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Abstract
This paper seeks to demonstrate the complexities of the Tagorean legacy through a re-examination of Tagore's influence on the filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Reappraising Ray's brief period at Santiniketan and some of his most celebrated engagements with Tagore, the essay argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, Ray was not a wholehearted follower of Tagore but a critical and creative interlocutor. The nuanced interpretation of his relationship with Tagore that Ray himself proffered in his last film Agantuk (1991), the essay suggests, is more persuasive than the exaggerated notions of Ray's Tagoreanism propagated by the vast majority of his biographers and critics.
Notes
1 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India: 1921–1952 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1988), p.596.
2 Considering that he made some thirty films over his career, Ray's engagements with Tagore were not particularly impressive in numerical terms. And they vanish almost into numerical insignificance in relation to the history of Bengali cinema. Although the Bengal film industry, when looking for classic stories, has always preferred Saratchandra Chatterjee—the author of the perennially popular Devdas and many other tales guaranteed to appeal to Indian audiences—as many as fifteen features had been made of Tagore's stories before Ray's 1961 Teen Kanya, and between 1923 and 1985 (the year of Ray's Ghare Baire), there had been nearly forty silent and sound adaptations of Tagore. Ray's uncle Nitin Bose directed four Tagore adaptations—Naukadubi and its Hindi version Milan (both in 1947), Dristidan (1948), and Jogajog (1958)—and edited a film that was notionally directed by Tagore himself (Natir Puja, 1932). Bose was also the cinematographer for Chirakumar Sabha (1932), directed by Premankur Atarthi. See Arunkumar Roy, Rabindranath o Chalachchitra (Calcutta: Chitralekha, 2nd ed., 2005), pp.203–12. As for Tagore's songs, Ray used them with great effect in some of his films but not as often as one might imagine. A rough count indicates that more than three hundred Tagore songs have been heard in Bengali films, of which only fifteen were in Ray's films, counting themes heard only on the soundtrack and including Baksha Badal, for which Ray wrote the script and directed the music. See ibid., pp.213–22.
3 For examples of such critical reviews, see Debipada Bhattacharya, ‘Teen Kanya’ (1961); Ashok Rudra, ‘Silipir Swadhinata’ (1964); and Purnendu Pattrea, ‘Ghare Baire: Rabindranather, Satyajiter’ (1989), all in Subrata Rudra (ed.), Satyajit: Jiban aar Silpa (Calcutta: Pratibhas, 1996), pp.284–6, 356–62 and 533–40 respectively.
4 See Penelope Gilliatt, ‘The Great Ray’, in The New Yorker (8 July 1974), clipping in British Film Institute Library, London (Micro-Jacket: Charulata); and Satyajit Ray, Nijer Aynaye Satyajit: Dirghhatama o Sesh Sakshatkar (Calcutta: Badwip, 1993), pp.51–2.
5 Debasis Mukhopadhyay, ‘Ghare Baire: Chhabi Tairir Nepathhya Kahini’, in Ekshan, Vol.17, nos.1–2 (Winter/Spring 1985), pp.109–14.
6 Chidananda Das Gupta, ‘Ray and Tagore’, in Sight and Sound, Vol.36, no.1 (Winter 1966/67), pp.30–34.
7 Ibid., pp.31, 34.
8 Chidananda Das Gupta, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2nd ed., 2001), p.xi.
9 Marie Seton, Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray (Delhi: Penguin, rev. ed., 2003), pp.160, 281. This edition has an Afterword by Indrani Majumdar covering Ray's post-1978 films.
10 Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (London: Tauris, 2nd ed., 2004), p.47; and Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p.xiii.
11 Bert Cardullo (ed.), Satyajit Ray: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), p.194.
12 Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, p.47.
13 Ray's use of Tagore's songs is omitted from consideration here. It is a fascinating subject but has been analysed perceptively by Sudhir Chakravarti, Bangla Filmer Gaan o Satyajit Ray (Calcutta: Gaangchil, 2008), pp.69–125.
14 The intertwined question of the so-called Bengal Renaissance is too complex to be dealt with here in detail, but it is worth pointing out that equating the Bengal Renaissance with Tagore and then connecting the two with Ray, as so many critics have tended to do, is historically untenable. Apart from the fact that most historians today would question at least some aspects of the traditional picture of the Bengal Renaissance, there was much more to Bengali cultural flowering in the nineteenth century than Tagore. For a helpful critical review of the Renaissance concept and its historiography, see Brian A. Hatcher, ‘Great Men Waking: Paradigms in the Historiography of the Bengal Renaissance’, in Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (ed.), Bengal—Rethinking History: Essays in Historiography (Delhi: Manohar and International Centre for Bengal Studies, 2001), pp.135–63. For a recent defence of the Renaissance concept from the perspective of cognitive science, see Subrata Dasgupta, The Bengal Renaissance: Identity and Creativity from Rammohun Roy to Rabindranath Tagore (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).
15 See Punyalata Chakrabarti, Chhelebelar Dinguli (Calcutta: Newscript, [1958] 1981), p.93; and for Upendrakishore's translations of Tagore's lyrics, A.H. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), pp.161–2, 166. On Fox Strangways and the larger contexts of his ethnomusicological project, see Zon Bennett, Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007), pp.249–90.
16 See Andrew Robinson, ‘Selected Letters of Sukumar Ray’, in South Asia Research, Vol.7, no.2 (1987), pp.182–3; and Leela Majumdar, Sukumar (Calcutta: Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2nd ed., 2001), p.101.
17 See Siddhartha Ghosh, ‘Sukumar Ray: Jibaner Kalanukramik Ghatanapanji’, in Ekshan, Vol.17, no.6 (1986), p.268.
18 See Partha Basu, Satyajit Ray (Calcutta: Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2006), pp.24–5.
19 The poem, as Ray put it, emphasised ‘the presence of the essential thing in a very small detail, which you must catch in order to express the larger thing; and this is in Indian art, this is in Rajput miniatures, this is in Ajanta, this is in Ellora, this is in the classics, in Kalidasa, in Sakuntala, in folk-poetry, in folk-singing’. See Cardullo (ed.), Satyajit Ray: Interviews, p.51. The original poem from Ray's autograph book is reproduced in facsimile in Satyajit Ray, Jakhhan Chhoto Chhilam (Calcutta: Ananda, 1982), p.37. It is, of course, arguable that Ray was interpreting the poem far too metaphorically—a less cosmic reading, but one no less relevant to Ray's work, might suggest that Tagore was merely stressing the importance of being open to grandeur and beauty in one's everyday surroundings.
20 When researching his documentary on Tagore, Ray was startled to find in a diary recording Tagore's seances that the spirit of his own father had requested Tagore to bring his son to his university. See Bijoya Ray, Amader Kathha (Calcutta: Ananda, 2008), p.68.
21 See Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, p.46.
22 See Abhijit Dasgupta, ‘Political Film Amader Deshey Bodh Hoy Kara Jay Na: Satyajit’, interview of Ray by Abhijit Dasgupta and others in Anandalok, Vol.25, no.8 (1 May 1999), p.71. See also Satyajit Ray, ‘The Education of a Film-maker’, in New Left Review, Vol.I, no.141 (Sept.–Oct. 1983), p.83.
23 ‘The few occasions that I met Rabindranath [Tagore] face to face—well, meeting is hardly the word: one stole up to him with one's heart in one's mouth, and touched his feet’, recalled Ray decades later. See Ray, ‘The Education of a Film-maker’, p.82. This was far from living ‘with the presence of Rabindranath Tagore’, as Ray's biographer Marie Seton would claim about his life in Santiniketan (Seton, Portrait of a Director, p.44).
24 Quoted in Julian Crandall Hollick, ‘Calcutta's Kaleidoscope of Cultures’ [http://www.ibaradio.org/India/calcutta/Kol.pdf, accessed 27 July 2011].
25 After finishing the documentary, he wrote to his friend and biographer Marie Seton: ‘Mukherji is by far the finest living Indian painter, apart from being a wonderful man and a great intellect…. I have always felt a great affinity with him’. Satyajit Ray to Marie Seton, 4 December 1973, in Marie Seton Collections, Section 2, Item 10, British Film Institute Special Collections, BFI Library, London.
26 Abhijit Dasgupta, ‘Political Film Amader Deshey Bodh Hoy Kara Jay Na: Satyajit’, p.14.
27 The same could be said of the apparent serenity of Ray's style and perhaps also about the reserve of his personality. In a celebrated essay, Ray quoted one of Nandalal's sayings to sum up the spirit of the Asian artist. ‘“Consider the Fujiyama”, he would say, “Fire within and calm without. There is the symbol of the true Oriental artist”’. See Satyajit Ray, ‘Calm Without, Fire Within’ (1963), in Our Films, Their Films (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1976), pp.152, 157.
28 Abhijit Dasgupta, ‘Political Film Amader Deshey Bodh Hoy Kara Jay Na: Satyajit’, p.70.
29 Benegal on Ray—Satyajit Ray, a Film by Shyam Benegal, script reconstructed by Alakananda Datta and Samik Bandyopadhyay (Calcutta: Seagull, 1988), p.107.
30 Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, p.49. Ray also listened to Western classical music with fellow art student Supriyo Mukhopadhyay, the eldest son of Tagore's biographer Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay and the owner of a hand-cranked gramophone. See the introduction by Amitrasudan Bhattacharya to ‘Aprakasito Patra: Satyajit Ray’, in Desh, Annual Puja Number 2010, p.59.
31 Benegal on Ray, pp.105–6.
32 Abhijit Dasgupta, ‘Political Film Amader Deshey Bodh Hoy Kara Jay Na: Satyajit’, p.16.
33 See Dinkar Kowshik, ‘Those Kala Bhavan Days’, in Santi Das (ed.), Satyajit Ray: An Intimate Master (Delhi: Allied, 1998), pp.17–26; and Dinkar Kowshik, ‘Kala Bhavaner Kichhu Smriti’, in Ekshan, Vol.19, nos.3–4 (1991), pp.74–90.
34 Abhijit Dasgupta, ‘Political Film Amader Deshey Bodh Hoy Kara Jay Na: Satyajit’, p.72. See also Debasis Mukhopadhyay, ‘Lekhhak Satyajit: Gorar Kathha’, in Prasadranjan Ray and Debasis Sen (eds), Sandesher Satyajit (Calcutta: Shaibya, 2007), pp.38–40. Both stories are reprinted in Ekshan, Vol.20, nos.1–2 (1993), pp.120–38.
35 Aniruddha Dhar, ‘Rabindranath: Chhabi Tairir Galpa’, in Ujjal Chakraborty, Aniruddha Dhar and Atanu Chakraborty, Panchali thheke Oscar, Vol.1: ‘Pather Panchali’ thheke ‘Charulata’ (Calcutta: Pratibhas, 2010), p.367.
36 I owe this point to Ujjal Chakraborty.
37 Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, p.183.
38 Abhijit Dasgupta, ‘Political Film Amader Deshey Bodh Hoy Kara Jay Na: Satyajit’, p.15.
39 Chidananda Das Gupta, ‘Ray and Tagore’, p.34.
40 Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, p.277.
41 Ray was unable, he admitted, to imagine a way of making the poetry interesting on screen, especially since the film was not intended for Bengalis alone. He found translations, including Tagore's own, to be lacking in the beauty and power of the originals and decided to leave most of the poetry out. See Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, p.278. The omission of the poetry was compensated for by including several of Tagore's most memorable songs on the soundtrack and staging some excerpts from the opera Balmiki Pratibha. Even here, however, Ray was less than staunchly Tagorean. The singer and eminent Santiniketan music teacher Santidev Ghosh pointed out that Ray's staging of Balmiki Pratibha did not follow the authentic Santiniketan style. See Dhar, ‘Rabindranath: Chhabi Tairir Galpa’, p.367.
42 Ibid., p.347.
43 Seton, Portrait of a Director, p.142.
44 Their disagreements, Ray's commentary declared, were ‘on the surface’ and their ‘deeper affinity transcended all occasional barriers’. For a comprehensive record of the often major differences between Tagore and Gandhi, see Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (ed.), The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore 1915–1941 (Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997).
45 In a 1978 interview with the British film scholar Eric Rhode, Ray declared that it was the ‘last ten years’ of Tagore's life that he found to be the ‘most significant’. ‘His later poems’, Ray remarked, ‘are the best things he has ever done. He wrote books for children, he wrote plays, music dramas…he became a remarkable painter and his handwriting developed to a point where every Bengali started imitating it. He participated in events, made political statements, came out very forcefully on certain aspects’. The interview was recorded in late 1978 and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in early 1979. I am profoundly grateful to Biswajit Mitra for providing me with an undated recording of the interview, to Eric Rhode for vetting its content and to Philip French (the producer of the programme), for providing broadcast details.
46 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Sabhhyatar Sankat’, in Rabindra Rachanabali, Sulabh Sangaskaran, 18 vols. (Calcutta: Vishwa Bharati, 1990), Vol.13, pp.739–45.
47 Dhar, ‘Rabindranath: Chhabi tairir Galpa’, p.348.
48 ‘Satyajiter “Rabindranath” Ekhhon aar Temon Bhhalo Lagey Na’, Anandabazar Patrika (21 May 2011), Patrika, p.2.
49 See Ray's letter of 22 June 1960, reproduced in Asim Som, Satyajit Kathha: Chalachchitrey o Nepathhey (Calcutta: Patralekha, 2010), appendix, npg.
50 Bosley Crowther, ‘Screen: India's Poetry by Satyajit Ray’, The New York Times (1 May 1963), p.35. For Crowther's ambivalent review of Pather Panchali, see his ‘Exotic Import; “Pather Panchali” from India Opens Here’, The New York Times (23 Sept. 1958) [http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9806E5D6163DE73ABC4B51DFBF668383649EDE, accessed 23 July 2011].
51 Rudra, ‘Silpir Swadhinata’, p.356. The original story is available in Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol.8, pp.499–502.
52 See Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol.8, pp.501–2.
53 Rudra, ‘Silpir Swadhinata’, p.356.
54 Bosley Crowther, ‘Songs of India: Melody and Rhythm in the Films of Ray’, The New York Times (5 May 1963), p.133.
55 See Aniruddha Dhar, ‘Charulata: Chhabi Tairir Galpa’, in Ujjal Chakraborty, Aniruddha Dhar and Atanu Chakraborty, Panchali thheke Oscar, Vol.1: ‘Pather Panchali’ thheke ‘Charulata’ (Calcutta: Pratibhas, 2010), p.532.
56 Aniruddha Dhar, ‘Teen Kanya: Chhabi Tairir Galpa’, in Aniruddha Dhar, Ujjal Chakraborty and Atanu Chakraborty, Panchali thheke Oscar, Vol.1: ‘Pather Panchali’ thheke ‘Charulata’ (Calcutta: Pratibhas, 2010), p.249.
57 Ujjal Chakraborty, ‘Satyajiter Chokhhe Ratan Ki? Bhritya na Bhagni?’, in Panchali thheke Oscar, Vol.1, pp.249–54.
58 Gaston Roberge, Satyajit Ray: Essays (1970–2005) (Delhi: Manohar, 2007), pp.171–2.
59 Satyajit Ray, ‘Charulata Prasangey’, in Bishay Chalachchitra (Calcutta: Ananda, 1982), pp.79–99.
60 Anandamath was first serialised in Bankim's magazine Bangadarsan from March 1881 to June 1882 and published as a book in December 1882. Strictly speaking, it could not feature in a film set firmly in 1879–80. See Julius J. Lipner, ‘Introduction’, in Bankimchandra Chatterji, Anandamath, or The Sacred Brotherhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.33; Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Vande Mataram: The Biography of a Song (Delhi: Penguin, 2003), pp.69–70; and Rushoti Sen, ‘Charulata: Prachchhanna Swadesh’, in Subrata Rudra (ed.), Satyajit: Jiban aar Silpa (Calcutta: Pratibhas, 1996), p.381. For analyses of Bankimchandra's role in early Indian nationalism, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp.54–84; Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 2002), pp.105–218; Sugata Bose, ‘Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of “India” in Bengali Literature and Culture’, in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (eds), Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.50–75; and Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
61 See Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, p.354.
62 Satyajit Ray, The Stranger: The Filmscript of ‘Agantuk’ (Antara Dev Sen trans.) (Delhi: TLM Books, 2003), pp.103–4. The actor Utpal Dutt, who played the role of the uncle, recalled Ray emphasising to him that the character was Ray's direct representative (pratinidhi) and was intended to express Ray's own views on the world and contemporary society. See Aniruddha Dhar, ‘Agantuk: Chhabi tairir Galpa’, in Aniruddha Dhar, Ujjal Chakraborty and Atanu Chakraborty, Panchali thheke Oscar, Vol.2: ‘Two’ thheke ‘Agantuk’ (Calcutta: Pratibhas, 2011), p.551.