Tagore as a factor in Indian cinema

[Continued from last week]

In the earlier part of the film, the frames are marked by the dictates of patriarchal culture. However, Ghosh deploys his visualities, his cinematic spaces not only to fortify the patriarchal culture within which the narrative unfolds but also to challenge it. Very often, in carefully constructed and modulated frames that affirm the power of the patriarchy, the director will use Binidini’s body language to puncture that patiently constructed world.

The use of space and the ensuing visualities, it is evident’ are pivotal to Rituparno Ghosh’s work. They grow out of a combination of rhetorical moves – the deft use of compositions, framing, camera positioning, play of light and shade, the information that the camera displays and withholds, and editing.

The way he generates cinematic space through physical space forwards the narrative discourse and his thematic interests in fascinating ways. Ghosh pays close attention to what are to be included in and excluded from his cinematic space, how are they situated in relation to diverse spatial axes of the frame, that is to say, the left-to-right and top-to-bottom axes that have a way intersecting with the perimeters of the frame.

Rabindranath Tagore

Rituparno Ghosh is also clever in the contrasts forwarded between on-screen space and off-screen space; indeed, they reflect his increasing control over his chosen medium of cinema. For instance, in the scene in which Mahendra and Binidini are going in the carriage to the doctor, there is a clear erotic mood shared by them.

Memories

However,, the off-screen space becomes important as Binodini brings in the memories of her dead husband; this intrusion has a way of reinforcing the in the transgressive nature of their action. Speaking of Ghosh’s use of space in Chokher Bali, and indeed in many of his other films, it is important to recognise the way he interpellates the spectator. He does not talk down to the spectator or to preach to him about the matters of social significance and need for social transformation that he is interested in communication.

Instead, he addresses the spectator as a mature, culturally sensitive and discerning person. I shall examine this aspect later in this essay. At this point, all I wish to claim is that Rituparno Ghosh’s cinematic space and the ensuing visual registers have a way of creating his subjects as culturally-knowledgeable, sensitive and discriminating subjects. Viewers without an adequate understanding of the contours and dynamics of Bengali culture will miss out on some important aspects of the cinematic space in Chokher Bali.

I have chosen to discuss at length the careful use of space by Rituparno Ghosh in Chokher Bali and his other films because it is crucial to the meaning of his work, and unfortunately, this topic does not seem to have drawn adequate attention of scholars and critics interested in his work.

Sixth, Ghosh is more forthright in his critique of the patriarchal social structure within which the narrative of Choker Bali unfolds. Clearly, Rabindranath Tagore was concerned with the harsh ways in which the dictates of patriarchal society were impinging on the lives of women in India, and in Chokher Bali and some his other novels he drew attention to this fact.

However, Ghosh is much more open in his critique. Let us consider the ending. (Interestingly, later Tagore repented about the way the novel ended). This is how the relationship between Binodini and Bihari concludes in the novel.

‘ Bihari remained silent, looking grave. Binodini continued, her palms held together in entreaty, ‘do not deceive yourself. You will never be happy if you marry me. You will lose your pride and self-respect and I shall lose mine. Live your life as you have always lived it, detached and serene – and let me remain at a distance, engaged in your work. May happiness and peace be ever yours.’ In other words, there is a kind of capitulation to the dictates of patriarchy; she wants to save him from the ignominy of marrying a widow. In the film, however, Binodini chooses her path in accordance with her desire to save others, to pursue her own goals of collective freedom. The way this desire s visually represented in the film adds to the emancipatory force that Ghosh seeks to unleash. I have alluded to, then, to six different ways in which Ghosh’s film goes beyond Tagore’s novel in focusing on the lack of freedom for women in India and the need for acquisition of agency to live less constrictive lives.

The idea of freedom, as I stated earlier, is central to the aims and ambitions of Rituparno Ghosh as a filmmaker. He was attracted to Tagore’s fiction partly because of Tagore’s interest in highlighting and exploring the concept of human freedom and agency. Ghosh’s notion of freedom contains a number of important strands.

For purpose of analysis, let me disaggregate six of them. First, he recognised the importance, as Tagore did, of the negative freedom; that is, the need to liberate oneself from constricting and self-diminishing external forces that shackle human beings. The recognition of the tragic inadequacy of outmoded conventions to meet modern needs is an aspect of negative freedom.

The film Chokher Bali deals ably with this aspect. Second, like Tagore, he was concerned with positive freedom; he paid great attention to the imperatives of self-realization and self-fulfillment. An essential ingredient of freedom for him was the capacity for self-fulfillment.

Freedom

Third, Rituparno Ghosh valorised freedom as the capacity for self-reflection and consciousness- raising. He saw unfreedom as the inability and unwillingness to reflect fearlessly. In Chokher Bali, the director constantly underlines with great enthusiasm Binodini’s desire to think against fossilised customs and habitual ways of thinking. In this regard, it is interesting to recall that Jean Pal Sartre, whose central concept was freedom, said that what he terms bad faith is the conscious refusal to reflect, and to go with the flow in unreflective awareness of the world and to operate cozily within some other person’s assessment of oneself.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre argued that freedom need to be construed as the reflective, imaginative capacity of the mind, its mobility, its clear negation of the given(Sartre:1992). Binodini’s behaviour in the film and the director’s reconfiguring of it conforms to this mode of thinking. Ghosh, in his film, is determined to emphasise freedom as reflective consciousness because he knows that a reflective consciousness is a moral consciousness.

Fourth, Ghosh perceives freedom as the ability to exercise choice and this is related to responsibility. In Chokher Bali, the film, the protagonist is unafraid to make choices despite severe forces arraigned against her, and the director says that this indeed is a mark of freedom. Thinkers as different as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Paul Sartre valorised freedom as choice. Do I have a choice in the current circumstances is a question that a person wedded to freedom would readily ask.

Fifth, Rituparno Ghosh conceives of freedom as the capacity of consciousness to investigate into its own powers and potentialities. He adheres to the notion that freedom has to be understood as a reality that consciousness seeks to create for itself. This thought is important in understanding Ghosh’s cinematic art and his faith in the power of newer visualities. His cinematic style, therefore, becomes both an instrument, and a product of the freedom that he prizes so highly. In that sense, Rituparno Ghosh’s films are on going processes; it’s the cinematic productivity more than the cinematic product that interests him. One aspect of this effort that we see clearly in Choker Bali is his penchant for granting freedom to cinematic images to tell newer stories, to unburden them of the cultural weights that had been placed on term.

It has to be said that his ambition to create a free world unfettered by self-defeating conventions, has been extended to his deployment of cinematic images. Rituaparno Ghosh was a filmmaker who was concerned with finding a social voice for the un-free and he clearly made cinema a site for the undertaking of that effort. He wanted cinema to be a site of social and cultural cross-talk where diverse signs modulate one another.

Humanism

A cultural theorist who shares some of Ghosh’s interests in freedom and humanism and activating the political consciousness is the French thinker Jacques Ranciere. Although he shared some affinities of interest with thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, he was also different from them. He believed in a form of humanism and the ability to act freely was a significant aspect of that humanism- a line of thought promoted by Rituparno Ghosh as well.

And this was linked to his deep belief that viewers are intelligent and independent-minded and the notion of passive spectators that has been commented upon by many theorists should be discarded. Rituparno Ghosh too had great faith in the intelligence and powers of discernment of ordinary viewers.

Jacques Ranciere advanced the notion of the emancipated spectator which has a great relevance to the interests of Rituparno Ghosh as a filmmaker. He believed that viewers are ‘active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs.’ Ranciere makes a strong case for the reality of what he terms the emancipated spectator. He says that ’emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand the self-evident fact that structure the relations between saying, seeing and acting themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.

It begins when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions…..she (spectator) observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of places. She composes her own poem with the elements of the poem before her. She participates in the performance by refashioning it in her own way…’

Observations

Here Ranciere is talking about the theater, but his observations are equally relevant to cinema. And it is interesting to note that Ghosh as evidenced in his films as swell as in the various interviews he has given endorsed this line of thinking. It must be pointed out, however, that there is a slight difference between the approaches of Ranciere and Ghosh to the idea of the emancipated spectator. Ranciere does not see emancipation as the teleological end-point of a political activity or a form of social liberation; it is, rather, a polemical establishment of equality. In the case of Ghosh, the political project and social liberation are more pronounced.

It seems to me, then, that Ranciere is very relevant to a deeper understanding of the cinema of Rituparno Ghosh. I say so primarily for three reasons. First Ranciere, like Ghosh, places great emphasis on the idea of freedom. Second, both of them prize very highly the concept of humanism and to them the supreme mark of humanism is the ability f human beings to follow the dictates of freedom.

Third both Ranciere and Ghosh recognised the importance of the idea of the emancipated spectator – the spectator who was not a passive voyeur as the generality of thinking holds, but an active participant, independent-mined, who is in search of meaning. In this quest for meaning, he or she is able to construct his or her own story on the basis of the presented experience. Fourth, the alteration of the sensorium, the field of sensory experience was of utmost importance to both. Ranciere wished to re-arrange the sensible fabric and so did Rituparno Ghosh. What Ranciere signalled by this is the need to re-structure the given order of relations between meaning and the visible, and propose alternate networks of the sensible. The way in which, throughout the film.

Binodini works within and against feminine images handed down by tradition attest to Ghosh’s interest in this endeavour. Fifth, the idea of artistic practice held a great importance to Ranciere. It is also useful to remind ourselves that there are interesting parallels in the thinking of Tagore and Ranciere, although they come out of different intellectual traditions.

What I have sought to do in this essay is to underline the fact that the pursuit of freedom was central to the cinematic ambitions of Rituparno Ghosh. Here his indebtedness to Tagore is abundantly clear. His intention, as I understand it, was to construct a cinema of possibilities that was motivated by a transgressive impulse.

He was deeply interested in fashioning, through his cinema and its style a free world unfettered by self-annihilating conventions. Consequently, in his cinema, he wanted performance to outwit performative restrictions and fetters. He wished to establish a disconnection between the performing body and its contextualising and constraining frames of performativity.

Aishwarya Rai’s acting throughout Chokher Bali can be usefully understood from this optic. Ghosh’s visual style is a vital part of his pursuit of freedom. Indeed, his cinematic style is both an instrument and product of that quest for freedom. He was struggling, not always successfully, through his constellations of images to produce a new visual consciousness connected to social change

Freedom

Ghosh’s pursuit of freedom is clearly manifest in his visual style. His frames are full of overlapping discourses and densities of meaning. Let me cite two examples. Throughout Chokher Bali, we see a careful and innovative interaction within the frames where on the one hand Ghosh establishes clearly the hierarchies and conventions related to men, women, wives, widows and so on, and on the other through his framing, bodily movements of characters destabilising these hierarchies.

Another topos that he constantly deploys is that of living and dead bodies – very often intimate and romantic moments are disrupted by the memory of the dead body of Binodini’s husband. And later in the film, the husband’s dead body gives way to the dead body of the widow in Benares. A vivid example of this is the way in the scene in which Bihari proposes to Binodini we see in the background the flames of funeral pyres.

For Rituparno Ghosh, an important aspect of freedom is the way in which one works in and through and against convention. This was indeed Tagore’s vision as well. This intent is deeply inscribed in his cinematic style. It is evident that Ghosh was a great admirer of Satyajit Ray. Indeed, he decided to become a filmmaker. He gave up his pursuit of a career in economics largely due to the influence of Ray.

Rituparno Ghosh decided to become a filmmaker. While recognising the importance of Ray and honoring him, Ghosh labored to go beyond him in infusing his cinematic style with a clear critical and political edge. Like ray, Ghosh adhered to realism, but his can be described as what I term interrogatory realism; he is keen to question what he sees and shows. Ghosh understands realism as the desire to capture appearances in all their pulsations, ambiguities and cross-talks.

In Choker Bali, there are two scenes that immediately recall Satyajit Ray’s Charulatha. The first is Binodini swinging in the park while on the picnic; this reminds of a similar scene in Charulatha. Secondly, Binodini observes the interactions between Mahendra and Asha through binoculars, and this is reminiscent of a similar scene in Charulatha. What is different is that Ghosh has moved beyond ray in emphatically underlining the erotic and psychological dispositions of his chosen characters. A mark of Ghosh’s cinematic freedom is to deploy intertextuality to expand its perimeter of meaning.

Popular cinema

Another area in which Rituparno displays his predilection for freedom is the way he has chosen to use aspects of Indian popular cinema for his purposes. In a number of interviews and private discussions Ghosh has maintained the fact that cinema should reach a sufficiently large number of people’ a cinema restricted to a handful of people, in his opinion, defeats the purpose of cinema. It is interesting to note that in Chokher Bali Ghosh has sought to draw on and make a connection with Indian popular cinema, more specifically Bollywood. The main actress of the film Aishwarya Rai is closely linked to Bollywood; in fact she can be regarded as a metonymy of Bollywood. By selecting her to play the role of Binodini, Rituparno Ghosh made a deliberate choice to establish a link with Bollywood.

This was indeed a calculated move on his part to appeal to a wider swathe of the audience. The important point to note is that while inviting Aishwarya Rai to play the lead role, he is also involved in an act of ‘ de-Bollywoodising’ by getting her to act in accordance with the restrained cinema that Ghosh practices. In other words, she is bending the attractions of Bollywood to suit his own purposes Indeed, in his films, one observes a blending of the semiotics of the popular and artistic cinemas of India.

He does so in order to undermine the circulation of Bollywood sign values. This attempt to draw on and re-frame popular cinema to suit his own distinctive intentions is, for Ghosh, an index of his freedom as a film director.

The way Rtruparno Ghosh constructs his mise-en-scene in Choker Bali, and indeed in his other films, speaks to his commitment to freedom as a film-maker. Mise-en-scene in its broadest sense, in the way I use it here, indexes the setting, composition, movement, lighting, costumes discernible in a frame.

The eminent French director Jean-Luc Godard thought very highly of it ‘ he said that, ’For the very definition of the human condition should be in the mise-en-scene itself.’. Similarly, Rituparno Ghosh placed great emphasis on the mise-en-scene; it was an integral part of the meaning of his films. Ambiguities, ambivalences, cross-currents mark his mise-en-scene generating interrogative meaning.

His mise-en-scene put into play a plurality of transgressive impulses that bear witness to his quest for cinematic freedom. Ghosh, in his films, draws a distinction between visibility and visuality, seeing and looking. In visuality the active participation of the spectator, his or her creative and critical engagement becomes extremely important. He fashions his mise-en-scene in a way that would activate these critical impulses of his spectators.

Rituparno Ghosh’s films, including Chokher Bali, are not without their faults and deficiencies, technical and otherwise. However, defects notwithstanding, it has to be conceded that his output adds to a significant corpus of work. In my discussions with him, I found him to be an extremely sensitive and thoughtful intellectual as well. Ritaprno Ghosh, it is evident as a film-maker was deeply interested in the pursuit of freedom. This desire finds articulation in his theme and style, in his narrative discourse and representational strategies He sought to effect a sensory and conceptual dislocation in the pursuit of cinematic freedom.

Communication

Ghosh was interested in cinematic communication as well as cinematic met-communication. What this means is that he paid great attention to the content he was communicating as well as to the contexts in and discursive formations from which the content assumed life. His desire was to entertain and educate in the broadest sense of these terms. John Dewey once said that, a liberal education paved the way for the emergence of critical citizens and interactive communities and extend social justice to all fields – social, cultural, political and economic.

He felt that a liberal education afforded the people to behave with a sense of ethical responsibility needed for’ reasoned participation in democratically organised publics.’ It is this kind of public that Rituparno Ghosh wished to create through his cinema, and the pursuit of freedom that I have been discussing in this essay is a both means and an outcome of this effort. Ghosh was not imagining an alternate system or utopia. He was convinced of the validity of Michel Foucault’s statement that, ‘I think to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system.’ That is why he chose to work in the shadows of Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray and Indian popular cinema while seeking to go beyond them.

What I have sought to do in these columns is to highlight the fact that Rabindranath Tagore exerted profound influence on Indian cinema, specifically Bengali cinema and to call attention to the work of a relatively young filmmaker who displayed a great admiration for the artistic vision and agendas of Tagore. Concluded