Remembering Ray

There is a scene (probably the last) in Pather Panchali, where Apu finds a necklace of beads inside the coconut shell where he and Durga used to hide their precious things. Once the realization dawns upon Apu that Durga had indeed stolen it, Apu hides the necklace in his hand and runs out. Far away from his house, Apu tosses the necklace into a big pond. As the necklace disappears into the bottom –the dry leaves that fell from a canopy of trees above, cover the water surface. Durga’s secret has been hidden by the leaves… and by Apu.
To me that just sums up the kind of cinema that Satyajit Ray epitomized as a film-maker.
Ray’s films (or Manik Da as we Bongs so fondly remember him) chronicled human emotions, unadulterated and sketched an earthly collage of love, hope, despair and death. Each of Ray’s films showcased the multifaceted genius of this director. While the Apu trilogy so poetically depicted the Circle of Life amidst all the trials and tribulations, the Calcutta trilogy (Seemabadhha, Pratidwandi & Jana Aranya) simultaneously brought to life, a city in decline and the angst of the disillusioned youth during the turbulent 70’s.Ray’s personal favourite however was Charulata, a classic, which told the story of Charu, a married woman torn between her idyllic gilded existence with her husband Bhupati and her growing love for her brother-in-law Amal , a dreamer ( flawless performances by Madhabi Mukherjee and Soumitro Chatterjee).Like the other masters of new wave or neo-realist cinema like Truffaut ( The 400 blows ) or De Sica ( The Bicycle Thief ) , Satyajit Ray had mastered the medium and captured on the screen , the social and political upheavals of the era in the context of everyday life ( in Ray’s case , the native Bengali Life and his uniquely Bengali sensibilities came to the fore). Another aspect of his craft that I admire the most is his choice of characters , a case in point being the casting of matinee idol Uttam Kumar in Nayak as also the exceptional use of classical music ( both Indian and Western ) as background score for his films. Such has been the impact of his craft that film-makers across the spectrum ranging from Shyam Benegal to Danny Boyle, from Meera Nair to Buddhadeb Dasgupta count him as their creative inspiration and carry forward the legacy of parallel cinema. And I still haven’t talked about Ray, the prolific writer. He created a much-loved private detective, Pradosh C Mitter or Feluda — whose adventures practically every Bengali kid who can read knows by heart and wrote science fiction stories starring the ingenious scientist Professor Shanku, not to mention the countless short stories, the brilliant sketches and the humour of Mollah Naseeruddin.

In the words of Akira Kurosawa,

Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon

By the way, Ray is part and parcel of my daily existence …. my Sonar Kella ringtone is a constant reminder of his brilliance 🙂