A Selective Study in Post-Colonial Bengali Cinema - always yours

37|Journal of Bengali Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2
threw the domestic economy into deep jeopardy. Bengali cinema gradually became commercially
sick, the industry began to dry up as the audiences were not getting the popular entertainment which
characterized other prominent industries of India, most notably Hindi and Tamil. We can read
Herbert as an allegory of our shrinking cultural production. One dominant theme of popular cinema
is that of production and manufacturing of narrative. A look at Mumbai-based Bengali scriptwriter
Sachin Bhowmik's Collected Works confirms that popular narratives are manufactured out of the
already existing elements of popular imagination; popular cinema, in other words destroys the
enlightenment derived Romanticism of an original auteur, the liberal humanist fantasy of a
visionary film-maker. Popular cinema, like epic and ballad, comes out of the social cultural and
political roots of a people. Surapati Marik is a producer who wants to manufacture a hit narrative
out of Herbert's dialogues with the dead, as he is able to detect the elements of a popular formula in
them. He calls Herbert “choubachhar telapia” (small fish from bath tub), whom he wants to promote
and make big (55). The idea stuck to Herbert and it appeared in his suicide note. The small fish of
bath tub now goes to the confluence of Ganga and Bay of Bengal, Herbert writes in his suicide note.
His suicide was an avenue towards a bigger and unknown world, he hoped. He did not know that he
would literally make a blast.
Satyajit Ray sings praise to the formula movie made in Bombay in his book Bombaier
Bombete from the Feluda series. He comes back to the question of formula (for the commercial
success of a film) in Our Films Their Films (90-91). Satyajit Ray himself celebrated popular
imagination in films like Parash Pathar with Tulsi Chakraborty (who characterizes stage and
cinema acting prior to arrival of leftists). Satyajit succeeded to make great movies because of actors
like Chhabi Biswas, he exploited Jatra tradition in Goopi Gyne Bagha Byne ( a deeply operatic and
fantastic movie). He explores the charm, fantasy and adventure of reincarnation in Sonar Kella. It is
then self-contradictory on Satyajit's part that he continues to whip up 'progressive' clichés against
early Bengali cinema for pandering to formulas of popular entertainment (in Our Films Their Films