Tomar naam, amar naam, Vietnam Vietnam! Folk styles and solidarity in the Bengali new wave cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Bengali new wave cinema of the 1960s and 1970s addressed historically important world events through an aesthetic inspired by Marxism and long-standing anti-colonial traditions dating to the middle nineteenth century. At the same time, an aesthetic derived from folk and artistic traditions was embraced as a cultural style in the middle twentieth century by local Marxist progressive theatre and writers’ associations. In 1968, the Bengali film director Ritwik Ghatak published a short speculation for the Bengal Youth Festival explaining the scenario for “A Film I want to make about Vietnam.” The film was not made, but the imagined detail is very much in the style of the Bengali new wave. Also important—and made, so we can see it—is Satyajit Ray’s short film “on” Vietnam, Two: A Film Fable (1964). The two films express, in different ways, the enthusiasm among Bengali intellectuals for Vietnam at the time when revolutionary youth solidarity with the anti-imperialist struggle was strong. What were Ghatak and Ray thinking with these films “on” Vietnam? Can they tell us anything of the times, the engaged role of film, the director as intellectual agitator, the politics of solidarity from afar? By evaluating the reception of historically focussed film from the perspective of the Bengali New Wave, I show how that cinema’s fascination with Vietnam evokes both much older folk traditions, yet now leads to a more worrying contemporary coda with the adaptation in 2019 of the old slogan by the Hindutva right to include Jai Ram.