CAL CONNECTION: (From top to bottom) Rahul Bose and Rituparna Sengupta in Anuranan, Shayan Munshi and Raima Sen in The Bong Connection, and Victor Banerjee and Lillete Dubey in Bow Barracks Forever

Remember Apu, the young boy wrapped in a dhoti and innocence in Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito, who leaves his remote village in Bengal in search of a life? Well, he has just made way for the new Apu, an opportunity-grabbing Bengali techie who bids goodbye to Calcutta to make his fortune in Houston.

The new Apu — in Anjan Dutt’s film, The Bong Connection — is a mark of changing times. Rabindrasangeet is no more a holy cow, Bengalis are no longer being perceived as stuck in the mud, and cinema is celebrating the change with a new crop of films and an emerging genre of music.

Suddenly, Bongs and Calcutta are the talking point. The trend started with Mira Nair’s 2007 film The Namesake, based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s story of a young Bengali boy who migrates to the United States. A clutch of new films is now set to mark the advent of the new Bong. And this one is hip, in sync with the times and speaking a language that director Dutt describes as ‘Benglish.’

As far as directors are concerned, Calcutta seems to have suddenly broken out of stereotypical moulds. It is being portrayed as younger in spirit, aggressive in attitude and dynamic in action. The recent spate of films such as The Bong Connection, Anuranan and Bow Barracks Forever are a reflection of this trend.

The Bong Connection revolves around the parallel stories of Andy, a Bengali American, and Apu, a Bengali Indian. Andy moves to Calcutta to dig into his cultural roots while Apu goes to Houston in search of greener pastures. Bow Barracks Forever traces the trials and tribulations of members of the Anglo-Indian community who may wallow in nostalgia but profess an undying love for the city. Anuranan has a character, Amit, who is the antithesis of the way the Bengali has been portrayed so far. He is not the zamindar, the Marxist and certainly not the dissipated lover — he is a materialistic Bong whose world revolves around the stock market. “Bongs aren’t just about arty intellectuals. They are boisterous, modern, trendy and have an undying love for the city,” says Anjan Dutt. “And today they are open to change. So it is important to project this contemporary face in films.”

IN THE PAST, RARELY have films from Bengal packaged the Calcuttan’s sense of heterogeneity. A stereotypical image of the stay-at-home Bengali has usually been Tollywood’s staple fare. But all that is changing. And the films — slick in form, youthful in spirit and sensitive in content — are doing well at the box office, enjoying a good run at the multiplexes.

Not surprisingly, Joy B. Ganguly, the producer of The Bong Connection, who returned from the US as he was “bored” with his job at a telecom company, is keeping up with the image of Bongs transcending borders. His production house, Moxie Entertainment Pvt Ltd, is producing a Hindi film, BBD, is behind a suspense drama, Via Darjeeling, and has tied up with an American production house, Westham Films, based in Los Angeles, to produce a crossover film on the underworld in America comprising Indians and Americans.

It was this perspective of the cosmopolitan Calcuttan that inspired the Jhankar Beats actor, Shayan Munshi, who used to be averse to working in a Bengali film, to play Andy’s role in The Bong Connection. “Calcutta is happening,” he says. “The youngsters are on a par with their counterparts in the other metros. It’s more with the times.” That’s perhaps why Anuranan’s director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury is unwilling to shift base from the city. “There may be more money outside Calcutta but my roots are here. Whenever I am away, I miss the city and its noise,” he says.

One of the offshoots of the advent of the new celluloid Bong is the fact that Rabindrasangeet, which evoked a hysterical outcry every time an attempt was made to tinker with it, is being remixed with artistic impunity. A song in The Bong Connection called Pagla hawa, composed by Rabindranath Tagore, has undergone a makeover, which, music director Neel Dutt says, gives it a “universal” appeal.

In bengal, we have usually been very rigid when it comes to Rabindrasangeet. But my father (Anjan Dutt) and I decided to approach the song in a different way by making use of techno tunes,” says Neel. “We wanted to capture the essence of the song, bring out its inherent wildness as it shows one of the protagonists morphing into a free spirit. Besides, we wanted to introduce a new sound in Bangla music.”

Needless to say, Neel’s experimentation with lounge, loop, Bhatiali and electronic fusion in The Bong Connection worked as much as the tribute to the rock ’’ roll genre of the Sixties did in Bow Barracks Forever.

The father-and-son duo are clearly doing their bit to highlight the cosmopolitan character of the city. “With the two films, I was trying to explore two different aspects of the city — its newness and dynamism but retaining a sense of values in the case of The Bong Connection, and nostalgia in terms of its music and old world charm in Bow Barracks Forever,” says Anjan Dutt.

For them, Calcutta is not just about Bengalis. It’s about the diverse communities who have made it their home. That explains why the music in the two films flows effortlessly from one language into another. The two have also formed a music band, Bowstreet Blues, for the promotion of Anglo-Indian music.

Clearly, Calcutta is on a high. The new Bong is on a song. And the camera is all set to capture it.