National Award-winning filmmaker Kaushik Ganguly’s Palan is a sequel to Mrinal Sen’s Kharij, the story of a Bhadralok couple whose apathy is responsible for the death of a “servant” boy. The film won the jury prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. Aside from plain silliness, Palan is bloated with misdirected sympathy for the Bhadralok
Palan is billed as a sequel to Mrinal Sen’s Kharij (1982), which won the jury prize at the Cannes film festival in 1983, one of a handful of Indian films to ever compete in the main competition section for the Palme D’Or. A project of homage to Sen’s centenary year (2023), the events in Kaushik Ganguly’s sequel take place 40 years after the original, where a “servant boy” died in an upper middle class Bhadralok household comprising a husband and wife who both worked and a child only a bit younger than the domestic worker. In Palan, the Bhadralok child is a married adult (Jisshu Sengupta) and the working couple are retired and rotting in a Kolkata house that is literally falling apart.
Kharij, the term used in Indian court language to denominate that a case is closed, is a sharp, clear-eyed social procedural that unfolds like a thriller in the south Calcutta locality of Beltala where director Sen lived. At the end of the investigation, nothing happens to the couple. It is the early years of the Left Front government in Calcutta, after the revolution has been ‘won’. Sen, by then in his sixth decade, was in the angriest, yet most introspective and magnificent phase of his four-decade-long career. This is the phase when he made Ek Din Pratidin, Aakaler Sandhaney and Kharij, where he holds up the mirror to where the rot truly resides — in urban, educated so-called Bhadralok, people like us, himself included.
Sen underlines this by calling the couple, played by the actors Anjan Dutt and Mamata Shankar, by their real names on screen — Anjan and Mamata. Their family name? Sen. In an unusual cold wave, on the coldest day of the year, Mamata and Anjan wake up with a plan to take their son to the zoo and find that their “servant boy” Palan has died of carbon monoxide poisoning inside the windowless kitchen. But why was he not sleeping in his designated sleeping space–under the staircase of the house — each of the couple asks separately. “He was cold,” the landlord’s “servant boy” Hari answers. He also sleeps under the stairway. Through the film, we often see Hari staring silently as the events unfold, his presence like the ghost of Palan. Here is another boy who lives the same life as Palan. Whose face speaks that he knows it could so easily have been him in Palan’s place. Kharij uses silence superbly — segments of the film have zero background music, forcing us to confront what we are seeing on screen.
Early in the film, Anjan asks Mamata what gift he can get her — a frigidaire, a radiogram, a bank locker. A young servant-boy, 12 or 14 years old, Mamata says, to help her at home. “Someone who doesn’t ask for a high salary or eat too much or argue much,” Anjan says. This is a couple with disposable income for luxuries so clearly they are doing well, and they want a young boy in the way they might want an object—a fridge, a radiogram or a bank locker. And Palan? He comes from a village stalked by famine and drought. His father has brought him to work so he can eat two meals a day and send his salary of Rs 30 a month for them at home. The revolution is won, Sen is saying, and its triumph is lived on the backs of those who work for Rs 30 a month and made to sleep under the staircase.
“We used to let our earlier boy sleep in the living room but he stole things from the room and ran away,’ Anjan tells the police, on his own without being asked about Palan’s sleeping arrangements. The living room is unlocked for the police. The subtext is clear: It was likely locked to prevent Palan from sleeping there. Later in the film, Sen underlines this room’s availability again. The couple make a bed for the dead boy’s father in the living room when he arrives. “Palan slept in the kitchen. I shall also be there,” the tall, stalk-thin father says.
Why do people get children to work for them, isn’t it illegal, an elderly bystander says. ‘It’s illegal and immoral, but how do we manage without them,’ says a younger man.
Early in the film, Anjan asks Mamata what gift he can get her — a frigidaire, a radiogram, a bank locker. A young servant-boy, 12 or 14 years old, Mamata says, to help her at home. “Someone who doesn’t ask for a high salary or eat too much or argue much,” Anjan says. This is a couple with disposable income for luxuries so clearly they are doing well, and they want a young boy in the way they might want an object—a fridge, a radiogram or a bank locker. And Palan? He comes from a village stalked by famine and drought. His father has brought him to work so he can eat two meals a day and send his salary of Rs 30 a month for them at home. The revolution is won, Sen is saying, and its triumph is lived on the backs of those who work for Rs 30 a month and made to sleep under the staircase.
Mrinal Sen left us in no doubt about the Bhadralok couple’s complicity (and by extension his own) in the boy’s death. Kaushik Ganguly’s Palan, however, is soggy with Bhadralok self-pity. This story is about how the Sens, now retired and ailing, are forced out of their decaying tenanted home by a builder who does not shift them to a suitable flat while their home is rebuilt. Their son Pupai (for whom the late Palan had been employed) however resides in a well-appointed apartment in a luminous building with a live-in domestic worker, drives a car and has a working wife. Whether they could have helped finance their parents’ rented apartment is a valid question but leave that aside. What is clear is that the Sens are an upper-middle class family, able to afford several comforts, as Kharij had underlined so memorably with the question that Anjan repeats twice in the film. Frigidaire, radiogram, bank locker? “No, I want a boy servant,” Mamata had said.
“My situation is like Palan’s, no place to sleep,” Anjan says in this so-called homage, without irony. Palan was a domestic worker, instructed to sleep on the floor under the staircase. Anjan is a retired white-collar worker with a house full of books, and complete awareness of his legal rights as a tenant. This comparison could not be more misplaced.
Palan commits two especially shameless manipulations. The film reduces Hari — the other “servant boy” who slept under the stairs — to a cheerful, tail-wagging family handyman who turns up whenever the Sens need a hand with physical labour and errands outside the home. Apparently, he brims with affection for the couple who killed his boyhood colleague. In Kharij, the minor Hari is often shown quietly watching the Sens fumble through the police inquiry and turn on each other to apportion blame. We know he knows that they are wholly culpable.
The second distortion is Anjan’s stunning declaration that his landlord was responsible for Palan’s death because the house had poor ventilation. That the Sens took the blame for the death because the boy happened to sleep in their kitchen. But the couple in the original film actually went blame-free; that is precisely what the title Kharij indicates. Even though they had locked their living room, so that their minor domestic worker could not sleep there, and had an extra mattress tucked away that they never offered him. In the midst of an unusual cold spell, a boy only a couple of years older than their son made the fatal mistake of sleeping in the small, warm kitchen.
It’s a wonder that the original cast—Anjan Dutt, Mamata Shankar and Sreela Majumdar (in what would be her final film role)—agreed to perform here. Their presence bequeaths Palan its strongest feature: their competent performances. But surely they knew the distance between what was Kharij and what is Palan. Unless that was their reason: they wanted to underline the difference between a director who was unafraid to hold up the mirror to his class and find himself in it, and a director who would do anything to deflect the truth in the mirror.
This review essay was originally published on Moneycontrol dot com in September 2023