Dibyendu's WallScript

“ The cinema’s prophets are few and lonely; none more formidable than the Spaniard Buñuel.” — Tony Richardson   “ I do not wish this film to enchant you. Rather, I wish it to enrage you.” — With these incendiary words hurled at the audience of a Marseille cine-club before the screening of Un Chien Andalou, the prophet of cinema, Luis Buñuel, announced his creed. From 1928 until 1977 , across nearly half a century of filmmaking, he never betrayed this inaugural declaration. Until his final work, That Obscure Object of Desire ( 1977) , he remained faithful to the vow taken at the dawn of his career. Thirty-two films in total — each one carrying the same flint of provocation, each one striking sparks upon the stone of society.   Every Buñuel film, one after another, has never lulled but unsettled; never caressed but incited. Critics have described his cinema as a mirror of society — an enormous, merciless looking-glass where the spectator confronts his own grotesque reflection, ...

The consciousness of community, in the history of Indian life, is perhaps one of the most astonishing gifts that the British bestowed — albeit unintentionally — through their imperial intrusion. Empire thrives by enthroning one language, one culture, as supreme; all other tongues, all other classes, are reduced to servitude beneath the weight of that imposed order. Conversely, this process estranges the common man from his own native speech, his ancestral memory, until he becomes a stranger within his own soil. These thoughts kept recurring as I sat for two consecutive days in the auditorium of the Bangla Academy, attending a seminar organized by the Khatra Adivasi Unnayan O Kalyan Samajsebi Sangha.   In that gathering, I observed three distinct yet converging streams of Adivasi awareness — young men and women from Adivasi communities who had found their way into education; activists and social workers engaged in Adivasi regions; and, lastly, urban scholars who studied the Adivasi ...

Of late, one hears a peculiar phrase gaining currency: the health of study . That this health of reading is not identical with the health of the body is easy to perceive. Yet, just as we speak of mental health—something that blends with discernment and conscience—so too can we speak of this health of reading. What a man reads, the subjects upon which he practices the craft of language, these together constitute what may rightly be called the health of his study. In our present age, this health of the reading mind has, for some decades now, been afflicted by an incurable malady. Whenever I sit to study, or acquaint myself with the reading habits of others, I feel ever more acutely the sting of this sickness of the reader.   Generally, there are two kinds of illness that assail the health of reading. The first is the disease of reading the wrong things. The second, the disease of reading the right things yet failing to grasp them rightly—in short, the malady of misunderstanding. The ...

If one were to measure the Indian era from August 15, 1947 to August 15, 2001 purely through the cold arithmetic of numbers, it would seem difficult to claim that our independence has been a failure. Agricultural production in this land has increased fourfold, food grain even more. Industrial output has swelled nearly fifteen times. In 1950–51, the average Indian earned barely eleven hundred rupees a year; today that figure stands at three hundred and fifty American dollars, that is, nearly fourteen to fifteen thousand rupees. Statisticians further assure us that the average span of life has doubled. Population has multiplied; alongside, the consciousness of rights within men, literacy, awareness of health, and the modest comforts of living have all expanded in parallel stride.   And yet, despite this emphatic endorsement by statistics, many have come to believe that our independence has faltered, even failed. One camp, believers in a market-driven economy, hold Nehru’s socialist b...

Albert Camus once observed: mankind can be divided into three kinds.   A. Those who do nothing that requires hiding, thus escaping the need for lies. B. Those who do not wish to conceal their deeds at all, believing truth is the better path. C. And the third—those who love secrecy and lies with equal passion.   So then, does it follow that if we continue lying long enough, humanity will one day arrive at truth? Let us consider an example.   The alibi of the “isolated incident”   In recent times, whenever an unpleasant occurrence takes place, we have invented a convenient false excuse: we call it an “isolated incident.” Those who so explain have no relation to separatists, and yet the credit for separating one from the whole belongs to them. Suppose an accident occurs once a month; we label it “isolated.” If it happens once a week, we baptize it as an “unbroken series of isolated incidents.”   Then the accident begins to happen daily. It is now an “unceasing isol...

Every day, in some neglected corner of this subcontinent, a Devi is born to fight against the society that denies her. Phoolan Devi — perhaps the most popular Indian woman of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century — was struck down by bullets from an unknown assassin’s gun. When I read the news in the papers, I stood bewildered. Why was the trigger of a gun still required to send her into eternal exile, after she had already been “killed” a thousand times over in public imagination? Dead was that Phoolan Devi, who in truth had been nothing more than a woman from an unlettered, backward caste in a society fractured by India’s caste hierarchies. And yet my concern is not merely with Phoolan’s death, but with the writing of this essay itself. Why should I hesitate to write on Phoolan Devi? At least a dozen biographers have already written her life in book form; many others contemplate doing so. To write on her is to stir a cauldron of sex, violence, and love — a khichdi of sen...