Anurag Kashyap is wrong, Bengali cinema isn’t ‘ghatiya’. But dubbed Pushpa, KGF are winning

Anurag Kashyap is wrong, Bengali cinema isn’t ‘ghatiya’. But dubbed Pushpa, KGF are winning

Gangs of Wasseypur director Anurag Kashyap’s comment that Bengali cinema has become “ghatiya”, or trashy, has angered not just Tollywood but a big section of Kolkata’s talk circuit. But rather than fuming over Kashyap’s criticism, who himself hasn’t fully recovered from his 2015 disaster Bombay Velvet, the industry should focus on the real crisis: the shrinking market space for Bengali cinema.

Every time a masala blockbuster like Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal or Atlee Kumar’s Jawan rakes in astronomical worldwide box office collections (Rs 917.82 crore and Rs 1,148.32 crore respectively), West Bengal’s filmmakers, consumers, and critics snigger. They scoff that Bengali cinema would never trade common sense, decency, and good taste for commerce. Bengal’s biggest filmmaker Srijit Mukherji even told me sarcastically in an interview for ThePrint that he doesn’t make films like KGF and Pushpa because of his immense respect for the laws of physics!

But after all this grandstanding, when someone like Anurag Kashyap—whose cinema, politics, and worldview tend to align with those of Bengal’s leading filmmakers—calls Bengali cinema “ghatiya”, there is all-round heartburn and hatred. This, primarily, is what ails Bengali cinema today.

What Anurag Kashyap thinks matters more to them than what pan-India hitmakers like Vanga, Atlee, Rohit Shetty say or do. It is another matter that none of the last three directors are likely to have watched any contemporary Bengali film. And if the argument is that cerebral cinema cannot be judged by box office collections alone, forget Vanga, Atlee, or Shetty—what was the last Bengali film that anyone talked about outside Bengal?

What Kashyap said, and didn’t

Kashyap’s comment at a seminar during the inauguration of the first Kolkata French Film Festival last week was something of a backhanded compliment.

“The fall in the quality of Hindi films is a fall from the first floor. Bengali films used to be in a far higher position. And hence, the fall is so evident,” he said.

His dismissal of an industry that prides itself as a cultural fount not only for West Bengal but also for Bengali speakers in Bangladesh and the global diaspora hit hard, especially the word “ghatiya”. Kashyap became persona non grata overnight, but instead of self-reflection, a wave of self-loathing followed, with panel discussions dissecting the downfall of Bengali cinema.

However, no one asked a crucial question: how many Bengali films has Kashyap watched in the last few years to justify his sweeping statement?

Did he, for instance, watch Prasun Chatterjee’s 2021 film Dostojee, about two young boys navigating the growing religious divide in their sleepy Bengal hamlet as the Babri Masjid falls? This film was screened at 32 international film festivals in 26 countries and won nine international awards, including the CIFEJ Prize (supported by UNESCO), the Golden Shika from Japan, and the Best Film award at the 24^th UK Asian Film Festival, supported by the Arts Council of England.

Has Kashyap heard about Srijit Mukherji’s upcoming film Oti Uttam? This innovative project uses artificial intelligence (AI) to resurrect the long-dead Bengali megastar Uttam Kumar. Through montages of his classic films, the legend will appear as a character alongside present-day actors in this movie.

Or has he watched the 2017 Kaushik Ganguly film Nagar Kirtan? It tells the story of a transgender woman from the slums who elopes with a delivery boy from a Chinese restaurant who moonlights as a flautist in kirtans.

These are just a few examples of “non-ghatiya” Bengali films from Tollywood that have won high praise from critics and viewers, as well as national and international awards.

The problem with Bengali cinema today is not “ghatiya” content but its shrinking commercial resources and reach. Tollywood is no longer an entertainment factory but a “cottage industry”, according to film producer Rana Sarkar.

Producers do not have money to spare and directors, artistes, and technicians have to make do with abysmally low budgets.

And because it has so little money, it cannot market the few genuinely good films it makes outside festival circuits.

Who or where is the industry? 

In the 2010 Srijit Mukherji film Autograph, a retelling of Satyajit Ray’s Nayak, Bengali superstar Prosenjit Chatterjee’s character says: “Ami Arun Chatterjee, ami industry (I am Arun Chatterjee, I am the industry).”

This film marked the beginning of Srijit Mukherji’s journey as Bengal’s most influential filmmaker of the past decade and half and Chatterjee’s monicker as “industry”.  Once known as Bengal’s matinee idol, Chatterjee shifted gear to do middle-of-the-road cinema—neither arthouse nor purely commercial—first with Rituparno Ghosh and then with Srijit Mukherji, among others. He carefully managed to craft a new image by playing the lead in such films, gradually weaning away from masala cinema.

But what really is Bengal’s film industry today? The vacuum in the commercial cinema space after Chatterjee’s pivot were filled by the likes of Jeet and Dev, superstars both. But something else was also happening. First, Bollywood masala films started copying big hits from the South. And second, Tollywood started copying Bollywood. So, Tollywood, by default, produced copies of copies.

“Bollywood could still pull it off,” film producer Rana Sarkar told me. “But our mainstream heroes did not have the kind of stardom needed to recreate South films that were being copied by Bollywood.”

And when South Indian films started getting dubbed in Bangla, the space for mainstream Bengali commercial movies dried up further. “Dubbed versions of Pushpa and KGF do more business in Bengal than our ‘original’ commercial films,” said Sarkar.

Meanwhile, the makers of middle-of-the-road cinema, while still churning out decent films once in a while, became overly focused on stories about living in, loving, and loathing Kolkata. They perhaps assumed that what Kolkata thought today, the rest of Bengal would think tomorrow and marvel at their superior cinematic minds. But the rest of Bengal had already moved on to dubbed superhits from up north and down south. Outside Kolkata and its immediate periphery, the state’s audiences rejected both commercial and middle-of-the-road Bengali films.

A young Bengali filmmaker who did not wish to be named for fear of reprisal from senior colleagues told me no film industry can survive if its commercial films do not.

“Middle of the road cinema cannot sustain an industry. And even in those kinds of films we are not thinking of the Bengali outside Kolkata. No wonder an outsider comes in and slams us today,” he said.

Film critic and journalist Bhaswati Ghosh, in a 2 February report for Ei Somoy, compared the commercial performance of Tollywood with Bollywood and other regional industries. Ghosh cited data indicating that while Bollywood earned Rs 5,380 crore in 2023, followed by the Telugu (Rs 2,268 crore), Tamil (Rs 1,961 crore), and Malayalam (Rs 572 crore) film industries, Tollywood could not even reach Rs 100 crore in the whole year.

Self-loathing has long been a Bengali pastime, but it’s time to revise the script. To thrive, Bengali cinema needs to reach out to all of Bengal and make more money. The industry needs to figure out a way of making meaningful cinema that is not limited by a sense of Bengali exceptionalism, or cultural superiority. And, finally, it should ignore Anurag Kashyap, who needs a hit or two of his own after the Bombay Velvet debacle.

(Edited by Asavari Singh)