Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Support our Journalism

9th Anniversary: Free Tote & Mug

Winkle Twinkle’s time-travelling comrade and the absent-minded communism of Kolkata

In Srijit Mukherji’s ‘Winkle Twinkle’, a young communist leader disappears during the Emergency. He reappears mysteriously in 2002, when a Left coalition rules Bengal.

If the purpose of good fiction is to delve into deeper truths, then Srijit Mukherji’s new Bengali film Winkle Twinkle has hit the proverbial bull’s eye. Feted by critics and fans alike as one of his most nuanced works, the film tells the story of a communist who vanishes into thin air in 1976, only to resurface in 2002 without having aged a day.

As the modern-day Rip Wan Winkle tries to make sense of changed realities, Mukherji nudges the audience to look within. The viewers gets the sense that even as West Bengal’s political realities have swung from the Left to the Right, more than a few things remain unchanged. And even under the first democratically elected Hindu Right government in the state, Kolkata has not delinked itself from the communist. 

Mukherji’s political drama Winkle Twinkle, which released on 4 September, is a cinematic adaptation of Bratya Basu’s 2002 play of the same name. In the film, as in the play, young communist leader Sabyasachi Sen (Ritwick Chakraborty) mysteriously disappears in 1976 while trying to escape the police. It is the Emergency era, when political activists are routinely rounded up, thrown into jail, tortured, or simply killed in police encounters. As the years go by, Sen’s comrades and family move on, assuming that he died—until he resurfaces in the same area he had disappeared from, unaware of where he was all this time, realising the world has irrevocably changed.

At the time Sen is supposed to have disappeared, West Bengal was still under Congress rule. Chief minister Siddhartha Shankar Roy had political opposition not just from the communists of the CPI(M) variety but also from the radical........

© ThePrint