Thursday, May 07, 2009
Unfinished Doctoral Research
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:
Shades of Ray: On the Heart of the Monstrous City
“What should you put in your films? What can you leave out? Would you leave the city behind and go to the village where cows graze in the endless fields and the shepherd plays his flute?…
Or would you rather stay where you are, right in the present, in the heart of this monstrous, teeming, bewildering city, and try to orchestrate its dizzying contrasts of sight of sight and sound and milieu?”
-Satyajit Ray in his article,“Calm Without Fire Within”, 1964. pp. 22-25.
“I am willing to believe that at the beginning you did not realise what was happening; later, you doubted whether such things could be true; but now you know, and still you hold your tongues.
The blinding sun of torture is at its zenith; it lights up the whole country. Under that merciless glare, there is not a laugh that does not ring false, not a face that is not painted to hide fear or anger, not a single action that does not betray our disgust, and our complicity.”
-Jean Paul Sartre in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of The Earth.
While the artist Satyajit Ray is mainly recognized as a film maker in the West, in his own country he represents the community of influential first generation post-independence artists. But in Bengal, Ray has always been viewed as being much more than a Nehruvian film maker—in fact there has been an almost consistent downgrading of his films while his talents as a commercial artist and short story writer has taken precedence. From an International film maker to a national artist to regional icon—where does the ‘real’ Ray figure in these representational gaps? His cinematic creations (what Ashish Rajadhyaksha terms the ‘Ray-movie’ in his 1993 article, “Satyajit Ray, Ray Films, and Ray-Movie”) similarly defy simplistic labels—perhaps this paradox reflects what is common to cinema generated within a post-colonial society, where despite his best efforts, India remains ‘an area of darkness’ for the average Indian film maker. As sociologist Ashis Nandy remarks, “Ray...lived a plurality of selves, and a part of him was as deeply Indian as a part of him was Western (“How Indian Is Ray?”, 1993. p. 43).” My study will try to chronicle how this struggle to define himself spills over to Ray’s larger struggle to define the India (embodied in the metropolis, Calcutta) of his films and literary works, within which he functions as an artist.
Born in 1921 to a middle-class Calcutta family of renowned artists, who had strong links to the Bengal Renaissance, Ray inherited the world-view of a class deeply committed to the European Enlightenment philosophers of progress. And this liberal-human idealism would pervade all his work. And the city, where the Bengal Renaissance took root, would become a major factor in his evolution as a creative individual par excellence. Within its urban colonial space Ray would encounter a modern nation.
Calcutta, as a symbol of a complex post-colonial nation, features in almost all of Ray’s films either as a mere background (Parash Pathar/ The Philosopher’s Stone), a state-of-mind (Devi/The Goddess or Ghare Baire/The Home and the World) or as the dominant factor (Pratidwandi/The Adversary). Individual beings live and survive, often with a sense of guilt and a troubled conscience within this seething, ever-changing metropolis. In my study I would like to focus on primarily three of Ray’s movies, which have traditionally been termed as the Calcutta Trilogy—Pratidwandi/The Adversary (1970), Seemabaddha/Company Limited (1971) and Jana Aranya/The Middleman (1975). In my opinion, these three films best represent Ray’s efforts at describing the making of a nation as it emerges from its feudal/colonial past to become a new hybrid, post-colonial entity coming to terms with its post-independence reality of unemployment, corruption and the death of the Nehruvian dream. In Amarta Sen’s words, “While Satyajit Ray insists on retaining the real cultural features of the society that he portrays, his view of India...is full of recognition of a reality with immense heterogeneity at every level (Satyajit Ray and the Art of Universalism: Our Culture Their Culture, 1996. p. 8).”
Ray began his film making career during the idyllic, hope-filled Nehruvian ‘50s, when India was projected as a progressive, secular, industrialised democracy. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1947-64) nursed a vision of a nation, which included a great diversity of peoples, reflecting a multi-layered sense of ‘Indianess’. And this inclusive vision matched Ray’s notion of culture as a hybrid entity, whose individual units come together to form the Whole. And artists like Ray took it upon themselves to reflect Nehru’s vision through their art. Ray’s films from Pather Panchali (1955) onwards sought to address his audience as citizens of a new India, who, like him, were trying to comprehend a newly emerging social world.
But from the mid-1960s through the ‘70s, this first flush of Independence began to wane. There were two wars—one with China (1961) and one with Pakistan (1965), growing unemployment among the urban middle classes, and an agricultural crisis, which had brought parts of the country face-to-face with famine. In addition, there was an increased disaffection and restlessness among the intelligentsia. The war in Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution in China had radicalised Calcutta's student community and many of its artists, writers and film makers. Revolutionary violence and the violence of the counter-revolutionary police forces gripped the city. Calcutta, became a dangerous place to live in. The Bangladesh war and the influx of refugees fleeing East Pakistan filled its streets and its outskirts. The successful Indian Army operations and the consequent birth of Bangladesh as an independent nation were capped by India's first nuclear test in 1974. The anti-Indira Gandhi agitation led to the imposition of the Emergency in 1975. And for the first time free Indians were subjected to an authoritarian government.
Mirroring the realities of his times, the ‘Ray-movies’ of the post-Nehruvian era beginning with, Aranyer Din Ratri/Days and Nights in the Forest (1969) through the last of the Calcutta Trilogy, Jana Aranya/The Middleman (1975), found it difficult to sustain the earlier idealism of his films made between 1955 and 1964, which asserted a romantic vision of future economic growth and social reconstruction. These are the darkest, most cynical of Ray-movies depicting the moral and spiritual decline of a society peopled with a generation facing alienation, waywardness and complete disillusionment. When Days and Nights in the Forest was made, Calcutta was literally burning with the social and political discontent of the Naxal uprising, and from this movie onwards Ray attempted a new search for understanding and identifying with this post-independent generation of urban Indian metamorphosis.
Born in 1921 to a middle-class Calcutta family of renowned artists, who had strong links to the Bengal Renaissance, Ray inherited the world-view of a class deeply committed to the European Enlightenment philosophers of progress. And this liberal-human idealism would pervade all his work. And the city, where the Bengal Renaissance took root, would become a major factor in his evolution as a creative individual par excellence. Within its urban colonial space Ray would encounter a modern nation.
Calcutta, as a symbol of a complex post-colonial nation, features in almost all of Ray’s films either as a mere background (Parash Pathar/ The Philosopher’s Stone), a state-of-mind (Devi/The Goddess or Ghare Baire/The Home and the World) or as the dominant factor (Pratidwandi/The Adversary). Individual beings live and survive, often with a sense of guilt and a troubled conscience within this seething, ever-changing metropolis. In my study I would like to focus on primarily three of Ray’s movies, which have traditionally been termed as the Calcutta Trilogy—Pratidwandi/The Adversary (1970), Seemabaddha/Company Limited (1971) and Jana Aranya/The Middleman (1975). In my opinion, these three films best represent Ray’s efforts at describing the making of a nation as it emerges from its feudal/colonial past to become a new hybrid, post-colonial entity coming to terms with its post-independence reality of unemployment, corruption and the death of the Nehruvian dream. In Amarta Sen’s words, “While Satyajit Ray insists on retaining the real cultural features of the society that he portrays, his view of India...is full of recognition of a reality with immense heterogeneity at every level (Satyajit Ray and the Art of Universalism: Our Culture Their Culture, 1996. p. 8).”
Ray began his film making career during the idyllic, hope-filled Nehruvian ‘50s, when India was projected as a progressive, secular, industrialised democracy. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1947-64) nursed a vision of a nation, which included a great diversity of peoples, reflecting a multi-layered sense of ‘Indianess’. And this inclusive vision matched Ray’s notion of culture as a hybrid entity, whose individual units come together to form the Whole. And artists like Ray took it upon themselves to reflect Nehru’s vision through their art. Ray’s films from Pather Panchali (1955) onwards sought to address his audience as citizens of a new India, who, like him, were trying to comprehend a newly emerging social world.
But from the mid-1960s through the ‘70s, this first flush of Independence began to wane. There were two wars—one with China (1961) and one with Pakistan (1965), growing unemployment among the urban middle classes, and an agricultural crisis, which had brought parts of the country face-to-face with famine. In addition, there was an increased disaffection and restlessness among the intelligentsia. The war in Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution in China had radicalised Calcutta's student community and many of its artists, writers and film makers. Revolutionary violence and the violence of the counter-revolutionary police forces gripped the city. Calcutta, became a dangerous place to live in. The Bangladesh war and the influx of refugees fleeing East Pakistan filled its streets and its outskirts. The successful Indian Army operations and the consequent birth of Bangladesh as an independent nation were capped by India's first nuclear test in 1974. The anti-Indira Gandhi agitation led to the imposition of the Emergency in 1975. And for the first time free Indians were subjected to an authoritarian government.
Mirroring the realities of his times, the ‘Ray-movies’ of the post-Nehruvian era beginning with, Aranyer Din Ratri/Days and Nights in the Forest (1969) through the last of the Calcutta Trilogy, Jana Aranya/The Middleman (1975), found it difficult to sustain the earlier idealism of his films made between 1955 and 1964, which asserted a romantic vision of future economic growth and social reconstruction. These are the darkest, most cynical of Ray-movies depicting the moral and spiritual decline of a society peopled with a generation facing alienation, waywardness and complete disillusionment. When Days and Nights in the Forest was made, Calcutta was literally burning with the social and political discontent of the Naxal uprising, and from this movie onwards Ray attempted a new search for understanding and identifying with this post-independent generation of urban Indian metamorphosis.
Labels: film studies, research, Satyajit Ray
Shades of Ray (contd.)
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).
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
