The rebel has left the building:The legacy of Nabarun Bhattacharya

A still from the movie Herbert, an adaption of his novel by the same name (Courtesy: Suman Mukhopadhyay

When filmmaker and theatre director Suman Mukhopadhyay met him for the first time in the mid-1990s, he was struck by how mild Bhattacharya was as a person. “I had just read Herbert and had expected him to be a different person. More sharp-tongued maybe, like his writing,” says Mukhopadhyay, who has made three films based on Bhattacharya’s works — Herbert (2005), Mahanagar@Kolkata (2009) and Kangal Malsat (2013). Like Bhattacharya, Mukhopadhyay earned the wrath of the ruling government for adapting Bhattacharya’s works for the big screen. In 2005, an adaptation of Herbert was refused a screening by the then Left Front government at the state-owned Nandan theatre, while last year his adaptation of Kangal Malsat was refused a certificate by the local revising committee of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) for its portrayal of contemporary Bengal politics. “He was used to such things. He tirelessly raised his voice against the establishment. These were minor issues for him,” says Mukhopadhyay.

Bhattacharya’s son Tathagata, a journalist based in Delhi, mentions how his father found it distasteful to fraternise with any political party. “Though he felt writers should be intensely political beings, he was against attending shows on news channels and events organised by political parties. He felt a writer’s work is to write,” says Tathagata. He was also disillusioned with the contemporary literary scene of Bengal. “Baba felt the writers are stuck in a rut. They haven’t opened their minds to new things. My father was a voracious reader, you could talk to him about the current political scenario in Ukraine as well as the ancient gardening technique of the Egyptians,” says Tathagata.

Nabarun Bhattacharya with his wife (Source: Tathagat Bhattacharya)

Filmmaker Q was impressed by Bhattacharya at their first meeting itself. “I had read Nabarunda’s works right after college. I don’t think that was the right time to read his work because I couldn’t fully grasp its depth. However, I came back to him later in life and realised how he has seeped into the deepest recesses of my mind,” says Q. When Q met Bhattacharya for the first time about two years ago, he had already been diagnosed with cancer. “I went to meet him as a fan and then decided to make a film on him. I wish we had more footage of him when he was healthy. My priority was to document his life and career,” says Q.

An unfinished novel and countless ideas is what Bhattacharya has left behinf, a fact that his son Tathagata rues. “He was also writing the last instalment of the story for our magazine Bhashabandhan,” says Tathagata.