Kolkata trams, now on their way out, inspired city's best-known filmmakers

In 1888, British writer and poet Rudyard Kipling visited Calcutta (now Kolkata), then the capital of the British Empire in India. The sprawling metropolis, where unimaginable wealth and decadence existed cheek by jowl with desperate poverty and disease, was described by Kipling, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, as “the city of dreadful night”. But despite his horror as the stark contradictions he witnessed, Kipling was impressed by the tram service, writing about it in his travelogue.

 

In one of these accounts, the author is deboarded from the tram car at the city centre by a conductor: “‘You want to go Park Street? No trams going Park Street. You get out here.’ Calcutta tram conductors are not polite,” he writes. “The car shuffles unsympathetically down the street, and the evicted is stranded in Dhurrumtollah.”

 

 

Little did he know then that a century and a half later, trams, once symbolic of this city — in his writing, but also in literature and cinema — would be on their way out. In late September this year, the West Bengal government announced that trams would operate only one route. All the other routes would be scrapped, as they were all financially unsustainable. While this announcement sparked outrage among Kolkata nostalgists and advocates of ecologically sustainable urban public transport, it is perhaps a good time to recall how trams played such an important part in the films of three of the most famous filmmakers from the city — Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen.

 

In Ghatak’s 1958 film Bari Theke Paliye, adapted from the eponymous novel by the Bengali novelist Shibram Chakraborty, Kanchan (Parambhattarak Lahiri) runs away from his village home and turns up in post-Partition Calcutta. The city is overrun with homeless refugees. While, on one hand, it is a coming-of-age film, on the other, it is also a city film, a love letter to Calcutta. As Kanchan roams about the streets like a vagabond, trams are ubiquitous. To begin with, they are only a part of the urban landscape, making their way through the traffic of endless cars and humans. A baul street singer even refers to it in his song.

 

But towards the end of the film, Kanchan boards a tram on an urgent expedition. His experience with the tram conductor, however, is different from Kipling’s. When Kanchan tells the conductor that he does not have money to pay the fare, he is not deboarded. Instead, the conductor tells him that he can have a free ride. It is perhaps a rare instance of kindness between strangers in this city of dreadful nights.  

 

Satyajit Ray-directed Mahanagar (1963) opens with the camera focussing on the antennae of a tramcar making sparks on the overhead electric wires. As the titles start appearing, the percussive music sets an operatic mood in the film. Adapted from a story by Bengali writer Narendranath Mitra, the film’s plot revolves around the lower middle-class family of Subrata Mazumdar (Anil Chatterjee), a bank clerk. His family comprises his wife Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), sister Bani (Jaya Bhaduri), son Pintu, and his aged parents. They are hardly suitable dramatis personae for an operatic narrative — but the conflict in their lives is turned into a morality play of sorts.

 

Subrata’s meagre salary is hardly enough to make ends meet. Dialogues between the different characters in early scenes reveal the financial struggles of the family: Subrata’s father needs a new pair of glasses, but they cannot afford it; Bani’s school fees have not been paid for months; Subrata gives private tuition to school students in the evening to increase their earnings. The desperate couple finally decide that Arati will also take up a job. Women working outside their homes was still a taboo in urban India in the 1950s, and the decision pleases no one in the family. Except Bani, who feels that her sister-in-law’s decision could provide her with a road map for independence.

 

Arati proves to be a good salesperson, impressing her boss Himanghu Mukherjee (Haradhan Banerjee). When the bank where Subrata works goes bust, her job is the only source of income for the family. Mukherjee is, in fact, so happy with her that he even promises to help her husband get a job. But the story reaches a crisis when the boss fires Mukherjee’s Anglo-Indian friend and colleague, Edith (Vicky Redwood). Outraged by the injustice, Arati demands that Mukherjee reinstate Edith; when he refuses, she, too, resigns.

 

Rushing out of the office building, she meets her husband, who has come to pick her up, and immediately regrets her decision. It has evidently aggravated their precarity. But Subrata assures her: “You have protested against what’s unfair. Is that wrong? …In our desperation to earn, we have become cowards.” The husband and wife walk away together, getting lost in the gathering evening crowd near central Kolkata. They are probably going to take a tram home. (In an earlier scene, Subrata and Arati come to this part of the city from their home in south Kolkata in a tram.) The tram becomes a metonym for the city.

 

If you were to meet Arati and Subrata in a tram, they would look like another ordinary, working couple in the city. Going home at the end of the day. You would hardly imagine them to be repositories of such bravery in the face of incredible adversity.

 

By the time Mrinal Sen made Interview (1971), the first film of his Calcutta trilogy, even filmmaking faced severe adversity in the city. Kolkata was overrun with the violence of the far-left Naxalbari movement and an equally violent counter-insurgency operation by the police. In his book Tritya Bhuvan (2011), Sen described the experience of living in Calcutta in those years as “living in a war zone”. The dissonant experiences are reflected in his flashy experimental filmmaking techniques, such as the use of freeze frames, cinema vérité documentary footage, jump cuts, and fusion music. Some critics even described these as “gimmicks”.

 

In an early scene of the film, its protagonist Ranjit (Ranjit Mallick), a young man in search of a job, takes a tram to get his coat, which he needs for a job interview, from the laundry. The tram is crowded with officegoers, college students, and others. Ranjit does not get a seat. As he stands near the window, he sees a fellow passenger reading a film magazine, which has published his picture. A few young girls have spotted it and recognised him as a film actor. Ranjit breaks the fourth wall and starts addressing the audience: “I’m not a star… The filmmaker Mrinal Sen liked my uneventful life and has decided to follow me around with his camera.”

 

This was perhaps the first instance of breaking the fourth wall in Bengali cinema. By employing this technique, Sen not only pushes the envelope aesthetically but also implicates the audience in the action of the film. Like people living in Calcutta cannot escape the “war zone” of political unrest, they cannot escape the turmoil in the life of a young man desperate to get a job. Film scholar Auritro Majumdar describes it as “lumpen aesthetics”: “Mrinal Sen’s cinema shows the long history of the urban underclass and the equally sustained tradition of resistance. At the same time, such cinema does not valorise every act of resistance but, resisting the lure of closure traces the limits.”

 

It is not without reason that this scene takes place in a tram, which serves as a metonym for the city itself. Now that there will be fewer trams on the city’s streets, it will not only be an ecological loss but also an aesthetic and political one.

 

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  Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist  Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper