The everlasting youth of Mrinal Sen

Shardul Bhardwaj

“I wrote a script. It was a very bad script perhaps, but my first script… I had two or three friends... Ritwik Ghatak, Salil Chaudhary and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Hrishikesh was the only person in cinema... neither me nor Ritwik Ghatak.”

The mention of these names that are now cornerstones of Indian cinema was made by Mrinal Sen, who passed away at the age of 95 earlier this week, after living a full life and perhaps a fuller cinematic career, miles ahead of that first bad script.

The influence of the above-mentioned filmmakers is ingrained in the everyday life and culture of cinephiles across generations. While Satyajit Ray continues to remain a major literary and cinematic force for the everyday movie lovers in Bengal to the extent that one can see his face painted at Durga Puja pandals even in New Delhi, Ritwik Ghatak’s appearance is sporadic. However, it’s rare to see Mrinal Sen’s presence. Sen along with Ghatak and Ray makes the triumvirate that has been often celebrated for ushering in modern and progressive cinema into India.

Ray once famously called Sen’s filmmaking “sloppy”. It is often that while talking about Sen’s cinema people quote what Ray thought of Ghatak. Fiery debates regarding who among the three has done more superior work have been raging for long.

However, one could commend Sen for capturing the despondency of a generation he did not belong to. Born in Bangladesh, he left home in Faridupur in 1940 and made Calcutta his home. In 1971, Calcutta was a city bursting at its seams. It was a time when revolution was in the air and the youth were in despair over lack of jobs. It was also the same year that Sen made a film called Interview (1971). The film baffled the audiences as Sen was at his full cinematic glory where he would effortlessly flow from stylisation to traditional realism. In one shot inside a bus, KK Mahajan, the cinematographer, is visible too. Sen hardly ever closed himself to the beauty of a script and the response to the moment that cinema is. He believed in making his work site-specific and allowing space for improvisation. In fact, like all right-minded filmmakers, he would not claim to know completely what he was making at the time of shooting.

Naseeruddin Shah once recounted that he had no idea what Mrinal Sen was making while shooting Genesis (1986). Shah went onto call it “crap” in an interview that Sen was very fond of showing around for he had immense love for his actors. In MK Raina’s words, on one hand there was Ray who would generally dictate minute movements to his actors and on the other was Sen who would almost use actors as ‘space’. For Sen, half of his job would be done when he would cast a good actor so that the need to direct him/her to the last detail does not arise. He would respond to what the actor was rather than wanting to make an actor act in a certain way.

He was not the most exceptional filmmaker and Genesis is an example. What Genesis also signifies is that he was in a state of constant experimentation. It is an allegorical story and Sen was known for his realistic cinema. By 1986, when he made Genesis, Sen was a known name. Bhuvan Shome (1969), Calcutta 71 (1971) and Khandahar (1984) had earned him name and fame all over India and the world. To conceive a project out of one’s comfort zone and in the so-called cinematic language can and is done only by those who make cinema not to establish themselves, but, to remain youthful.

Sen was popular for being stern on the sets but, at the same time, people who worked with him say that he was a romantic at heart. It’s a cliché often used but he was young at heart, his films and his everlasting search for a form say so. Perhaps it was Charlie Chaplin, his greatest influence, who rubbed off on him. His eyes would sparkle wide as he would talk about seeing Chaplin in a Doordarshan interview. A child would leap out of those two beautiful eyes that saw and made some of the finest cinema that the world has ever seen. 

To compare him to a Ghatak or a Ray is a futile effort as they belonged to very different ways of filmmaking. Mrinal Sen’s fuel was to explore the politics of daily life. His wasn’t a cinema of answers but more of questions — questions which unsettle and never have an easy answer. He famously once asked: “Why should a man-woman relationship be only seen romantically?”

Indeed, he taught many generations of filmmakers that romance has its own politics and politics has its own romance. To see his passing away as a chapter in cinema closed would be a grave mistake. To view it as a new beginning would perhaps be the ideal tribute. Scores of people will now retreat to his cinema or maybe discover something that could be relevant today. What one will definitely find is the immense dignity he always afforded his characters, who were conceived as underdogs.

His cinema never preyed upon people’s emotions by using the lives of the underdogs, but made the viewers sit up from their seats to question class, caste and religion. Goodbye to a filmmaker, writer, artist, teacher and, above all, a youthful and compassionate human being.