Academic couple Hari Chowdhury (Adil Hussain) and Ramona Bose (Amrita Chattopadhyay) are in the middle of a quiet, romantic evening celebrating their wedding anniversary with food, wine, and music, when the light suddenly goes off, and a group of masked strangers barges in. They rampage around the house – Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, Arundhati Roy’s Walking with Comrades and My Seditious Heart are pulled out from the bookshelf, the meat being cooked in the kitchen is taken note of, Hari is questioned about his views on the Bhima Koregaon movement, on the atheism of Bhagat Singh. And just as strangely and suddenly as they had arrived, they leave. That is how A Knock on the Door begins. The scene is not too difficult to imagine in the times we inhabit.
On a hot Calcutta afternoon made warm by the people I spent it with, I landed up at the maverick cinematographer and filmmaker Ranjan Palit’s residence to talk about his latest directorial venture. My friend, filmmaker and musician Sreemoyee Singh, who has done a cameo and sung a beautiful song for the film, took me to him. Surrounded by books and plants and paintings, with a massive poster of Ghatak’s Subarnarekha behind him, Ranjanda – as he is fondly called by all who love him – leaned towards my phone recorder and spoke. He had first thought of the story after reading an article in The Caravan magazine, on the raid on Prof. Hany Babu’s home in 2019. Some of Palit’s friends had also been arrested during that time – Shoma Sen, Susan Abraham (whose husband, Vernon Gonsalves, was arrested), and Gautam Navlakha. In his film, Professor Hari Chowdhury eventually goes missing. ‘I used to feel that people would soon start disappearing without a trace.’
A Knock on the Door takes place in a world emerging fresh out of a raging pandemic. The post-Covid ways of existence interplay with the politics of the time. As society refuses to believe Ramona and Hari’s lived truth, the growing paranoia of the couple is easily dismissed as an after-effect of being locked indoors for long periods. ‘I felt that the time just after the lockdown was ideal for a watchdog society to emerge,’ the filmmaker explains. ‘Everyone was watching and reporting on the other person. A system where people – not higher up, not people at the center – but even in the familiar WhatsApp groups, are constantly spying on other people.’ The closed spaces, dark interiors, and close-up shots build the stifling environment of disbelief and paranoia.
At the core of the film is disbelief. No one really trusts Ramona and Hari, and everyone seems to have their own interests at stake – their versions of history that must be accepted as truth. And thus the couple, too, find fewer and fewer people in their circles who they can turn to in their times of crisis. Hari and Ramona’s bosses at their respective academic institutions (played by the impeccable Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah), the neighbourhood police inspector (Ashoke Vishwanathan), Hari’s childhood friend Shivy (Filmmaker and founder of the Film Heritage Foundation, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur in a surprise cameo) – there’s no one they can fully trust. Even Hari’s man Friday, D’Cruz (for some trivia, also watch this ), who has been with them for years, acts suspiciously. At the blurry intersection of the personal and the political, and of belief and disbelief, is Hari’s ex, Reena (Nandita Das), who is a lawyer and wants to help the couple. A ray of hope is Aman (Imaad Shah), Hari’s student who is vocal in his politics and unafraid of standing by Ramona and Hari in unwavering support. All of these interesting characters (and more) become part of Ramona and Hari’s story, but the film still manages to not get caught up in making enemies out of the individuals – to not take the easy way out by creating a ‘villain’ and directing the anger of the protagonist (and thus, the audience) at them, but remembers to zoom out and look at the bigger picture – at the state, at the politics of the present – at the hands of which these unlikeable characters are but mere pawns.
The background score for A Knock on the Door is composed by filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee. I reached out to him to hear a bit more about the collaboration – ‘We were shooting Tees (2024) when the thought and the story germinated. I heard the story sitting in a hotel room and got excited, I thought the film should be made. Both Vishal Bharadwaj and I wanted to work on the film’s music, and perhaps because Ranjan and I were shooting together then, I got to do it!’ Due to his involvement right from the film’s inception and due to their history of working together (Palit was the cinematographer on Ghost Stories and Tees) – there wasn’t much need for a brief while composing the background score, Dibakar says. The music score is subtle, making sure not to overpower a scene, but intense. ‘I was looking for notes that would merge into each other instead of standing out – a wail, a moaning sound. Every day, I would go back home and work out a theme, play it on my keyboard, and send him a recording to expand on it at the studio the next day. It was over within a week.’
The assortment of songs in the film is remarkable. The song of resistance, ‘Gaon Chhorab Nahi’ by Adivasi leader Bhagwan Maaji, is sung at a students’ demonstration. ‘Goodnight, Irene’, the American folk song, appears and reappears as a motif throughout the film. Adil Husain’s Hari strums the guitar and improvises on the famous Goalparia folk song made popular by Pratima Barua – ‘Tomra gelei ki ashibe mor mahout bondhu re’ (O my dear elephant tamers, will you return if you leave?). ‘The selection of songs were from Ranjan’s lived experiences, his lifelong association with music,’ Dibakar says. ‘I knew music was deeply personal to him, and did not interfere there.’
When I ask Ranjanda, he speaks briefly about some of the songs, until Sreemoyee insists, ‘No, talk about what music really means to you.’ ‘If I could’ve done music properly, I might not have made films,’ he smiles. I point out that he had said this in his (brilliant) 2009 documentary, In Camera as well. ‘I was very inspired by Bob Dylan, that’s how I started playing the guitar and singing songs. I got my first guitar in college. You had no YouTube then, so you had to figure out the chords yourself.’ His relationship with Kanai Das Baul, the blind singer on whom Palit has made a documentary, Abak Jaye Here (1996), also goes back a long way. ‘Ranjanda and I had connected because of our shared love for music,’ Sreemoyee says. ‘We’ve spent a lot of evenings with friends, singing folk songs, Dylan, some Joan Baez, Cohen. Through him, I’ve also learned a lot of music.’
Something that stayed with me long after I had finished watching A Knock on the Door was a song, ‘Life Falls Over You’, that was written and composed by Palit for the film itself. He doesn’t do that too often – this is only the second song he has ever written.
Palit carries with him a long, illustrious history of documentary filmmaking, having shot and directed more than a hundred, right from his diploma film at FTII on the powerloom workers of Bhiwandi, or Anand Patwardhan’s ‘Bombay, Our City‘ (1985), his first work as a cinematographer after film school. Palit calls himself the ‘grand uncle’ of Indian documentary filmmaking (having made the correction after calling himself ‘grand dad’, for ‘that title can only be given to Anand Patwardhan’). His previous feature film, Lord of the Orphans (2020), was part fiction, part autobiographical – on three generations of the Palit family, a powerful reflection on personal history, memory, and the immensity of the passage of time. Politics is important in his work, and his documentaries remain a chronicle of that. A Knock on the Door, too, was his response to all that was going on around him in the country, and he chose fiction. ‘I’ve had enough of documentaries’, he laughs. And, of course, it is easier to get people to watch fiction, he admits. But even his fiction is born out of years of lived experience – the many lives he has witnessed at close quarters, the many questions he has asked himself from behind the camera.
‘Isn’t it surprising that I cannot think of any film from the past few years that mentions Bhima-Koregaon?’ Ranjanda asks. He is right – I cannot really think of any that directly mentions what is perhaps one of the most crucial series of events in the country in the past decade. But again, how does one tell these stories, how does one sustain? A Knock on the Door was largely self-funded, with some contributions from friends. The film was shot with minimal resources with a small team. ‘I saw him run around in the Calcutta heat, doing everything by himself when the film was selected for International Film Festival Rotterdam,’ Sreemoyee says.
It brings us, once again, to the question with no answer – how does indie cinema survive? How do stories that swim against the tide, that bring out voices not conforming to mainstream society, politics, or ways of life, get told? How long shall making an independent film continue to feel like fighting a lonely battle? Interviewing Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi’s Baksho Bondi (2025) team some time ago, sitting with a roomful of people who had come together simply to get a film made, I had felt a surge of hope in my heart. But the veteran cinematographer-filmmaker sitting in front of me that afternoon wasn’t too optimistic. There’s fear. There’s apathy. And there’s a persistent lack of resources. ‘Be more courageous’ is Ranjan Palit’s clear message to young filmmakers.
I end with what Dibakar had to say about Ranjanda – ‘Ranjan has one of the most distinctive eyes in the whole world, and not just India. His eyes must keep seeing.’ I hope they do.
