I watched The Bengal Flies on Saturday afternoon. My recent book, Gandhi: The End of Nonviolence, about Gandhi’s epic march through the villages of Noakhali in the winter of 1946-47, and his peace efforts in Calcutta during the turbulence prior to Independence in August 1947, made me curious about the film’s depiction of the events.
The Bengal Files takes us through the violence in Calcutta on Direct Action Day, declared by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (August 16, 1946) and the mass killings that followed in Noakhali soon after. There is barely any detail about social relations between Hindus and Muslims before violence is unleashed on Hindus in both places. Visuals of Hindu girls roaming carefree through the Howrah Bridge and in the marketplace on their bicycles, and singing Baul songs in a Kali temple, do not contribute much to our knowledge of the social fabric. The political backdrop is also highly simplified, with brief appearances of Jinnah and H S Suhrawardy, and a Hindu Mahasabha leader. There is no Syama Prasad Mookerjee or Sarat Chandra Bose. The film’s central focus is the graphic representation of violence. That is a problem.
Working on my book, I read historical details of the violence in Noakhali and Calcutta. Jinnah’s declaration of Direct Action and subsequent public statements by members of the Muslim League were primarily responsible for instigating the carnage of Partition and setting the template. Pakistan was a tactical lie where the idea of the largest minority was used to destroy the meaning of minority.
The violence of Partition in Bengal was a preplanned affair by officials and henchmen of the ruling League. Bengal’s premier Suhrawardy played the behind-the-scenes manipulator. Gholam Sarwar Hosseini was an active participant. In Calcutta, coupons for gallons of petrol and food rations were issued for League activists, and Hindu police officers were transferred from key areas (the film notes the latter fact). The planning behind Noakhali was more ruthlessly organised. The entry and exit of Hindus in the ghats was monitored by the dreaded Muslim National Guards. These details are no less important for cinema.
If you make a film on a gruesome event from the past, you can’t depict the actual violence alone. The chilling details behind the violence give the audience a sense of the cold-blooded mechanism of leaders and planners behind the heat of brutality. Similar operations have been behind the execution of violence against Muslims in Bihar in 1946, as a revenge for Noakhali. The shadow of state complicity during communal violence plagues the political history of the subcontinent post-1947.
Some of the initial scenes of the aftermath of violence are poignantly depicted. The delirious walk of a young Bharati Mukherjee (an inspired performance by Simratt Kaur Randhawa) through dead bodies is haunting. But the overdose of recreating scenes of horror borders on fetish. Suffocating the audience is an act of manipulation. But to what end? If the artistic response to communal violence is to regenerate communal fear and hatred, the aesthetic objective of cinema deteriorates into propaganda. The film’s rhetoric of speaking for “the right to life” then appears like the right to retribution. A spate of films that appeared in Germany in the prewar years used the trope of victimhood to generate a public that was selectively de/sensitised on the question of violence.
There is nothing wrong with reminding people of a barbaric episode in history. There is also nothing wrong with focusing your lens on a particular community that suffered on that occasion. Sentimentality may not produce the highest form of art, but it is permissible. To use that sentiment, however, to reinforce the very logic of the communal divide that the film is supposedly against is not just contradictory. It’s dangerous. If cinema turns Schmittian (imbibing the political concept of the German jurist and thinker, Carl Schmitt) and legitimises the friend-enemy divide as an acceptable form of cinematic language, it will blur the lines between the communal and the human. The abandonment of the human for the political (community, class) is a crisis in both fascism and communism. To counter such tendencies, India needs truth-and-reconciliation forums where people across communities traumatised by the memory of communal violence can speak to — and learn from — each other without ideologically motivated intermediaries.
Gandhi is caricatured in the film (helped by an uninspiring performance). The epic nature of Gandhi’s four months of walking (often barefoot) through the forty-seven villages of Noakhali, offering hope to victims and poking the conscience of perpetrators, is reduced to a whimper. Gandhi rued publicly that his method of nonviolence failed, but refused to be defeated. The psychological import of his telling victims to be prepared for death was an instigation to be fearless, wrongly shown in the film as an act of weakness. The superficial reading of Gandhi’s motives is a failure to locate the real source of courage when facing physical harm. However, Gopal “Patha” touching Gandhi’s feet despite refusing to give up his weapons is an interesting acknowledgement of Gandhi’s moral presence.
The tormented figure of an old Bharati Mukherjee (played by Pallavi Joshi) is scarred by the image of the “bheed” (crowd). She witnessed the collective immorality of a murderous crowd during communal carnage. The film, however, keeps the audience overwhelmed by the crowd, without offering an understanding or critique of its nature. In Bengal, the urban and rural subalterns engaged in brutality in 1946-47. For ideological reasons, Indian historians and social scientists who have worked on the violence of Partition haven’t adequately formulated an ethical critique of this violence where class and community converged. The crowd also represents the spontaneous barbarity of a communal gang whose religious identity changes according to the context.
Partition’s horror must be written, painted and filmed. Sentiments may not always work under the prism of secular objectivity. It is ethically permissible to voice or depict the woes of one’s own community. Even Ritwik Ghatak does that in his Partition Trilogy (the Muslim is largely absent in Ghatak). The more urgent question is: How do you depict horror? The recreation of horror is to psychologically remain trapped by — and addicted to — its spectre. To recreate horror is to remain unhealed by it. Gandhi’s prayer meetings in Noakhali were intended as mass spiritual therapy. Nonviolence is not just an option for peace. It is the only chance for our survival.
The writer is the author of Gandhi: The End of Nonviolence
