Satyajit Ray, A Film By Shyam Benegal | Excerpt

Ray, we have been told, would have liked this film to be more Benegal than Ray, more of an evaluation of or response to his entire corpus. I recall Benegal thinking aloud on the same lines after a spell of shooting. I have never asked him why he changed the thrust. Was it the sheer clarity of Ray바카라™s articulation that took over at a certain point and shaped the film the way it now is? For in what is perhaps his most comprehensive interview till date, Ray, speaking to Benegal, lays bare with remarkable candour all the elements that have gone into the making of that formidable body of work that represents as it stands an enlightened liberal바카라™s perception of the history of modern India, retold in terms of education as a value in itself triumphing over the vestiges of caste-bound orthodoxy, only to go under eventually as ruthless commercialism asserts itself out of the same bourgeois value system. 

Benegal recognises the departure that Sadgati is, with its almost naturalistic energy directed to an exposure of the exploitations of caste: 바카라˜I mean the film comes through with a tremendous amount of power and strength, and you do see oppression of a particular kind in full force. It isn바카라™t the kind of your gentle, the more ironic look at things.바카라™ But Ray would not acknowledge it as so much of a departure: 바카라˜It바카라™s just that the story called for that kind of treatment because that force, that anger is already there in the original story. And it seemed absolutely right for this particular story . . . I really don바카라™t know, I haven바카라™t worked it out whether this is a sort of inner change in myself, a looking at things in a more harsh sort of way than in an oblique way.바카라™ When I interviewed Ray for the National TV for the TV premiere of Sadgati, I found him more committed to a resolve to make at least a few more films directly on the rural/tribal realities. The Sadgati experience had been a kind of discovery not for Ray바카라™s audience alone, but for Ray himself too. And one of the stories he was considering seriously immediately after Sadgati was Mahasweta Devi바카라™s Bichlum. 

In fact, though Ray tells Benegal: 바카라˜it바카라™s exactly how Premchand conceived the story, I바카라™ve made almost no change [to the story] except perhaps add a few scenes here and there바카라™, there had been an overlay of irony in the story amounting almost to a cruelly mocking denunciation of the submission and endurance and acquiescence of the outcastes. Ray, in his film, had dispensed with the mockery Which was there in the narratorial voice that frames the Premchand story. Ray바카라™s tonal shift gives the narrative a charge that is more direct than the bitter irony of the original. 

In 1970, with Pratidwandi, Ray moved away finally from the area that he had defined for himself in the Apu trilogy and the films that followed immediately바카라”the experience of a culture, primarily rural and still maybe loosely rooted in feudalism, evolving into the urban under the impact of colonial education. In a 1980 interview, even as I was telling Ray: 바카라˜in the earlier films like the Apu Trilogy or Devi, though ostensibly set in the village, there is a looking forward to the city, a search for the roots that the city has in the villages, the village that lies underneath the urban mind of Calcutta, which has yet to assume what we would identify more definitely as an entirely urban sensibility . . . 바카라˜, Ray interrupted me to add, 바카라˜Aranyer Dinrcitri too is really about the city.바카라™ But with Pratidwandi, Ray seemed to have reached the city at last. The forward-looking values that Ray had been celebrating in his first phase of filmmaking바카라”the reaching out to a rational conscience바카라”seemed to have collapsed in a terrible morass of buying and selling in the nightmare world of his Calcutta Tetralogy. 

In what Samar Sen, poet and radical journalist, described as Ray바카라™s descent 바카라˜to the lower depths, not of poverty, but degradation바카라™, the ideals that had inspired the dreamy-eyed Apu appeared grotesquely unreal. Benegal asks Ray: 바카라˜Would you say that you knew that the environment was changing around you, and there was the effect of that on you?바카라™ Ray replies, 바카라˜That did happen towards the end of the sixties, the early seventies. I could describe that as a period in which you strongly felt certain changes taking place, almost in the day to day existence, you felt it, and you felt that without that you couldn바카라™t make a film.바카라™ 1970, the Pratidwandi year, was a kind of watershed. Six years later, Samar Sen would be asking: 바카라˜How does one explain the change in Satyajit?바카라™ Then another six years, another interview, and I was already asking him: 바카라˜Films that really represent your expression have gone probing into problems, into larger situations, very often historically determined situations, into basic human relationships. But haven바카라™t you been doing only lightweight films for a fairly long,. time now from before Shatranj and since? . . . In your sequence °I the films made in the seventies, you explored some of the most significant problems associated with middle class existence in Calcutta. 

Do you think you have exhausted the whole range of these problems? Would you say you do not see at the moment any problem of the same significance demanding cinematic projection?바카라™ Ray answered quite firmly: 바카라˜I do not see any at the moment. I can바카라™t find any.바카라™ But then a couple of minutes later he would be telling me, 바카라˜I don바카라™t feel inspired right now.바카라™ 

In a moving defence of his work in the late seventies, Ray told me in the course of this interview: 

바카라˜Now let바카라™s see what I바카라™ve made since Shatranj바카라”Jai Baba Felunath, and my latest, Heerak Rajar Deshey. You must have noticed this trend with me of spending all my time outside cinema for children, writing for them, illustrating for them. This has now gone on for nearly twenty years. Our Sandesh is now twenty years old . . . My work for children, which surfaced in the cinema for the first time in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, I enjoy immensely. In fact I have been feeling this other need more and more over the years beyond the urgency of what you call probing into problems바카라”always at the back of my mind바카라”to reach a larger audience. After making films for twenty years바카라”twenty-five years바카라”we haven바카라™t been able to reach an audience substantially large. When we see cheap films at a very average level of craftsmanship finding large audiences, we cannot just ignore the phenomenon. We came into films twenty or twenty-five years ago. But what have we achieved through our work over all these years? There has been the development of a certain kind of appreciation at the Film Society level. But that remains too limited to be really significant. What we call the audience remains far beyond it . . . They lie there somehow as an amorphous mass, far and absolutely beyond our circle. What do they want from cinema? We often ask ourselves: can바카라™t we do something for them, not necessarily going for all those cheap things or making compromises? This has been a perennial problem. Making films for children that could work at several levels, as in Goopy Gyne, and as definitely in Heerak Rajar Deshey, could be an answer. That way I could entertain the children, give the more intelligent and sophisticated adult spectators something to respond to with appeals at several levels. It바카라™s worthwhile to carry on with experiments in that direction . . . But that does not mean that I have moved away altogether to that end. Two films바카라”they are nothing absolute. If you take a maker바카라™s complete oeuvre, two films are really nothing. There can be a radical change of direction after these. Larger perspectives can open up immediately. When you look back at these ten years hence, you will find these representing just a passing phase, one of those phases.바카라™ (Cinewave, 1, January 1981) 

The 바카라˜change of direction바카라™ came in 1981 itself, with Pikoo and Sadgali. Benegal opens his film with Ray shooting The Home and the World, and goes back to the beginnings of a man born in an almost archetypal 바카라˜renaissance바카라™ family, growing in a rich ambience drawing on Western classical music, Santiniketan, drawing and painting, the first film society in Calcutta, Renoir and Pudovkin and Cherkasov, the world of children and their tastes, and a political setting that turned more and more complex 바카라”to make a rich oeuvre of films in which he claims: 바카라˜One thing which I have tried to do is not to repeat myself thematically.바카라™ In his long interview, Ray opens up in a manner in which he has not opened up ever before, and that would perhaps be the greatest compliment for Benegal, who has treated Ray more as an elder colleague and fellow worker than as a master. 

(Excerpted from 'Satyajit Ray, A Film By Shyam Benegal' with permission from Seagull Books)