(This story was first published on 16 July 2019. It has been published from The Quint’s archives to mark the death anniversary of the filmmaker, Mrinal Sen.)
Mrinal Sen (1923 - 2018), the politically committed filmmaker from West Bengal who passed away last year, made one of the strongest statements against police and government brutality in his 1973 movie Padatik (The Foot Soldier). Padatik, along with Calcutta ’71 and The Interview, belongs to what is called Mrinal Sen’s “Calcutta Trilogy” - three movies that cover the political happenings in Calcutta (but also more generally in West Bengal, India and internationally), cataloguing the defeats and victories of international left movements.
Padatik recounts the story of Sumit (Dhritiman Mukherjee), who escapes from police custody and, with the help of some party comrades and a middle-class advertising agent Mrs. Mitra (Simi Garewal), goes into hiding.
Padatik wears its internationalism on its sleeve. Internationalism means solidarity and support for the struggles of the oppressed and exploited across the world. How does Mrinal Sen bring this internationalism to a movie that has a highly located plot, with the student and Naxalite uprisings in the late-1960’s West Bengal?
The movie recounts the story of Sumit (Dhritiman Mukherjee), who escapes from police custody and, with the help of some party comrades and a middle-class advertising agent Mrs. Mitra (Simi Garewal), goes into hiding .
One of the ways in which Mrinal Sen bridges differences between people’s situations is by juxtaposing shots of people struggling together. Thus, scenes of young students protesting on the streets of Calcutta are interspersed with shots of Vietnamese youth coordinating against the onslaught of the American forces. Struggles for decolonization and socialism from Latin America and Africa are frequently mentioned. Throughout the movie several characters quote Marxist and Communist leaders and thinkers like Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara.
Internationalism is, importantly, not anti-nationalism. Internationalism believes in friendship and amity among distant and disparate places, provided that this friendship be based on the rights of and respect for the poor and exploited. For instance, an international trade deal that establishes special economic zones that will push out people living “illegally” on a piece of land is not internationalist because it disregards the rights of the poor.
Simi Garewal’s character surveys many women from different backgrounds about their views of gender equality and women’s rights, and not each and every one of them paint a picture of male-violence and the manner in which men control the lives, incomes, and bodies.
This solidarity is not only with the “rest of the world”, however. Global concerns by no means override local ones - instead, they actually provide an atmosphere of what it was like to see the political turmoil taking place in different parts of the world in a synchronized and interrelated matter.
For instance, one of the most important questions that the movie tackles is that of gender equality between men and women. Simi Garewal’s character surveys many women from different backgrounds about their views of gender equality and women’s rights, and not each and every one of them paint a picture of male-violence and the manner in which men control the lives, incomes, and bodies. This question is of great importance considering so many of the protesters and student activists that we see in the footages of Calcutta are men - so one might be led to assume that the revolutionary classes in this situation was exclusively male.
The movie strives to dispel this notion, making it clear that women’s role in the struggle for equality was more, if not equally, as important. Garewal’s Mrs. Mitra even provides a specific instance of the exploitation of women - she is repeatedly harassed by her ex-husband (who, we are told, was abusive) who calls her and then blackmails her into giving him money. It is in Mrs. Mitra’s house that Sumit finds refuge. She is also the stand-in for the middle-class viewer, far more than Sumit, whose idealism remains a little hard to understand.
Simi Garewal’s Mrs. Mitra even provides a specific instance of the exploitation of women - she is repeatedly harassed by her ex-husband (who, we are told, was abusive) who calls and then blackmails her into giving him money. It is in Mrs. Mitra’s house that Sumit finds refuge.
It is Mrs. Mitra who, we are shown, is torn between making ads for infant supplement powders (called “Vita Tone”) while thinking about the extreme malnutrition that is prevalent among so many children in Eastern India (Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, among other states - once again in light as Acute Encephalitis Syndrome has recently led to the deaths of more than 70 children in Muzaffarpur).
Padatik has a plot, but this plot is so minor that the focus inevitably shifts on how this plot is being told to us, rather than what is being told. The how is to establish the characters as having pasts, histories, and psychological depths which open up to personal as well as international struggles.
Garewal’s Mitra is again paradigmatic in this regard. When she explains that her brother left their home in Punjab, many years ago, to join the leftist struggle in the region, and never came back, the point of leftist solidarity and struggles in far away places and the point of her psychological depth and her personal trauma are fused together. This drives the plot not only ahead, but also in many different directions at the same time. Through one revelation (the departure of the brother), it makes several things clear, such as Mrs. Mitra’s psychological and personal life, her relationship to the left, but also on a more larger scale, the kind of political turmoil and leftist struggles that India, and South Asia generally, were seeing in the 1960’s and 1970’s, struggles that connected disparate regions like Punjab and Bengal, and the experiences of people in both these places.
Throughout the movie we see newspapers going to press, with their headlines appearing on screen: “Normal Life Disrupted,” “Crisis Surfaces in Tamil Nadu,” “Gujarat Several Plants Closed,” “Maharashtra Industrial Belts Sleeping,” “Uttar Pradesh Faces Industrial Crisis.” These headlines are another way in which the general character of anti-capitalist striking and anti police brutality protests beyond the city of Calcutta are integrated into the movie. Mrinal Sen’s dedication is clearly not to parochial concerns, but with the liberation of all oppressed and exploited humans, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or religion.
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