Short Abstract:

'A Bid for Bengal' lays bare historical fault lines and visits frontal organizations that allowed Hindu nationalist politics to gain a foothold in West Bengal from 2019 to 2021. As resistance takes shape, one arrives at the immediate present marred with anxiety, yet not bereft of hope. *The filmmakers, Kasturi Basu and Dwaipayan Banerjee, will be present to take questions after the screening.

Long Abstract:

(NOTE: This documentary screening is supported by the Human Rights Thematic Group (hence Deborah's name automatically and erroneously populated into the filmmaker section). Please note also that the Human Rights TG has proposed a roundtable "Solidarity, and Social Inclusion in a Shrinking Discursive Space: Challenges for journalists and others in the media in India" with Kasturi Basu as one of the discussants.)

I have selected for theme, "Human Rights and Development" , but this would also fit with "Social solidarity, grassroots approaches, and collective action"

ABSTRACT:

How did Hindu nationalist politics find a foothold in West Bengal after all these decades? Using fresh and archival footage with personal family history, 'A Bid for Bengal' lays bare historical fault lines and visits the workings of frontal organizations in the Hindu right-wing network responsible for the recent political shift in West Bengal, in between witnessing two consecutive elections trails, from 2019 to 2021. As resistance takes shape, one arrives at the immediate present marred with anxiety, yet not bereft of hope.

**

Best Indian Documentary / Shubhradeep Chakravorty Memorial Award / CIDSFF 2022

Best Editing in Documentary / Kumar Talkies Award / IDSFFK 2021

Official selection competition - Film Southasia 2022, Kathmandu, Nepal

Official selection as closing film - Crossings online Film Festival 2022, Goettingen, Germany

Official selection competition - SiGNS Festival 2022, Muvattupuzha, India

Official selection competition - Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival (CIDSFF) 2022, Chennai, India.

Official selection competition - International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) 2021, Thiruvananthapuram, India.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT:

The recent phenomenal growth of Hindu-nationalist politics and communal polarisation in West Bengal - a region that saw a three-decade long rule of the Left Front headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - has intrigued many. Our film ‘A Bid for Bengal’ searches for an answer to this phenomenon.

Through this film we wished to tell the history of Hindu-nationalist politics in West Bengal from the distant past to the immediate present. By juxtaposing archival material with fresh footage from our family history, our film lays bare the old historical fault lines of a broken Bengal that made possible the current gains of the Hindu-nationalist project in a land divided by the 1947 partition. Partition separated West Bengal (India) from East Pakistan (which later became Bangladesh since 1971). Bengal was a land shared by nearly as many Hindus as Muslims; but today, seven decades after partition, both sides have increasingly become majoritarian community spaces where minority communities have been made to feel vulnerable. Can we trace this back to fault-lines in our fractured past?

The film visits cow-protection cells, Ram Navami processions, Hindu nationalist radicalization camps, the insides of BJP IT cells, and riot-torn landscapes, to bring to the fore the underbelly of the Hindu-nationalist project in West Bengal; in between covering two consecutive elections trails -- for the National elections of 2019 and the State Assembly elections of 2021. In the end, the film takes the viewer through an anti-fascist citizens’ campaign, to arrive at the immediate present marred with anxiety, yet not losing sight of hope born out of the quiet resistance of ordinary people against the politics of hate and intimidation.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS:

Kasturi Basu is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, writer, and editor based in Kolkata. By training, she is a physicist, an alumnus of Jadavpur University, University of Cambridge, and Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey. Her debut feature-length documentary ‘S.D.: Saroj Dutta and His Times’ (2018) won the 12th John Abraham award for the Best Documentary at the SiGNS Film Festival, Kerala, in 2018, and was screened at several prestigious documentary festivals including Film Southasia (Kathmandu), IDSFFK (Kerala) and the Kolkata People's Film Festival (KPFF).Kasturi is a founder-member of the community radio station, ‘Radio Quarantine Kolkata’.

Dwaipayan Banerjee is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, editor and researcher, based in Kolkata. He is an alumnus of Presidency College and Calcutta University. He was associate director, researcher and screenwriter for the award-winning feature-length documentary 'S.D.: Saroj Dutta and His Times' (2018).

Basu and Banerjee are founder members of several independent cultural and social collectives; namely, the ‘People’s Film Collective’, 'People's Study Circle' and ‘Humans of Patuli’. They are co-organizers of the annual Kolkata People's Film Festival (2014 - present). They have been organizers of the ‘No Vote to BJP’ campaign as co-conveners of the citizens’ platform, 'Bengal Against Fascist RSS-BJP'.

Basu and Banerjee edited the book, ‘Towards a People’s Cinema: Independent Documentary and its Audience in India’ (2018) published by Three Essays Collective, New Delhi. They also edit 'Pratirodher Cinema (tr. Cinema of Dissent), a Bengali journal on documentary cinema and counterculture, since 2014.