Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1972, and the bourgeoisie that had ‘come of age’ with the Discovery of India now demanded an increasingly fascist state intervention, leading to the Emergency (1975).

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Film-maker and critic Chidananda Das Gupta, around the time he published his definitive The Cinema of Satyajit Ray ,’ pointed to a slight problem he was having with his mentor.. the Golden Lion of St Mark in Venice, the Golden Bear and two Best Director awards and a special jury award for the totality of his work in Berlin, the Selznick Award, the Sutherland Trophy, Best Film for 1957 and Best Director of the year 1959 at San Francisco, honorary doctorates from Oxford and London Universities, Most Outstanding Film Director of Half-a-Century citation from the British Federation of Film Societies, and innumerable others that Indians have stopped counting. . . The depth and extent of the western response to Ray often mystifies Indians; he is great, but is he that great? Sometimes even his ardent admirers at home are baffled by the chorus of praise abroad that greets those films to which their own response is lukewarm.

Ever since Ray made his influential Pather Panchali / Song of the Little Road (1955), and then since its even more influential New York release the following year, his cinema has set off a variety of contradictory speechlines.

There was the classic 1929 Bibhutibhushan novel on which the film is based, chronicling the history of pre-war Bengal through the story of a young lad who leaves his village for the pilgrim city of Benares, eventually landing in Calcutta and on a ship bound for South America. There was the film itself, whose four-years-in the-making story has become part of Indian film legend. Then there was the filmmaker, ancestrally associated with the landed gentry of north Calcutta and its nineteenth-century reform movements, Shantiniketan, Tagore, mass communication and commercial art, the Calcutta Film Society and Renoir’s The River (1951). And there was the film’s reception in the USA.

It was the last that in many ways proved the most decisive. The ‘magic horse of poetry” elaborated into a perennialist and humanist ‘Ray sees that life itself is good no matter how bad it is” to virtually invent a Ray-movie surprisingly unvarying in 8 reviewer comment over the past three decades. ‘Ray’s genius is for the lyrical, for the contemplation of life as a blend of material and spiritual beauty. ’s Rarely located in the actual historical context of its making or its plot (’. . . timeless and international. Its story and characters are applicable on any place on earth”), Ray-movie remained black-and-white, usually in middle-grey tones avoiding harsh extremes, documenting individual gesture with loving precision in themes set mainly in rural India or in turn-of-the-century Calcutta. The projection of oriental phantasy into this post-war ‘third’ world later extended to the film-maker, even to his English speaking accent (’That presence became articulated in the most beautiful use of English I have ever heard… .

The sensitive exactness of the words he used was … the most perfect revelation of why he could make a film like Pather Panchali ‘?’… talked briefly and simply in a strong, pleasant, and above all musical voice of indefinable accent). Ray himself has on a few rare occasions expressed his discomfort over this kind of typecasting, saying for instance to a Sunday Observer interviewer that it was no longer enough for him that a film he makes be called a masterpiece: he wanted intelligent comment. I am fully aware now, thanks to my western critics, of the western traits in my flms. They have so often been brought to my notice that I can actually name them: irony, understatement, humour, open endings… . It is not as if I find myself saying: Ah, now for a bit of British understatement. They are used intuitively to best serve the needs of the subject..

Asked by Shyam Benegal (in the latter’s documentary Satyajit Ray , 1984) why early twentieth-century Bengali literature was such a major source for his film stories, he went to some length to deny that he made only period movies, pointing to his contemporary Calcutta films, his original screenplays and his children’s fantasies.

And towards the end, with Ganashatru / An Enemy of the People (1989), Shakha Proshakha / Branches of a Tree (1990) and Agantuk I The Stranger (1991), he said with increasing frustration that he was no longer interested in the past, he wanted to set his films in current events and on phenomena like institutionalized corruption, and now felt the need to write his own stories rather than base them on available fiction. Until the early seventies Ray was seen in India as an influential member of its first generation of post-Independence artists.

This generation of film-makers, writers, theatre directors and painters worked with vastly different individual programmes, nevertheless defined collectively through a common, and often stated, desire to integrate their nationalist legacy into a globalizing aesthetic of modernism. Through the sixties, several essays by Ray updated the early acknowledgements to Renoir and De Sica to now include the editing of Kurosawa and Ford, Truffaut’s tracking camera and Godard’s soundtrack as part of that inheritance. More than that, he shared the classic liberal nationalist discomfort of most Indian artists of his generation in the late sixties when the ‘Naxalite’ Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) appropriated for itself the voice of radical change. Its student agitations and consequent state 9 brutality informed his Calcutta films ( Pratidwandi / The Adversary , 1970; Seemabaddha / Company Limited , 1971), and led even to an uneasy contemplation that he might have to leave Calcutta and find work in Bombay.

Only in the early seventies, then, did the shift away become pronounced. It came partly through his western image, as the Ray-movie motif was for the first time imported into India. Imported, it was refurbished into the latest frontier of regional nativism, making a straight ideological flip-side of the modernist programme even as Indira Gandhi’s nation-in-danger rhetoric did a mirror-act on Nehru’s non-aligned internationalism. Ray-movie now started getting made in Kannada, Malayalam, even in Hindi (Shyam Benegal). And Ray, as its most important pioneer, started claiming for the first time that ‘I think of myself as a Bengali and my films are aimed primarily at our own audience:

The nativist tag remained an uneasy one, evident less from his films than from the position he was made to represent. In Bengal, for instance, the oriental image of a renaissance figure was presented through a consistent downgrading of his films as his most significant creations, with more and more programming emphasizing his commercial-art sketches, his children’s short stories (the Felu and Shonkhu characters), his childhood reminiscences Uokhon Chhoto Chhilam , 1982). Right now, the West Bengal government is apparently vying with Calcutta’s biggest publishing house, Ananda Bazar Patrika, to put together his collected works, believed to be the hottest literary property in the history of Bengali publishing.

And Ray went along with the line: this writer, in his only encounter with the film-maker in December 1990, accompanied an English radio journalist to his Calcutta home shortly after Shakha Proshakha was made. Asked informally about his experience of working for a French producer, he said he looked forward to an international distribution of his film. He added that in Calcutta itself, projection conditions of most big theatres prevented him from participating in the local commercial releases of his work, and barring a few private screenings in his native city, he wished now more and more to show outside Bengal, in Delhi, Bombay and particularly in Kerala with its highly film-literate audiences, all places where he has never had a good commercial release. The tape-recorder was switched on; ‘I make my films’, he said, ‘for a Bengali audience’.

And then Ray died. Shortly before his death, and shortly after he received the lifetime-achievement Oscar, he was awarded the Bharat Ratna – India’s highest honour, an exclusive preserve of politicians and so far bestowed mainly on former prime ministers. He also got the National Best Film prize for his last feature, Agantuk / The Stranger (1991). Commenting on this last bit of adulatory excess, an Economic Times editorial somewhat cynically dubbed Ray the most awarded film-maker of all time, wondering why critical understanding was being replaced by appreciation of so dubious a nature. (Ray himself has at times disdained from even entering his films for the National Film awards.)

When he died, India was primed to play out yet again the passing of what was described as an era, as Ray was relocated into his earliest nationalist mould: with government flags at half-mast and public institutions dosing down to enable people in his native Calcutta to pay their last respects. India had practised this on a similar scale only recently, when Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination two years ago signalled with the same clarity the passing of a nationalist dream. Now, as then, the man came to mean more than his work; Rajiv Gandhi, contrary to his political ideology, was seen as the last of the Nehrus, and now Ray was more than a mere film-maker: he was repeatedly described as the last figure of a Bengali renaissance two centuries old. Put those associations together with what Gary Arnold of the Washington Times said referring in his obituary to Ray’s televised hospital-bed reception of the Oscar, and you get the picture: ‘… it’s gratifying that he had the opportunity to orchestrate his own deathbed scene. And it was an extraordinary performance – the best of its kind since Clifton Webb’s fictionalized farewell as Elliott Templeton in The Razor’sedge.

As students of painting in Rabindranath Tagore’s university in Santiniketan, we had to learn the rudiments of Chinese calligraphy. We rubbed our sticks of Chinese ink on porcelain palettes, dipped our bamboo-stemmed Japanese brushes in it and held them poised perpendicularly over mounted sheets of Nepalese parchment. ‘Now draw a tree’, our Professor Bose would say (Bose was a famous Bengali painter who had made pilgrimages to China and Japan). ‘Draw a tree, but not in the western fashion. Not from the top downwards.

A tree grows up, not down. The strokes must be from the base upwards. . . .’ [Tihis was basic - this reverence for life, for organic growth. When you paint, each stroke of brush, each movement of finger, of wrist, of elbow, contemplates and celebrates this growth. And not just things that live and grow. Everything that comprises perceptible reality is observed, felt, analysed and reduced to its basic form, basic texture, basic rhythm." Nandalal Bose, Santiniketan artist and Ray's teacher, is a controversial figure in contemporary Indian art history. Much of the debate around Bose concerns his enormously influential Gandhi-inspired definitions of what nationalism should mean in Indian art: abandonment of easel painting, emphasis - as Ray writes - on organicity. These definitions received official Congress Party sanction when Bose organized the village-craft exhibitions accompanying Congress sessions at Faizpur (in 1936) and Haripura (1938). Certain ideal built on a par with the shift from Gandhi's pre-war emphasis on villagecraft indigenism to the full-blown Nehruvian dream, a 'temples of the future' realism.

This realism functioned entirely through symbols - and technology was one of the commonest. These symbols were believed by definition to encompass the 'contemporary' or the even more compelling 'future', and could therefore be freely imbued with a variety of psychoanalytic and political associations. Raj Kapoor, for example, in his Shri 420 / Mr 420 (1955, the same year as Pather Panchali), characterized this post-independence Indian society as a money-fetishism, its acquisitive desire explicitly excluding his infantile longing for salvation. In Nitin Bose's Deedar (1951) the blind hero is literally delivered into the world by a medical eye-operation, and when he sees that this world includes his betrayed lover he puts his eyes out again. Elsewhere, more politically, the Tamil Nadu-based Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) movement did a similar act with its devastatingly effective melodramas, locating nationalism as the behavioural hegemony of the North' - its villains 'peopled with womanizing temple priests, helpless deities, usurious North Indian moneylenders and villainous brahmins'.12 So that when the hero vanquished a tiger in unarmed combat (M.G. Ramachandran in Gul-e-Bakavali , 1955), it too was in the name of the oppressed South.

Realism, then, was for the most part a subterfuge: a means of weighting certain kinds of symbols of the contemporary with certain kinds of desires and apprehensions, all the while restaging earlier genres of the reformist social and its religious counterpart, the devotional movie, into full-blown melodrama. Ray himself - contrary to much public perception of his Renoir/De Sica persona - was not at the time averse to either these genres or the idea of updating them. He worked for instance with the morality fable in Parash Pathan / The Philosopher's Stone (1958); even Kanchanjunga (1962).

Indeed, the inept naturalism of Kanchanjunga's soundtrack, or the uneasy dissolves in Devi / The Goddess (1960) - especially when set alongside the remarkable crane shot of the goddess Kali with which the film opens - form textbook examples of the limitations of realism as ideology before its seemingly unending usefulness as symbol or as aspiration.

It was not the first time in recent Indian history that the real was thus symbolized. India has virtually never had a tradition of realism in the European sense, although it has been one of the strongest traditions in the world on iconic and narrative representation. When in the nineteenth century Indian artists - court and bazaar alike - faced the technology of easel and frame, the photograph and the woodcut print, many of the more successful ones handled the problem by ascribing certain often mystical meanings to the technology they used. Photographers who joined bazaar artists at the temple town of Nathdwara invoked the idea of a divine immortality when pictures of pilgrims were pasted on drawings of the deity (the form was called manoratha ). Elsewhere, a successful assimilation of mass-production occurred at the temple of Kalighat, Calcutta, whose famous patuas assigned narrative values to production itself, painting serially and elaborating certain comic book-like satires over several works made and sold separately. The association of indigenism with certain labour-intensive technologies was bred into the 1905-O8 political movement of Swadeshi (Own-Country) allowing Dadasaheb Phalke, India's first feature film-maker, 13 to proclaim that his films are swadeshi because 'the capital, ownership, employees and stories are swadeshi' (1918).

Literary historian Meenakshi Mukherjee, on the original 1929 novel Pather Panchali: Bibhutibhushan's novel is conditioned ... by a very different concept of time and of aesthetic form than what underlie western realistic fiction. The word Panchali of the original title refers to a devotional narrative song which continues for a long stretch of time without any perceptible climax, and where the story does not follow a rigid sequential order...

The movement from the village to the city and the consequent nostalgia for a lost paradise which Pather Panchali deals with only incidentally, has turned out in the next half-century to be one of the major themes in novels written in the Indian languages.

Satyajit Ray when he saw De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) in London:

I had the proof [that one could really work with an amateur cast]. And it [Pather Panchalij was all shot on location, at least 90% shot on location. I had the proof that one could shoot out there, in all kinds of light. I had been told by professional directors here that you had to have control over the light, which meant you had to have artificial light. ‘You can’t control the sun’, that’s what they said. ‘And if you want rain, you have to create it artificially, because how could you control actual, natural rain, it stops and goes and comes.’

Meenakshi Mukherjee gives other examples of Indian writing to show a whole trend of pre-world war II fiction working with a realism of minute description of the everyday, but inventing simultaneously the scale of an epic, of changing season and vast landscape, death and the struggle to live. She says that Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee, author of Pather Panchali and its 1931 sequel Aparajito , although unsystematically familiar with some western literature, reveals little in the way of European influence. It was this novel, then, that Ray updated through his formal and technical apparatus. It was as if he looked back on the novel, and through the novel its pre-war world, and through that to India’s near-century-old history of encountering the modem. Now, finally, the fumbling, the anticipation, the drama invested into the zinging wires, could find contemporary form – and ideological stability. The Trilogy’s retrospective review of the past remains a classic in its sense of control over history with which Ray’s cinematic apparatus was imbued, in those early years after independence. You couldn’t – certainly Indian viewers couldn’t forget what those placid paddy fields and the city of Calcutta in the Trilogy had just been through, although few foreign reviews make mention of this fact.

Independence as an event climaxed a whole series of earlier events that had already caused a traumatic shift in the realist mode: from reality as object ‘out there’ to reality as ‘event’: the 1943 Bengal famine and the 1946-47 partition. Ray’s films retain the first, romantic instance of the shift: of reality into a technology that could dominate it. This, to the extent that India has had such a thing, was the high cultural point of Indian modernism. This modernism had no debate between Brecht and Lukacs informing it, it built no neo-realist citadel of truth, had no Adorno-like warnings about a totalitarian culture-industry. And yet – in the way Nehru consciously located nation-building as part of a globalizing process of modernization, with a fully articulated aesthetic component – it did have certain selective overlaps with Europe, as Ray’s own work demonstrates. Nehru wrote his seminal Discovery of India , part autobiography, part travelogue, part history lesson, precisely to invent such an apparatus of control. And substantiated it by inviting Rossellini to make his India films and Le Corbusier to design the city of Chandigarh, ‘to show Indians that modern architecture exists’. Several Indian artists, oil-painter M.F. Husain, musician Ravi Shankar, among others, now partook of recently demystified technology, and the promise that for the first time in India’s troubled and confusing history, we may discover our true place in the world.

Not all of them, indeed very few, shared the expressly Nehruvian nationalist component of this idea of modernism: historian D.D. Kosambi, while endorsing Nehru’s space-research programmes, reviewed Discovery of India in an essay evocatively titled The Bourgeoisie Comes of Age in India’. And artists from the former left avant-garde still saw no reason to celebrate: Ritwik Chatak, for instance, shared no sense of the national belonging clearly inscribed into the means of domination and control now available, and single-handedly turned the freedom struggle debate around to place on the cultural agenda his own radically different sense of home. But for those that did share in the moment, the modernism appeared, for the first time, capable of explaining the trauma and the scale of India’s past even as it provided, with its instruments of understanding, a sense of self-determination. the films of Godard and Glauber Rocha and the rest? No, certainly not, because I still believe in the individual and in personal concepts rather than in a broad ideology, which keeps changing all the time.

Then the anticipation disappeared, and all that was left were the objects: privileged at one time, like Durga’s secretly stolen fruit, now little more than deadweight. For Ray himself, cinema as a liberating apparatus lasted, in retrospect, a very short while indeed. The dissolves in Devi have been mentioned; in Mahanagar / The Big City (1963) you have this mistrustful shot of the Anglo-Indian secretary holding a pair of scissors, low in wide-angle (quoting from memory), his first explicit depiction of a pure fetish object. Nayak / The Hero (1966), made shortly thereafter, almost revels in its moralistic condemnation of brutalized technology, the unsettling train journey merging into the unsettled insecurity of its film-star hero and his nightmare objects.

After Mahanagar Ray started adopting a more and more formulaic character (or event) that, at a certain point in the film, injected a virtual social cancer into its comfortably naturalist world. In Seemabaddha (1971), news of the rejected consignment from the hero’s company leads to a sequence of top-angle shots and fast cutting, on one occasion even a long zoom into the telephone wire that connects the hero with his corrupt personnel manager.

Sequences like these reveal Ray’s increasing mistrust, through the seventies, of his cinematic apparatus. By a logic startlingly clear in retrospect, it was as though the sense of control that he had invested into that apparatus, in the idealism of the 1950s, had today come to develop precisely ideological associations that, as he says, ‘keep changing all the time’. He was still in the middle of his Calcutta films ( Pralidwandi, Seemabaddha, Jana Aranya / The Middleman , 1975) and signalling with growing frustration a reality that appeared too complicated to handle. This well-documented crisis has now become part of Ray-lore.

Acclaimed for his revolutionizing of acting in Indian cinema, Ray was now unable to do anything at all in what is probably the single most lethal area of ideological manipulation in film: its soundtrack. With the Calcutta films he started conveying more and more of their information through sound, as the visual illustrated what the dialogue was saying. He got increasingly embroiled in problems of naturalism – like what accent his actors should use in their occasional English lines – even as he succumbed on the far more controversial convention of submerging effects beneath his dialogue tracks. And then came the lush colour of Ashani Sankef , in a film supposed to be set in famine conditions.

Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1972, and the bourgeoisie that had ‘come of age’ with the Discovery of India now demanded an increasingly fascist state intervention, leading to the Emergency (1975). Ray clearly had no sympathy for the Indira regime, and – almost in retaliation – set out for the first time his definition of the tenets of Ray-movie. He did it, unusually, in a series of violent attacks on the emerging independent ‘new’ Indian cinema movement, arguing that it was all very well for the west to have an avant-garde, where film-makers could use ‘the element of permissive sex … as a safeguard in nine cases out of ten’. (This, incidentally remains the standard argument of the commercial Hindi film industry, and its excuse for its own financial unviability.) On the other hand, ‘third world’ limitations behoved filmmakers to ‘bear in mind certain limitations they have to face, the “conventions” that even they have to follow’.” Those conventions were the primacy of a story, the necessity of using film-stars to sell the film, an elaborate script. Not much longer, the regionalism motif joined the list. It was ironic, to say the least, that the Emergency held Ray-movie as the model to emulate when it imposed stringent censorship norms on independent film-makers. The Film Finance Corporation for instance was instructed by a parliamentary com mission to only fund films that demonstrated ‘l. Human interest in the story;

Indianness in theme and approach; Characters with whom the audience can identify; Dramatic content.”‘ And the notorious ‘Film-20′ series commissioned similar art-house shorts to illustrate each point in Mrs Gandhi’s 20-point programme. Ray, in indirect response, quit making films set in the contemporary for the next fourteen years, withdrawing into children’s stories (at least one of which, Hirak Rajer Deshe / The Kingdom of Diamonds , 1980, made veiled allusions to the Emergency) and period movies including his trusty Tagore ( Ghare Baire / The Home and the World , 1984). When he returned to the contemporary ( Ganashatru, Shakha Proshakha, Agantuk) it was, in the sympathetic words of Amaresh Misra, as ‘an armchair liberal functioning as a simple humanist who now viewed social reality in terms of a naive individual-versus-society conflict and placed his hopes and disillusionments either in some grassroots cultural activity or the travails of innocent children, sensitive but mentally retarded figures and maverick outsiders.”‘ For, whatever Ray would have had to say about it, this India – defining liberalization as an induction into a global market on terms set by American trade representatives – was not entering the place in the world that he had sought for in those heraldic fifties when he made Pather Panchali .

Ashish Rajadhyaksha has published widely on cinema and contemporary art. He was the member of the editorial collective, Journal of Arts and Ideas and a regular contributor to Framework and Sight & Sound. He is also currently co-ordinating the media archive at CSCS.

The article originally appeared in the Issue no-23, Journal of Arts&Ideas, May 1992, in India. A version of this article titled ‘Beyond Orientalism’ was published in Sight and Sound, Homage to Satyajit. The article is republished here from the Journal of Art&Ideas under the Creative Common License.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

•   FiI nworld, Bombay, January 1980. New Delhi, 1980. 3. Arturo Lanodto, quoted in Marie Scion, Portrait of a Director, London, 1971. 4. Pauline Kael, 1149 It at the Movies, New York, 1965. 5. Newsweek review of Ashani Sanket / Distant Thunder, 1973, quoted in Satyajit Ray, edited by Chidananda Das Gupta, New Delhi, 1981.

•   Art Film Publications, Los Angeles, on Apur Sarver. 7. Frances Flaherty, quoted in Marie Seton, op. cit.

•   Andrew Robinson, The Inner Eye, London, 1989.

•   Roy Armes, Third World Film-Making and the West, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1987.. Quoted in Satyajit Ray, edited by Chidananda Dos Gupta, op. cit.

•   Satyajit Ray,’Calm Without, Fire Within’, Indian Film Culture, Calcutta, September 1964.

•   M.S.S. Pandian, The Image Trap, New Delhi, 1992.

•   The Road Revisited’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 4.

•   In Satyajit Ray, edited by Chidananda Das Gupta, op. cit. 15. ‘On Seemabaddha’, in ibid.

See, for example, Robinson’s chapter on the films in The Inner Eye, op. cit. 17. ‘An Indian New Wave?, 1971.

Committee on Public Undertakings 1975-76, Report on the Film Finance Corporation, New Delhi, 1976.

‘Satyajlt Ray’s FUnn Precarious Social-Individual Balance’, Economic and Politiaol Weekly, Bombay,

Tags: De Sica, Indian Cinema, Pather Panchali, Ray-films, Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray

Posted By Ashish Rajadhyaksha | Monday, November 9th, 2009 | Filed under Auteur, Film Education