I did it to myself. I had read the novel, not liked it, but curiosity got the better of me and off I went to watch Raja Sen’s adaptation of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel, Krishnakanta’s Will. Did you ever watch The Mahabharata? Well this film seemed longer. In college, we were told this was a novella, a short novel. The film, however, bore no resemblance of this distinction.
A quick recap of the story. There is a patriarch called Krishnakanta Roy, who has disinherited his son, Harilal, for all sorts of reasons. Harilal decides to get a fake will made and with the help of a young widow, Rohini, he manages to exchange the real will for the forged one. Soon the young widow realizes that her action will disinherit the man’s cousin, Gobindalal who is a kind soul and has dealt with Rohini with understanding and affection. Rohini soon falls in love with Gobindalal who is already married. His wife, Bhramar, is jealous. Gobindalal gets attracted to Rohini. They elope. Soon after, Bhramar falls fatally ill while there is trouble brewing between the illicit couple thanks to Bhramar’s father who sought revenge.
It might be evident that it is a fairly stock story. Love, the other woman, jealousy, inheritance, villains, greed, death etc. What I’m struggling with at this point is whether I should even bother to write any more since that is the beginning and end of this film. It is tempting to be critical of Bankim Chandra’s novel because it reeks of his conservative stance in almost every chapter, but that would be unfair—not just because the novel has some unique, appealing features, but because the film didn’t bother with any of the nuances the book had to offer.
The most interesting aspect of the novel was its narrator. A playful, opinionated story-teller who made this simplistic series of events and relationships more connected and hinted an oral flavour. The two overt references to widow-remarriage are not the end of the matter. The novel is not about relationships, it is about women, more importantly, about widows and Bankim’s reservations (let’s be polite and call it that) on the idea of widows getting married again. The narrator hints at these social comments of the writer with much more depth than the actual characters do. And the film does away with the narrator. Just to think of how fascinating a film this could have bee had this voice been retained, makes me dislike it even more. Even while reading the novel, I remember being wary of this ensnaring narrator. One had to think with him and then beyond him. And it is that process that made the experience worth anything, not the story. For instance the character of Rohini. We have no choice but to listen to the narrator pass judgements on her character, but then we think of more erudite concepts like desire, sexuality and the possibility of innocence co-existing with these qualities. There was a point early in the film when there was a hint of this understanding. But the moment she falls for a married man, she is shunned to the dark side, and the director seems more than content with that action. The caring, soft-spoken Rohini turned into a devilish creature who decides to raise Bhramar’s envy. The ‘basicness’ —to concoct an obvious word— of the emotions portrayed is jarring. And clearly if the director is happy with these basic emotions, then the actors will not push themselves and will be happy to remain simple actors in a simple story.
Another telling feature of the novel is how it ends. Gobindalal is blinded by jealousy and realization of Rohini’s ‘loose character’ and thereby of Bhramar’s godliness. Both women die (Gobindalal kills Rohini), and a golden statue of Bhramar is erected. For all those who were in any doubt about the intention of this novel and its construction of the good woman and the bad one, this move changes everything. And the film doesn’t deem it important enough to retain. One can argue that being a man of the 21st century, Raja Sen was distancing himself from this literal deification of women. But if that were the case, Sen wouldn’t have picked this novel or rather this writer at all. What’s the point of basing yourself on a novel if you erase all traces of its uniqueness from your rendition?
What I do have to admit is the one sensible thing I saw in the film. The novel has a very vocal working class that is visible in the peripheries of the plot. A kind of social critique comes through with the various servants we encounter and Sen had the good sense to highlight them.
The greatest mystery however is the look of the film that prompted more than one person to wonder when it was made. The director clarified that it was made in 2007. It is difficult to explain what exactly I mean when I say that it seemed the film was made in the 70s. Try to recall the inherent superficiality of colours that is evident to us today when we watch the first few colour films. The colour seems super-imposed and far from natural. That is true of this film. There must be some secret formula Sen used for it because as far as I know, that quality is now so obsolete that it is impossible to achieve.
I don’t know what else to say. Maybe I won’t say anymore because there isn’t anything more to the film. The possibilities were immense and they were obviously not even in the vicinity of the filmmakers thoughts, and besides, the damage has been done.
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