Anjana Basu collaborated for two decades with the colourful and charismatic filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh. Translating for Rituparno is a book that will contribute to film studies in Indian academia and globally. What scintillates right through this very uniquely crafted collection by Basu is the underlying philosophy in Ghosh’s repertoire — his love of the marginalised, dispossessed, and downtrodden. And his respect for women.
For 20 years, Basu worked with Rituparno on his scripts, translating them for the censors, for subtitles and festivals. “My work began with Hirer Angti and continued till Satyenweshi,” she informs with quiet pride. This book consists of a selection of the different screenplays, both published and unpublished, that she worked on with him, including Antarmahal, Chokher Bali, Dosar, Khela, Last Lear, Raincoat and Chitrangada, along with a new version of Guru and The Princely Imposter.
Basu currently works as an advertising consultant, while continuing to write poetry, fiction, and features. Her body of work reflects a sustained engagement with storytelling in its many forms — from magical realism to children’s fiction, from poetry to cinema — and an enduring commitment to themes of history, imagination, and storytelling. To date, Basu has published 11 novels, one work of translation, and three books of poetry. Her reflections on this collaboration were collected in Translating for Rituparno, published by Jadavpur University Press.
A tete-a-tete with Anjana Basu.
How long did it take you to write Translating for Rituparno, and what made you write something so different from your other books?
This was done in tandem with his films since he used the scripts and subtitles to present to producers and in his work. What was written later were the pieces of introduction that related to each film. Rituparno had got to the phase where he felt he needed a Marie Seton, though he wasn’t exactly sure whether I would fit the bill. I had never been to a shoot, barring popping in for a single scene of Hirer Angti with Moon Moon Sen in it. I was threatened with Amitabh Bachchan at one point when Last Lear was in progress, but crowds made the situation impossible, and Bachchan was shot at what the media termed an ‘unknown location’, which, I knew, was somewhere behind Navina Cinema. I suggested putting together a book of all the translation work that I had been doing for him, and he sniffed: “There’s more to my work than translation!” Which was true, but I felt that it needed to be out there.
There is a certain camaraderie that comes through in your narrative between Rituparno and you. Where did you strike a chord?
Rituparno and I had been comrades and colleagues ever since we had met over a potato chip campaign; it was his campaign and my translation of it. I didn’t realise then that that was how the relationship was going to go — his Bengali and my English side by side. We matched each other in thought and speed and capped each other’s creativity perfectly. Rituparno was then in Response, a star Bengali writer, Ram Ray’s favourite and monarch of all he surveyed from silver betel boxes to books. I joined Response for a year, so the association grew closer. He wrote the Boroline Puja advertisements, and after a while, I started turning them into English, following him to Kumartuli since he felt that I needed to be inducted in the Bengali culture.
Running parallel to this was my work on his feature film scripts. I would sit at a spare computer translating from his scrawls with great difficulty since I did not read Bengali handwriting easily. It wasn’t subtitles then, those came later; it was script translations to be sent to Mumbai producers.
Having known Rituparno and his work so intimately, how would you locate his talent or contributions to cinema?
He created a cinema that appealed to the middle-class Bengali. Unishe April brought people to cinema halls again to watch Bengali films rather than being glued to TV screens and soaps. Later people would say that he was the first filmmaker to make a gay statement through his work which was true, but over and above, Not Just Another Love Story and Chitrangada were stories about ordinary middleclass life that made an impact; stories related to his own life and the lives of other people he knew with an undercurrent of lyricism and the songs like Megh peon from Titli which resonated in hearts. This was why he bought the rights to the Byomkesh stories and started on Satyenweshi to recapture his main target audience again.
As for Hindi megastars, there was a need to prove himself as the director of stars beyond Bengal and reach out to film festivals worldwide and because he had become a name, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Amitabh Bachchan were happy to take part in his films.
What is the essence of the concept of translation to you, in your act of translating the Bengali script of Chokher Bali, for instance, into English?
It was not just words but capturing a cultural ethos. “I need an erotic 19th-century sonnet. Something that an anglicised Bengali might write to his wife and the word ‘ashalata’ in it, or at least ‘asha’,” demanded Rituporno. The challenge was more the sonnet than asha, and I spent a happy few evenings playing with Shakespearean rhyme schemes. When I mailed it to him, he called to say: “Khub bhalo hoyechhey.” That was my first introduction to Chokher Bali. I was told that the name meant ‘sand in the eye’, a reference to a popular phrase for friendship in Tagore’s time.
In the learning process as translator of the subtitles of his films, what do you think you learned from Rituparno?
We worked through innumerable film concepts and subtitles on the telephone — his sleeping tablet-filled nights usually wound up at 6.30 in the morning, and he would be wide awake contemplating the latest project or the latest line of dialogue and waiting for me to be out of bed to turn his Bengali into English. He knew my schedule very well. The phone would ring at 7am for half an hour of in-depth discussion, followed by a half-hour break for my bath, and then the conversation would resume until I told him it was time for me to get ready for work.
What I did enjoy was the interaction, even though it was mostly over the telephone, the exchange of ideas and the tapping of my knowledge of English, history and all the other odds and ends that I could supply him with while he taught me his Bengali. Occasionally, I was summoned to meetings at his house and ferried there in an SUV. These meetings happened either at his house or sometimes at a house in Azadgarh, where he had done up one floor in a star guest house style so that he could house out-of-town actors and save on film budgets.
Compared to other Bengali art filmmakers, Rituparno did not have enough time to build a repertoire as he passed away too soon. What were his greatest contributions in the films he did make, and where might he have improved?
He created film after film in a rush and was certainly beginning to build a body of work. Given his short life, there is a host of films that made their mark as they were shown. As a result of the rush, I had objections to many of his stories, which I felt needed tweaking but that remained something on which we agreed to disagree. The hurry also resulted in problems with finding producers, with the result that the magical realism film Sunglass was never released. It also resulted in a host of projects explored and discarded — Mahabharata from Draupadi’s viewpoint, or the Bhawal Sanyasi case. Some faltered for the lack of funding or interest; the others were pushed aside for future reference.
The sad thing is that many Pride activists choose to ignore the main body of his work for his gender-sensitive films, reducing his oeuvre radically, which is why perhaps the impression remains that he did not leave a significant body of work behind. He has 21 films to his credit, along with work for television and documentaries.
Julie Banerjee Mehta is the author of Dance of Life, about the resurrection of Cambodian culture after genocide, and co-author of the bestselling biography of Cambodian Prime Minister — Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature. She currently lives in Calcutta and teaches Masters English at Loreto College, and curates and anchors the monthly Literary Circle discussion of the Rising Asia Foundation