Writer-director Ranjan Ghosh’s Adamya (The Unbroken) is nothing short of a marvel, writes critic Saibal Chatterjee. Set in the Sunderbans, the political thriller follows a fugitive rebel confronting power, ideology, and survival.

Portrait of a feisty rebel in a swampy labyrinth: The film, a political thriller that wastes no breath, is lean, razor sharp and laser focused.

Set in the Sunderbans and shot entirely in natural light, or in its absence, Adamya is about a young rebel who will neither be tamed nor be reined in. Akin to a matchstick that aspires to burn like the sun, he is up against the firepower. It may be a losing battle, but he will fight the good fight no matter what.

Depending on what one’s political stance is, the ‘unbreakable’ protagonist, Palash, a twenty-something boy on the run after a failed attempt to assassinate a minister, is a dangerous malcontent who must be weeded out at all cost or an inspired renegade worthy of our attention and support.

Adamya, which is now in its fourth week in cinema halls in Kolkata, is a hyper-indie film shot by a skeletal crew. It made it to the multiplexes against all odds. That it is holding firm a month on is no mean feat.

Performance, Cinematography and Sound

Powered by a splendid lead performance by Aryuun Ghosh – he is in every frame – and marked by brilliant cinematography (by first-timer Arkaprabho Das) and an evocative soundscape, the film quickly sucks the audience in and sustains its grip all the way through

Adamya, Ghosh’s fifth film, is produced by the director himself along with Bajranglal Agarwal and filmmaker-producer-distributor Anjan Bose (whose Aurora Film Corporation is India’s oldest surviving studio), and presented by Aparna Sen, whose Iti Mrinalini (2010) Ghosh co-wrote.

The interlinked matchstick/sun metaphor could sum up the film itself. Adamya is a flashlight that has burst through the darkness that envelopes much of contemporary Bengali cinema as well as a streak of lightning that could illumine the path for Kolkata’s indie filmmakers labouring away in the shadows and producing occasional brilliance.

Poetry, Politics and Resistance

To create the context for Palash’s confrontationist worldview, Ghosh employs a poem by revolutionary poet Sukanta Bhattacharya, whose Deshlai Kathi (Matchstick) turns into a rousing battle cry, and lines written by Naxalite poet Murari Mukhopadhyay, who looks for the heat of the sun “to light up the darkened forests”.

Adamya is a portrait of a fugitive as a young man so unwaveringly committed to a cause that he thinks nothing of making light of the grave risks involved in his endeavour. The minimalist cinematic project has a single principal character and sparse dialogue. The minister who escapes the assailant’s gunshots is only heard, not seen. Palash’s mother, too, is (except for one sequence) only a voice at the other end of a phone call.

In the absence of conventional conversations, Adamya employs several other layers of communication to convey piece together Palash’s story as well as debate the morality of the battle he wages against exploitative and deceitful politics. We hear the opinions of citizens and activists discussing oppression and resistance and the self-congratulatory speeches of the politician Palash failed to kill.

Palash’s own conversations with his seamstress-mother, whose handkerchief he has mistakenly brought along, and the voice of his conscience reflected in ‘exchanges’ with a dead comrade add to the flow of information.

Completing the picture are news updates on airwaves about the assassination attempt, the accidental death of a sub-inspector (whose widow is also interviewed by a broadcaster) and the progress of the investigation.

A Stark Visual Aesthetic

It isn’t, however, its technical brilliance and its strikingly effective score by Avijit Kundu that sets Adamya apart from Bengali films of the day. Its adherence to a stark visual aesthetic shorn of frills that makes it the film that it is. The protagonist, with fire in his belly, wants to burn down a rotten political system that breeds greed and inequality, perpetrates systemic violence and exploitation and thrives on oppressing the powerless in the name of development.

The two poets Adamya invokes, like Palash, were young revolutionaries. Both died young – Bhattacharya at age 20 of tuberculosis three months before the Partition; Mukhopadhyay, at 26, gunned down along with 15 others in Hazaribagh when they attempted a jailbreak in 1972. Palash is no older than the latter and certainly no less obdurate.

In Deshlai er Kathi (the poem Adamya cites), Bhattacharya wrote: “I am a tiny matchstick/So insignificant that I might not catch your eye/Yet beware I have gunpowder on my tip/In my bosom burns an irrepressible urge to ignite.”

Mukhopadhyay’s poem, an ode to a different kind of love, opens with “When in love, do not become the moon/Come forth as the Sun/I will take along its heat/And light up the darkened forests.”

A Fugitive in the Sunderbans

Running from the fire that he has set off, Palash flees towards the forests and swamps of the Sunderbans. His hiding place is a squalid, abandoned mud hut in need of a thorough clean-up – a microcosm for the nation at large. He gets down to work immediately, meticulously setting things in order so that the space becomes habitable.

Palash has Bhagat Singh’s face tattooed on his chest. His leader calls him occasionally to give information and instructions. But he is entirely on his own for the most part, with frugal meals being left at the doorstep by somebody neither he nor the audience sees.

Stepping out only to bathe in a stream or to visit a village tea shop where he encounters live examples of the very distortions that he is fighting against – a young servant-boy who should ideally be in school and a bunch of goons (with political connections) who extort money from the eatery.

He reads, solves crossword puzzles and sketches a falcon that takes shape bit by bit, its wings spread across two pages of a scrapbook. The natural world around him goes on unhindered as the powerful become more powerful.

Cawing crows, crowing cocks, chirping birds and crickets, clapping house lizards, hooting owls and buzzing cicadas – the most powerful of beings – make up the soundscape in a world where a bright young human is a hunted animal.

As danger creeps closer, Palash crawls through the forest undergrowth and slithers through slush to avoid being detected. The soundtrack and the background score heighten the anxiety and uncertainty that surround the absconding man. The feeling of unease seeps out of the screen and causes deep discomfiture. One can almost smell the swampy estuary that Palash looks to find a way out of but sinks deeper and deeper into.

A Film That Gets Under The Skin

That is where the film’s triumph lies. It gets under one’s skin. It disturbs and provokes. Adamya is fiery and tender, edgy and emotive, dispiriting and defiant all at once. Not an easy watch that is not to be missed.

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