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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

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A salute to India's greatest film-maker

Film history too is a progression of a great many slow steps — and a few giant leaps. If one must identify a single leap that had Indian cinema come of age, that was surely Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali. Half a century after it was released, this first in what subsequently took shape as the Apu Trilogy remains undiminished as a classic. Perhaps the secret of the abiding appeal of the art of India's greatest film-maker is his rootedness in his own culture. The great limitation of Ray's films must be that their medium is Bengali (Shatranj ke Khilari and Sadgati being the two exceptions), a language spoken in a relatively small part of the world and unfamiliar to a majority even in India. This inevitably means there are aspects of Ray's art lost on non-Bengali audiences, a condition that is not helped by the unsatisfactory quality of some of the subtitles. But this, of course, is also the strength of Ray's cinema, the deep engagement with a particular language and culture that is the source of his art. Ray's films glide over an astonishingly varied range of expressions that life in the Bengali-speaking world is capable of producing. The slow-moving pace of Pather Panchali, which in Kurosawa's words "flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river," gives way to the harsh conflicts in Apu's private world as he moves away from the village and from his mother in Aparajito, and to his struggle to survive in a big city in Apur Sansar. The richly ambivalent portrayal of the crumbling world of an economically doomed and culturally refined landed gentry (Jalsaghar) and of a class destructively steeped in superstition (Devi); the comic depiction of the lure of easy money in the life of small men in the city (Paraspathar); the loving vignettes on the lives of three women of dissimilar ages and inclinations (Teen Kanya); the little elite group in Kanchenjungha with its own peculiar set of heartaches, fads and beliefs; the Renaissance world in the exquisitely lyrical Charulata; the brooding heaviness of Kapurush set in a north Bengal tea garden; and the comic exploits of Birinchibaba in Mahapurush — together they build up a rounded picture of Bengali life, much of it still recognisable, some of it part of a shared memory of a recent past.

Special mention must be made of what has come to be called the Calcutta Trilogy, three unconnected films in which contemporary reality springs to life with a directness not seen earlier in Ray's cinema, to come back with a faint echo in his adaptation of Ibsen's Enemy of the People towards the end of his life. There is a kind of rage in Pratidwandi, Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya that is not otherwise characteristic of Ray, a bleakness one would not suspect from the maker of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. Perhaps this was inevitable in the stormy Calcutta of the 1970s. Perhaps they fill out Ray's vision of the milieu that inspired his films, raising questions that come back in a very different form and setting in his swansong, Agantuk.

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