The Bengali film Bohurupi, directed by Shiboprosad Mukherjee and Nandita Roy, has become one of the biggest all-time commercial films of Bengali cinema. With a box office collection of over Rs 16 crore and counting, the film, released on 8 October, is still running to packed houses at theatres in West Bengal, and has emerged as the third-highest grossing Bengali film of all time.
Bohurupi has also managed to earn more than Rs 5.5 crore from national multiplexes, an unparallelled feat for Bengali cinema. But an even greater feat for the film perhaps is the fact that director duo Mukherjee and Roy may have ended up giving Tollywood – the Bengali film industry – a hit-making formula: Ditch Kolkata-centric stories for stories from the rest of West Bengal.
It is a formula Tollywood should not gloss over, given the fact that the industry has been in a rut for a while with lacklustre performances of its big releases. Earlier this year, director Anurag Kashyap also lamented the current state of Bengali cinema, saying it has turned “ghatiya” (pathetic).
Curing the bhadralok hangover
Bohurupi is a cop and robber story about an honest policeman and a bank dacoit who uses his talent for disguise to pull off daring heists. Though the film features some of the top names in Tollywood, including Abir Chatterjee, Shiboprosad Mukherjee, and Ritabhari Chakraborty, the story goes into Bengal’s heartland to dig out an age-old tradition that Kolkata’s art and culture circles had first ignored and then forgotten.
Bohurupis are quick-change artistes who travel from village to village performing mythological skits and keep an ancient tradition alive.
“In no time, a Bohurupi artiste can change costume and become Parvati from Shiva or Ravan from Rama. With their garish makeup, colourful clothes and catchy skits, Bohurupis are still insanely popular in Bengal villages. But they have been given the short shrift by the Kolkata bhadralok who would rather watch a sanitised play at an urban theatre,” Satanik Pal, a doctoral candidate in comparative Asian studies at the National University of Singapore, told ThePrint.
Pal said it is interesting that mainstream filmmakers like Mukherjee and Roy would ditch the comfort of doing a Kolkata noir or an urban love story and write a film on a neglected art form from interior Bengal.
“The character of the Bohurupi in the film as well as those who aid him in the bank heists are all from Dalit and other lower castes. This is representative of the non-Kolkata bhadralok culture that a wider audience in West Bengal could identify with and hence flocked the theatres in large numbers,” he added.
Shiboprosad Mukherjee told ThePrint that the team spent months in the interiors of Bengal with real-life bohurupis and even had one of them sing songs for the film. This is not the first time though for Mukherjee and Roy to shift their cinematic gaze from the city to the rest of Bengal.
Their last directorial outing Raktabeej, released in October 2023, was set in a fictional village where Muslim radicals were planning to assassinate the president of India who had gone to his ancestral home for Durga puja celebrations.
Apart from attempting a subject like illegal infiltration which has become a political rallying point in the state, Raktabeej captivated audiences by the way it captured the beauty of the Bengali countryside. It became a runaway hit.
Another hit film from last year relied on the same formula. Pradhan, starring Bengali superstar and Trinamool Congress MP Dev Adhikari, released on 22 December 2023 and told the story of an honest cop fighting a corrupt system in the backwaters of north Bengal. The story of a fictional mofussil town brought more audiences to the theatres than many recent films centred around Kolkata.
Also read: After a long slump, Bangla film industry has a box office hit with Bohurupi
Numbers don’t lie
For senior entertainment journalist Sudip Ghosh, subjects of recent Bengali films have not just become confined to Kolkata, but the screen space has become limited to the drawing room. The trend, Ghosh said, was started by the legendary filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh. “From ‘Unishe April’ to ‘Chitrangada’, many of his films were shot within the four walls of a well-to-do South Kolkata household. And, they did work at the box office too”.
Filmmakers who came after Rituparno Ghosh tried to replicate the same formula. It no longer works. Ghosh said the Bengali audience is now bored of the South Kolkata drawing room.
Tollywood’s financial health has been a point of contention for a while. Film critic Bhaswati Ghosh, in a 2 February report for the Bengali daily Ei Somoy, compared the commercial performance of Tollywood with that of Bollywood and other regional industries.
Ghosh put out data that indicated that while Bollywood earned Rs 5,380 crore in 2023, followed by the Telugu (Rs 2,268 crore), Tamil (Rs 1,961 crore), and Malayalam (Rs 572 crore) film industries, Tollywood could not even reach Rs 100 crore in the whole year.
After a dismal 2023 and the first half of 2024, Bohurupi has come as a face saver for Tollywood. “Bohurupi has bridged the rural-urban divide. Both Kolkata audience and those from the rest of Bengal are pouring into theatres,” Ghosh said.
The hinterland may finally end up saving the Bengali film industry that is housed in Kolkata.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)