Prof. Chandan Sengoopta has a well researched paper in which he rebuts the view that Satyajit Ray was apolitical. He points out that Ray's grandfather had participated in the campaign against the partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon. His father was sympathetic with the swadesi movement & Ray himself, as a child, had been rather good at spinning cloth.
Calcutta had a large European, Commercial, population and their discriminatory practices (e.g. Ray being paid one third as much as his English colleague who was equal in rank) must have rankled with the highly educated 'bhadralok' gentry which Ray, himself, represented.
Before Pather Panchali: The Feudal-Colonial Nexus Ray‘s first serious script, it is well-known, was based on Rabindranath Tagore‘s Ghare Baire and drafted in 1946.
Before partition- but the atmosphere was darkenting. Direct Action Day riots occurred in August of that year. Tagore's prediction that Muslims would slaughter Hindus was coming true.
The film was to be directed by Harisadhan Dasgupta (1923-1996),
a documentary film maker with whom Ray sometimes collaborated
who had recently returned to Calcutta with some Hollywood experience.
He had been to film school in California. It is said that he had been an apprentice to a black-listed actor/Producer. Left wing sympathies was by no means a disadvantage in the Indian film industry.
Quite a lot of preparatory work was done for the film but the project collapsed when Ray refused to accept changes suggested by the producer.
The boy would have been 23 years old. Ray was 2 years older.
Shortly after this fiasco and before his fateful encounter with Jean Renoir (who would come to Calcutta in 1950 to film The River), Ray also wrote scripts of Manik Bandyopadhyay‘s ‗Bilamson‘ (‗Williamson‘) and Subodh Ghosh‘s ‗Fossil‘, two starkly anti-colonial stories by communist writers.
The Pakistani's made a good film out of a story by the former. The script was by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Meanwhile, Pasolini- who had come to India to make 'Motherland' for the Government- had eloped with Harisadhan's wife.
As Sharmistha Gooptu has shown, Ray‘s thematic choices broadly paralleled trends in mainstream Bengali cinema and in the 1940s, the Bengali film industry, threatened with marginalization by Hindi films from the Bombay studios, evolved specifically Bengali sub-genres, one of which was the anti-colonial melodrama.
Why would this be 'specifically Bengali'? An action film based on the life of, the Indian Bruce Lee, Bagha Jatin (about whom Dasgupta did do a documentary) would have been a smash hit.
Ray‘s projects, had they been accomplished, would have pioneered this genre, which came to be represented by films like Hemen Gupta‘s Bhuli Nai (Unforgotten, 1948)
about the 1905 Partition. Back then Hindus had opposed it. More recently, they insisted on it.
or the same director‘s Byallish (‘Forty-Two, 1951) set against the backdrop of the Quit India movement.
The Brits had fucked off. Hindus from East Bengal were well and truly fucked.
Ghare Baire, with its emphasis on the Hindu communal character of the swadeshi movement of 1905-7, was a topical subject for the 1940s, a time when Indian politics had divided sharply along communal lines.
No. The country had been partitioned. The minority either accepted second class status or was chased away.
Tagore‘s novel showed how, Nikhilesh, a liberal landowner, opposed the boycott of foreign goods being called for by his friend Sandip because it was inimical to the interests of his poor and largely Muslim tenants but was destroyed by the forces of fanatical nationalism.
He was killed by Muslims who were killing and looting his Hindu neighbour. This was a case of religious fanaticism, not Nationalism. Also stealing money & raping girls is an agreeable way to pass the time.
Ray balanced this critique of nationalism, however, with ‗Bilamson‘ and ‗Fossil‘, both of which portrayed the collusion of British colonialism and Indian feudalism.
The Indian landlords paid for British protection. Then they fucked off. Sad.
‗Bilamson‘, first published in 1943, recounts how the weak-willed Bengali landowner Mahidhar lets his estate be taken over by an Englishman named Stephen F Williamson. Williamson shows no compunction in destroying lives and communities in order to build roads and factories and the first person to resist him is the local boy Dhurjati, who organises Mahidhar‘s tenants against Williamson. Refusing to leave, Williamson goes on a rampage against the villagers and Dhurjati is killed. Mahidhar tries to evict Williamson but the story ends with Williamson plying him with drink and lecturing him on the sacred duty to stick it out for their shared ideals.
Sadly, the scene where Williamson sodomizes Mahidhar is not shown. Williamson crowns his career of inequity by going off to fight the Japanese. He was so thoroughly racist that he didn't want 'orientals' to take over Bengal & rape & loot its people. Thus, in the end, Williamson is just as bad as Churchill who used to bugger Gandhi senseless.
An allegory representing the establishment and perpetuation of British colonialism in India, the story implies that colonialism endured because, ultimately, the Indian feudal classes colluded with the British.
Because they were 'plied with drink' & sodomized incessantly by the Viceroy.
‗It was‘, as Ray outlined the subject later, ‗about an English manager of a zamindar‘s estate and described how a spirited youth takes a stand against the manager‘s exploitation of poor peasants‘.
In other words, it was shit. Indians were very good at exploiting the fuck out of each other. What they were shit at was fighting the Japs or Chinks or whatever.
Ray‘s one-line summary suggests that his treatment may have included more intense and direct confrontations between Dhurjati and Williamson than in the original story.
Would it feature sodomy? No. How about a cricket match like 'Lagaan'? Fuck that. Such a film might be entertaining. Ray was against entertainment.
This surmise is supported by the fact that when Ray read out his script to a potential producer, the latter suggested that at the end of the film, the idealistic young hero should cry ‗Quit India!‘ as he confronted the cowering British manager.
The Premier of Bengal at that time was Fazlul Haq. Britishers, like Williamson, were fighting the Japs or the Germans.
Ray considered it a crass suggestion but whatever its merits, the fact that it could be made indicates that Dhurjati must have survived to the end in Ray‘s treatment, which, therefore, may have been more overtly nationalistic than the original.
Less shit.
Subodh Ghosh‘s short story ‗Fossil‘ (1940), set in the tiny princely state of Anjangarh, is also a parable about the colonial-feudal nexus.22 The king of Anjangarh and his court are benighted and cruel but the new law agent, a Bengali polo-playing idealist called Mukherjee, has grand visions for transforming the state. He develops the mining industry and the king‘s treasury overflows with money.
Money is bad. Everybody should starve to death- unless the Japs are willing to enslave Bengal.
Prosperity, however, brings new challenges. The members of the kurmi tribe
i.e. the agriculturist caste
are no longer inclined to be serfs and want to be paid for their services.
In which case they need to kill the King, his family, etc. It is called a Revolution.
The mining syndicate, run by British businessmen, accedes to their demands (the mines could not be operated without kurmi labour) but the king is appalled by the tribals‘ insolence. Eventually, a big mining disaster kills numerous kurmis and in a separate incident, the king‘s own forces fire on a kurmi band for cutting down forest trees without permission, killing nearly two dozen people.
But were they also sodomized?
Fearing criticism and press attention, the king and the syndicate join hands to cover up the incidents.
Oh. Sodomy did feature. Sad.
Mukherjee turns ashen when he learns of their plan, and the story ends with him watching the corpse of the kurmi leader and of those who died in the forest shooting
the big 'forest shooting' back then was the Katyn forest massacre
being lowered into the pit where so many kurmi labourers had already died in the accident. He imagines a distant future when palaeontologists, examining fossilized bones recovered from that pit – ‗whitish, without any bloodstains‘ –
but with bullet holes. Bengalis have shit for brains.
would decide that these poor, subhuman creatures must have been buried by some sudden natural catastrophe.
After shooting themselves- right?
The notion that the decadent representatives of feudal India sustained colonialism was central to contemporary communist doctrine and propaganda.
Because, after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the Commies had 'sustained colonialism' to the best of their ability- i.e. not at all.
That Ray, a lifelong liberal, was inspired by it is interesting in itself but it is particularly intriguing that he returned to it, as we shall see later, in a major work of his later years, Shatranj ke Khilari.
Which shows Indian Muslims are more than a bit shit.
Pather Panchali and Beyond None of this interest in colonialism and nationalism, of course, was immediately perceptible in Ray‘s celebrated first film, Pather Panchali (1955).
He was an artist.
As we saw earlier, however, critics have seen it, together with the other films of the Apu trilogy, as reflecting and complementing the optimistic Nehruvian vision of a new, progressive India even though the films were set in the 1930s and 40s and despite the ‗complete absence‘ in the films of the ‗dams, irrigation projects, and machinery‘ that characterized the high hopes of Nehru‘s India and which featured prominently in such films as Mehboob Khan‘s Mother India.
Dhan Gopal's 'Caste & Outcaste' had been published in America in 1923. It was a success. There was a market for a lyrical evocation of a rural childhood even in a shithole country.
Nehru was a steadfast supporter of the young film-maker and Ray, on his part, admired Nehru so deeply that he even contemplated making a short film which would help the prime minister raise national morale during the 1962 war with China.
It was the commercial Cinema which produced such morale boosting movies. Film stars raised a lot of money. Ray was useless.
This mutual admiration had little to do with such typically Nehruvian projects as state socialism or industrialization, stemming more from the cosmopolitan liberalism that Ray saw in Nehru and the artistic sensibility that he detected in the prime minister‘s writings.
Nehru thought everything which wasn't boring was vulgar. Ray agreed.
As C A Bayly has argued, socialism was not all there was to Nehru‘s politics:
being boring was all there was to it.
‗Nehru had a delicate understanding of the need for social and religious liberality in his vast and disparate society.
No. He understood that Bengalis were shit. Keep them out of decision making. Let the State decline.
It was his liberal, rather than his socialist, political judgement which characterised the Pandit‘s rule‘. And it was this liberal Nehru whom Ray admired.
Nehru was, as he said, the last Englishman- a crap one- to rule India. That's what Ray admired.
Although the documentary on the China war was never made, Ray‘s affiliation with the Nehruvian ethos was expressed powerfully in Kanchanjangha (1962), his first film based on his own story and also his first in colour.
Foreigners who wanted to understand why India had been beaten so thoroughly by the Chinese found the explanation in this movie. Darjeeling had been taken by the Brits from Sikkim. China claimed Sikkim, Bhutan, Ladakh etc. on the basis of their claim to Tibet. The Indians wouldn't fight for it because it wasn't Indian land. It was real estate stolen by Brits in 1849. Moreover, the Indians, in their stupid & lethargic way, were moving towards liberating themselves from the British legacy- i.e. private enterprise, the rule of law, having an army & not getting invaded incessantly, etc. etc.
It told the tale, more or less in real time, of a few hours in the life of a Bengali upper-class family on holiday in Darjeeling, counterposing the old-world values of the elderly magnate Indranath, who cherishes his British title of Rai Bahadur
because the Brits had defended Bengal & kept Hindus from being killed or forcibly converted. Indeed, they had extended its territory to include Darjeeling.
and adores the ‗erstwhile rulers‘,
who didn't keep losing wars
with those of Ashok, a young man from a vastly different social background.
No. He has the same social background- i.e. caste/religion. He is just less well connected & economically successful. Obviously, being Bengali, he isn't going to rise by his own hard work & enterprise.
The latter is no revolutionary and initially hopes to find a job by cultivating the Rai Bahadur, who promptly subjects him to a discourse on the greatness of British rule.
The Brits had beaten the Japs. They would have beaten the Chinese. Nehru would shit himself and surrender.
Indranath questions what ‗the fruits of independence‘ will be, although he is glad he has lived to taste them, unlike one of his friends, who, he contemptuously remarks, had participated in the nationalist movement and died in jail.
Other contemporaries had been released from jail & then killed or chased away from their ancestral homes in East Bengal.
Ashok is so irritated by Indranath‘s declamations about British greatness that when he finally agrees to give him a job, he turns it down, declaring that he would find one through his ‗own effort‘.
Why not start learning Chinese?
Although he later claims that it was the unusual ambience of Darjeeling that had infused an uncharacteristic courage into his soul, Ashok‘s words suggest something more complicated. ‗To find a job so easily … to hell with it!‘, he exclaims. ‗What will be, will be. Let me struggle. No charity! So what if he‘s the chairman of five companies, so what if he is a Rai Bahadur!‘
So what if he pays taxes? Nehru's government will piss the money against a wall one way or another. China's Chairman is our Chairman!
Jobless young males would recur insistently in Ray‘s films of the 1970s
his son, fortunately, was able to become a film-maker like his dad- with his dad.
and many of the director‘s views on the nation would be articulated through or around them. Ashok, however, has none of the detachment of Pratidwandi‘s Siddhartha or the cynicism that Somenath comes to acquire in Jana Aranya. Despite the economic difficulties of life in India,
they would get worse
the Nehruvian dream, as Ashok all but explicitly declares, still survived for his generation.
He thought he could get a job. Since he was of working age & was capable of work, this was a realistic ambition.
‗Struggle‘ would lead to success not simply for Ashok the individual but, it is implied, for his class and his nation, proving Indranath‘s generation wrong.
Proving them right. The Brits had struggled to rise as had the Indians who worked for them and who later took over the management of enterprises created by them.
Ben Nyce has rightly observed that Kanchanjangha is ‗a political statement about post-independence India‘ but he does not analyze the interesting way in which the statement is articulated.
It was a shitty film which, because of the date when it came out, confirmed that India would accept the loss of territory the Brits had conquered from non-Indian polities. Also, they would be as lazy as shit.
The clash of nationalist faith and colonial toadyism
which couldn't exist because the Brits had fucked off
is presented as a debate between two generations and two social classes, albeit not entirely as a face to face exchange. Instead of listing the fruits of independence‘,
West Bengal was now ruled by Hindus, not Muslims.
Ashok speaks up for freedom itself,
being unemployed gives you more free time
whilst acknowledging the responsibility that came with freedom (‗struggle‘). Indranath, however, does not get an opportunity to reply – the debate is closed by Ashok‘s response. This structure was typical of Ray. All his characters, even the least likable, were given ample space and a largely uninhibited voice – this respect for his characters, of course, was largely responsible for Ray‘s reputation as a ‗humanist‘ who, like Jean Renoir, believed that everyone had his reasons. What the champions of the humanistic‘ Ray tend to overlook, however, is that all reasons weren‘t necessarily equal in Ray‘s universe.
They were all nonsense.
Certain types of characters and their views, even though freely articulated, were invariably contested within the narrative and refuted directly or by implication.
It is vulgar to be productive. Scolding is the sole activity worthy of a buddhijivi.
Debates were never left open but closed on specific notes, endorsing one side or another by giving it the last word. Ray‘s narratives, in short, are all-embracing but they are never allforgiving.
They are silly. How does scolding an industrialist help protect the country from Chinese invaders?
A Nation in Making? In 1964, Ray made Charulata, which he would always regard as his most perfect film. Based on the novella ‗Nashtaneer‘ by Rabindranath Tagore, the film has been written about extensively.
Husbands should have sex with their wives. Women want to have babies. At least, let them adopt a child.
Its political content, however, has not been appreciated adequately.
It had none.
Set in 1879-80, two years after Queen Victoria was proclaimed as the Empress of India at a grand durbar in Delhi, the film contains a remarkable recreation and critique of nineteenth-century moderate‘ nationalism.
There was no such thing. Either you were a loyalist or you just focussed on making money. Either way, you had zero importance.
Much of this is achieved through Ray‘s radically expanded characterization of Bhupati, the wealthy Bengali intellectual who is so obsessed with his political newspaper that he neglects his young and gifted wife Charu,
Why is he not fucking her? That is his fucking job. If his 'political newspaper' can get him into the good books of the Administration, he may get the title of Rao Bahadur. But nobody would greatly care.
who falls in love with Bhupati‘s cousin Amal. In Tagore‘s original, Bhupati is a bit of a lightweight – there are hardly any references to his politics in the story and the story is mostly about his romantic travails.
In those days, grooms were twice the age of their child-brides. Some neglected fucking them because they came to see them more as daughters who should be educated rather than people who wanted to have babies. Tagore had a sister-in-law who committed suicide coz she was getting no nookie & thus was doomed to a childless existence.
Ray‘s Bhupati, however, is a fully fleshed-out liberal –
nobody cares if a slave is liberal or conservative.
and Liberal: he is a fervent supporter of Gladstone).
Gladstone didn't need his support. India had no MPs in Westminster. Ireland did. That's why Gladstone was becoming pro-Irish.
He hates the label ‗idle rich‘
though he is too lazy to fuck his wife
and seeks to use his wealth to bring about political reform and national improvement.
By scolding people.
He has no time for literature and declares to Amal that from a national point of view, a new tax represents a greater tragedy than Romeo and Juliet.
Romeo & Juliet is entertainment merely. What Ray doesn't get is that India needed new taxes so as to have more resources to solve collective action problems which would raise productivity. Ray had a degree in Econ.
Bhupati is always ready to criticize the government (which shocks Amal) but he is as loyal to British rule as the great Bengali teacher, politician and journalist Surendranath Banerjea (1848-1925), whose speeches Bhupati adores and on whose paper The Bengalee Ray modelled Bhupati‘s newspaper The Sentinel.
Surrender-not did help set up the Indian National Congress which achieved mass contact through cow protection.
To be outspoken‘, Bhupati tells Amal, ‗is not necessarily to be disloyal‘ but when Amal plays ‗God save the Queen‘ on the piano, he wryly comments that saving the Queen was all very well, but how would the Bengali people be saved?
They had been saved by the Brits. Once the Brits fucked off, their condition would deteriorate- unless they let rural girls get transferred to giant factory dormitories.
The answer, for Bhupati‘s generation, is not by ending the Raj but by its continuation in a less despotic and more genuinely British form.
That was A.O Hume's idea. Sadly Surrender-Not wasn't interested. Bengalis like scolding only.
Bhupati‘s political mentors are ‗Burke, Macaulay, Gladstone‘ and even though he has never been to Europe, he worships ‗France, Germany, Greece, Italy – the land of Mazzini and Garibaldi‘. This belief in the providential nature of European rule had also been held by Rammohan Roy (1772-1833), whom Bhupati hails as the ‗first and greatest liberal of the nineteenth century‘ and ‗the father of our political consciousness‘ at a party to celebrate the victory of Gladstone and the Liberals in the British general election of 1880.
Roy & Tagore had lobbied Westminster to lift all restrictions on European migration to India. The truth is, the Bengalis gained by British expansion in Burma.
British rule, Rammohan had thought, would benefit
Hindus by protecting them from Muslims
Indians by introducing capitalism and bringing about ‗improvement in literary, social and political affairs‘; for him as well as for his admirers, the quest for Indian nationhood was ultimately a quest for modernity.
As opposed to being massacred by Muslims.
Their nationalism had few real connections with the Indian masses
It was based on fucking over the masses through the Permanent Settlement.
and was largely restricted to the small community of English-educated Indians.
No. There were plenty of landlords who didn't know English though they might employ them as lawyers or Estate Managers.
Ray‘s engagement with late Victorian nationalism in Charulata, Suranjan Ganguly has argued, might have been related to Nehru‘s death the year the film was made.
Ray knew Niradh Chauduri whose pro-British views were becoming popular as the country turned into a starving shithole unable to defend itself even from an equally shitty Pakistan. f
For Ray‘s generation it marked the end of a dream shaped by a nineteenth-century cultural ethos‘.
The English speaking Indian class was no substitute for actual English folk.
But Nehru, of course, was also a powerful critic of nineteenth-century nationalism.
No he wasn't. Socialism is a nineteenth century ideology which was part & parcel of the agitation for National Self-determination.
Although he admired the moderates for their ‗advanced social outlook‘, he described them as ‗a mere handful on the top with no touch with the masses‘
because that is what the Brits were saying
and thinking only in terms of the new upper middle class which they partly represented and which wanted room for expansion‘.
Whereas what Nehru stood for was contraction- i.e. losing territory & then not having enough food to eat.
This is almost exactly the crtique of moderate nationalism that is implicit in Charulata.
Not to mention Mughal-e-Azam & Raquel Welsch in 'One Million years BC'
The film even hints at the eventual rise of more radical varieties of nationalism with its references to Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838-1894),
who worked for the Brits
the novelist whose complex influence on Indian nationalism has been explored in depth by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Partha Chatterjee, Sudipta Kaviraj and others.
Useless Bengalis talking bollocks about useless Bengalis. Bipin's importance lies in his anti-Muslim ideology.
41 In Ray‘s film, Bankim is not just Charu‘s favourite novelist, but also the author of Anandamath, the novel about an eighteenth-century rebellion that contains the famous hymn Bande Mataram (Hail, Mother), the song that would become the battle-cry of the early-twentieth-century swadeshi movement and, subsequently, of militants, terrorists and Hindu nationalists.
Muslim Nationalism is fine. But Hindus should not have a Nation.
The first words that Amal says to Charu in the film are: ‗Have you read Anandamath?‘ Later, when Bhupati tries to entice him into marriage by saying that the prospective father-in-law had offered to send him to Britain, he, after rhapsodizing on ‗the land of Shakespeare‘, recites a few lines from Bande Mataram and declines the offer.
Why go to Britain to learn to do useful things? Why not be utterly useless while scolding everything in sight?
No critic, to my knowledge, has noticed that these allusions to Anandamath, completely absent from Tagore‘s story, are blatantly anachronistic for a film set so firmly in 1879-80. Bankim‘s novel was serialized in his magazine Bangadarsan from March 1881 to June 1882 and published as a book in December 1882.
Nobody gives a fuck.
Given the care with which Ray had researched the film‘s historical background, this is unlikely to have been a simple error. Instead, I would argue, Anandamath was brought in intentionally
because Bengalis knew Bankim. They didn't know Gladstone.
to indicate that radical alternatives to Bhupati‘s loyalist nationalism were gestating in Bengali culture.
There was some point to being loyal but useless. Why not be disloyal & useless?
The association of Anandamath with Amal, moreover, is interesting. Tagore as well as Ray deride his literary efforts so thoroughly that it is hard to take him seriously. And yet, Amal genuinely adores Bankimchandra‘s writings and feels a deep bond with Bengal.
Because he is Bengali.
Although he opts for marriage, a paid-for trip to Britain and the career of a barrister at the end of the film, he has already revealed his awareness of the racial discrimination that he would experience in England.
Sadly, racial discrimination was much greater in Calcutta.
A Bengali in Bilet (England), he says in the course of a game of alliteration with Charu, would be treated as a black native and come back to Bengal baap-baap boley (with tail between his legs).
He'd return as a barrister. Would he also have a 'L.L.D' (i.e. will he have married the land lady's daughter)? If so, he might amount to something.
The Indian viewer would also be aware that whilst many barristers lived lives of prosperous conformity, a whole generation of Indian nationalists, including Gandhi and Nehru, had also trained as barristers in Britain.
They didn't 'train'. The ate dinners & passed exams.
So, Amal‘s future remains entirely open and we cannot decide whether or not his passion for Bankim and his chanting of Bande Mataram presages a later, serious involvement with some nationalist creed far more radical than Bhupati‘s.
He seems a nice enough lad. Will he fuck his wife? If so, he may have progeny.
Counterposed to these two men, of course, is Charu who has no political interest and whose love for literature has no English referent.
She wants to get preggers.
When she tries to write, she first tries to imitate Amal‘s florid style, just as her husband models his political activities on British exemplars. Unlike Bhupati, however, Charu is far from satisfied with the results and turns ultimately to write about the people and places she has herself known. The people Charu envisions in a reverie – presented as a montage of pastoral scenes of rural Bengal – just before she sits down to write her piece would never be seen at a party hosted by Bhupati. Her piece entitled ‗My Village‘ is accepted by an elite journal that published the work of new writers so rarely that Amal had decided not to send any of his essays to it.
We must scold magazines for not publishing our scoldings. Also, how soon before even goats & cows start publishing articles about their village or their pig sty or whatever?
The source of Charu‘s creativity‘, Suranjan Ganguly has remarked, ‗becomes the point of convergence where thought, memory, and emotion all come together‘.
In other words, she has a brain. Not a big one. Still, for the moment she is one up on goats & cows.
This convergence does not simply pull her ever more deeply into her own self. It also enables her to reach into the heart of the nation, represented by her village and its very ordinary residents.
Sadly, she does not mention the pigs & some of the more loquacious plants.
In short, Charu resolves what Partha Chatterjee has claimed was the greatest tension ‗in all nationalist thought‘ – the tension between ‗the modern‘ and ‗the national‘ – by using the modern vernacular print culture to connect with and represent her people, the unmodern masses of rural India.
also the goats & cows. It must be said, the cow-protection league did have some impact.
Although Charu‘s literary success is used as a lens to reveal the flaws in Amal‘s approach to literature as well as Bhupati‘s idea of nationalism, the critique does not proceed by debate, as in Kanchanjangha, but by narrative intertwining and analogy.
Basically, the Bengalis were giving themselves a pat on the back for having been less poor & stupid in a previous century.
The structure of the narrative compels viewers to contrast Charu‘s originality
she recalls some nice cows & goats from her village. Sadly, she doesn't have a baby & thus has to write for the magazines.
with the ‗derivative discourse‘ of Bhupati and Amal. Before the emergence of Gandhian mass nationalism,
there was cow-protection & Ganesh Chaturthi & the anti-Partition Swadesi agitation. After that there was Jugantar, Ghaddar, etc. If Tegart hadn't been able to kill Tiger Jatin, nobody would have bothered with Gandhi.
Partha Chatterjee has argued, the only real alternative to the deracinated modernism of the moderates was religious-communal‘ nationalism.
After 1917, there was a rapidly growing Communist Left.
Ray‘s representation does not acknowledge this.
If you make a film about Bagha Jatin- it will be as exciting as 'Fists of Fury'. Ray didn't want to make anything which wouldn't bore everybody to death.
Apart from a few images of a charak festival, Charu‘s reverie ignores the explicitly religious and it is surely noteworthy that Tagore‘s title for her piece, ‗Kalitala‘ (The Kali Temple), is changed by Ray to ‗Amar Gram‘ (‗My Village‘) in the film.
Ray truly hated Hinduism.
Similarly, when Amal quotes from Bankimchandra‘s Bande Mataram, all religious and idolatrous references are quietly omitted – just the three words sujalang, suphalang, sashyashyamalang (‗rich in waters, rich in fruit … verdant with the harvest 16 fair‘) are used to indicate his attachment to Bengal.
He is a Sickularist cunt.
Ray‘s Nehruvian sensibility, in other words, is perceptible not only in his critique of Bhupati‘s Eurocentric nationalism but in the ‗secularization‘ of the battle-cry of its future opponents. A similar expurgation, as we know, preceded the approval of Bande Mataram as a national song by the Indian National Congress in 1937. On the advice of Rabindranath Tagore, a committee that included Jawaharlal Nehru decided that only the first two stanzas of the song would be acceptable to Muslims and other monotheists.
Nothing was acceptable to Muslims save the slaughter of Kaffirs.
So far, so Nehruvian –
actually, Nehru was less boring than Ray. At least, he'd spent a lot of time in Jail. Did he also meet the Shawshank sisters? We hope so.
but Charulata also moves beyond the progressivism and developmentalism espoused by the Nehru generation. The sylvan images of her village that flit through Charu‘s mind do not suggest an economically battered colony in desperate need of Nehruvian development‘,
i.e. the Etawah model produced by Americans. But AO Hume had done better in Etawah a century previously.
nor the infinite poverty which, for Bhupati‘s generation, could only be remedied by industrialization and the cultivation of European modernity.
or what would become Japanese modernity, Chinese modernity, Korean modernity etc.
The nation Charu connects with is not one that, to use Surendranath Banerjea‘s phrase, is ‗in making‘ – it already exists in all its eternal plenitude.
i.e. has lots of cows & goats
Here Ray is even more Tagorean than Tagore himself was in Nashtaneer‘.
i.e. he is more boring.
As Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown, Tagore never ignored the actual deprivation and squalor that was to be found in the Bengali village. Nevertheless, he also believed that something transcendental lay beyond the objective and historical condition of those villages: if one had the eyes to see and the sensitivity to experience it, one could ‗pierce the veil of the real‘ and perceive the eternal soul of sonar Bangla (golden Bengal).
Sadly, Tagore's rent roll collapsed during the Great Depression. If sonar Bangla can't produce gold for zamindars, it has turned to lead.
The images that glide through Charu‘s mind and into her essay in Ray‘s film are not just one individual‘s memories: they are visions of the eternal and eternally nurturing nation lying beyond ordinary perception.
Unless, like the good Professor, you live in London.
A Nation in Disarray It has often been noted that Ray‘s Nehruvian faith in progress,
Industrialization? He wasn't big for it. What was he for? Poverty porn. There was a foreign market for that.
reason and the nation crumbled over the second half of his career. These were the years when the political liberalism, relatively honest administration and national optimism of the Nehru years came to be replaced by pervasive corruption in government,
Ray worked for a British Company in Calcutta. He knew corruption was already pervasive there. The Bombay Stock Exchange indicted Mundhra for selling forged share certificates in 1956 itself. But Marwaris & British Managing Agencies had been colluding to get round Exchange Controls from 1946 onward. No 'box-wallah' didn't know the sordid details.
economic stagnation, industrial unrest, violent political clashes in Bengal between the Naxalites (as the Maoists of that period were known) and their political adversaries from the left as well as the right, a huge influx of refugees from the erstwhile East Pakistan in 1971
like the one in 1947?
and a general lowering of the quality of life all over the nation that could not be obscured by Indira Gandhi‘s increasingly strident socialist rhetoric.
Socialism was the cause, not the effect.
In the words of Sunil Khilnani, ‗intellectuals outside the government slumped into despair or catatonia‘ during this period:
they emigrated. Ray should have fucked off to Hollywood & made films titled 'Tarzan meets King Kong'.
‗The sense of a ―crisis‖ was everywhere: India‘s original project seemed to have fallen into corruption and degeneration‘.
It became dynastic.
It was against this bleak backdrop that Ray entered into a remarkable new phase of his career, charting, from the end of the 1960s, ‗the moral and spiritual collapse of the new urban India … and the death of a whole cultural ethos‘ in films like Aranyer Din-Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, 1969),
A forest without either Tarzan or fucking is as boring as shite.
Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970) , Seemabaddha (Company Limited, 1971) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman, 1975).51 The dark themes, unpleasant characters and sardonic humour of this series nonplussed admirers of the old, serene Ray.
By then, Calcutta's reputation as the arsehole of the Turd World was well established.
‗How does one explain the change in Satyajit?‘, wondered the leftist poet Samar Sen after seeing Jana Aranya, whilst other voices lamented Ray‘s failure to commit himself to revolutionary socialism, which, for them, represented the only rational solution for the Indian malaise.
You could make an exciting film about Naxals on the run from the Police. Ray didn't want to make exciting films.
Some forty years later, these films remain little-known in comparison to Ray‘s earlier works and scholars are just beginning to grapple seriously with them.
Scholars grapple with scholarly shite- not boring videos on YouTube.
All four are key texts for any study of Ray‘s evolving views on the Indian nation but Pratidwandi is the most immediately relevant to the present essay. Based on a novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay, the film charts the experiences of Siddhartha, a young, introspective and unemployed graduate.
Ray's son was a history graduate. He had to go into the family business. Siddharta was a medical student who discontinued his studies after his father died. Will he get a job as a medical rep? No. He is useless. The fact is, plenty of poor would be medicos got work with a Charity hospital & then slowly acquired professional qualifications. Nothing wrong with starting off as a surgical assistant & learning on the job. Alternatively, the boy could have sat the Army's AFMC exam.
Its most striking sequences are of job interviews. One of them, coming early in the film, is at a Government of India office, where three officials grill Siddhartha entirely in English. One interviewer, speaking in a clipped Oxbridge accent, asks: ‗Who was the prime minister of England at the time of independence?‘ ‗Whose independence, sir?‘, responds Siddhartha.
India's. England was already independent. The answer was 'Clement Atlee- who also nationalised the 'commanding heights' of the British Economy and set up the National Health Service which offered free medical treatment to all. '
That slight stress on the ‗whose‘ encapsulates the whole sense of disillusionment with the Indian nation that Ray would express in the 1970s.
No. It is a reference to the Bengali belief that 'China's chairman is our Chairman'. India can't be independent unless ruled from Beijing. Sadly, Churchill had prevented it being ruled from Tokyo.
(Can one imagine Ashok of Kanchanjangha speaking in such a way?)
No. That's because the Chinese didn't invade till later in the year. Bengalis become very happy if they think some bunch of foreigners is on the point of taking over their country.
But what really upsets the interviewers is Siddhartha‘s claim that the war in Vietnam, not the moonlanding, is the most significant event of the last decade.
Why not just say 'I'm a Naxal. If you give me a job, I will destroy your enterprise. Also, I will rape your family to death.' ?
The latter, the young man explains, was a remarkable achievement‘ but far from unpredictable. The Vietnam war, however, had revealed an extraordinary power of resistance‘ that nobody had expected from the Vietnamese people.
Except the French who had to run away from there. Would the South Vietnamese be able to keep out the North Vietnamese Communists? No. One eighth of the population had to run away.
This isn‘t a matter of technology – it‘s just plain human courage and it takes your breath away‘.
The boat people showed courage. If they survived, they did well.
The chair of the interview panel now asks the obvious question: ‗Are you a communist?‘ Siddhartha‘s reply that one did not need to be a communist to admire Vietnamese resistance
to Vietnamese Communism?
is obviously not adequate and he is asked to leave.
Because he is a shit candidate for a job in the private sector.
The viewer, however, is convinced in the next scene that Siddhartha is not a communist. Sitting despondently at a tea shop after the interview, Siddhartha is accosted by an old political friend who reminds him of his activism during his college-days and asks him to come and work for the party‘ again.
i.e. kill Congress supporters then mix their blood with rice and forcibly feed it to their mothers till they go stark staring mad.
Entirely uninterested, Siddhartha turns his face away and the acquaintance‘s soothing baritone voice is drowned out by Siddhartha‘s angry thoughts.
Stupid thoughts. Emigrate already, you cretin!
The third ideological option available to him – mainstream Indian nationalism
i.e. joining the IAS
– is excluded immediately after this encounter. Slinking into one of the fashionable ‗English‘ cinemas of central Calcutta, Siddhartha is confronted with a government newsreel showing images of a smiling Indira Gandhi and proclaiming the greatness of the 1970-71 budget and simply closes his eyes and settles down for a snooze.
Not a wank? Sad.
But politics cannot be excluded so easily. As was often the case in Calcutta then, a bomb, planted by Maoists or their adversaries, goes off within the cinema and along with everybody else, the drowsy Siddhartha rushes out on to the street. In the melee, his watch falls from his wrist and stops. He takes it to a repair shop and is told that the balance wheel is broken. The broken watch sums up the lack of fit between Siddhartha, his nation, his age and his city.
HMT had been producing (shitty) watches since about 1962. The broken watch doesn't symbolize shit.
Apart from his obvious disillusionment with the different brands of politics, he is also shocked by the ease with which his old friends have succumbed to various degrees of immorality and how his own sister is ready to sell out to whatever capitalist opportunities are available.
She is prepared to work for a living as a receptionist. She doesn't object to getting a modelling contract. How shocking!
Virtually nothing about present-day India or Calcutta appeals to him and when he sees a group of American hippies marvelling over a cow and imagining India to be some spiritual haven, he can scarcely hide his disbelief.
He doesn't say 'Moo!' & produce plenty of dung. Sad.
Pushed into a corner by his own personality and his society, Siddhartha ultimately breaks free by doing something so self-destructive that he has to leave Calcutta and the woman he has just fallen in love with.
He is a loser. Then he loses.
An ambiguous ending, combining a Hindu funeral chant with the call of a mysterious bird
Maeterlinck's blue bird?
that Siddhartha had heard in childhood and has been looking for throughout the film, suggests that he may well have recovered his soul but only by sacrificing his worldly prospects and personal happiness.
Medical student loses his Daddy. How will he finance his medical education? He won't. He is a loser.
In this India, 'struggle‘ had no meaning and the fruits of independence, it seemed, were as sour as Indranath had feared they would be.
Also, film-making would have no meaning- unless it was entertaining & made money.
Spectres of the Raj Despite his deepening doubts about the Indian nation, Ray‘s anti-colonial attitude never weakened significantly.
It was never strong. Moreover, it was irrelevant. Bengal had been ruled by elected leaders since he was 16. Famine & ethnic cleansing was the result.
This is often more evident in his stories. In a 1987 science-fiction tale, for instance, the protagonist Professor Shonku has just developed a computerized device that can communicate with spirits. The first spirit he summons is of Siraj-ud-Daula, the last independent Nawab of Bengal, and the only question the spirit is asked concerns the Black Hole incident. Did Siraj really order the inevitable death of so many British people by imprisoning them in a tiny room? The spirit of Siraj replies unequivocally that he hadn‘t known anything about the incident and the British had concoted the story simply to discredit him. ‗Spirits do not lie‘, writes a relieved Shonku in his diary, ‗and it was a great vindication‘.
If Siraj didn't do it, some minion of his did. Why didn't he catch the fellow & string him up? He had 'command responsibility'.
The Raj is often presented in Ray‘s stories through ghosts but the story I want to discuss in detail, ‗First Class Kamra‘ (First Class Compartment), is only seemingly a ghost story.
Ghost stories can be entertaining. Ray was against entertainment.
A rich man called Ranjan Kundu, travelling by train from Raipur in Central India to his hometown Calcutta in 1970, is delighted that by some miracle, he has got a spacious, British-era first-class compartment.
They had been taken out of service in 1955.
A fervent Anglophile like the Rai Bahadur of Kanchanjangha, Kundu resents the disappearance of these old luxuries in independent India and we hear much about his views on the decline of India since the departure of the British. Calcutta was now a mess – the telephones didn‘t work, the public transport was unbearably crowded and life had become nasty and brutish. Returning after a visit to London, Kundu had exclaimed, ‗the British know how to live, know the value of a well-regulated lifestyle, know what civic sense means‘.
Sengoopta lives in London. It isn't great, but it isn't utterly shit either. Still, there are way too many darkies & the place stinks of curry.
No wonder, then, that Kundu is delighted to get his Raj-era compartment and to add to his pleasure, he can travel in lordly solitude because his friend, Pulakesh Sarkar, who was supposed to accompany him, cannot ultimately come. In sheer joy, he simply strolls around the compartment for a few minutes and then, having finished a rather Bengali supper of luchi and vegetables (whilst sighing for the chicken curry, rice and custard pudding that used to be served by the railway caterers in British days), he curls up with a book and drifts off to sleep. Waking up when the train stops at a station, Kundu is startled to find another passenger in the compartment. Bathed in the dim glow of the blue reading lamp, a white man sat in the berth facing him, drinking whisky. The moment he notices Kundu, he barks: ‗You there! Get out and leave me alone! I refuse to travel with a nigger‘.
Indians, if properly dressed, had always been permitted to travel first class. Moreover, if you had reserved a first class compartment, you got the Railway staff to eject anyone else who might be sitting in it.
Kundu had never fully believed stories of British mistreatment of Indians during the Raj and he finds it incredible that he was being called a nigger by an Englishman on Indian soil in 1970. But maybe, he thinks, it was only because the man was drunk, and calmly points out to him that India had been independent for twenty-five years and Englishmen were now expected to address Indians politely.6 Exploding in laughter, his co-passenger asks when India became free. Upon hearing the date, he whips out a revolver and, introducing himself as Major Davenport, rages: ‘You‘re not just a nigger, you‘re insane. Do you know what year this is? ?1932. That loincloth-clad leader of yours is trying to cause trouble, but no matter how much you lot dream of independence, it will never become reality‘.
Actually, it could have become reality in 1924. In 1931, the Prime Minister clarified that Dominion status was what the Round Table Conferences were working toward.
Cowering in a corner, Kundu muses that if only his hot-tempered, patriotic friend Pulakesh had been with him, he would surely have taught this crazy Englishman a lesson, gun or no gun. He also recalls a story he had heard long ago of an army man, also named Major Davenport, who, in the days of the Raj, had actually been killed by a ‗native‘ whom he had tried to evict from his compartment. But Kundu lacks that kind of courage and finds himself promising Davenport that he will get out at the next station. Davenport drinks on, occasionally muttering ‗dirty nigger, dirty nigger‘, but Kundu, exhausted by the encounter and inured to the abuse, dozes off. When he wakes, it‘s daytime and the compartment is empty. Kundu breathes a deep sigh of relief, assuming that his tormentor had been a ghost – maybe of that same Davenport who had been killed years ago, perhaps in that very same compartment. Returning to Calcutta, Kundu keeps mum about his terrifying experience but his friends gradually notice that he had lost much of his fondness for the British Raj. Ten years go by and finally, one evening Kundu tells his patriotic friend Pulakesh about the incident. The latter reveals with a chuckle that the whole thing had been a practical joke conceived to liberate Kundu from his delusions about the British. Upon seeing the old first-class compartment and also recalling the story of Major Davenport, Pulakesh had immediately thought of the trick and claiming to be unable to travel with his friend, had got into the adjoining compartment. The moustache had been a bit of cotton wool from his first-aid box, the whisky was borrowed from a 23 fellow-passenger and the gun was a toy belonging to that passenger‘s child. The rest, he says, was done by the dim blue light and Kundu‘s imagination.
If a Bengali is your friend, you have no need for an enemy. I suppose that's the reason Bengalis want to be ruled by foreigners from distant lands.
Once again, the narrator is as apparently neutral as the narrator of Kanchanjangha. Kundu‘s reasons for missing the Raj are far from irrational and listed without the slightest sarcasm. The nationalist side, represented by Pulakesh Sarkar, wins the debate not by listing the ‗fruits of independence‘ but by physically staging a particular aspect of life during the Raj.
No. It stages a fantasy.
The practical joke demonstrates that one does not need to evaluate the achievements of independent India to oppose the Raj:
Why oppose something which ceased to exist long ago?
all the clean cities or firm governance in the world cannot make up for the absence of freedom and dignity.
Nor can freedom & dignity make up for the entire place smelling like shit.
Beyond Mainstream Nationalism Despite such statements on colonialism, Ray, during this period, could not regain his old Nehruvian faith in the nation.
You can't regain what you never had.
Nor, however, could he find a better alternative until his very last film Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991). The film was based on one of Ray‘s own stories for children, albeit greatly expanded and embellished.
Bibhuti's Apu goes on adventures to far-away lands. His Rider Haggard like stories set in Africa have been turned into box office hits. Ray does not get that it is places the anthropologist has visited which are interesting. His returning to Bengal to scold everybody is not interesting at all. His family thinks he has returned to make sort of property claim.
A mysterious man suddenly visits a middleclass Bengali family, claiming to be an uncle who had disappeared long ago. Having travelled the world and made a reputation as an anthropologist, he has now returned home for a brief halt before moving on again. Unsure about his identity and motivations, his relatives treat him with suspicion and after an unpleasant confrontation with a family friend, the uncle goes away to Santiniketan, where he is followed by his embarrassed relatives. They find him, not in Tagore‘s university, nor in the middle-class neighbourhoods around the university, but in a nearby village, consorting with Santal tribals and drinking their home-brewed liquor, hanriya.
Sadly, a 'Santal tribal' is now President of India. Mamta & Mahua are not pleased.
Instead of expatiating on the simplicity or the primitive charm of the tribals, he lectures his niece and her husband on their patriotism.
Bengalis live to scold.
The ultimate distinction of the Santals, for him, is that they fought the British long before anybody else in India. The allusion, of course, is to the great ‗Santal Rebellion‘ of 1855-56 against oppressive and corrupt Hindu (usually Bengali) moneylenders and traders but also, subsidiarily, the British government.
The Santhals had arrived in the Parganas from 1790 to 1820. They were good fighters and were able to assert property rights in the lands to which they had recently immigrated (after a big famine in their own ancestral land). The Brits had promoted their migration into Birbhum etc. Thus the Santhals in Shantiniketan had only arrived circa 1800.
Although the Santal insurrection was far from exclusively anti-British
It was a struggle for land. They won. Get over it.
and pervaded, moreover, by millenarian and supernatural elements that Ray would have disdained in his early years, the anthropologist uncle is convinced that it was India‘s first war of independence.
Because he is as stupid as shit. The fact is the Santhal ancestral Chota Nagpur area only came under direct British control in the 1830s. There was considerable reform in response to disaffection amongst the indigenous people.
Although supposedly ‗uncivilized‘, the santals‘ patriotism was worth far more to him than the modernist nationalism of urban Indians.
Santhals speak a Munda language. Clearly, this gives them first right to territory traditionally Bengali speaking.
As Prathama Banerjee has demonstrated, the Santals have traditionally been used by the Bengali middle classes as ‗primitive‘ foils against whom they have constructed their self-image as ‗advanced‘, an image that was in part born of their own subjugation by the even more ‗advanced‘ British.
Santhals, like Britishers, looked down on the feeble Bengali. Brahmins like Mamta & Mahua are telling President Murmu to fuck off back where she came from.
In his final film, Ray sought to dismantle this ‗politics of time‘, portraying the ‗primitives‘, who had gained the least from the creation of the modern Indian state, as the earliest and most genuine patriots, whilst ‗civilized‘ Calcuttans were presented as shallow, smug and narrowminded.
Anything and anyone is better than a Bengali. The whole Universe was only created as a stick for Bengalis to beat Bengalis with.
Interestingly, the Santals were not portrayed in Agantuk with any of the eroticized exoticism so characteristic of modernist primitivism and which, indeed, had been prominent in Ray‘s own earlier film Aranyer DinRatri.
Birsa Munda was the big Santhal hero. The state of Jharkhand was created on his birth anniversary.
There was a whole new tendency in Ray‘s final film to question the value of ‗civilization‘, ‗science‘ and ‗progress‘ that revealed how far the director had outgrown his early Nehruvian tendencies.
He understood that he wasn't the Indian Bergman. He was a primitive ethnographer with a side-line in scolding.
Had he, however, moved beyond Rabindranath Tagore, to whom he was supposedly linked by profound intellectual, ideological and emotional bonds?
His Uncle directed Tagore's only venture into film. Then, Nitin Bose invented play-back singing thus giving Indian Cinema its killer app. In the South, 'Reel Society' took over 'Real Society'. In Bengal, Cinema turned to shit.
The very theme of the film – the meaning and value of civilization – echoes Tagore‘s famous address on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, ‗Sabhhyatar Sankat‘ (Crisis in Civilization) but the Tagoreanism of Agantuk is not the conventional Tagoreanism of the Bengali middle classes.
Fuck would stupid Bengalis know about civilization? If you aren't productive & can't defend yourself, you aren't a civilization. You are some sort of parasitic entity.
The climactic scenes of the film occur near Santiniketan but not in it, and its protagonists are the Santals, not the refined Bengalis who come to study at Tagore‘s university or the aging Calcuttans who come to spend their retirement near it. At the end of his career, the denizens of the poverty-stricken villages of tribal India
relatively recent immigrants.
seemed to Ray to be better representatives of Tagorean values than the comfortable bourgeoisie of Calcutta, or, for that matter, the power-brokers of Delhi.
We get it. Tagorean values are shit. If your life is shitty- that's what you have.
But on the fundamental point of Indian independence, Ray remained unmoved and he became increasingly bitter in his final years about the contemporary West‘s pornographic interest in Indian poverty.
The West had a pornographic interest in people with hot bods & huge wangs. Some may have pretended that they cared about starving darkies but they didn't really.
This bitterness was probably reinforced by allegations by film-star Nargis Dutt and others in the 1980s that Ray had built his international career by peddling images of Indian poverty. Ray‘s response to this controversy involved making as stark a film on Indian poverty and social oppression as Sadgati (Deliverance, 1981)
Which was shit.
and simultaneously opposing Western, neo-colonial attempts to exploit those same subjects. It is well-known, for instance, that Ray opposed the film City of Joy (1992), which, directed by Roland Joffé and based on a Dominique Lapierre novel, depicted the brutalization of the poor in Calcutta.
It was shit despite starring Patrick Swayze. More porn, less poverty is what the box office said.
Such Western attempts to ‗sell‘ Indian poverty
Louis Malle's 'Phantom India'? It didn't make a lot of money.
were at the heart of Robertsoner Ruby (Robertson‘s Ruby), Ray‘s final story about detective Prodosh Chandra Mitra (known to all as Feluda), which was published posthumously in 1992.
Strangely, Ray wasn't dead when he wrote it.
Feluda, his cousin Tapes (Topshe) and the mystery writer Lalmohan Ganguly, are on their way to Birbhum for a vacation
because Hell was sold out- right?
and run into two British friends who have come to visit India. One, Peter Robertson, has come to India to return an enormous ruby that an ancestor of his had looted from a nawab‘s palace during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.
He could have handed it over to the Indian High Commission in Aldwych.
His friend, Tom Maxwell, is a photographer descended from an indigo-planter who, in the nineteenth century, had owned a factory near today‘s Santiniketan and whose brutality toward Indians was legendary at the time.
It was legendary because it wasn't true.
In the course of conversation, Feluda finds that whilst Robertson genuinely likes India, Maxwell is interested only in the country‘s poverty. ‗Poverty‘, he declares, ‗is more photogenic than prosperity‘.
Only in the sense that turds are more photogenic than pictures of cake.
In Birbhum, he almost gets into trouble with some rough youths when, without seeking anybody‘s permission, he tries to take photographs of corpses being cremated. He is saved by Feluda but when a police inspector warns him to be more respectful of Indian customs, Maxwell furiously responds: In these two days, I have seen how backward your country is. You haven‘t progressed an inch in these forty-five years. You still plough your fields with bullocks, human beings pull rickshaws in a city like Calcutta, entire families live on the pavements – you call these civilized? You may want to hide these things from the world but I am not going to play along. I shall expose the reality of independent India with my photographs.
Genuine British people actually talk like that. I recall meeting Nicholas Maugham- 14th Earl of Maughamshire. He said 'you faltu desis are chewing paan only. Why you not spitting also? Viceroy Curzon tried to teach you spitting but you budhoos not learning. I exposes it to whole world by uploading video to Youtube.'
75 Not cowed by Maxwell‘s rant, the inspector responds: ‗Aren‘t you going to note the many areas in which our nation has progressed?‘ The list he goes on to provide is naïve, even banal. ‗We are capable of building spacecraft‘, asserts the inspector. ‗You must have noticed the profusion of consumer goods being made in our country. Clothes, medicines, cosmetics, electronic equipment – India is producing it all. Why do you want to see only the poverty? Is there nothing deserving of criticism in your country?
Yes. There are too many darkies milling around the place. Look at Rishi Sunak!
But Maxwell is not to be persuaded. ‗Don‘t compare the two‘, he fumes. ‗India‘s independence is a hoax. I shall prove that with my camera. You need to be ruled today exactly in the ways our forefathers ruled you fifty years ago‘.
Also, you stupid desis are not talking Bengali properly. I teaching you Shuddho Bangla Bhasha.
On a hot night, Maxwell tells the inspector, his great-great grandfather had woken up in a sweat, discovering that his punkah-puller had fallen asleep on the job. The servant was duly kicked to death and this, says the younger Maxwell, was the right way to treat Indians.
Also, if police inspector turns up, he should be thoroughly sodomized.
Further on in the story, Maxwell is beaten up and the ruby, which was in his keeping, is stolen – it was the inspector who turns out to have been responsible. It is also revealed that the servant killed by Maxwell‘s ancestor had been the inspector‘s own greatgrandfather. Having uncovered it all, Feluda does not, however, pursue the case. In a significant departure from the strict moral norms that Ray always maintained in his detective stories, Feluda tells the inspector: ‗I would have done the same in your situation … you are innocent‘.
So, Ray was a shithead. He didn't care if Bengalis knew this. It was only Whites he was trying to bamboozle. The only reason he didn't make blockbuster movies like RRR (2022) or Devil: The British Secret Agent (2023) was because he thought it a sin to make an entertaining film.
Whether in Kanchanjangha or in ‗First Class Kamra‘, the debates did not turn on what free India had achieved or failed to achieve; they turned on the unconditional value of freedom. Ray‘s stance in those works remind one of what the one-time revolutionary M N Roy had written in 1950: ‗Freedom is not an instrumental value. It is not a means to something; it is an end in itself‘.
So is Slavery or taking it up the arse from all and sundry.
By the time of Agantuk and Robertsoner Ruby, however, Ray was
dying
trying to evolve a new rhetoric that would retain his old anti-colonialism but be more specifically rooted in the reality of independent India.
being dead may indeed be considered a new rhetoric- thinks nobody at all.
That quest for a new rhetoric, however, led Ray to a defence of the achievements of the Indian state in Robertsoner Ruby,
Ray's new rhetoric had to do with scolding Whitey as well as Bengalis.
which, apart from being banal, was far from compatible with the reconsideration of patriotism, modernity and nationalism in his last film.
Sadly, Thirty years later, Brahmin ladies like Mahua & Mamta are scolding Santhal ladies.
‘Critical Openness’ and National Improvement Ray‘s consistently anti-colonial stance never interfered with his cultural cosmopolitanism or his readiness to criticize various aspects of indigenous life and culture. He never saw much worth emulating in Indian cinema, for instance, and often declared that he had learnt much more from the work of European and American filmmakers.
Only in so far as they made boring shite.
This was entirely in line with family tradition.
No. Nitin Bose made plenty of Bombay blockbusters.
Upendrakishore as well as Sukumar Ray had supported the swadeshi movement but rejected the idea that Indian artists should practise a swadeshi art that eschewed European naturalism. The rules of art, they argued, were universal and particular styles did not belong exclusively to particular nations or races. Sukumar Ray declared that ‗true artists created art to satisfy their inner artistic compulsion, not to produce ―Indian art‖, ―Greek art‖, etc‘.
Films are part of the entertainment business- not the being boring & stupid business.
Indians had every right to practise naturalistic, supposedly Western art – indeed, it was a national duty to learn from Western techniques when they were genuinely superior.
The Brits had set up an Art College in Calcutta. E.B. Havell championed an indigenous style exemplified by Abanindranath Tagore. It was through Havell, Abanindranath & Okakura that Will Rothenstein got to know Tagore. Incidentally, he also helped Uday Shanker (elder brother of Ravi) get his start as a dancer & impressario.
This cultural cosmopolitanism has often been misinterpreted as simple anglophilia. Ashis Nandy, for example, has declared that the Rays were ‗proud of their British connection‘ and ‗played the civilizing role demanded of them by the modern institutions introduced by the Raj into the country‘.
Nothing wrong in that.
The cosmopolitanism of the Ray family, although capacious, was far more rooted in an Indian identity than Nandy appreciates.
Nandy was a Christian. Ray's family were Brahmo or Hindu.
As Upendrakishore had put it, he felt a ‗legitimate and affectionate pride in all that is noble in our national 29 life and tradition‘ but he was also filled with ‗sincere regret for our shortcomings and eagerness to remove them‘. It was his self-critical and selfimproving impulse that drove Upendrakishore to ‗advocate the study of European art as a means of improving the art of my country‘.
But this was already happening. Kipling's dad was brought to Bombay by Parsi entrepreneurs.
Satyajit Ray would not have dissented from this view and this ‗critical openness‘, as Amartya Sen has pointed out, was also characteristic of Rabindranath Tagore.
Scolding isn't criticism.
They were opposed to the serious asymmetry of power‘ involved in colonial rule
All rule is asymmetric. So is death. Oppose death by all means.
but were always eager to embrace useful or valuable aspects of Western culture.
Like not being dead.
Also, Satyajit Ray recognized that individuals differed.
Women don't have penis. Sad.
The unpleasant British characters in his stories were usually balanced by an example or two of their decent and humane compatriots. There was a Peter Robertson for most Tom Maxwells.
Both were too stupid to have ever actually existed. If you want to return a looted treasure to a foreign country, you contact their Embassy.
This individualism could even lead Ray to portray a colonialist with some sympathy, as with the conscience-stricken figure of General James Outram in Shatranj ke Khilari.
Outram said 'Vovi'- I have vowed- (I have Oudh) just as Napier said 'Peccavi' (I have Sindh). For Premchand, or, indeed, Sunni Muslims, the Nawabs were wastrels whose lavishing of money on Najaf & Kerbala created a problem for Iraq which continues to this day.
But despite the humanizing touches, Outram as well as Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, whose kingdom of Awadh Governor General Lord Dalhousie was intent on grabbing, both represented negative forces for Ray. In this respect, his views had not changed significantly over the years since ‗Bilamson‘ and ‗Fossil‘. Despite Wajid and Outram being portrayed with sympathy in Shatranj, neither was considered to represent a progressive tendency.
Muslims are fucking horrible. Brits are better.
Nor were the two chess-playing noblemen who refused to get involved in the political tussle between Wajid and the Company. The only spark of patriotism was seen in the peasant boy Kalloo, who lamented that the British had been allowed to annex Awadh without a single shot being fired and who, as critic Ujjal Chakraborty has rightly pointed out, seems to hold ‗the seed of the Great Indian Mutiny inside him‘.
It was a miserable failure.
‗I was portraying two negative forces, feudalism and colonialism‘, Ray explained when he was accused by critics of being soft on colonialism in Shatranj. ‗You had to condemn both Wajid and Dalhousie. This was the challenge. I wanted to make this condemnation interesting by bringing in certain plus points of both the sides‘.
The plus point to Wajid was his patronage of the Arts. Shatranj should have had a dynamite song & dance numbers. The genius of Birju Maharaj was wasted. Indeed, all the actors were under-utilized.
This remark illuminates not only the characterizations in one particular film but a key feature of Ray‘s style, especially where ideological questions are involved. Ray populated his films and stories with rounded characters who were given the freedom to speak freely to the viewer or reader, but, as in Kanchanjangha or ‗First Class Kamra‘, this liberty did not undermine the overall ideological stance of the work.
No. Ray was an auteur. Nobody had any freedom. Since Ray wanted to be a boring shithead, he produced boring shite.
Debates and conflicts abound in Ray‘s corpus but those exchanges are not left open-ended. One side is always endorsed, albeit not necessarily to the accompaniment of fanfare, and when colonialism is in question, it is invariably the anti-colonial side. And the anti-colonial side, for Ray, is usually also the anti-feudal and, later in his career, the anti-bourgeois side.
The proletariat wouldn't watch his shite.
It is wholly inaccurate to argue, as so many commentators have done over the years, that Ray refused to ‗take sides either with characters or ideologies‘.
He was against Hindus & anything which might make India less of a shithole.
Some sixty years after Pather Panchali, it is time for critics to reassess Ray‘s work without relying on such simplistic, inadequate and even tendentious formulations.
No. It is time to admit Ray was stupid & made shitty films. Still, he always broke even or made a profit. That's an achievement in itself.
