There are few pleasures in life comparable to leaving the cinema stalls and feeling at one with your fellow man, having been moved by the experiences of people from a land distant from your own, who now appear warmly familiar in the mind. As the credits descend for Debshishu (or Child God, as translated from Hindi), I find myself reliving this pleasure once more. Ultimately, I have Dr Omar Ahmed to thank. His scholarly expertise and top-shelf curatorship has provided the 38th Leeds International Film Festival (LIFF) with a close up on the powerfully transgressive, fiercely beautiful films of Smita Patil.
In Western cinema, a space filled with rising stars who have their own credos on bringing about social change, it’s easy to overlook how special it is when a young actor transcends their films to become a harbinger of progress. But to understate Patil’s puissance is a cardinal sin. By the time of her death at 31 in 1986, Patil had become the iconic face of India’s first post colonial film movement, Indian Parallel Cinema. Her ferociously sharp eyes looked towards a space for the lived-in stories of an invisible population – the hungry, the subjugated, the helpless – who had previously been sugar-coated out of existence by Hollywood-friendly narratives, heroes/villains and glamour and all.
Building on the progress made by the Film Finance Corporation (India’s state film financing body at the time) in 1969, when it called for “low budget films, talented new filmmakers, Indian stories”, filmmakers and performers alike were given greater ability to address the social ills that befell the population living outside the bubble of middle class ‘respectability’.
With this change, new forms of indigenous filmic expression were ushered into play. It created a place in the sun for talents such as Patil, whose intensely theatrical style and cacophonous range took a rampuri to the throat of colonial authoritarianism, as in Kehtan Metha’s Mirch Masala, or the horrors of institutionalised misogyny faced by vulnerable women in reformatory homes, as per Jabbar Patel’s Umbartha. (In Mirch Masala, watch in awe at Patil’s vengeful stare as she coats the tormenting subedar in arterial red chili powder: all will become clear.)
Debshishu (Child God)
One could say Patil showed a religious devotion to her craft, especially with Utpalendu Chakraborty’s Debshishu: one of her last films, which she allegedly completed without pay. Perhaps this is why the actress’ performance feels tailor-made for her. She plays Seeta, a mother attempting to navigate a grueling, impoverished existence, raising her family on the desolate frontier between West Bengal and Bihar. This is not some prosaic tale of good versus evil. It’s about the vicious law of nature – appearing here as its own character hanging in the atmosphere – and how its cruelty can make beasts of those who have, as well as those who have not.
Take the introductory sequence, for instance. Joyous bhajans that ring from the hut of her wealthy, landowning sister-in-law, Leela, are only audible to Seeta and her husband, Raghubir (Sadu Meher), from the darkness of a cow shed. The life and vitality they knew before has been lost in a great storm, etching onto the whites of the couple’s eyes the misery of hunger, thirst and complete rootlessness. Much as in Elem Klimov’s Come and See, the unending open country they trudge through has become the only place they can call home. The family are all but refugees in their own country. Or, at worst, new slaves to the despotic Leela, who forces the young son, Khodu, to scrub at her legs, while subjecting Seeta to piles of garlic and ginger peeling.
Cinematography par excellence
If life is suffering, then Soumendu Roy’s beautifully moving cinematography draws this into bittersweet clarity. I find myself mouth agape watching Raghubir gazing at Khodu at the creek, a lifetime of sadness welling up in his eyes as he watches his child toiling over dirty clothes. It’s as if the barbed wire that surrounds the family’s refuge wraps tighter around him as each scene unfolds, freedom becoming an increasingly painful privation. What a marriage of composition and performance, cinematic literacy and human richness.
There are worthy competitors, however. A heart-rending monochrome scene of starving mothers cramming rations into their babies’ mouths feels abundantly poignant now, during the humanitarian catastrophes being experienced across Gaza, Lebanon and South Sudan, to name but a few. There’s also a sequence photographed with rich, maternal warmth where Seeta secretly feeds her children milk next to a cow and suckling calf: a rare moment of harmony between humanity and nature, brought forth by mother and child. These are images to be cherished.
A triptych of greed, fanaticism and superstition
Ironically, moments of rural barrenness offer us comfort. It is these scenes suffused with colour and life that boil the blood: Chakraborty dips his pen in the ink used to create Stalinist propaganda posters, painting lines of feet that march towards a makeshift pilgrimage centre where a three-headed Child God can cure you of all your ailments and ills, all for the small price of 19 paisas. Salvation for a fee.
Thousands of desperate people descend on what looks like an old circus, and when Raghubir enters, he realises it is. He recognises a magician (played with consuming theatricality by Om Puri), who, with a sleight of hand, had previously stolen his wife’s earrings before cunningly handing them back in front of a crowd of amazed on-lookers. But now, he is here. Dreams are to be sold and pockets are to be looted and salvation is but a myth attached to a triptych of greed, fanaticism and superstition.
It’s little surprise when Raghubir, arms outstretched and eyes like hens’ eggs, drops at the feet of a Kali idol and asks why those who suffer are doomed to suffer more. He weeps; we weep with him. Perfection.
The three-headed Child God painted on the walls of a makeshift pilgrimage center, courtesy of Leedsfilm.com
Final thoughts
In his blog, Movie Mahal, Dr Ahmed discusses The Naxalites, a fictional documentation of the communist group’s battle against state repression that only seems to exist as scrappy VHS transfers on YouTube. Important films float off into the ether, never to be seen again.
It is for this reason that LIFF’s screening of Debshishu, and other works featuring Smita Patil, is so important. As academics, cinephiles, or casual film lovers, it is our duty to preserve the beauty of such mesmerising films so they can live on and be experienced by generations old and new. After all, few pleasures in life are comparable to this.
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