The visionary’s World

Book Review: Non-fiction/cinema-Deep Focus: Reflections on Cinema by Satyajit Ray (edited by Sandeep Ray), Harper Collins, 171 pp; Rs550 (Hardback)
There is unanimity among different sections of polemists who regard Satyajit Ray as the man who heralded realism in Indian cinema and whose contribution is strongly felt in India and the world; not only in the cinematic arena but on the overall movement of realistic art. Ray was a thinker, writer and gifted speaker, which made him distinctively creative and appealing to different class of observers. The first writing proposal Ray received was from P.C. Mahalnobish, renowned economic planner of free India, who at that time was heading the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Calcutta. Impressed by the young economics student, Mahalanobish offered Ray a regular column in ISI’s journal. This marked the beginning of the latter’s tryst with writing.

At a different point in time, Rabindranath Tagore had induced Ray’s mother to send him to receive art education at Shantiniketan, which Ray happily joined to live under the shadow of Tagore rather than earning a formal recognition in art. After Tagore’s death, he felt living in the campus was purposeless and thus left his art training in the final year in favour of travelling across India with meagre resources but the rich company of a few likeminded friends. Free humane spirits always drove him more than anything else; Ray, like Tagore, remained attached to the beautiful attributes of life and works. As a filmmaker, he met the acclaim he deserved though his contributions as a writer remained subdued under the deep canopy of the former.

It was in 1976, when Ray published his first collection of articles, Our Films, Their Films that critics started to take notice of his sublime, creative side. Our Films, Their Films is one of the most memorable collections of Satyajit Ray's writings, besides My Life, My Work, a five-part lecture delivered by him in Calcutta in English in 1982, and Under Western Eyes, an essay about distorted European and American perceptions of Indian culture as well as Indian cinema, which appeared in Sight and Sound in 1982 and can be called Ray’s finest ever piece in depth and vision.

Deep Focus ,which comes after an abnormal hiatus, is a rich anthology of Satyajit Ray's writings, which includes, Under Western Eyes and twenty one other previously published pieces, compiled under the editorship of his son Sandip Ray. The range of pieces is diverse in length and arc from the subtle to the substantial. They focus on a spectrum of subjects: from the craft of filmmaking and cinema as an art to Ray's childhood memory of an accidental family visit to a “soft porn” Bengali silent film as well as the unusual experience of sitting on a Soviet film festival jury. The book also includes personal responses from Ray’s fellow directors such as Charlie Chaplin, Jean Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosowa and others.

This compendium of Ray’s (literary) work is an impressive feat despite the glaring omission of some of his finest write-ups: Speaking of Films, Ordeals of the Alien, Why do I make films?, and his memorable tribute to Rabindranath Tagore, written in 1991 for the Guardian, which was incidentally, the last article written by Ray in English. However, this book genuinely maintains ----as is the tradition with other earlier Ray centric works—the intricate details of Ray’s cinema through pictorial representation and by recalling the behind the scene catalysts such as Banshi Chandragupta, art director, Subrata Mitra, cameraman and others who assisted Ray very firmly. Under his restless natural urge to depict scene and sensibility, Ray’s star casts were naturally fit to act according to his creative imagination; whether or not the same actors would have well with other directors is a discussion that falls within the realm of conjecture .

Undoubtedly, Ray’s influence in Bengal stands next only to Tagore. This marks the continuance of the Bengali middle class’ articulate fascination with culture and literature very actively; even the long static rule of Left front hardly derailed them from the special works of Bengali cinema, literature and art. On one level, it is satisfying, if not gratifying, to have the legend’s influence so closely down even to the bottom social level but it simultaneously also affirms the blockade of path breaking productions in literature, art or cinema from Bengal. That’s something that cannot be sidelined as a momentary affliction that will soon wither away.

Ray was against any such conformism that prevented looking at retrospective works in new light, new approaches; his writings in this book or his vision across his works exemplify this. He transcended from economics to arts as an academic learner and shifted from his professional overtures with the then leading advertising agency, D.J.Keymer (Now, Oglivy &Mather) towards making realistic Bengali cinema which reveals his dynamism and self discipline. The essays in the present volume highlight, what was not ideal with cinema, society or with the overall systemic structure during the lifetime of Ray while his work continues to be open to varied inferences by critics and intellectuals.

Deep Focus would prove to be a prominent source of reference for all those who love cinema and wish to acquaint themselves with Ray’s vision on different themes, in a different timeframe. If the respective countries (France,Japan and Italy) could be proud on Jean Renior, Akira Kurosowa and Vittorio De Sica, India too could nominate some of the most epoch making cinema makers from her land. But in any case, Ray would be the ranked first and his works would serve to know about India in making and complete totality. Ray mortally departed at dawn of economic liberalisation in India. Twenty years down the lane, all spheres are in laissez faire mode, whereas Satyajit Ray’s idealism or shrewdness faces the risk of oblivion, alas.
Atul Kumar Thakur
June 16, 2012, Saturday, 2012, New Delhi
Email: summertickets@gmail.com
(Published in Businessworld,June5,2012/ http://www.businessworld.in/businessworld/businessworld/content/Visionary%E2%80%99s-Worldview.html )

Revisiting Tagore

Amit Chaudhuri’s essays on Rabindranath Tagore delineate the former’s intimate relationship with an iconic poet and intellectual whose life and works have (and continue to) inspire generations of scholars and readers
Book Review: Non-fiction/On Tagore: Reading the poet today by Amit Chaudhuri, Penguin/2012, 178 pp; Rs399 (Hardback)

The beauty of Amit Chaudhuri’s essays on Rabindranath Tagore lies in how they allow the reader a tantalising glimpse into the rich textures that construct the broad views that have governed the works of one of the world’s most celebrated thinking men. This volume leaves an overarching effect in clearing the fog about how Tagore was great in many spheres. Not due to his plutocratic background and plumy exposures — a fact corroborated by Job Charnok’s foundation of the city of Calcutta — during the peak of colonialism, but because his writing can be seen intricately, through different prisms without ever deviating from his core belief which was imbibed in universalism. This wistful thinking is probably the centre of all under and over stated freestyle views on the life and literature of Tagore.

Even if one has, perchance, encountered one or all five essays in the collection independently, reading them in sequence helps the reader savour and recuperate the ‘essential’ Tagore. An eminent literary scholar, critic and musician of high senses, Amit Chaudhuri’s ideas on the writer should be treated as his subjective point of view; an independent observation on Tagore as opposed to any discourse on interventionist blocks active in propagating alternative vision on Bengal’s renaissance and India’s decisive struggle against the colonial rule. Chaudhuri has promptly confessed, in the foreword of this book, how carefully his relationship with Tagore began: First by listening to the renditions of rabindra sangeet by great vocalists such as Subina Roy and his mother Bijoya Chaudhuri and it was later that he becoming serious about Tagore’s literary works. For long, however, W.B. Yeats has remained his favourite poet and in Bengali, it has been Jibanananda Das (not Tagore); something that has remained a subject of sublime argument between Chaudhuri and his uncle, as it apparent through the former’s essays.

The first essay, ‘The Anniversary Begins,’ first published in The Guardian/2011 , strengthens Chaudhuri’s stand that a writer is not essentially attracted to another writer of great merit out of populist fascination; rather it is the importance of his work that brings them closer. His honest perspectives on Tagore’s persona and overall presence within the Bengali psyche is (slightly less but still) very much affiliated with Universalists without any boundaries. This essay therefore espouses the boundary less emotion associated with Rabi Thakur/Tagore and what his 150th anniversary meant for the world.

The Nature Of Poetics
The oldest essay of this collection, ‘The Flute of Modernity’, first appeared in The New Republic in 1998. It overtly explores Tagore through his personal quest during the process of writing Gitanjjali while elaborating on his intellectual on impact British artists and writers such as William Rothenstein and W. B. Yeats. As a poet who achieved unprecedented heights in the history of mankind, Tagore emphatically shaped a new overview about the wisdom of the East. Chaudhuri opines that, “Tagore’s poem is an implicit tribute to an intellectual ambience and the possibilities it created; and it also a tribute to the secular, silent act of reading, which, in that culture, had become a significant activity whereby old texts, and the printed page, were being placed in new contexts, and reassessed and reimagined”.


The next essay solves the puzzles surrounding what inspired Tagore to be close to nature and verses so keenly? In his formative stages, especially around the time he composed the Bhanusingher Padabali, the music of medieval Bengali poet Chandidas and Maithili-Bengali poet Vidyapati charmed him immensely. But it’s also equally true that Tagore lived and observed modernism from close quarter and this way; his concern proliferated in diverse dimensions of life. Leading social historian In Ram Chandra Guha’s view on Tagore, “If Tagore had merely been a ‘creative artist’; perhaps one would not have found him put to rank alongside those other builders of modern India”, draws his unique persona in terms of the multiple efforts he had relentlessly made in his lifetime. Tagore’s humbleness always exposed him as a creative artist in consistent effort contrasted him from his very early acceptance into a worldwide figure.

‘A Pact with Nature’ was earlier published in The London Review of Books in 2006 and examines Tagore’s leaning towards nature as a close part of his action whose impact is visible in his works of literature, art, institution making and as well as his life. This essay has a very wide canvass that sufficiently absorbs the thematic debates from oriental lingual emancipation to the profoundness of the Upanishads as a distinct source for knowing India’s past. Also, this work focuses on the mystery about Tagore’s decision to translate Gitanjali into English, which he only used with a degree of insecurity in his own confession. Though Ezra Pound’s slapping of “boomed by the pious non-conformist” for Tagore’s Nobel Prize in literature was the height of enthusiasm and insecurity among the figures of literary London towards the arrival of a man outside of Occidental terrains. This essay is very relevant for understanding the cultural whims and fancies between the East and West, and lastly the synthesis compromised across different periods.

The fourth piece of the volume, ’Poetry As Polemic’ was first written as the foreword for Harvard University Press and later for Vishva Bharati’s Essential Tagore in 2011. Tagore’s drive for experiment was relentless and many conclusions inundated through those painstaking actions were simply turned down by the poet himself as transitory accomplishments. Hence, his works are hard to be seen only in bounded framework, rather they must be reckoned with consideration of a “larger interest”, evident in Tagore’s all work. Bengalis seldom admire both Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak at the same time but the influence of Tagore is common on both and they have cinematised it well in their immortal works. Ray adaptation of Tagore’s novels such as Ghare Baire, and novella, Nashtanirh (Ray’s Charulata) among others and celebrated worldwide, while Tagore’s poetry influences a number of Ghatak’s movies. Infact, he immortalised Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud Covered Star) through portraying amazing landscape and multi-vocal, performing entity actively indulge in the desire of existence at the end of cinema. That sense was drawn from Tagore which denies “landscape” only as serene, indifferent, permanent background to human endeavour. This essay is short, lucid and worth of calling essential reading on Tagore.

Tagore always enjoyed the intrinsic struggle of art very intimately and entwined those conflicts into different realms of life. Amit Chaudhuri’s elaborates that “Tagore knew this, and it’s from his intimacy with solitariness and secrecy that his extraordinary language and his transformative vision of the world emerged — he often seems to make this solitary self an interlocutor, in a tone at once self-flagellating and accusatory; in India, Tagore is viewed as a sort of Guinness Book of World Record holder” The last essay of the book, ‘Nothing But A Poet’, first published in The Hindustan Times, 2010, tries to deciphers the versatility of this unparalleled man.

Legacy Of Thought
We Indians seem to have a masterly command in forgetting our own traditions and being part of them. Tagore’s criticism also suffered similar flaws both at home and abroad. Amit Chaudhuri’s voices the concern that, “from Vidyapati (great Maithili poet of14th century AD, of whose songs Tagore once composed a pastiche) to Tagore, there’s an immense movement; but of what kind?” This brilliantly covers the historical series of negligence towards the discipline of literature.

At this eventful juncture of modernity, India needs to look back towards its own thinkers rather than surmising on absentee philosophers from different geographies of the world. The time is ripe for taking Tagore’s vision in completeness and expelling all virulent perceptual divisions. These five essays stand to make a huge difference in high standard debates on Tagore. As always, Amit Chaudhuri’s contribution in literature is path breaking and challenges the occupied territory of (many) stubborn self styled experts.
Atul Kumar Thakur
April 29, 2012, Sunday, New Delhi
Email: summertickets@gmail.com
(Published in Business World, April17, 2012)

Ritwik Ghatak : A Relentless Maverick

In the last quarter of year 2008, Cine club of India Habitat Centre organized a screening of Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara; being a cinema lover I had reason to attend this show and interact with the serious viewers of cinema. On this occasion, I availed an opportunity of interaction with the renowned cinema maker Kumar Sahni who was once very closed to Ritwik Ghatak at FTII (Pune) and in later period of life. He profoundly revealed his relentless creativity and his promising attitude towards the progressive ideology.

Every close observer of his life and work can see a close connection between his Idea and action. Writer and activist of international repute Mahasweta Devi, who is a close family member of Ritwik Ghatak, recalls his work with great admiration and memorized his restlessness in pursuit of purposeful creativity.My own frequent conversation with Mahasweta Devi in last six months enhanced some of my closer views about this great cinema-maker-Ritwik Ghatak.

Ritwik Ghatak was born on November 4, 1925 at Zindabazar in Dhaka (East Bengal), He and his twin sister Prateeti were the youngest among nine children of his parents. They grew amidst the natural proximity, those memories and nostalgia canopied over his consciousness throughout the life. It’s also quite visible in his cinemas. Ritwik Da was born and brought up in East Bengal but at the time of partition, they had to flee away from their own land to Calcutta, where he along with his family bound to live an extremely strained new life. Like many others, they too lost their belongingness from East Bengal, but anecdotes kept Ritwik Da culturally sensitive and oddities of life, even more progressive.

Though a sense of alienation never fled from Ritwik Da’s mind in Calcutta, probably his own bitter experiences in life enabled him to see sufferings of modern time, like war, partition, exile, and dispossession in acute way. Distortion of his life further made him inclined towards an organized and solid ideological base of Marxism.

Ritwik Da was a perfectionist practitioner of art, music and literature, articulation from his natural impulses assisted him in cinema making. In his childhood, he was deeply influenced through the works of Abnindranath Tagore and certain paintings of Gangendranath Tagore. In later phase, he practically comprehends the works of Rabindranath Tagore and with certain conditions, liked his intent for the humanity.

As an avid reader, he found taste for the progressive Bengali and world literature, especially he admired the works of Sukanta Bhattacharya, Bibhutibhusan Banerjee,Manik Banerjee,Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar,Abrahan Lincoln Marx and Lenin. He even used the poem (Cheel) of Sukanta Bhattacharya in his masterwork Bari Theke Paliye.
In the sphere of music, he learned its universal anatomy from the great maestro-Ustad Alauddin Khan. He had great taste of music (mostly in background scores) which he consistently shown in his cinema’s like Meghe Dhaka Tara.

Probably that affection for music made him among the real admirers of Beethoven, Thaickovsky, Paul Robeson, S.D.Burman and others. In1920’s, influenced through the literary impression of Manik Banerjee, a legendary Kallol group was formed. Manish Ghatak (Elder brother of Ritwik Da) was one among its founders. Radicalism of this group shaped the child mind of Ritwik Ghatak for the progressive ideas.

In 1942, IPTA came into existence and involved itself to forward the collective opposition of masses against the British imperial rule. The formidable front-bearers were-Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Sambhu Mitra, Balraj Sahni,Salil Chaudhary, Ravishankar,Udayshankar, Bijon Bhattacharya.

Ritwik Ghatak entered in active Communist politics during his college days in Berhampur in 1946. In 1948, he graduated from Berhampur College and joined the IPTA as full-timer. He started activism with theaters, and later wrote stories, plays, essays in Bangla and English. Jwala, Sankho, Dalil are some of the illustrating plays of Ghatak, which spread across the Bengal and earned great attention of peoples.

In 1955, he married with Surama, a renowned IPTA activist. Ritwik Da believed in the continuance of life countering with devastation of life, that way he tried to live a creative life but with clear objective realities. He translated Bertolt Brecht’s, The life of Galileo and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, besides he also penned two remarkable novels in Bangla namely as, Ayananata and Akash Gangar Path Beye.

He had also edited two journals- Abhidhara, Abhinay Darpan and produced a collection of essays in English- “Cinema and I”. Ritwik Da was equally great as a literary genius, which he proved in his very short stint as a script writer for Hindi films in Bombay- he worked on the scripts for cinemas like, Madumati (Directed by Bimal Roy), Musafir (Directed by Hrisikesh Mukherjee). But as he was destined for creating history as a cinema director in Bangla, he left Bombay early for Calcutta, to get completely involved for his own projects.

He had considered cinema, as a form of revolutionary Art. So, naturally he was working as part of the new cinema movement of India, started off with Dharti Ke Lal(IPTA,1949). Cinemas of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Siegfried Kracaner, Paul Rotha and Roger Manville emphatically influenced him. By reference, Baedeni (1951) was his first cinema under his direction, but with having some technical faults, that could not be screened publicly.

So, it would be appropriate to recall Nagrik (1952), as his first cinema, which was based on the middle class families’ agony in Calcutta in post-partition days. The cinema exposes and condemned the insensitivity of the system. It does lucidly cinematize the grim struggle and tragic fall of a middle class family in heartless metropolis of Calcutta. Nagrik reflects Ritwik Ghatak’s own painful struggle in Calcutta; he portrayed the city life in as like ‘web of betrayals’.

Ritwik Da personalizes his odd experiences in this cinema through showing pauperization of its protagonist Ramu, who even fall to the label of a wage laborer despite being a teacher’s son-the depiction creates the grim picture of helplessness of exiled masses in cruel city life. Observers of such realistic works also become equally helpless with watching Ramu and his old mother to enter in a slum, his conditional drifts from girlfriend Uma and seeing turning of Uma’s sister in to prostitution.

Ritwik Da moved to making a documentary after his first breakthrough of Nagrik, in 1955, he made “Oraon”, on the tribes of south Bihar. His next major work was Ajaantrik (1958), centered on an unusual story of Subodh Ghosh, this proved one of the few cinemas to win international acclaim within a short span of time. The cinema was based on the relationship between men and machine, with concentration on the nuances of divergence that modern system creates with the humanity.

The next from him was Kato Ajanare (1959), which chosen not to be released after the last scene was shot. In the same year, he came out with a landmark work in Indian cinema-”Bari Theke Paliye”, Ghatak could be seen doing technical experiments in this cinema. The cinema presents various faces of city life though unnamed postures but portrayal of Calcutta becomes visible on screen and in mind of audiences. Despite having all the typical concepts of Ritwik Da, cinema allowed the viewers to enjoy for some moment, but the centrality of ideas remains serious.

I personally take “Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960)’” as one among the greatest cinemas, the world has seen so far. Here, every character appears immortal with the great casts from Supriya Chaudhary, Anil Chatterjee, Bijan Bhattacharya, Niranjan Roy, Geeta Ghatak and others. This cinema shows a lower middle class family in suburban Calcutta where the bread earner Neeta (Spriya Chaudhary) severely struggles for the survival of her family. But in the course of time, her family started to show indifference from her falling emotional and physical conditions, even with the deadly Tuberculosis which she got in solitaire.

Only her elder brother (Dada, acted by Anil Chaterjee) offers true emotion for her falling condition but his late success in the field of music could not make his dream true for her loving sister. The relationship between these two touches high moral ground, cinema ends in sanatorium amidst the emotional exchange of words between brother and sister. After listening about the recently earned fame of her brother, she could not resist her temptation for life, she broke out for the first time for own sake…”Aami bachbo Dada”.

That forwards the core concerns of feminism and other aspects of our problem ridden society in modern times. In 1961, ‘Komal Gandhar’ was released and elegantly visualized the shattering dreams of the principle characters; he very cautiously utilized the metaphor of “Anasua” from the “Abhijana Shakuntalam” (Kalidas) and “Miranda” from “Tempest” (Shakespeare). “Suvarnarekha (1962)” should be considered among his best works, it also touches the life of Ritwif Ghatak in Calcutta. Madhavi Mukherjee and others characters including of Ritwik Da himself lived the story of uproot beingness at various levels.

Cinema starts with viciousness of a displaced brother, sister and an orphan (outsider), presence of this outsider radically altered the life of its prime character Sita (Madhavi Mukherjee). She represents the sound of opposition (in her suicide) against the decaying values of society. Ghatak Da again becomes successful to utilize the realistic metaphors from Indian tradition.

In 1970, he made an exceptional documentary on “Chhou” dance of Purulia-a year later, “Amar Lenin (Short Film)” was screened in Russia though it never released in India. In 1973, he made a cinema ‘Titas Ekti Nadir Naam’ on the tragedy stricken lives of a fishing community living along the banks of river Titas in Bangladesh. It could fetch modest response from the critics.

‘Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974) could be said his last cinema, because his last work (Documentary on Ramkinkar) was mysteriously lost, and therefore could not screened publicly. Ritwik Ghatak made eight feature films, four short films, four documentaries and an Ad film in his life time and like his own role acted in ‘Jukti Takko Aar Gappo’ disappeared suddenly from the scene on February 6,1976.

His premature death was a major blow for the world of progressive cinema and its admirers. It is regrettable that Ritwik Ghatak could achieve the proper evaluation of his work only after his death, still his cinemas deserve fresh look from the critics and cinema lovers, because even today, his kind of works are as relevant as they were fifty years back!

Atul Kumar Thakur
New Delhi
10th April 2009
atul_mdb@rediffmail.com