His Son’s Friend – A Review of Kunal Sen’s ‘Bondhu – My Father, My Friend’ (Seagull Books, 2023, 188 pages. INR 599.)

This is a memoir full of stories and stories about stories. It appears that Mrinal Sen loved to think of people in real life or, at least, some essential parts of them, as characters out of fiction. The specifics would differ from one retelling to the next. But that, according to him, did not alter their essence. This is a subject on which his biographer son would have arguments with him. The sparring continues into the pages without abatement or spleen.?

Sen’s talent for storytelling might well have been a sentiment he shared with his wife, Gita, an immensely gifted actor. She would relate incidents, often acting them out, in which her husband would feature as the quintessential blunderbuss. Sen would listen without intervening but remind her if she skipped a related bit. Even in these moments of conviviality Sen comes through as a deep-dyed maker of performing art. With impish delight, he enjoyed watching his wife perform and the effect she had on the audience. ?

As the memoir rolls out, it becomes evident that the idea is to portray an extremely gregarious man active in the very public arena of culture yet, rooted in the family which his wife and he started. Without its agency his trajectory need not necessarily have been the same. Soon after Kunal moved to Chicago to pursue academic research, the University of Chicago’s cine-club screened Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito, a film that moves him profoundly to this day. To those of his Chicago friends who had made up their minds to stay on in the US, the hero’s mother was manipulating him and even getting in the way of his aspirations. Kunal, on the other hand, having recently come away from his mother and home, was filled with remorse. Come next morning, he writes a letter to his mother about the incident and promises to return to India as soon as his studies are over. ?

Bondhu or Friend – the term of address for his father that Kunal adopted from his early childhood – used a suitably adapted version of his letter to his mother for his telefilm called Aparajit in the mid-1980s. This did not bother Kunal as it was not a documentary. But he got upset when in an article Sen quoted from the letter, with its language altered. Upon being confronted, Sen was surprised. It was not as if he remembered his son’s letter to him to have been written the way he cited it in his piece, but he contended that the altered version was better than the original. ?

Kunal writes he never agreed that his father’s version was necessarily superior stylistically. He argued with Bondhu that he did not have the right to change words he attributed to a real person. But this was a position Mrinal Sen refused to accept because he thought his version rendered a much better story. It is easy to see him arguing, as Jerome Bruner does, that ‘reality’ and ‘stories’ feed on one another. (cf. Making Stories – Law, Literature, Life). Mrinal Sen read, traveled, and made friends extensively. There is no knowing the cultural theories that caught his fancy or the formulations he hit upon independently. Readers familiar with his deliberately activist feature films are free to speculate that what animated him was not merely the need to analyse the world but to change it.?

That Kunal and his wife’s return to India does not eventually materialize is a turn of events the old man had foreseen clearly with a pragmatism, entirely at odds with his eccentricities, reveals an interesting side of his persona. Kunal lets fall that, over time, he and his wife accumulated enough rationale to stay on in the US forever. ?

The bare facts of Mrinal Sen’s life are woven into the work with tender care as are those of his wife’s. In the chapter devoted to his mother, the author says that it is not possible to understand either of his parents without understanding the story of the other. Gita Sen grew up in deep penury after the incarceration of her father even before he was thirty on account of his participation in the anti-Empire politics of the Indian National Congress. The fifteen-year-old Gita becomes the breadwinner and head of her parental household in Uttarpara, a mofussil of Calcutta then, now inexorably gobbled up by Kolkata. It is fascinating how years later, as an actor in films, she would go into isolation to prepare for an emotionally demanding scene. No, she would not think just about her role or the scene. She would think back to her past. ?

Mrinal Sen was born in 1923 in Faridpur in East Bengal where his father was a reputable lawyer. He moved to Kolkata well before the Partition which would eventually cause his parents and siblings to relocate to Park Circus on the city’s eastern fringe. It was then that the jobless Mrinal, having quit work as a medical representative, moved into this joint household that had suddenly been rendered indigent. It was natural that some of his struggling brothers would resent this entirely avoidable financial worry. Gita suffered on account of being the wife of “the most irresponsible and useless family member.” ?

There is not much else about Sen’s parents and siblings in the book after he and Gita move out of the menagerie. Yet there are continuities from this past in his persona and in the films he made. His professed antipathy to nostalgia – the sentiment he considered an enemy of objectivity – is certainly a gale from that direction. At the same time, he would fondly recount scenes from his Faridpur childhood but always as funny anecdotes. To the reader, ?this may come through as an emotional strategy of role-distancing to show that he had outgrown his past, his romance with the much bigger city of Kolkata having immersed him till death did them part.?

Yet Sen’s engagement with the larger societal past was full of nostalgia for idylls dear to his heart. In 1999, during the film festival in Sochi, Russia, Sen, now clearly getting on in years physically and without his ailing wife by his side, had an afternoon off. He went, under the care of his daughter-in-law, Nisha, to a dacha that Stalin used. There a replica of Stalin was installed at a desk. A visitor, who might have been an American, put her lit cigarette to Stalin’s lip. Sen was furious. He lashed out at her for disrespecting history and the man’s role on the side of justice in World War II. This transports Kunal to a Saraswati Puja day in his childhood home where Bondhu walks in and puts his lit cigarette between the idol’s lips. This was an occasion he remembers seeing his father cross a line which “made my mother very angry, and I burst into tears.” ?

In his Odiya film, Matira Manusha, Sen went on to sit the denouement of Chandi Charan Panigrahi’s eponymous novel on its head by making the two feuding brothers go their separate ways. The producer, in deference to the unhappiness of Odia viewers at an outsider’s lack of appreciation of their culture, contrived a different ending by aligning it with the novel and released a version with the director’s name excised from the credits! The biographer son writes that his father was convinced about the inevitable break-up of the joint family. This is of a piece with his early movement from the household of his birth.?

Sen was fond of engaging with people much younger than he. It is a fair guess that he quite hated the idea of his mind turning into a geriatric slow coach. This could have been a reason he looked upon nostalgia as an ideological foe, a reasoning which must have helped him along with his experiments with the medium of his choice. Kunal’s close friends eventually became his father’s collaborators and friends. Among them was Abhijit Gupta, the author’s closest friend from school, who could not make a financial success of his vocation as an artist and died early, but not before designing the “iconic poster” for Sen’s Padatik that released in 1973. ?

Abhijit’s art college friend, Nitish Roy, who designed the sets for Kharij, both annoyed and surprised Sen with his query about the backstory of the couple’s wedding – was it a love marriage or an arranged marriage? – a matter obviously not germane to the plot. On Sen’s interrogation Nitish explained that in case of a love marriage, the furniture would be a hotchpotch gathered from diverse sources. However, if the couple had come together through a wedding arranged by parents, the mise-en-scène would not be very far from being just so. Nitish went on to become a sought-after Bollywood art director. Similarly, young Gautam Bose became well-known as an art director in the Kolkata-based film industry. ?

Rahul Bose – not the actor – is Kunal’s long-lost friend whom Sen loved to engage with as an intellectual peer. Bose always came prepared with the intellectual apparatus needed to deal with the challenges that a director who hit the ground running would throw. Rahul moved to the civil society arena after some time. ?

Another young man, Sambit Bose, Kunal’s friend from college, was wondering what to do for a living after graduating in commerce. He used to spend a lot of time in the Sen household. Eventually, he enrolled in FTII and came back to join the crew as cinematographer KK Mahajan’s assistant and went on to become Sen’s cinematographer in a couple of films.?

The story of the initial bonding of Kunal with his father, through an improvised rite of passage shines a tender light on their bonding. One winter morning, Mrinal Sen wakes his infant son up even before there is any hint of the sun. Father and son board a tram that drops them at a very misty Maidan. About the time Kunal begins to get familiar with the surroundings, his father lets go of his hand. Just as he is beginning to panic, he hears Bondhu calling him and suggesting they play a game of hide and seek. Looking back, he surmises that Bondhu did not want him to lose his way, yet he did not want to chaperone him either.?

This is a layered account of interest to a wide variety of people – film makers, students of culture, society, urban sociology, politics, post-coloniality and sociolinguistics. One telling description is how Gita Sen’s diffidence about her own scarce English disappeared on experiencing first-hand at film festivals in countries outside India that many of the well-known guests there had no English. Scattered through the pages are a motley crew, many of them known around the world and the country and many no longer remembered today and people completely unknown even in their own times. A poor cab driver, who had once been in a revolutionary group dedicated to putting an end to the Raj with guns, is among them. There is even a ghost who, the atheist Sen insisted, was about to break his neck. ?

The moods of the people in the photographs are an interesting statistic. Most of them are people busy doing whatever they are up to; just joshing or sheltering away from the cruel, on-location sun, dining and so forth. In a total count of thirty black-and-whites, ten and a half, meaning exactly 35%, have the subjects consciously facing the camera.?

There is more than just a nip in the air in the picture taken in Santiniketan credited to Mrinal Sen. His wife is wrapped in a shawl. The fine needlework on her cotton sari barely rises from the fabric. Kunal is next to her flashing an expectant smile at the lens. He stands a good head shorter than his mother seated on an outdoorsy chair, her cheek resting on the back of her palm. She is lost in thought, gazing past the camera into the middle distance. They are on the balcony or the terrace of a house with trees and garden. She must have posed to begin with but soon lost interest. This is the picture in which one half of the subjects is eager for the shot while the other half has forgotten about the lens. ?

The photograph of Satyajit Ray and Sen in conversation in a room overflowing with books must excite interest, considering the attack that Ray had launched in a letter to the editor of The Stateman on Sen’s Akash Kusum soon after its release in 1965. The skirmish had lasted a month. The way both men have salt-and-peppered in the picture, clearly dates them to a time when emotions have cooled. This could have been soon after Sen’s Mrigaya won the Golden Prize at the 10th Moscow International Film Festival in 1977.?

Mrinal Sen’s end approaches with a gradual fading away of his overt mental faculties. While his wife, who predeceased him, remained alert till her last days, he began to lose his bearings. Sometimes he would stabilize and then again, the decline would resume. It is remarkable how, even after he began to lose his ability to stay focused on conversations, he continued to be able to put his thoughts together into his autobiography, Always Being Born. But before this phase set in, Sen wrote his last book on his idol, Chaplin. Significantly, one of the first books he authored was also about Chaplin with the cover designed by Satyajit Ray. This was at a time when neither stalwart had entered the world of films. ?

It is hoped that the next edition will be cured of typos.

?Abhijit Sarkar