EMPEROR OF EMOTIONS
SATYAJIT RAY (1921—1992)
The architect of Indian realist cinema globally
Ashis Nandy’s observation that Satyajit Ray had a ‘plurality of selves’ is a neat expression of his cultural complexity. Like other figues from the Bengali intellectual elite of his time, Ray grew up with western culture. This was not just a middlebrow level of nodding acquaintance with famous names and works but a profound understanding of western music, literature, and, of course, cinema. Ray’s knowledge of and love for European realistic cinema are manifested throughout his films, and famously he collaborated with Jean Renoir on The River (1951).
Ray said he learnt about Bengali culture only later in his life when he studied in Shantiniketan. However, his familiarity with a wide range of Bengali culture, from the high to the low, is striking. He was a sensitive interpreter of Bengali fiction. Yet Ray’s cinema was not just the product of a solitary genius. It also lay in the choice of his team, working in close collaboration with cameraman Subrata Mitra, and his art director, Bansi Chandragupta. He also hired the same actors for several films, including Sharmila Tagore, and most of his films featured Soumitra Chatterjee.
All of Ray’s films share certain features not usually seen in mainstream Indian cinema. The films are realist, though set in very different contexts, ranging from the village to the city, from historical to the contemporary. The attention paid to cinematic elements of the film, notably the visual and aural components, is one of the great strengths of Ray’s cinema.
Ray’s characters are complex individuals, facing personal dilemmas, often about tangled sexual desires and family relationships within the home, as well as grappling with wider social issues. His slow style focuses on faces, bodies and gestures than on dialogue to reveal the unfolding of human emotions. His films are studies in love—not just romantic love but of love within the family and of friendship in the wider world. The characters search for love, find it, often lose it and then find a new means of coexistence.
Ray’s cinema is said to be non-political perhaps because of his insistence on foregrounding the aesthetic elements, but the political is often present in the way he handles issues, notably nationalism in his adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire (1984), one of his most discussed, if not most loved, films.
I find it almost impossible to select a favourite Ray film.I could pick one of the several moments that are indelibly engraved in my memory. The wonder on Apu’s face at his first experience of erotic love and happiness with his bride as he examines her hairpin which he finds in their bed. Apu trying to read his wife’s letter while travelling on a crowded tram. Charulata singing ‘Fule fule dhole dhole’, Rabindra Sangeet, on the swing—a bored woman falling for her husband’s cousin, a story which cannot end happily. The musical performances of Jalsaghar, as the aristocrat enjoys his last display of taste and aesthetic refinement. My personal favourite, Devi, is one which brings together many of Ray’s best qualities. Although renowned as a director of cinema, the most modern of art forms, Ray’s knowledge of the West seems to be drawn from the 19th century and before, blending ideas of the Enlightenment, of liberalism and humanism, while his interpretation of Indian culture is also shaped by the contemporaneous ‘Bengal Renaissance’.