Is Bengali cinema losing its rootedness?

A mountain of refuse rises along Kolkata’s eastern edge. Plastic sheets tremble in the wind as men and women navigate its shifting slopes, picking through waste with the practised attentiveness of people who know the terrain by heart. Children weave between the mounds. The Bengali spoken here carries the cadences of different homes, migrations and lives shaped by labour and survival.

This is Dhapa, Kolkata’s largest landfill. For months, filmmaker Ishaan Ghose, whose films include Jhilli (2019) Morichika (2025), wandered through the dumpyards without a script, a camera or even a clear idea of the film he might make. “It was a strange irony. Just a few kilometres away from Bengal’s cultural hub was this completely invisible world, and hardly anyone knew it existed,” he says. The irony extends beyond Dhapa. What happens when a culture becomes so accustomed to looking at itself through a handful of familiar images that it begins to mistake them for the entirety of Bengal?

For decades, Bengali cinema drew strength from its particularity: the textures of its speech, the anxieties of its middle classes, the politics of its time and the lives unfolding beyond the city. Today, contemporary filmmakers Ishaan Ghose, Ashish Avikunthak and Indrasis Acharya believe that specificity is thinning out. Kolkata increasingly stands in for Bengal; familiar genres crowd out lived realities; language loses some of its density. Their diagnoses differ, but their central question is the same: when cinema stops looking closely at the world around it, what remains of its cultural identity?

A language that makes you listen

Ashish Avikunthak’s cinema offers little of the familiar Bengali imagery audiences might expect. In his films, ancient rituals unfold in long, austere takes; naked bodies resist conventional cinematic framing; and dhrupad, including the music of rudra veena maestro Ustad Mohi Bahauddin Dagar, inhabits images that seem to emerge from another time.

Ashish, who shoots on film stock and is interested in the philosophical weight of an image, deliberately resists the comforts of conventional cinematic storytelling. His Bengal exists somewhere between history and myth, between what a culture remembers and what it has forgotten how to name.

The Bengali language spoken in his films, steeped in sadhu bhasha (formal Bengali), can sound unfamiliar. “I think what has happened with the Bengali language is that it has become highly simplified over the last hundred years. In the process, it has lost what I believe is its rootedness,” he says.

For Ashish, this is not merely about vocabulary changing with time. “I wasn’t trying to revive an older Bengali. I wanted to create a new linguistic register that allows us to think differently,” he explains. “This is not the language that was used earlier, nor is it contemporary Bengali as we hear it today. It is a created language. That’s why it acquires density. That’s why it becomes difficult.”

For Ashish, rootedness cannot be restored by inserting more symbols of Bengal into a film. It requires interrogating how people speak, see and understand themselves.

“I’m not interested in national thinking or even regional thinking. I’m interested in civilisational questions,” he says. His films therefore do not return Bengal to audiences in a familiar form. They make it unfamiliar again, asking what survives when beliefs change, rituals outlive their meanings and language loses ways of thinking that once seemed indispensable.

Across Rati Chakravyuh (2013), Kalighat Fetish (1999), Vakratunda Swaha (2010) and Kalkimanthankatha (2015), Ashish treats ritual, myth and oral tradition not as picturesque details but as fragments of a civilisational order. His films ask what knowledge survives in gestures, sounds and forms of speech long after their original meanings recede.

For Ashish, his films are artefacts, fragments of history. For the viewer, their symbols, music and motifs become tools of excavation. He hands over the film as if to say: “Now go, decipher.”

The Bengal beyond the frame

If Ashish searches for rootedness in language and civilisation, Ishaan looks towards the people and places Bengali cinema has overlooked.

“Bengali cinema should not be just about Kolkata and its people. From the northern tip of Bengal to the Sundarbans, the State is incredibly rich and still not explored enough for us to truly recognise what Bengali cinema can be,” he says.

Kolkata’s trams, cafés, crumbling houses and bookshops have supplied Bengali cinema with a dependable visual vocabulary, but the city is more than its familiar cinematic image.

Ishaan prefers to enter unfamiliar spaces without deciding in advance what they must mean. For his film Jhilli (2021) , Ishaan spent months at a dumpyard without an agenda. “I simply fell in love with the people there. Only after they accepted me did the film begin to emerge,” he recalls.

There is a difference between filming a marginalised community to illustrate a predetermined argument and spending enough time with its members to discover what their lives might reveal. For Ishaan, place is not scenery. It determines the rhythms of a story, the relationships within it and the language through which its characters inhabit the world.

“I like treating dialogue almost like a soundtrack— thinking about its rhythm, its frequencies and how it flows with the images and the music,” he says.

A contemporary Kolkata film, he argues, cannot plausibly speak in a single, polished Bengali voice. Its multilingualism must reflect the people who live and work in the city, shaped by migration, occupation and social circumstance.

His interest extends to young people building lives in difficult circumstances, as well as Bengal’s indigenous communities, whose relationship with Nature he believes offers lessons for modern society. These are worlds that rarely occupy the centre of mainstream Bengali cinema.

“You can immediately tell when a film is rushed or inauthentic. As a filmmaker, you have to devote yourself completely to the world you’re building,” he says.

His assessment of the industry is blunt: “I feel Bengali films are not rooted anymore. Stories and characters don’t feel real at all, and compared to world standards, technically we’re light years behind. Filmmaking is craftsmanship, and that’s the weakest point in Bengali cinema right now.”

Where is the timestamp?

Indrasis Acharya is known for films like Bilu Rakhosh (2018) , Goodby Mountain (2025) , and Niharika (2024). His concern is less with geography or linguistic density than with what cinema chooses to remember about its own time. He sees a wider erosion of intellectual and cultural seriousness, a growing disparity between popularity and achievement.

“Our shilpa sahitya charcha has taken a back seat. We are only thinking about what to wear, what to eat,” he says, referring to Bengal’s tradition of engagement with art, literature and ideas.

For Indrasis, cinema should be part of that conversation. A film ought to leave behind evidence of the society that produced it, allowing future audiences to reconstruct its anxieties, aspirations and contradictions. “So many Bengali thrillers are being created one after the other. None of them reflects our society, its events, or its socio-economic structures. Nothing comes out of it,” he says. He is particularly frustrated by the formulaic murder mystery: a relative is killed, a detective investigates, the culprit is arrested, and the story ends. “How does it reflect our society?” he asks.

His argument is not that commercial entertainment is inherently shallow. He points instead to Pushpa: The Rise (2021), Sukumar’s Telugu blockbuster about the illegal red sandalwood trade. Indrasis outlines, “In Pushpa, they are showing the illegal trade of red sandalwood. Which is a reality. This, therefore, puts a time stamp on the film, making it rooted and reflecting the times it is a product of.”

Rootedness does not require solemnity or turn every film into a sociological treatise. Even a thriller can illuminate class, money, ambition and power. What matters is whether reality shapes the story or merely serves as its backdrop.

Indrasis fears that audiences accustomed to formulaic storytelling may become less receptive to films that challenge them, creating a cycle in which filmmakers have little incentive to experiment.

His proposed measure of a film is deceptively simple: will it tell someone, 50 years from now, something meaningful about the time in which it was made?

The three filmmakers approach rootedness differently. Ashish asks what happens when language loses its capacity for complex thought; Ishaan asks who remains invisible when cinema confines itself to familiar geographies; Indrasis asks what a film preserves of its time. None calls for a return to a golden age. Their concern is that familiarity has become a substitute for observation.

The way forward may not lie in making Bengal more recognisable, but in allowing it to become more fully visible. A cinema rooted in its time must be willing to listen to unfamiliar voices, inhabit uncomfortable spaces and look beyond the stories it already knows how to tell. Otherwise, it risks becoming a portrait of a culture that exists largely in its own imagination.