By Joshy Joseph
The celebrated Bengali is rather infamous for his traffic sense. Or, senselessness, to put it straight. It takes just few minutes in a bus stop or an auto joint . Once a westerner commented:” They don’t drive left or right. They drive on whatever is left.” Even though there’s hardly any space left on either side, the autos blast off their horns as if there’s a war breaking out. The result is an interesting juxtapose.
Didi, the Chief Minister of Bengal ,ordered to play Rabindra Sangeet at traffic junctions, bringing face to face the senseless Bengali on road and the sensitive Bengali at heart. At every red signal, the soothing soulful songs elevate the mavericks on road to a serene calmness and the next moment , when the green lights are up he is back to his maverick best. The Crescendo and decrescendo pattern continues at every junction.Rituparno Ghosh`s films won`t present you this contrasts. He was a Tagorean, top to bottom. He belonged to those few minute’s calmness at red signals. He had a couplet of Tagore for all pains, pangs ,feelings, emotions and animal instincts of the Bengali- as if a perfectly tuned accompaniment. In other words, his reactions to the Bengali madness were loaded with good dose of madness too. In that light, red or green,he had done his job- and did it rather well. That of communicating with the contemporary Bengali.
The aura of cultural height, catapulted often by festivals and intellectual discourse of outdated ideas often comes to others through carefully crafted scheming and other machinations. Such strenuous circus is alien to Bengali. Rather it comes so easily to him like a Lara cricketing shot. The reason ? The spirit of Tagore even in his 151st year.
The Super Metro –centric multiplex era signaled the times of Ritu- at least his major creative span.Yet his driving force was the naturalness with which the Bengali endorsed and embraced the poetry of Tagore even without dwelling deep into it or even reading them . Ritu’s world and that of Ritwik Ghatak are light years apart. Ghatak never painted the European varnish over the melodrama of Bengali stage and mainstream movies.
If one thought that the so called controlled narrative of the European kind didn’t sink into the sensibility of the great maverick Ghatak, that’s off the mark. The genius didn’t care to wear a cloak of stylized control or look. In fact he was in the drivers seat of that auto rikshaw which let loose itself on the streets of Kolkata. As if a mad maverick was the driver. Readers may please replay the scene of Park Street in “Subarnorekha”,the classic of Ghatak. The timeless imprint of an artist still retains its sheen , after so long.
For “Chokher Bali”, the heroine Aiswarya Rai was not anywhere near the accepted realms of Bengali sensibility. Still, Ritu , fought hard at the marketplace with this Bengali through the sheer power of his USP – craft and conviction. A remarkably poignant observation by the renowned Bengali English author Amit Chaudhuri presents an interesting view. Ray-Ghatak-Sen trio are seen and worshiped as the last holy trinity of Bengali renaissance, besides their stature as filmmakers. In that light ,Ray had elevated himself to the pantheons of great world Filmmakers when he made Tagore’s “Charulatha” ,while Ritu could only achieve some global halo to his “Chokherbali”,by Tagore.