THR India's 25 in 25: 'Asha Jaoar Majhe' And The Quiet Shape of Love

Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s National Award-winning debut feature film in Bengali is a meditative portrait of how the vagaries and mundanities of modern life birth intimacy in a claustrophobic existence.  

The film is a near-silent and hypnotic visual treatise on an unnamed married couple in Kolkata, played by Ritwick Chakraborty and Basabdatta Chatterjee, whose lives move in opposite rhythms shaped by recession and routine. The man burns the midnight oil at a printing press while the woman toils away in a handbag factory. The only time their individual worlds collide is in the slender hours between her return and his departure, when sleep, work, and love overlap.  

The film unfolds almost wordlessly, as the narrative is instead told through the hum of trams, the hiss of gas stoves, the lapping of water in a basin, the static of a distant radio carrying news of layoffs and protests, as the city itself becomes a third presence that observes their isolation and endurance.  

A still from 'Asha Jaoar Majhe'

Sengupta’s camera lingers on gestures — a fan oscillating, a pot bubbling, footsteps on linoleum — elevating the banal into the lyrical, the repetitive into ritual, the domestic into devotion; it is a meditation on time, labour, and intimacy, where absence becomes its own form of presence and the brief moment the couple shares before dawn glows like a secret the world has forgotten. Through exquisite sound design and painterly compositions, the film finds poetry in survival, romance in exhaustion, and grace in the simple act of carrying on — an ode to those whose love exists between shifts, in the silence between breaths.  

Despite its inherent poetry, Asha Jaoar Majhe is also a scathing commentary on the nature of the modern idea of life — hanging by the straws of emotional exhaustion and depravity that fuels a colourless existence — an aspect poignantly captured by Sengupta’s ash and blue palette. Almost as a hat-tip to the Italian neo-realist movement, this modern-day masterpiece has stood the test of time for over a decade, with the performances literally speaking louder than words.  

Aditya Vikram Sengupta on Making Asha Jaoar Majhe  

The idea for the film was triggered by a two-page short story by Italian writer Italo Calvino, titled “The Adventure of a Married Couple”, written sometime in the ‘60s or ‘70s. It stayed with the director long enough for him to use the narrative as an inward-looking lens through which he processes all that surrounds him.  

“When I started writing the film, it became an observation of how love was shown in my immediate environment,” Sengupta says. “Even at home, growing up in Kolkata, I never saw my parents hold hands. At least for the most part, what I have seen is they expressed love for each other through the things they did for each other,” — a trope the filmmaker captures on screen, using gestures as a surrogate for words that often get lost in the din of the everyday.  

While one may assume that the most ambitious part of the project — especially for a debutant — was forgoing the need for words, Sengupta insists that dialogue does exist in the film, only not in the conventional sense. “The film does not have spoken dialogues, but is heavy on dialogues,” he says. Because dialogue, after all, is a conversation, regardless of language, and the language of eyes, touch, movement, and silence comes together to make up our worlds, which constantly exist in a state of flux, like that of the characters in the film.  

Aditya Vikram Sengupta

The execution of this subliminal visual narrative did not feel particularly difficult for Sengupta. In fact, it came from a “place of exploring and the joy of creating, sans an agenda.”  

Sengupta tends to “feel” his way through the world — a tactility he lends to his film and the characters who convey much through the simple acts of touching — even if it’s just surfaces and objects, in a sharp commentary on how life is now retrofitted into the material world.  

Personally, however, the enduring success of the film has burdened the director with artistic expectations from his own self, which he constantly hopes to outrun to stay true to his creative desires. “I want to go back to where I was when I made Asha Jaoar Majhe. Along the way, I wanted to make bigger films, and that's when you start moving away from who you are. I think this film reminds me that I should always preserve that part of me so I can be true to my craft, even though holding on to that process can become difficult.”