Ashani Sanket

Satyajit Ray (1973)

The Bengal famine of 1943 was the result of a complex of factors.  The region’s agrarian economy had been struggling for some time to cope with the needs of a rapidly increasing population.  The escalating costs of military investment in World War II led to rising inflation, which wages couldn’t keep pace with.  During the Japanese occupation of Burma, the British government’s ‘scorched earth’ response, involving disruption of the region’s market supplies and transport systems, led to a large-scale loss of rice imports.  Natural disasters in south-west Bengal (tidal waves, flooding, crop disease) made matters worse.  According to Wikipedia, an estimated two to three million people in the Bengal province of British India died in the famine.  Five million perished according to film-maker Sangeeta Datta, who gave a pre-recorded introduction for this BFI premiere of the newly-restored version of Satyajit Ray’s Distant Thunder.

Ray’s screenplay is based, like his scripts for the Apu Trilogy, on a novel by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay but Distant Thunder is very different from the Apu films, and not just because it was made in colour.  It’s often impressive but markedly less natural than these forebears:  Ray does convey the pre-famine rhythms of life in the Bengal village where the action takes place; he often also seems to be making points in relatively explicit ways.  Distant Thunder presents the growing threat and increasingly dire consequences of the famine chiefly through the eyes of Gangacharan (Soumitra Chatterjee), a Brahmin priest-teacher-doctor, and his wife, Angana (Bobita).  Sangeeta Datta suggested that the film, like earlier Ray works, concentrated on a small number of central characters against a ‘backdrop’ of large-scale changes in a world contiguous to their own.  You knew what she meant:  technological advance symbolised by the railway train that runs through nearby countryside and excites the village children in Pather Panchali (1955); the factory workers briefly observed by the title character in The World of Apu (1959).  Datta’s use of the word ‘backdrop’ was surprising, though.  The thunder of the title isn’t distant for long:  learning to live with rather than die from famine is the fabric of the characters’ world from quite an early stage of the narrative.

The film’s strongest element (also highlighted by Sangeeta Datta) is its depiction of the breakdown of a community and its values in the face of famine.  What’s particularly impressive is the characters’ continuing awareness of this, epitomised in the remark by Chutki (Sandhya Roy), Angana’s friend and neighbour, that her mind stops working when she’s hungry.  By ‘mind’, she means her moral compass:  Chutki is regretfully conscious of what she has done when she sells herself, in exchange for rice, to the horribly disfigured kiln worker, Jadu (Noni Ganguli), referred to as ‘Scarface’.  (Ray’s close-ups emphasise that, although the right side of Jadu’s face and upper torso was badly burnt in a fireworks explosion, the left-hand side of his face is handsome.)  Among many potent images, the very last is the strongest, and the most dramatic illustration of famine encroaching on the characters’ private worlds.  Angana tells Gangacharan that she is pregnant as they contemplate vast numbers of starving figures massing on the horizon.

As Gangacharan, superior in terms of both caste and self-estimation, Soumitra Chatterjee gives proof of his remarkable versatility as an actor.  The bespectacled, umbrella-toting Gangacharan is spiritually far removed not just from Apu but also from the would-be poet Chatterjee played in Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964).  The action is punctuated by large Bengali characters on screen that are not subtitled (dates?).  Technically excellent as this (4K) restoration of Distant Thunder may be, I couldn’t help being reminded that unsatisfactory subtitling was also an issue with the version of The World of Apu that I saw at BFI ten years ago.

19 December 2023