Bibhu Mohapatra is the quintessential Indian success story in the West. The New York-based, Odisha-born fashion designer whose claim to fame includes styling power lady Michelle Obama revisits Satyajit Ray's classic Mahanagar and his own long-cherished links with the beautifully chaotic Calcutta.
Mahanagar (1963)
"I have my own parallel relationship with the 'mahanagar'. My father studied in Calcutta, so every time I go there I try to look at Calcutta through his eyes. Whether it is Kalighat, Chowringhee, Park Street or Howrah, this city is always a process of discovery for me. The Bengalis have a drive to live. It doesn't matter what class or platform you belong to. Everyone is hustling and making their place. People go there with dreams and make it happen.
One such character is Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), Mahanagar's ambitious heroine. She's not a suffering housewife but actually a working woman who goes out to pursue her dream. Satyajit Ray sets her middle-class lifestyle and mores against the backdrop of the Bengali cultural heritage and a hint of the colonial past. The film talks about women finding their place and standing for themselves. It shows her relationship with her family which is the traditional side but, at the same time, Ray also places her firmly in the modern context.
Ray's movies explore human relationships, their place and surrounding. No filmmaker has depicted change or the need for change as well as he did. Take, for example, Mahanagar's post-Independence setting, a time when Calcutta and the rest of the country are on the threshold of change. Mahanagar doesn't have sprawling shots of the 'exotic' Calcutta but in essence, it captures the city's spirit.
Calcutta is big and chaotic but within that, you see how people co-exist. It is fluid, everyone finds their place eventually. When foreigners complain about its poverty and unhappiness I say: ‘Who says people are unhappy? They have their reality and have made peace with it'.
I was there in 2017 for the launch of Artemis [his fine jewellery collection], and remember driving through old haunts. It's amazing how Calcutta manages to remain the same, even as the whole world is in a constant flurry. With my entire family, we went to Arsalan and ordered literally everything on the menu. I later found out that Kewpie's on Elgin doled out the same smacking home-cooked Bengali cuisine and Flurys was still the go-to institution for breakfast. The streets are the same buzzing self and people are still happy to live in this chaos. When they say New York is a city that never sleeps, I say: 'Try Calcutta'. Of course, the only time a Bengali goes off to sleep is after a hearty meal of rice and fish curry."