08/02/2016
In 2016, it must be safe to say that an abiding gift of Indian Communism is its most accented cultural snobs. The Bengali and the Malayalee, long abbreviated to just the Bong and the Mallu in hostel rooms, college canteens, press clubs and now exalted into diplomatic parties and corporate dos.
Contemporary Kerala has a joke that is popular on Whatsapp. A Keralite goes to Bengal and says Bengal is just like Kerala.
“You also have as many Bengalis as we do.”
This is a very familiar thing for Bengalies visiting Kerala too. And the two states’ sterling history of being able to push progressive impulses has often intertwined, despite the forbidding estrangement of the two languages. The iconic Malayalam film Chemmeen had music by Salil Chowdhury, who went on to compose songs for many more Malayalam films.
That said, it is also safe to say that Malayalam filmdom has taken a seemingly unbeatable lead over its Bengali counterpart.
For a generation of Indians, films outside of the regular masala genre, began with Satyajit Ray and Pather Panchali.
But, in the late nineties when I joined a Calcutta paper, -- which once had this headline: ‘Amartya Sen, Bengali & Indian, Wins Nobel’ -- I got caught in an unexpected melee. A busload of reporters was being ferried to report on Sonia Gandhi’s first political address in Nandurbar, a tribal district of Maharashtra bordering Gujarat.
After a long overnight ride, we were offloaded in the local Congress Member of Parliament’s spacious, obviously rarely used, seventeenth house. Unfortunately, it was built to be a house, and however opulent, it could not accommodate 37 desperate bladders and bowels from Bombay.
The seasoned political reporters, familiar with this situation, immediately cornered the right to the washrooms. In a set of four to five Bengali reporters, my immediate caretaker was the Ananda Bazaar Patrika man and his own friends. As we were whiling away time, they started to talk about Bengali films and how great Ray was. I don’t quite know which part of me to blame, but somewhere I felt very sidelined. After the quiet travel to the place, I felt the need for conversation. And decided my own dubious Malayalee identity was the best chat bait.
So I interrupted the conversation saying that after Ray and Mrinal Sen, the entire parallel cinema trend was hijacked by Malayalee directors from Kerala. It kind of silenced the Bengali cabal for a while, and as I was preparing to be lynched, a Maharashtrian reporter of the Deccan Herald suddenly jumped in saying “He is correct.” Toh barobar bolto hain!
The gallant who jumped to my defense was Sunil Tambe, and that act of gallantry has made him a close friend ever since.
Immaterial of material evidence, there is a nice parallel between Ray’s iconic cinematic debut, heavily influenced by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, and Malayalam films.
Two years after Ray began filming, a group of college-going teenagers in Kerala, also influenced by De Sica, went through more or less the same struggles as Ray did to raise money and make a neo-realistic film. The Newspaper Boy, the Malayalam film, beat Pather Panchali to public release in May 1955.
The protagonists in both the films shared names, (Apu in Pather Panchali and Appu in the Malayalam version), and both were a humane take on poverty in a recently independent India, just as De Sica graphically depicted the poverty of the citizen in post-World War II Italy in 1948.
The Newspaper Boy has been relegated to trivia rounds of quizzes, despite the fairly high quotient of critical acclaim it garnered for its boldness and the heroic, awe-inspiring ambition and tenacity of its young makers.
It is possible to postulate that perhaps all those college-going students who made The Newspaper Boy went into filmmaking, giving Malayalees the edge over the Bengalies. It also helped that the Bengali film industry collapsed like the Pakistani film industry, while Malayalam films prospered. Fortunately, a new crop of Bengali directors are bringing more armor from our former leftists from the East of India.
(Photo credit: lorenzo please via Foter.com / CC BY-NC Meanest Indian via Foter.com / CC BY-ND)