Book excerpt: How Aparna Sen's cinema is localised in Bengali culture but also universal

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A central influence in Aparna Sen's life perhaps has been that of her father, the celebrated critic and filmmaker Chidananda Dasgupta, whose writings on cinema were not only seminal but also remain influential in the world of film criticism in India. One of her father's closest friends was Satyajit Ray, with whom Dasgupta would go on to found the Calcutta Film Society in 1947. Ray himself famously forged a new path in filmmaking and radicalized Bengali cinema's images, symbols and language.
The trio of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen undoubtedly influenced Aparna's choice to become not only a filmmaker but also one with a distinct cinematic language. Her years as an actor no doubt helped hone her skills in directing films, making it easier for her to understand when an actor had problems with certain movements or lines. Says Sen: 'It also helped me in writing dialogue, by acting lines out in my head before I actually wrote anything down.
Of Ray's cinema, Chidananda Dasgupta wrote, '…neither in content nor in style did Ray's films owe anything at all to Bengali, indeed Indian, cinema traditions…' Arguably, then, Ray ushered in another cinematic tradition that combined the modern with the traditional, the global with the local, which Aparna undoubtedly drew upon.
Aparna says, 'It is very difficult not to be influenced by Ray in the same way that writers were influenced by Tagore. At that time, he was like a huge banyan tree. We had come from the same kind of background – enlightened liberal Brahmo stock.' Her unique cinematic medium – localized in high Bengali culture, but at the same time intelligible to a global audience – was perhaps constructed by following in the footsteps of her two mentors, the two Bengali giants Tagore and Ray.
In Aparna Sen's cinema, the women are categorized by specificities (almost granting them a real life) such as class positions and family backgrounds, almost always portraying various intimate interpersonal relationships. This can be seen through a close examination of the women in her various films – Miss Stoneham in 36 Chowringhee Lane, Meenakshi Iyer in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, the eponymous character in Parama, Meethi in 15 Park Avenue, to name just a few.
Not being didactic, Sen's films do not offer forced happy closures for her women. Again, there are no binaries in terms of representation of women. The women are probed until their inner beings shine through.
At the time that Aparna was making her presence felt, Bengali commercial cinema was at an all-time low. Greatly influenced by the Bombay template which basically meant the 'angry young man' phenomenon, it came to imbue the same with a unique local feel. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a complete departure from social reality into the realm of folk and fantasy.
However, it was Aparna Sen and later Rituparno Ghosh who drew the middle class back to the theatres with their brand of cinema. With Parama and later the other films, Sen came to raise some important questions about gender, sexuality, marriage and motherhood, and what these terms meant to the middle class.
Aparna's cinema, though rooted in the Ray-Ghatak-Sen school and to a certain extent also influenced by parallel cinema, announced a phase that would come to be called 'Middle Cinema', which is distinct in form, style and intellectual complexity. While Aparna's films are realistic portrayals of social and political issues often played out in a domestic scenario, her difference from other directors is marked by her portrayal of women characters enacting their agency within a patriarchal Bengali society.
It is precisely this which grants her films a certain universality, and in turn, they reach a wider audience, thus extending her regional identity to that of a national director. Her choice of stories, the art of narrating them, cinematic style, realism, simplicity, and the absence of flamboyance mark her cinema, and lend her oeuvre a certain distinction.
Several critics including Shoma Chatterji opine that like many women film directors (of which there were very few when Sen made her mark), Aparna Sen represents a feminine sensibility in the way she portrays women's negotiations with Indian patriarchy. Sen herself rejects the idea of her films being labelled feminist: 'I don't believe in any 'ism' other than humanism…women's issues are to me a part and parcel of humanism itself – something that I believe in and try my best to live by.'