He had been ailing for some years, yet when news came of his death, anyone who had known the man even briefly found it difficult to accept he was gone. Such was the presence of the distinguished documentarian, Calcutta’s own Shashi Anand (1955-2025), who died recently. But the focussed commitment to the downtrodden that he brought to his art was not the only badge of honour Shashi wore lightly. You had to meet him to understand where that art came from.
One source of the inspiration that went into his internationally acclaimed Man Versus Man (1981), in which Shashi poured out his intellect and his heart in support of Calcutta’s thousands of hand-pulled rickshaw-pullers, was likely his upbringing. The artist’s love for his fellows was, in all probability, an overflow of his love for his parents. Without his ever spelling it out, those who knew him understood how deeply he loved his parents and the lengths he went to make their last days comfortable. If his professional career suffered in the process, he was the last person to complain. A more compelling conscientious objector to self-aggrandisement would be difficult to find.
To give readers a sense of the infectious Shashi Anand persona in action, they must be transported to the 1980s, when a group of chattering, argumentative film-lovers gathered by the Nandan waterfront in Calcutta, calling themselves Protichhobi (Counter-Image). Shashi was not a regular attendee, but whenever he came, a whiff of refined good humour followed; performative seriousness was not for him. The airs and poses customarily picked up at the Institute (Film and Television Institute of India, Pune), evident in some members of the group, were not for Shashi, who had also trained at that famed seat of learning. The humour he brought to the occasionally leaden proceedings needs illustration.
Once, someone commented on Shashi wearing a ladies’ watch on his right wrist. With a straight face — normally a smiling one — Shashi said the watch belonged to his oldest and best girlfriend. Naturally, the group was curious about the lucky person’s identity. “My mother!” Shashi replied, at which he and the rest of us, including a few young women, broke into peals of delight.
Shashi had much to be proud of: his presence, his popularity, his family’s business success, the honours won at Oberhausen, critical acclaim at other documentary film festivals, proximity to Mrinal Sen or the theatre director Usha Ganguli, among others. But a more naturally humble disposition was difficult to find. He never lost his head or his poise in the stampede of success. He had his views about life and art but would not voice them unless asked.
Occasionally, though, he would put his foot down; he was not one to suffer fools gladly. When he felt the need to step in, he did so with a style that spoke of class. Somehow, in an inscrutable way, his soft yet firm nature connected with the deep empathy he showed for the daily trials of Calcutta’s Bihari rickshaw-pullers. In a style both interrogative and accommodative, Man Versus Man addressed the antagonisms surrounding the hoary tradition of Indian citizens being used as beasts of burden, but also how migrants reconciled themselves to their “value” as indispensable cogs in the societal wheel. If they picked up tuberculosis and other serious ailments in the process, there was little the victims could do.
To understand Shashi’s commitment to the loner and the underdog — as revealed in his rickshaw-puller film and in Aar Koto Din (How Much Longer? 1990), made for the Government of West Bengal about domestic workers in middle-class Calcutta homes — it helps to consider his father’s example. Anand senior, a victim of the Partition of Punjab, greatly admired revolutionaries who had perished fighting the British.
On a visit to his home, this writer found a long series of oil paintings of martyrs lined against the wall. In reply to a query, Shashi said his father had spent thousands of rupees hiring professional painters to do these portraits, hoping some government or public institution would create a gallery of heroes for children and their parents to learn about neglected figures of the national liberation movement. Shashi mentioned that his father was skeptical the government would do anything tangible.
Although principally a man of documentary cinema, Shashi’s interests extended to theatre, literature, and fiction film. Each time Usha Ganguli’s Hindi theatre group Rangakarmee staged a new production, Shashi would be among the first to attend. One afternoon, this writer witnessed Shashi bending low to touch Ganguli’s feet as they met in front of Nandan, the West Bengal Film Centre. It was a heart-warming experience: the young man’s humility and respect for an older artist, and the latter’s affection for him. Ganguli took Shashi’s hands in hers, preventing him from touching her feet. It is scenes like this from the past that bring home once again what we have lost, only to regain him by refusing to let go of our fondest memories.
Chronicles of government failure
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, several important documentaries addressed various social issues; at least three left such a deep impression that even today, three or four decades later, many sensitive viewers remember them with respectful nostalgia. If Man Versus Man was set in Calcutta of the Left Front era (1977-2011) yet evoked a more distant past, Anand Patwardhan’s Hamara Shahar: Bombay Our City (1985) examined another metropolis where routine demolitions of hutments providing a toehold to migrant labourers went hand in hand with construction for the elite on a massive scale.
If Shashi Anand and Patwardhan observed with compassion and analysed with reason the old, overcrowded cities where they were born, in Kutty Japanin Kuzhandaigal (Children of Mini-Japan), Bangalore-based trade unionist-turned-documentarian Chalam Bennurkar (died 2017) took his camera to Sivakasi in Tamil Nadu, notorious for its fireworks-producing factories and the dehumanising conditions in which children are sacrificed at the altar of adult greed, selfishness, and hypocrisy.
For many years following their release, each of these chronicles of government failure, social apathy, class tyranny, and abortive resistance by victims were carefully watched and discussed. They also won awards at prestigious competitive festivals such as Oberhausen, Cinéma du Réel, Nyon, Mannheim, or Amsterdam, causing the West to notice the quality work being done by a band of gifted young Indian documentarians. The era of the government’s stranglehold on the documentary appeared to be ending. But little did anyone know that by the turn of the century, new demagogues dressed in democratic apparel — this time fiercer — would push the independent documentary tackling uncomfortable subjects into the margins.
Mrinal Sen and Sashi Anand, his cinematographer, during the shooting of Antareen (1993), which is set in an old palatial mansion. | Photo Credit: Sen’s family collection
Man Versus Man offers both a bird’s-eye and a worm’s-eye view of a “chance-directed, chance-erected” colonial settlement gone further to seed in the hands of post-1947 rulers who knew how to agitate but not how to organise. Through Shashi’s lenses, Calcutta’s tall buildings emerge as ominous entities offering no hope of new beginnings. Top shots of the skyline formed by buildings of differing heights are juxtaposed with glimpses of the dismal tenements in which migrant workers eat and sleep. Whereas the grand structures housing commercial activities have a lifeless, formal, unexciting quality, paradoxically, the ghettos of the poor are coloured by the camaraderie of a common destiny of din ani, din khai (living by one’s daily earnings); in other words, no work, no pay. They sleep on the floor in rows; eat chattu with green chillies, a twist of lemon, and a piece of onion; and chat among themselves with an occasional touch of enthusiasm in the little time snatched from backbreaking labour.
On Sundays, they make their way to the Maidan dressed in what is perhaps their only set of clean clothes, to sing the word of the Lord (the Ramayan) with gusto to the accompaniment of frenetic music produced by dholaks (percussion) and kartals (hand-held seasoned metal pieces). These weekly socio-religious gatherings in the vicinity of the Shaheed Minar (previously Ochterlony Monument) were an inseparable part of what was commonly known as “Dharamtallah ka Mela”. These gatherings are rarely seen now, a casualty of changing times and interests. What remains are memories of a once-splendrous subaltern institution, encapsulated in a documentary by Abhijay (Jojo) Karlekar, made in the 1980s. The film was favourably spoken of by, among others, Ulrich Gregor, founder of the Forum for Young Cinema, a sidebar of the Berlin Film Festival in its prime.
If Shashi’s film suggests a bird in flight or a worm burrowing into its hole, it also views the city and sections of its populace at eye level. The camera walks slowly or runs briskly with the rickshaw-puller as he ploughs through crowds or negotiates waterlogged streets. The human cargo he pulls comes in many ages, weights, and descriptions, from young lovers to schoolchildren to the middle-aged and the old. At times, it appears the migrant almost enjoys his work, especially when transporting children from home to school or back. Perhaps he is reminded of his own children left behind in some village in north Bihar; of the family that depends on his monthly remittance for survival. Perhaps larger amounts could be sent if a part of the earnings did not line the pockets of traffic policemen who, ironically, come from the same parts as the rickshaw-pullers.
Shashi’s camera catches money changing hands at a busy traffic junction more than once. The viewer is informed, in Naseeruddin Shah’s suitably modulated voice-over, that most of the rickshaws are owned by Biharis employed by Calcutta Police, meaning only a fraction of each day’s earnings is retained by the rickshaw-puller. So in a real sense, the hard-pressed drawers of men and materials over the cobbled roads of Calcutta are at the mercy of better-placed brethren from Bihar, lending credence to the belief that when it comes to exploitation of the weak and vulnerable, the question of belonging to the same place does not arise. If there is any romance in the nitty-gritty of life in the lower depths, it exists in some overblown imagination or in laughable specimens of fictional cinema.
Scanning Shashi’s career behind the camera, one realises the extent of time, energy, and intellectual gifts he poured into the works of others. True, he was paid for some of this work, but it could not have been much considering he readily agreed to offers from people like Mrinal Sen, who themselves never ran after big amounts.
Shashi is on record that he enjoyed working with Sen not only because it gave him opportunities to learn how to devise and improvise from a master innovator, but it was simply fun to watch how a man advanced in years was capable of producing youthful vibes all the time, helping everyone give of his best. Shashi did camera for two of Sen’s late-career films: Mahaprithibi, about the adverse fallout on a middle-class Calcutta family of the Berlin Wall coming down, and Antareen, based on a Saadat Hasan Manto story; a documentary, Calcutta, My El Dorado; and several episodes of a television serial, Kabhi Door Kabhi Pas.
Shashi belonged to a rare breed — he had time for everybody, for the established but also for the struggling. Attending the Dhaka International Documentary and Short Film Festival in February 1993, this writer came across a film from Pakistan shot at a delicately controlled pace by Shashi and edited by Amitabh Chakraborty, also from Calcutta. Directed by the young and gifted Sabiha Sumar, Where Peacocks Danced took on the subject of systematic attempts by the Pakistan government to marginalise the Sindhis, culturally and politically. Sumar tried to draw parallels between the upsurge of Sindhi nationalism and the nationalist fervour the Bangladeshis had experienced in the 1960s and early 1970s under the leadership of Sheikh Mujib. But, before that, Sabiha forcefully argued that the Sindhis had a flourishing civilisation thousands of years before the advent of Islam, and tried to nail the official myth that the history of Sindh began with the arrival of Islam about a thousand years ago. Where Peacocks Danced included rare clips of Sheikh Mujib and the movement he fathered. Interviews with intellectuals, peasants, and commoners were caringly integrated with sequences of how state machinery was working overtime to rob ethnic Sindhis of their pride, history, and culture. If there is anger at the physical despoliation of the ruins of Mohenjo-daro in an attempt to destroy and subvert history for political gain, the film also carries a sad lyricism adding to its strength and impact. Needless to emphasise, Shashi’s contribution to the articulation of Sabiha’s directorial vision was substantial. Being a director with specialisation in cinematography must have had its own unique advantages.
Man in the role of beast of burden
To return to Man Versus Man, the unforgivable but readily forgiven violence associated with the disgrace of rickshaw-pulling in certain parts of the city should explode the false folklore that has grown around the appellation “City of Joy”. Calcutta is no more a “City of Joy” than Kerala is “God’s Own Country” — two equally empty wisecracks emanating in all likelihood from some advertising agency.
While the lower classes cringe in despair when they have time to dwell on such existential crises, middle and upper-class upstarts in the advertising, public relations, tourism, or film industries in search of an easy buck laugh all the way to the bank. (Lapierre and Joffé, with a little help from unsuspecting members of the Missionaries of Charity, among others, be damned for popularising the heartless and vulgar myth of Calcutta being “Ulhas Nagri” (City of Joy) when in reality it is little short of “Andher Nagri” (City of Darkness).) Blaming the War, the Famine, or Partition may make some historical sense, but there are other factors of human failure of more recent origin also to consider.
Rickshaw-pulling has a hoary presence in Calcutta cinema, from Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (1953), if not earlier, to Shashi Anand’s Man Versus Man, and beyond. Violence can be said to exist in every layer of life in Calcutta, but nowhere is it found so effortlessly as in the practice of man in the role of beast of burden. The Bengali babu is as much an offender as the Marwari bibi, a supercilious look disfiguring their respective faces as they ride with or against the wind; ride roughshod over pockmarked streets and the feelings of migrants in search of their next meal in Muslim-dominated localities like Sahebbagan, Tiljala, Beckbagan, or Kidderpore. The bent figure of an elderly Muslim pulling his rickshaw is shown more than once as if to emphasise the culture of callousness that makes it possible for such an image to exist.
Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema, society, and politics.
Featured Comment
