Fiddler on the Roof

I have to figure this one out by myself;
Now that I've set myself afire
I must pleasure in my pain.

But when tears fuel fires, what is one to do?

For the careless days of youth I've left behind:
The defiant toss of my head,
The spirited spring in my step,
The sparkle in my eyes...
Have mellowed and dimmed in the shadow on my mirror.

Do I drown in you?
Or in the slumbering feelings you've kindled in me anew?
Do I need you?
Or do I need to see myself in yet another hue?
Is it me or is it you?

I have to figure this one out by myself;
Now that I've set myself afire
I must pleasure in my pain.

Shared laughter and companiable silences;
A searching eye-lock and a responsive ghost-smile,
An excuse for a conversation,
An avid wait over a cup of tea...

Does the weary heart recognise the balm it seeks?
Does the fire scorch you too as it burns me with its intensity?

Shared laughter and companiable silences;
My smile awaits your gaze—were it to fall on me.

Let me lie buried on your breast a while longer;
Hold me tighter, don't let me breathe,
Shower my swollen eyes and my tear-washed cheeks...

Let's keep all dark cares beyond our inner circle;
Stop the world seeping into my consciousness!
Hold me tighter and don't let me breathe...

Let us forget for an ecstatic instant,
Let blessed peacefulness descend;
Let me lie spent in your arms a while longer...

The fecund jasmine string and the mogra too
Strewn asunder as the cruel strains flew
Oh Azure Lord who plays the flute so
Brewing within dusky Yamuna a storm anew
Causing dark clouds to burst into rain
Smudging my kohl eyes, drenching me with pain...

And they say that
A drop of poison is far desired
To the beloved’s tears!

(August 2011)

flat stones and round ones and coloured ones too
glassy marbles, cowrie shells and shiny beads blue
tag games and blind folds and dusty frocks askew
oh so little time and so much to do!

snooping around back yards, lonely places taboo
sandy pits, mud puddles and shrubs dotted with dew
sliding down dirt hills, scrambling up a tree or two
oh my friend, we had so little time and so much to do!

left behind are those days my playmates, left behind with you
carefree days of yore my comrades, if only we could renew...

Waiting is such sweet agony
Ticking off each passing second
Blood drop by blood drop
Measuring each merging minute
Heart wring by heart wring
Counting every heavy hour
Death-Life by Death-Life

Take care to hurry your feet quicker to me my love
Take care for the waiting hour kills and stills
My pulse beats in each nerve knot

Take care and hurry for the life blood gushes away my love
With each waiting minute my ruby lips grow pale
My iris dims

May my last waking second catch you in my weary arms
Hurry my love, hurry, hurry...
Don't bleed me so, don't kill me so!

Read my lips, read the words they mouth
Read my eyes, reflecting my faith
Read my heart beats, they thunder their love
Come bathe in my spirit, awash with my strength

Come dive beneath my ocean soul, you'll find the floor strewn with pearls
Anemones flashing, ruby red corals, and the shifting sands of time...
Useless to most!
For they buy no diamonds in our market city
But few may fathom what they have lost
For they take you closer to eternity...

My last breathe
My heart's blood
My aspirations and all my strengths
Are yours to keep forever my love
But please walk gently beside me please

My soul runs deep
My arms are wide
My bosom soft to pillow your weary head
All these and more were always yours my love
But please keep me gently by you please

My heart is heavy
My eyes tear-laden
My sighs follow quickly each other all day
I grapple with life's meaning my love
But I only long to be held gently by you please

By Buro, my bro

My muse are you
Unbeknownst to you

My muse are you
Sending all my thoughts askew
Firing off my inner peace
Flame engulfing my inner world

Birthing possibilities deep within my womb
Scratching bloody trails deep within my soul
Smouldering away my inner peace
Shaking away my carefully stacked contentment

My muse are you
Unbeknownst to you

Oars in oars out
The silence of a twilight river
Occasional swoops of a pied kingfisher
Along the river’s banks

Oars in oars out
The waters gently sway my boat
From side to side
And then again, before my boat
Finds its balance
Sinking into her silken waters
Drowning waist-deep into her re-assuring bosom

Oars in oars out
Lulled into a sleepy melody
Of the rivers own song of contentment
Mimicked by santoors and a jal tarang
Peaceful, happy peals and tinkles
Of the river’s bangled limbs and
Azure flowing sari-end
Wrapped around my creaky boat

Oars in oars out
Mirroring the silent song in my heart…

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.
– Emily Dickinson

Found the drafts of my long-forgotten PhD synopsis recently, tucked away in a cobweby corner of my Yahoo! Briefcase (a defunct service as of now). Since nothing much is going to happen to this anyway, thought I might as well put it up on my blog:

Labels: film studies, research, Satyajit Ray

Existing Research
Western critiscism on Ray is for the most part hyperbolic and eulogistic in nature (Marie Seton’s Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray, 1971, and Pauline Kael’s review of Ghare Baire/The Home and the World are cases in point) and as such, such an adulatory approach does nothing to help study an individual’s work in the critical spirit of things. The first serious study of Ray’s cinema by any Indian critic is Chidananda Das Gupta’s book, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, 1994. Apart from usefully placing Ray against the historical background of the Bengal Renaissance and Tagorean (rabindrik) culture, he divides Ray-movies into two periods. The first stretches between Pather Panchali (1955) and Charulata (1964)—it is interesting to note that this period also coincides with the Nehruvian era—which he terms as the “searching and finding phase” of Ray. And the second begins with Kapurush O Mahapurush/The Coward and the Holy Man (1965)—and is characterised by “an emptiness ans spiritual exhaustion”. While this is a seminal work in its own right, it suffers from problems arising from Das Gupta's own conservative views on a film maker’s task of cultural creation.

In my opinion, the most useful reseach in this field remains Geeta Kapur’s essay, “Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray” in the Journal of Arts and Ideas (No. 23-24, 1993). She places Ray within a liberal, non-ideological discourse of post-independence India, where both the “pan-Asian revivalism of Santiniketan” and the IPTA movement had both petered out. Kapur proposes that the “phenomena of Satyajit Ray” and his “unproblematized faith in the self-emancipation of …the emergent Indian middle-class (p. 20)” in the prevalent atmosphere of a dominant liberal discourse, which priviledged Ray’s realist genre with its redemptive promises—positions Pather Panchali and the Apu Trilogy as symptomatic of the first decade of India’s independence.

She argues that the very choice of Bibhutuibhushan Bandopadhyaya’s bildungsroman(s), Pather Panchali, 1929 (and Aparajito, 1931) belies the allegorical (national/ethnographic) aspirations of Ray’s first trilogy. In other words, the archetypal brahmin boy’s rites of passage to the modern mainstream serves as the trope of a national narrative, which is pregnant with the “percieved destiny of ‘the people’ (p. 20)”. As she lucidly puts it—the whole phenomena of Ray himself, coupled with the oft-repeated story of the making of Pather Panchali with its unprecedented international success leading to the Western image of Ray as an Indian film maker—all these different but intricately linked discourses came together, through the aesthetics of Ray’s cinema, to create Pather Panchali as that seminal work through which newly independent India would fashion her emergent cultural identity.

Together with Geeta Kapur’s article the other piece of relevant research, which appeared in the same volume of the Journal of Arts and Ideas was Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s “Satyajit Ray, Ray Films, and Ray-Movie”. His article is also important inasmuch as it invites us to recognise the independent identity of the ‘Ray-movie’, typically characterised by adulatory and, to use Rajadhyaksha’s expression, “unvarying in reviewer comment (p. 8)” over the decades since Ray has been creating his films. He further identifies them as being “[r]arely located in the actual historical context of its making or its plot (lending it with that ‘timeless and international quality’)” and usually in “middle-grey tones avoiding harsh extremes (p. 8)”.

TG Vaidyanathan in is book, Hours in The Dark: Essays on Cinema (1996), draws parallels between VS Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness and the experiences faced by post-independence, Indian film makers. Vaidyanathan reads the problems of post-colonial cinema in the light of a certain chapter in Naipaul’s book, where he goes to visit his ancestral village in India.

He identifies three important phases in Naipaul’s encounter with his ancestral legacy—the first of these, in Vaidyanathan’s words, is marked by “tremulous awe”, the second by “embarassment caused by encounter with the ‘fabled’ reality” and the final stage is characterised by an “abrupt return to the now familiar-irritation and disgust of much of the book (p. 80)”. These three stages, identified as the enactment of the awe-embarassment-irritation syndrome, are percieved to be symptomatic of post-independence Indian cinema’s attempts at dealing with its own ‘reality’. Vaidyanathan then shifts this parallel of the awe-embarassment-irritation syndrome from the body of post-colonial Indian cinema in general to the work of an individual film maker—Satyajit Ray.

He reads ‘tremulous awe’ (the adbhut rasa arising from vismaya bhava, the states of awe and wonder according to the Indian aesthetic rasa-bhava theory) in Ray’s earliest works, notably, the Apu Trilogy (1955-1959) and discerns Ray’s second phase most clearly in Devi/The Goddess (1960), where embarassment at the Indian reality is presented as nostalgia for a lost world. This phase reaches its peak with Charulata/The Lonely Wife (1964) and continues with Nayak/The Hero (1966) and Aranyer Din Ratri/Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), which also marks the end of the second stage. According to Vaidyanathan, Pratidwandi/The Adversary (1970) and the rest of the Calcutta Trilogy marks Ray’s mounting irritation with the contemporary urban Indian reality of student revolts and police violence, naked profiteering, unemployment and corruption, and a general moral degradation ensuing from both material poverty as well as the poverty of the soul. Significantly, says Vaidyanathan, in Ray’s very next film after Jana Aranya, he retraces his steps to the second stage—yet again using nostalgia to camouflage his embarassment at contemporary reality—with his only feature film made in the national language, Shatranj ke Khiladi (1977), which was based on a short story by Munshi Premchand.

Suranjan Ganguly’s book, Satyajit Ray: In Search of the Modern, 2000, locates Ray culturally and aesthetically in the nineteenth century’s cultural ethos of modernity, while the Ray scholar Darius Cooper reads the traditional nine rasas within the Ray-movie in his book, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity, 2000. Cooper tries to “situate and evaluate the cinema of Satyajit Ray from an Indian aesthetic as well as an Indian social and historical perspective (p. 1)”. This is where the importance of Cooper’s research lies—he, perhaps for the first time, tries to capture Ray’s creations, as well as his position as artist and spokesman in relation to his nation, from within the indian tradition itself. This book is largely a study of the relationship between the sociological and the artistic. Cooper examines the Apu Trilogy in the light of the Indian aesthetic theory of the rasa/bhava as laid down by the three Sanskrit theoriticians, Dandin (7th century), Anandavardhana (9th century) and Abhinavagupta (10th century).

Labels: film studies, research, Satyajit Ray