The line — “This clock works if it is lying down” — from Padatik (The Guerrilla / The Foot Soldier) by Mrinal Sen (1973) is one of those deceptively simple sentences that carry multiple layers of meaning. It’s both literal and deeply metaphorical, encapsulating the film’s central tension between ideology and individual, motion and stasis; revolution and fatigue.
The line has haunted me for long and has kept me awake many a night. My elder brother and sister,were part of the Naxalbari movement,both foot soldiers to a cause. Both sufferered ireperable damage and I have witnessed it from near. Let’s view it on several levels.
The line refers to a broken clock that doesn’t function properly unless it’s placed horizontally. The mechanism works only when it’s lying down, not when it stands upright, which is absurd for an object meant to stand and measure time.It’s a small domestic image, but in Mrinal Sen’s hands, it becomes a symbolic statement about a generation and a movement.
In the film, the protagonist, a young Naxalite revolutionary in hiding, represents the disillusioned “foot soldier” of a cause that once promised transformation but has faltered. The clock becomes a metaphor for the revolutionary machinery or perhaps for time itself that no longer functions upright, with dignity and purpose.
“It works only when lying down” = It functions only in defeat, in repose, in compromise.
The line suggests that the system, or the movement, has lost its natural equilibrium. The revolution that should have been dynamic and upright has collapsed into inertia.Time itself, the forward march of history,seems to have fallen sideways.
On a personal level, for me,it mirrors the protagonist’s own exhaustion.He, like the clock, is disoriented. His ideals are intact, but his spirit is fractured. He can “work,” survive, or think, only when he has lying down; when he has withdrawn from the world and its battles.
So the line becomes a symbol of moral and existential fatigue:
“I can only function when I have surrendered my stance.”
Mrinal Sen often used objects: radios, clocks, mirrors to comment on the middle-class conscience. Here, the clock is also a portrait of a society whose moral machinery works only when it lies flat, i.e., when it is passive, complacent, or compromised. The upright position (principle, resistance) has become untenable. So people “function” only when they give in; lying down both literally and metaphorically.
Finally, time itself, in Sen’s cinema, is not linear. It is deconstructed: falters, bends, lies down. The clock, then, becomes a metaphor for a distorted sense of time and history in 1970s Bengal: a generation caught between revolution and repression, youth and surrender, dreams and disillusionment.
“This clock works if it is lying down”
→ A parable of broken equilibrium.
A world — and a man — that functions only in defeat. A revolution that survives only in stillness.Time that no longer moves forward, only sideways.
In the final movements of Padatik, the image of the clock that “works only when lying down” quietly returns, not as a literal object, but as an echo in the protagonist’s own consciousness.
Having spent the film in the uneasy refuge of a middle-class apartment, hiding from the police and from his own past, the young revolutionary gradually shifts from certainty to introspection. The mechanical metaphor of the clock becomes a psychological and moral one: he realizes that he, too, has been functioning only in a position of surrender, lying low, running from the vertical weight of his own convictions.
The clock’s absurd dependence on a fallen position becomes the mirror through which he begins to question not only the movement he served but the very idea of ideological purity that had defined his youth.
Mrinal Sen stages this transformation not through dramatic confrontation, but through quiet thought and dissonant stillness. The rhythm of the film breaks down; time no longer flows with revolutionary urgency, but with hesitation, repetition, and introspection.
This fractured rhythm is deliberate: Sen constructs Padatik as a chronicle of broken time, where the linear promise of revolution collapses into self-examination. The clock, which should have been the symbol of historical momentum, becomes the emblem of its failure. The revolution’s tempo, its heartbeat, has faltered. What remains is a suspended duration, a time of questioning rather than marching, of lying down rather than standing tall.
As the protagonist begins to reflect on his past actions, on the cost of violence, on the contradictions within the movement, and on his own alienation from the very people he wished to liberate, he experiences a moment of recognition: that the true revolution may lie not in slogans or orders, but in the courage to confront one’s own ideological blindness. This is the moral and emotional culmination of the film.
The clock’s brokenness no longer appears tragic; it becomes instructive. It points toward a different rhythm, a slower, more human one, that accepts the imperfection of all systems and the fragility of conviction.
Mrinal Sen’s larger allegory, then, is not of failure alone, but of the necessary pause in the rhythm of revolution. The clock lying down is both defeat and reflection: the interval between two beats of history. In this stillness, Sen locates a deeper truth—that the revolutionary must first learn to question himself before he can hope to change the world.
The final tone of Padatik thus carries both melancholy and clarity: time has fallen sideways, but it still ticks, quietly, insistently, waiting for a generation to rise again, this time not in unthinking zeal, but in the awareness born of disillusionment.