Mrinal Sen-60 Years In Search Of Cinema

By Dipankar Mukhopadhyay

Mrinal Sen is one of India's finest film makers and one of its most renowned in international circles. After an inauspicious feature debut, Sen found his feet with critically acclaimed films like "Baishey Shravana" in 1960, and "Akash Kusum" in 1965. His "Bhuvan Shome" in 1969 inspired a whole new generation of film makers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 12, 2009
• ISBN: 9789351360483

Dipankar Mukhopadhyay

The author was born in Calcutta and educated in Presidency college. His book Kathapurush in Bengali based on the conversation with Mrinal Sen, earned him many accolades including a certificate of merit from the president of India in 2004.

Book preview

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

Pratap K. Das Gupta

Almost fifteen years ago, I wrote The Maverick Maestro when HarperCollins India, which had just started operations here, came up with an ambitious scheme to publish biographies of some eminent Indian film personalities to coincide with the centenary of cinema. The luminaries who figured in the list were, to the best of my memory, Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy and Ashok Kumar. I had no quarrel over their greatness, but the absence of Mrinal Sen’s name in the list upset me immensely as I considered him the tallest personality of Indian cinema after the demise of Satyajit Ray, an opinion which has not changed in the intervening years. Not only did I send a strong letter to the publishing house, protesting against this arbitrary omission, but also volunteered to do the job myself if the company could not find a better candidate. I still do not know how it happened, but almost immediately I was offered the assignment. I had never written a book before; the only things I had going for me were almost two decades of journalistic experience, a few vital years spent in the promotion and development of Indian parallel cinema, and one and a half decade of intimacy with the subject of the book. If my memory serves me right, this was in early 1994.

I realized the difficulties once I started on the assignment. There was very little documentation available on Sen. I had to go through moth-eaten, dog-eared pages of journals and magazines of defunct and semi-defunct film societies and stray newspaper articles. In the beginning, Sen himself was not very enthused about the project. He must have been approached by many people for information on his life, none of which had obviously gone anywhere. Only after he saw the first few chapters did he open up. After that, I virtually shadowed him with a cassette recorder. But to my dismay, I found him not particularly organized. He had never bothered to keep a scrapbook, or a diary, so I was totally dependent on the memory of a seventy-two-year-old man. Here, I must gratefully acknowledge my debt to the late Mriganka Shekhar Roy, not only an eminent film critic but who had also worked as Sen’s assistant in his early years. A storehouse of information, he not only came up with interesting anecdotes, but also guided me to whatever documentation was available.

Another massive drawback was the non-availability of his films. Most of his prints were lying in pathetic conditions in various laboratories all over the country and there was nobody to look after them (this is true even today as seen from the cancellation of the retrospective of his films at Cannes this year owing to non-availability of good quality prints). The era of digitalization had not yet dawned, so all that he could give me for viewing was a bad videocassette of Matira Manisha.I had to write about his films mostly from memory as I had seen most of them and had been associated with some of them from inception. There was no point in looking at the scripts as Sen had the habit of shooting extempore, independent of the script.

In spite of all these problems and roadblocks, the book finally saw the light of day in October 1995 and, I am gratified to say, was appreciated not only at home but also abroad. Many foreign books published over the next decade referred to this book not only as Sen’s standard biography but also as a guidebook to the New Indian Cinema. Appreciation came not only from film circles, but also from unexpected quarters. I was floored when about five years ago I received a congratulatory letter from the then Deputy Prime Minister Shri L.K. Advani, expressing his happiness for this account of his ‘Dear friend Mrinal’, although politically and ideologically they were, and still are, miles apart. When I showed it to Sen, he also reciprocated the sentiment. Their friendship started during L.K. Advani’s brief tenure as Information and Broadcasting Minister in the late 1970s and it was revived during Sen’s Rajya Sabha days.

About five years ago, the book somehow disappeared from the Indian market, although it still features prominently on Amazon.com, where one can obtain it by paying the princely sum of $28. I am immensely grateful to the present management of HarperCollins Publishers India, especially to its dynamic publisher and editor-in-chief V.K. Karthika, for the decision to reissue the book in the Indian market. Writing the text this time was much easier as there have been lots of publications and documentations on Sen after my humble beginning and I believe more will follow this year. Some of his major scripts are also available in both Bengali and English and, wonder of wonders, most of his films from the middle and later period can be easily obtained in DVD/VCD format, although it seems that most of the films he made in the first decade of his career are lost forever. Still, one must be thankful for small mercies.

At eighty-six, Sen may not be a maverick any more, but he undoubtedly remains a maestro. Only history will tell whether he will make another film. His spirit is very much willing and he is looking for a suitable story. But film-making is not only a cerebral activity, it involves considerable physical hardship. In the meantime, I am fortunate to get yet another chance to pay my humble tribute to this extraordinary man, internationally considered a modern master of the audio-visual medium, who, along with Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, will always remain the third figure of the Holy Trinity of Indian cinema.

NEW DELHI, MARCH 2009

DIPANKAR MUKHOPADHYAY

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

Pratap K. Das Gupta

I first saw Mrinal Sen about twenty-five years ago, at the end of the first commercial screening of his film Interview. Clad in a slightly crumpled kurta-pyjama, he stood near the exit gate of a North Calcutta cinema house and bombarded the spectators as they trooped out: did they like the film, why and why not. Since it was the first day, first show, I had no preconceived idea or knowledge about the film. I expected something on the lines of Bhuvan Shome, but all the Brechtian alienation and cinema verite style of shooting totally confused me. I somehow managed to avoid the questioning director with a vague nod and a vaguer smile and rushed to Coffee House for a hot cup of stimulant.

Exactly ten years after that, the same gentleman in the same attire barged into my room at the Directorate of Film Festivals in Delhi’s Lok Nayak Bhavan. He introduced himself and told me that he had brought the print of his new film—it had a strange title: Ek Din Pratidin. It had to be despatched to Cannes for a preview. This was our first exchange, a strictly official one, but it soon spilled over to a typically Bengali adda. This soon became a habit. I particularly remember one occasion when he met me around three-thirty in the afternoon, and when I finally saw him off in a taxi, after going through a number of location changes in the course of our adda, it was one-thirty a.m.! Yet, after getting into the cab, he put his head out of the window and exclaimed, ‘Delhi is not too conducive to adda. Come to Calcutta, we will have a grand session!’ And we had, not only in Calcutta alone. We had nightlong marathons at the Imperial Hotel in Delhi, the NFDC Guest House in Bombay, and even in distant Berlin. What fascinated me during those sessions—which must have lasted a few hundred hours altogether—was that he seldom spoke about anything other than cinema. It seemed that his whole existence was only for cinema and nothing else. I have never seen such complete devotion or dedication to one’s profession before.

Those were also the golden years of his creativity, the period spanning Ek Din Pratidin to Khandahar, and I had the privilege of seeing how he conceived each film, how he went about them. I was present during the scripting, shooting and dubbing stages to follow how each film took final shape. In the meantime, I had left the film job and switched over to some mundane activities, but our relations had not cooled off, because of him. He never forgot to give me a ring whenever he was in Delhi.

Yet, I never thought about writing a book on him, because there were enough competent, knowledgeable people around to do the job. Till date, there is just one exclusive book on Sen in Bengali (Mrinal Sen, edited by Pralay Sur) and that too is a collection of articles published in various film society journals and not a comprehensive volume on the film-maker. The only book in English (John W. Hood’s Chasing the Truth) is written by a foreigner who, in spite of his best intentions, committed some omissions and commissions, because of his lack of knowledge of the language and milieu of the films. Moreover, it is an academic treatise on film theory, rather than an appreciation of Sen’s cinema. I was aware that there ought to be a book which would trace the development of Sen as a film-maker against the backdrop of his life and times.

I expected something to be published on the occasion of his seventieth birth anniversary, but to my surprise and disappointment nothing happened. The media and the general public remained largely indifferent to the man who, after the passing away of Satyajit Ray, was surely the tallest personality in his chosen field. At the same time, something happened that hurt many of his admirers. Although the staging of the Calcutta International Film Festival coincided with his seventieth year, no attempt was made to honour him in any way. After an unsavoury controversy about who should inaugurate the festival, the honour went to one of his colleagues from Calcutta, and Sen was present merely as a spectator. It is these turn of events that forced me to rush where angels fear to tread. HarperCollins (India) had just announced a scheme to publish biographies of eminent Indian film personalities to celebrate the centenary of cinema and I offered to write one on Sen.

In the beginning Sen was not very keen—so many people must have asked him so many things about his life that he must have been bored about the whole idea. But after he saw the draft of the first chapter, he warmed up to the project. I met him at fixed times on weekends, when he would come out with his reminiscences and insights, but he never denied me the right to contradict or oppose him. The proceedings were enlivened by the occasional presence of Gita-boudi and her continuous supply of black tea and white rosogollas.

From media and film circles, many friends came out to help me and I am grateful for all their inputs. At least a few names must be mentioned: Mriganka Shekhar Roy, who is not only an eminent film critic but also functioned as Sen’s assistant for some years, gave me genuine insights into and rare details of many incidents; Swapan Kumar Ghosh was generous with information. I am grateful to the management of Nandan for allowing me to use its well-stocked library. All encouragement came from Nabyendu Chatterjee, Abani N. Bhattacharya and Ashish Chakraborty.

I must mention two names for their motiveless magnanimity: Saraswati Dutta for drawing and designing the impressive cover jacket literally overnight and Deepanjana Mukhopadhyay for translating all original material of Genesis from French to English, also in a very short time; otherwise, these would have remained Greek to me.

A special word of thanks is due to Aditya Mukherjee, my long-suffering editor from HarperCollins, who coaxed, cajoled and goaded me through one complete year to finish the project. I have seldom been more pampered and in spite of my repeated failure to stick to the deadline, he not only kept his cool but even managed a brave smile. After the sixth violation of deadline and the third rescheduling of the date of release, when he finally received the manuscript, he must have felt like Salman Rushdie after he was told about the non-execution of the Irani fatwa.

CALCUTTA, JUNE 1995

DEEPANKAR MUKHOPADHYAY

1

THE BIRTH OF A FIFM-MAKER

My entry to cinema was very accidental. I travelled a long and difficult way—difficult, because I did not know how to walk. I learnt through experience.

—MRINAL SEN¹

Neel Akasher Nichey

A strange object was flying in the sky. A toddler, playing in the courtyard of his house, looked at it with curious eyes. It was a bright, sunny day and above him, against the clear blue sky, was the strangest bird he had ever seen. He watched it carefully—it had two silvery wings which dazzled in the sunlight, so it had to be a bird; but it also emitted a peculiar humming sound which utterly confused him.

The boy ran inside to call his brothers and sisters. They were also very excited. Everyone rushed out to have a look. His father even took out a map to chart the course of the strange object. In the tranquil 1920s, an aeroplane was a novelty—more so in a sleepy subdivisional town of undivided Bengal. In the excitement that followed his discovery, the young boy learnt that what they had seen was not a bird but a manmade flying machine. It was an experience he knew he would never forget.

This boy was born in a large family. He lived with his parents, brothers and sisters—eleven in all—and other relatives. Often, total strangers would huddle together, talk in whispers and then they seemed to melt in the darkness. There were nights when the boy would suddenly get up from his sleep and find the whole house packed with people. His father would be talking to some of them very seriously while his mother tirelessly cooked meals for the visitors.

Sometimes, a few days after such visits, local policemen dressed in khaki and red headgears came to question his father. They even searched the house, looking into every nook and corner. The boy knew they would not find what they had come to look for, as he had seen his mother deftly stuffing some papers inside her undergarments. She would then quietly slip away to the toilet, a little distance from the main household, where she hoped the police would not pursue her. Was the boy worried about his mother’s safety? Did he know what would have happened to her if she was ever caught? No one knew. No one understood that an idea was already taking shape in his mind: he had come to realize that there were only two classes in society—the Chaser and the Chased. It was a game with the police on one side and his parents, along with those strangers of the night, on the other. He also knew that those men wanted to do something great for their country. They were called revolutionaries.

The boy grew up. He was in his early teens when a touring cinema company came to their town. The screening was organized in a makeshift auditorium, a big room with a tin roof. The boy could barely suppress his excitement as he saw moving images narrating a story. The film was the famous hit of the silent era—Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s tragic love story Devdas. Some people found the experience unnerving. One of his friends told the boy that the screen was too short, sometimes only the legs of a character were visible. Obviously, the audience did not know the meaning of ‘close-up’, nor did the boy. But he enjoyed every moment of this thrilling experience. In one sequence, when young Devdas and Parvati were running hand-in-hand, suddenly rain came pouring down and the boy observed how the pitter-patter of the raindrops on the tin roof matched perfectly with the footsteps of the young couple running on the screen. He did not know he was learning one of his greatest lessons—the importance of soundtrack in a movie.

These stray episodes are flashes of recollection of his childhood in Faridpur by Mrinal Sen. ‘My childhood was an ordinary one, it was neither colourful nor retarded’² is his favourite answer to any query. In spite of his well-known reticence about his childhood, Mrinal Sen does not deny that his fascination for technology, his political ideology and his passion to portray life through celluloid, are all rooted in his early years, as he grew up in Faridpur during a crucial period of our history.

His father Dineshchandra was the leading lawyer of the town. But what he earned by winning legal battles was spent in his attempt to save young revolutionaries who had dared to take up arms against the mighty British Crown. Often he was unsuccessful as most of them were either sent to the gallows or deported to the Andamans to serve life sentences. But Dineshchandra did not lose heart. His house was a haven for all political workers and he also kept close contact with eminent political leaders of Bengal. Mrinal, one of his twelve children, was born on 14 May 1923, and his association with politics can be traced right from his infancy. According to the family legend (so he has heard a number of times), he had his first joyride in a motorcar on his mother’s lap, with none other than the great nationalist leader Bipin Chandra Pal sitting next to him. Even the car was not an ordinary automobile—it was the only one of its kind in the entire town and it belonged to the family of Prof. Humayun Kabir, who later became a Union minister of independent India. On that specific occasion, Bipin Chandra had come to Faridpur to address a political meeting and had also coaxed Dineshchandra’s wife Sarajubala, whom he loved like his own daughter, to sing the opening song. It was quite an eventful journey: young Mrinal hurt his finger badly as the car door jammed on his thumb and blood came gushing out. One of the hangers-on of the leader came forward to suck out the blood. Sen has often wondered what happened to the man who drank his blood!

He remembers very vividly his first encounter with Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. Young Mrinal was howling with a toothache, when this extremely handsome ‘doctor’ came up and comforted him. Later he also sent an ointment for application on Mrinal’s swollen gum and assured him that he would be all right in no time. Sen did not know the name of the ointment, but remembers that he had read ‘Made in Germany’ on the tube. Sure enough, Netaji’s treatment gave him the much-needed relief.

As Mrinal Sen was growing up, the independence movement was going through various phases. Although Gandhi’s call for non-violence was the accepted political line of the Indian National Congress, there was always a subterranean streak of political violence in Bengal, and the provincial Congress leaders had a sneaking admiration for those rebels. Dineshchandra’s unstinted support to those young militants brought him close to many such leaders. In 1924, a year after Mrinal was born, Faridpur hosted the All Bengal Conference of Peasants and Ryots with Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das as president. Dineshchandra was the unanimous choice for the chairmanship of the Reception Committee. A large portion of his speech was devoted to the praise of what he called ‘The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia’. The fact that Dineshchandra, a Congress supporter, eulogized the October Revolution of 1917 in an open meeting, amuses his son even now.

In the eye of every boy, the father is a heroic figure and Mrinal Sen was no exception. Dineshchandra was a man of many qualities but what most impressed his son was his uncompromising honesty. In the early 1930s, when Gandhi was arrested after his return from the abortive Round Table Conference, the Congress called for a day-long hartal throughout the country. With the closure of shops and bazars, lawyers in Faridpur court also stopped work. Next day, the District Magistrate—incidentally, an Indian—called all the lawyers in his office and asked them to state their reasons for abstaining from work. While others cited illness or urgent domestic work as their excuse, Dineshchandra told the DM bluntly why he had boycotted his court. The magistrate immediately debarred him from legal practice for six months. Dineshchandra moved the Calcutta High Court against the sentence. Sarat Chandra Bose, Netaji’s elder brother and a legal luminary, became his counsel and he won the case. The sentence was set aside and Dineshchandra triumphantly returned to the Bar.

Growing up against this background, it is not surprising that young Mrinal would become politically conscious—in fact, the baptism came a little too early. He was barely seven or eight—a student of primary school—when he shouted ‘Vande Mataram’ at the police: he was taken to the police station and confined for a few hours. This was Mrinal Sen’s first protest against the ruling class—but a non-violent one of the Congress kind.

However, as Mrinal entered adolescence, the world around him started changing and it changed his political views also. The War of Spanish Liberation was in full swing, poets and writers like Ernest Hemingway, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender had taken up arms in the fight against fascism. Already a voracious reader, Mrinal read their writings on classless societies and equality of men and became interested in their views and ideas. At home, he enjoyed the company of people like Mohit Sen alias Subodh Sen and Bagala Guha, men who in the days to come would distinguish themselves as some of the best activists and theoreticians of the Bengal wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI). They were widely read and talked in a language which had little similarity with that of his father’s friends and associates. Dineshchandra did not like these young rebels much—he thought they were too intelligent and too arrogant—and was not particularly happy to find his son in their company. But Mrinal, an adolescent in search of his own independent identity, found much to admire in this non-conformist group.

Around this time, Mrinal started disliking a particular trait in his father’s character. Although the Great Calcutta Killing was still years away, often there were feelings of communal tension in various areas of East Bengal, because of the mixed population. To his discomfiture, Mrinal observed that whenever there was any report of communal clashes, his nationalist father would develop a streak of Hindu militancy. He would stockpile bricks, stones and other missiles on the terrace of their house to be used in case of exigency; he would have verbal battles not only with his Muslim friends and colleagues, but even with his son’s classmates. Mrinal would watch, with horror, his father shouting and gesticulating at his brother’s close friend Sadhu, someone whom they regarded as a family member, who would also take up the cudgel on behalf of his community. The battle would stop just short of blows, because of Sarajubala’s timely intervention. Incidentally, in later years, Sadhu became well known as the poet Jasimuddin.

In spite of all his admiration and reverence for his father, Mrinal could never accept this attitude and as a result, he became stridently anti-communal.³ Once at a Hindu Mahasabha meeting, when the party boss Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee made a derogatory comment about Netaji, Mrinal and his friends created a pandemonium; the meeting was abandoned and in the mêlée, Mrinal banged his umbrella on the bald pate of a local teacher. He could make good his escape and the culprit was never traced. He would boast to his friends that at the first chance, he would marry a Muslim girl. This was typical adolescent defiance of the parents—probably he hoped that somebody would carry the tale to his father, which would lead to a grand confrontation. Nothing like that happened, but the spirit of rebellion gradually crystallized into a genuine interest in Marxist thought. Even during his schooldays, he was involved in organizing rallies and protest meetings conducted by the local CPI; after matriculation, as a student of Faridpur College, he became a member of the student wing of the CPI, the Student Federation of India (SFI) and later, the General Secretary of its Faridpur chapter. Thus began his long and a rather ambiguous relationship with the Communist Party, in both its undivided and divided reincarnations with occasional ups and downs.

But it was also the time to say goodbye to Faridpur. In 1940, Mrinal passed his Intermediate Examination with a good first division and the family decided that he should continue his education in Calcutta. His admission with Honours in Physics was arranged in Scottish Church College, a revered institution in North Calcutta and alma mater for quite a few illustrious Bengalis—Swami Vivekananda and also Mrinal’s ‘dentist’ Subhash Chandra, who got admission there after his expulsion from Presidency College.

But before his departure from Faridpur, the seventeen-year-old boy indulged in a mischievous game. Without any prior warning, he confronted his mother and asked her point blank: ‘Don’t you think I am a genius?’

Poor Sarajubala did not know what to reply. She faced an awful choice, a battle between motherly love and rational judgement. So, she mumbled something incoherent.

‘That’s all right,’ her son assured her. ‘Have you ever heard this: All are genius up to the age of ten. Do you know who has said that? Bertrand Russell. So, you can give me the benefit of doubt.’

Leaving a perplexed mother behind, Mrinal Sen embarked on his fateful visit to Calcutta, to find out whether he was a genius or not.

Farewell to Faridpur also signified the end of his childhood and adolescence. In the small district town, he was part of a large family—loved by his parents, brothers and sisters, liked by his teachers, admired by his friends and contemporaries. Suddenly he was transplanted to the huge concrete jungle where he would become an anonymous dot in the ocean of humanity. It was an overnight transition to adulthood and the start of a long, grim struggle against poverty, deprivation and other odds. Faridpur became a distant dream beyond the horizon, even its memory became irrelevant for him.

This might be the reason why Mrinal Sen is so chary of talking about his childhood. If one probes hard, he tends to become philosophical. He wants to fight nostalgia, because nostalgia leads to sentimentality and sentimentality leads to weakness—he argues with the conviction of a teacher of mathematics explaining an axiom.

In view of this, it is probably not surprising that Mrinal Sen soon lost interest in whatever was happening in Faridpur. A new world was slowly opening its door to him, and he had no inclination to look back. It would take him exactly half a century to return to Faridpur. The year was 1991 and Faridpur was now part of Bangladesh. He had last visited Faridpur in 1942. Calcutta absorbed him, assimilated him totally. Those were the days of World War II. The city had its share of bomb-scare, blackouts, famine, communal riots; with all those turmoils for company, Sen was growing up with the city. Later, he had the opportunity of visiting many countries, travelling virtually round the world. Still he always feels that Calcutta is his El Dorado.

This decision to abandon Faridpur might have been an unconscious one and was definitely not deliberate, as Sen feels now, yet it had a tremendous impact on his art. Because of this mental distance, the partition of Bengal did not affect Sen at all. While his friend and contemporary Ritwik Ghatak could not get over the shock in the next three decades, Sen remained unmoved. In spite of his passionate pleas to bring contemporary reality in cinema, this particular aspect of our contemporary history has not found a place in his films.

It also throws some light on one interesting aspect of his character. While Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali has generally been the most appreciated film of the Apu Trilogy, Sen has always considered Aparajito as the best one. He even described it as the most modern film ever made in this country.⁴ What impressed him was Apu’s development as an artist, his struggle in a ruthless city and his total alienation with the world he had left behind. It struck the right chord somewhere as that is exactly what Sen had done during his formative years. The only difference is that in the fiction, Apurba Kumar Roy had to go back to his ancestral village for once to perform his mother’s final rites; in reality, Mrinal Sen never went back to Faridpur.

This was not his first visit to Calcutta. He had come twice earlier on short trips. Still there was a feeling of awe as the gawky seventeen-year-old stepped out on the platform of Sealdah station with his box and bedding. Even after fifty-odd years, he could still recall it:

As soon as I came to the big city, I was seized with a kind of fear. I confronted a crowd, a huge crowd. I felt I was standing alone in the crowd—an anonymous, self-absorbed, indifferent swarm, even menacing and monstrous. (I was) suffering acutely from a depressing sense of emptiness. Till things proved different, I remained an outsider.⁵

After joining Scottish Church College, Sen was again involved in SFI politics in a big way, so the outsider syndrome did not last long. In fact, he literally became an insider, when in 1941, he spent a week in the police lock-up at Lalbazar. This time he did not shout ‘Vande Mataram’ or any such thing at the police; the guardians of law came and picked him up from his humble boarding because he was an activist associated with a banned political outfit—the Communist Party of India. All this happened within a year after his arrival from Faridpur.

But Sen remembers the year 1941 for some other reason. It was a day in the month of August and he was, like any other day, attending his classes. One of his professors entered the classroom and announced that Rabindranath Tagore was no more. The eighty-year-old poet had been unwell and was virtually in a coma for the last couple of days, yet the news came as a shock. Sen, who had never seen Tagore before, decided to have a last look at him. Along with his friends, he first went to Tagore’s place at Jorasanko and then quickly moved to the cremation ground at Nimtala. They reached hours before the funeral procession and took possession of a suitable spot—a slightly raised piece of land which offered a better view. Because of the poet’s funeral, all other cremations were stopped for the day. Sen and his friends saw a gentleman waiting with the body of his dead child wrapped in a towel. The body of the poet entered at the head of a huge procession and a wave of humanity swept the whole ground. Caught in the midst of the surging crowd, the man lost his grip, dropped the towel-wrapped body—and it was not seen any more. The dead child simply disappeared under thousands of onrushing feet.

Sen was shocked by this incident which he never forgot. Whenever he thinks about Tagore’s death anniversary, it comes back to him. Twenty years later, when he made a film about the end of a relationship between a man and his wife, he fixed their anniversary on the twenty-second of Shravana—the day, according to the Bengali calendar, on which Tagore died. The death of two innocent people—the young wife and the unknown child—got overlapped in his mind.

Very soon Calcutta became Mrinal’s oyster. The young man from Faridpur, now in his early adulthood, had stopped going back home even during the vacations. Slowly he became familiar with every lane and bylane of North Calcutta. He enjoyed his studies and although he was a student of science, developed a lifelong fascination for literature—both English and Bengali. But politics fascinated him even more. An active worker in the student’s front, he soon became a member of study circles, where Marxist doctrines were taught and discussed. Sen regularly attended those sessions and through those informal meetings, he came to know a group of leading Marxist intellectuals and theoreticians like Prof. Hirendranath Mukherjee, Niren Roy and Gopal Haldar. Although he graduated in 1943 and was no longer a student, his association with them continued, and in spite of the difference in age, he became quite close to some of them, specially Gopal Haldar. They had a regular meeting place, a traditional Bengali adda, at Kamalalaya—a leading department store at Dharamtala Street. The store had a bookshop attached to it and the adda would start after the shop pulled down the shutter for business. There was an incentive for becoming a regular member of this joint: whenever a new consignment of books arrived, the owner would remove the dust jackets and circulate them among the regulars for a couple of days—only after the members had finished reading them, the books