Saibal Chatterjee
New Delhi

BENGAL's intellectuals, among them celebrated actors and stars, are rooting for change. For decades they were in thrall of the ideals of the CPM-led Left Front, which has ruled the state without a break for 32 years. But now they are increasingly adding their voice to the chorus of popular dissent against the Marxist government’s continuing “misuse of power”.

Keshpur, Nandigram, Singur, Lalgarh… numerous flashpoints have driven filmmaker-actor Aparna Sen, theatre persons Bibhas Chakraborty, Kaushik Sen and Saonli Mitra and poet Joy Goswami, among many others, to pick up cudgels against a decaying political culture that has thrived on a combination of social exploitation, administrative sloth and a crisis of leadership.

“Support for the Left from the artistes’ community isn’t just eroding. It has already eroded,” asserts veteran filmmaker and Rajya Sabha member Shyam Benegal who, in 1982, made Aarohan, a West Bengal government-funded feature film that highlighted the plight of a 1960s farmer (Om Puri) who fights in vain to wrest ownership of his land from a zamindar (Victor Banerjee) aided by a slew of feudal reforms.

“The land reforms initiated by the Left Front after it came to power did make a difference to the lives of one-time sharecroppers,” says Benegal. “But the government did precious little after that, and no progress worth the name was made in the agrarian sector.”

Historically, Benegal argues, “the Left has never, at crucial points of our politics from 1942 to the Indo-US nuclear deal, done what is right”. In Bengal, where the CPM has been in power since 1977, the gap between expectation and actual performance has only got wider over the years. It has now touched breaking point.

“Not only in Lalgarh, but in various other parts of Bengal, people are completely disillusioned with the ruling CPM,” Kaushik Sen, theatre, television and film actor, has been telling the media ad nauseum since he, along with several others from the creative fraternity, visited Lalgarh at the height of the violent stand-off there between Maoists and tribals on the one hand and the police on the other.

Although the independent fact-finding team, which included Aparna Sen, Saonli Mitra and Joy Goswami, extracted an appeal for peace from the local people’s committee chief, Chhatradhar Mahato, the first, and only case, that the police filed after regaining control of Lalgarh village was against these very celebrities for violating prohibitory orders.

Writing a column in a Bengali-language weekly on her return from Lalgarh, the feisty Mitra gave vent to her anger: “Will we let the Maoist story take the focus away from the neglect and deprivation that the tribals have faced for decades? The history of the world is replete with violent agitations wherever power has been abused. If the Maoists have found a foothold here, it is only because of the crushing poverty of the tribals… They’ve existed on the fringes for too long… No education, no healthcare, no employment… When will the government wake up?”

The case of filmmaker Sekhar Das is a classic example of an erstwhile leftist trade unionist who is now using his medium to expose CPM ‘misrule’ in rural Bengal. The former Life Insurance Corporation employee’s third feature film, Kaaler Rakhal (The Understudy), was commercially released in early April, weeks before the last parliamentary elections in Bengal, only to be quickly withdrawn from theatres ostensibly under pressure from forces that did not like its strident anti-establishment stance.

“It’s my most angry film to date,” says Das. Kaaler Rakhal tells the story of a young Bohurupee performer who, at the behest of the political satraps of his village, stands in for a few rupees more for party-backed criminals whenever the police hauls them up. “I know the party inside out,” the director says. “It’s not just the leaders but also the cadres that have degenerated beyond recognition.” Ironically, Das’ cinematic critique of the Left ran unhindered in Nandan, which is owned by the government and is currently headed by civil servant Nilanajan Chatterjee, author of the story from which Kaaler Rakhal has been adapted.

Das argues that Bengal is witnessing a repeat of the 1970s, when the Congress was voted out of power because it had become synonymous with criminalisation of politics. “It wasn’t a party, but an entire political culture, that the people had voted against back then,” he adds. “Today, the Left represents a culture that isn’t acceptable anymore. It represents neo-feudalism of the petty bourgeoisie, who’ve been riding on the back of poor, exploited cadres spread across the state.”

Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress has tapped into this public mood to create a strong groundswell for itself. It is no coincidence that one of the key TMC sympathisers who have ridden this wave all the way to the 15th Lok Sabha is reluctant politician Kabir Suman. The one-time left-leaning poet, songsmith, crooner, musician and self-confessed acolyte of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, is a Bengali Brahmin who converted to Islam in 2000. The 60-year-old Kabir Suman is, in a way, the poster boy of the anti-establishment movement that is rapidly gaining ground in Bengal. “Civilisation has died today in the fields of Singur,” the singer had said on witnessing the state brutality that had been unleashed on hapless displaced farmers in that village.

In spirit, Kabir Suman is a descendant of a singer of a very different kind, the legendary Rabindra Sangeet exponent Debabrata ‘George’ Biswas. The latter was a card-carrying Communist. But he drifted away from the Left disillusioned with several crucial aspects of the movement. He also fell foul of Visva-Bharati, copyright holders of Tagore’s creative output, because of his radically unorthodox renditions of the poet’s compositions.

Even as the Lalgarh imbroglio has emerged as a symbol of a people’s protest against the status quo, Biswas’ autobiography, Bratyajoner Ruddhasangeet (Stifled Songs of the Outcast, published a year before he died in 1980), has provided the raw material for a play, Ruddhasangeet, conceived and directed by actor-filmmaker-playwright Bratya Basu. It celebrates artistic, personal and, by extension, political freedom of an individual.   

Traditionally, the creative community in Bengal has had links, sometimes tenuous, sometimes pronounced, with the Left. But those connections have wilted and many leading theatre personalities, artists and filmmakers are churning out works that expose the ugly face of leftist totalitarianism in the guise of democracy. Veteran actor, playwright and director Bibhas Chakraborty has been staging Mrityu Na Hotya? (Death or Murder?), an adaptation of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, designed as a direct attack on the politicisation of the police force under three decades of Left rule in Bengal.

Since Nandigram, many Bengali plays have pulled no punches in targeting the left. Saonli Mitra’s troupe, Pancham Vaidik, has done Poshu Khamar, based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm; Kaushik Sen’s Swapnasandhani has come up with Bidushak and Dakghar: and playwright Bratya Basu has crafted Agunmukho (Fire-faced), a play directed by Suman Mukhopadhyay. Artist Shuvaprasanna, once known to be close to the CPM, has, in a recent painting, projected Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya as Hitler..

Kaushik Sen has paid the price for his anti-left outpourings, but he isn’t throwing in the towel. “We have supported several people’s movements in the past two years and the government has called us names,” he says. There was a time when Sen’s theatre group would receive upwards of 30 invites to perform in different parts of the state. The number of on-demand performances has dropped to well below ten.

So, it isn’t easy fighting a government that has been in the saddle for three decades, as Aparna Sen found out when an arrest warrant was issued against her after her Lalgarh sojourn, but it doesn’t seem that this battle will end anytime soon.

August 2009 Edition

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