Acclaimed director of Bangla films, Ranjan Ghosh was in Hyderabad recently for the screening of two of his celebrated movies—Ahaa Re! and Mahishasur Marddini as a part of 19th Anniversary celebrations of Moving Images Film Club.
Ahaa Re! narrates the tale of a rich Muslim Chef from Dhaka and a middle-class Hindu woman from Calcutta who loves to cook and how cooking is elevated to art form when their paths cross.
Mahishasur Marddini is a socio-political drama which makes a scathing attack on patriarchy and misogyny prevalent in the society.
Ranjan Ghosh prior to turning film director worked in merchant navy, which to most of us seem like two disparate career paths, but for Ranjan merchant navy career was the means to fulfill his childhood dream of making films. Ranjan is deeply influenced by the works of William Shakespeare and Satyajit Ray as evident from his movies and believes that films should also point out the flaws in the society while entertaining the audience. Mahishasur Marddini, his latest outing has received critical acclaim and at the same time audience have been able to relate to the movie and identify with issues that it raises.
DC had a tete-a-tete with the acclaimed and socially conscious director on the sidelines of the screening to bring out the influences, motivation, journey and film making philosophy of Ranjan Ghosh – the man and the director to our readers.
Sailing a ship and filmmaking are poles apart. You have done both. How did the transition happen?
My father made me watch Aparajito at a film club and a lot of other children films including Charlie Chaplin in my school days. Later, when I was in Class 10, the teacher asked us what we wanted to become when we grew up. All my other classmates mentioned that they wanted to be an engineer or a doctor. I was the only one who said I wanted to make films and the whole class erupted into a laughter. Hence, my interest was right there from my school days. But hailing from the small town of Durgapur, I had no idea of how to fulfill that aspiration. Hence, after finishing class 12th, I enrolled for a course in the university, where I studied physics and subsequently, joined Merchant Navy.To realize my childhood dream of film making I wanted a formal education in film making. My reasoning was that to become a doctor, you have to enroll into a medical college, to become an engineer, you have to enroll into an engineering college. Similarly, if you want to become a filmmaker, you should join a film institute. Also, I had read Satyajit Roy’s Bishoy Chalachitra, where he had written that we should have some film institutes in the country for training our filmmakers. This thought had stayed with me. So, I worked with Merchant Navy for around five years to earn the money to pay for my film education. After that I quit Merchant Navy and enrolled into WhistlingWoods, a film institute in Bombay, studying filmmaking for two years and graduated with screenwriting as my major. Hence, that was the journey with film making being the ultimate career goal and intermediary career in Merchant Navy a means to achieve that.
Your first movie, HridMajharey was inspired by not just one but three works of Shakespeare. How did you manage that because even literature students find Shakespearean works complex.
I think it was a blessing that I was not a literature student. My subject was physics. But as a child, I would hear my mother teach Merchant of Venice to my sister in the other room. Then we had Julius Caesar in our school. So, the exposure to Shakespeare was there. But it was more as an enjoyable recreational activity than a dreary subject which required you to make an effort to master and therefore miss out on the enjoyment part. Therefore, I was in love with Shakespearean literature, which I read later in my merchant navy days along with lot of other classic literature – both in English and Bangla. While I never set out to do anything on Shakespeare, it kind of crept into my stories and screenplays which I was writing as a student. I started writing a love story. And gradually, I realized that some elements from Othello, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar, had organically crept into the story. Possibly, the result of the years spent in consuming the copious volumes of classic literature. Therefore, characters akin to Othello, Desdemona, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, or the soothsayer from Julius Caesar, who says, beware of the eyes of smart – all these characters kind of crept into the story organically, without my conscious knowledge. And once I found that these had crept into the story, I kind of developed it. And I think I could do it because I was not in awe of Shakespeare like a literature student.While I know how the play pans out, what dialogues are in the play, I approached it without any baggage, without any kind of pressure. I think that was why it was relatively fresher. And I am told that it is very fresh from all the other Shakespeare adaptations that have been there.
Let us talk about Mahishasur Marddini, it was like a scathing attack on patriarchy. And there was so much discussion and buzz around it. How did you come up with this story idea?
Oh, this idea took birth with the Nirbhaya incident.The brutality of the whole incident tore into my being, just like it had into our collective conscience as a nation. And then, I started making notes. Different kind of notes on varying every day incidents of misogyny which assail us whether you look at newspapers, browse through television channels or mobile screens.It has been more than a decade since the Nirbhaya incident, but harrowing tales of misogyny right up to the recent Manipur incident continue unabated. To understand this, I looked at myself, my surroundings, people that I run into everyday—acquaintances, friends, relatives, and general public. I looked at our mythologies, our classic literature, and the social practices and norms. And as I looked at all of these, I found that patriarchy, this violence on women and this misogyny, has existed since time immemorial, and there is no drastic change with time. And it seems to me that probably we are all asleep, you know, and are having a nightmare. And probably one day when we will all wake up, we will come to realize that this violence, this hatred, this misogyny is not real.This Manipur incident is probably a nightmare. What happened with Asifa was probably a nightmare. What happened with Dr. Priyanka Reddy in Hyderabad in 2019 was probably a nightmare. The violence on women is probably all fiction. And one day we will wake up to find that the world is a kinder and a nicer place to women. So, this was the thought behind Mahishasur Marddini. That on one hand, we celebrate the Mother Goddess with so much pomp and with so much glamour and with so much of love. And at the same time, we are so atrocious and so hateful to women in Manipur. So, you know how much valid this is even today?10,000 years of literature and God knows how many centuries of civilization. We still treat women as commodities and it is not only men, sometimes even women treat women badly. And then there are these intersectional issues like class, caste, colour, education, making this whole thing nightmarish. That was how Mahishasur Marddini came into being.
Yeah, talking about patriarchy, when you are talking about gender violence, it is almost totally patriarchal in nature, right? So how difficult was it to handle the issue in Mahishasur Marddini being a male?
Yes, it was difficult. Being a man, being a woman, whatever it is, we have been brought up in a patriarchal way. Like I said our country is known as our motherland. We worship women, and at the same time, we burn our brides for dowry. We rape our daughters, and the rapes happen from known people. So, these things were there and it was difficult writing the script and forming the story because one did not know what to select and what to throw out. There was so much information and its enormity is self-bruising and self-hurting. Is this what we do? I have referenced from my own life where I have discriminated against women and how I have wronged her. So, it was very painful, it was very shameful at the same time, now that the film is done and I watch it, it has kind of been cathartic. At the various screenings that we have been doing whether at JNU or Jamia or Pondicherry University or University of Hyderabad recently, everyone is silent after the film and they are taking 10 minutes to open up to the film, to start the discussion because people are disturbed and they say that sir, this is what we do. You are showing it. It is shameful and it is painful. At the same time, I honestly wish that 50 years from now we do not have to make a film like this. I may not be there at that point of time, but I certainly hope that another film like Mahishashur Marddini is not made after 50 years.
So, for the concept so bold what was the censor board reaction? Did they actually object to a certain dialogue or a particular scene because it is a bold movie?
They told me that you have made this film very intelligently and said that you are escaping by a whisker. And they said it is a very bold film, a deeply political film. Someone I think mentioned that it reminds them of the education propaganda. Cinema that agitates. Cinema is not only about poetic visual. Film is also a pen to protest. I think the camera is also an instrument to protest. So, someone from the censor board mentioned it is a bold film and you have used your camera very intelligently. So I took that as a compliment.
Tell us about the Durja Pujo connect of this movie.
You see we celebrate Maa Durga as the ultimate symbol of woman power. The power that is brave enough and is great enough to defeat a male power that no other god was able to defeat. Hence, Maa Durga was created and Maa Durga defeated that demonic male power. We celebrate Durga Pujo all over India and not just in Bengal and female deity is worshipped in forms of Kali or Saraswati or Lakshmi across the country and therefore has a wider connect. She is so powerful and has ten arms. However, she is turned into a mute witness on that particular night in the story where one after the other incidents of misogyny and violence on women are being exposed. I thought that is a very powerful visual. How even Maa Durga has been turned into a mute witness and she cannot do anything.So, I thought that was a good metaphor to bring out the unbelievably dangerous situation. There’s another thing to this. If you have seen a Durga idol, the front of the idol is all glamourous and all beautiful that kind of inspires your awe. But if you look at the back of the idol, it is looks crude with the clay, the basic bamboo structure, and the straw. It disturbs you. I still remember seeing a Durga image and the light was focused on the front of the image and I was looking at the image from the back side and the silhouette of the image of the idol with ten arms, it almost looked like a gigantic spider and the visual was so powerful. That is metaphorically used in the story as well that on one side we celebrate woman and worship women, we do all these great things and at the same time we exploit them.
Did you decide the cast before scripting because Rituparna Sengupta had worked in your earlier film too, but you chose to repeat her in Mahishasur Marddini as well?
It so happened that when I conceptualized the story, she was not in my mind. I just happened to write the story first. But when the story gradually got developed and when the central protagonist’s character was being written and the other two characters started getting written, I could start visualizing who could play the main protagonist and I could not find anyone better than Rituparna Sengupta to play the part. Saswata Chatterjee and Parambrata Chatterjee were my first and the only options for the roles they essayed. Similarly, I did extensive auditions for college students. And I was extremely lucky to cast them.
Talking about actors, are your actors bound by the script or you give them creative freedom to make changes?
With all my earlier films, I was a little more flexible. But with this film, you know it is also combining the forms of performing theatre and cinema, the acting had to be at a certain level. The mannerisms of the actor should reflect a blend between theatre and cinema. And while writing the script, during pre-production, I had a clear idea as to what it should be like. So,while rehearsing with my actors I told them what I wanted. But when the actor says can we try it out this way, then I give them the freedom to try it out their way and let me see. If it falls within the bandwidth of what I want, then it is fine, else we have to come back to what I have asked them to do.
Is there a blockbuster movie, which you think you would have made better?
I think I would not want to watch a classic and think I would have done it better. If I really want to try making a film on the subjects on which already a classic has been made,then I think I would like to try two films – Ganashatru by Satyajit Ray,an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Play “An Enemy of the people” and ‘Rang De Basanti’ by Rakeysh Mehra. I really love the film, a huge blockbuster and critically acclaimed. On these subjects I would like to make that film and not necessarily better those films.
So can we expect to see a film on patriotic genre coming from, you next?
No. Not on the patriotic genre because we tend to mistake what is patriotism. I think Mahishasur Marddini is a patriotic film. If I am criticizing the system that exists in my country, then I am a big patriot otherwise I will not be able to do it.You point out the system flaws only because you love like parents do. They point out our mistakes because they love us. So, I think patriotism is relative to different people.
You watch movies in different languages. Is there a non-Bangla movie which you watched and liked?
I watched Kantara and very eager to watch Rajinikanth’s latest film Jailer. I am hoping to catch it up in Hyderabad now. I love to watch the original with sub titles. I love to watch typical Rajni movies, whether it is Moondru Mudichu or Chaal baaz. The thing about Kantara is that it has an earthy feel to it. So, it seemed that it is the story of Kannadigas specific to their culture and it did not seem external. It told me a lot about that land, its people, their life, their way of living. And it was very original and rooted in its own culture. I liked it a lot.
What next?
I spent a lot of time on Mahishasur Marddini. So sometime next year, I would like to do something light—like a family drama.
