Rabindranath Tagore: The real 'kahaniwala'... ?

You know Rabindranath Tagore as a poet, novelist, musician, painter and playwright. But in 1932, when he was a little over 70, Tagore had his first and only brush with filmmaking. New Theatres, a prominent studio in those days, adapted Tagore’s poem Pujarini for a film. Tagore himself supervised the screenwriting by his nephew Dinendranath Tagore.

Natir Puja was also directed by Gurudev himself and he played a small role in the film too. The actors were students from Shantiniketan, with Tagore also composing the music of the dance-drama.

Although the film has been lost in its original form, the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC) managed to salvage whatever it could, resulting in what is now a 20-minute version. Natir Puja will be one of the items on a DVD set launched by NFDC, which has five full-length films and a documentary, to mark Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary on Saturday.

Nuances of social milieu
Tagore’s works have spawned a number of films in different languages over the years, with master filmmaker Satyajit Ray using Tagore’s material for at least three of his films — Charulata, Teen Kanya and Ghare Baire. It probably requires a filmmaker of Ray’s class to bring out the sophistication and nuances of Tagore.

“Ray was probably the best interpreter of Tagore’s works. In recent times, Rituparno Ghosh is the only one who’s done justice to Tagore’s stories,” says filmmaker Shyam Benegal, adding that he himself never adapted any of his works because the “ethos” of Tagore’s stories didn’t always fit in the cultural world Benegal explored in his movies.

Benegal chaired the screening committee that recommended the contents for the commemorative DVD set, titled ‘Tagore Stories On Film’. Ghare Baire and Teen Kanya are among the films included, along with Tapan Sinha’s Khudito Pashan, Hemen Gupta’s Kabuliwala and Kumar Shahani’s Char Adhyay. Ray’s documentary, titled Rabindranath Tagore, which he made as a tribute to the writer around his 100th birth centenary in 1961, forms another DVD, along with Natir Puja.

The idea behind selecting the films was to display the versatility of Tagore’s stories, says Benegal. Khudito Pashan is the story of a tax collector in pre-independence India who falls in love with a ghost, albeit a beautiful one. Ray’s Teen Kanya, an episodic film based on three short stories — The Post Master, Monihara and Samapti — has tales of a young village girl taught by a city-bred postmaster; a woman’s obsession with her jewels; and a tomboyish girl who changes after marriage.

Ghare Baire, also by Ray, is about a woman who takes her first step toward emancipation, encouraged by her husband, only to fall for a hypocritical but charismatic nationalist leader. The film, which had a husband encouraging his better half to explore the world outside their home (hence the title, which means ‘The Home And The World (Outside)’), was controversial for its time, because it questioned blind faith in nationalism.

Becoming more accessible
“A lot of Tagore’s work had to do with the social nature of the time. As a filmmaker, it’ll always be a challenge to adapt his stories — Ghare Baire, for example — because it will have to rightly depict the dynamics of the era,” says Benegal, adding that in comparison, Shakesparean stories continue to see multiple adaptations because he wrote from a more “global” perspective, while Tagore’s stories were more rooted in his milieu. “That’s not to say his stories didn’t have universal appeal,” he adds.

Kabuliwala, first made in Bengali by Sinha in 1957, and then remade in Hindi by Hemen Gupta in 1961, is an example of a story that people everywhere can easily relate to — an Afghan selling his wares in Calcutta strikes a friendship with a young girl who reminds him of his daughter back home. Similarly, in Char Adhyay, the protagonist questions the revolutionary nature of the Indian freedom movement, giving a different perspective on patriotism.

In recent years, Tagore-inspired films have been few, with Rituparno Ghosh making the critically-acclaimed Chokher Bali, and now, Noukadoubi. With most of Tagore’s writings in Bengali, filmmakers there find them easier to access. But with Shantiniketan getting more proactive with translations, filmmakers across India, and perhaps around the world, will find a treasure trove of Gurudev’s stories to explore for cinematic interpretations.