Shashi (Abir Chatterjee) is not the ‘hero’ we’re used to seeing in mainstream cinema. He comes off as someone perpetually irate at the people around him, but it’s probably his powerlessness that gives way to his anger. The one and only doctor in a tiny hamlet in West Bengal, despite his best attempts, Shashi is never able to meet his own expectations. In the film’s first scene – he discovers a dead acquaintance, killed by a bolt of lightning. The man was on his way to find an educated groom for his teen daughter. More than anger, Shashi is disappointed how a life is lost in search of a 10th-pass prospect. 

Chatterjee’s dismayed face reminded me of Amitabh Bachchan in the first minutes of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand (1971). Before he became Bollywood’s angry young man, one could see embers of his disillusionment with the inequality around him. Similarly, Dr Shashi Kumar Das is trying to cure a society that isn’t merely afflicted with diseased bodies, but also diseased mind-sets. 

Some women in the village would rather suffer in closed rooms than be a topic of scandal for being treated by him. However, one of the best surprises of Suman Mukhopadhyay’s Putulnaacher Itikotha (The Puppet’s Tale) is that this is not merely a straightforward story of an educated, upright man patronising and reforming the ways of a rural India.

Based on the 1936 novel by Manik Bandopadhyay of the same name, set in a pre-independence India (it’s implied to be around the second world war), Mukhopadhyay’s film cuts both ways. As much as Shashi helps and tries to cure the village folk, he’s also eager to leave it behind. Multiple times, during the film, he tells anyone who would listen about his plans to leave for England in some time. He issues that caveat while treating his patients: “It’s only a matter of time…” 

Shashi is looking forward to setting up his practice in a place where he will be surrounded by people with his scientific temperament and progressive outlook on life. Alas, he will never leave this place. Bound between his sense of duty to the village folk, his aging father and imprisoned by his empathy, Shashi will never make it out of the village. 

Mukhopadhyay has said in interviews how he wanted to draw parallels between Shashi and the Bengali intellectual class – those who talk the talk, but rarely find the courage to walk it. It’s an interesting metaphor for how a certain class of Bengali society has found comfort in its self-flagellating existence. Shashi’s life, in a way, becomes a critique of middle-class Bengali nobility. 

Mukhopadhyay’s film comes at an interesting time, when upper-caste Hindu Bengalis – fiendishly protective about their heritage, language – have turned a blind eye as migrant labourers are discriminated against for speaking Bengali. Primarily because most of them are Muslims. For all their progressive values, the bhadralok’s Islamophobia is rather disappointing. 

Chatterjee is excellent in the role of the tentative protagonist, grappling between playing the knight in shining armour and someone defeated by his circumstances. In a world of simple certainties, his rigour of thought and self-doubt is seen as a weakness. But what sold the film to me was Mukhopadhyay’s chosen supporting cast surrounding Chatterjee, which is even better. 

Kusum (Jaya Ahsan), a neglected wife in the village, is far from the demure village belle we’re so used to seeing in such films. In fact, I found myself taken by the waft of jealousy, lust and power Ahsan brings to the screen when Kusum is introduced on screen, ignoring the calls of her mother-in-law while getting ready one morning. She brazenly flirts with Shashi, asserting her desires in front of a man too consumed by posturing in front of society to ever introspect his own feelings until it’s too late. 

The pandit in the village – played by Dhritiman Chatterjee – who seems like Shashi’s only ally at one point, despite his aversion to Western medicine, tells Shashi that his faith is weak (and therefore he is weak). It’s a striking line that underscores Shashi’s cynicism as a fault, reinforcing how science operates from a place of doubt; dogmatism can rely on unwavering faith. ‘Predicting’ his own day of death, the pandit makes a spectacle of his last day, becoming a messianic figure while Shashi remains a powerless bystander, preventing his compeer’s death, and puncturing this theatre of superstition. 

However, it is Kumud (Parambrata Chatterjee), Shashi’s friend from college, who twists the knife in even further. A jatra (Bengali folk theatre) actor, Kumud lives a nomad’s life – going from village to village, teasing Shashi’s inability to act on his ambitions to leave the village behind. He shows up in Shashi’s hamlet for a few days, performs, falls in love, marries and then leaves for good. It is implied that Kumud was the better student in college but he showed the courage to act on his ambition of becoming an actor. Meanwhile, Shashi remained a slave of his societal mask.

Luminously shot by cinematographer Sayak Bhattacharya, Mukhopadhyay’s film examines its protagonist, and a nation, at the crossroads of Eastern philosophy and Western skepticism. The commentary still holds for India and West Bengal in 2025 – tussling between an archaic belief system and being a spectator to the techno-fascism all around us. 

Like today’s liberals, the film mocks (and also empathises with) Shashi for being a captive of his ambivalence. By the end, everyone he is fond of, has either left the village or died. For a man who made peace with the inevitability of death, Shashi begins to look like the shadow of a corpse cycling down a mound.

*Putulnaacher Itikotha (The Puppet’s Tale) is playing in limited theatres 

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