mahanagar, A Woman’s Place, in English. But that did not happen (The official English title turned out to be as unimaginative as The Big City). But in the gendered space of the city, the woman has always been treated as the subaltern. Ray’s heroine gave up her career protesting against the injustice done to an Anglo-Indian woman. That’s the best she could have done in the face of patriarchal butchery of a woman’s honour. The women in Mahanagar@Kolkata are apparently more liberated, perhaps more empowered. But Suman Mukhopadhyay locates them in history, revoking the unspeakable injustice done to them in the past in public: the vicious Sati. The modern day woman, though liberated, has in her unconscious the terrible memories of the inhuman act deeply embedded. So, in a surreal sequence, we find Rongili (Rituparna Sengupta) undergoing the paraphernalia surrounding the bride to be sacrificed at her husband’s funeral pyre. Incidentally, she is on the verge of separation from her husband Rohit (Chandan Roy Sanyal) who suspects that she is sleeping with some other guy. In the surreal sequence Rongili’s constant companion is Kamalini (Sreelekha Mitra), the night-club queen, least prejudiced about sex and relationships, and someone who dabbles with Marx. Yet, she too is a victim of the patriarchal system, and undergoes the experience related to Sati, although indirectly.

The open-sky economy has opened up immense job opportunities for the educated middle class. We have come a long way from the 1960s, when Ray’s hero, having lost his job, sulks at home. In E-Kolkata, MBA degree-holders float like sewers beneath the roads everywhere, and are barely out of job, no matter what inhuman slavery they are compellingly a part of. Rohit is one such new age hero, although there is nothing heroic about him. For, there are no heroes any more. Suspicious of his wife’s adultery and unprepared for beginning a family, he undergoes tremendous stress, characteristic of the Genex crowd of the metropolis. As in a moment of crisis he takes off his clothes one by one, and madly breaks into a song with his guitar, he screams out his soul as it were…perhaps some emotional protest against what he exactly can’t figure out. Chandan Roy Sanyal is simply brilliant in this particular scene.

Mahanagar@Kolkata is a cult film in its own right…a new way of looking at our city. Although the cinematography is a bit too dull, an excellent script is its strength. Rupam Islam’s music does justice to the theme, and on the acting front all have delivered satisfactorily. Mostly claustrophobic, the film somehow inspires the need to feel this claustrophobia deeply. Squarely located in contemporary West Bengal and its turbulent political atmosphere, Mahanagar@Kolkata mutely apprehends an apocalypse. Suicide, death, violence, corruption and above all the death of compassion shock us…we can no longer afford not to look at things. The voluntary blindness we all have adopted cannot really help us keep that unknowable FEAR at bay.