Sword silences pen, but film finds a voice

Daniel Nelson

An exiled Indian artist, a banned Bangladeshi writer and a Persian cat are the heroes of a wistful film about the sadness of living in unwanted exile.

The opening credits describe

as a tribute to Indian painter M. F. Husain, who lived his last years in Doha and London, where he is buried, after receiving death threats in response to his nude portraits of Hindu gods and goddesses.

And the credits say it is inspired by another victim of intolerance: Taslima Nasreen, a Bangladeshi author and doctor who has lived in exile since 1994 because religious dogmatists didn’t like her feminist views and religious critiques.

The film doesn’t mention Nasreen and it’s not a biopic, but her presence hangs hauntingly over it.

Director Churni Ganguly captures beautifully the cultural dislocation of a Bengali in Sweden. The writer's ejection from Bangladesh in an attempt to placate street protesters is so sudden and swift that she is left bewildered and barely able to respond to the well-meaning but unimaginative kindness of the Swedish authorities, let alone adjust to the contrast between her fertile, febrile, colourful homeland and her austere, cold, monochrome new home.

Above all, she misses hearing and speaking Bangla, and talking to her cat. The white Persian Baghini (tigress) plays Nasreen’s real cat, Minu: an excellent performance. (“No animals were injured in the making of this film,” we are assured.) Baghini stands in loco parentis to Nasreen’s family and friends, from whom she has been forcibly separated.

Ganguly heightens the contrast between the cultures by playing much of the Bengali end for slapstick laughs, as the buffoon-like politicians and bureaucrats have absurd meetings about the politics of being seen to favour an exile by posting her cat or literally fall over themselves as they try to grab the foxy feline.
The mockery may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s basically a little light relief to the gloom of exile and Ganguly evidently feels that the administration deserves everything it gets for failing to face down noisy protesters.

It’s a touching film, with a defiant coda, and then a quote, perhaps to make the writer’s exile bearable: “It is ironical that a woman who has been honoured with universal citizenship by the UNESCO is banned, blacklisted and banished by her own country and has a price on her head.”

“The conflict is between those who value freedom and those who do not. Come what may, I will continue my fight for equality and justice … I will never be silenced.”

And does the real Nasreen like the film? "I feel relieved the film was finished and released in India,” she told The Times of India. “It is a victory for me. It's a political success."

•   Nirbashito (Banished) is showing at the London Indian Film festival at 8pm on 21 July at the BFI, Southbank and at 7pm on 22 July at Cineworld Wood Green

+  A rain-soaked love letter to India

blog comments powered by Disqus