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PADATIK / THE GUERRILLA FIGHTER (Dir. Mrinal Sen, 1973,India) - 'Go to war...'

The opening titles sets up Calcutta as a city on the verge of collapse.

'PADATIK has something to do with the contemporary political scene... To my mind, I tried toanalyze the political situation the way I felt it would be done. It could have been clearer but I feltthat even this should be done. We had arrived at a point when the Left movement was lying lowand the leftist parties were in disarray, losing perspective, and isolated, at a time when there was aneed for unceasing self-criticism.'

--Mrinal Sen interviewed by Udayan Gupta, 1976

The final part of Bengali film maker Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta trilogy expands upon the prescient 1970s dilemma ofthe Naxalite inspired Bengali youth evident in both Calcutta 71 and Interview to make the questions surroundingspolitical activism a central ideological debate. Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (The Adversary), a study of the Calcuttayouth appeared in 1971 as almost a thinly veiled response to accusations of apolitical abstention and whilst bothRay and Sen shared the young actor Dhritiman Chatterjee, their views on cinema, politics and ideology were instark opposition to one another. Satyajit Ray was very openly critical of the New Indian cinema manifesto andparticularly criticised film makers like Mrinal Sen for over indulging in the empty ideological, stylistic and aestheticposturing of European new wave cinema including most notably Jean Luc Godard and Alain Resnais.

Dhritiman Chatterjee as Sumit; a radical political activist and the face of 70s Bengali youth.

Writer and academic Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s latest publication ‘Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: FromBollywood to the Emergency’ (2008, Indiana University Press) has been somewhat completely overlooked bymost of the major film journals in the UK. It is one of the best written and ideologically sustained accounts of therelationship between Indian cinema and the wider context. Chapter 9 titled ‘The Indian Emergency – Aesthetics ofState Control’ offers a remarkably alternative reading of the development of film policy during the 70s, discussingin detail the re-shaping of the FFC and the lively culture wars between Ray, Sen and Kumar Shahani. The Centrefor the Study of Culture and Society has the full chapter available to download as a PDF file for free of charge(thank you) and I think to engage much more fully with the ideological questions being raised in such a politicallyradical film as Padatik, and elitist as it sounds, one must have a better understanding of the wider political,economic, historical and social situation of Calcutta and Bengal in the turbulent 1970s.Chapter 9 the Indian Emergency - Aesthetics of State Control By Ashish Rajadhyaksha, 2008

What Padatik offers is both a historical document on the political mindset of the burgeoning Bengali youth and apersonal struggle from the film maker Mrinal Sen to make sense of Marxist revolutionary ideology and ascertainwhether or not it is a misguided enterprise. The plot is as elliptical as many of the film’s made by the nouvellevague, concentrating on Sumit, an uncertain member of a left wing political party, probably Marxist and harbouringstrong Naxalite sentiments, who escaping from police custody goes into hiding. Interestingly, both Pratidwandiand Padatik may differ in their approach but they both attempt to deal with the same political questions – does thesubscription to an ideological cause necessarily make one revolutionary? In the case of Pratidwandi, Ray comesto a conclusion that was at odds with the political reality of the time and whilst Sen’s ending is also tinged with adegree of Utopian totality, Sen’s representation of Bengali youth is fixed in a reality that sees the oppressed fatherand patriarch of the family instruct his son to continue fighting the system. Another interesting point to note is thatPratidwandi and Padatik are not just linked by the presence of Dhritiman but both make significant symbolic useof a funeral; Pratidwandi opens with the death of Siddhartha’s father and his funeral whilst Padatik closes with thedeath of Sumit’s mother and her funeral – the affects of political unrest are delineated starkly and the cost ismeasured in the loss of family.

The closing moments; father and son in a poignant exchange of political discourse.

Shot by Sen regular K K Mahajan who like Raoul Coutard became pivotal to the visual look of the new wavecinema, Padatik is surely one of Sen's most radical works and deserves its place amongst films from the Bengali70s era such as Pratidwandi. Even in the final shot, Sen reverts to using the freeze frame and holds on the angryface of Sumit but unlike claims for interpreting this ambiguously or hinting at an uncertain future, it is a selfreflexive pause that extols rather than criticises revolutionary struggle. It is such an honesty that makes Padatikfeel alive in today's world of political re-awakening.