Pratidwandi (The Adversary) is said to be the first among the three city-centered films Satyajit Ray made. This celluloid journey began in 1970 to be followed by Seemabaddha (1971) and end with Jana Aranya (1973) to peel off, layer by layer, like the skins of an onion, the psyche of youth in an ever-changing Calcutta, yet to have a changed nomenclature.

This was a turbulent time in many parts of India in West Bengal in general and Calcutta in particular. Frustration arising from poverty, unemployment and social inequalities led young men like Siddhartha’s brother to involve themselves in active and violent resistance, exploding at times into violence against all forms of authority. On the one hand, the state of West Bengal and its capital city was the epi-centre of much of this ‘revolutionary thinking’. On the other, the public and private sector were building up a culture of bribes and corruption, with the older generation teaching the youngsters how to ‘get ahead in life’.

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With rising unemployment, the rise of the underground Naxalite movement that appropriated a slew of brilliant students of Calcutta and Jadavpur Universities within its fold, were committed to uproot capitalist and/or fascist rule through armed revolution. Alongside, there was an influx of hippies from the West, white-skinned youngsters from the US and European places living a Bohemian life, doing drugs, dancing away on the streets of Calcutta, enamoured of the poverty, the dirt and the debris. In one indoor scene, we find one hippie trying to hear the sound of a khanjani (a percussion instrument used mainly in religious songs) through a stethoscope! It is a fleeting scene but carries its own comment.

The protagonist in Pratidwandi, Siddhartha Choudhury, is forced to give up his medical education when his father dies suddenly and he has to join swarms of educated, middle-class young men looking for employment. Failing to get a job despite being competent and educated, he takes to walking the city’s streets or wandering across to the digs of his two classmates from medical school and ruminating on how he can stop his younger brother from engaging in dangerous Naxalite activism or his sister from engaging in an affair with her boss.

Even his efforts on the personal front prove unsuccessful because his brother Tunu shrugs him off while his sister,........

© Mathrubhumi English