Far from the madding crowd, the technology and the intellectual ferment of urban life, in a lonely flag-cabin of a far-flung and idyllic Bengal village, live two men who endlessly pursue their favourite occupation of wrestling. Nemai, the signalman, and Balaram, the gateman, beat the boredom of their loneliness by grappling with each other in joyous rivalry. The village, largely populated by tribals, has a Christian pastor who ministers his small flock of converts, besides serving the leprosy patients of the area. This widower's only family is an adopted seven-year-old, Mathew. Also populating this serene landscape are a group of dwarfs who pass by the village every morning on their way to work, and a troupe of traditional masked dancers who perform in the village.
This world of contentment and tranquillity, created with the masterly brush of filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta in his latest movie, Uttara, is meant to be shattered by the forces of intolerance and evil.
While the likes of Deepa Mehta get embroiled in controversies let loose partly by their own publicity machinery, before the first frame is even canned, Dasgupta is more intent on filming as art. So, he unobtrusively packed off with his unit to a remote village of Purulia district in West Bengal, made infamous by the as-yet unexplained air-drop of arms in 1995. The story of Uttara has explosive contemporary connotations, and it was important in these party-politicised times that the filming at least be a low-key affair.
Remaining strictly within the genre of the non-narrative poetic style that he has mastered, the internationally acclaimed filmmaker has emerged from Purulia with a work that condemns both religious fundamentalism and the callous human response to the sheer beauty of life. To drive home his point, Dasgupta draws from a real-life very-recent incident that rocked India's claims to tolerance: the burning of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons in Orissa. But the film itself is based on a short story of the same name by the late Bengali novelist Samaresh Basu. With producers reluctant to finance a film that had all the ingredients of controversy, the director himself produced the project with some Swiss assistance.