Thursday, May 07, 2009
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
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