“Taare Zamein Par” won’t be bringing the Oscars to India. Not that we uber-nationalists need to worry—”Slumdog Millionaire” will be winning many and “do India proud”. Coming back to TZP, I cannot say that it deserved to be nominated as I have not seen any of the movies that edged it out. However I can say that I thought it was an exceptional bit of work from mainstream commercial Bollywood, not because of the noble “message” or because of the story but because of its immensely cinematic first half where we are provided a beautiful insight into the world of a child, as he skips out of school and wonders on the small wonders of the world like the glories of paint mixing and the other small miracles we adults no longer are moved by.What it was perhaps missing was a bit of Indian exotica or a bit of the old sweat-and-dung-and-heat kind of muskiness that defines the sub-continetal cinematic experience—the Darsheel character’s dyslexia was fine and all but if he only had leprosy along with it, TZP would have been a “celebration of the wonder that is India”. Perhaps.

India’s most popular blogger, a gentleman appropriately named the Big B, had this to say recently in the context of Slumdog Millionaire.

The commercial escapist world of Indian Cinema had vociferously battled for years , on the attention paid and the adulation given to the legendary Satyajit Ray at all the prestigious Film Festivals of the West, and not a word of appreciation for the entertaining mass oriented box office block busters that were being churned out from Mumbai. The argument. Ray portrayed reality. The other escapism, fantasy and incredulous posturing. Unimpressive for Cannes and Berlin and Venice

Normally I usually let the news media obsesses over the latest blog statement from Amitabh Bachchan (and they do a good job over the obsessing part) but today I make an exception and comment on something from the Big B blog. Why? Simply because this statement of AB does make an interesting point and most importantly it serves as the perfect lead-in to something I have been wanting to write for some time now. What that is, I am coming to.

First let’s look at the first part of the argument. Namely that somehow mainstream Bollywood fare, the kind of stuff that made Bachchan famous, has not been given its due by the Western cognoscenti.

What constitutes “good art” is forever a matter of dispute and ultimately a subjective highly personal assessment that varies greatly from individual to individual. Mr. B may very well believe that excellence in cinema ought to be defined by its popular appeal or as Himesh the Great succinctly puts it on SaregamaPa “Public ke dee-i-shon (that’s how he pronounces decision) is all that matters.”

However Cannes and Berlin and the Oscars rely on a different aesthetic while evaluating movies—an aesthetic that favors “I could have been a contender” over ” Hum to tamboo main bamboo lagaaya baithe” (even though the latter may have got more whistles), Janet Leigh’s shower scene in Psycho to Mandakini’s waterfall scene in “Ram Teri Ganga Maili” (even though more people may have remembered it), the “swing” scene of Ikiru over the swing scene of Sanjog when Jaya Prada sings Zhu Zhu Zhu  (even though more people may have wept at seeing the second than the first) and the magic realism of La Strada over the surrealism of thousands of lemons bouncing down the hillside to Jeetendra’s dance moves and the accompanying poetic lyrics “Choli tere tan par kasi kasi “ . (though I personally consider the latter to be an award-worthy directorial touch). An aesthetic I felt would also favour TZP but alas it did not.

Now this preference may seem elitist and out of touch with reality (this is what Bill O’Reilly says) but then again the Oscars or the big film trophies never claim to be popular awards.

In that respect, its not as if these awards have an axe to grind only with popular mainstream Bollywood . The Oscars and the big international film festivals also refuse to acknowledge  escapist, fantastic and immensely popular cinematic creations from Hollywood like White Chicks (which comes in at the level of “Aaya Aaya Toofan Bhaga Bhaga Shaitaan” in terms of recall factor) and iconic movies like Star Wars and Die Hard whose audience-pleasing abilities have been validated over generations by commercially successful sequels.

Do Cannes and the Oscars always remain consistent to their aesthetic? Of course not and at least for the Oscars these transgressions have become even more egregious over the years. After all, how could a movie like “Titanic” sweep all the golden statues?  Film festivals and academy awards are prone, like anything that has a committee, to manipulations—through lobbying, influence-mongering, personal connections and other overt and covert forms of  what the French call “jugaad”.

There are certain themes that Oscar committees have a well-known bias for and so sometimes mediocre and cliched movies can simply play the system and win big if they strike the right notes and pander to the right stereotypes (and we know which potential Oscar winner I am talking about).

However despite the deviations in practice, on paper the aesthetic that guides Cannes and the Oscars remains constant and by that standard, Transformers or Amar Akbhar Antony will never be considered to be the best of world cinema, painful as that fact might be to some.

But what the greatest “There’s something about Mary” or “Terminator” fan will never do is to blame Oliver Stone or Scorcese for why their favorite movies do not get approval from the critics.

This is however precisely what Bachchan does when he says that Bollywood had to “battle the adulation and attention paid to Ray” as if somehow it is because of Ray’s realism and the ”realistic” stereotypes that he defined that Subhash Ghai and Manmohan Desai do not have several Palm D’Ors, Swarna Bhaloos and Best Director Oscars in their living room showcase.

Which brings me to the point of the post. And yes I have taken some time in getting there.

Satyajit Ray.

In the 80s, Congress MP Nargis famously declared that Satyajit Ray has won international acclaim because he sells India’s poverty to the West. There were undoubted political reasons for this diatribe, traceable to Ray’s refusal to kowtow to the then-Madam and Ray’s perceived slights to Bollywood, but that is not the topic of discussion here.

The accusation of Nargis however is.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Ray’s work and having no axe to grind would realize straight up that the very basic premise of Nargis’s accusation is false. The overwhelming majority of Ray’s movies aren’t even about “poor” people, where poverty is defined as the grinding sort that gets Westerns to go “Oho…so unfortunate”. Charulata and Ghare Baire are set in rich zamindar families. Kanchenjangha and Aranyer Din Ratri look at social dynamics in an urban, upper-middle class context. Nayak is about a matinee idol. The Kolkata trilogy deals with youth unrest, social changes in urban life and corporate wheeling-dealing.  Ray deals with civilizational crisis in Agantuk, corruption in Ganashatru, history in Satranj ki Khiladi, the tragedy of blind faith in Devi, feudalism and the inability to move with the times in Jalsaghar, the tensions caused in a middle class household when a housewife takes up a job in Mahanagar. There are detective stories, children’s fables with political subtexts, comedies about Bengali middle class aspirations—in short a mind-boggling variety of themes are explored by Ray where poverty is totally absent or where it is just a sidelight (for instance the female character in Mahanagar has to take a job when her husband gets laid off when the bank he works for fails) to the dramatic conflict that is at the crux of the narrative.

Even when Ray depicts poverty as he does in Pather Panchali, it almost never becomes the exclusive focus.  In a Ray film, there will hardly ever be gratuitous displays of human suffering of the “rolling in excreta and skin peeling off” kind that Boyle and even some Indian art movie directors, who shall remain nameless, use as a means to shock.

Not many people know this but one of the persistent criticisms that Ray faced throughout his life from Left-leaning Bangali intellectuals was that his depiction of suffering was not hard-hitting enough (Ray’s most stark depiction of poverty “Asani Sanket” was dragged over the coals as a “dushtu-mishti” [sweet-naughty] depiction of the Bengal famine because according to the critics it was way too arty and subtle and poetic.)

Some said that it was his bourgeois sensibilities which led him to be defensive about showing poverty. Some said it was because of his upper-class privileged upbringing that he had little idea of true human misery.(These incidentally were the same criticisms against Rabindranath Tagore). My take is that rather than being bookishly “gritty”, as in showing people vomiting on a glass screen and taking a shot from below ( a scene which I have actually seen in an Indian “art” movie popular on the festival circuit), Ray relied on indirection, symbolism, shot composition and use of light and shade to convey his message in a more cinematically aesthetic way. Likewise, Boyle could have used a number of ways to show extreme love for Bollywood celebrities but he chose the “easy way out”—the “shock and awe” strategy. Using perhaps the most gratuitously odious and heavy-handed way of getting the message across [a sentiment echoed here], he no doubt grabbed attention and pleased the crowd but the mechanism through which he achieved this can hardly be considered to be a great example of the director’s craft as it is defined by the  “Oscar and Cannes” aesthetic. That in a nutshell is the difference between Ray’s depiction of poverty and Boyle’s—it’s not the depiction of extreme poverty that makes Slumdog ordinary but the way Boyles chooses to do so that is.

Much of the assessment of Ray and people’s judgment of him  is based on the Apu trilogy, or perhaps just “Pather Panchali” as for many that is possibly all the Ray they have seen. Isn’t the Apu trilogy about poverty you ask, maybe visually artistic but about poverty none the less? Seeing nothing but poverty in “Pather Panchali” is like seeing nothing but graffiti on the walls of the Sistine Chapel. I have reviewed briefly the Apu trilogy in a series of three posts (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) and I would request the interested reader to look through them if you are interested to know more.

Here let me just say that the appeal of the Trilogy lies primarily in the universality of the themes it explores, themes that transcend barriers of time and social context. Apu can be taken out of the context of a poor village in rural Bengal and transplanted to graduate school in the US in 2009, a young Indian male adjusting to a new world with wide-eyed wonder in the process turning his back to his roots. Sarbajoya then can become his mother, dying inside, waiting for her son to call, running to the phone to realize she has imagined it to be ringing and sitting at the verandah of her third storey floor looking wistfully down at the road, expecting her son to come walking down the front street like he used to many years ago. And even then, if the camera was in the hands of a skilled director (no Mr. Bhansali I do not mean you) the story and the visuals would lose none of their poignancy even though the poverty and rural angle has been totally taken away.

In conclusion, it is this timelessness and universal relevance that makes Ray’s movies such exquisite works of art, rather than his “realism” or his “depiction of poverty”.

Now if only some people would get this.

Apur Sansar is known as “The World of Apu” in English.

What is lost in translation is the duality of the word “Sansar” in Bengali—-it means both family as well as world.

Apu’s detachment from Nature is now complete—–the movie starts with him residing in a dingy one-room near the train lines—-the same train, which symbolized the advent of the outside world in “Pather Panchali”, has by now totally lost its wonderment for Apu for whom the incessant cacophony is nothing but an irritant.

Despite being jobless and broke, Apu is happy. He is free as he always wanted to be–from attachments and from tradition. But, in a moment of idealistic impulse, he saves a girl (Aparna) from being married off to a lunatic by stepping in as the groom—-and by force of circumstance, becomes anchored again.

A new phase of his life begins where Apu learns to reconcile happiness with the ties of “family” (sonsar).

But then Aparna dies during childbirth and his journey grinds to a halt.

Turning away from life, he shuns all responsibility for his child (whom he holds responsible for snatching away everything he held dear) and becomes a lonely, broken-hearted recluse.

And then many years later, he meets his son Kajal. Roles are reversed as Apu, for the first time, consciously wants to feel attached but Kajal rejects his absentee dad. In the final climactic scene (which again is a moment where, no matter how many times you have seen it, tears well up) Apu is walking back, unable to get his son Kajal to accept him as his father and accompany him to Calcutta. As Apu walks down the winding road, he is accosted by Kajal, who standing atop a small hill asks him

“Who actually are you?”

Apu tries to say “father” but all that comes out is ” I am your friend”.

Kajal rushes to Apu, Apu lifts him in his arms and both of them ,iridescent in the glow of happiness, walk into the sunset, with the theme of “Pather Panchali” playing in the background.

After traversing a long and weary road, Apu has found salvation at last. His world is complete.

Undoubtedly, one of Indian cinema’s most enduring moments.

Soumitra Chatterjee, soon to become a regular part of Ray’s movies, gives a break-out performance as the adult Apu. Dreamy eyes, expressive face and oscillating between emotional extremes , Soumitra successfully brings out Apu’s essential vulnerability in a way few except him could have.

Sharmila Tagore makes her debut in this movie as Aparna. Heavily directed, she does a competent job and is mercifully without the affected Bengali and exaggerated mannerisms she subsequently picked up during her Mumbai days.

Sometimes directors in the midst of worrying about cinematic beauty, shot composition and seamless transitions lose sight of the supposedly mundane responsibility of story-telling.

Not Ray. “Apur Sansar” is the most story-oriented of all the other installments of the Trilogy and the movie stands on its own purely on the dint of Ray’s amazing capacity to tell a good story in an engaging way—–”Apur Sansar” never drags, the pace is perfect.

So even if you are not able to appreciate all the subtle nuances of a master of the craft, you can still walk out of the theatre with the feeling that you saw an entertaining movie.

And “Apur Sansar” is all about subtle symbolism. Watch the scene where the village elders come to convince Apu to become the “replacement” groom. The camera goes wide-angle as you see a bewildered, disbelieving Apu surrounded by all the village elders—— poor Apu, striving to break free of all shackles, has been caught, inescapably, in a steadily shrinking net of claustrophobic circumstance.

“Apur Sansar” is subtly humorous too (like most of Ray’s great works) . With minimalist brushes of his directorial pen, Ray etches unforgettable characters and situations—–the “interview” board for one of Apu’s jobs consists of a gaggle of ludo-playing, boisterous geriatrics, an office colleague rants to a thoroughly disinterested Apu about his submissive wife and how some amount of friction is necessary for an “exciting” marriage and a lunatic groom who ,while being led away from the marriage hall after Aparna’s mother refuses to hand over her daughter to him, asks his father uncomprehendingly :” Won’t I get married?”

Normally the lunatic husband, who was being foisted upon Aparna, would be depicted as an object of scorn. But such is Satyajit Ray’s deep humanism and compassion that you end up actually feeling sorry for the poor chap—he is as much a victim of this charade as Aparna.

Satyajit Ray later went on record saying that, in retrospect, he erred in showing Apu slapping his brother-in-law in anger after hearing of Aparna’s death because it went against the very grain of Apu’s character.

Many disagree. The way they see it, the news of Aparna’s death triggers a cataclysmic change in the overtly emotional Apu and he swings to an extreme that is a total refutation of his normal character traits —–he becomes despondent, pessimistic, escapist and hard-hearted (he refuses to even see his child for five years).

The slap is the fulcrum point for this violent change and thus is quite in tune with Apu’s new “anti-Apu” character

While the detachment between mother and son was the focus of “Aparajito”, the uneasy attempts at bonding between father and son in “Apur Sansar” are its most emotionally satisfying parts.

Kajal, as Apu’s son, wrestles with his desire to gain acceptance from a father he idolizes (note the scene where he says—”My father will come and beat you up”) and the overwhelming sense of hurt at being abandoned for no fault of his own (he throws away the toy his absentee father brings for him) and the child who essays the role of Kajal (possessed with amazingly expressive and sad eyes) admirably expresses this conflict———no small measure due to one of Satyajit Ray’s greatest skills –that of extracting awe-inspiring performances from children.

Kajal is Apu’s only source of redemption and in him he sees all that he used to be and has forgotten. Which again brings me to the genius of the final scene—–the father-son reconciliation is an emotionally evocative moment no doubt but it is not a happy, quick-fix solution (Kajal’s trust in Apu has to still progress from friend to father) .

Yet it holds out the promise for a better tomorrow thus crystallizing perfectly, in “Apur Sansar”‘s final frame, the theme of the Trilogy —– that regardless of death, poverty and separation, life always holds out hope.

In my opinion, the greatest celebration of life ever captured on screen.

“Aparajito” (Unvanquished), the second part of the Apu Trilogy and thematically the most nuanced, is about Apu’s aspirations.

Apu is now in the cusp of boyhood and manhood–gawky, dissatisfied and increasingly feeling constricted by his rural surroundings. On one hand is the strong pull of tradition—–his mother and his elders want him to continue the family profession of priesthood and stay in the village. And on the other hand is the desire to break free.

As his headmaster at Arboal (the village where he stays) tells him while encouraging him to read books—

“We may be rooted in a remote corner of Bengal but that does not mean our mind should be confined here.”

“Aparajito” chronicles the awakening of Apu’s mind and the conflicts it brings in its wake.

While “Pather Panchali” depicted Apu as an intrinsic part of his pastoral surroundings, “Aparajito” marks his gradual detachment from nature and from the things that used to enthrall him previously. The entertainers in the village fair bore him, he grudgingly performs the priest’s responsibilities (note the scene where he comes back from Puja and rushes off to play—though you cannot see it you can hear the loud sound of him dumping the “Narayana Sila” with singular lack of veneration), and once he goes to Calcutta for higher studies becomes increasingly disinclined to come back to the village even for a few days.

“Aparajito”‘s depiction of the mother-son relationship came for some criticism when the movie was released—-many Indians, used to picture-perfect familial bonds on-screen, could not come to terms with the gradually increasing aloofness on the part of Apu from his mother.

Sarbojaya is petrified of losing her son to the city. Widowed and alone, she clings to Apu as her only support and the more she does that, the more stifled does he feel and moves way.

To Apu, his mother’s dotingness symbolizes the constriction of village life—paradoxically feeling more claustrophobic in the open spaces of Arboal than in the dingy printing press in which he works in Calcutta.

It is this growing distance between mother and son which is , in my opinion, the most heart-rending part of the movie.

Alone in the village, Apu’s gradually infrequent visits become Sarbojaya’s only lifeline. But for Apu it is just a duty he has to discharge. In one memorable scene, Sarbojaya talks about wanting to see Calcutta and of how her health has been failing—-only to turn around and find that Apu has fallen asleep.

In another unforgettable scene which shows that Apu also loves his mother but just is not comfortable expressing it, Sarbajaya pleads with Apu to stay, Apu brushes her off rudely, goes to the train station and cannot bring himself to board the train, comes back and tells his mother not the truth…..but that he missed the train.

Karuna Banerjee as Sarbojaya gives a tour d’force performance —–in one evocative scene , dying and alone, she hallucinates that Apu has come back. Her eyes light up with joy and she rushes out to the empty village path and the light that shone in her eyes gradually dims out as she realizes that noone is coming.

As an aside: Bibhutibhushon Bandopadhyay’s depiction of the growing distance between mother and son in the original novel was even more brutal. There after Sarbojaya has passed away, Apu comes back and feels extremely happy——-happy that all the bonds with the village have been broken irrevocably and that he is free at last. Only when he sees the pickle jars and realizes that there is noone to prevent him anymore from opening and eating them, that he breaks down and starts sobbing disconsolately.

In someone else’s hand, “Aparajito” could have become morose and pessimistic. But not Ray’s. With his typical sense of understated humor, he infuses a dark movie with luminant characters and situations—-the school inspector, the college professor and of course, the devil-may-care Pulu, Apu’s best friend in Calcutta.

Darker and more disturbing than the other installments of the Trilogy, “Aparajito” is not everyone’s cup of tea.

But it’s still a masterpiece.

One of the babies he “christened” was Satyajit Ray and what he composed for Ray is instantly recognizable as one of Tagore’s most famous short poems (though not many know it was for Satyajit Ray).

Translated to English (for those who have read the original, forgive me for my purely functional non-poetic translation), it says:

” I have been gone everywhere, spent a lot of money—travelled to the mountains, seen the sea…….trying always to find beauty. I now realize that all the time I wandered the earth, I missed seeing the splendour that lay before me, just 2 steps from my door—–a dewdrop glistening on a blade of grass”.

If ever someone lived upto their “dedication” it was Satyajit Ray.

“Pather Panchali” opened the eyes of the world to the beauty that lay in the most unexpected of places—-rural, poverty-striken Bengal. And in the lives of those struggling to live there.

If there is something at the heart of Pather Panchali, it is this overwhelming power of life that asserts itself even in the face of poverty, misery and death.

Yes Pather Panchali is about struggle. Satyajit Ray had to pawn his wife’s jewelry in order to finance the first stage of shooting. Shooting had to be suspended for lack of finances—wherein Ray prayed for two miracles—that Chunibala Debi (in my opinion, the star of “Pather Panchali”) who played the old aunt, Indir Thakurun, does not die in the interregnum and that the boy who plays Apu does not “physically” grow up.

The two miracles did happen and also a third. Dr. Bidhanchandra Ray, West Bengal’s much-loved first chief minister, ultimately financed the movie. Known to be an aesthetically-challenged but big-hearted man, he found the ending of “Pather Panchali” to be too depressing and suggested that Ray change the ending to show Horihor’s family becoming part of a government cooperative program and building a new house. Thankfully, the suggestion was not taken nor insisted upon. (An aside: the financing of “Pather Panchali” came from the Public Works Department because Dr BC Ray reasoned that the most logical source of finance for a movie called “The Song of the Road” has to be the department that finances roads)

When “Pather Panchali” was released, it became a huge commercial success all over Bengal. My father, who like Apu went to a village school with a straw hut and had a teacher who multiplexed as a shopkeeper, saw the movie when he was a kid. Going to the district capital of Siuri from his native village of Nagari , along with his aunts and other village folk in a cavalcade of bullock carts and watching a movie which told “their story”, was an extra-cinematic experience for him and the people of his generation.

To my father (and many like him) Apu was his own image projected onto celluloid—a dramatization of his struggles and aspirations, and a celebration of his way of life—–that of a village boy, who physically maybe in the backwaters of Bengal but whose mind encompasses the world (a theme that is developed through the Trilogy)

Apu was him. He was Apu.
I cannot vouch for how much my generation can empathize with Apu’s struggle to manhood—-I suppose perhaps not as much as my father’s.

But the sheer weight of the visuals—- the trance-like dance of the raindrops on the pond, the wind rustling through the kaashphool, the sweet vendor’s reflection gliding over the pond —and the timeless simplicty of its story still have the power to hypnotize a generation brought up on cell-phones and laptops….a generation in which many of us have never seen or shall ever see a “real” village.

“Pather Panchali” has its critics not the least of whom were gentle white folk who got up midscreening in New York because they were repulsed seeing people eating with their fingers.
Back home, one group of haters led by actress-turned MP Nargis Dutt denounced Ray, particularly in reference to the Apu trilogy for “exporting images of India’s poverty for foreign audiences”. Others castigated “Pather Panchali” for its pessimism and gloominess.

Of course, there are several uncharitable reasons for Ms Dutt’s angst against Ray and “Pather Panchali” which I shall not get into here. (If you are still interested, please read the fable about the jackal and the grapes). However the point I wish to make is that such critics fail to perceive the heart of “Pather Panchali”(and the entire “Apu Trilogy)——– that being that poverty, death and deprivation are mere sidelights to the inexorable march of life.

My favorite “Pather Panchali” moment is when after Durga’s death, Apu throws the necklace which she stole (and whose hiding spot only Apu knew) into the pond and the lotus leaves cover up the place where the necklace enters the water— the burial of a small secret memory in collusion with Nature.

My mother cries buckets when she sees “Pather Panchali”. There are places where even I, a self-professed alpha-male, cannot stop tears from welling up. For me the most plaintive moment, (even more than Durga’s death or Horihor’s silent crescendo of grief when he gets to know that his daughter has died) is where Indir Thakurun, in the fading light of the day, sings in her sad feeble voice—-

“Hori Din To Gelo, Sandhya Holo, Par Koro Amaare”

which (apologies for my translation skills) translates to:

“God… the day is finished, evening has descended……..now please take me across”

Poetry on celluloid.

Pure and simple.