Autumn nostalgia
Coming of Durga Puja and the movies that have captured the essence of the celebration
I was in a pool of sweat waking up from the afternoon nap on Friday. The heat has risen palpably from last week—finally the end of monsoon it seems. On second thought, the rains now make their uninvited appearances in short phases till end of the year.
I had been trying to ebb away the afternoon nap for a week. On Friday however I was sunk into tiredness like I haven't in a long time, the one one's feel after a fulfilling work. I had taken the initiative to make chili chicken, which in reality only became me assisting Ma and imitating her ways. The fulfillment was nonetheless achieved when I had it for lunch, stuffing myself with double from what I usually have.
This reminds me of a letter of Rabindranath Tagore wrote on an early September day to his niece, Indira:
[...]It is because Bengalis eat so much at lunchtime that they cannot enjoy the intense feel of the beauty of the afternoons—all they do is close their doors, puff on their tobacco and chew on their paan while making satisfying and substantial arrangements for a siesta. With that they grow quite unctuously smooth and plump in the process. But nowhere else in the world does the desolate, tired afternoon spread itself out more silently and immensely upon the monotonous, endless, level fields of crop as in Bengal. These afternoons have made me fervent with feeling from my very childhood. In those days there would be no one about outside on the second floor, and I would lie there quite alone by the open door in the hot wind upon the curved couch—and in what imaginings, what unspoken anxieties would the entire day pass!
5 Sep 1894, Shahjadpur, Letters From A Young Poet
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I and my sister discuss it often how it has eluded from our memory altogether how we used to while away afternoons and vacations in early childhood, yet reminiscing the idea of it fill us with a irreplaceable comfort. Like how afternoons were spent in childhood, a lot of other instances have been residualise to nostalgia. With Durga Puja celebration to commence in full gusto midway down this week, none of the earlier excitement now shows up. Nostalgia however withstand all changes like gravity, pulling us all into the festivity, keeping the cycle going for another year. “But the nostalgia isn’t always nostalgia for a past”, writes Valeria Luiselli in Sidewalks. “There are things that produce nostalgia in advance—spaces that we know to be lost as soon as we find them—places in which we know ourselves to be happier than we will ever be afterwards. In such situations, the soul twists itself around, as if in a voluntary simulacrum of seeing its present in retrospect. Like an eye watching itself look from the perspective of a later time, it sees that remote present and yearns for it.”
In the effort to ignite this nostalgia produced by imagination, on Saturday I searched for movies with Durga Puja and finally settled on Hirer Angti, the directorial debut of Rituparno Ghosh. It was a light comedy and drama with a mixture of the two original Feluda movies, Shonar Kella and Joy Baba Felunath. Watching it, the nostalgia of not much the festival in itself but of the movies I've previously watched with Durga Puja in them crowded in.
Pather Panchali (1955) — Satyajit Ray
The iconic train scene of Apu and Durga running through the cloud of kash phool is imprinted on our minds as the eminent sign of nearing of Durga Puja. I'd eye the rail line side from the train on the way to college as autumn would set in. In a few weeks patches of littered empty plots gets soft in view with the young fluffy white wildflowers. Then by late autumn as all festivities have ended, the soft view would've turned to wilting brown, a little thud of sorrow settling in the gut.
Kahaani (2012) — Sujoy Ghosh
My first memory of this movie is opening the door to Ma coming home from cinema hall and her announcing the climax to me. It was the day before my exam, but both of us were more interested in discussing the movie first. Both thus sat down for the evening tea, as Ma narrated the whole story, three months before I would actually watch it on TV. No other non-bengali movie so far has been able to make Durga Puja the character and climax like Kahaani—from the making of the idols, the red bordered saree, to finally the shidur khela and bisorjon. Mixing the idea of Goddess Shakti with the mystery thriller genre, this movie has become one of my favorites to rewatch.
Utsab (2000) — Rituparno Ghosh
In contrast to Kahani, Utsab is subtle in showing parallels between the days of Durga Puja and the lives of its characters—the coming together of the family in their childhood home where their mother still lives. Passion in the air—all love, anger, resentment—in the beginning days of puja however shrouded by miscommunication and secrecy, which slowly unfolds to find content by the time bisorjon comes.
Joy Baba Felunath (1979) — Satyajit Ray
Another among the movies I've watched countless times, this children's mystery comedy drama has fed onto our nostalgia since childhood. The only movie on this list set outside of Bengal, it plays on the two stereotypes—first, that Bengalis are everywhere you go, and second, that one can take Bengali out of Bengal but not Bengal out of Bengali. Durga Puja thereby retains that gravity even outside of Bengal that brings people together.
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Enclosing the newsletter with an excerpt of another of Tagore's letters to Indira:
All the rain and storm came to an end yesterday. A beautiful sun is out this morning. The morning breeze today has the slightest nip of winter in it, just enough to make you shiver. Tomorrow the Durga Puja starts, so this is a beautiful preamble to it. When ripples of joy flow through all the people of the country and in every home, then even if you don’t belong to the same society, that joy touches your heart. Day before yesterday on the way to Suresh Samajpati’s house in the morning I saw images of Durga, ten hands aloft, being built in the courtyard of almost every mansion—and all the boys of the houses all around had become very restless. Observing this, I thought how both the young and the old in the country all become like children for a few days and together begin to play with dolls on a very large scale. If you think hard about it, all the higher pleasures are comparable to doll-playing, in the sense that there is no ambition or profit in it—if you look at it from the outside it seems like a sheer waste of time. But something that brings a feeling of joy, a huge enthusiasm, to the people of the entire country can never be wholly barren or insignificant. There are so many people in society who are hard and dry and worldly, for whom poetry and song are all completely meaningless, yet even they are affected by the pervasive feeling of anticipation for the festival and become one with everybody else. Surely this deluge of feeling every year humanizes men to a large extent; for a few days it engenders a feeling of such empathy and softness in the mind that love, affection and pity can easily germinate there—āgamanī, the songs of bijaẏā, the meeting of friends, the melody of the nahabat, the śarat sun and the transparent sky, all of it together composes a joyful poem of beauty within the heart.
5 Oct 1894, Kolkata, Letters From A Young Poet
Until next newsletter,
Hold onto the nostalgia, not of melancholy but imagination.