“Rasta ghaat dekhe mone hochchhe, Kolkatay eto lok eto more-tore?”/ “Who can tell by the sight of the streets that there are so many deaths in Kolkata?” In Satyajit Ray’s “Seemabaddha” (1971), we see a world where a great deal of effort is made to hold together a Calcutta that was exploding in the 1970s. Zizek posits: “Subjective violence is seen as a perturbation of the normal, peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this normal state of things.

Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.” This means that what is objective violence is understated, implied, and seemingly tranquil. At the same time, subjective violence is an unmeasured attack on this false state of peace that is a tool to oppress the masses. As the first peasant insurgency post-Indian independence, the Naxalbari movement used subjective violence to put an end to objective violence.

The movement had some objectives, which included the confiscation of weapons and excess land from landlords. What emerged as a peasant revolution soon invited the hands and minds of the youth of Calcutta. If the uprising can and ought to be seen as a rural peasant uprising at its inception, the involvement of leaders like Charu Majumder made it affirmatively urban, youth-centric.

As the youth posed a threat to the workings of the state machinery, the state machinery in turn deployed violent measures to quell their idea of violence. From 1970, there were mass arrests of suspected youths from villages or cities. Those who were remotely connected with these youth were brought to the police station for questioning and even had to face brutal police torture.

The words with which the essay begins are by Dolonchapa, wife of the protagonist Shyamalendu Chatterjee. She directs this question to her sister, Tutul, who has just arrived from Patna. The question reflects the self-satisfaction of having politics obliterated from the streets and, by extension, from the lives of people like Shyamalendu, who center their life around the aspiration of social ascension with foreign companies like Hindustan Peters working as wind beneath their sails.

The film begins with Shyamalendu introducing the pressing question of unemployment, but he quickly changes his course by making it very clear to the spectators that he is far from being ‘unemployed’, unlike his predecessor Siddhartha (“Pratwindwandi,” 1970). He introduces himself as the Sales Manager of the Fan Division of Hindustan Peters and is quick to inform that all his thoughts are devoted to his company. New urban prosperities in Calcutta presented to the middle classes a host of domestic comforts and ornaments.

Devoid of the upheavals, Shyamalendu’s Calcutta is this city of beauty parlours, fancy cafes, premium clubs, and the race-course. Even the rhetoric of the film is replete with allusions to this social aspiration, where the pressing issues of unemployment and the Naxalbari movement cannot be addressed. After Tutul reaches the flat of the Chatterjee’s, she is given a tour of the house by her sister Dolonchapa.

While standing in front of the window, with the cityscape in view, Dolonchapa says to her sister that the noises of gunshots and bombs are a regular occurrence here. When Tutul comments that it looks peaceful now, she is quick to comment that it is because they stay on the seventh floor. According to her, the higher floors are better for the comparatively lower infestation of insects and dust.

The simultaneous mention of the placement of their abode high above the ground and the attempt of the upper-class Chatterjees to keep the revolution at bay, like the mosquitoes and flies, suggests how far they have been taken from the realities of the political upheaval by the upward mobility in the social ladder. Also Related: 10 Best Films Dealing with Toxic Work Culture If upper- and middle-class Calcutta congratulated itself on shunning the revolutionary upheavals that shook Calcutta in the 1970s, it should not be presumed that the revolution entirely disappeared from the city. In many senses, the revolution remained and reared its head and made its presence known.

In the film, the gunshots are heard, and the reverberations loom large in the Chatterjees’ vacant drawing room. In the other sense, it is through the arrival of Tutul, Shyamalendu’s sister-in-law, that the revolution makes its appearance. From the point of her arrival, Tutul is invested in the political upheavals in Calcutta.

She wants to know if Shyamalendu is acquainted with the revolutionaries. When Shyamalendu asks her jokingly if the purpose of her visit is to study the revolutionaries, she instantly remarks that the intention is rather to study a non-revolutionary. Shyamalendu is not the revolutionary element in the film. Matching the spectral presence of the revolution, it is the lover of Tutul, a young revolution