'The Bengal Files' Movie Review: A Shallow And Slanted Polemic

Credit where it's due: Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri makes the most interactive Hindi films imaginable. One of the discreet pleasures of watching his Files trilogy — Bengal was preceded by Kashmir and Tashkent — in theatres is also listening in on the audience chatter. His films coast on a call-and-response strategy that I find uniquely fascinating. There are pauses built into the narrative for the viewer to gasp and react—in horror, in indignation. Ideologically, these films are crude and convenient monologues; as a piece of communal theatre, though, they're a dialogue!

My morning screening of The Bengal Files at a suburban multiplex in Mumbai was by no means a muted experience. When a hopeful and patriotic man, circa 1946, announces optimistically that Calcutta will be never become a 'Muslim' city, an elderly lady three rows from me ad-libbed sarcastically, "Of course it wont". On Mahatma Gandhi hawking his spiel of non-violence as Hindus are butchered in the streets: "What an a**hole". And a little earlier, when a Sikh character enters the narrative, this priceless enquiry to the screen: "What is a sardar doing in Bengal?"

After painting a cuddly picture of Kashmir as a land of harmonious co-existence in his previous hit, Agnihotri has set his unerring sights on West Bengal, a place of rabid communalism, illegal immigration, vote-bank politics and — perhaps most damningly— unevolving musical taste. Honest and 'apolitical' CBI officer Shiva Pandit (Darshan Kumar) arrives in Murshidabad to investigative the disappearance of a Dalit girl. The local MLA, a wily Muslim businessman played with button-pushing nastiness by Saswata Chatterjee, lords over the town as his private fiefdom: no sooner has Shiva arrived than he is pelted with stones by a furious mob.

That mob is exclusively Muslim, as are all the aggressors in this film. Agnihotri draws a straight line from contemporary Bengal to the heated events of 1946, when Muhammad Ali Jinnah — disillusioned with the Congress and the Cabinet Mission proposals — announced August 16 as Direct Action Day. This bloody chapter of the nation's fratricidal birth is brought to gory, painstaking life: arson, riots, rapes and public executions fill the screen with aplomb, as Muslim League workers and National Guard volunteers run amok on the streets of Calcutta (Jinnah's incendiary line, "We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India," is attributed here to Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the rabble-rousing premier of Bengal Province and later the 5th Prime Minister of Pakistan).

As his raison d'être, Agnihotri homes in on a contentious — and unsung — figure of the Calcutta Killings. Gopal Patha (Sourav Das), a charismatic Brahmin butcher who took up arms to protect his Hindu brethren, famously announcing, "If they kill one, you kill ten", is the film's most honest political representative. He rejects Gandhian non-violence, declaring Bharat as a Hindu rashtra. He unites Sikhs, Jains, Yadavs and Marwaris in a common retaliatory offensive, at one point instructing his boys to source guns and cartridges from 'kalwe' ('blackie) African-American soldiers stationed in the city. Nothing unites like racism, I suppose.

It will be argued soon that the events depicted in The Bengal Files adhere closely to historical fact. Even so, there is a camp relish to how Agnihotri wields his ladle and doles out the torture. As in The Kashmir Files, the gut-wrenching violence is designed for maximum impact: a child suffocating in a mill, swallowing droplets of sweat from his parent's arm; a woman running for her life, the red-bordered anchal of her saree on fire, trailing a flaming line in the mud. There is a lot of Kali and Durga symbolism. In a toe-curling scene, the villain played by Namashi Chakraborty mockingly yells 'Insaaf' (Justice) while officiating at a lynching; as his helpless victim — a specimen of the trusting, secular, forward-thinking Indian — dies, we see a collapsing poster of a film called Insaaf.

Armed with a proper budget, Agnihotri occasionally shows interest in mounting a proper film: the set extensions are adeptly handled, and I liked the framing in a couple of countryside scenes. Barring a handful of committed performances in the older timeline (Simrat Kaur Randhawa, Namashi, Eklavya Sood), and a delightfully hammy one by Mohan Kapur as Suhrawardy, the actors have been lined up for a school play: Anupam Kher's Gandhi is both comic relief and King Lear, silently and helplessly watching his world go up in flames.

Agnihotri makes no room for alternate voices or accounts, let alone depict the plight of Muslims killed or displaced in the Partition riots. In fact, it's almost admirable how proudly and single-mindedly The Bengal Files pursues its worldview, brooking no argument, feeding on and verifying majoritarian anxieties much like the power structures it decries. The only solution — a final one? — it offers is answering communalism with communalism. Bheed se darna chahiye, Pallavi Joshi's Partition survivor reminds Shiva. The mob should be feared. Yet the film plays straight into it.