Ideology and Subversion: A Comparative Study of Mrinal Sen’s Padatik and Raghav Bandopadhyay’s Communis

Padatik, the final part of Mrinal Sen’s movies of the Calcutta Trilogy, offers both a historical document on the political mindset of the burgeoning Bengali youth and a personal struggle of Sen himself making sense of the Marxist revolutionary ideology and ascertaining whether or not it is a misguided enterprise. Raghav Bandyopadhyay in his conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty recollects how during his prison days he had sent a letter to the regional comrades. He had enlisted the reasons why their project had failed, also stating, how it would be best to abort the mission and retreat to "safer shelters" to study and reconsider the struggle. His years as a political activist and a political prisoner were penned down as Communis (1975). This paper is a comparative study of the picture of the 1970s Calcutta that Sen and Bandyopadhyay present in Padatik and Communis respectively, with special attention to the youth upsurge and the violent mission that the contemporary youth had dedicated themselves to. Bandyopadhyay, through his words, paints an equally realistic portrait of the "infernal city" that Sen films in his Trilogy. While Bandyopadhyay has largely been an unsung hero in the canonical growth of Indian Literature, Sen has been a world phenomenon with his brand of parallel cinema. However, both of them offer criticism to the left movement, when it was lying low and was in disarray. The paper would thus assess both their differences and their similarities in their reception and representation of the movement, its ideology, and its subversion.