Suman Mukhopadhyay’s The Puppet’s Tale captures the turmoil of a doctor trapped between feudal traditions and modern ambition, reflecting the anxieties of a pre-independence India in transition.
Still from The Puppet's Tale.
Last Updated: 08.40 PM, Feb 04, 2025
SUMAN MUKHOPADHYAY's Putulnacher Itikatha or The Puppet’s Tale (part of the Big Screen Competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam this week) begins with a man on a boat, the twilight glistening in the swampy conditions surrounded by rural Bengal of the late 1930s. On the boat is Dr Shashi Bhuto (Abir Chatterjee), encountering his ancestral village and with it, death. “Everyone must face death someday”, his voiceover drones, insisting that he doesn’t, therefore, mourn. He lives a double life, one in his physical manifestation, as a doctor in a village in pre-Independence India, populated by people with little to no education and beset by all kinds of issues, from religious dogma, superstitions and lack of access to basic services amidst war in Europe and freedom struggle. His other life is in his head, his future he dreams of in a city, maybe London, as the affluent, posh doctor he wishes to be.
In many ways, The Puppet’s Tale — adapted from Manik Bandopadhyay’s 1936 novel of the same name — is a curious film. It can be placed in the context of a particular time in India as well as a particular period in Indian cinema. It is set during a transitional, commotion-filled phase in modern Indian history — less than a decade for independence from British rule—with the movement touching every corner of the country. The film intentionally refrains from registering any of that. In cinema terms, it is almost two decades before Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, which itself is a certain rural time capsule of new India, followed by forced migration towards busier parts of the country. Here, Shashi’s existential crisis takes precedence over India’s own. That’s not to say he is unbothered by the condition of a country that is just about incubating. His existential crisis eats away at him, he holds dreams of moving to London to be the doctor that he wants to be instead of toiling away treating the local villagers who are sceptical about his methods.
This underconfident, underserved India, more importantly, Bengal, and its accommodation for an educated, upper caste man from a feudal family who is caught between duty and aspiration is Mukhopadhyay’s focus, rendering his dilemma about his place in society against that of the country. There is one man who reads the newspaper for a coterie of men in the village, probably the only one who can read. He reads about the war creating rice shortage and Stalin’s movements in Europe. Shashi lives on his ancestral property, his father commanding all the feudal notions while he becomes increasingly weary of treating people who are either dying with no clinic nearby or by way of their dogmatic beliefs and superstitions.
Shashi finds some spiritual solace in visiting Jadab Pandit (Dhritiman Chatterjee), an elderly figure in the village who lives an austere life with his wife in what looks like a ruined manor. He also locks heads with Jadab, the rare local who has witnessed urbanity and whatever progress there is but claims that he is a village man and asks why we need Englishman’s science. Shashi is also haunted by a femme fatale, in the figure of Kusum (Jaya Ahsan), an ignored housewife who finds every reason to corner Shashi somewhere secluded and flirt with his stethoscope. Shashi’s façade of virtue makes him reject her advances, his woes only multiplied by his predicament of whether to be unattached while on duty or fully embrace the life in his village with everything it has to offer. Shashi is often framed in a silhouette against the golden hour, a shot Mukhopadhyay revisits multiple times, as if to say that Shashi’s life is at a sunset phase even as he waits for it to begin.
The Puppet’s Tale is about many things. Shashi can neither surrender to his dream and walk out, nor can he live peacefully accepting the good and the bad of staying back. He thinks people will reform overnight while he expects money from the poor villagers (who are leaving for the city in search of better prospects) and when they don’t pay, calls them “lowborn”, laying bare his legacy and caste status. The film then becomes a critique of the Bhadralok, the bourgeois tendencies of the Bengali of a certain era, which strangely would only continue beyond Indian independence in life as well as pop culture. Which at once makes The Puppet’s Tale grand and intriguing. This reading is ironically reinforced by having Dhritiman Chatterjee play a sort of godman, an actor known for playing confused but rational men in Pratidwandi and Padatik when he was young and more statesmen-like roles in his older avatar. Shashi is caught in a similar crossfire as India’s independence is uncertain, and so is his future but at the same time, he holds a guilty conscience for his seemingly charitable actions.
Two men on the opposite ends of the spectrum dare to hold a mirror to Shashi. One is Jadab, his preordained death becomes a spectacle and who in his deathbed tells Shashi that his mind lacks strength. A damning but accurate indictment. Shashi remains so indecisive that he loses everything and everyone — his dream of moving to London, Kusum, his already waning relationship with his father—not a good man but one who knows exactly what he wants. The other is Parambrata Chatterjee’s Kumud, an old friend of Shashi, who is now an artist. He is the exact opposite, living life impulsively one day at a time. He recites Macbeth, “Life is but a walking shadow”. Shashi is living proof. Even as he claims he doesn’t mourn and that death comes for everyone, he lives a forever tragedy.