Was Satyajit Ray a bigger bore than Tagore?

 Nature has made of the Brahmaputra- widening as it merges with Sky and Sea- a marvel which our Species can only exceed when, as in a Rabindranath Tagore or Satyajit Ray- it throws up a vacuous narcissist more crashing than that river's tidal bores. 

The early Ray was okay because the pictures were pretty enough while the sound-track was that of Ravi Shankar (who did the music for a Chetan Anand film which won a prize at Cannes in 1946) or Ali Akbar or Vilayat Khan- all of whom would win acclaim in the West. 

Sadly, Ray was too much of an 'auteur'- i.e. a bore- to stick with such great artistes. Perhaps they were a little too 'folk' for his taste. He started composing his own music with the result that his works became more and more brittle and discordant and even the pictures weren't pretty any more. 

Why were his films so shit? The answer is that his technique was wholly western while his subject matter was the boring shittiness of a boring shithole. Like Himanshu Rai- who, like him, had attended Shantiniketan- and whose collaboration with the Germans- Franz Osten in particular, had kept him within a Western idiom (indeed, he did a Movie in English with his wife, Tagore's great niece, Devika Rani)- Satyajit saw India through aristocratic, Eurocentric, eyes. But, as with 'Light of Asia' (released when Ray was 3 years old), this meant box office failure. Who will pay to see a Prince who, for philosophical reasons, decides to become a starving beggar rather than Aladdin going in the opposite direction while having lots of thrilling adventures along the way? 

 Ray owed nothing to Indian cinema which also meant that he owed nothing to Indian culture. One might say some of his films had a luminous humanity- but it was a mere trick of the light which Europe was using for its own purposes as it rose from the ashes and turned itself into a Common Market. Humanism, at that time, was a Cold War desiderata. It had nothing to do with India which had seen no military operations and where the human-all-too-human was the predominating note. 

 Thus Ray was a westerner- albeit by but grammar and mimesis of technique- forcing his own, that too artificially, deracinated view of India down the throats of Bengalis who had managed to become genuinely deracinated by getting the fuck out of India.  That patronizing cunt said 'the Bengali folk artist can't understand the cinema as an art form'. This was because the Bengali folk artist- like everybody else- wanted entertainment, not boring shite produced by a guy who loathed his own culture and wanted everybody to share that loathing while, if foreign, patting him on the back for staying in a shithole so as to crap the more intensively upon it. 

Chandak Sengoopta, who escaped India quickly enough, explains that the only people who watched Ray's annual films were middle class Calcuttans but only so they would have something to talk about. In other words, this was a cunt whose films talked about Calcutta as a shithole which other Calcuttans then had to talk about because Bongs are a garrulous bunch. Their one aim in life is to compete with the Brahmaputra's tidal bores. One might say some of Woody Allen's films are similarly narcissistic and pseudo-intellectual. But New York mattered- it was the Capital city of Capital. Calcutta did not- it was not even the ghost of its vanished Capitalist creators. It was simply a decomposing corpse. Sex matters and Comedy matters because sexual love is a tragic tale. Zombies may exchange soulful looks. But this is an expressionism as fatal to humor as to romance. It has too thoroughly destroyed all its aesthetic possibilities in advance. Ray's oeuvre did not challenge his audience. It challenged his critics. What can you say about films made unwatchable by the auteur's loathing of the trained and hermeneutic eye? Ray, like Tagore and Sen, displays his bigotry so brutally and incessantly that to comment upon him is to either grovel blindly or else to display an equal bigotry. 

Why did Tamil Cinema become so greatly superior to Bengali Cinema? Calcutta was richer in the Fifties and even the Sixties. Ellis Dungan was brought to Calcutta, by a wealthy Bengali who had been his fellow student in Film School, to make movies but, by happenstance, Dungan moved to Madras and worked in Tamil Cinema.  There he had to work with Tamil folk-artistes or 'devadasi' (courtesan class) singers and, by making them 'camera aware', he helped develop a vernacular oeuvre. Since Dungan didn't know Tamil or anything about India, he could not impose any stereotypes on the 'folk-artistes' of whom Ray was so contemptuous.

Dungan made M.S Subbalaxmi a star and gave Karunanidhi his start as screen writer. Tamil Puranic Hinduism (the 'kathakalakshepham') spread to the rest of India though Bollywood was disinclined to master the idiom of  'mythologicals' ( 'Jai Santoshi Ma' being a but low budget flash in the pan). But the Telugu Cinema soon took over Madras's role. Meanwhile, Karunanidhi and MGR had invaded politics and made it a tributary to the Screen. Then, in the Eighties, Indian TV finally outgrew the shadow of the Cinema Hall with the Ramayana and Mahabharata etc. Thus, in a sense, an American director helped India, through Cinema, become what it always was- viz. Hindutva. This was Vivekananda's vision not that of Tagore for whom Brahmobandhav Upadhyaya had committed the ultimate sin against the Holy Bore by abandoning 'East-West fusion' for simple Nationalism- i.e. vulgar stuff with in-built narrative tension. Why be a hunted revolutionary- i.e. the star of a scenes a faire thriller- when you can be a boring shithead endless complaining that both East and West think what you offer is confusion not fusion? 

Imagine a Bengal which celebrated Bagha Jatin- whose fists of fury were unleashed on actual British soldiers- or Ras Behari, a Scarlet Pimpernel who made a second life for himself in Japan- instead of Tagore and Ray and Amartya Sen. It is true that Bimal Roy, along with other talented people left for Bombay by about 1950 but they could still have made films set in contemporary Bengal.  Come to think of it, maybe the Bengal which celebrates heroes, not bores, is Bangladesh. Tareq Masood's films were good. Kagojer Phool, however, might have made for uncomfortable viewing on this side of the border. 

Around the time Ray was gaining acclaim globally, development economists were arguing that the need for achievement (McLelland) drove growth and modernity whereas the need for affiliation might have the reverse effect. Ray and Tagore and Sen's achievements are of a negative kind. They affiliate with being boring shitheads from shitholes so as to, not shine by comparison, but fuse West and East through multiple identities as boring shitheads with nothing to say but who will just go ahead and babble high falutin' nonsense anyway.