“Rasta ghaat dekhe mone hochchhe, Kolkatay eto lok eto more-tore?”/ “Who can tell by the sight of the streets that there are so many deaths in Kolkata?”
In Satyajit Ray’s “Seemabaddha” (1971), we see a world where a great deal of effort is made to hold together a Calcutta that was exploding in the 1970s. Zizek posits: “Subjective violence is seen as a perturbation of the normal, peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this normal state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”
This means that what is objective violence is understated, implied, and seemingly tranquil. At the same time, subjective violence is an unmeasured attack on this false state of peace that is a tool to oppress the masses. As the first peasant insurgency post-Indian independence, the Naxalbari movement used subjective violence to put an end to objective violence. The movement had some objectives, which included the confiscation of weapons and excess land from landlords.
What emerged as a peasant revolution soon invited the hands and minds of the youth of Calcutta. If the uprising can and ought to be seen as a rural peasant uprising at its inception, the involvement of leaders like Charu Majumder made it affirmatively urban, youth-centric. As the youth posed a threat to the workings of the state machinery, the state machinery in turn deployed violent measures to quell their idea of violence. From 1970, there were mass arrests of suspected youths from villages or cities. Those who were remotely connected with these youth were brought to the police station for questioning and even had to face brutal police torture.
The words with which the essay begins are by Dolonchapa, wife of the protagonist Shyamalendu Chatterjee. She directs this question to her sister, Tutul, who has just arrived from Patna. The question reflects the self-satisfaction of having politics obliterated from the streets and, by extension, from the lives of people like Shyamalendu, who center their life around the aspiration of social ascension with foreign companies like Hindustan Peters working as wind beneath their sails.
The film begins with Shyamalendu introducing the pressing question of unemployment, but he quickly changes his course by making it very clear to the spectators that he is far from being ‘unemployed’, unlike his predecessor Siddhartha (“Pratwindwandi,” 1970). He introduces himself as the Sales Manager of the Fan Division of Hindustan Peters and is quick to inform that all his thoughts are devoted to his company. New urban prosperities in Calcutta presented to the middle classes a host of domestic comforts and ornaments. Devoid of the upheavals, Shyamalendu’s Calcutta is this city of beauty parlours, fancy cafes, premium clubs, and the race-course.
Even the rhetoric of the film is replete with allusions to this social aspiration, where the pressing issues of unemployment and the Naxalbari movement cannot be addressed. After Tutul reaches the flat of the Chatterjee’s, she is given a tour of the house by her sister Dolonchapa. While standing in front of the window, with the cityscape in view, Dolonchapa says to her sister that the noises of gunshots and bombs are a regular occurrence here. When Tutul comments that it looks peaceful now, she is quick to comment that it is because they stay on the seventh floor.
According to her, the higher floors are better for the comparatively lower infestation of insects and dust. The simultaneous mention of the placement of their abode high above the ground and the attempt of the upper-class Chatterjees to keep the revolution at bay, like the mosquitoes and flies, suggests how far they have been taken from the realities of the political upheaval by the upward mobility in the social ladder.
Also Related: 10 Best Films Dealing with Toxic Work Culture
If upper- and middle-class Calcutta congratulated itself on shunning the revolutionary upheavals that shook Calcutta in the 1970s, it should not be presumed that the revolution entirely disappeared from the city. In many senses, the revolution remained and reared its head and made its presence known. In the film, the gunshots are heard, and the reverberations loom large in the Chatterjees’ vacant drawing room. In the other sense, it is through the arrival of Tutul, Shyamalendu’s sister-in-law, that the revolution makes its appearance.
From the point of her arrival, Tutul is invested in the political upheavals in Calcutta. She wants to know if Shyamalendu is acquainted with the revolutionaries. When Shyamalendu asks her jokingly if the purpose of her visit is to study the revolutionaries, she instantly remarks that the intention is rather to study a non-revolutionary.
Shyamalendu is not the revolutionary element in the film. Matching the spectral presence of the revolution, it is the lover of Tutul, a young revolutionary seldom mentioned, who is pitted against Shyamalendu, both in terms of their ideology and their attraction towards Tutul. For Shyamalendu, rising the social and corporate ladder is more immediate than considering the state of the employees subordinate to him.
Rarely do the workers find a place amongst the many and varied thoughts of Shyamalendu involving Hindustan Peters. Shyamalendu is challenged severely by Tutul. Away from the cause of revolution, it then becomes his fixation on becoming the director and becoming desirable to Tutul. Tutul embodies the middle-class values of Shyamal’s long distant land of Patna. Therefore, it is also the desire to be appreciated by his roots that drives him throughout the narrative.
In her essay, ‘Have You Seen My Sister: The Framing of the Urban Male in Ray’s City Quartet’, Somdatta Bhattacharya writes “[Shyamalendu’s] anxiousness to earn [Tutul’s] approval is the masculine performance anxiety that is the instrument of perpetuation of the patriarchal order”. In a house party at his flat, the remarks of Shyamalendu and his colleagues about the revolution compel Tutul to go down a thinking spiral, as is evident by the quick dolly shots framing of Tutul’s face wearing an expression of ambiguity. The upper class’s apathy towards the revolution is beyond the comprehension of Tutul.
In the end, Shyamalendu does reach his destination, but not without prices. It is, after all, a contrived strike and a mishap that contributes to Shyamalendu’s success. Upon failing to deliver a consignment to Iraq, Shyamalendu hatches a plan to disrupt the factory functions by inciting a riot in the factory. In the process, the watchman of the factory is injured. For Shyamalendu, the subordinate employees and factory workers are mere objects of privileged sympathies.
Although the expression of Shyamalendu upon visiting the injured watchman hinted at his realisation of the horror that had been deliberately created, that image is quickly replaced by the feelings of relief at having saved the reputation of Hindustan Peters. Shyamalendu does reach his much-coveted destination on the social ladder. However, it is one of disconcertion and anomalies.
The anomaly was derived not simply from Shyamalendu’s moral degradation but also from the resultant fall of him from the affections of Tutul. Thus begins his process of gradual inner decay. Mirroring the dissolve in the moral values, we also see Tutul returning the expensive watch of Shyamalendu and slowly dissolving from his life, thereby becoming a haunting spectral presence.
The paradox of Calcutta in the 1970s, and along with it the upper-class sensibilities embodied in Shyamalendu, is nowhere, in terms of Ray’s oeuvre, more challenged than in “Seemabaddha.”
Read More: Dreams on a Train: Psychoanalysis and the Subconscious Journey in Satyajit Ray’s ‘Nayak’ (1966)
Bibliography:
-
Bhattacharya, Somdatta. “Have You Seen My Sister!”: The ‘Framing’ of the Urban Male in Ray’s City Quartet”. Popular Masculine Cultures in India: Critical Essays, ed.
-
Rohit K Dasgupta, Steven Baker. Setu Prakashani, Kolkata. 2013.
