Apu And After: Re-Visiting Ray's Cinema

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Seagull Boob

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0 Seagull Boob 2005 ISBN 1 9054 2 225 3 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from tht' British Libr.iry Typeset by Seagull Boob, Calcutta, India Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddies Ltd, King's Lynn

CONTENTS MOINAK BISWAS

Introduction: Critical Returns

19 SOURIN BHATTACHARYA

Develop-Mentalist Tum: Recovering Ray's Panchal/ 37 MOINAK BISWAS

Early Films: The Novel and Other Horizons 80

RAVJ S. VASUDEVAN Nationhood, Authenticity and Realism in 1ndim Cinema: The Double-talte of Modernism in Ray 116 SUMAN GHOSH

Ray's Musical Narratives: Studying the Screenplay of Kanchmjungha

14-0 MIHIR BHATTACHARYA

Conditions of Visibility: People's Imagination and Goopy Gynt Bagha Bynt

192 SIBAJI BANDYOPADHY AY

Ray's Memory Game

251 SUPRIY A CHAUDHURI

In the City

2n SWAPAN CHAKRAVORTY

Meaning in the Middle: Dwogue and Word in Jana Aran_ya

296 UJJAL CHAKRABORTY

Those Who Work 308 Notes on Contributon 310 Select Bibliography

Introduction: Critical Returns MOINAK BISWAS

THE LITERATURE ON RAY'S WORK was already voluminous in his lifetime, as an effect as well as part of the discourse of the 'author' attending his figure. Since his death in 1992 more has been added to this body of writing. It is a reflection on the character of his cinema and its reception that a large part of that literature is not critical in the strict sense of the term. To be critical is not necessarily to be negative, but critical engagement does involve negativity and debate, a kind of dispersal of the iconic work. It involves subjecting the text to fragmentation and re-alignments, unpacking and re-assembling the elements to which the work lends unity. The elegance and nobility of Ray's cinema, the seemingly perennial quality of its content, largely discouraged such interrogation. The moment of arrival of his cinema for many reasons had to be a moment of discovery for us, of wonder and deep admiration. One learnt about cinema by appreciating Ray. It was more important for the first generation of viewers to go through this process of discovery. The distinctive restraint of that cinema was not only an aesthetic achievement, it also signified a principled stand on cultural expression, its economy being its gesture of refusal to fall in line with the convention. On the level of content, Ray's work seemed to extend into cinema the modem traditions established in the Indian arts by the early decades of the twentieth century, especially in literature, where several phases of experimentation with modem modes had already consolidated themselves. Culturally, it was more than a matter of bringing a distinction to Indian cinema and challenging conventions. 'Humanism' has been invoked frequently in connection with Ray's work-as a matter of being both humane and democratic, of embrac-

2 I APU AND AFTER

ing a non-melodramatic celebration of common life, openness of form, multiplicity of interpretation. It was also a matter of commitment to the scientific spirit, to a notion of progress, and to the centrality of individual conscience. The realist form was not merely an aesthetic choice in this regard; it was implicated in a worldview that staged a secular confrontation with the past even as it drew sustenance from it, confident about the tasks of new creation at hand. If there is any value in the other frequently cited aspect of Ray's work-the synthesis of the East and the West-it should be sought in the confidence that his work placed in the value of the modem tradition as it negotiated a vernacular cinema as part of a world cinema. Ray represents the figure of an artist who was not anxious about using his skills in the world idiom. All this came to be perceived as problematic as the binaries in question-East and West-were reformulated (once again) in terms of dominance and subjugation, of 'incommensurability', and colonial rupture. But the first moment of doubt came before this 'postcolonial' turn in cultural criticism. It came in the middle of the sixties, at a time when signs of wide-scale disaffection with the dreams of official modernization became visible. A new politic.al language appeared that showed a deep dis-identification with the discourse of nationalist idealism, a discourse that built a bridge between pre- and post-independence political cultures. Languages of dissent became creative once again as the apprehension of fractures and conflicts rather than the imagination of unity began to characterize political life. It was also a time of generational schism. Not only were there ruptures in the National Congress in the wake of Nehru's death, the Communist Party also underwent two splits in the 1960s, both of which showed a division of age in the ranks. The whole nationalist legacy, including ideas about the nineteenth-century 'enlightenment' were also to be challenged. As the moment of radical students' politics reached a climax in Calcutta and elsewhere chiming with a world-wide upsurge in 'student power' 1 the quiet dignity of Ray's evocative cinema looked quietist to many. The music.al conception of contrasts seemed to act against the recognition of conflict. 2 Contrasts are captured musically in a world evacuated of personal villainy-the cruel char-

INTRODUCTION / 3

acters from Bibhutibhushan 's novels are all gone in the Apu Trilogy, even the patriarch Kalilcinkar in Devi (The Goddess, 1960), a repository of values Ray seems to be fighting, evokes sympathy. Ray's lndianness it.self could be seen as a source of crisis. The musical movement, what Alcira Kurosawa called 'the river like flow' of Ray's early cinema, was seen as stemming from an Indian philosophic-aesthetic tradition that has avoided 'conflict and drama'. 3 By the middle of the 1960s, Indian critics were voicing serious misgivings about Ray's ability to address the contemporary-the moment that the modem Indian artist should inhabit. One of the first complaints came from his close colleague, the critic Chidananda Das Gupta, almost exactly at a time when the political tunnoil took on an acute visibility. The Calcutta of the burning trams, the communal riots, refugees, unemployment, rising prices and food shortages does not exist in Ray's films. Although he lives in this city, there is no correspondence between him and the 'poetry of anguish' which has dominated Bengali literature for the last ten years. 4 In the wake of the Naxalbari movement and the Vietnam War, in that hour of the youth, Ray seemed to be disconcertingly removed from the historical present. A left-wing critic wrote: (f)housands like myself who once adored the humanist Ray, today cannot find him the same great creator of Pather Panchali and Aparajito . . . getting alienated day by day from the people and their problems, their struggles for survival-which are becoming harsher and acute . . . s International acclaim continued to rise, national awards came pouring in, critical and popular success at home was by no means on the wane. But Ray's work had definitely begun to encounter criticism. The critic cited above belonged to what was soon to be called the film society movement, which is significant. Ray not only made the films, with his cinephile friends he had pioneered film society activity in India, contributing directly to the creation of the critical discourse on film that was crucial to the reception of his cinema. He

4 / APU AND AFTER

took part in building the new audience. In the seventies, as they spread in various parts of India with great rapidity, the film societies hosted a large number of left-wing radicals. Their scepticism was aimed primarily at middle-class cultural projects, even at the kind of aesthetic education that their forebears in the film society movement had undertaken. The denunciation came in the name of committed art.

It is important for criticism to emerge, for disbelief to clear the ground. Sheer appreciation does not allow us to interrogate the work and therefore deprives us of a richer enjoyment of it. In principle, the criticism seemed to call for an avant-garde departure, a Third Cinema practice as Teshome Gabriel would conceive it-a break with both the mainstream commercial cinema and the national cinema of taste that is almost always realist in form. 6 But unlike most of the other film cultures, realism does not characterize the dominant cinema in India, it never has. The cinema of artistic intent and that of social commitment found a point of convergence in realism here; the modernist cinema in a sense was realist. What the radical critics ended up demanding in fact was a thematic extension of that realism. A political apprehension of reality was missing from Ray's cinema, they felt. Wasn't he making in 1968 a children's fantasy where kings are redeemed by the plebs, wars are stopped by pacifist crusades? Wasn't he making in the following year a film about urban youth holidaying in the forests, narrating their moral passivity in the most indolent manner possible, aligning himself, moreover, with the literature that embraced libertarianism precisely to mark its distance from politics? Paradoxically, it is thanks to this questioning, this discomfort among the radical intelligentsia of the time that one can now read more than narrative mastery, more than formal elegance and 'human' qualities in the two great films in question, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures cf Goopy and Bagha, 1968) and Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, 1969). One can now discover, as Mihir Bhattacharya's essay in this volume attempts to do, the effects of instituting a peasant gaze at the heart of the fairy tale in Goopy Gyne, the politics of a plebian fantasy around food, music and travel, the downscaling of Icings and courts into proportions fitting the frame of

INTRODUCTION / 5

the workaday rural imagination, the substitution of desires of pawer with those of pleasure. It is not only that we now appreciate the carnivalesque promise of the peasant winning the hand of the princess in the film, and place it in contrast with the heroism of the paor in the contemparary papular film, or see the subversive patential of making an irate king break into the dialect of Birbhum, we can now formulate the problem of Ray's palitics in a new way. We can ask why the world of Goopy Gyne is almost wholly devoid of female characters, a question not considered impartant at the time of the film (which is itself a reflection on the limits of the radical project concerned). It is passible to undertake a productive investigation of the generic limits (children's tales that exclude young girls) at work, the choice in genres exercised by Ray as a member of a family of writers and artists who have made a major contribution to children's literature in Bengal, as well as of an imagination constrained by conditions of visibility. Bhattacharya's essay presents a model of viewing that simultaneously recognizes the ideological limits of a certain 'people's imagination', its imperatives of exclusion, and finds it necessary to appreciate the artist's work as creating spaces of modem expression from within those limits. Close to European cinema of the sixties in style and temperament, Aranyer Din Ratri was adored by western critics, and along with jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958) it remains a favourite with them. Ray himself considered it amongst his best works. It marks the beginning of a series of films set in the contemporary and featuring the youth in Ray's career (at a time when he was still making one film a year). Mrinal Sen launched his palitical series based on dissenting young protagonists and urban strife around the same time, attempting to answer the call for a palitical cinema more ardently. Sen deployed Brechtian elements borrowed from Godard and the New Latin American Cinema. Ritwik Ghatak's explicit engagement with Brecht came with his last film Jultti Tak.Ito ar Gappo (Arguments and a Story, 1974) as young radicals entered the plot, forcing the directorprotagonist into a fatal confession. That Tapan Sinha, Dinen Gupta, Parthapratim Chowdhury, Piyush Basu-filmmakers from nearer the mainstream-were also working with the thematics of the disaffected

6 I APU AND AFTER

youth and the idiom of anger shows a generic situation in the making. Ray's young urban protagonists, in Aranyer Din Ratrl, Pratidwandi (The A.dvmary, 1970) and Jana A.ranya (The Middleman, 1975), are decidedly indecisive about politics, sometimes plainly alienated from radical or violent action. Those who have taken the plunge are part of the surroundings, never placed at the centre of the narrative. The superb craftsmanship of Aranyer Din Ratrl appeared more dubious to many among Ray's home audience because of the film's literal removal from the scene of historical production of the angry youth. For today's critic, once again, the point is not to recover the universal human content that the radical in his impatience forgot to notice and that the uncritical appraisal of the director has never forgotten to mark; neither is it merely to re-discover the deft weaving of relationships, social differences, individual alienation, urban anomie and moral confusion. The point is to look for a structure of response to the times in the film, the registration of a time that was forced to reflect on its inheritances. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay places the 'memory game', a seemingly rambling moment in the film, one that appears to contribute little to the plot, at the centre for the purpose of such a reading. The idle recitation of names filling in a summer afternoon in the shade conjures up, through its very aimlessness, overlapping/diverging frames of reference. From Shakespeare and Tagore to Mao and Atulya Ghosh, the roster invokes not only 'figures' but a figure of mnemonics. At one level quickness of mind is being tested, and cultural exposure, taste-to place the characters in various positions on a spectrum of sensibility, and draw a map of possible heterosexual affiliations. At another level, the game is a commentary on the task of remembering, a differential table of possible/impossible political association, even of political identification, nothing less than an inventory of the Bengali middle class at a moment in its history when one had to make known one's affiliations. More powerfully than their 'decadence' (the word most frequently invoked by leftwing critics in describing the hedonist rebels in Bengali culture in wake of the 'Hungry Generation' writing and the kind of establishment literature exemplified at that point by Samaresh Bose's novels, Bibar and Prajapati) the moral degeneracy of our heroes is brought out

INTRODUCTION / 7

through their alienation from the people of the region they have chosen to visit. The moral question, always problematic in itself, is rendered complex by its imbrication with the question of class. The chowkidar, the errand boy, the tribal girl, instead of forming a back.drop to the protagonists, come to signify their hollow insides. And this is done without a simple denunciation of the protagonists, without a moral judgement. Bandyopadhyay claims that the critical force of the film is weakened by the one lapse into moral judgement that occurs through the character of Rini. He also traces out the metaphoric discourse on money in the film-how money is raised to its proper level of reality even as it is figured in its abstract physicality. Money connects the characters even as it separates them; as currency it returns and weaves narrative threads, its function being ironic and sad at the same time. Memory and money, Bandyopadhyay suggests, are not only objects of social interrogation, they create spaces of interrogation, for both social realities and for the mechanism of film. Commentary on Ray's film form has of necessity locked in on the question of realism. From considering realism itself as a progressive, aesthetically and socially liberating value, critics have moved into an investigation of realism as ideology. Bandyopadhyay's essay attempts to bring back the question of naturalism, presumably to break out of the deadlock of ideological reductions. It shows how the play on memory makes possible a critical surfacing of the naturalist patential of the medium, makes it necessary for the critic to recognize the reflexive use the director was making of it-the kind of use that would affiliate the film to the world phenomenon of palitical cinema in the sixties and seventies. The play on money, on the other hand, makes for another reflex as it gently reminds us of the scandalous reality of cinema as an economic activity, an activity that Ray himself in his writings measured in terms of its success with the audience. Money doesn't appear only as a symbol of moral crisis; it also points to a basis of exchange and communication which in more than one sense is economic in character. Swapan Chakravorty explores the extended meaning of economy in Jana Aranya, the last in the series of the city films. As it begins,

8 I APU AND AFTER

the film visualizes the removal of the protagonist from the scene of politics. Again, there was enough in this staging of alienation to disappoint the radical critic of the time. Appearing right in the middle of the National Emergency in 1975, the portrayal of the young hero becoming a fixer was for many a baffiing take on an urban reality inching towards the climax of a nationwide political crisis. Once again, to the extent that the film records the moral degeneracy of the generation, presents the metaphoric spectacle of the son becoming a pimp as the idealist father gropes in the dark for knowledge, it seems lacking in critical thrust. In late Ray this view of moral crisis and generational schism becomes naive to a disturbing point. In Shakha Prashakha (Branches of a Tru, 1990) for example, the industrialist patriarch's education in the fact of corruption leaves us incredulous and betrays a loss of contact with real dimensions of societal change. In Jana Aran_ya Ray is uncharacteristically cruel, his target is precisely the naivete of the middle class which thinks it can fmd a foothold in the changing world without taking part in the business of changing it. As the film moves away from the lamenting perspective of the father, the old man who wants to 'understand' the political rebels because he has respect for their sincerity, it gains, paradoxically, in critical insight. It indulges in a fascination for what stands opposed to idealism, the reality of the market. It does not perhaps debunk faith, but it destroys illusions. At one level the film certainly mourns the passing of a positive social order, a set of ideals, but at another, it clearly mocks at a social class which refuses to acknowledge the active contribution that market relations make to the very hwnan substance, which refuses to see that the economic truth of its life cannot be comprehended sentimentally. The poet Sankha Ghosh called Jana Aran_ya the first film of protest in Ray's career since it shows how we come to stand on the brink of a disaster by following the everyday logic of making a living, by just surviving. 7 Perhaps the most memorable character in the film is the fixer Natabar Mitra, played by the great comedian Robi Ghosh. As one witnesses his dismantling of the hero's moral coordinates one senses how the political content of the film lies in its cold, non-sentimental delineation of the economic content of human ties. Chakravorty concentrates on Ray's dialogue, a

INTRODUCTION I 9

remarkable aspect of almost all his films, as he shows how deeply Jana Aran_ya is marked by a discourse on the market. The construction of identities (the middleman for example) takes place on a grid of market relations, something that is difficult to figure through dramatization in film. Chalcravorty shows how dialogue as exchange becomes a metonym for exchange in the larger sense in the film; how words, as they are shared between people, present the semantic tension between use and exchange values, and the changes of register embody the pulse of transactions. Words are not only symptoms, they constitute the body, which in film is never simply the physical appearance of humans, but a gathering and dispersal of effects of 'presence'. Words in the film conjure up the body through economies of more than one kind; selves are to be planted on this body that is coming into being. Chakravorty mentions Aran_yer Din Ratri as a point of beginning in Ray's career of a mode of portrayal which is not primarily evocative as it was in his early classics, but is deeply analytical. And analysis does not so much depend upon characters as its vehicle, but figures the space between the individuals, the space of exchange. Film society criticism in India was consistently dismissive of the industrial output because of its non-realist character, whereas the charge against Ray of 'falling short of reality' could be read in terms of a problem that the artist faced with a new political language breaking the seams of a certain consensus. When the second moment of interrogation arrived it was, however, Ray's realist conscience that came to be considered problematic. Coming in the late eighties, this moment coincided with a re-evaluation of the Indian popular cinema, and also with the Film Studies turn in Indian film criticism. The new scholarship was based in the new humanities, at a point of convergence of methods of social inquiry, semiotic textual criticism and cultural theory. The ideological analysis of texts had by then constituted realism as a 'bad object' of sorts. The latter was suspect because of its disavowal of codes of representation and narrative. The critique of positivist knowledge found fault with realism for its reproduction of prevalent orders of discourse under the guise of objective representation. A

10 / APU AND AFTER

little later, postcolonial theory, as it studied the historical conditions of importation of forms from the metropolis to the colonies, found its own reason to question realist narrative's claim to privileged access to reality. It would stress that narrative's deep alliance with modernity, especially modem ideologies like nationalism. Cultural Studies demanded closer attention to popular forms on the other hand, which in Indian cinema can be seen to resist the realist paradigms. Scholarship on Indian cinema working in this intellectual climate developed an almost obsessive pre-occupation with the question of the nation. Since Ray's realist cinema came to be idealized as a form of national cinema it could now be seen as inventing the individual echoing the values of a developmental state, as a humanist vision of individual and social destiny that does not take into account the irreducible contradictions of society. The more unsparing of these critics found Ray's rationalism and humanism to be consonant with the Nehruvian model of nation-building, a model that now came under increasing attack from the critics of postcolonial modernity. A powerful critique of Ray's cinema in terms of its affinities with the cultural project of the Nehruvian state came from the art historian and theorist Gceta Kapur. In an analysis of Devi she investigated the limits of the rationalist treatment of faith in Ray. A comparison is drawn with the Prabhat Film Company production Sant Tukaram (V. Damle and S. Fattelal, 1936), and its popular critical engagement with institutional religion through a Bha.kti world view. 8 In a more complex and nuanced essay on the Apu Trilogy, Kapur brings out the ideological implication of Ray's work in the post-independence project of national reconstruction. 9 Her primary target this time is Ray's vision of history. The great bildun9sroman of Apu's life, which masters the finest resources of humanist art, ends up, according to her, presenting a seamless narrative of the emergence of the normative middle-class citizen. One contribution of the realist cinema in India was thought to be the introduction of the modem individual-psychologically coherent, historically set off, socially explicable--a perspectival individual of the novelistic discourse, poised against the schematic characters found in the popular cinema. Kapur finds the saga of Apu's growth into a modern individual allegorizing the history

INTRODUCTION / 11

of Ray's own class in a destinal narrative. It is the organic model of development of that individual that she finds ideologically compromised. It does not recognize rupture; for instance, the violent break that colonialism stands for in the story of the nation's emergence. This time the critique is launched more from an avant-garde position on the artist's role in relation to his cultural inheritance. The three essays dealing with the early films here take issue with Kapur's argument at some point or the other. Once again, it should be acknowledged that this critique has opened up new modes of engagement with the films, and shown the possibility of re-situating the films in their times, against a larger logic of inheritance. Kapur's deep appreciation of the films has not stopped her from probing their possible ideological implication and cultural politics. This is exemplary as it forces the critic to go beyond aesthetic evaluation, to look at the historical convergence of the elements that form the aesthetic in question, to look into their cultural processing. The essays here do not simply debunk the terms of analysis proposed by Kapur, they complicate the connections further, suggest a more complex relationship between the ideology and the films in question, and re-assert their value in terms of a (relationship of) distance between the world that the films conjure up and the space of the nation and its culture that the developmental state, for instance, envisioned. Sourin Bhattacharya's essay re-asserts the usefulness, even necessity, of locating Ray's early work, especially, the Trilogy, in the context of Nehruvian national reconstruction. He presents a description of that context in order to propose a distinction between the 'development narrative' and the 'narrative of development'. The narrative of development has a material reality of social change, of a social project in action; Ray's work of necessity lives within its ambit. But it does not have to have only one life. We would probably have forgotten the films like many others from the time if the content was circumscribed by the project in question. What Louis Althusser called the 'internal distance' of a living work of art, to its relationship of noncoincidence with the ruling worldview, can be brought out in Ray's case as one attends to his relationship with the other narrative, the development narrative, which Bhattacharya sees as a whole apparatus

12 / APU AND AFTER

of identification with the state programme, a whole culture, no less. The Trilogy did not have to identify with the development narrative even as it shared to a large extent the emancipatory promise of postindependence progressivism. The internal distance with ideology becomes clear as we dismantle the self-identity of the ideology itself. It is not only that a complex and rich artistic work resists being reduced to a set of ideological tenets, the ideology, the state's view of development in this case, should itself not be taken as unitary, stemming from one dominant class interest. In its formulation of principles the state was in no way free of conflict. I argue in my essay for the necessity for revisiting the early Ray in non-allegorical terms, that is, in terms that do not force an overlay of narratives with the narrative of the nation. On the one hand, one could remain committed to the task of opening out the text to a weave of cultural composition; on the other, it is necessary to return to the artistic process. Ray not only borrows his story from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's novels, his cinema is deeply connected with a certain tradition of the novel. If, as the most influential theorist of cinematic realism, Andre Bazin, claimed, it is the destiny of realist cinema to become novelistic, in the Trilogy cinema was meeting the novel in a specific language context. It was bringing on to screen a certain content, a life processed so far in a 'novel project', which cannot be understood on the grid of a nationalist conception of the nation. The modem tradition Ray imbibed reflected on social life both in historical terms using tools of positive social analysis, and in terms of recursive time and experience, with close affinity to mythical structures. Bibhutibhushan's and Ray's apprehension of the reality of Indian life does not accommodate a sense of rupture in the sense that avant-garde art does, or the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak does; its consciousness of colonialism is not direct and reflexive either. This mode, the novelistic mode as I am calling it here, did not capture a direct encounter with colonialism; if it had a response to colonialism it was in its presentation of a texture of everyday living, in the accumulation of secular details of life, the creation of a place, of the rhythm of the day. It was an extremely important task of detailing the quotidian that it set itself, to create a sense

INTRODUCTION / 13

of wholeness at a non-heroic level of resistance to enforced rule and mandates of change. It is necessary to revisit the artistic process at work in the Trilogy to see how Ray has created in it not only the normative trajectory of a citizen, but a 'place', a teeming horizon, a region. This second work follows the naturalist rather than the realist impulse, something that comes to gather evidence of a 'place' rather than create a nationalist image of desh. 11 Naturalism, usually considered a flawed, incomplete realism, appears to constitute a faultline in the ideology of realism here. Ravi Vasudevan' s essay reads the complex function of realism in the early films in relation to another fault-line, a formal reflex that he calls modernist. At crucial moments in the Trilogy, the realist discipline is interrupted by narrative conjunctions that are elliptical in nature, that foreground the technique, and at the same time, move the representation away from its focalization of character. This not only creates a scope for reading conflicting perceptions within a seemingly untroubled order of representation, it also allows for a creative recall of 'past' modes, including popular modes of image-making and story-telling. The emergence of a normative selfhood, to the extent that there is such a thing in the films, is complicated by a recall of selfhoods that are left behind or forgotten in the process of becoming modern. Instead of a celebration of a modern order that is accomplished at the level of national reconstruction Vasudevan notices the compulsion in Ray's cinema to create an archive of the present precisely in terms of its difficult dialogues with the past. In Charulata ( The lonely Wife, 1964), the formal classicism is made to confront modes of writing and viewing which belong to the feminine, folk or popular domain. This is consonant with the sophisticated critique of the formation of the colonial subject that the film undertakes. It anticipates theoretical investigation by historians that was to come more than two decades later as it places the story of conjugality and love on the grid of a set of binaries. The story of Charu, Bhupati and Amal is mapped onto the dichotomy of the home and the world, the private and the public, literature (culture) and politics, vernacular (Charu's writing) and English (Bhupati's magazine), to set off the irony of the fundamental internal fracturing that attends the making

14 / APU AND AFTER

of the modem Indian individual. Vasudevan's survey of some of the most important films in the first twenty years of Ray's career shows the range of thematic choices and formal options that the director employed, often making different generic choices within the space of a single film. The mobilization of conflicting formal options does not allow for a simple authentication of a model narrative of development or models of individuality imposed by official discourses. In his discussion of Jana Aranya, a film that returns to focus through many essays in this volume, Vasudevan points to a certain dissociation of the narrative form. Ray allows for a dispersal of the effect of reality, for a dynamic movement of the sensory effects that narrative cinema tries to discipline. Probably this marked the definitive end of the early project in which Ray was connecting with a tradition of literature. As he comes to grips with the contemporary, tries to develop a mode of encounter with the city, Ray feels the necessity for taking risks with the form. The city films (Pratidwandi, Seemabaddha [Company Limited, 1971), Jana Aranya) abandon the formal poise of the earlier work as if to allow the present to leave its marks on the body of the film. The time had to be perceived as an intractable present, embodying hardly anything else than a rupture, its own interruption. Historically, in such moments the photograph and film have embarked on a new engagement with the experience of the city. The city appears in filmic image as an embodiment of the present. It is possible to write a history of these moments of contact between cinema and the city where established conventions of form enter into a crisis, new possibilities of cinematic speech emerge. The question of naturalism poses itself again at this point. In a way Supriya Chaudhuri's essay on the city films (regarded by many as another trilogy) addresses the same question. She takes her cue from Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, who were among the first writers to regard the contact between the city and photographic representation in terms different from an object-image relationship, who saw the conjugation of the two as part of a single perceptual regime of modernity, as having a single reality, so to speak. Chaudhuri proposes a reading of the politics of these films that attends to the specificity of the medium even as she argues how the

INTRODUCTION / 15

historical moment motivated an essentially extra-cinematic processing of the cinematic effect. She finds the most import.ant political aspect of the films in their worlc of dispersal-the dispersed form, the stark impressionism of images, the sense of a social space itself becoming cinematic in nature. How do these films bring back the 1970s to us now? One has to look at the body, the fragmentary gestures of bodies negotiating the city, in order to arrive at an understanding of how the physical registration of a turbulent time, a time of discontinuity, is stored as memory for us. It is necessary to move baclc and forth between bodies captured in the films and the cinematic body, the materiality that is conjured up through film, in order to keep the critical sight trained on two questions simultaneously. How do the films become political through the very energy that circulates in them, through their convulsions, their formal instability? How, on the other hand, is the cinematic material in them constituted through a blurring of familiar distinctions between the object world and the image? What is often glimpsed in these films is a re-negotiation of realism through processes that are closer to naturalism, an opening out of the medium into the world, a propensity to treat the raw and contingent impression of the world as already cinematic in effect. Chaudhuri's invocation of Gilles Deleuze is especially relevant in this context since Deleuze looked for a model of film theory which would avoid the duality of image and referent, which would see the two as part of a single weave of reality. As we employ the inter-disciplinary resources of new film scholarship in our effort to revisit Ray's cinema, we cannot overloolc the usefulness of more familiar, time-tested methods of analysing authors and texts. Suman Ghosh and Ujjal Chakraborty demonstrate the continuing viability of textual and auteurist analysis of form and content in their essays. Ray's screenplays have been considered immensely readable texts in themselves. Their published versions in several issues of the Bengali little magazine, Ekshan, should be regarded as constituting an independent oeuvre. Ghosh reads the screenplay of Ray's Kanchenjun9ha ( 1962, the first one to be based on his original story and published as a book) closely to test Ray's own claim that he learnt the dramatic form from western classical music, especially

16 / APU AND AFTER

from Mozart. In his famous essay 'A Long Time on the Little Road' Ray complained that traditional Indian music does not offer a structural model that can be used in film. The contrapuntal moves, the symmetries and patterns of motifs that emerge from the reading of the screenplay pose interesting questions: What is the relationship between content, or the specific life being portrayed, and such form? Is it possible to cast a novelistic apprehension of life (for example, the one that Ray borrows from Bibhutibhushan) into a structure of this kind? Wasn't it necessary for Ray to write his own story, move away from a certain literary tradition, for the purpose? The success of this structural/musical experiment probably marked the beginning of a new phase in Ray's work, so that even a film like Charulata, based on a literary classic (Tagore's 1901 story, 'Nastanir'), adopts a more discursive, analytical mode of recasting the literary material. It is not accidental that this was also the beginning of an engagement with contemporary European film styles in Ray's career. One wonders if a new conception of location wasn't necessary for this formal structure to emerge in Kanchenjun9ha. It is one of the rare instances in Ray where the location has a geometric function in the narrative, from which it can be notionally abstracted. The Darjeeling roads, with their bends and flights, their varying elevation and proximity, contribute to the destinies of the characters, lend a hand in the making and unmaking of relationships. They also provide a stage for the confrontation of ideas. Ghosh' s reading also reminds us of the changes Ray had to actually undergo before he moved into the city films phase, into a new engagement with his own location. Ujjal Chakraborty, a well-known Ray aficionado, traces a certain motif through Ray's films and fiction, which helps us return to the question of the political in a refreshingly new way. He shows the continuing validity of close content analysis as he moves from a thematic emphasis on the question of class and labour in Postmasur (part of Teen Kan_ya IThree Dau9hurs, 1961)) to minor, muted articulations of the question in certain later characters and situations. The truth of the relationship between the postmaster and the little girl in the film cannot be grasped only by appreciating its human content; it is not complete without an exposure, an ironic laying bare of the reality of

INTRODUCTION / 17

work. Is it possible to identify the reality of the middle-class world of Ray's cinema by the limits of it that he sometimes includes within the frame of representation? Chakraborty shows the possibility of an answer in the affirmative. He suggests a reading of the films in conjunction with the popular children's fiction that Ray wrote, the fiction that has sometimes baffied critics by its preoccupation with the supernatural and the occult, and that has led at least one critic to believe that Ray's rationalist self betrays a schism, a 'personological split' at this point. 12 Chakraborty shows how the ghost story has often appeared as a disguise for the story of labour in Ray: servants and slaves return in them to serve their masters after death, they cannot forget their deep obedience, their fear of retribution. These quietly insistent menials appear in another form as marginal, silent characters in the films. To notice them and read their untold but possible stories, is to discover the holes in the fabric of reality that we see, to remember the inevitable exclusions of which it is made. The substratum of reality is the reality of work, the bedrock, but it can only be glimpsed through a detour of the occult. Chakraborty's method is quite different from the rest of the contributors, but his reading connects up at this point with the section on labour in Sibaji Bandyopadhyay's discussion of Aranyer Din Ratri. It also returns us to the question of realism-a question that haunts almost every essay in this volume. At the end then we ask what is it that is kept out of the frame so that Ray is able to say what he seems to say? The contributions by Sourin Bhattacharya, Mihir Bhattacharya, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay and Ravi Vasudevan appeared in their earlier versions in the journal of the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University (journal of the Movin9 lma9e, no. 2, 2001). I would like to thank the editors and the Registrar, Jadavpur University, publisher of the journal, for allowing us to use material from the issue. Thanks are also due to Anjum Katyal, for great encouragement, advice and help in putting the volume together.

18 / APU AND AFTER

Nous

1 Radical students' politics in Bengal coincided almost exactly with the Prague-Spring, May 68, the student movements in USA, West Germany, Italy and England. Immanuel WaUcrstcin has seen this connection as a moment of revolution in the global modernity he cal~ the world system; sec his '1968, Revolution in the World-system' and 'Marx, Mar-xismLeninism, and Socialist Experiences in the Modem World-system' in Gccpolitia and Geoculturt: &sop on the Changing World-System (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 65-83, and pp. 95-96. From the point of ftlm history, the usefulness of seeing the moment in world pcrspcctivc is that it can go some way towards explaining the crisis of the humanist-realist cinema in several national contexts which, again, more or less coincided with each other.

2 'Can a seriow lllm maker, working in India, afford to shut his eyes to the reality around him, the reality that is so poignant, and so urgently in need of interpretation in terms of cinema? I do not think so.' 'Problems of a Bengali Film Maker', in Ray, Our Films, Their Ft/ms (Calcutta, 1977), p. 41. 3 Chidananda Das Gupta, 'Satyajit Ray: The First Ten Years', in Tailing About Films (New Delhi, 1981), p. 60, 68. 4 Ibid, p. 72. Sections of the essay were published in 1966-67 as 'Ray and Tagore' in Sight and Sound, 36: I, Winter. 5 Amitava Chattopadhyay, 'Satyajit Ray: Then and Now', in Chiuabiishan, Annual Number, 197S, pp. 9-28. 6 Sec essays by Gabriel and others in Jim Pines and Paul Willcmen ed., Qyestloru of Third Cinema (London, 1989). 7 Sec Sankha Ghosh, 'Pratibader chhabi', in Subrata Rudra ed., SatyaJH: Jiban ar shilpa (Calcutta, 1996). 8 See Geeta Kapur, 'Mythic Material in Indian Cinema', Journal of Ans and Ideas, nos. 14-15, July-December, 1987. 9 Gecta Kapur, 'Sovereign Subject: Ray's Apu', in Whai was Modernism, Essays on Conremporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi, 2000); earlier version published as 'Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray', Jaumal of Ans and Ideas, nos. 23-24, January, 1993. IO Sec Louis Althwscr, 'A Letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre', in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster (London, 1971 ). I I Which mcilllS both country and nation in many Indian languages. 12 Sec Ashis Nandy, 'Satyajit Ray's Secret Guide to Exquisite Murders, Creativity, Social Criticism and the Partitioning of the Self', in The Saragt Freud and Other F..uays on Possible and ~trierablt Stires (Princeton, I 995), pp. 237-66.

Develop-mentalist Turn: Recovering Ray's Panchali SOURIN BHATTACHARYA

be the last thing to be said about any work of art. We may have other kinds of interest when reading a novel, experiencing a work of theatre or viewing a film. To deliver a judgement on the mere aesthetic quality of a work is often trivial, if not downright misleading. 'Speaking aesthetically' thus does not always carry much sense beyond giving an expression to one's subjective preferences. These preferences are also analysable, and in themselves may constitute an important area of discourse, which, one should remember, is a discourse different from that of the primary work under consideration. With reference to any work of art there can be a discourse of that work itself and an array of associated or collateral discourses of so many subjective preferences. But the 'discourse of the work itselr is again not so simple a structure. Such a discourse itself gets constituted through our readings, through so many of our readings, in fact, and in our readings there can be an interference of our subjective preferences. These preferences constitute our readings, and our readings constitute the discourse· of the work itself, and thus the two levels of discourses may also have several interfaces. AESTHETIC JUDGEMENTS MAY NOT

The above mW1t not be taken to mean that aesthetic analyses, whatever that may mean, or even technical considerations, are unimportant. On the contrary, it is to enrich our conceptualization of the 'aesthetic' and to lend substance to what is usually mown as the 'mere technical' that we may start from the end of the different layers of discourse. This may bring us to the context of history and culture. All our spheres of activity are historically contained and culturally moulded. Thus to look into a work of art is also to look for the historical and cultural constitution of the work. This is often evi-

20 I APU AND AFTER

dent in a ,·ery straightforward manner. The storyline in a novel or a film or even in an epic of the dimension of the Ramayana or Mahabharata usually weaves a pattern leading to the structure of a narrative. The narrative is shaped out of the elements of the story when they are put into a certain kind of relational network. Both these levels should hold our attention for different reasons. The elements of the story may directly give us information about the historical and cultural state of the society in the period concerned, and the narrative through the structure of relations tells us about the way people used to look upon their own state. But since there is representation involved in what we get to know, we do not expect to know the thing-in-itself. We know things only through layers of refraction.

In a sense all our doings and utterings basically have a discrete character. But that we make pictures, tell stories and sculpt figures with these is made possible through our being able to gather the discrete elements into a structure of relations. This is how we build our narratives. A given set of elements may very well enable us to build different narratives. This indicates a kind of freedom the artist loves to enjoy. But there can also be a narrativizing role at the level of reception. The receptor's work thus also becomes creative. Hence, with any of work of art we are confronted with these two levels of the narrative--the creator's and the receptor's. The creator may not really be conscious of her/his narrative for s/he is primarily telling a story or painting a picture, sculpting a figure or making a film. But the artist has to arrange the elements to bind them into a certain structure, and it is here that the narrative emerges. The signs of the times enter the work of art at this level of arrangement of elements. We are narrativizing also at the level of reception of the same work. And there is no reason why the two should necessarily coincide. For everything else apart, there may be a separation of times: we often have to take a work of art that was made in a different age. Even when the creation and reception belong to the same age, there may be wide differences in our perception, for we may share times differently. This is all the more relevant for modem times. When the

DEVELOP-MENTALIST TURN / 21

hold of collective life was relatively stronger, the social sharing could be more homogeneous. But with the emergence of the modern individual that homogeneity gets fractured, there occur divergences in the social sharing of times. To bring bade the homogeneity of perceptual experiences one needs to have an external reinforcing mechanism often working through cultural dispersals. The receptor thus builds a narrative of her /his own, which bears the mark of all these complexities. That also contains the sign of the receptor's times. Hence there are two open spaces. One is at the level of the artist, the creator, the builder of the narrative, who exercises her/his options on the elements of the work of art. The narrator through the particular mode of weaving of the pattern happens to say something. What does the narrator say? How do we reach what s/he says, really? The receptor's open space becomes important at this Point. The receptor reaches the narrator through the narration itself; whatever else may be put at her/his disPosal-in the form of biographical notes or in the form of references to the historical events--may have a complementary role at the most. The elements of the creator are the elements at the hands of the receptor as well. The receptor's narrative has also to be built up basically on the same elements. But while making her/his narrative s/he needs no longer to be constrained by the terms laid down by the creator's narrative. This is precisely her/his open space. It is for the openness of this space that one always has to be on one's guard so that no arbitrary element may creep in. New elements in the narrative in the form of new turns and unexplored suggestions must be let in, but what is arbitrary must be filtered out. The borderline between novelty and arbitrariness certainly remains a grey area. Here there is no surer guide than commonsense and maturity of one's aesthetic judgement. So the aesthetic does come back and it comes back in an urgent way. In this idea of a kind of independent narrativization we may find a way out of the shackles of a mere internal reading of a text, and once we do that, many a Possibility may open up. For we may then work on a collateral vision of hitherto unsuspected social forces, now informed with meaning. I · u

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tradition of

22 I APU AND AFTER

talking about the state, the nation, the nation-state and their narratives. We have used this narrative in writing about Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (Sona ef the Little Road, 1955) and also about his Apu Trilogy as a whole. Geeta Kapur in her article in the Journal ef Arts and Ideas• presents an in-depth analysis of the creative work done in the first decade of our independence. The paper virtually becomes a case study of the early Ray. A newly independent nation-state was emerging; there was enthusiasm all around. Maybe its reach was limited, but the enthusiasm itself was genuine in at least that segment of the society that could be so reached. It is not unnatural to want to respond to Ray's Trilogy with this perspective of transition to modernity. But the openness of space we have referred to would allow us to build other competing narratives as well. Using Ray to construct a narrative of our creativity of the first post-independence decade one is naturally drawn to Tagore. After all, Ray had spent an early apprenticeship in Tagore's institution at Santiniketan. As an art student there, Ray had the opportunity of experiencing the T agore feel. Though these were the very last days of the poet, the ambience was there, from which Ray had possibly felt a kind of internal distance. While he was painting nature there, Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), a film he was loath to miss, as he laments in his later reminiscences, was being shown in Calcutta. Satyajit, Santinketan, Rabindranath, Bengal renaissance, the dawning of nineteenth-century political thought-all this seems to mesh well within a certain kind of model. Brahmo morality, filmmalc.ing within the ambit of a close literary tradition, the traces of the nineteenth-century modernity of mind---all these could be said to constitute the basic elements of Ray's aesthetic perception. In this model there penetrates a certain narrative of the Tagore-Santiniketan project. Santiniketan symbolically represented pan-Asian revivalism, and Tagore, inasmuch as he was committed to rural craft-based technology, was as though poised against industrial modernity. 1947 was a termination of all this, leaving at most only traces of nostalgic remembrances. Then comes a new era, a new regime and the beginning of a phase of modernity with a new face altogether. The narra-

DEVELOP-MENTALIST TURN / 23

tive of a model like this is too familiar to all of us. Not just Gandhi, Tagore also had to face bitter criticism for being atavistic, for tenaciously clinging to the image of a glorious past. He even had to face some embarrassment in foreign lands, causing consternation in the minds of his foreign hosts. 2 The temperamental differences often seemed unbridgeable. We did not shy away from pitting Tagore against the machine-based industrial civil.iution either. But the Santiniltetan-Srinilcetan narrative could also be arranged in a different way. Instances are not rare where, in an intimate reading of the project, one finds intensely modem meanings in it. The dimensions of modernity we often talk about are too linear, as though the premises of modernity are not temparally or spatially related. To many that view of modernity might very well seem shapeless; they would have reason to look for different kinds of modernity in different contexts, making for modernisms in the plural. Once we reach this paint we can take upan ourselves the respansibility of a search for our modernity. Do we find any promise of this search in the Santiniltetan-Sriniketan project? There is no point in being bothered about its success or failure: the question is of our being able to get to the idea of the project. Shouldn't our modernity have something to derive from an enormous work-oriented project to displace the form of modernity based on individuality into a form based instead on a confident selfhood-a selfhood that looks for authentic modes of expression, with social and aesthetic dimensions merged into one full identity? One may fmd something here to enrich one's vision of the alternative narrative of modernity. In its attitude towards environment, its search for water in an arid wne, in its use of organic manure, its rhythmic cadences of cooperative life, this initiative of shaping a new style of community living was no less modem. True, there were gaps and limitations and inadequacies. The question, as I have said, is not one of success or failure. It is the conceptual scheme of things that should hold our attention now. Just as we can have one kind of narrative for Ray's Pother Pancholi and the Trilogy starting off from one kind of narrative for Tagore and Santiniketan, so we can probably reach another kind of narrative

24 I APU AND AFTER

for Ray's modernity if we successfully question the earlier narrative. Pather Panchali came in 19 55. We can very well describe those times

in the mid-fifties of the last century as the moment of development. It was not yet a full decade after independence, after the palitical and administrative transfer of pawer in India. The first emotional upsurge was yet to die down. As a matter of fact, the state actively sought to keep alive these emotions. One may recall that the tenth anniversary of Independence Day was celebrated in 1957 on a rather grand scale, and schools and colleges remained closed for two days, the 15th and 16th of August. One may question the declaration of public holidays, but there is no denying the fact that these were unmistakable signs of a state reconstruction of the social mind. It is this logic that allows us to enjoy a public holiday even for a 'historic' victory in a cricket test match at Kanpur. The same logic should have prompted a similar holiday when the Mohunbagan club won the IFA Shield in 1911 . But those were other times. The mid-fifties were the moment of development. In a rough division of the first century of independent development activity, the beginning of the decline is usually located in the middle of the sixties, the seventies and eighties being the decades of crisis, with the nineties marking the beginning of a new meaning of development altogether. The mid-fifties were when the First Five Year Plan, which by no stretch of imagination could be taken to be a very big effort in development planning, was coming to an end. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm the plan could generate in planning itself was truly remarkable. It was common sense then that this was the way India would revive herself. To entertain any doubt about it was anathema. Then came the Second Five Year Plan in 1956. This was the period of the famous Mahalanobis model, of Nehruvian socialism, state-spansorcd planned economic development, and it expressed the spirit of the Avadhi session of the Indian National Congress that pledged to build a socialistic pattern of society in India. This was the so-called progressive phase of India's development. The days of questioning 'progress' itself were yet to come. A particular paradigm of development was unfolding itself through such mega projects as the multi-

DEVELOP-MENTALIST TURN / 25

purpose river valley developments at Damodar and Bhakra-Nangal. This was the period when India was set, in Nehru's metaphor, to build her new temples of modern times in the form of these engineering wonders. Incidentally, was this choice of the temple metaphor careful or casual on Nehru's part? Did Nehru realize then that it would be prudent to speak in these terms, or did it simply sneak into his subconscious? ls it symptomatic of a kind of paradox for modern India? Was the chasm between tradition and modernity thus to be wished away? The state-sponsored modernity of Indian development, shaped in the form of development planning, may have been inspired by the Soviet model, but it was in some sense a pre-independence phenomenon. The Indian National Congress that spearheaded the nationalist struggle had already embarked upon the idea of a centrally controlled planned economy. The Congress under the presidency of Subhash Chandra Bose had constituted a National Planning Committee as early as 1938. The Committee included such personalities as M. Visveswaraiya, Meghnad Saha, Purushottamdas Thakurdas, Ambalal Sarabhai, K. T. Saha, Nazir Ahmad, A. D. Shroff, A. K. Saha and D. S. Dube as its members. It seriously took up the business of formulating a plan outline for the industrialization and economic uplift of the country. Different subcommittees were formed to deal with different aspects of the subject of economic development and planning. The subcommittees were to work out subject-wise group reports, which were to be later collected into a comprehensive plan outline. The work of the plan groups was interrupted during the war days, and the final report of the National Planning Committee came out in late 1949. In this context mention must be made of the so-called Industrialists' plan which was first published in January 1944 as A Brief Memorandum Outlinin9 A Plan ef &onomic Development for India. The authors included such names as J. R. D. Tata, G. D. Birla, Sir Ardeshir Dalal, Sir Sri Ram, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, and even two members of the Congress Committee, Purushottamdas Thakurdas and A. D. Shroff. There were still other attempts at plan formulation-the Gandhian plan by Sriman Narayan and the People's plan by M. N.

26 / APU ANO AFTER

Roy. The setting up of a Planning Commission in independent India through a cabinet decision could well be seen as a development in this chain of events. The basic outlook enshrined in the First Five Year Plan was not all that new after all. But what needs to be noted here is the almost unquestioned faith in the agency of the state in removing poverty and bringing about an improvement in the standard of living of the people. This, in fact, led to the constitution of a nuanced development narrative, as different from the narrative of development. This imprint of the agency of the state in the popular mind was being articulated also through other 'progressive' positions of the new state under the stewardship of a western educ.ated 'progressive' national leader, Jawaharlal Nehru. The latter was inevitably to be in constant conflict with many of his colleagues in his own party and government. These ideological clashes and conflicts often brought accolades from the Soviet leaders who were India's 'natural' ally in international affairs, and to that extent the 'progressive' Congress under Nehru could gamer a limited support from the then principal opposition parties of the Communists and Socialists. India's national reconstruction in the first dec.ade after Independence was taking shape within the contours of this 'progressivism'. Statist, centrally controlled economic planning geared to the c.ause of industrialization, expansion of the public sector, restrictions on monopolistic enterprises, curbs on foreign monopoly c.apital and egalitarian taxation policies along with non-alignment (skilfully mixed with a discernible slant towards international socialism, a consistent anti-imperialist stand in foreign policies and a non-nuclear peace initiative) were some of the elements of this progressive face. One should not, however, look at this list in a credulous manner; almost every element in it had holes. Nevertheless, such were the times that one was not normally inclined to pick holes. That was precisely the triumph of the 'progressive' developmentalism. We are talking about memories of development. Whose memories are we talking about anyway? To be sure, the memories of the likes of us who happened to have shared the process of that devel-

DEVELOP-MENTALIST TURN / 27

opment. But there were many, too many really, whom the process had scarcely even touched. They are the excluded ones. The exclusion has been made possible through many a development at the levels of society, economy, politics, culture and education. It is certainly nobody's case that there was no physical impact of the development processes on the excluded segment. What we want to argue is that to be merely touched by the developmental activities is one thing, to be submerged in its memories and feel romantically nostalgic about it is another. One needs to share not just the development experiences but also the development narrative for this nostalgia. We may share the narrative of development without sharing the development narrative. The narrative of development may be confined to the materiality while the development narrative has to concern itself with the responses to that materiality. If we have to talk about the moment of development we have to talk about both these levels. The development narrative of the fifties was much broader in its sweep than the simple narrative of development. It had many other elements as well. Remember, this was also the period of the Cold War, which was so intense in its psychological impact that world events then came to be easily, if not entirely accurately, interpreted in bipolar terms. One had the western capitalist democracies under the hegemonic leadership of the USA on the one hand, and the fledgling socialist republics under a sort of totalitarian control of the Soviet Union on the other. International events and relations were the result of the actions and interactions of these two polar powers. The competition between the two, their mutual distrust and intolerance were nearly total. The socialism of the Soviet circle was then trying to gain self-confidence; it was to play a game of one-upmanship with the West even in matters of technological industrialization. The West was materially afraid of the East. In terms of nuclear proficiency Eastern socialism was already comparable to them. In 1957 the Soviet Sputnik sent shock waves through the Western psyche. When this was the spirit of the times the conceptual categories of 'progress' and 'reaction' could be unproblematically posited. It was reactionary to prepare for nuclear warfare, while it was progressive to organize peace

28 I APU AND AFTER

movements. The reaction was out to destroy human civilization, the progress was to take guard; reaction was aligned with vast accumulated capital, associated science and technology too eager to serve its cause, while progress was to think out newer ways of resistance, bereft of power and resources. The Soviets seemed to symbolize progress. The Sino-Soviet rift was still years ahead, and the SinoIndian conflict was still far off. While this was the nature of perception of world events our Nehru was busy, along with Nasser of Egypt and Tito of Yugoslavia, in organizing the non-aligned movement. The 1955 Bandung Conference, the peace efforts in the Korean war before that and such events of the period also made important contributions in shaping the development narrative. The state was doubtless the principal protagonist in this development narrative, not just in the narrative of development. The responsibilities of the state appeared to be almost total and came to be rather easily accepted. Even in matters of art and culture this role of the state was welcomed. Institutions like the Sahitya Alcademi and the Sangeet Natale Akademi were coming up wholly under state patronage. The merit and the efficacy of their functioning are a different question, but there can be no doubt about the fact that through the mediation of these institutions it became somewhat possible to move towards an idea of lndianness. There is no point in surmising if this idea was there right in the beginning when these institutional policies were conceived; one cannot reasonably doubt that through these efforts the regional works of art to a certain extent could assume an Indian character. The awards and fellowships of these Alcademis bring with them an all-India recognition. Moreover, it is important that the regional works now merit judgement by all-India standards. While set within the matrix of regional language and culture, the latter now assume an Indian face. This extension was no mean achievement. 'Indian literature is one written in different languages'-this theoretical position of the Sahitya Alcademi is an important conceptual move towards building an all-Indian literature. But these new developments also posed serious problems. On the one hand it was important to judge whether this Indian character was nourishing or debilitating the

DEVELOP-MENTALIST TURN / 29

regional cultures, and on the other it was important to know whether this was enabling the state to stretch its arms to undesirable lengths. To build a pan-Indian nation-state was conducive to the interests of organized capital. Too much regional intervention was bound to lead to clashes and conflicts. The emergence of a sense of regional ethnoidentity was also inevitable against the backdrop of a free and fearless development of regional cultures. Did these early social antinomies ultimately develop into the crisis of national unity and integrity which was to cause so much state headache as to call for a constitutional amendment (42nd amendment, 1976) for the verbal insertion of the word 'integrity'? 3 These processes were certainly more complex. But one may reasonably note that our thinking about the industrialization of the fifties was neatly compatible with the thinking of the extension of the state and state-spansored cultural activities. These activities gradually extended to the fields of literature, music, drama, fme art and film. Not by design and certainly not within this mode, but that the making of Pother Pancholi was also to depend on state funding to get over its initial financial crisis may appear symbolically significant. But it would be quite mechanical, merely for this reason, to try to see Pother Pancholi as set within this state narrative. Those who feel that Pother Pancholi has a rightful place there must have other reasons too. Whatever the coincidences, the decade of the fifties was a remarkable period for drama and film. 1954 was marked by the production of theatre giant Sombhu Mitra's Raktakarabi and 1955 by Pother Pancholi. This was the decade when Sombhu Mitra, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak were all extremely productive. Ray and Ghatak were truly contemparaneous. Ghatak's Na9arik ( 1953) was in fact made earlier than Pother Pancholi, marking the beginning of the new wave. Ray's work then moved steadily forward, and Ghatak made Ajantrlk (1958), Me9he Dhaka Tara (1960), Koma/ Gandhar (1961) and Subomarekha ( 1962). This could be seen as an explosion. The exact nature of the self-image of these directors must be largely a matter of speculation. Some of them might not like to place themselves very securely within any tradition of Bangla film. But even Pother Pancholi

30 / APU AND AFTER

may be seen to have a history linked to the tradition of indigenous films. Even if we leave out such directors as Nitin Bose, we may legitimately start thinking from Udayer Pathe (Bimal Roy, 1944). The quality of film language used is not being judged here, we are thinking of the idea of the film, the mode of its making, its situation in the total cultural scenario of the time. Looked at this way Udayer Pathe may be taken as a turning Point in the story of this succession. The kind of situation that films enjoy in our cultural map now has not always been there. It took years to emerge, and our films had to earn that Position. There are many ups and downs and many a twist in our socio-cultural reality. The cultural respectability of film owes much to efforts like Udayer Pathe. After this, even a random roll call of names should include Anjan9arh (Bimal Roy, 1948), Chhinnamul (Nimai Ghosh, 1951 ), Pathilc (Debaki Bose, 1953), Natun lhudi (Salil Sen, 1953) and Dulchir Iman (Sushil Majumdar, 1954). This moment of films, therefore, touches UPon the moment of development, at least in respect of temporal coincidence. Is that Possibly one of the reasons why we should feel tempted to see Pother Pancholi within the development narrative? For the Apu Trilogy this possibility certainly cannot be ruled out. The motif of the railways, the death of Durga, the end of the feudal placidity of rural Bengal, the attempt to escape village poverty, the gradual, uncertain steps of Apu towards the problem-ridden hard realities of life, the emergence of the individual in him through a succession of personal losses and tragedies--all these become conditions of Apu's move into the 'world'. There are twists and turns in the journey; and there is a death at each tum. The family moves to Kasi after Durga's death, the mother and the son leave Kasi again after the father's death, and Apu finally leaves rural life after the lonely death of his mother in the village home. With Aparna's death Apu takes his plunge into the unknown. With these discrete elements one may build a narrative of forward movement in a linear, progressive manner. But with the same elements one may also choose to build another narrative that may show tensions and fissures. This family wanted to come out of the waste and humiliation of life in Kasi and they came back to

DEVELOP-MENTALIST TURN / 31

Manasapota with an old distant relative of theirs. On Sarbajaya 's part the decision was not easy to take, but her silent gaze on the staircase of her rich employer's house says a lot. Her decision was not simply a helpless surrender to an unknown fate. That remark.able shot that focuses on her expressive, melancholy eyes seems to suggest an active, rational decision. The strength involved in this meaningful decision in a state of desperation may also be seen to have an element of genuine modernity in it. Sarbajaya may have nursed the idea that Apu would eventually take up the family profession of brahmin priest. That could have given some security to the mother-son unit. But Apu had other ideas, and with Sarbajaya's death even the faint possibility of her idea ever materializing came to an end. But note the paradox. If Sarbajaya's active decision had a touch of modernity in it, this modernity would itself need the continuity of the traditional for its survival. So things are not that straightforward. Upon being requested by the old man to perform the last rites for his mother in the village itself, Apu replies that he will do it in Kaligbat in Calcutta. He then moves forward with his belongings tied into a bundle. His steps into the future also did not lead down a straight and simple path. During his aimless roaming days Apu was lost to the rest of the world. But then, when he comes back, he finally takes Kajal up on his shoulders. Kajal symbolizes to Apu his disastrous past, and Apu in fact had meant to pass it over. To take a leap from one phase of life to another is not all that simple. In our moment of the modernity debate now, may we not arrange things into such a non-linear narrative? Our times influence the kind of narrative we might build. In fact, our narratives are a way of negotiating our times. Pother Pancholi ·or the Apu Trilogy was at one time possibly looked upon in a way that betrayed the mark of 'progress' as a sign of one phase of our times. In our own social moment we may feel free to undertake a new reading of the same texts, to constitute a new narrative. To provide theoretical sustenance to this initiative we proposed a kind of re-working of the Santiniketan-Sriniketan narrative. If we can derive alternative suggestions from the model, then we may also grope for ways

32 / APU AND AFTER

of emancipation from the pressures of untainted modernity. To move away from modernity is not necessarily to move into primitivism. There can be more than one face of modernity. SantiniketanSriniketan may represent one such face. Related to this there may be a cognate reading of the Apu texts full of fissures and disjunctions. It may not really be a narrative of neat continuity. The well-knit narrative of development and the development narrative of the early days both have now developed cracks. This doesn't mean that we no longer talk of development. We do talk of it. If anything, we are now more passionate about it. Our politics today seem totally wedded to development; politics seem not to have any broader and nobler ideal. But even in these days of developmentalist politics the narrative of development is broken. This means that development can no longer move forward in a linear manner. Its fractures, distortions and rough edges escaped our attention earlier. That we would not notice them was precisely what the development narrative did-its role becomes important here. What happens to the narrative of development may be better perceived through what happens to the development narrative. The current development narrative would possibly show us that not much can be achieved through state diktat alone. One can sanction a certain amount of money to construct a macadam road to run right through the village. But whether the road would in fact be constructed, and if constructed what its quality would be, would no longer be something over which the state machinery had any effective control-it really becomes linked to the social structure and the web of social relations. Furthermore, suppose the road is built. What does it mean, after all? How docs the village stand to benefit from it? The goods transported on the road may mean different things for the village in different circumstances. What if this village gets drawn into the network of international drug trafficking? That we have to look at all these things is a teaching of the development narrative. That the narrative of development is fractured today can only be seen through the development narrative. This narrative is formed by social experiences, and here we must remember that it has no fixed frame. It has a fluidity,

DEVELOP-MENTALIST TURN / 33

and a certain pattern seems to emerge as though from the stirring of the muddy waters of our critical perceptions of social existence. Clear pictures can possibly be never expected. That the narrative of development got fragmented may be taken to suggest that in the first phase of our development perception there was no room for the complexities of social relations. We failed to see the depths to which the complexities of life could penetrate. We were bent on making faultless plans and staked all our resources on providing for the expenses of attractive projects. No wonder that these development efforts failed us. Development is, after all, a social process. It is difficult to make any headway here without allowing oneself to be totally submerged in the whirlpool of the lived experiences of the community. One has to take account of the relations of love and hatred, the clashes and conflicts of individual interests, the tension between different social classes and the evils of machination and manipulation. A formal-institutional approach as embodied in such state-level efforts as COP (Community Development Programme), IRDP (Intensive Rural Development Programme), CADP (Comprehensive Area Development Project), Indira Rozgar Yojana, etc. may lead us from one project to another in a very superficial manner. Even with this there can be a certain kind of development; there can, of course, be a certain degree of technological advancement, and to that extent a certain amount of modernization is possible. This development is likely to remain external; and without much of an internal impact on social life it is fraught with other kinds of danger, dangers of a destabilized equilibrium. Does the film Pother Pancholi sound a note of warning here for this moment of the development narrative? Maybe the maker of the film had nothing like this in mind; but it doesn't matter, really. Our reception may claim this much autonomy only if it does not do much violence to the text itself. We have only to examine perceptively if the body of the film allows any such suggestion. Well, here is a film made in a very affectionate tone, with empathy for the life of the community. Does it really go well with the statist mentality inherent in the rule-oriented bureaucratic temperament? Let us look for small

34 / APU ANO AFTER

bits of evidence. Why did Ray make the film at all? What attracted him to the novel? (The attraction was so intense that he put aside the long-cherished Ghare Baire [The Home and the World, made finally in 1984) project and went out to search for a location around GariaBoral-Mallikpur). He had no producer to back up the project, and had to take a lot of financial risks in the early stages. Shooting was interrupted for lack of money. Incidentally, Ghare Baire was also about a tension between the home and the world-the inside and the outside, in fact. Ray in his articles often refers to the pictorial quality of Bibhutibhushan's writings. But did Pather Pancholi offer only that? Here is what Ray says about why he chose it for his debut: I chose Pather Panchali for the qualities that made it a great book: its humanism, its lyricism and its ring of truth. 4 These were natural qualities on which to base a choice. The humanism and the lyricism have been much talked about, both for the novel and for the film. The film was acclaimed at the Cannes festival for its documentation of human reality. But 'its ring of truth' needs some attention. In a sense all that we get in a novel or a film is artificial, made up, not real. But certain things and certain pronouncements sound right, appear to be right. What makes them so defies clear analysis and description. The ring of truth is a rare quality indeed. How would he go about filming the novel? The director says: I felt that to cast the thing into a mould of cut-and-dried narrative would be wrong. The script had to retain some of the rambling quality of the novel because that in itself contained a clue to the feel of authenticity: life in a poor Bengali village does ramblc. 5 While thinking about the film the director experiences a transcendence; he finds a ring of truth. The 'rambling' also draws his attention. There can be no straight movement, you can take a turn here, make a fast move there, stop suddenly, then begin a hesitant move again. This meandering of our narrative discourse has rather

DEVELOP-MENTALIST TURN / 35

recently been probed with all the seriousness it deserves. For the authenticity of the film the form must ramble since 'life in a poor Bengali village does ramble'. This vision of poverty-stricken rural Bengal gets intermingled with the perception of form in Ray's work. It was more than the pictorial quality of the novel that attracted him. Can we look for an alternative following this strand of thought? The narrative of development and the development narrative of the middle fifties were relatively more linear, they were then not prepared for the rambling. How important these underlying tensions of the non-linear were is now being realized through experiences, though it is probably yet to be fully understood. But we may wish to look for them in our narrative of today. May we not, therefore, take Ray's pronouncements on the fifties of his experience as a sort of warning? The image of 'rambling' was not just lying around for Ray to pick up. In the essay cited above he writes, 'What I lacked was first hand acquaintance with the milieu of the story'. He lamented the lack, but did not let it deter him. You need to know what you do not know. He knew that the novel 'was not enough' for the knowing. This led him to step out. The inspiration of Italian neo-realism may not have been the only decisive factor. Looking for his location he passed over Jadavpur and Garia and finally settled for Boral. In the aftershock of Partition, Jadavpur, Baghajatin, Bijoygarh were already experiencing the winds of change, new refugee colonies were coming up in these areas. Bora! was relatively unshaken till then. It was there that he looked for that quality of life. The following passage speaks about what he found there: While far from being an adventure in the physical sense, the explorations into the village nevertheless opened up a new and fascinating world. To one born and bred in the city, it had a new flavour, a new texture: you wanted to observe and probe, to catch the revealing details, the telling gestures, the particular turns of speech. 6 Once you step out, you have this entire world to savour. This may

36 / APU ANO AFTER

be your entry into the life of the community. Where do you draw your sustenance unless you learn to look for these things? Does our narrative of development and development narrative remain somewhat undernourished for the lack of this acquaintance?

Noit.S Gceta Kapur, 'Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray', Journal ef Ans and Ideas, no. 23-24, Janiary, I 993.

2 See Rabindranath Tagore, Ta/Its in China, edited by Sisir Kumar Das (Calcutu, 1999).

3 Government of India, Ministry of Law, Justice and Company Affairs, The Constitution of India, 'Preamble', p. I, fn. I and 2. 4

Satyajit Ray, 'A Long Time on the Little Road' in Our Films, Th~ir Films, p.

33. 5 Ibid. 6

Ibid.

Early Films: The Novel and Other Horizons MOINAK BISWAS

Marks

ef difference

TOWARDS THE MIDDLE of Apur Sansar (The World ef Apu, 1959) there is a scene where the protagonists, Apu and Aparna, are at the cinema. We are taken straight into the screen without a warning, and it takes us some time to realize the film is framing another film. As the camera pulls out and reveals the illusion, we feel we should have known, since what we saw on the screen could not have been a scene in Ray's film; it is visibly different in style. The couple has come to watch a Mythological about the child saint Dhruva, replete with firebreathing demons, calendar gods, indoor forests and early optical tricks. We are transported to the following scene through another frame-trick: a rectangle view of Calcutta roads recedes; we then discover it is the back screen of a cab in which Apu and Aparna are travelling. Ray indulges in a bit of play with transitions, underscoring the lilting, joyful flow of the scenes of Apu's married life. He allows for a minor distraction so that one may casually reflect on the dimension of craft involved in making these scenes possible. Does that reflection produce a sense of absolute distinction between the cinema that the couple goes to and the one that tells their story? Robin Wood writes that the staging of the film within the film is 'Ray's brief artistic testament . . . succinctly defining his own position in relation to the commercial Indian cinema. ' 1 Talking about the episode, and taking a cue from Wood, perhaps, John Russell Taylor went a step further to say that most of Indian cinema 'has hardly moved on from the kind of nonsense (Ray) gently satirizes . . . all trashy, theatrical, sentimental and fantasticated. ' 2 This comes close to the position of the early art cinema discourse on the relationship between Ray and the popular film. We could dismiss the

38 / APU AND AFTER

'the hardly moved on from' view out of hand as untrue, but even at the time of making the Trilogy a model of absolute demarcation between Ray and the rest of Indian cinema would prove problematic on closer historical inspection. As a matter of fact, the 'crude trick-effects, wild melodrama, magicians and monsters' 3 were already receding into the past by 195 5. The Mythological itself had become a minor genre, ceding ground to the Social in the first era of sound. Hence, like the jatra performance that Apu watches wide-eyed in Pother Pancholi ( 1955), the film within the film is quaintly outmoded, pointing among other things to the lingering childhood sensorium in the character of the protagonist. Patht:r Pancholi came out of a context which saw a busy experimentation with the realist narrative that produced various results, not just one. The film can be seen as the point of culmination of the final phase of that negotiation, falling roughly between 1953 and 1955. One can bring in the vexed question of authenticity here, and suggest that it would not have been Possible for the film to be the popular and critical success it was had there not been a ground already prepared for its reception. 4 If in contemporary cultural criticism authenticity implies rooted-ness, continuity with local practices and difference from globalized norms, the very success of Ray's debut should complicate the issue. On that count the claim about its absolute novelty asks for qualification. It has become part of the lore that, when he aired his plans, people were aghast that he should want to shoot entirely on location, in cloudy weather, in natural rain and with amateur actors. 5 But these techniques produced pleasure for Ray's audience because the ground on which these effects could combine to produce a new aesthetic was already being laid by a certain development of the Social film. Realist experimentation within the Social, the dominant genre of the studio-era (c. I 93 I 1950), was fairly advanced by that time. later criticism, turning the tables on art cinema polemics, would sec Ray's discontinuity in a new light. For them it lends tacit support to the suspicion that the realist narration Ray adopted in the phase of national reconstruction had much that was elitist in affilia-

EARLY FILMS / 39

tion. Such contrasts in perception might remind us of the old dialectical wisdom of considering an artistic form in its potentially divergent affiliations. One standard objection that Ray and his colleagues had against the convention was that it was imitative of Hollywood, this tendency being the most pronounced in the Socials. 6 If this does not square with Ray's account that the entrenched tradition was operatic-theatrical and mythological, 7 his comparison between two of the most successful directors of the studio era would go to add a further complexity to the argument. He disliked the doyen of the romantic tragedy, the actor-director P. C. Barua, for his aristocratic attitude and his artificial Bengali, but also for the elements that came into his ornate style of direction through his contact with European cinema. Whereas he had admiration for Debaki Bose, who specialized in the Devotional, for coming much closer to developing a 'Bengali' style, specially in his later films like Kabi ( 1949). 8 Artificiality was not only an effect of the lack of autonomy of the medium as it was practised, it was the absence of a local, national language of cinema. The young Ray, writing one of his first polemics for the new cinema in 1949, argued that one could learn from Renoir how to look for a national style. 9 There must be a way to understand continuity itself as marked by discontinuity. When Manik Bandyopadhyay writes in 1952 that he could see the cinema taking a new realist tum, his comments encourage us to look for historical continuity. 10 When Ritwik Ghatak writes that in Pother Pancholi Ray achieved what he and his fellow artists had thought of doing many times before but did not know how to, he posits continuity at a different level. 11 Ghatak points to the fact that a genuinely successful break is always anticipated in a cultural practice. It was impossible, after having produced the modem Indian genres of literature, painting and music, to keep to the limits of the Socials of the Bombay Talkies or New Theatres in cinema. Ghatak does not see this as contradicting his submission in the same essay that he practised a cinema different from Ray's. The negotiation of cinematic modernity across the genres in the I 950s--the new bourgeois melodrama, the minority realist cinema and the critical cinema of

40 I APU AND AFTER

Ghatak-should urge us to consider Ray's break as also organic. The perception of authenticity in terms of organicity comes up against contradictions at every level, though. Let us take that elusive but certain mark of distinction in Pacher Panchali, its rhythm. Was not the rambling quality of the film, its river-like flow, its serenity of progress, a function of its material? Not only did it set the film apart from the conventional practice; it became the point of identification of what Ray calls the national style. To cite an early example, Chidananda Das Gupta wrote that one has to work on getting used to Ray's rhythm, but it is essential because the rhythm expresses the wider reality of India lying outside its 'islands of modernity' . 12 The audience in the West was divided in its appreciation of the rhythm: on the one hand, there was recognition of its necessity, its contemplative beauty; on the other, it kept putting off critics and cineastes with its languor and passivity. 13 Ray has repeatedly said that his material dictated his style and rhythm. His material happened to be also a novel, not simply the 'poignant reality' 'urgently in need of interpretation in terms of the cinema' . 14 In his first phase Ray undertook the project of creating a cinema that would connect with modem Indian traditions by re-articulating generic specimens of Bengali literature on the screen. He reminds us that in the case of Pather Panchali the original novel raised similar questions. The author, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, was turned down by publishers for the reason that his work lacked a proper story. It was serialized in a popular magazine on the condition that publication would be stopped if the readers so wished. But the serialization and the book were both to prove hugely successful. 15 To say the novel does not have a story is to admit that the relation between its tempo and the dramatic content is a difficult one, which is what 'rambling' means in this context. It is possible to reflect on this mediation-the director reaching out to a life and its rhythm, life perceived as rhythm, through established conventions and their ideological affiliations. A young critic has recently argued that Ray shares the perceptions of Indian village life available in the colonial discourse, most prominently- in the writings on village communities by political economists and legal his-

EARLY FILMS / 41

torians. He thinks that the anticipation and fulfilment of a worldview itself functions as a measure of authenticity in the film. But whereas the colonial administrators saw the non-changeability etc. morphologically, Ray turns to its philosophical dimensions, something that an Indian would recognize as a pattern, with the nodal points life and death in it. 16 Ray himself has linked the rhythm to the question of authenticity. The script, he thought, had to 'retain some of the rambling quality of the novel because that in itself contained a clue to the feel of authenticity: life in a poor Bengali village does ramble' . 17 If one is to attend to the artistic process involved and not reduce it to pure ideological units of function, one could start with this expression: only 'some' of the rambling was to be retained. It was out of a process of selection and recombination that the film script was born, and what it was supposed to deliver was a 'feel' of authenticity. The artist had to be aware of the fact that he was working with available representations. The novel was an 'encyclopaedia' of Bengali rural life, but the thoroughly city-br~ director decided to make actual trips to the countryside for a firsthand experience. For that one had to drive only a few miles from the centre of Calcutta. The experience was highly enriching and humbling, and it revealed the tonal variations--the shades that moderated between the polarities of representation. 18 Wasn't this tonal calibration to become the hallmark of Ray's realism? The cinematography that Subrata Mitra developed with him, especially the diffused bounced-light effects devised for Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956), became emblematic of this mode of observation. But he makes light of this experiential education, this search for the authentic, in an anti-climax. When the shooting began, he found everything had to be re-invented. The machine broke up the fantasy of creating a 'great humanist epic' by simply 'recording' the 'truth' lying out there in the unsullied land. 19 And, to make matters worse for meditations on authenticity, Ray writes about his rhythm in relation to Western music. Indian films suffered in quality because of the absence of a dramatic narrative tradition in Indian music, he thought. The raga works with a predetermined mood and tonality, and is 'built

42 I APU ANO AFTER

up like a temple starting from a solid base of alap, culminating in a spire of flourishes on the higher octaves of the scale', whereas Western music is more of a temporal form, and, since the invention of the sonata, has been humanized to dramatic ends. The latter has found universal application in the practice of telling stories that Hollywood has developed. 20 So it is a matter of learning from the life that the book presents, from the book itself, and from musical and cinematic practices functioning at a remove from the local traditions. The apparent contradictions that seem to arise from these statements reveal the essential role played by cross-filiations in the process of discovery of an authentic form and language. The absolute distance of Pother Pancholi from the existent film culture has been accepted by both the partisans of the realist cinema in India and the populists, making it difficult to think of possible continuities. The very division of cinema into art and popular created the scope for historical blindness on this point; the institutional basis of art was forgotten. It was overlooked that a creative new style cannot come about in a situation where the industry has no means whatsoever to support it. A significant artistic practice cannot be sustained in film when the popular cinema is weak and lacks innovation. The late films, Ghare Baire, Ganashatru (An Enemy ef the People, 1989), Shakha Prosakha (Branches ef a Tree, 1990), and A9antuk (The Stran9u, 1991 ), show not only the crisis of an artistic project, but the institution of Bengali cinema in a shambles. The institution provided the ground for the new cinematography, the new narrative intelligibility, the new use of dialogue or the new style of performance, to emerge. It would be impossible to think of the highly successful character types that Ray uses in his films without the contribution of an acting tradition established in the industry. The remarkable 'typage' that he seems to have learnt partly from Eisenstein and that he extended into a study of cultural behaviour (e.g., the old aunt, the grocer-teacher, the sweet vendor in Pother Pancholi, the headmaster, the school inspector or the debauched neighbour in Aparajito) drew upon the performance traditions that Chunibala Devi, Tulsi Chakrabarty and Chhabi Biswas- to name only the best· · represented. It also involved

EARLY FILMS / 43

the audience's familiarity with particular speech idioms and use of dialogue. Similarly, a certain development in cinematography within the Social prepared the grounds for the innovations that Subrata Mitra and Ray were to introduce. Faredoon Irani, Nimai Ghosh, Radhu Karmakar, V. Ratra, Kamal Bose, Ramananda Sengupta, and V. K. Murthy's work in Bengal and Bombay between 1940 and 1955 can be cited as examples in this regard. The ramble, the horizon and the self

The 'ramble' could be a paint to start on the 'break' that Pother Pancholi brought. The way Ray builds up descriptive passages would not have been passible without the full elaboration of a realist aesthetic. It is possible to find passages in earlier cinema which do not serve an immediate dramatic purpose in the narrative--expository landscapes would be an example-but they do not have the regularity and centrality that they have in Pother Pancholi. There is a crucial spatial aspect to the descriptive work, involving objects and bodies, but also an ideality of their relationship. The work of detailing can thus be related to the category of landscape even when one does not have an actual landscape at hand. Karatani Kojin has re-written the entire history of modem Japanese literature in terms of the emergence of the landscape, which he uses as a master category of sorts to explain the modem tum in late Meiji Japanese culture. The separation between the world and the observing consciousness, the idea of consciousness as interiority, the invention of phonetic writing and the emergence of the expressive face-all these are connected by Karatani into one epistemic inversion that he calls the discovery of the landscape. 21 The connection of the landscape to modem epistemology and representational ideology has been known to theorists, but Karatani 's ideas are a little more relevant to us since he studies a non-W estem context and observes a process of genesis of the modem paradigms through intermediary and non-paradigmatic phases. It is possible to locate phases in Ray's work where the 'landscape' and the subject go through 'relative' stages of separation, allowing us to study realism in relation to more than one formation of the self. It

44 / APU AND AFTER

is customary to study the development of realism in cinema in terms of the development of narrative codes, but it is when description becomes a part of its competence and enters into a tangle with the work of narration per se that cinematic realism attains a mature form. Realism up to 1955 does not show the full elaboration of this descriptive-narrative elaboration, which left narrative itself often dependent on pure dramatic articulations. The otherwise highly advanced realism of Taxi Driver (Chetan Anand, 1953) or Aar Paar (Guru Dutt, 1953) could be cited as examples. Description in Ray's work is often referred to as detailing. The detail, as Roland Barthes pointed out, can work in excess of the narrative purpose. In modem modes of historical or fictional discourse it is not integrated to the narrative and thus creates the effect of a residue, of the substratum of the world in the representation. Barthcs calls this the 'reality effect', the direct encounter between the signifier and the referent, the situation where 'aesthetic constraints arc steeped . . . in referential constraints'. 22 Georg Lukacs introduced the category of description as a vital mark of distinction between naturalism and realism. The relative autonomy of description to be found in the post1848 European novels of Flaubcrt, Zola and the Goncourts testified to the decline of the epic comprehension and dramatic power of Scott, Balzac and Tolstoy, argues Lukacs. Description in naturalism is not integrated to character, plot and action; it is anti-narrative. 23 Jean Renoir's 1930s work exemplifies one way in which the method of Zola could be extended into a practice of cinematic innovation. But we are trying to look at naturalism/description as a mode of lending materiality and significance to that which the conventional totalities of narration have come to ignore in a cultural context. Its conditional autonomy from narrative became its condition of creativity in that sense. Description, seen in this light, can enhance realism and can also bring it to a crisis. The two divergent trajectories of Italian neorealism and the French Nouvelle-Vague can be historically connected through these dialectical possibilities of naturalism. Lukacs's formulation leaves no space for the historically mutating functions that elements like naturalism or lyricism can have within realism. Moreover,

EARLY FILMS / 45

there would be special problems in applying his ideas to film, which works with mimetic content quite differently from literature. As it processes literary material itself, ftlmic naturalism works in a way that complicates the evaluative model of Lukacs. The Apu Trilogy, for instance, is also re-describing a world touched and transformed by a literary tradition.

In a world where commodity circulation is minimal, and property is perilously meagre, the art of detailing cannot depend much upon proliferating objects of use and consumption, 24 or on aristocratic accumulation of objects of distinction. There is a ready motivation for selective investment in the trivial, timewom things. Some objects, like lndir's utensils and Durga's trinket box, are meant to stand out; others easily merge into the background like the stolen necklace swallowed up by the hyacinth pool. The very blurring of the boundaries induced by sociological vision between objects and their background shows how important it was for the film to create a sensate space, a space imbued with intelligence and feeling. In a way it is curious that a film that is supposed to have instituted realism over and against the melodramatic lack of character-centred narration in Indian cinema does not allow character to dominate or get alienated from space. The observer's consciousness is privileged in this kind of narration, which strikes up a conversation as it were with the space that holds the characters and events; a correspondence is established between the horizon and the eye behind the camera. As the camera acknowledges nature's animated presence in Pathtr Pancholi, this contact seems to dictate the rhythm and the flow of the events. The movement generated by such a pictorial stance is impossible to think of without conceiving the contact of the camera and the 'real location' as a principle of shooting. Arguments about the essentially constructed character of the image and narrative, or about the inaccessibility of the real, are not that relevant when one is thinking of the emergence of this new material. The point is not to stress the value of real rain over synthetically produced rain-to invoke an old debate-but to say that as the filmmaker breaks away from the established codes of the sets, and works with the contact between real location and the camera, he

46 / APU AND AFTER

is in a pos1non to launch a new mode of construction. Studio sets themselves underwent a radical change under the impact. The 'ramble' in Pather Panchali, the style that also places it apart from Hollywood realism, is in this sense an effect of the film's encounter with the specific pro-filmic material, even though the contact, inevitably, is already informed by technique, in this case a technique learnt from Italian neorealist cinema. 25 The continuous flow of objects, bodies, textures and shades makes it possible for description to work against the compulsions of narration. The textual organization takes its cue from this flow. Realism is a matter of discovery here; before its elementr-location, light, performance, speech----hecome parts of a definite artifice, there is a level at which the signifying tools can be seen to be forging a new material. To discover a nature and a habitat, discover faces and voices excluded by the ritualized conventions of filmmaking: cinema is expected to fulfil this mission in any national context. One must hypothetically make distinctions between the modes of knowledge and pleasure that various practices of realism are meant to produce. The pervasive realism of modernity includes surveys, cartography and census as well as painting, drama and novels. The first set of technologies became allies of disciplinary regimes, as an influential critic of modernity has suggested. 26 The fundamental scepticism about realism that tends to disregard its historical functions would stress this rationalizing knowledge production about society that the form is deployed in. The overlap between the developmentalist vision of the Indian state and the realism of Ray seems viable when considered from the perspective of this critique of modernity as capitalist modernization and a specific form of governance. But it runs the risk of reducing artistic practice to the ideology of form. Sourin Bhattacharya's essay, recounting his own experience of the arrival of Pather Panchali in the midst of the Nehruvian planning initiative, makes an interesting distinction between what he calls the narrative of development and the development narrative. Apu's story, a development narrative, shares the same environment with the narrative of development, but that does not make them the same story. 27 When seen in relation to literary traditions it becomes even more

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difficult to look upon realism in the early Ray in terms of a hegemonic modernizing aspiration. The novel tradition had already established a powerful storehouse of images and narratives of the rural life of Bengal. The foremost novelists of Ray's time, Bibhutibhushan, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Satinath Bhaduri and Manik Bandyopadhyay, were all engaged in that documentation. The community of readers, which was a constituent of the tradition, would look to the cinema to produce its own articulation of those images and stories. lbis would be the second task of discovery performed by cinema in a national context-to re-articulate a richly saturated community experience of fiction. Looked at from this angle it is not so much the programmes of modernization but the modem traditions of a community that would support the release of the landscape, the flux of objects, the profusion of details in Patha Pancholi. One could start with the question of detailing, crucial to Ray and his commentators, 28 looking at it in the light of this mediation--by literature, by the reading public--as a first step towards reading Ray in tenns of a cultural discourse of the novel in India. Pother Pancholi the novel 29 creates its rhythm by the frequent interpolation of descriptions of the immediate surroundings of Apu's house, hemmed in by the shadowy bamboo grove, of areas that lie outside it and make up the village topography, and also of the remote territories which could be the wilderness, another village or another land altogether, either seen or imagined. A great density and beauty of description suffuses the narrative as it moves freely between plants and animals, the human world and the natural cycle. The tapestry of sounds, colours and shapes is woven through a narrating voice which, as Apu grows up, shifts imperceptibly between outside and inside of him. Even in the sequel Aparajito, which deals with the adult Apu, the narrator's voice maintains this dual position.

The detailing, in its turn, moves between the mundane, the mysterious and the cosmic, almost imperceptibly. Even as the haunting beauty of Nischindipur comes to be savoured through the eyes of Apu, nature retains its autonomy, its abundance and sadness. It is imbued with a sensibility and at times takes on the aura of divinity. The latter is not to be understood in religious tenns since it has very

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little to do with scripture or rituals. The figure of the mother goddess that can be glimpsed sometimes in the heart of the woods and fields is a pantheistic entity. And she is closer in spirit to the noncanonical local deities. She is like the goddess Vishalakshi who, the novelist tells us, abandoned the village long ago and is now homeless, a poor wandering gnome. The affective zone in which the objective description of nature and the characters' experience meet and become interchangeable is given the name maya. Just before he narrates the legend of Vishalakshi, Bibhutibhushan tells us how the seemingly endless woods rich in plants and creepers forming one boundary of their dwelling has left its caressing green touch on the hearts of Apu and his sister. The seasonal colours, sounds, the movement of animal life within, all create a deep sense of happiness that can only be called a maya. Apu dreams of the goddess Vishalakshi appearing before him like a rustic mother. And then the scene changes into an epic site for the dreamy boy, the characters of Mahabharata come to life in it. 30 Maya is a metaphysically loaded term in Indian thought, but here, in the double sense of illusion and attachment that the word carries in the vernacular use, the sense of attachment is dominant. Nature's plenitude is already marked with the past as it unfolds; this past that lives just beyond our tenuous limits of everyday living is a constituent of the maya. The village as present-past cannot just appear, it always returns. 31 The two novels work with description often without relation to the dramatic development. Often nothing would happen in a chapter other than the passage of an ordinary day, which is exactly what makes the detailing so important. Detailing is related to the movement of the day, the seasonal cycle, the life cycle, but it is also related to play. The endless little games that Apu and Durga devise take up a major portion of the novel; in them they become most creative, making innovative use of the things they find in their surroundings, compensating for the scarcity of toys or fancy objects in their lives. The d