With love, from a screenwriter

Pankaj K Deo

Not many would know the screenplay writers of Devdas, Teesri Kasam and Abhiman, the evergreen hits of Hindi Cinema. However, when it comes to the directors, it is usually common knowledge. Cinephiles have always been partial towards filmmakers. For each film that’s a hit at the box office, the director bags all the accolades, while the screenwriter remains the unsung hero. No wonder, most scriptwriters are forgotten over the time, except for a few. Nabendu Ghosh is one such exception. Ghosh, who wrote for directors like Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, Basu Bhattacharya and Shakti Samanta, was in a league of his own. He had already made his mark as a litterateur before he began writing for films.

A writer seldom earns success as a screenwriter. Premchand, who tried his hand at penning down scripts, left the Bombay film industry in utter dismay. F Scott Fitzgerald was also a failure in Hollywood as a scriptwriter. Ghosh, however, straddled the two worlds — cinema and literature — with ease. He had a strong grip on popular imagination and treated screenplay as a new art form, distinct from other literary genres. He proved that the timelessness of both great literature and cinema lie, in no small measure, in skilful writing. Ghosh catered to popular taste, but his narrative was always intertwined with social concerns. Films like Sujata and Bandini are examples of his inclination. 

The collection of his stories That Bird Called Happiness: Stories, edited and translated by his daughter Ratnottama Sengupta and others, seeks to  increase Ghosh’s reach as a writer among English-language readers. The character and plot of the first story, Lights!, bear resemblance to Meena Kumari, the famous Bollywood actress, and her life. The author deftly knits the story of her life in a few pages, along with glimpses of other characters and their knotty relationships.

Against the deceptively simple setting of a group of middle-aged teachers going on a pilgrimage, Ghosh skillfully paints contemplations of characters on life and death, illusion and reality in the title story, That Bird Called Happiness. He beautifully depicts a character pining for unrequited love. There is, however, a case of misattribution, and a Shakespearean one at that. The title story erroneously attributes Macbeth’s famous line ‘Out, out, brief candle’ to Othello. If the error was in the original, it should have been fixed in the translation.

As a screenwriter and a litterateur, Ghosh fought against decadent social mores.  The crumbling of customs in the wake of the Partition is also evident in his writing. Sreedhar, the main character of Full Circle, burns down a Hindu scripture when his daughter’s husband and father-in-law refuse to accept her after she is raped. Life comes a full circle for Sreedhar, who had once excommunicated a rape victim from his village. When he sees his own daughter battling the same circumstances, Sreedhar is a changed man, ready to take on the world.

Ghosh’s writing carried the spirit of reform in Hindu society, unleashed by the Bengal renaissance. Love outside the institution of marriage is something he loved to deal with. A story titled Happiness is about love brewing between a young girl and a married army officer. The Fifth Raga captures the relationship between a woman under veil and her letter writer, who is her only means of communication with her husband abroad.

The author’s view on love is that the emotion is the most divine feeling that human beings experience. However, love — be it platonic or physical, transitory or permanent — can break our hearts, and change lives forever. The anthology bears the imprint of a seasoned storyteller, who offers the readers an opportunity to view the multihued aspects of human life from many perspectives. An unputdownable collection of stories — all nicely translated by the author’s kith and kin.