Painted faces,cold reason
Chidananda Das Gupta: critic,artist,taste-maker.
Samar Sen,one of the iconic figureheads of the post-Jibanananda Das generation of modern Bengali poets,had chosen to resolve his dilemma by abandoning the problem altogether. Frustrated by the chasm between medium and message on one hand and the target audience on the other,Sen quit writing poetry,devoting the remainder of his genius and time to the cause of Marxism,which included editing Frontier.
Chidananda Das Gupta,who passed away on Sunday night in Kolkata,underscored the central flaw in the modus operandi of the leftist filmmakers of his generation,a flaw the filmmakers themselves were well aware of — those they mediated for through their cinema didn’t get to see the films they made,nor make sense of them. The audience that did see their films were the already converted “elite” and “educated middle class” — the exact fate of Bertolt Brecht’s plays.
Across media,from Samar Sen to Mrinal Sen,the problem remained unalterable for the artist with a defined or definable agenda.
Cinema,above all,is an urban art form,umbilically attached to patrons with tangible interests. What prevented much of the parallel cinema in India (“unpopular cinema” in Das Gupta’s terms of reference) from penetrating to the masses? The simple truth that “no free society demands that all literature and all art be totally accessible to the masses”.
No free society allows that to happen. Das Gupta believed in this demonstrated truth; but despite the protesting egalitarians,of post-modernist,subaltern or plain resi-dual Marxist persuasion,his other article of faith was social engineering through cinema. Cinema,without abandoning aesthetics,must be educative,enlightening and empowering. “Good cinema,” as Ritwik Ghatak said,“must have its roots in the people.” This is what the “New Indian Cinema” had set out to do,tracing back its reformist zeal to the 19th century Bengal and Indian Renaissance — an unambiguously middle-class,urban phenomenon.
This is a worldview with many enemies. But as long as he retained his critical powers — and that was till practically the very end — Das Gupta would argue that the cynicism wrecked on cultural and critical discourse by the post-modernists begat a lazy rejection of “all utopias and notions of transcendence or mediated change”. This is an important complaint to note,coming as it has till the other day. It might have become suicidal to question the post-modern “alliance with popular culture” long ago,but the damage done by an intellectual and critical practice that questions little and appears spellbound by its own wonder at the day’s menu is caught in Das Gupta’s half-sentence: “justifying philosophies for whatever sells.”
Das Gupta himself was one of the most perceptive students of popular cinema’s interface with society and politics. However,film criticism,subsumed under the gigantic everything-goes-therefore-nothing-matters umbrella that the world and the arts have become,has forgotten an essential truth: all this while,the “popular” and “unpopular” didn’t question or hinder each other’s existence,like the give-and-take between the “margi” (elite) and the “desi” (popular) in Indian artistic tradition.
India’s parallel cinema that had its heyday in Das Gupta’s critical prime was a fundamentally modernist effort,with the seriousness that had defined European High Modernism. This,Das Gupta celebrated. Yet,as India’s pre-eminent and pioneering film critic,nobody was more aware of the failure of Indian modernity as reflected in this cinema,and the failure of the modernism of this cinema itself.
What Das Gupta wouldn’t do,and what the filmmakers he admired and equally locked horns with didn’t do,was abandon the problem altogether. His critical legacy will more and more disappear in the academic labyrinths,unlike the works of those filmmakers; but the totality of his achievement as film critic,filmmaker and literary translator will endure awhile in the accessible domain. At its core is his taste-making for film appreciation and scholarship in India,beginning with the Calcutta Film Society he co-founded with Satyajit Ray and Harisadhan Dasgupta in 1947,a year after his first article of film criticism. Late in life,he probably found the “messianic fervour” of those days amusing,as recollected in his introduction to Seeing is Believing: Selected Writings on Cinema (2008). Yet,without his generation that mixed up political independence and a new cinema as a socio-aesthetic force,we wouldn’t have come so far,for good or for bad,popular or parallel.
As critic,Das Gupta had a million faults,many errors of judgement,still more blatant biases. But much as he found himself in the minority during his argument with Ray over his review of Shakha Proshakha (1990),it was a rare Indian intellectual moment of a heavy-weight critic taking on a heavy-weight artist. From the rant against Pather Panchali (1955) in Parliament by a popular actress of questionable intellect to the unblinking wonder at a giant is but a coin’s thickness. Chidananda Das Gupta,loved or hated,was not of the stature of Andre Bazin; but he was the closest we came. With his death,fewer tools are left us to interpret.
sudeep.paul@expressindia.com
Share
