Bilet Pherat (1972)

Noted critic Das Gupta’s critically acclaimed solo feature reworks the theme of one of the first Bengali films, Dhiren Ganguly’s Bilet Pherat (1921) satirising colonial India’s ‘foreign-returned’ youth. The film tells three separate short stories, all written by the director and featuring young men who prove unsuccessful in getting their idealism to work in present-day India. The best known of the three, Rakta, was later re-issued as a separate film. In it, a young man (S. Chatterjee) who returns to Calcutta from Oxford University is forced by the conservatism of his family to quit his job as lecturer and then his job as executive in a British firm. He rebels and starts his own business, converting animal blood into fertiliser, but loses that as well when it is taken over by multinational interests. The film combined fiction with documentary sequences, which continued Das Gupta’s fascination with Calcutta first in evidence in his b&w documentary Portrait of a City (1961) using the remarkable camerawork of Barin Saha.