Traced on the timeline

Shoma A. Chatterji

Saroj Dutta and His Times is a documentary by two social activists who were not even born when Saroj Dutta went missing in 1971. Kasturi Basu and Mitali Biswas have put together five years of painstaking research to make an investigative documentary. The film is more history than politics and reflects how the democratic use of aesthetics and facts can turn the film into a masterpiece.

 “The Naxalbari peasant uprising post-1947 India marked a point of departure in the Communist Movement, pushing the question of agrarian revolution to the forefront. The large-scale killing and thousands of young revolutionaries going missing indicated towards the authorities’ attempts at crushing any uprising,” inform Kasturi and Mitali.

 Saroj was a historical figure shaped by his times. Like Victor Jara and Federico Garcia Lorca, he too was killed for wielding his pen against the State’s bullets. “This period also marked the hollowing out of lofty notions of ‘justice’, ‘democracy’, ‘civil rights’ and ‘rule of law’,” they add.

Every single frame, sequence and interview for which Saroj Dutta used his razor-sharp pen have been captured well in the film. His works also inspired youngsters raise voice against injustice and violation of human rights. Old photographs of the family and Dutta at different stages of his life dot the space.

 Dutta’s wife, in her eighties, narrates how as an active member of the Communist Party, he was ordered to visit the villages and work within the agrarian movement immediately after their marriage. “I learnt to make bombs and also knew how to use guns. The party leadership asked us one day to go back to the kitchen,” she tells with her toothless smile.  

The political ideology the film is based on does not really matter. What makes the film special is its direction. The two young directors also appear in the film watching old clips, editing the film, looking at scanned pages of old newspapers, which gives the film a real feel. 

There are dozens of interviews of Saroj Dutta’s old friends and colleagues, his followers and wife. A unique technique used is of superimposing the figure of Saroj Dutta (using an actor without showing his face) with the printed pages of the different newspapers he wrote for or edited in the pen name Shashanko.

 “This film began on the birth centenary year of Saroj Dutta and wrapped up after four years, on the 50th anniversary of the Naxalbari Movement. The story itself rolled out and painted its canvas to show the context, complexities, turbulences and aborted promises of the times. Saroj’s life couldn’t be seen in isolation from the burning questions of his space and time,” the two ladies sum up.

The film has been screened at the 5th Kolkata People’s Film Festival earlier this year, followed by an official screening at the 6th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival and will now be screened at the 11th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala.

Who was Saroj Dutta? 

One of the most outstanding journalists, poets, writers, whose pen was sharp enough to set officialdom sit up and take notice, Saroj Dutta (1914-1971) was a hardcore leftist and a member of the Communist Party of India which later became CPI (M). Dutta was picked up one day from a friend’s house in a police van in 1971. He never came back.