A man who is not a Communist at the age of 20 is a fool. Any man who is still a Communist at the age of 30 is an even bigger one.

—George Bernard Shaw

Filmmaker Ashok Vishwanathan is a firm stickler of the above adage. "The Soviet Union finding its stepping stone of a firm establishment and the post-World War experiences leaving a deep dent on the Leftist Marxist tenets had impelled many great thinkers and philosophers to swerve from the roots of Marxism to other divergent routes," he says.

Vishwanathan is an analyst, critic, conceptualiser and director of alternative cinema. In a casting coup of sorts, he has roped in Bollywood stars and some front-running Parliamentarians and politicos for his hard-hitting Bengali venture Shesh Sanghat (The Final Conflict). Currently showing at theatres across West Bengal, the film is slated for a national release with English subtitles. Veteran Bollywood actress and Samajwadi Party MP Jaya Prada leads a long entourage of characters in the storyline as its central magnetic focus. The general secretary of Samajwadi Party and a member of the Rajya Sabha, Amar Singh, also emerges as a surprise package. Riding high on injustice, superstitions, inequalities of rights and privileges, caste-ridden prejudices, racial discrimination, gender-biases, oppression of feudal lords over landless peasants and tax-payers (despite the zamindari system being abolished long back), illiteracy, backwardness of the hapless, impoverished rural folk, et al, Shesh Sanghat delineates a canvas of rustic life that is not irrelevant in today’s tumultuous times. Given the contemporary scenario, where tribal insurgence is rampant and appalling across the length and breadth of the country in specific earmarked belts, the screenplay seems to be straight spun out of reality. The rural interiors and forests are infested with subversive forces of extremist groups lying ambush and looming large with life-endangering threats. The corridor of states (Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Bengal) under siege by notorious Maoist groups reeks of a bloody coup d’état. The Maoist leaders, scattered in pockets, are in-charge of a smouldering uprise with their posse of caped crusaders. The grenade-shelling and gun-totting fleet of armed Maoists is on the loose at large. They have been converted into seditious rebels out of deprivation or other relevant reasons and this transformation is open to much contemplation, hot debates and discussions across the table through an honest, transparent dialogue.

"Two winters back in 2007, I found the germ of this story idea. At that time, the Singur-Nandigram land-acquisition strife in West Bengal was just beginning to gather some momentum. So even if the plotline of my film shows a tussle between the native tribesmen and the usurping land sharks, it doesn’t necessarily pick up the threads from that burning incident in reality. In a generic sense, these occasional disputes between the ruling mandarins and the ruled tillers are nothing out of the blue. They only reflect the socio-economic tendencies prevalent for long in the subcontinent," he says. "As a matter of fact, films ring in the portrayal of reality and hold a mirror to the prosaic, mundane world by weaving a tapestry of poetry around it. Some things remain eternal. They cannot be contained within a stipulated time-frame. If scarcity, petty politics, casteism or untouchability reigned supreme in the pre-independence era, it still sticks out like a sore thumb in the contemporary cyber-age as well. We can’t live in the denial mode with a blinkered vision to reality," he says.

Alluding to references, Vishwanathan cites that his film’s theme is ideally inspired from South Indian author K. Narayan Rao’s Telugu story set in the backdrop of Andhra Pradesh. "Over here, the setting is based in a village of West Bengal, precisely in the cusp area along the borders of Bengal and Jharkhand," he says.

The story unfolds with a tribal, subaltern lady spearheading at the centre of a boiling insurgence of protest. As a teenage child, Rajnandini or Raji, the female protagonist, gets raped by the overbearing village feudal lord and is then brutally exploited by his band of sycophantic followers. In the process, she conceives her offender’s offshoot, who outraged her modesty and tarnished her virtuous image. Her life is now thrown into utter disarray and she knows no way to redress it. She seeks an outlet to run away from her befuddling condition and retrace the crumbled pieces to fix it up. The innocent, adolescent girl finally grows up to be a daring, doughty woman, seething with revenge to vanquish his batterers. She receives a guerrilla training in wielding weapons and conceals her true identity in commando uniforms to launch her surreptitious mission. "While Raji in the mould of bandit queen Phulan Devi lies in the focus of a microcosmic chaos, the deprived lot of adivasis or the village tribal folk represents the macrocosmic disorder," says Vishwanathan. In the present-day context of "agriculture versus industrialisation" fiasco creating a ruckus over the political maps of many provinces, the film stands topical. It shows that the poor cultivators whose fertile lands and mineral rich soil have been wrested from their patrimonial property are invariably given a raw deal. They rightfully demand an amount of compensation money in commensurate to their sold out acres of land from the government which has taken a lease of their inheritance for 99 years in exchange of a paltry sum. Consequently, a confrontation amidst the rustic landowners, politicians, administrative satraps and the state machinery surface to the fore. A righteous police officer, played by Jackie Shroff, sits on the horns of dilemma as the list of demands proffered by the adivasis is as valid as the state regime’s mandatory policies to implement law and order in a zone of pandemonium. So, both as an employee and a human being, he doesn’t know whom to side with. "Beneath the veneer of a tough cop, lies a vulnerable heart that is torn apart between his humane emotions and the call of duty. The film is neither preachy in tone nor didactic in its essence. It doesn’t suggest a solution to the mess but only upholds the true canvas of earthly existence," he says.

Actor Sabyasachi Chakraborty (of Dil Se, Khaki, Parineeta fame), enacting a Naxalite spy and nursing feelings for Raji in the movie, affirms that this "tale of exploitation and mass anti-establishment movements is not new to the popular psyche as the political climate of the late ’60s and the decade of 70s throughout had already witnessed and weathered such few good squalls across the national territory."

Incidentally, this touching celluloid saga also strikes a chord against the usual, oft-repeated clichés. "The ubiquitous stereotype borne out of regressive male-chauvinism says that a woman is always another woman’s foe, rather than friend. But here, on the contrary, the fairer sex hits back. Instead of the men shielding them, they take the plunge into the battlefields for their rights and privileges," he says.

Pramita Bose