Gangor, a film by Italian director Italo Spinelli, opens with shots of the erotic postures on the walls of Konarak. Up, down and sideways goes the camera slowly. Not, for once, caressing the sculptures, but in an effortless, matter of fact way. Mostly, with a man’s hand on a woman’s breast.
The breast is the film’s centrepiece. Based on a short story Choli ke Peeche by Mahashweta Devi who has championed the cause of tribals and the underprivileged, Gangor was screened for the first time (with Mahashweta Devi and the cast in attendance) in competition at the Rome Film Festival on October 31 to a large and rapturous audience (“It got a standing ovation,” Spinelli told me). It was screened yet again in Rome for a few of us last week on the sidelines of the Asiaticafilmmediale — a festival of Asian cinema launched by Spinelli eleven years ago. And it is part of the programme at the ongoing Iffi in Goa.
Gangor is a straight tale with several crooked and troubling ramifications. And the place in it of the breast is both literal and symbolic. A left-leaning photojournalist, Upin Puri (Adil Hussain), travels to Purulia from Kolkata to do stories on invisible India. An India that doesn’t make headlines. In the course of his work, he sees tribal women doing hard labour. He takes their pictures. And then freezes as his eyes fall on a lovely, lissom, sexy young labourer (Priyanka Bose in a powerful performance) who has opened her blouse to feed her baby. Shaking himself back to life as it were, Puri clicks again and again. The young woman, Gangor, tells him, calmly: “Photos… money.” Transfixed, he gives her all he has.
Shortly afterwards, the picture is published on the front page of his paper accompanying an article on women’s condition. And that turns the world upside down for everyone: for Gangor, for the tribal community to which she belongs, for Puri, his wife and friends. For journalism.
Why publish this picture? What was it meant to convey? Was it quite simply exploitative — “pornography disguised as art?” as one character suggests? Or was it, as Puri believes, a search for form and the ideal body in art? Is he, an outsider, simply unaware of the sensitivities of the people? No one in Purulia’s hinterland, of course, perceives it in any aesthetic sense; in fact most feel it’s pernicious. The upheaval of this one act of photography in the small town is extensive, twisting the destinies of the two protagonists out of shape. Of a sudden, the personal and the social collide, the net widens to rope in rampaging policemen who rape Gangor (she has no option left in life except to turn to prostitution) violently and lacerate her breast; Upin Puri who tries desperately to help her and is chased by the same policemen; a concerned local NGO; and Gangor’s kinfolk who bemoan what she has done and the shame she has brought to her family and the community. Behind all this loom larger questions: journalistic ethics, the status of tribal women, the atrocities they suffer, their vulnerability and the desperate means they employ to protest against injustice and sexual violence. All this while the choli ke peeche number from Khalnayak is played intermittently in the background as a mocking counterpoint to the unfolding story. When the film wraps up, we have shots of a group of women calmly baring their breasts in front of the police station — a throwback to a similar protest in front of the Assam Rifles headquarters against the extrajudicial death of Manorama Devi in Manipur in 2004 — holding placards that say “Save them. Save the Breast”, and the policemen looking down in embarrassment and what we hope is shame.
Gangor takes a serious problem of the country head on and handles it competently. As the eponymous Gangor, Priyanka Bose exudes sensuality, and moves with ease from a timorous tribal to a self assured prostitute who has the guts to report the crime against her to the police. The change is visible in her new swinging gait. The film succeeds in drawing in the viewer with its pace and focus.
Director-writer-actor Italo Spinelli, a long-time friend of India, has been coming here regularly since the 1970s and knows the country well.
He met Mahashweta Devi several times and she left him free to re-tell her tale, raising no objections to a slightly different ending or to the introduction of Medha, Upin Puri’s wife who does not figure in the original story.
Interestingly, Spinelli told me that he was a bit like Upin Puri: an outsider to the material he was handling. We thus have a double view — that of the director and that of his character. In the end, though it hurts to see the erotic beauty and the intimate pleasure of the breast immortalised on the Konarak walls transformed into an ugly and savagely scorched image in today’s India.
As scorched, the film tells us, as male prestige.