Fiddler on the Roof

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.