Rediscovering Ray

MARQUEE

Contrary to popular perception, Delhi isn't an entirely arid city if you're a cineaste. For those who know where to look, there are options: the regular Friday film screenings held at the French Cultural Centre, for instance, or the treasures that can be sampled at the little auditorium in the Italian Embassy (with its admittedly uncomfortable seats), or at screenings held by organisations like Sarai. We do know our Fellinis and our Truffauts.

But there has, at least in the past few years, been a surprising lack of opportunities to see the films on Satyajit Ray on a big (or medium-sized) screen. So when the annual Cinefan film festival screened five of Ray's best-known movies this year, we were ready to camp outside the auditorium the night before each screening, in the best tradition of Star Wars fans.

Watching these films "" most seen before, but on whimsical video prints many summers ago "" reminded me of how Ray has been pigeonholed in some quarters, many aspects of his career consequently overlooked.

For instance, some of my friends whose theoretical knowledge of his films far exceeds their practical experience of watching them still think the bulk of his work was in the realm of rural dramas about poor people, or in period films. In this context Pather Panchali has cast a very long shadow, its iconic stills of the minutiae of a poor family's life often held as emblematic of the director's career.

As late as 1980, former actress Nargis Dutt, referring especially to Pather Panchali, was able to say that Ray's films were popular overseas because they exoticised India's poverty "" an unfair allegation from any standpoint, but bizarre in its compartmentalisation of a director who had, just a few years earlier, completed a fine set of movies about modern life in Calcutta.

It tends to be overlooked that the "Apu Trilogy" itself follows the trajectory of a young boy's life as he gradually moves away from his roots and moves towards a modern world.

Even the well-informed among us sometimes get swayed by myths. So it was a revelation to see some of the Ray movies screened at the festival: like Mahanagar, about a sheltered housewife who takes up a job to supplement her husband's income and finds that her growing confidence unsettles the conservative family; and Seemabaddha, a gripping morality tale about a man moving up the corporate ladder but leaving his conscience many rungs behind.

Both films, especially the latter, show that Ray was a smart, perceptive chronicler of the demands of city life, and that it was possible for this aspect of his craft to co-exist with the love for humanity that runs through his work. (In one of his essays in The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen reminds us that there are very few villains in Ray's movies "" people to whom the blame for bad things can be conveniently transferred. Seemabaddha, with its depiction of a likable protagonist who embraces amorality in the face of competitive pressures, provides an excellent example of this.)

There is, of course, a lot more to Ray's films than the urban-rural debate. His dabblings in fantasy and adventure produced some of his most enchanting films "" an interesting paradox since, as Salman Rushdie pointed out once, Ray apparently disapproved of surrealist elements in movies.

To watch movies like the Feluda mystery Sonar Kella (which was screened at Cinefan) and that delightful fantasy Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, based on a story by his grandfather, Upendrakishore Roychowdhury, is to realise the fallacy of the impression some people have of him as a "boring" director who makes "niche" films.

The misconceptions are too many to list here, but there's only one surefire way to get rid of them. The films of India's most celebrated director need to be watched, rather than read about "" even if that means turning to pirated DVDs.

(jaiarjun@yahoo.com )