Mrinal Sen’s Matira Manisha ( Two Brothers , 1966): A Forgotten Odia Film

In his first film made outside Bengal, Mrinal Sen adapts Kalindi Charan Panigrahi’s most well-known novel, Matira Manisha , into a film of the same name in 1966. He makes potent and unapologetic use of melodrama to reinvent the story of two brothers’ familial strife over inherited land. Through the narrative of a fight between two brothers – one striving to preserve the joint family structure and traditional values, while the other yearns to embrace ‘modernity’ – Sen brilliantly harnesses the connection of the personal with the political. However, the politics and aesthetics in Matira Manisha , the novel and its film adaptation, exhibit ideological contradictions. The film was never properly released in Odisha, although it garnered appreciation at film festivals. Ironically, the cultural gatekeepers of film and literary magazines have alleged that the film portrays an anti-naturalistic narrative vis-à-vis the novel. And this film remains marginal within Indian film academia as well. Its conditions of production and reception reveal many facets of the history of Odia cinema, and they also inform a broader understanding of Mrinal Sen’s corpus.