Son spots: On Mrinal Sen as friend, father, filmmaker
Kunal Sen’s book is an intimate look at his parents' marriage, their politics, his own bond with his father and his work. It’s memory, with no myth, he says.
For a long time, Kunal Sen resisted the idea of writing about his father, the late legendary filmmaker Mrinal Sen.
“To begin with, I am not a writer,” says Sen, who lives in Chicago and works with Encyclopaedia Britannica. “I have avoided talking much about my parents (Kunal’s mother was the late actress Gita Sen) because if I said good things, it would be seen as a partial view. If I was critical, it would become fodder for gossip.”
Last year, however, the 69-year-old says he realised that “many of my memories would disappear unless I put them to paper”. So he began writing, and 10 months in, he had Bondhu (Bengali for Friend), an intimate portrait of his father, published by Seagull Books in May, to coincide with his father’s 100th birth anniversary.
The title is a nod to an unusual bond; Bondhu is how Sen had addressed his father since he was a child.
The anecdotes in the biography cover personal memories, his parents’ marriage, his father’s socialist-leftist politics, and the making of some of India’s most critically acclaimed films, including Bhuvan Shome (1969; about a bureaucrat who has his eyes opened while on a journey through the interiors), Ek Din Pratidin (1979; on the policing of working women), Khandhar (1984; a story of love, fidelity and betrayal set in a village).
“My father loved a good story and had a way of stringing anecdotes together,” Sen says. “A friend from college called them ‘Mrinal da’s golpo mala’.” As a tribute to that, the book is non-linear. “I wrote each chapter independently and then shuffled them around to see what worked.” What else can the reader expect? Excerpts from an interview.
You’ve had an unusual relationship with your father…
In the very beginning, I could never take him very seriously. From a child’s perspective, he seemed a little eccentric and unusual, sometimes even embarrassing… I would try to keep him away from my friends as much as possible.
Also, he never had that fatherly image of someone in control, in charge, somebody who could take care of any situation. I always thought of him as a bumbling person. To me, the role of man about the house was played by my uncle (actor Anup Kumar; Gita Sen’s brother).
It is only closer to my high school days that I started falling in love with his intellectual side. We lived in a very small flat, so the 10 ft x 10 ft living room is where I studied. And it was where his friends would spend the whole day at these addas, talking and debating. I could see why all these people came to our house every day to listen to my father.
Did these addas inform his world view and his films?
Yes and no. What I remember from the late ’60s and ’70s is that most of the people who came to our house, especially after he became well-known, were sycophants. Sadly, so many intellectuals tend to surround themselves with people who are of lesser intellectual capacity. We do not have a culture of strong people with different views, sitting together and talking. Why, for example, were there no regular addas with (Satyajit) Ray and (Ritwik) Ghatak? They could have all benefited just by being challenged and questioned, but there were none.
Your father’s political leanings certainly informed his cinema.
The films he made in the early and mid-1970s were overtly political. This was a period of political upheaval and of hope for a better world, not just in Kolkata but around the world.
Towards the end of that decade, it was becoming clear to him that this change was not going to happen. The people who were supposed to bring about that change were inadequate, and that becomes evident in his cinema. In Padatik (1973; a tale of a struggling political activist), despite having sympathy for the Naxalite movement at a personal level, he was critical of the process and the violence.
By the late 1970s, his focus had shifted and he made films such as Ek Din Pratidin and Kharij (1982; about a middle-class family who must live in fear themselves after their ill-treated house help dies). These also viewed the world from a political perspective, but no longer pushed an agenda.
Given he had friends such as Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Salil Chowdhury move to Bombay and become part of Bollywood, what did he think of popular culture and popular cinema?
He had absolutely no interest in any form of popular culture. When he lost friends like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Salil Chowdhury to popular cinema, it increased his resolve to stay away from it. He never could support or understand the attraction. To him, filmmaking was not a livelihood. It was a calling.
I know that he couldn’t recognise any popular actors or filmmakers. If he ever met any, either my mother or my wife Nisha would have to whisper the filmstar’s name to him.
Most Indian biographies, especially when family is involved, are less honest than yours has been…
I knew if there was to be any lasting value to this book, it had to be its honesty. I also felt that his legacy and importance could survive a few negative stories.
He once planned to make a film, wrote a treatment of it but the film never came out. It was about how we make myths out of people. It’s about a family where the matriarch has died and everyone has gathered to remember this great woman. Through two days spent together, they begin to realise it’s all a myth. We build myths around people, and I know he wouldn’t have wanted one built around him.