One of the most famous Bengali adventure novels is Chander Pahar (retitled as Mountain of the Moon in subsequent English-language translations), which was written by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, an Indian writer in the Bengali language, and was originally published in 1937. Just under a decade ago, it was turned into a blockbuster Bengali movie that I have long wanted to watch, due to its notable cryptozoological content, as will be revealed below, but trying to track down its English-subtitled 2-disc DVD proved all but impossible.
True, one example had been listed on ebay for quite a while, but its seller was based in the USA, and when the very considerable cost of shipping it to the UK quoted by the seller, plus import charges, were added to the far from inconsiderable Buy It Now purchase price of the DVD itself, the total cost far exceeded what I was willing to pay for it. And so my wait continued, until very recently, when local friend and Amazon Prime subscriber Jane Cooper very kindly enabled me to watch it at long last by purchasing it for a significantly lower cost on AP. So here now is my review of this spectacular monster/adventure movie. (Incidentally, I'd still very much like to purchase it in the form of its 2-disc English-subtitled DVD, to add to my movie collection and thereby always have it directly available to rewatch, so if you see one anywhere for sale at a reasonable price, please do let me know – thanks very much!)
Directed by Kamaleshwar Mukherjee, released in 2013 by Shree Venkatesh Films, and set in the years 1909-1910, Chander Pahar follows the exciting (albeit sometimes positively Munchausenesque!) adventures of a 20-year-old Bengali man named Shankar Ray Choudhuri. He has long dreamed of being a derring-do explorer in Africa, but seems destined to spend his life much more mundanely, working as an administrator at the local jute mill in his small Bengali town instead. Happily, however, fate steps in, in the shape of a relative who secures for Shankar a job in Kenya, as the station-master of a tiny railway terminus miles from anywhere.
Shankar accepts the position with alacrity, seeing it as a stepping stone to his becoming a daring Dark Continent explorer. However, his long-treasured romantic daydreams of Africa are soon shattered by the reality of living in such a remote spot there, when he encounters a ferocious man-eating lion, which he amazingly manages to out-run (and eventually shoot dead) even though he has injured his leg, and a deadly black mamba that sneaks into his railway cabin one evening and bites him, but which he miraculously survives with no more than a bandaged hand (in the original novel, conversely, he is not bitten at all).
One day, while exploring his isolated little kingdom beyond the railway terminus, Shankar spies a middle-aged man, seemingly close to death, lying high up in a tree while a pack of hungry hyaenas repeatedly leap up towards him, hoping to haul him down and devour him. Armed with his trusty hunting rifle, however, Shankar soon scares them away, and then rescues the man, carrying him back to his cabin.
The man informs Shankar that he is a Portuguese explorer and gold-seeker named Diego Alvarez, who is able to speak Bengali and English (a consequence of this being that from then on, the dialogue spoken between them in the movie switches constantly – and sometimes very confusingly – from one language to another), and during his recuperation, tended to by Shankar, Alvarez thrills him with dramatic stories of his real-life African adventures.
In particular, some years earlier Alvarez and a fellow explorer, Jim Carter, had journeyed to an inhospitable and virtually inaccessible arid land of high hills and even higher mountains known as the Richtersveld, situated in the northwestern corner of what is today South Africa's Northern Cape province. They were seeking a legendary diamond mine supposedly hidden inside a cave deep within a mysterious Richtersveld mountain known as Chander Pahar – the Mountain of the Moon.
According to local legend, however, this diamond mine is guarded by the cave's monstrous inhabitant – a gigantic beast still-undescribed by science, but which for reasons never explained either in this movie or in Bandyopadhyay's original novel is known here as the bunyip (despite the latter name being in reality an aboriginal name specifically applied to Australia's most famous indigenous mystery beast!). Moreover, not long after reaching Chander Pahar the two men swiftly and all too tragically discover that the bunyip is no legend, when it confronts Carter and slaughters him. Alvarez flees back to civilization, but vows to return one day, to avenge Carter and once again seek Chander Pahar's hidden cache of diamonds.
Listening to Alvarez's bold exploits is more than sufficient to inspire Shankar to quit his station-master job and set out with Alvarez on his long-planned return to Chander Pahar. During their arduous journey there, they narrowly survive the explosive eruption of a volcano that hasn't even been documented by the Western world, but before they have chance to seek out the diamond cave's gemstones, they are confronted by its horrific guardian – the bunyip. Shankar freezes in terror, so Alvarez races to his rescue, only for the bunyip to turn its attention to him instead, attacking and mortally wounding him with its pair of immense walrus-like fangs, before departing into the night, leaving behind a weeping, devastated Shankar, who cradles the dying Alvarez in his arms until he passes away a few moments later.
After burying Alvarez, Shankar is now entirely alone and sees no option but to return to civilization. However, he loses his way, and accidentally encounters the diamond cave, but without suspecting that this is what it is. After entering the cave, Shankar becomes lost again, but by collecting some pebbles that he finds inside it and using them to mark his trail to prevent himself from walking aimlessly in circles, he finally discovers an exit and escapes, taking with him a few pebbles as souvenirs of his time spent there.
In his attempts to find a route back home, Shankar stumbles upon another cave, and when he enters it he discovers the skeleton of the Italian explorer Attilio Gatti, who had been betrayed and abandoned by his own diamond-seeking party some time earlier. Gatti had managed to hide some uncut diamonds from them, however, and left a note stating where they are and that whoever finds his remains can take the diamonds for themselves if they will give him a Christian burial.
This Shankar does, but is astonished to find that Gatti's uncut diamonds look just like the supposed pebbles that he, Shankar, had found in the previous cave and had used for marking his trail there. At last he realizes that he had discovered the diamond cave after all, albeit unknowingly, and those 'pebbles' from it that he'd retained as souvenirs were priceless uncut diamonds!
Trekking through the jungle again after burying Gatti, Shankar rediscovers the cave, and his fury over Alvarez's slaughter by the bunyip resurfaces, spurring him on in seeking to destroy this monstrous creature once and for all. So he devises and builds a concealed, deadly trap, then purposefully lures the bunyip towards it, using himself as bait. The trap functions perfectly, impaling the murderous creature on a series of long wooden spikes, thereby incapacitating it and enabling Shankar to shoot his fearsome foe dead with his rifle while safely suspended in a tree far above it and out of its reach.
Following an ill-advised decision to seek home not by continuing to trek over the jungle hills but instead by venturing into the Kalahari Desert, however, Shankar realizes all too quickly that one sand dune looks very like another, especially when his skills at reading a compass prove less than adept. Finally, dying of fatigue and dehydration, and terrorized by hyaenas, he decides to end his life with what in his thirst-induced delirium he believes to be his very last bullet – but just as he is about to do so, he spots a road far below him, with some vehicles travelling slowly along it. Summoning one final spurt of energy, Shankar staggers down the hill, shouting and waving his arms – and they see him! The vehicles are being driven by a survey team, who promptly rescue him and take him to a hospital in what was then Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), where he recuperates and amazes everyone with his tales of his exploits, just as Alvarez had previously amazed him with his own.
The movie ends with Shankar, now fully restored to good health and having become a very rich man after selling most of his diamonds (and sending the others to his family back home in Bengal), as well as his story to a newspaper. So what are his plans now for the future? This is Shankar we are talking about, so there can only be one answer to that question – he charts a vessel to take him by river upon further adventures as he journeys back to Chander Pahar, the Mountain of the Moon.
By the way, I should point out that whereas all of the other major characters in this movie (and novel) are fictitious, there really was an Italian explorer of Africa named Attilio Gatti, who journeyed to the real Mountains of the Moon (the nickname of the Ruwenzori Mountains on the border of Uganda with the Democratic Republic of the Congo) but thankfully he did not die abandoned in a remote cave. Instead, after a highly successful career not only as an explorer but also as a popular author and pioneering wildlife film-maker, he ended his days peacefully in Vermont, USA, aged 72, on 1 July 1969.
At the time of its production, Chander Pahar had the highest budget in the history of Bengali cinema (roughly equivalent to US$ 2 million), and it shows. Filmed on location in several different but all extremely photogenic sites in South Africa (including the Drakensberg Mountains, the Kruger National Park, and the Kalahari Desert), as well as in Kenya, Uganda, and West Bengal in India, it is brimming throughout with spectacular scenes of wildlife, and stars Indian acting/producing/singing megastar Dev as Shankar, alongside celebrated South African actor-poet Gérard Rudolf as Diego Alvarez, and South African rock star Martin Cito Otto as Jim Carter.
Nevertheless, this historic movie has not been without its critics. Some have opined that Dev's portrayal of Shankar was unconvincing, which only makes me wonder if they watched the same movie as I did. Dev plays Shankar as an excitable, dream-driven, achingly-naïve young man, barely adult but ebulliently energetic and totally indefatigable, who is finally realizing his life-long ambition to explore Africa – all of which is exactly what Shankar is, and how he was verbally portrayed by Bandyopadhyay in his novel. Rudolf received better reviews as Alvarez, providing an older, far more experienced traveller's wisdom and practical restraint to Shankar's periodic bouts of over-enthusiasm and under-thinking.
Another aspect of the movie that has attracted criticism is the bunyip – which is why I have held off from describing this monster until now, as I felt that it needed its own separate discussion here. In Bandyopadhyay's novel, the bunyip is never directly seen – a shadow of it moving outside the tent of Shankar and Alvarez one evening is as much as is offered to the readers, leaving the rest to their imagination. In contrast, this movie presents the viewers with a truly memorable CGI bunyip in all its hideous glory, and gory activity, but which some reviewers have denigrated for destroying the monster's mystique, and others for what they considered to be its inferior quality (similar criticisms regarding their quality, or lack of it, have also been aimed at the CGI-engendered volcanic eruption scenes).
As revealed earlier in this review via a series of photo-stills, the bunyip is undeniably a startling creation – unlike any beast known to science, that's for sure. A waddling, feline-faced abomination with a swollen, toad-like body and an exceedingly long, whip-like tail, plus a huge and revoltingly-vascular, pendant throat-sac, livid crimson in colour and hanging down so far that the creature seems in permanent danger of tripping over it when galumphing after one of its potential human victims. Most noticeable of all, however, is its pair of truly enormous vertical fangs that any prehistoric sabre-toothed cat would have given its high teeth for (so to speak!). (Moreover, a Kindle e-book edition of Bandyopadhyay's novel actually depicts the bunyip on the front cover as a bona fide living sabre-tooth.)
Interestingly, however, this terrifying apparition does recall a traditional African mystery beast known as the dingonek (click here for my account of it and comparable cryptids in my ShukerNature cryptozoology blog), and which is actually mentioned in Bandyopadhyay's novel in addition to the bunyip. In contrast, as noted earlier, I have yet to discover why Bandyopadhyay applied the name of an exclusively Australian water monster to his terrestrial African mystery beast. According to traditional African lore, conversely, the dingonek is amphibious in nature, i.e. both an adept swimmer in rivers and a formidable adversary on land – so why didn't Bandyopadhyay simply call his monster the dingonek instead of distinguishing it from the latter?
Another criticism that I've seen when reading reviews of Chander Pahar is that the movie's lengthy opening scene is entirely superfluous, serving no purpose whatsoever. This scene depicts Shankar as already an explorer in Africa, and being chased by an adult bull elephant, but leading the creature towards a trap that he had earlier (off-screen) created – only for Shankar himself to become accidentally entwined in a trip-wire noose that hauls him up through the air, leaving him dangling so high above the ground that even his proboscidean pursuer and other approaching elephants cannot reach him with their trunks. He then wakes up – it had all been just a dream, albeit a nightmarish one, and he is in his bed at home in Bengal. Far from being superfluous, however, this scene serves a vital role – for not only does it offer the movie's viewers an immediate example of how obsessed Shankar is with becoming an African explorer but also, crucially, it is this dream that inspires Shankar's subsequent creation in real life of the deadly trap that snares the bunyip. Indeed, Shankar even works into that climactic encounter – but this time as a deliberate escape ploy – the trip-wire noose that hauls him up through the air, out of reach of the bunyip while he shoots it dead.
Overall, and certainly not for the first time with movies, I disagree diametrically with those who have criticized Chander Pahar – imho, it is a thrilling, visual delight that kept me enthralled throughout its not inconsiderable 148-minute running time. In addition, it constitutes a very bold, decisive surge forward in the history of Bengali cinema, which until then had scarcely ventured into the field of adventure movies typified by such Hollywood blockbusters as the Indiana Jones feature films, for instance. Consequently, those viewers who agree with me will be pleased to know that Shankar clearly survives his journey back to the Mountain of the Moon, because in 2017 his exploits continue in a second movie, Amazon Obhijaan. This time he is seeking ancient treasure in South America, but once again confronting all manner of dangers along the way, including a predatory giant anaconda. At present, this latter movie is the highest-grossing Bengali film of all time (grossing US$ 7.47 million worldwide), with Chander Pahar in second place (grossing US$ 3.41 million worldwide). So, critics notwithstanding, Shankar and his movies' makers are clearly doing something right!
If you'd like to experience for yourself a glimpse of the thrills and spills that Shankar experiences during his search for the Mountain of the Moon and its hidden diamonds, be sure to click here to watch an official Chander Pahar trailer on YouTube showcasing its very stirring title song. (You can also watch the entire movie free here on YT, but only in the form of an Odia-language version with no English subtitles, sadly.) And don't forget to click here if you'd like to view an excerpt from Shankar's daunting to-the-death encounter with the belligerent bunyip!
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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