As I was watching Suman Ghosh’s feature-length documentary, Parama – A Journey with Aparna Sen, I recalled the beautiful and humane closure of her first directorial debut 36 Chowringhee Lane.
Miss Stoneham visited Nandita and Samaresh after their wedding to give them the 78 rpm records wrapped in newspaper because she had forgotten to give them along with the old phonograph she had gifted them. In all her innocence, she took time to read into the thinly veiled brisk reception that left clear hints for her to leave as a housewarming party was on. After the initial shock, Miss Stoneham walked away, stepped out of a taxi outside Victoria Memorial, and quoting from Shakespeare’s King Lear, gave away pieces of the pie she decided not to gift the couple with, to the dog that follows her around. Her identity crisis – of being or not being an ‘outsider’ is resolved within herself. She is rooted in Calcutta and Calcutta is where she will live on. The lines she quotes from King Lear spell out her brave decision to stay on.
Suman’s film opens with this last scene of 36 Chowringhee Lane, as a pre-title visual, with the weary Stoneham slowly making her way back, the Victoria Memorial behind her, and the dog following her. She sits on a platform and takes some rest, her aging feet weary with walking.
One can imagine the multiple talents of an actress-turned-filmmaker who could make such a beautiful debut with an unforgettable film even at a relatively young age. To make a documentary on Sen was long overdue. Filmmaker Suman Ghosh, directing films over the past 15 years with a National Award along with other awards in his kitty, has tried to bridge this long time gap with Parama – A Journey with Aparna Sen.
The title is apt because it is really a ‘journey’ through her long sojourn in cinema stretching to around six decades including a couple of decades as one of the most successful leading ladies of Bengali mainstream cinema. Ghosh has struck rightly on turning the 80-minute documentary into a “road movie” in more ways than one. He journeys with his subject, Aparna Sen in a fascinating time travel where the two take themselves back to the house in which Sen shot 36 Chowringhee Lane, where Violent Stoneham lived. Sen points out to the dilapidated building with wires hanging everywhere along the outer walls, as Sen begins to climb the stairs leading to the flat despite her very bad back. Thankfully, for the filmmaker Ghosh and the subject, Sen, the building still exists and has not gone under the hammer of mindless, profit-oriented promoters and builders yet.
Sen has made 17 films and is the only woman to have ever won the National Award for Best Director, twice for her debut 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) and Mr and Mrs Iyer (2002) for which her daughter Konkona Sen Sharma also bagged the National Award for Best Actress. In 2021 she received the prestigious Kim Jiseok Award at the 26th Busan International Film Festival for her film The Rapist.
Two of Suman Ghosh’s films will be screened this month at the Indian Film Festival in Houston. Parama – A Journey with Aparna Sen is the opening night film, his current feature film Kabuliwalla, will be screened as the centerpiece film. This double whammy underscores the recognition of Suman Ghosh as a winning filmmaker.
Ghosh directed Aparna Sen in his mainstream magnum opus Basu Poribar, Ghosh’s foray into a multi-starred, mainstream film. This brought him closer to Aparna Sen. Sen says, “I find a string of Rinas behind me, then all of them coming and merging into this Rina,” her nickname being Rina. The unit then sets about trying to locate the old house where 36 Chowringhee Lane was shot but the place has changed considerably from 40 years ago. The lift which had the sign “out of order” in the film and made Stoneham negotiate the stairs is still there but not functioning. So, the camera takes a mid-long shot in semi-darkness focused on Sen slowly clambering up the stairs to reach the home.
The film then cuts to bytes from filmmakers Goutam Ghose and Anjan Dutt who freely say that Sen’s performance in mainstream films was not up to the mark and that she could have done better. Sen responds that the family was in dire straits and she just had no choice but to accept the roles that came to her as she was a single mother with two daughters to bring up.
A novel feature is the appearance and interview with Kamalini Chatterjee, Sen’s elder daughter who lives in the US and remains invisible from public view. She backs up her mother’s comment about the family being in financial straits without explaining the details. Her second daughter Konkona Sharma, an actress-director in her own right, denies that her mother was a lesser actress than Konkona. Konkona adds that mainstream cinema which Sen dominated for around two decades, placed a certain demand for a specific image and a specific kind of acting and she did it throughout those years in her films. Konkona goes at length to describe the problems she faced while shooting for The Rapist.
Sen’s husband Kalyan Ray, says that he has observed her craving to learn. “Even when she was shooting for a film on another floor when she heard that Ray was shooting on the next floor, she would rush to that floor during a break to learn and learn and learn as much as she could.” About her role as a mother, Sen admits that though she was more or less an absentee mother to her two daughters because she was busy acting, directing, travelling across countries, she loved them dearly and that was all she could give them.
There are nostalgic clips from Ray’s Teen Kanya in which Sen debuted as a teenager, followed by mainstream films like Memsaheb, Basanta Biliap, and Mrinal Sen’s Akash Kusum. The contrast when the present Aparna Sen, bespectacled and mellow cuts into the scene and gets on with her conversations. These films were from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s when Sen was young, slim, and very pretty. Shabana Azmi goes on record to state that Sen’s success in mainstream films across the board proves her versatility as an actress and also as a multi-faceted woman.
Sen’s movements through the spaces they journey into show Sen having evolved into a mellow, all-round personality, with glasses, a bit weighty, and very articulate and forthright. The film shifts to Parama, the most powerfully designed feminist film at the time.
It is about an upper-middle-class Bengali housewife of Kolkata with growing children trapped in a loveless marriage bound within wifely responsibility she is not even aware she is suffocating within. In this trapped world enters Rahul, the young friend of a distant nephew. Slowly, they drift into an affair scandalizing the entire family and relegating Parama to an outcast within the same home. It was a path-breaking film and remains till now. Parama remains a milestone in Aparna Sen’s journey as one of the most outstanding filmmakers India has produced. The “woman” prefix may be wiped out as she hates it.
They then visit the home where Paromitar Ek Din was shot and the family members who still live there are pleasantly surprised by their celebrity visitor and welcome her.
There is working footage from The Japanese Wife with bytes from Rahul Bose who confesses that they had horrid fights and “everyone thought it was the end” but it was not. Suman and Sen travel to the ancestral mansion where the indoor shots of the film Parama are shot. There are clips from other films too such as Arshinagar which did not go down well with the audience, a musical and contemporary adaptation of a Shakespearean tragedy. There are clips from Paromitar Ek Din too.
The film later makes references to Sen’s parents, the reputed intellectual, journalist, author, and father of the film society movement, the late Chidananda Dasgupta and his wife with lots of still photographs drawn from the well-kept family archives which invests the film with a personal and intimate dimension. Sen talks about the influence of her parents on their lives. There are passing references to Sen’s stint as editor of Sananda, a Bengali fortnightly from the ABP house she nurtured as an editor for two successful decades. Sudeshna Roy, journalist-turned-filmmaker who assisted her for many years adds her bit.
The editing, cutting, slicing, mixing, and moving backward and forwards in time and place throughout the footage is enriched by (a) the use of clips of the films she acted in, and directed over time,(b) the physical journey to the places where she shot many of her films,(c) still family photographs with her daughters, herself and her parents at different stages of her growth, and (d) bytes from people who know her closely and have worked with her. All this has made Parama – A Journey with Aparna Sen, a complete film with a beautiful background score that never dominates the visuals but adds a lyrical rhythm that gives the film a beautiful texture.
My only lament is that no one cared to mention a single word about the book – Parama and Other Outsiders: The Cinema of Aparna Sen, an auteur, in-depth critique of the first five feature films directed by Sen which won the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema in 2002.
(Shoma A Chatterji is an Indian film scholar, author and freelance journalist. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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