‘Ekta Daak Aasa Darkar’: Docu revisits the many worlds of broadcaster Pankaj Saha
Times of India | 7 August 2025
Kolkata: One of the greatest challenges in making a documentary about a multi-faceted talent lies in providing essential information without overwhelming the audience with unnecessary details. Dibyendu Porel's 88-minute docufilm ‘Ekta Daak Aasa Darkar', screened at Nandan on Wednesday and organised by the Forum for Film Studies and the Allied Arts, offers a lyrical exploration of poet and broadcaster Pankaj Saha's life, poetry, philosophy and legacy.
Unlike many talking-head projects, this documentary presents a pleasant identity crisis that refuses to pigeonhole Saha as merely a television personality. Instead, it artfully weaves together his poetry and anecdotes from associates including Pabitra Sarkar, Bibhas Chakraborty, Samik Bandyopadhyay, Shankarlal Bhattacharya, Chiranjeet Chakraborty, Madhabi Mukhopadhyay, Purnadas Baul and Swagatalakshmi Dasgupta, to present a nuanced portrait of Saha's life.
The film opens with a reference to his birth in undivided Bengal and goes on to highlight his days at Jadavpur University before his association with All India Radio. It touches upon how Saha established the Institute of Audio Visual Culture to popularise recitation, his memorable Doordarshan programmes such as ‘Darshaker Darabare', ‘Sahitya Sanskriti', and ‘Tarunder Janya', his stint in Bangladesh during 1971 and his experience at the BBC.
The recollections become particularly engaging when Shankarlal Bhattacharya analyses the ‘layakari' in Saha's presentation and Chaitali Dasgupta recalls how he taught her to pay close attention to linguistics by insisting on saying a documentary "about a person" rather than "on a person". There is also Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay's take on the internationalism in Saha's poetry and Samik Bandopadhyay's discussion of his emphasis on the synergy between technology and aesthetics to reach the audience.
A particularly interesting segment features a short clip of poet Shankha Ghosh recounting how Saha once walked into his classroom at JU and gifted him a small microphone he had brought from London. From 1985 to 1992, this microphone became central in Ghosh's life, enabling him to continue lecturing after he had nearly lost his voice.
Porel cinematically composed the shots for the interviewees to avoid turning the film into a boring collage of quotes. "It is as important to look at the aesthetics of filming as to know how to edit the content of the quotes," Porel said.