Visarjan ki Kahaani

In the film Kahaani, Sujoy Ghosh has poured his heart out in compiling, in the crucible of his mind, a great narration of homage to womanhood, which Vidya Balan, unforgettably, has incarnated.

Homage also to the city of Kolkata, in its visceral exposure: warm, palpitating, alive, despite continuing decay and malfunction. Homage to Bengali pride in the only Renaissance this country has experienced and enriched itself by, and now lost, allowed to decompose and become compost. Homage to the unashamed language of Bengal, in Bengali and Hindi.

The film's shortcomings, arising from a too-complex, at times unbelievable, and alien plot, have been deftly handled by Sujoy's use of multiple time-lapse montages of Kolkata street-life, people going about their routine work, walls, trams, busses, taxis; glaring, gaudy posters, tea stalls, and life bursting at the seams so rapidly and, sometimes, in vertical strips of overlapping events. They serve to  shake off the concentration of the viewer from the story-line. This is pardonable in view of the overall excellence of crafting of the film.

For such an extraordinary artistic expression, I am unable to reconcile with the plebian title, Kahaani. The whole story is about the variegated evil that pervades us, and its destruction, which all of us, in our collective consciousness, long for. There can be just only one, and only one, name for it: Visarjan (Visarjan in Sanskrit, is immersion, the winding up, the extirpation, the end).

Please also peruse Kahaani: A heart-pounding work of staggering creativity, by Trisha Gupta.