Satyajit Ray and Rituparno Ghosh: Soulful cinema, seamless joy

In the early 1990s, a publicity campaign for the Statesman newspaper in Kolkata went something like this: “At times, a solo instrument sounds distinctly sweeter than the discordant clutter of many”. Interestingly, this advertisement campaign for Kolkata’s venerable English daily was being tom-tommed at a point of time when the gloss and shine had already started peeling off the British-era broadsheet in the eastern Indian metropolis. The Statesman’s dwindling readership notwithstanding, the objective truth behind the statement that notes from a solo instrument at times rise way above the din of a cacophonous orchestra is beyond question.

In a signed article in the newspaper on August 14, 1949, Satyajit Ray wrote about French director Jean Renoir: “‘Look at the flowers,’ said Renoir one day while on a search for suitable locales in a suburb of Calcutta for his film “The River”. Look at the flowers. They are very beautiful. But you get flowers in America too. Poinsettias? They grow wild in California, in my own garden. But look at the clump of bananas and the green pond at its foot. You don’t get that in California. That is Bengal and that is fantastic.’” Ray goes on to recount in his piece some of the other things that Renoir found “fantastic” and quintessentially Bengali — a woman drawing water from a well, saris hanging from the verandas at Bowbazar residences in central Kolkata, patterns of cow dung on the walls, an anonymous flautist on Waterloo Street. Cinema being primarily a visual medium, “integrity of atmosphere” is the necessary concomitant of a good film, Ray insisted.

And in terms of this aspect of “integrity of atmosphere”, two filmmakers who undoubtedly rise way beyond the “discordant clutter of many” in Bengali as well as Indian cinema are Ray himself and Rituparno Ghosh — their “integrity” to “atmosphere” not merely restricted in terms of set props and locales, but more so in terms of a “fantastic” externalisation of a profound emotional upheaval. Starting from Ray’s 1955 classic “Pather Panchali” (Ballad of the Road) to Ghosh’s swansong “Chitrangada”, Bengali cinema is embellished with gems, transcending spatio-temporal immediacy and offering viewers an immersive experience of visual art. Both Ray and Ghosh were masters of their craft. Their presentation of on-screen reality and characterisation had always been a very natural extension of their inner sensitivities — that ability to present the infinite in finite terms, that deep tugging at the heartstrings over mundane matters of everyday truth, that honesty of purpose that propels one to “see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower”, “hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour”, as Romantic poet William Blake had propounded. Indeed, the cinematic journey that one embarks upon from Ray’s “Apu” trilogy (“Pather Panchali”, “Apur Sansar” or The World of Apu, and “Aparajito” or The Unvanquished) to Ghosh’s “Dosor” (The Companion) is like Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience” all rolled into one rich repertoire of emotional bonding with the milieu of a constant tussle between the “being” and “the other” as epitomised by the protagonists.

“I don’t believe in dullness,” Ghosh had once told a scribe during an interview. “Every moment in life is infused with a hidden vitality. The language of cinema is to articulate that.” Like Ray, whose craft was at its brilliant best in such seminal works as “Pather Panchali”, “Charulata” (The Lonely Wife), “Ghare Baire” (Home and Away) and “Nayak” (The Hero) to name a few, Ghosh was a class act too, with his characters plumbing the depths of the human mind in such absorbing productions as “Chokher Bali” (The Constant Irritant), “Dahan” (Crossfire), “Antar Mahal” (The Inner Recess), “Dosor” and “Shob Choritro Kalponik” (Characters are all Imaginary). Indeed, there is hardly a dull moment in any of Ghosh’s films. His handling of such a sensitive subject as marital rape in “Dahan” is as riveting and convincing as his treatment of the issue of a married man’s tryst with “the other” woman and his desperate, at times even hapless, attempts at rapprochement with his much-wronged wife in “Dosor”.

Talking of characterisation, had Ray not been there, Bengali cinema lovers would have been deprived of such a multifaceted talent called Soumitra Chatterjee. True, Soumitra had a fair bit of grounding in the commercial productions that Tollygunge churned out, but it was under Ray that his talent was put to its optimum use on celluloid. Having achieved immense critical acclaim in films such as “Apur Sansar” and “Ghare Baire”, it was Ray’s casting of Soumitra as a suave private sleuth in the epochal role of “Feluda” that catapulted the actor’s popularity to almost epic proportions.

While Ray broke new ground with his presentation of Soumitra as the quintessential middle-class, educated, urbanised hero who turned out to be the icon for virtually every household in Bengal in 1960s and 1970s, Ghosh went a step further and sort of metamorphosed the world of actor Prosenjit Chatterjee. From the kitsch-ridden, melodramatic and at times even farcical fare that Tollygunge dished out, Prosenjit was transported into a realm of finesse and celluloid brilliance that perhaps only Ghosh was capable of conjuring. Until Ghosh’s shock demise late last month, the Rituparno-Prosenjit combination allowed fans of Bengali cinema a glimpse of what it takes to unearth talent from the least expected of crevices and let it bloom to its fullest under the glaring lights of a contemporary “popular” culture. In fact, as a filmmaker, Ghosh’s biggest contribution was his ability to see and acknowledge the immense potential that almost always lies untapped in what is disdainfully brushed aside by the high-brow as “pop culture”. This whole debate over “commercial” cinema and “art” or so-called “parallel” cinema acquired a completely new meaning with Ghosh’s emergence as a directorial and screenplay behemoth. Bengali as well as Indian cinema will remember this former advertising copywriter for showing it in the most definitive terms that anything “popular” need not be looked down upon as banal; that anything that is too contemporary and appealing in terms of glamour can still be fodder for good cinema; that anything that has the allure of “box office” can also be soul-stirring and thought-provoking; and most of all, “mainstream” can also be “artistic”. It is no wonder that names such as Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Ajay Devgn, Abhishek Bachchan and Bipasha Basu have adorned screen space in lead roles in several Rituparno Ghosh films, as “Rituda” threw the doors open to a “new age” cinema whose appeal stretched far beyond the immediate relevance of its “made in Bengal” tag. Ghosh presented cinema in Bengali for a pan-India audience — an audience for whom the language of the spoken word or the medium of verbal communication, namely Bangla in this case, was only subservient to the inner recesses of the minds of the characters and hence their universal appeal.

When Ray cast Bengal’s all-time great matinee idol Uttam Kumar in the lead for “Nayak”, an acclaimed contemporary, Mrinal Sen, had questioned the choice as pandering to a populist sentiment — namely commercial cinema. But Ray’s choice of Uttam Kumar for “Nayak” was a call to the filmmaker’s inner sensitivities as an artist and had hardly anything to do with a populist culture. Ray’s world was artistically too inclusive and open to be bogged down by sociopolitical compulsions or prejudices. And his choice of Uttam Kumar in “Nayak” today stands out as probably one of the best examples of “art for art’s sake” in Indian cinema — triumphing as a true timeless classic. The full impact of this is hammered home by Ghosh, whose casting of the senior Bachchan in the lead for “The Last Lear” is as altruistic as it is steeped in a creative urge to excel.

Ray’s career ended with “Agantuk” (The Visitor), but his legacy inspired a legion of honour and glory in Indian cinema in the form of Shyam Benegal, Aparna Sen and Mira Nair, to name a few — a lineage that has done India proud with its creations. The legacy of the Satyajit Ray-Ritwik Ghatak-Mrinal Sen trio will live on for generations because what they produced was path-breaking in thought and presentation. Likewise, though Ghosh is no more, his inspiration and influence are indelible through the works of Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury (“Antaheen” or Limitless), Srijit Mukherjee (“Baishe Srabon” or August 7), Aveek Mukhopadhyay (“Bhuter Bhobishwat” or Past is the Future) and the likes.

Ray’s craft was his art of making films speak for themselves — even to the extent of being criticised for making his cinema “export poverty”, as Nargis Dutt had once complained of Ray. But Dutt could have taken a leaf out of Akira Kurosawa’s observation on Ray: “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the Sun or the Moon.”

While Ray wove a many-splendoured mosaic of the human mind in the backdrop of a post-Independence, urban, middle-class milieu in Bengal, Ghosh brought issues such as repressed sexuality and gender politics out of the bedroom and into public domain with his characteristic verve and unabashed honesty. In that sense, Ghosh was a true iconoclast who, along with his self-confessed guru Ray, has proved beyond doubt that good cinema creates its own audience.