“Tyaag”, Stories by Rabindranath Tagore - Debatma Mandal (2015)

Rabindranath Tagore’s short story “Tyaag”, aka “The Renunciation” (1892) [1], concerns the eternal conflict between what feels right in the heart and what is dictated by social customs. In this case it is a matter of romantic love up against the rigid constraints of the Indian caste system.  This story served as the basis for the 15th  episode, “Tyaag”, of the anthology television series Stories by Rabindranath Tagore (2015), which was under the general directorship of Anurag Basu, with this episode having been directed by Debatma Mandal. 

This Tagore story, which was scripted for the screen by Samrat Chakraborty, not only features the emotional urgings of romantic love in conflict with the traditional caste system; it is also laced with strains of personal revenge.  Much of the story is told in flashback, as a newly married couple come to face a crisis associated with their marriage.

The story begins with Hemant Mukherjee at home expressing his rapturous love for and to his new wife, Kusum.  But Kusum has a troubled look on her face and doesn’t express what is worrying her.  Then we move into a flashback relating how the two of them met each other. 

The distinctions between when we are in the “present” and when we are in the past in this presentation of the story are often obscure and poorly signaled.  The primary telltale indicator here is that Hemant in the present sports a mustache, while he is clean-shaven in the flashback scenes.  Here we see in flashback the clean-shaven Hemant immediately smitten when he first sees Kusum on the street in a rickshaw.  He soon starts following her around on his bicycle whenever he sees her rickshaw.  These lyrical sequences of their cautious flirtation via furtive exchanges of glances are the highlight of this episode. They are accompanied by evocative music, notably the beautiful “Come, O’ Monsoon Shower of the Night”, which I believe is a song by Tagore.

Then back in the present, we learn what was troubling Kusum.  Unbeknownst to Hemant, who belongs to an orthodox Brahmin family, Kusum is not a Brahmin – she is a Kayasth, which is a lower caste, and it is forbidden to orthodox Brahmins to marry outside their caste.  Hemant had believed when they were married that she was a Brahmin, and she had been meaning to tell him ever since about this lie.  But before she could muster the courage to tell her husband, he is informed of the problematic situation by his father, Harihar.  Harihar orders his son to immediately cast out Kusum from his home, insisting her presence is polluting their entire family.  Already the father of his sister Hemlata’s fiancé, Sumont Banerjee, has cancelled their upcoming wedding because of this supposedly scandalous situation.  When Hemlata asks Sumont what he is going to do about this edict, Sumont meekly tells her that he will abide by his father’s’ wishes.

Now in another flashback we learn about Kusum’s background.  As a very young girl, after her parents had passed away, Kusum was adopted and raised by a kindly Brahmin, Biplavdas Chatterjee. Everyone always assumed that she was Chatterjee’s legitimate daughter and therefore a Brahmin, too.  But now that Kusum has come of age, the elderly Chatterjee has started to worry about Kusum’s future.  His relative Pyarishankar, however, urges Chatterjee to go off on a long put-off religious pilgrimage and that he, himself, will look after Kusum while Chatterjee Baba is away.

During this time Pyarishankar sees that Hemant and Kusum are enamored with each other, and he arranges for them to get married, with Kusum presented as being a Brahmin.  When Kusum expresses misgivings about this lie, Pyarishankar tells her that

“a lie that can unite two hearts is better than a hundred truths”. 

When Chatterjee returns from his trip, Pyarishankar convinces him, too, to let the marriage go ahead in the name of true love.  So Hemant and Kusum were then married in a sumptuous and traditional ceremony.

Now we return to the “present” again, and Hemant is shown to be greatly troubled about having been deceived about Kusum’s background by Pyarishankar.  Pyarishankar explains to him that his marriage was arranged in order to take revenge on Hemant’s father, Harihar, whom he had known earlier.  Years earlier in a Bengali village where Pyarishankar lived, Harihar had led the locals to banish Pyarishankar from the area for the crime of funding his son-in-law’s study abroad, something forbidden to orthodox Brahmins.  Pyarishankar was accused of polluting Brahmin purity.  Although as a penance Pyarishankar had offered to douse his house in river Ganges holy water and force his son-in-law to eat cow dung, his pleas for forgiveness were rejected, and he had to leave the village and move his family to Kolkata.

Later when Pyarishankar saw that Harihar’s son was in love with a non-Brahmin, he saw his chance to take revenge and pollute Harihar’s family.  Then after the unholy marriage took place, he wrote a letter to Sumont’s father informing him how Hemant’s blasphemous marriage had polluted the Mukherjee family and had consequently rendered Sumont’s marriage to Hemlata untenable.  It was all done not to support true love but in the interests of revenge.

In the final scene, Hemant sees Kusum, having been ordered out of their home by Harihar, packing her bag to leave.  Harihar tells Hemant that it is necessary for him to forsake Kusum in order to salvage Hemlata’s intended wedding to Sumont.  But Hemant, having thought things over, tells his father that he will forsake his wider family and his caste before he will forsake his wife.  He is going to stick with Kusum, come what may.  And at this point Hemlata informs them that she doesn’t want to marry Sumont, anyway.  She, too, it seems, stakes her future on true love above traditional ritual.

Then in the very last shot, there is a knock on the door, and Pyarishankar is shown getting in his last vengeful dig.  He has come with some Ganges water and cow dung to give to the still-stubborn Harihar so that the man can serve penance for his sins.

That final shot was tacked on to the tail of Tagore’s story to give what I think is an unhelpful sarcastic twist at the very end.  However, another, and in my view more productive, addition to the tale was an amplification of Hemant’s sister Hemlata’s role in the narrative. This expansion ties up something of a loose end that was left unattended in Tagore’s original story.  Overall, this is a slight tale, but it is eloquently told.
★★★

Notes:

1. Rabindranath Tagore, “THE RENUNCIATION”, (1891), The Hungry Stones and Other Stories, ©. F. Andrews, trans.), The Project Gutenberg, (2013).   

Abdellatif Kechiche

Films of Abdellatif Kechiche:

• The Secret of the Grain (La Graine et le Mulet) - Abdellatif Kechiche  (2007)

“The Secret of the Grain” - Abdellatif Kechiche (2007)

One of the more highly lauded French films of recent years was the Franco-Tunisian production The Secret of the Grain (La Graine et le Mulet, 2007), which in English is also known as Couscous and Mullet and Couscous.  Written and directed by Tunisian-born Abdellatif Kechiche, this film received César Awards (the highest film awards in France) in 2008 for Best French Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Most Promising Actress (Hafsia Herzi).  Perhaps because the film has a cultural perspective of particular interest to the French – the nuances of French-Arab social and cultural relations – it has attracted a particularly enthusiastic response from the French public and critics.  But English-language critics have also been generally highly supportive [1-5], although not uniformly [6].  From my own perspective, I would say that there are some interesting positive and negative peculiarities about the film, which I will discuss below. 

The film’s story concerns events surrounding a Tunisian immigrant, Slimane Beiji (played by Habib Boufares), who is an elderly dockside worker in the French Mediterranean seaport town of Sète.  Very early on in the piece, the viewer learns that the 61-year-old Slimane is a rather deliberate (and hence not quick enough) worker and that, due in part to declining import traffic at the port, his work is of reduced value to his employers, and so his hours are to be reduced.  Slimane suspects that soon he may even be let go.

Slimane has been working in the Sète docks for thirty-five years and presumably immigrated to France during the wave of Tunisian immigration that began in the 1960s following Tunisian independence.  His six children, being second-generation Tunisians in France, are much more comfortable with French and the French way of doing things.  That and the fact that Slimane is a particularly stoic and laconic individual mean that much of the film’s focus turns out to be on Slimane’s family and acquaintances.  They are a varied lot, the most prominent of whom are listed here:

• Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk) is Slimane’s vigorous ex-wife and the mother of his six children.  She is an excellent cook, and couscous is her specialty.  Every Sunday evening her extended family comes over to her home to feast on it and gab with each other.
   
• Latifa (Hatika Karaoui) owns a tiny dockside hotel and is Slimane’s current partner.
   
• Rym (Hafsia Herzi) is Latifa’s twenty-year-old daughter by an earlier marriage.  Because of her mother’s relationship with Slimane, she feels filial affection for Slimane and wants to help him.
   
• Karima (Farida Benkhetache) is a married daughter of Slimane and Souad and has two little kids.
   
• Olfa (Sabrina Ouazani) is a younger, but still adult, daughter of Slimane and Souad.
   
• Majid (Sami Zitouni) is Slimane Souad’s eldest son.  Although married and with a young  son, he pursues adulterous sex with other women.
   
• Julia (Alice Houri) is a Russian immigrant and is Majid’s neglected wife.
   
• Riadh (Mohamed Benabdeslem) is Slimane and Souad’s youngest son.

A key weakness of The Secret of the Grain, however, is its generally slack narrative.  Instead of keeping an eye on the primary issue, which concerns what should be done about Slimane’s situation, it often gets sidetracked and wallows at times into various situations with Slimane’s family members, which seem little more than distractions.  And so what we often wind up with are extended sessions that, although featuring dramatic intensity, slow things down.  Paradoxically and at the same time, though, some of these intense encounters are what we take away as the film’s most memorable moments.

Overall, we can consider the narrative to be divided into three general sections.

1.  Slimane and his family

The first part of this section starts with an overview of Slimane’s dockside situation.  But then it moves, rather quickly and without much narrative motivation, over into a surveying coverage of his extended family.  The main vehicle for presenting the family together is Souad’s weekly couscous feasts, and the family are seen gathered around the table and enthusiastically gorging themselves on Souad’s cooking.  This is all shown using extreme wide-angle closeups, often with disruptive jump-cuts.  And it is all done with a shaky handheld camera.  This has a strange, disturbing effect, because the extreme facial closeups place the invisible viewer much closer to the faces under scrutiny than would be the case for someone occupying a place at the table.  Instead the viewer is placed almost on top of the respective person in view and is subjected to uncomfortably observing their eating in all its lip-smacking squishiness.  This is presumably intended to establish intimacy with the subject matter, but it didn’t work for me.  In fact the shaky handheld, wide-angle cinematography throughout the film is atrocious and is a considerable detriment to the overall viewing experience.

2.  Slimane’s project
After awhile Slimane decides to leave his dock-working job and use his redundancy payments to start his own business – a seafood/couscous (“la graine et le mulet”) restaurant to be situated inside an abandoned cargo ship at the dockside.  The featured food will be Souad’s couscous.  All of the family members pitch in to help with this project in whatever way they can.

A major problem to be surmounted with this project is securing all the licenses and permits that are needed from the government, and much of the focus of this section of the film is on this issue.  In this connection Rym comes to Slimane’s rescue as she passionately and patiently guides him through complex pathways of the government’s bureaucratic channels.  It is during this phase that Rym emerges as the real star of the film.

3.  Opening Night
After failing to get all the required permits, Slimane and his family resolve to hold a party at their new, not-yet-commissioned restaurant and invite all the city officials, including the recalcitrant ones.  They hope to wow their guests with good food and thereby get them to approve their remaining permit requests.  This turns out to be a lavish affair, and again the focus is on food.  But there is also on display the interesting contrast between French behavior (the guests) and Tunisian (the servers).  However, a serious problem arises when Majid’s narcissistic perambulations cause the crowning dish of the evening – Souad’s couscous – to go missing.  There ensues desperate efforts on the part of several principles to rectify the situation.  Some people try to find the missing dish, while others set about the arduous task of making a second batch.

Meanwhile, the hungry guests are waiting for their main dish and getting seriously impatient.  So Rym decides to entertain them all by performing an Arabic belly dance.  The passionate earthiness of Rym’s dance highlights the contrasts between French and Tunisian culture, and it arouses the rapt enthusiasm of the no-longer-bored dinner guests. 

So now the film is suspended in unbearable tension.  The guests are waiting.  The servers are scrambling.  And Rym is dancing.  What will happen?  Kechiche draws out this tense situation for an almost unbearable length of time.  In fact he seems to extend it indefinitely, as you will feel if you watch the film’s conclusion.

As I mentioned, there are some intense individual dramatic situations focusing on a single character that Kechiche dwells on for extended periods. 

1. Julia engages in a long tearful tirade about her sufferings brought on by her irresponsible and unfaithful husband, Majid.
    
2. Rym implores at great length for her jealous mother, Latifa, to attend Slimane’s opening night party, even though the featured food has been prepared by her paramour’s ex.
    
3. Rym’s lengthy, exhausting, and fleshy belly dance.

These moments in the film hold the viewer in an extended emotional storm that has its own peculiar fascinations, irrespective of their pertinence to the overall narrative.  And they do exhibit a certain degree of moment-extending skill on the part of Kechiche and his actresses.

I have already alluded to three major themes in The Secret of the Grain – food, family, and Franco-Tunisian cultural contrasts.  There is a fourth theme worth mentioning – womanhood.  All of the women in this story are relatively responsible and ready to take the initiative.  The men around them are mostly powerless, and sometimes irresponsible.  This reminds me of another “food film”, The Fish Fall in Love (2006), in which the principal women had more initiative and more emotional fortitude than the men they encountered.  I wonder how much this is generally the case in food films.  In any case, your response to the film will depend on the degree to which the film’s presentation of these four themes resonate with your own feelings.
★★½

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “The Secret of the Grain”, RogerEbert.com, (21 January 2009).    
2. Philip French, “Couscous”, The Guardian, (22 June 2008).   
3. Peter Bradshaw, “Couscous (La Graine et le Mulet)”, The Guardian, (22 June 2008).   
4. Wesley Morris, “The Secret of the Grain: No Secrets”, The Criterion Collection, (27 July 2010).   
5. J. Hoberman, “The Secret of the Grain”, The Village Voice, (24 December 2008).   
6. Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban, “SECRET OF THE GRAIN, THE”, Urban Cinefile, (n.d.).   

“Chhooti”, Stories by Rabindranath Tagore - Debatma Mandal (2015)

Rabindranath Tagore’s short story “Chutti”, aka “Chhuti” or “The Homecoming” (1892-93) [1], concerns something that most all of us are familiar with but which all too rarely attracts our sympathies – the confused awkwardness of early teenage boys.  This story served as the basis for the 14th  episode, “Chhooti”, of the anthology television series Stories by Rabindranath Tagore (2015), which was under the general directorship of Anurag Basu, with this episode having been directed by Debatma Mandal. 

The problem with boys of this age period (12-14-years-old) is that they are in-betweeners – no longer children, but not yet adults.  Thus they are no longer given the accommodating tolerance that little kids get, and at the same time their often confused early adult-like assertiveness is not tolerated and given gentle refinement, either.  This story “Chhooti” is about one such boy and his struggles.  In connection with this awkward age for boys, Tagore made these explicit authorial comments in his story [2,3], which were not included in the filmed episode under discussion:

“In this world of human affairs there is no worse nuisance than a boy at the age of fourteen. He is neither ornamental nor useful. It is impossible to shower affection on him as on a little boy; and he is always getting in the way. If he talks with a childish lisp he is called a baby, and if he answers in a grown-up way he is called impertinent. In fact any talk at all from him is resented. Then he is at the unattractive, growing age. He grows out of his clothes with indecent haste; his voice grows hoarse and breaks and quavers; his face grows suddenly angular and unsightly. It is easy to excuse the shortcomings of early childhood, but it is hard to tolerate even unavoidable lapses in a boy of fourteen. The lad himself becomes painfully self-conscious. When he talks with elderly people he is either unduly forward, or else so unduly shy that he appears ashamed of his very existence. “

Tagore goes on to say that what a young teenage boy in these circumstances needs – and what he for the first time in his life feels a craving for – is love [2,3]:

“Yet it is at this very age when, in his heart of hearts, a young lad most craves for recognition and love; and he becomes the devoted slave of any one who shows him consideration. But none dare openly love him, for that would be regarded as undue indulgence and therefore bad for the boy.”

Note that the anglicized version of the title of Tagore’s story “Chutti” is usually given as “The Homecoming”.  However, it is my understanding (using Google Translate) that the word ‘Chutti’ could be translated into English as ‘Holiday’, and this rendering seems meaningful at this story’s end.

The filmed version of this Tagore story, as is characteristic of the Stories by Rabindranath Tagore series, once again makes excellent use of closeups and slow-motion sequences to shape the subjective ambience of the main character.  In addition the cinematography by Abhishek Basu (Anurag Basu’s brother) and film editing also effectively contribute to the emotive psychological atmosphere and is very well done throughout.

The story of “Chhooti” begins with a gang of young boys engaged in rambunctious game-playing in the sylvan outskirts of a rural village.  Their boisterous leader, Phatik Chakravorti (played by Suyash Shivaji Shirke), is by no means an attractive or winsome lad; he is just a naughty, self-centered boy up to no good.  When his pestering young brother Makhan gets in his way, he rudely pushes him to the ground, which evokes Makhan’s vow to run home and report Phatik’s misbehavior to their mother. 

Once Phatik is home, his widowed mother, Shanti, harshly scolds him for his habitual bullying of his younger brother.  It is clear that she is used to punishing him for his perpetual naughtiness.  In the middle of this, she looks up to see the surprising appearance of her older brother Bishamber (Ravi Gosain), who has come to visit her after a long absence.  Feeling guilty that he has not been fulfilling his traditional Indian familial duties by looking after his unattended younger sister, and also seeing that her sons Phatik and Makhan are incessantly quarreling, Bishamber asserts his family authority and tells Shanti that he will take Phatik away with him to his home in Calcutta.  There he will raise the boy as a member of his own family and enrol him in a proper school.  Phatik is delighted to hear this news, and Shanti, powerless to object, quietly submits to Bishamber’s intentions.

When they get to Calcutta, Bishamber introduces Phatik to his wife, Kumud, as their new son.  Kumud, though, is an urbanized woman and unabashed about expressing her displeasure over this new situation.  She complains that she already has two sons to look after, and she wasn’t even consulted about the idea of adding another one to her burden.  Her two sons, Sidhu and Kanai, are equally unwelcoming to Phatik and look down at the new arrival as an unsophisticated yokel to be laughed at.

Phatik, though, is at first oblivious of his unwelcoming surroundings, so dazzled is he over the wonders of the big city, Calcutta.  He is amazed that the city never seems to sleep; and he marvels at the way schoolboys spend so much time collectively chasing after and kicking a little round (soccer) ball.  But soon he begins to suffer from the scornful treatment he is getting from Kumud, Sidhu, and Kanai.  After he gets into a scuffle with Sidhu at school, Kumud angrily calls Phatik an uncouth illiterate; and she wonders aloud why he just doesn’t go away.  Later, from his bed at night, Phatik overhears Bishamber and Kumud vehemently arguing about him.  There are few things more disturbing for a child than to hear his or her parents, even if they are surrogate parents as is the case here. engaged in an angry argument.  Then Phatik also overhears from the adjoining bedroom Sidhu and Kanai expressing their shared wish to each other that Phatik would go away.

Despite these negative signs, Phatik begins penning a letter to his real mom.  At first he lies and asserts to her that everything is rosy with his life in Calcutta.  But when he starts recollecting how harshly he was treated by his aunt Kumud on the occasion of his losing his school bag, he changes his tone – he writes that he wants to return home.  He promises that he will be a good boy from now on and do whatever his mother tells him to do. 

Then Phatik goes to his uncle Bishamber and tells him he wants to be taken back home.  Bishamber, though, is busy, and, besides this is the middle of the school term.  He tells Phatik that the soonest he can take him back to his home village is when Durga Puja holiday comes, which is several months away.  Phatik insists he wants to go right away, but he gets nowhere with the authoritative Bishamber.  That night Phatik goes to bed and makes a decision.

The next morning Bishamber and Kumud learn that Phatik has run away during the night, and Bishamber notifies the police about the missing boy.  Now for the first time Bishamber, Kumud, Sidhu, and Kanai feel anxiety about their own culpability in Phatik’s disappearance. 

That evening in a pouring rain, the police carry the weakened-by-fever Phatik back to the Bishamber residence.  It is clear that the delirious boy is critically ill, and a summoned doctor is not optimistic.  Meanwhile, in his delirious state, Phatik has idyllic visions of his mother and little brother, evidently recalling, or dreaming of, some precious moments when he felt loved.

Soon Phatik’s mom Shanti, having been notified about her boy’s serious condition, tearfully rushes to his bedside and lovingly fondles his feverish head.  Phatik looks up at her, and in his closing words asks, “has the holiday finally come?”  Indeed it has.

The story is a sad one and reminds us that the awkward years of early adolescence, while exhibiting the first impulses of boastful assertiveness, also feature a newly intense, but unexpressed, need for love and affection.  It was love that Phatik so desperately needed but didn’t get.  And in the end Shanti, Bishamber, Kumud, Sidhu, and Kanai, having failed to express to Phatik their love, could only express their remorse.
★★★

Notes:

1. Rabindranath Tagore, “Chutti”, aka “Chhuti” (“The Homecoming”), (1892-93).  Available English translations:
• Rabindranath Tagore, “The Home-Coming”, Wikisource, (1892-93/2014).   
• Rabindranath Tagore, “THE HOME-COMING/CHUTI”, Wattpad, (1892-93/n.d.).   
2. Rabindranath Tagore, “The Home-Coming”, Wikisource, (1892-93/2014).   
3. Rabindranath Tagore, “THE HOME-COMING/CHUTI”, Wattpad, (1892-93/n.d.).    

Sachin Deo

Stories by Sachin Deo:

• "Wafadaar", Stories by Rabindranath Tagore, Episode 11 – Sachin Deo (2015)
• "Two Sisters", Stories by Rabindranath Tagore, Episodes 17 & 18 – Sachin Deo (2015)