The sins of a pioneer - Satyajit Ray Re-Examined

Ray's best adaptations from his own stories are films like Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and Sonar Kella which are essentially for children, although Ray's humour and virtuoso storytelling ability make them enjoyable at any age. Until he completed Shatranj Ke Khiladi Ray seems to have successfully avoided uncertain terrain and, for all their flaws, his films upto (and including) Shatranj are marked by gentleness and humour. The trouble, I think, really began with Ghare Bhaire. From this film onwards we begin to feel that as a great filmmaker, Ray was conscious that 'statements' were expected from him. The change in attitude towards his own work and its importance is also evidenced by his later adaptation of an early story. Among the stories in the collection I mentioned earlier is one entitled 'The Guest'. This story, like the others in the collection, is lightweight and gives us no reason to suspect that it could be adapted as ponderously as it was in 1991. Agantuk is Ray's adaptation of 'The Guest' after he became convinced of the importance of his own ethical vision. Agantuk is the last part of Ray's final trilogy but before we examine Ray's ethical vision as evidenced in his final films, it may perhaps be worthwhile to take a cursory look at what ethics can mean in narrative cinema.

Artists have long debated over the place of ethics in their work. With the rise of Marxism as an intellectul force, Lenin's dictum that 'Ethics are the aesthetics of the future’ reinforced the belief that ethics was all-important in art. Marxism as a dogma also provided the 'committed' artist with a readymade framework within which individual actions might be judged. While some filmmakers (from Sergei Eisenstein to Gillo Pontecorvo) who were primarily not taken up with the status of the individual, were content with the broad ethical framework provided by Marxist orthodoxy, others (Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard) whose work reflected the predicament in which the individual was placed, went deeper to understand the difficulties involved in making lasting judgements, the manner in which the differences between good and evil have become less distinct. In Renoir's La Chienne the essentially decent hero brutally murders his mistress and allows an innocent man to die for the act. The man who is executed is a thief and a pimp who still does not deserve to die. Godard's early films seem to be poised in the act of making a political choice between two sides which are not unlike in their methods (Le Petit Soldat, La Chinoise). Godard, like Bertold Brecht (in 'The Measures Taken') consciously chooses 'the boring pamphlet and the necessary murder' as alternatives to inaction.

The fall of the Marxist state has made the ethical question in art an even more difficult one. In any case, one can say that the deeper ethical questions can only be answered if one accepts the darker aspects of one's drives and emotions. A sensibility which refuses to come to terms with these darker aspects might have all its enquiries condemned to remain superficial.

The full thrust of Ray's ethical vision is contained in his final trilogy. Ganashatru, the first of the three films, is a faithful adaptation of Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People'. The ethical concerns of Ibsen's play are not complex and are best described as 'pre-Marxist'. The most successful adaptation of Ibsen's play on the screen may have been Spielberg's Jaws which (by replacing the play-wright’s 'contaminated water supply’ with a Great White Shark) threw away the uncomplicated ethics for just the right touch of sensationalism. Ray, simplemindedly, goes back to Ibsen's ethical questions which now seem particularly inane. To make matters worse, the film is heavy and ponderous with none of Ray's characteristic humour (which deserted him after Shatranj Ke Khiladi).

After Ganashatru Ray made two more films in the same mould, both of them based on his own stories. Shakha Proshakha, the first of these two films, relates a story set during the seventieth birthday celebrations of Ananda Majumdar, a businessman and a philanthrophist who rose from humble origins to become the owner of a Mica producing firm and the patriarchal figure in a town which now bears his name – Anandanagar. Ananda has four sons and three of them now live in Calcutta. The second son, once the most 'brilliant' of the four is now robbed of his mental faculties because of an unfortunate automobile accident. This son now lives with his father, doing nothing between fits of melancholia except listen to music.

On the day of the birthday celebration Ananda has a heart-attack and his sons are summoned to his bedside. As Ananda is convalescing the situation which exists in the family becomes clearer. It is obvious that the sons from Calcutta have not been too scrupulous in their financial dealings (except the youngest of them who has just given up his job on ethical grounds to become a jatra actor). The issue of integrity and 'black' money are mentioned over dinner and women are shocked over the cynicism of their husbands. Eventually, Ananda begins to recover and his three sons prepare to depart. Iust as they are about to leave, a grandchild of Ananda's visits him and imparts some information acquired over dinner: about the various kinds of money -No.l, No. 2 and so on. Ananda has a near relapse but he takes comfort in the steadying hands of his disturbed second son.

There are several sub-plots in the film but this brief narration is enough for the reader to understand how ludicrous Ray's moral perspective seems. Shakha Proshakha is told chiefly from Ananda's view point and Ananda remains its moral centre. Ananda is blameless but doesn't Ray understand how impossible it is for us to accept a prosperous businessman as a figure of moral authority? When Ananda's youngest son sacrifices his job, one tends to remember the fortune which is coming to him from his father and this makes us doubt the value of his sacriflce. Ray was an avid reader of detective fiction. One wonders if he couldn't have read Dashiel Hammett's 'Red Harvest' which describes a small industrial town in the grip of a single economic interest, a small town which is a far cry from Ray's 'Anandanagar'. Shakha Proshakha fails abysmally as a moral statement and this is largely due to Ray's chronic inability to understand the darker aspects of human behaviour in the context of which moral questions become so much more complex. 'Behind every great fortune is a crime' wrote salzac. By making Ananda rise from the ranks of an ordinary worker to the status of a successful capitalist through completely unimpeachable means, Ray shows more faith in the intrinsic merit of capitalism than seemed reasonable even in Balzac's time.

After Shakha Proshakha came Agantuk. The hero and heroine of this film are visited by a maternal uncle of the latter, whom neither of them has ever seen. Manmohan Mitra left home at an early age and no one knows what he has been upto for the past thirty-five years, after he reportedly went abroad. The film follows the story ('The Guest') quite closely in the beginning – the couple is naturally suspicious because the man who is visiting them could be an imposter. After the gentleman actually arrives they discover how unjust their suspicions really are. But this happens a little too late because the uncle has left, also leaving behind some money for his niece.

As mentioned earlier, the story is very lightweight but Ray attempts to give the film some moral fibre by interspersing it with discourses (from Manmohan Mitra) in support of primitive values and critical of the corruption that technology has introduced into the world. The few arguments and debates that Ray introduces into the film are so one-sided that we wish Ray had provided Manmohan Mitra with more intelligent adversaries. Ray's stories are often interspersed with bits of encyclopaedic information about Dinosaurs in a science fiction story about time travel, geographical information in 'The Guest'. The effect of this information is faintly amusing: we recall the imposter in Sonar Kella who pretends to be a globe-trotter by imparting doubtful information about 'the wolves in Africa' to his listeners. In Agantuk, this encyclopaedic information (taken literally from a children's encyclopaedia) is used to buttress Manmohan Mitra's moral arguments. We had always assumed that Ray was being tongue-in-cheek in the encylopaedic parts, but in Agantuk he is doing it in dead earnestness. What makes Agantuk a far worse film than Shakha Proshakha is Manmohan Mitra's (and Ray's) moral complacency, heightened by Utpal Dutt's smug performance. Some of Ray's earlier films (notably his Calcutta trilogy) also showed moral concerns but one doesn't remember their narratives revolving around a central, morally blameless figure. In fact, in Seemabadha and Janaranya, the essentially decent protagonists are forced into actions which are morally repugnant to them. Seemabadha and Janaranya are not morally complex films because their protagonists remain innocent at heart and the guilt is finally apportioned to the 'system', but the films are honest and Ray seems to be genuinely grappling with the issues of his day. Ray's last three films, on the other hand, invariably revolve around a blameless central figure with whom the director seems to identify, and the films become treatises on the failings of other people.

Satyajit Ray received the greatest amount of international acclaim long after his best films were made. Ray was not indifferent to the acclaim and this may have caused him to place an entirely wrong emphasis on the importance of his work. About Charles Chaplin it was once said (by Eric Bentley) that he put into his later films what people said they found in his early ones. Satyajit Ray was a master storyteller. The acclaim he received in the last decade of his life may have persuaded him that he needed to be much more than a storyteller to merit the acclaim. That may have been the real tragedy of his last few films.

M.K. Raghavendra

[in "Deep Focus", VI, 1996, pp. 39-46]

Films di Satyajit Ray citati nel testo (in parentesi, oltre alla traslitterazione e alle date, vengono riportati anche i titoli inglesi con cui i film sono conosciuti)

Agantuk (Āgantuk ; The Stranger, 1991)
Ganashatru (An Enemy of the People, 1989)
Ghare Baire (Ghare bāire; Home and the World, 1984)
Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (Gūpī Gāyan Bāghā Bāyan; The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, 1968)
Janaranya (The Middleman, 1975)
Seemabadha (Sīmābaddh; Company Limited, 1971)
Shakha Proshakha (Shākhā prashākhā; Branches of the Tree, 1990)
Shatranj Ke Khiladi (Shatranj ke khilārī; The Chess Players, 1977, in hindi)
Sonar Kella (Sonār kellā; The Golden Fortress, 1974)

Nota
Jatra = jātrā, lett. "viaggio", forma di teatro tradizionale, popolare in Bengala, Bihar e Orissa..