I watched the Hindi film Newton last week. I’m not sure whether I actually watched it — I was so sleepy on the long-distance flight that it is possible I might have imagined some of it. As is common knowledge by now, Newton is a film about a young government official’s efforts to conduct a “free and fair parliamentary election” in a hostile environment, a space made hostile by the unfair treatment of the local people by the administrative and military forces of the Indian nation. Newton — a name the young man gives himself, after being teased by his friends for being the possessor of a name like Nutan Kumar — comes to a forest in central India to conduct a parliamentary election. It is what has been called a Maoist-hit region. Right from the beginning we are made aware that election day will be a farce. Everyone, including the audience, can sense this, but not Newton, who, fuelled by his sense of professional honesty and discipline, decides to conduct elections in a manner as instructed by the Election Commission.

The election site is a forest. Inside the forest, feared less for its wild animals than for Maoists supposed to be hiding (hiding, mind you, not really living) in it, is a school where the polling of 76 villagers will be conducted. Taking it as a given that none of the villagers would turn up to cast their votes, the local police officer-in-charge advises Newton and his team to not take the trouble to go to the school building at all. But Newton is adamant and so he walks eight kilometres with his team, which includes a clerk who is also a poet, and another man who says he agreed to come to this forsaken place because he wanted to experience a helicopter ride. The remaining person in this election supervisory team is a local, a tribal girl called Malko. Efficient and decorous, but not without personality, she tells Newton about the distrust of the tribes in the administration.

As I watched Malko, beautiful, dignified, graceful, educated much beyond her degree and the circumference of her means, I thought of another group of male city-dwellers coming to a forest and encountering a woman of the forest. That was in another film, Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri , made 47 years before Newton . Based on a novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay, it is the “story” of four men who decide to break out of the bondage of civilisation temporarily by taking a holiday in the forests of Palamu, in what is now Jharkhand.

I found myself comparing the journey made by four urban men to a jungle about half a century ago to the one made by three men to a forest. Yes, I have used “jungle” to differentiate it from the “forest” today — for there are no jungles any more (forest department, not jungle department, remember). In both the films we find the men encountering a local girl (belonging to the tribes).

It is in the study of the differences, however, that we also find a reflection of how the character of the forest has changed in India. The four Bengali men go to the forest not for banwaas — they are temporarily leaving civilisation and its rules. Said to be based on the real-life excursions that Gangopadhyay took with his poet-friends, Aranyer Din Ratri is carnivalesque. Newton and his team, which consists of a part-time poet on the verge of retirement from his bureaucratic job, have come to the forest with an obverse mission — to bring the parliamentary elections is to bring in a constitutional version of civilisation into the forest. Duli, the tribal girl with whom one of the Bengali men has sex, had almost no agency in the film — she is seen (and shown) as all body. Malko is a schoolteacher — she shows the men their homegrown cure for malaria (using ants, which she later teaches him to eat), and in a fantastic scene towards the end, she talks about the five senses and pointing towards her head, almost as an indictment of Newton’s bureaucracy-drugged brain, says, “And this, if you have this.”

It is not only this that has changed in the last 50 years in the Indian forests. The sign of joy and revelry, of celebration and life, that we’d chanced upon in Ray’s film has been replaced by fear and coercion. The men who danced in Ray’s film have turned into Maoists in Newton . There is a school but there are no students, only graffiti and dried fallen leaves. Both the films are made in languages recognised by the Indian State — Bangla and Hindi. As Malko reminds us, the students drop out because they are not taught in their mother tongue.

Even after half a century, the State has not tried to learn the language of the forests and its people.

 

BLINKSUMANA
 

 

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree;

Twitter: @SumanaSiliguri

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