Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of Antarjali Jatra/Mahayatra

Timestamp:

Jul 17, 2012, 8:18:15 PM (12 years ago)

Author:

Trupti

Comment:

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Antarjali Jatra/Mahayatra

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+'''Antarjali Jatra/Mahayatra'''
+
+
+aka The Voyage Beyond
+1987 140’[B]/123’[H] col Bengali/Hindi
+d/sc/c/m Gautam Ghose p Ravi Malik,
+Debashish Majumdar pc NFDC st Kamal Kumar
+Majumdar’s novel Antarjali Jatra (1960)
+lp Shatrughan Sinha, Promode Ganguly, Robi
+Ghosh, Mohan Agashe, Shampa Ghosh,
+Basanta Choudhury, Sajal Roy Choudhury,
+Kalyan Chatterjee
+
+
+In 1829, in the context of various reform
+movements associated with Raja Rammohan
+Roy, sati (the widow immolating herself on her
+husband’s funeral pyre) was outlawed by the
+British. The film, based on the noted Bengali
+writer Kamal Kumar Majumdar’s best-known
+fiction, is set after that date and addresses the
+cruelty of a patriarchal practice which
+continues even today. The Brahmin Seetaram
+(Ganguly) is dying and an astrologer (Robi
+Ghosh) assures the dying man and his relatives
+of finding happiness after death on condition
+that his wife commits sati on his death. The
+villagers defy the law and persuade an
+impoverished Brahmin (Choudhury) to marry
+his daughter Yashobati (Shampa Ghosh) to the
+dying man so that she may commit Sati. The
+only dissident is Baiju (Sinha), a drunken
+Untouchable who tends to the cremation
+grounds. Baiju persuades Yashobati to flee. In
+the end, on a moonlit night, Baiju tries to kill
+old Seetaram. The superstitious Yashobati tries
+to prevent the deed and the two struggle on
+the muddy banks of the Ganges. The struggle
+changes into lovemaking but the river in spate
+eventually carries away both Seetaram and
+Yashobati. The film’s end sums up a major
+controversy surrounding Ghosh’s filming of a
+difficult text. Yashobati’s death, which in effect
+constitutes the act of sati, is shown as a
+combination of accident and desire, further
+contrasting her ‘holy’ condition with Baiju’s
+traditionless bestialism. Much of this is revealed
+in the original novel through broken syntax,
+interior monologue and a dense, graphic style
+of disjointed phrases, from which Ghosh
+assembled something like a coherent story.
+Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1992) contrasts the
+book with the film, suggesting that Majumdar’s
+novel ‘takes as understood a fully formed
+ideological subject (and thus) a question that
+can only be asked by us, as Hindus, of
+ourselves. This text is exactly not for the
+outsider who wants to enter with nothing but
+general knowledge, to have her ignorance
+sanctioned’. The film, on the other hand,
+‘shatters this project by staging the burning
+ghat as a realistic referent carrying a realistic
+amount of local colour, a stage for a broadly
+conceived psychodrama played out by easily
+grasped stock characters.’ She accuses the film
+of being ‘an abdication of the responsibility of
+the national artist, trafficking in national
+identity (in the name of woman) for
+international consumption’. Ghosh used
+another, and equally difficult, literary text for
+his next film Padma Nadir Majhi (1992), this
+time by Manik Bandyopadhyay.
+
+[[Film]]