A film-dreamer departs: Buddhadeb Dasgupta

He was a poet whose cinema spoke the language of fantasy, song and fable even as it addressed sociopolitical concerns

With the departure of Buddhadeb Dasgupta, we have lost a great poet and auteur. He belonged to the generation of filmmakers who entered the scene after the first wave of pioneers in Indian art cinema like Ray, Ghatak and Sen. He also represents the post-Emergency era, whose social concerns, political vision, and aesthetic sensibilities were honed in the post-Nehruvian age of disillusionment with establishment of any kind — social, political, cultural and aesthetic. The promises of the nationalist project as well as the revolutionary dreams of the radical movements — both were on the wane, leaving a huge vacuum within the larger political imagination. . From his first films — Dooratwa (Distance, 1978), Neem Annapurna (Bitter Morsel, 1979), Grihajuddha (The Civil War, 1982), and Andhi Gali (Blind Alley, Hindi, 1984) — one sees an auteur-in-the-making, with a distinct aesthetic vision and narrative style. Also evident are his primary sociopolitical concerns and thematic trajectories, and the larger political anxieties and uncertainties that loomed large over these narratives about individuals, their struggle for survival, personal ambitions, love affairs and marital conflicts. In the later decades, his works became more complex and nuanced, more intensely poetic and melancholic. And in a filmmaking career that spanned four decades, he made some of the most memorable works of film art, leaving behind an enchanting trail of dreams, fantastic but also nightmarish.