Sen’s nonsense

Faridpur-born eminent Indian film director Mrinal Sen is being pilloried as a communist lackey. Normally celebrities like Sen are surrounded by lackeys. But after the ignominious fall of the communist regime in West Bengal, the 89-year-old is suddenly exposed to public scorn and ridicule in Kolkata — the city he migrated to as an ambitious young man and famously described as his El Dorado after scaling the dizzy heights of success.

Mrinalda was never a closet Marxist. He wore his political ideology on his sleeve. The reds saluted him. They even cajoled Delhi into making him a member of the Rajya Sabha, or upper house of parliament, from 1998 to 2003. But when regimes collapse, collaborators are often hung, drawn and quartered. Sen's disgrace, however, pains me because he is an old man. Although his critics have good reasons to gun for him, I am not too happy with his public humiliation. He is in the twilight of his life. In my opinion, he is probably entitled to a little bit more kindness and consideration. He deserves better because he never sang and danced like an intoxicated Buddho [former chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya] groupie!

Sen invited tonnes of trouble by observing in a newspaper article that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) never intruded into his "democratic space" or "interfered with his personal freedoms". The signed piece in Anand Bazar Patrika asserted: "For 34 long years I have enjoyed the democratic atmosphere that any ordinary citizen craves for. This is the essence of true democracy."

The clean chit to a party of control freaks who trampled on civil rights for decades raised hackles immediately. By the way, hackles literally mean the hairs on the back of a dog's neck that stick up when the canine is provoked by a smell or sight. An angry pack of human rights activists started baying for Sen's blood no sooner the article was read.

The backlash was inevitable. Hell broke lose because the main reason for the electoral rout of the communists was the party-centric rule which virtually reduced ordinary men and women across Bengal, particularly the toiling masses in villages, to slaves. The red party robbed their freedom and ran their lives. The subjugated ultimately rebelled against the coercive apparatus and pulled it down. Sen's defence of an autocratic CPI(M) therefore rubbed salt into many wounds.

Sen's paens in praise of the CPI(M), to say the least, were ill-timed. Now he is facing the music for turning a blind eye to the sufferings of countless lesser mortals evicted at midnight from homes which were reduced to ashes by red cadres for not toeing the party line. The luminary is being asked whether rickshaw-pullers forcibly prevented from plying their vehicles because they failed to turn up at a party rally, or college professors who were assaulted for not making a donation to a CPI(M)-affiliated body, enjoyed the same democratic freedom as him during communist rule.

Sen touched another raw nerve heaping praise on Nandan – the state government-run movie theatre in Kolkata. He wrote that his overseas friends were very impressed by the world class cine-complex where Buddhadev spent many an evening watching films. But Sen's accolades provoked others to brand Nandan the "headquarters of cultural terrorism". They asked whether the director's overseas friends were aware that films like Herbert [directed by Suman Mukherjee based on a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya, son of anti-establishment icon Mahasweta Devi] and Sthaniyo Sangbad [directed by Arjun Gourisaria and Moinak Biswas] had to seek legal redressal because Nandan authorities refused to screen them. Similarly, Kaushik Ganguly's Aarekti Premer Galpo, which revolves around a gay film-maker played by Rituparno Ghosh, was shown the door. Film buffs fumed when Nandan's CEO Nilanjan Chatterjee publicly proclaimed last year that he was the super censor single-handedly deciding which films to screen!

Nandan, in any, case is an elitist institution. Did communists extend a helping hand to the Tollygunje film industry which caters to the common man? Sen's studied silence on the touchy subject has jolted even his sympathisers; they feel he should have exerted some influence on friends holding high offices to come to the aid of ailing Tollywood, particularly low-paid technicians.

Sen is also in the dock for declaring that communists patronised artistes and writers more than any other dispensation. Now his detractors are demanding that he name intellectuals who remained in Marxists' good books after criticising them. The truth is that anyone who criticised communists faced problems at every step. Sen claims that he disagreed with Buddhadev on many occasions but they remained friends – matantar anek shamoyi hoeche kintu manantar hoyni. Unfortunately, there are no buyers for Sen's story. His detractors say that Stalinists brook no dissent. And cite West Bengal government stifling the voice of even little magazines – products of a literary movement for publishing journals on shoe-string budgets without corporate support – as proof of communist intolerance.

As enraged critics turn on the heat, Sen – a little bird informs me – is burning the midnight oil poring over Selina Hossein's delectable short story "Bhalobasha O Sramer Sandhan" (Love and Search for Labour). Can the octogenarian turn it into an unforgettable movie like Kharij? I doubt it very much.

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S. N. M. Abdi is a consulting editor, writer, columnist and broadcaster from India.