by Ian Buruma
The sad appeal of bhadralok culture is that it flowered so briefly. Ever since the British shifted the capital of the Raj to New Delhi in 1912, Calcutta has been a city in decline. Its European elegance had always been somewhat anomalous in the humid heat of Bengal. But Calcutta somehow managed to wear its decadence with a certain amount of grace; the high culture in the midst of squalor strikes one almost as a kind of dandyism. It is a common theme in Ray’s work, and a common trait in many of his characters. In his book there is the story of a middle-aged man who used to be a successful amateur actor and earned a decent living. Now reduced to genteel poverty, he is suddenly asked to fill in as an extra in some tawdry local film. His only line is “Oh!” as he is knocked down in the street by the star of the production. He rehearses the scene endlessly on his own, trying to recapture his old élan. He does the scene perfectly:
But all the labour and imagination he had put into this one shot—were these people able to appreciate that? He doubted it. They just got hold of some people, got them to go through certain motions, paid them for their labours and forgot all about it. Paid them, yes, but how much? Ten, fifteen, twenty rupees? But what was twenty rupees when measured against the intense satisfaction of a small job done with perfection and dedication?
He walks away without waiting for his pay. He is too good for such a sordid business.
Just as Apu’s father in Pather Panchali, Ray’s first film, is too cultured for his surroundings. He is a poor literary Brahmin dreaming of writing a masterpiece, while his family almost starves in a village of illiterate peasants. And just as the landlord in The Music Room ignores his debts and pawns his possessions so he can still pretend to live in aristocratic style. Ray is never sentimental about these dreamers. “It is true,” he says about The Music Room, “I am interested in all dying traditions. This man who believes in his future is for me a pathetic figure. But I sympathise with him. He might be absurd, but he is fascinating.”4
The sad nobility of being out of step with one’s surroundings or time can go much deeper than the simple contrast between poverty and dreams. In a way, the entire bhadralok culture, its refinement, its liberalism, its sophisticated attempt to bridge East and West, was out of step—just as Calcutta, the old colonial capital, has been out of step for a long time with the way India developed in the twentieth century. Although Ray himself, like Tagore, at whose school he studied art, believes in the enlightened values of the liberal bhadralok, he gently mocks the proponents. Not only are some of the Bengali intellectuals in his films a little absurd but they wreak havoc upon the emotions of innocent people by being carried away by their ideas to the exclusion of all else. This is particularly true of films based on Tagore’s stories. Bhupati, the pipe-smoking journalist husband in Charulata (1964), is one example. His head, usually buried in books, is so full of new ideas that he loses sight of the people around him. His young and beautiful wife, Charu, is bored and frustrated, endlessly peering through her binoculars at life outside the claustrophobic women’s quarters. Bhupati, the modernist, is still a traditional Indian husband who takes his wife for granted. He encourages his young cousin, Amal, a literary youth, to keep her company. The inevitable happens. Charu falls in love. Amal runs away to escape his guilt. Bhupati learns his lesson.
In the first scene of The Home and the World (1984), based on another Tagore story, we see Nikhil reading Milton in English to his young bride, Bimal, who doesn’t understand a word. The story takes place in the first decade of the twentieth century, when Bengal was partitioned by Lord Curzon, dividing Hindus and Muslims. Nikhil is a large landowner. His grand mansion reflects his culture: part of the house, particularly the women’s quarters, is wholly traditional, while the drawing room, with its crystal chandeliers, chintz-covered sofas, flowered wallpaper, oil paintings, grand piano, and cut-glass ornaments is Victorian English. Nikhil sees it as his mission to get his wife out of the women’s quarters (“Purdah never was a Hindu custom”) and into the Victorian drawing room. To please her husband, she takes singing lessons from an English lady and learns to recite English poetry. He finally gets her to break the taboo of purdah: she opens the door of the women’s rooms and walks through the hall to the drawing room, where she is introduced for the first time to a man who is not a relative. His name is Sandip. The home, as it were, is suddenly opened to the world.
Sandip, the revolutionary demagogue, seduces women the way he seduces the masses. He dazzles them with his ruthless charm. This supreme egotist, justifying his actions by a kind of Nietzschean nihilism, writes in his diary that “whatever I can grab is mine.… Every man has a natural right to possess, and therefore greed is natural. What my mind covets my surroundings must supply.” He covets Bimal and she falls for him, stealing her husband’s money for Sandip’s cause (to Sandip sex and his cause come down to much the same thing). Sandip’s present cause is boycotting British goods. He forces the poor Muslim traders, who cannot survive by selling expensive and inferior Indian goods, to burn their British products. Those who refuse are robbed and sometimes killed. Sandip exploits communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims, leaving them to slaughter one another in riots. All for the cause.
Nikhil, the gentle humanist who believes in the freedom of choice, does not dare to intervene for fear of losing his wife. He allows his friend to stay in his house, for otherwise “Bimal would regret it. She would not stay with me out of her own choice. That would be unbearable.” When Bimal finally sees through her lover’s deception, Sandip escapes the chaos he has caused. Nikhil tries to stop the killing and is shot dead. Barbarism has proved to be a stronger force than Nikhil’s enlightened ideals.
Nikhil and Sandip, the humanist and the radical, the two faces of modern Bengali culture. “We both decided to have nothing to do with irrational conventions,” says Nikhil at one point in the film. “He was just more radical than I.” Besides Ray, the other Bengali filmmakers of importance, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, were both Marxists. Ghatak, who was four years younger than Ray, was a Communist sympathizer until his death in 1976. People who champion Sen’s films often accuse Ray of being sentimental, lacking in class analysis, or even of being “feudal.” It is certainly true that Ray is less interested in analyzing the human predicament politically than in showing how people behave, how they react to love and death. With Sen—though oddly enough less than with the more radical Ghatak—one sometimes feels that he is more interested in ideas than in people.
Unfortunately, the weakness of The Home and the World, compared, say, to The Music Room, Charulata, or the Apu trilogy, is precisely that the characters represent ideas, preventing them from wholly coming to life. This accounts, perhaps, for the unusual—for Ray’s films, that is—wordiness of the movie. Ray’s best scenes are often silent: the death of Durga, Apu’s sister, in Pather Panchali, or the look on the face of the starving husband at the end of Distant Thunder (1973), set during the great famine in 1943, when his wife tells him she is pregnant. Words could never express the emotional intensity of those silent moments. Words, at least to one who cannot understand Bengali, appear to detract from the realism in The Home and the World; they express literary and political ideas rather than feelings.
Ray suffered a heart attack while making The Home and the World. But I think the relative weakness of the film (it is still very good compared to most movies in India, or anywhere else) cannot be explained by Ray’s ill health alone. The flaws are also in Tagore’s original story.5 Tagore’s biographer, Krishna Kripalani, wrote that Nikhil, “who is compounded of the Maharshi’s [Rabindranath’s father] religious insight, of Gandhi’s political idealism and of Tagore’s own tolerance and humanism, is too shadowy to be real.” Sandip, however, “the Machiavellian patriot, the unscrupulous politician, the splendid wind-bag and shameless seducer is, on the other hand, very real.”6 In Ray’s film it seems more the other way around. Nikhil, played by Victor Banerjee, still reveals a brooding complexity, while Sandip, played by Soumitra Chatterjee, appe
ars as more of a caricature.
The most convincing character is the woman in the middle, superbly acted by Swatilekha Chatterjee. As is the case with many Japanese heroines, Bimal’s shy and submissive exterior hides a character that is stronger and more passionate than those of the men who appear to dominate her. One is reminded of the women in Mizoguchi Kenji’s films such as Sansho Daiyu (Sansho the Bailiff). Both Ray and Mizoguchi managed to get great performances out of their leading men (think of Soumitra Chatterjee as the grown-up Apu, or Shindo Eitaro as the wicked bailiff in Sansho Daiyu), but the most powerful roles are usually for women. (Strangely, women hardly figure at all in Ray’s short stories.)
Japanese critics like to call Mizoguchi a “feminist” (they use the English word). And many of Ray’s films, such as his latest one, deal with the emancipation of women. But neither filmmaker—least of all Mizoguchi, a traditionalist to the core—is a feminist in the political sense of the word. Ray once said in an interview: “A woman’s beauty, I think, also lies in her patience and endurance in a world where men are generally more vulnerable and in need of guidance.”7 This is precisely what Mizoguchi would have said. It is what the Japanese critics meant by his feminism. The transition from Asian tradition to Western-influenced modernity, a constant theme in both Ray’s and Mizoguchi’s work, often focuses on women. Still the bedrock of tradition, they offer solace. But it is also those same traditional women whose emotions are most affected by modernization.
There may be a religious element in this brand of feminism. Japan and India, particularly Bengal, share strong matriarchal traditions of worshiping mother goddesses. This, by the way, is a thread running through Ritwik Ghatak’s films, where women sacrifice everything for their men. Ghatak, a keen student of Jung as well as Marx, tends to mix religious and political metaphors: his suffering heroines stand for the downtrodden peasants, for sacrificing goddesses, and even for his motherland, raped by the British imperialists and their Indian capitalist collaborators.
We speak of Western civilization because of shared religious, philosophical, and political traditions. Do such widely different countries as India and Japan have enough in common to allow us to talk of a distinct Eastern civilization? Tagore, as his statements in China and Japan made clear, believed so. In his fascinating essay about Japanese cinema, Ray, though a little more tentatively than Tagore, reaches the same conclusion. He quotes his old professor at Tagore’s academy as saying: “Consider the Fujiyama.… Fire within and calm without. There is the symbol of the true Oriental artist.”8 Mizoguchi and Ozu Yasujiro, Ray says, “both suggest enormous reserves of power and feeling which never spill over into emotional displays.” Well, this depends on what one means by emotional displays. But I think I know what Ray means. The feelings under the surface, the long spells of apparent calm, suddenly interrupted by an emotional climax: a look of terrible grief, a stifled scream, a burst of silent tears. The image of the woman betrayed by weaker men, biting her sari or kimono in anguish: this marks the style of Ray’s films, as it does of Mizoguchi’s. Perhaps this offers a hint of what makes Ray’s films seem, for lack of a better word, Asian.
Ray’s films, like those of Mizoguchi, are often accused of being slow. To those for whom only perpetual action can stave off boredom this may be true. But the lingering over everyday details, the moments of complete calm—compared by Ray to the slow movements in music—are necessary to express the intensity of the emotional highlights. The slow realism of the classic Asian cinema is a bit like the Japanese Noh theater or the English game of cricket: the slowness—which, to me, is never boring—draws you into the world expressed on the screen, the stage, or the playing field. This process is more than entertainment—it is not always entertaining. Nor is it a matter of slowing down life to the pace of real life—that really would be boring. Rather, it slows down moments in life sufficiently to, as it were, catch reality.
This form of realism has almost died out in the Japanese and Indian cinema. Commercial pressures, especially acute in a place like Bengal, with only a small educated audience, are partly to blame. With the advent of television, video discs, and other new entertainments, the film industries have opted for safe formulas: song and dance in India, soapy melodrama in Japan. But I do not believe this is the only reason for the coarsening of Japanese and Indian cinema. Ray made the following point about the great Japanese directors:
I am not saying that these masters did not learn from the West. All artists imbibe, consciously or unconsciously, the lessons of past masters. But when a film maker’s roots are strong, and when tradition is a living reality, outside influences are bound to dwindle and disappear and a true indigenous style evolve.
This was certainly true of Ray, Mizoguchi, Ozu, even Kurosawa. They all imbibed the work of such different directors as John Ford, Frank Capra, and Jean Renoir. But they were settled in their own traditions, which was the very condition that made their art universal. This is what has changed. Few young Japanese filmmakers are at home in Japanese painting, as Mizoguchi was; few Indian filmmakers could compose a score of Indian music, as Ray does. What is left, in this world of instant communications, is a constant exposure to Western fashions, which, without a strong traditional culture to absorb them, become meaningless ornaments. These ornaments are merged with the showy conventions of local pop culture. The result is often profitable, sometimes entertaining, but only rarely extraordinary. There are still serious films being made in India, but they tend to be melodramas containing political messages. Both in style and content they are parochial in a way that Ray’s films never are. One rather fears it will be a long time before another Satyajit Ray appears in India. He is one of the last true cosmopolitans and perhaps the very last Bengali renaissance man.
1 Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films (Calcutta: Orient Longman Ltd., 1976), p. 155.
2 Our Films, Their Films, p. 24.
3 Satyajit Ray, The Unicorn Expedition and Other Fantastic Tales of India (Dutton, 1987).
4 Satyajit Ray: An Anthology of Statements on Ray and by Ray (New Delhi: Directorate of Film Festivals, 1981), p. 34.
5 The Home and the World (London: Penguin, 1985).
6 Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (Grove Press, 1962; revised edition, Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1980), p. 264.
7 Satyajit Ray: An Anthology of Statements on Ray and by Ray, p. 67.
8 Our Films, Their Films, p. 157.
17
THE WAY THEY LIVE NOW: MIKE LEIGH
THERE WAS A time, about twenty-five years ago, when spontaneity was the rage. This was encouraged in daily life, as well as in the theater. Indeed, the cult of spontaneity demanded that the barriers between the two should be removed: theater was life, life was theater. “Happenings” turned the world into a stage. Inhibitions were an enemy, to be kicked over in public. Audiences had to “participate.” And the participants in theater workshops were provoked into revealing their “true” selves in so-called encounter sessions. People would howl and cry and laugh hysterically, while others would sit around, watching this mental stripping with embarrassed fascination. Orchestrating these spectacles was the leader, or director, or whatever he (almost always a he) was called, who looked at what he had wrought with the smug demeanor of a guru.
Much of this was more group therapy than theater. Happenings could be fun, even creative, but the cult of spontaneity produced little of lasting value. For most theater workshops and happenings were too narcissistic, too unformed, too raw to be meaningful to anyone besides the participants. Letting it all hang out does not create a work of art. Transforming one’s feelings into something else can do so, but that takes talent and discipline. The former is always in short supply, and the latter is hard to reconcile with pure spontaneity. And yet the experimentation of the 1960s was not a wasted effort. For some remarkable things emerged from the dross. Peter Brook’s work in the theater, for example, and the movies of John Cassavetes owed much to improvisation. And then there is Mike Leigh. His latest f
ilm, Naked, won him the best director’s prize at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.
Leigh was born in the north of England in 1943. He was trained in the theater at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and in film at the London Film School. When he arrived in London in the early 1960s, he was excited by Cassavetes’s movies, and by Brook’s work at the Royal Shakespeare Company. “Improvisation,” as he put it, “was around.” But he distanced himself from its psychodramatic excesses. Happenings didn’t interest him. Acting, writing, and directing did. He no longer acts. But so far he has written and directed twenty-four theater plays, twelve TV plays, four movies, one radio play, and several short sequences for television. He describes himself as a storyteller. His stories are made up during many months of rehearsal. “There is nothing extraordinary about our technique,” Leigh told me in his London office. In fact, I think there is. What is extraordinary is the combination of improvisation and discipline, spontaneity and precision.