A Portrait of the Artist

IT’S a portrait of an artist we may be losing sight of. If not anything else, this gentle rekindling of interest in Satyajit Ray, in th...

IT’S a portrait of an artist we may be losing sight of. If not anything else, this gentle rekindling of interest in Satyajit Ray, in the form of an updated biography 12 years after the film-maker’s death, should at least open a window to his ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ worldview — as opposed to the ‘‘narrow-minded parochialism of kupamanduks (frogs in the well)’’. A worldview which imbibed traditions of the East and the West, and was equally at home with baul gaan and Beethoven and Billy Wilder, Rabindranath Tagore and Raymond Spottiswoode, whose book on film aesthetics Ray read as an art student in Shantiniketan.

Andrew Robinson arrived in Calcutta in 1983 to watch the shooting of Ghare Baire (based on Tagore’s rousing novel), 12 years after Marie Seton had written her gushing but comprehensive Ray bio-peek. In a sense, Seton, who met the film-maker just after Pather Panchali had been filmed in 1955, got the best of Ray. By the time Ghare Baire would be completed — and critically ripped apart — Ray would have had two heart attacks and be forced to lead a life dictated by doctors. Which, of course, didn’t stop him from making a touching documentary on Sukumar Ray, his fantastist father and creator of such abiding nonsense verses as Abol Tabol, and three other films, Ganashatru, Sakha Prasakha and Agantuk.

By then, says Robinson, awards had come to mean less to him. He commented in 1989: ‘‘I’m embarrassed by praise and irritated by censure. As for my films, I know them — their faults as well as their virtues — better than any critics do.’’

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The obvious constraints notwithstanding, Robinson gleaned some interesting facts of Ray and his illustrious family, observing whom gave him an invaluable grounding in the mores of Bengali life; of Ray and Tagore, who had famously written in seven-year-old Satyajit’s autograph book a few lines about travelling the world over and eventually returning home to discover the world reflected in a single drop of dew on a blade of grass; and of Ray and his film-making, especially Pather Panchali and the struggle — and excitement — that encompassed.

According to Ray, it was a miracle that Pather Panchali, which faced major problems in raising finances, didn’t fall foul of other intransigent obstacles. ‘‘Three miracles, according to Satyajit. One, Apu’s voice didn’t break. Two, Durga didn’t grow up. Three, Indir Thakrun (the elderly distant relative of Harihar, Apu and Durga’s father) didn’t die.’’

After the Song of the Little Road, we get a film-by-film sketch of Ray’s oeuvre, not a critical insight into the mind of the maker. Perhaps after being firmly told ‘‘I don’t want another foreigner writing a book about me without learning Bengali’’, Robinson ran into Ray’s reticence.

Ray was at home in Calcutta, as he remarked to Robinson: ‘‘I don’t feel very creative when I’m abroad somehow. I need to be in my chair in Calcutta!’’ Ensconced in his favourite chair, feet up on a low table, Ray loved to work at ‘‘the red cloth-bound shooting notebooks that contain literally every aspect of a film’’, and on Sandesh, the magazine started by his grandfather, for which he would write, illustrate and design.

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By 1984, he had already made 30 films and documentaries covering every range possible, from ‘‘pure farce to high tragedy, musical fantasies to detective stories’’ — including the Apu Trilogy (adapted from Bibhuti Bhusan Bandopadhyay’s classic), Charulata (based on Tagore’s short story Nashtanir), Kanchenjunga, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (based on a short story by his grandfather Upendrakishore Ray), the Feluda films (Sonar Kella, Joy Baba Felunath), Aranyer Din Ratri (a Sunil Gangopadhyay story), Shatranj ke Khilari (Premchand) to name a handful.

In the first Robinson edition (1989), there were 147 illustrations, including sketches by Sukumar Ray; but the revised version has only 16 due to ‘‘lack of space’’. That apart, there is a chapter on Ray’s last three films and, like before, a section on the films he couldn’t make: Ravi Shankar, The Mahabharata, A Passage to India, The Alien.

There is something about creating beauty in the circumstances of shoddiness and privation that is truly exciting, Ray had once said. But will the 21st century share his excitement about the society and culture his films describe?

There is a risk, says Robinson, that Ray’s work, except for the Apu trilogy, will become trapped in an eddy by the very breadth and uniqueness of its creator’s range of eastern and western references… For Ray’s sake and the world he represents, we hope not.