No wonder the West Bengal government has resorted to an unofficial ban of Vivek Agnihotri’s The Bengal Files once the laughable attempt to get the Calcutta High Court to stay its release—on the grounds of his using the well-known suffix ‘Patha’ for Gopal Mukherjee—had failed. Because the film really isn’t about the 1946 massacres in Calcutta and Noakhali but about their unfinished agenda that is still being pursued in West Bengal today, via different means.

There was a pressing need to retell the story of 1946 too, deliberately downplayed and forgotten by academic and political sympathisers and fellow travellers of that unfinished agenda. Not only to stoke the conscience of those who lived through it and heard about it, but also to inform those who were born long after. The seeds of today’s communal politics were planted back then and now its deadly roots have snaked all round West Bengal, mostly hidden but flourishing.

Those who do not live in the state, or never stay for fairly long stretches, may not realise the contemporary parallels of the film — and why the state government and ruling party therefore sees it as subversive and damaging. They will judge it on what are extraneous to the importance of the story: the plot, cinematography and acting. For all who live in Bengal, especially in Murshidabad, Sandeshkhali, etc, the similarities of the story with the present are what will resonate.

Many have wondered why Agnihotri has used a sledgehammer (or perhaps a machete) to drive home his point about the bloody birth of divided Bengal and its continued violence. Well, anything less would not have been effective, such is the strength of the wrong narrative of the past 78 years. At the movie hall, the faces of the audience corroborated this. Those old enough to remember 1946 (or stories of it) were jolted into nodding in agreement with what they saw.

The younger viewers—generations for whom the Partition was not a lived and survived horror but just a chapter in history textbooks—were shellshocked. They entered the cinema engrossed in their mobile phones, or canoodling with their companions and eating popcorn. But as the story unfolded, they were transfixed: by the brutality, venality and duplicity of the powerful and the tragedy of “We the People", then and now. They suddenly realised what’s at stake.

Suppressing, denying or........

© News18