Suman Mukhopadhyay’s Putulnacher Itikatha adapts Manik Bandopadhyay’s classic novel with sensitivity and cinematic depth, bringing alive its conflicts of reason and superstition, desire and morality, tradition and progress for contemporary audiences. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri reviews it.  

Putulnacher Itikatha, directed by Suman Mukhopadhyay and based on Manik Bandopadhyay’s landmark Bengali novel, is a haunting exploration of desire, morality, superstition, and progress in 1930s Bengal. Featuring standout performances by Abir Chatterjee and Jaya Ahsan, the film situates Gaodiya’s intimate dramas against the shadows of war and famine, weaving themes of reason versus faith, tradition versus change, and longing versus restraint. With Sayak Bhattacharya’s evocative cinematography and Mukhopadhyay’s unhurried yet powerful direction, this adaptation refuses easy nostalgia, instead offering a timeless meditation on how individuals and communities struggle with modernity, memory, and moral choice.

Adapting Literature to Cinema

Adapting a canonical Bengali novel for the screen is a creative minefield. Stray too far from the source and you risk alienating purists, adhere too closely and you might lose cinematic vitality. Suman Mukhopadhyay has, of course, been here before. His debut feature Herbert (2005), based on Nabarun Bhattacharya’s cult novel, announced his arrival as a filmmaker capable of bridging literature and cinema with imagination and rigour. In theatre, he has tackled Chekhov, Brecht, Tagore, and Shakespeare. But Putulnacher Itikatha presents a particular challenge: to translate Manik Bandopadhyay’s internal, almost clinical dissection of human nature into a cinematic experience that breathes, aches, and unsettles.

Suman Mukhopadhyay manages the delicate feat of staying faithful to Manik Bandopadhyay’s essence while bending the material to his own meditative, at times unsettling, visual idiom. Published nearly ninety years ago, the novel has lodged itself into Bengali cultural memory through moments like Dr Shashi’s brusque question to Kusum: “Shorir, shorir! Tomar mon nai, Kusum?” (The body, the body, don’t you have a heart/soul, Kusum), a line as much about the eternal tug-of-war between body and mind as it is about the coded hypocrisies of desire. Mukhopadhyay stages this and other key exchanges with a deliberate, unhurried rhythm, allowing the tensions to seep in rather than explode.

The film’s opening image – river water merging imperceptibly with a cloud-heavy sky – sets the tone for a story where the surface calm is always shadowed by undercurrents. Into this stillness steps Dr Shashi (Abir Chatterjee, in what is among his finest performances), returning to Gaodiya village and immediately confronted with a death that is as symbolic as it is literal: a man and a banyan tree frozen mid-strike by lightning, nature itself staging an omen.

Themes of Desire, Tradition, and Change

Through Shashi’s gaze, we meet three central figures: Jadab Pandit (Dhritiman Chatterjee), the immovable guardian of orthodoxy; Sen Didi (Ananya Chatterjee), the much younger wife of an elderly kaviraj, whose beauty is both her armour and her undoing; and Kusum (Jaya Ahsan), vivacious yet marked by the loneliness of unfulfilled desire. Around them swirl smaller orbits: Moti (Surangana Bandyopadhyay), Kumud (Parambrata Chattopadhyay, in a delectable cameo), each bringing new frictions to the web of attraction, resentment, and shifting allegiances.

What distinguishes the film from a straight literary transposition is Mukhopadhyay’s layering of imagery and historical resonance. By moving the setting from the mid-1930s to 1941–42, he situates Gaodiya’s cloistered dramas against the encroaching spectres of the Second World War and the Bengal famine to come. A warplane sinking into the river in the final act echoes earlier motifs – the solitary firefly caught in Shashi’s pocket, the lightning-struck tree – suggesting that the personal and the historical are bound by the same inevitability of loss.

Set in 1930s Bengal, the narrative follows Shashi, who embodies reason and scientific progress, carrying the certainties of modern medicine into a world where disease is still countered with mantras, and social relations are dictated by feudal hierarchies and rigid custom. His return is not triumphant but quietly corrosive: he finds himself caught between his ideals and the stasis of village life. More importantly, as he is reminded again and again by other characters, he lacks the nerve, the courage, the will to leave the village.

The most compelling arc lies in Shashi’s interactions with Kusum, a woman whose loneliness and longing defy the neat moral codes of her community. Their dynamic crystallizes the film’s central theme: the struggle not merely between tradition and modernity, but between physical impulse and moral restraint, between emotional need and societal interdiction.

Around this axis, Mukhopadhyay weaves a dense tapestry of village life: the gossip and pettiness, the resistance to change, the quiet tragedies of unrealized lives. As in Bandopadhyay’s text, there are no pure heroes or villains here; only flawed, yearning individuals, moving like puppets to the strings of circumstance, caste, and culture.

In Shashi’s world, mortality is never far away: epidemics, poor sanitation, malnutrition. Yet the opposition he faces is not merely ignorance, but an entire worldview where the gods and ancestors, rituals and hierarchies, offer a sense of order that modern medicine cannot fully replace. The film understands this without condescension. Mukhopadhyay refuses to render the villagers as caricatures of backwardness; their resistance to Shashi is, in its own way, a defence of dignity and identity in the face of alien systems.

Abir Chatterjee’s Shashi is a quiet revelation. I have always admired the actor for what he can bring to a film if given the opportunity, as in The Royal Bengal Tiger, Abby Sen, Ami Joy Chatterjee, and Shri Swapankumarer Badami Hyenar Kobole, to name just a few. He strips away his Byomkesh and Sona-da charm here to reveal a man who is both principled and paralysed. His Shashi is an idealist who cannot entirely escape the inertia of his surroundings, a man capable of both compassion and cruelty, especially in his brusque rejection of Kusum’s desire.

Jaya Ahsan’s Kusum is the film’s aching heart, the soul of the film – playful, manipulative, vulnerable, and utterly aware of her precarious place in the social order. She carries the weight of a life circumscribed by gender and circumstance, but also pulses with agency in her moments of longing. Ahsan lets us see the human beneath the label of “fallen woman” or “desperate lover”; her Kusum is neither saint nor vamp, but an individual negotiating the small margins of freedom available to her.

Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Dhritiman Chatterjee (who lends Jadab Pandit’s stubbornness a kind of tragic dignity), and Ananya Chatterjee (conveying both sensual allure and the ache of lost power) fill out the supporting cast with lived-in authenticity, ensuring that Gaodiya feels like a real, breathing community rather than a backdrop for Shashi’s drama.

A Cinematic Experience Rooted in Reality

Visually, Putulnacher Itikatha is a period piece without the trappings of over-designed nostalgia. Sayak Bhattacharya’s cinematography captures the textures of rural Bengal – the monsoon-wet earth, the dappled light in courtyards, the oppressive stillness of summer afternoons – in a palette that feels rooted rather than prettified. He turns these motifs into visual memories: fireflies glimmering in a darkness thick with monsoon humidity, tree branches bending like roots in a disorienting inversion, the moon’s reflection on a pond half-obscured by a palm tree as voices float over it. There’s a tactility here that aligns with Bandopadhyay’s own unsentimental prose. What’s striking is how Mukhopadhyay avoids the temptation to “modernize” the narrative through flashy devices or overt political messaging. His direction trusts the material – and the audience – to register the resonances without overt handholding.

A literary purist might argue that much of Bandopadhyay’s psychological interiority – the thoughts and sensations that make the novel a pioneering work of Bengali realism – cannot be fully translated to film. And it’s true: cinema inevitably externalizes what prose can keep private. But Mukhopadhyay compensates by leaning on the performances and mise-en-scène to suggest inner states. The silences, the glances, the charged absences of touch become as eloquent as any monologue.

He also resists the lure of romanticizing Shashi as a lone rational saviour. This is crucial. In both the novel and the film, Shashi is not there to “fix” the village; he is there to live in it, and to confront, often uncomfortably, how it changes him as much as he changes it. This refusal to turn the narrative into a morality play keeps it honest to the author’s original vision.

In an era when cinematic adaptations of classics often feel like exercises in heritage-branding – designed for festivals, awards, or nostalgic consumption – Putulnacher Itikatha stands apart. It is neither embalmed in reverence nor dressed up for modern taste. Instead, it engages with the text as a living work, alive to its contradictions and its enduring questions. The battle between reason and superstition, progress and tradition, is hardly a historical footnote; it plays out daily in our politics, our healthcare, our personal relationships. In that sense, Gaodiya is not just a village in 1930s Bengal. It is a mirror, reflecting the compromises and conflicts of any community negotiating change. In interviews, the director has pointed out how relevant this conflict remains. Nearly a century later, India is still grappling with the tug-of-war between entrenched values and the urgencies of progress. What makes Putulnacher Itikatha potent today is not just the obvious clash between science and superstition, but the subtler ways it questions the compromises we make, sometimes willingly, to coexist within our social ecosystems.

This is not an easy watch in the conventional sense. It is measured, sometimes almost stubbornly so, refusing melodramatic release. It demands audience attention. But it is precisely this patience, this willingness to inhabit the stasis and the small shifts that gives the film its haunting power. Not many Bengali films of late can claim to do that. This is not a film of narrative swerves but of slow revelations. It lingers in the spaces between impulse and restraint, in the long shadows cast by tradition and history. By the time the final flames of the downed warplane light up the river, Mukhopadhyay has brought his “puppet’s tale” full circle, rendering it less as a period piece than as a meditation on how desire, death, and the inexorable pull of the past keep us tethered, even as the world outside shifts towards catastrophe.

For those who know the novel, the film offers a chance to see its themes refracted through another medium, stripped of literary nostalgia. For those encountering the story for the first time, it may be a bracing introduction to the moral and emotional ambiguities of Manik Bandopadhyay’s world. Either way, it confirms that the dance of the puppets – between reason and belief, desire and restraint, self and society – is as intricate, as painful, and as relevant as ever.