ZAHIDUR RAHIM Anjan’s first feature film borrows its name, Meghmallar, from a musical melody by Tansen. Most of its story plays out either inside a home or a college staffroom while it is pouring outside. Yet the central theme of Meghmallar is the sweeping violence about to unfold in the making of a new nation in the Indian subcontinent nearly half-a-century ago. The debut film of Anjan, who studied direction at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, two decades after the liberation of Bangladesh from erstwhile East Pakistan, provides an alternative narrative in the recounting of the country’s history. It is also taking Bangladeshi cinema to newer heights.
Premiered in the Discovery section of the 40th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last month, Meghmallar is about a family’s struggle to comprehend the meaning of a conflict that is fast approaching its doorsteps. Retold from a popular short story, Raincoat, by celebrated Bangla author Akhteruzzaman Elias, the film follows the travails of chemistry teacher Nurul and his homemaker wife Asma to stay afloat, as the clouds of war engulf even the interiors of the country. Their lives change, however, when Nurul steps out of home one day, wearing the raincoat left by his brother-in-law Mintu, a rebel.
Horror without violence
“Three million people died fighting for freedom in Bangladesh,” says Anjan. “There are a lot of stories that were not noted down in history.” Employing a plain narrative, Anjan revisits the horrors of the 1971 war without the help of visible violence. Instead, the violence takes the shape of the palpable tension within the minds of the protagonists.
“The film is about the suffering and sacrifices of innocent people,” says Anjan, who is influenced by the filmmaking of Indian masters like Ritwik Ghatak and Mani Kaul, Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu and French director Robert Bresson. In Elias’ Raincoat, the story takes place in Dhaka, but the director shifted the scene to a village 200 km away, as the “city has changed 44 years after the war”.
Indian cinematographer Sudheer Palsane, Anjan’s senior at FTII, creates a virtual supporting cast in the monsoon-soaked surroundings in Meghmallar, while Kolkata-based musician Abhijit Bose joins in with his soul-searching chants. “Anjan eschews the histrionics typical of war films, bringing instead a patient minimalism to bear on his examination of the tensions between family and nationalism, love and loyalty,” says TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey. “Meghmallar resonates with a profound and, ultimately, devastating humanism.”
Looking for a language
Anjan believes in cinema expressing a distinct language “like Ghatak did when he discovered an Indian language of cinema” in films such as Subarnarekha. Anjan is also a member of Bangladesh’s alternative cinema movement called ‘Short Film Forum’, which he founded in 1987, along with filmmakers like Chashi Nazrul Islam, Tareqe Masud and Tanvir Mokammel. In 1990, for his FTII diploma film, Morning, which is based on Anton Chekov’s short story Sleepy, he cast Irrfan Khan and Shambhavi Kaul. A fresh National School of Drama graduate then, Khan had just started his career. Interestingly, all three—Anjan, Khan (for Meghna Gulzar’s Talvar) and Kaul (for her art installation, Fallen Objects)—were guests at the Toronto festival, one of the greatest global stages for cinema, this year.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer