‘Cyclone Asani’: Almost 50 Years Ago, Satyajit Ray’s ‘Ashani Sanket’ Depicted Not Nature’s Wrath But Man-Made Tragedy

Bhubaneswar: The well-marked low-pressure area intensified into a depression over southeast Bay of Bengal and adjoining south Andaman Sea on Sunday. If the system intensifies into a cyclonic storm, it will be called ‘Cyclone Asani’, a name given by Sri Lanka. It means ‘Wrath’ in Sinhala. Nature’s wrath.

While ‘Cyclone Asani’, if it forms, is unlikely to live up to its destructive name, almost 50 years ago, in a film set in Bengal, Academy Award winning director Satyajit Ray showed the unimaginable scale of human tragedy in a namesake film.

That film, made in 1973, was Ashani Sanket. Ray’s film wasn’t about the wrath of a devastating cyclonic storm.

Told through the eyes of Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays a Brahmin priest who has recently come to live in a village in Bengal with his wife, played by Bangladeshi actress Bobita, the film is based on Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s novel of the same name, set against the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 that claimed the lives of more than five million people.

When Soumitra, who plays Gangacharan Chakraborty, and Bobita, who plays Ananga, arrive in the village, there is no shortage of food. But as the film progresses, the village confronts the grim reality of shortage of rice, and other food items.

Unscrupulous hoarders resort to blackmail. The village men resort to looting and rioting. The village women eat snails from ponds and walk miles into the forest to collect wild potatoes.

But in Ashani Sanket, Ray depicts Nature as beautiful and tells audiences that the famine was not the work of an angry Nature but was entirely manmade.

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