In debutant director Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s
Chauranga there
are so many scummy characters swimming in the tides of a debauchery and
greed that you desperately look for ways to tell yourself that life is
worth living after all.
Chauranga, set in an impoverished
village of what seems to be Chattisgarh or Jharkhand, is so denuded of
hope and goodness, you come away a little sickened in your soul and
stomach. The frightening truth about Mishra’s plot is that the world of
caste exploitation that it inhabits actually exists in many part of
North India.
A youtube screen grab from Chauranga.
Sanjay Suri, trying hard to get the body language and accent right, plays a
Zamindar
who objectifies the women around him with such arrogance, he doesn’t
for a moment see himself as the symbol of caste and gender oppression
that he happens to be. Suri’s feudal character is shown copulating
regularly with a feisty Dalit woman Dhaniya (Tanishtha Chatterjee,
gloriously in-character) who encourages his amorous attention just so
that she can afford her two growing sons’ education in the city.
The
most despicable character in recent times is that of the village priest
played by veteran Dhritiman Chatterjee. The blind character literally
gropes at everything he can lay his hands on, man woman, child and
animal. It is the most naked and unabashed portrayal of evil in the garb
of religiosity seen in recent memory.
You wait for these
characters to come to a suitably sticky end, but in vain. Nemesis is not
an easy beloved to please in this village of the vile, populated by the
scummiest specimens of humanity on the earth. To their credit these
hateful are played by actors who don’t mind looking irredeemably corrupt
and compromised.
Dhaniya’s two sons Bajrangi and Santu, played by
Ridhi Sen and Soham Maitra, are the fulcrum of hope in this despondent
scenario. Soham Maitra’s character Santu, an endearing mix of
poverty-induced indignation and wide-eyed adolescence, anchors much of
the film’s angst against injustice.
Tragically Santu is much too
young and inexperienced to shoulder the plot’s theme of omnipresent
exploitation. Most of the time we end up looking at monstrously
compromised and unhappy creatures of the dark trying to create a rhythm
to their utterly futile existence.
It is not an easy film to watch. Such is life.
There
are constant and jolting reminders of how brutish life is at the
bottom-most layer of existence. The debutant director knows his
characters and their location well. But the plot is over-populated and
under-nourished. In a playing time of merely 90 minutes,
Chauranga crams in an abundance of derelict characters, each one’s eyes telling their own saga of tears.
Particularly
ruminative in her poised stance of tragedy is the character of Sanjay
Suri’s neglected wife (a distant relative of Meena Kumari from Sahib
Bibi Aur Ghulam), played by the expressive Arpita Chatterjee. She dreams
of a better life for her educated daughter Mona(Ena Saha). Alas, dreams
die hard in this heartless heartland of Hindustan.
Chauranga is
a dark, cryptic and provocative look at cast oppression as seen through
the eyes of a young innocent boy. This is the world of Shyam Benegal’s
Nishant and Prakash Jha’s
Damul.
But a lot more murky and yes, clumsy. There is way too much fondling,
pushing and touching, not all of it appropriate or even apt. Sanjay
Suri’s love making scenes with Tannishtha Chatterjee show him copulating
violently, with his pyjama on.
While Suri breeds his lust, Tannishtha’s character breathes her last. She probably died laughing.
