The Great Speeches of Modern India

by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

  Films remained a great attraction right through college. But by then I had discovered something which was to grow into an obsession. This was Western classical music. I had grown up in an atmosphere of Bengali songs, mainly Rabindrasangeet and Brahmo Samaj hymns. Even as a child, the ones that I liked most had a Western tinge to them. A Vedic hymn like Sangachhadhwam, or the song by Rabindranath with a rather similar tune, Anandalokay Mangalalokay; or the stately chorus, Padoprantay rakho shebokey, that came as a wonderful relief after three exhausting hours of sermon on Maghotsab Day. My response to Western classical music was immediate and decisive. As a small boy, I had read about Beethoven in the Book of Knowledge, and developed an admiration for him which amounted to hero-worship. Now I was listening enraptured to his sonatas and symphonies. If films were fun and thrills and escape, the pursuit of music was something undertaken with deadly seriousness. It was a great voyage of discovery, and it transported me to a world of ineffable delight. Films were at the most a once-a-week affair, while music played on the hand-cranked gramophone took up all my spare time at home. At the age when the Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

  My reading was then confined to light English fiction. I hardly read any Bengali those days; not even the classics. In fact, I was not conscious of any roots in Bengal at all. That happened in Santiniketan.

  The few occasions that I met Rabindranath [Tagore] face to face—well, meeting is hardly the word: one stole up to him with one’s heart in one’s mouth, and touched his feet—he would glance up at my mother and say: ‘Why don’t you send your son to my school?’ To be quite honest, I had no wish to go to his school at all. The few Santiniketanites that I got to know—usually painters and musicians—all had long hair, and spoke Bengali in a strange, affected sing-song. One took this to be the Santiniketan accent. Well, such accent and such people put me off, and I thought—if this is what Santiniketan does to you, I have no use for that place.

  When, after my graduation, I did go to Santiniketan, it was out of deference to my mother’s wish, and much against my own inclination. I think my mother believed that proximity to Rabindranath would have a therapeutic effect on me, much as a visit to a hill station or health resort has on one’s system. Although I joined as a student of Kalabhawan, I had no wish to become a painter—certainly not a painter of the Oriental school. I strongly disliked the wishy-washy sentimentalism of the Oriental art one encountered in the pages of Prabasi and Modern Review. I had shown a flair for drawing from a very early age, doubtless inherited, and my taste in painting had been formed by the same ten-volume Book of Knowledge which had told me about Beethoven.

  The Book of Knowledge left out everything before the Renaissance, and ended with the Royal Academicians. Among the paintings and sculptures I knew and loved were: Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, Franz Hals’s Laughing Cavalier, Michelangelo’s David, Rodin’s Thinker, Landseer’s Proud Stag With The Spreading Antlers, and Joshua Reynolds’s Bubbles, which, in those days, was used in advertisements for Pear’s Soap. Of course, I also knew Raphael’s Madonna, and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. I read somewhere that Mona Lisa’s right hand was the most beautifully executed hand in all painting. I would gaze at this hand, and marvel at the critic who had studied all the hands in all the paintings of the world, and come to that conclusion.

  Since I never meant to complete the five-year course of Kalabhawan, I left at the end of two and a half. Rabindranath had died a year before. It was hard for me to judge if it had made a material difference to the place; after all, he had been virtually invisible to us much of the time. But with everybody saying ‘it’s not the same thing any more,’ one found oneself concurring. But the main reason I left was not because Rabindranath was no more, but because I felt I had got as much out of the place as was possible for me.

  My relationship with Santiniketan was an ambivalent one. As one born and bred in Calcutta, I loved to mingle with the crowd on Chowringhee, to hunt for bargains in the teeming profusion of second-hand books on the pavements of College Street, to explore the grimy depths of Chor Bazar for symphonies at throwaway prices, to relax in the coolness of a cinema, and lose myself in the makebelieve world of Hollywood. All this I missed in Santiniketan, which was a world apart. It was a world of vast open spaces, vaulted over with a dustless sky that on a clear night showed the constellations as no city sky could ever do. The same sky, on a clear day, could summon up in moments an awesome invasion of billowing darkness that seemed to engulf the entire universe. And there was the Khoai, rimmed with serried ranks of tall trees, and the Kopai, snaking its way through its rough-hewn undulations. If Santiniketan did nothing else, it induced contemplation, and a sense of wonder, in the most prosaic and earthbound of minds.

  In the two and a half years, I had time to think, and time to realize that, almost without my being aware of it, the place had opened windows for me. More than anything else, it had brought to me an awareness of our tradition, which I knew would serve as a foundation for any branch of art that I wished to pursue.

  But my attitude to painting as a vocation did not change. The first painting I did as a student showed a very old, blind beggar standing in the middle of nowhere, leaning on the shoulder of an angelic looking boy who carried the begging bowl. My later paintings improved, as I moved away from literary themes, but I just didn’t have it in me to become a painter.

  But Santiniketan taught me two things—to look at paintings, and to look at nature. We used to go out in the afternoon to sketch from nature. Nandalal Bose, our Mastermoshai, would steal up from behind, peer over the shoulder and say: ‘That’s a good outline of a cow. But a cow is more than an outline. You must feel the form of the animal—the flesh and bones beneath the skin—and this feeling must show in the way your pencil moves.’

  It was Santiniketan which opened my eyes to the fact that the kind of painting that I used to admire, the kind that provokes the reaction, ‘How life-like!’, should be a preoccupation that lasted only 400 years. It started with the first awareness of perspective in the fifteenth century, and ended with the invention of photography in the nineteenth. The first representations of nature by man are believed to be the stone-age cave paintings of 20,000 years ago. What is 400 years in a span that stretches 200 centuries?

  Neither Egyptian, nor Chinese, Japanese, or Indian art ever concerned itself with factual representation. Here the primary aim was to get at the essence of things; a probing beneath the surface. Nature was the point of departure for the artist to arrive at a personal vision. Personal, but within the ambit of certain well-defined conventions.

  Two trips to the great art centres of India—Ajanta, Ellora, Elephanta, Konarak, and others—consolidated the idea of Indian tradition in my mind. At last I was beginning to find myself, and find my roots.

  What I missed most in Santiniketan was films. Almost imperceptibly, they had become an object of study, as music was, and not something to be just seen and enjoyed. I had found and read a couple of books on film aesthetics in the Kalabhawan library. They were most revealing. How interesting to know, for instance, that films and music had so much in common! Both unfold over a period of time; both are concerned with pace and rhythm and contrast; both can be described in terms of mood—sad, cheerful, pensive, boisterous, tragic, jubilant. But this resemblance applies only to Western classical music. Since our music is improvised, its pattern and duration are flexible. One can hear a complete raga in a three-minute version on old gramophone records, and we know that a raga can be stretched to well over two hours. Also, the structure of Indian music is decorative, not dramatic. It builds up from a slow beginning to a fast conclusion, becoming more and more intricate and ornamental in the process. This is rather like an Indian temple, which builds up from a solid base, goes through narrower and narrower layers of ornamentation, and ends up in the dizzy heights of the shikhara. The mood of the music is predetermined by the raga, and convention demands that there should be no departu
re from it. What the musician aims at is to give the ideal form to the concept implicit in a particular combination of notes. That is why Indian music is great only in the hands of a great musician performing at the top of his form. In the process of execution, the musician can achieve beauty, he can achieve tension and excitement, and he can achieve sublimity. But he cannot achieve drama, because there is no conflict in the music.

  Unlike Indian music, Western music can depart from the tonic or Sa, and much of the drama arises from this modulation of certain basic melodies from key to key. This can be likened to the vicissitudes experienced by characters in a story. At the end, the music has to return to the tonic or Sa, which again is like the resolution of a conflict, where one feels nothing more needs to be said, as the drama has come to an end.

  It is significant that most of the pioneers of the cinema—those who helped to create its grammar and its language (Griffith in the USA, Abel Gance in France, Eisenstein and Pudovkin in Soviet Russia)—were all deeply responsive to music. Griffith was one man who virtually created the language of the cinema single-handed. It took him a little while to realize the incredible potentialities of the medium, but once he saw that images could be invested with meaning, and such meaningful images could be strung together like sentences in a story, and the story could be made to unfold with the grace and fluency of music, the art of the cinema evolved in no time at all.

  In the early days, when books on film aesthetics had yet to be written, filmmakers who were in the forefront were geniuses who instinctively produced works of art which at the same time had a wide appeal. That films had to reach a large public was taken for granted, since filmmaking was a costly business. But the wonder is how little pandering this involved. The one obvious concession to the public was in the use of slapstick, which was a direct importation from the Music Hall and Vaudeville. But in the hands of a filmmaker of genius, even slapstick could be so inventive, so precise in timing and so elaborate in execution that it acquired a high aesthetic value, while retaining its power to provoke laughter. Buster Keaton in his film The General performs the most incredible antics in the driver’s seat of a runaway train, while a full-scale battle rages in the background. To say that the scene is funny is not nearly enough; it is one of the most elating aesthetic experiences in the cinema.

  Unfortunately, this double function of artist and entertainer was rarely sustained in the period of sound. Popular entertainment too often came to mean films of overt escapism, where the artist was conspicuous by his absence.

  It is not easy to define what gives a film the distinction of a work of art. Some definitions will emerge in the course of this talk, but it is necessary at this point to stress the fact that to be able to tell a work of art from a work of mere craftsmanship calls for a trained response. In other words, it calls for what the shastras define as a rasika. One wouldn’t think so from the way seemingly learned opinions on this or that film are bandied about by all and sundry. Nevertheless, it is true that serious accomplished films, films which use the language of the cinema with insight and imagination, challenge our sensibilities in the same way as the more rarefied forms of music, painting, and literature. Even an apparently simple film which makes a direct impact on the emotions may call for understanding.

  It was my growing interest in the cinema as an object for serious study which led to our forming the Calcutta Film Society in the year of India’s independence. Most of the films we showed and discussed were from abroad. To be quite honest, we found nothing worth studying in Bengali films from an aesthetic point of view. But it was interesting to try and discover why they were like what they were.

  There is little doubt that the Bengali’s fondness for the theatre and jatra was one of the things which impeded the growth of a pure cinema in Bengal. When one watched the shooting of a film in the studio, as I had done on several occasions, one had the strong feeling of watching the performance of a play. Rooms had three walls and no ceilings, windows gave onto crudely painted backdrops, dummy books lined the shelves, and the performers appeared plastered with makeup. Right from the start, speech was taken as the primary means of conveying information, with images and gestures hardly given a chance to speak for themselves. Songs and melodrama, standard prescription for Bengali films, were direct imports from the stage. Such was the Bengali’s fondness for songs that K.L. Saigal became a popular hero, and no questions were asked either about his Bengali accent, which was redolent of the Punjab, or his acting ability, which was rudimentary.

  The fact that some of the leading Bengali writers of the time—Sailajananda Mukherji, Premankur Atarthi, Premendra Mitra, Saradindu Bandopadhyaya—were involved in films as writers or directors or both, did little to improve the quality of Bengali films. When writing fiction or poetry, these writers obviously aimed at a literate public; but when writing for films or directing them, they seemed to assume a totally different identity, and aim at the lowest of lowbrows. Occasionally, one would come across a believable character, or a situation with a breath of life in it, but they were invariably smothered by the dead-weight of formula. The idea seemed to be that the cinema being a popular medium, it should only lightly divert and not seriously engage the audience. That it was possible for a film to do both seems not to have struck them at all.

  And yet Bengal never lacked craftsmen. There were excellent cameramen, editors, and sound recordists who knew their jobs, and above all, acting talent of a high order. If the mannerisms of the stage occasionally crept into a film performance, it was because the material itself was conceived in theatrical terms. Such mannerisms were actually encouraged as a sop to the public. Having worked with stage actors myself, I know how well they’re able to tailor style to suit the needs of the cinema.

  But all this excellent material was being used by people who were determined not to encroach into areas which would endanger the safety of their positions. What was singularly lacking was the spirit of adventure. Everyone played safe, and the result was stagnation.

  Two years before the film society was born, I had illustrated an abridged edition of Pather Panchali. It had struck me then that there was a film in the book. But it was no more than a passing thought. But ever since then, whenever I read a work of Bengali fiction, half of my mind would be engaged in exploring its cinematic possibilities.

  One such work of fiction was Rabindranath’s Ghare-Baire. I was then working as an artist in a British advertising agency. In my spare time, I occasionally wrote screenplays as a hobby. In the late forties I wrote one of Ghare-Baire, and there came an exciting point when a producer liked it enough to decide to sponsor a film of it. I signed a contract with him, and so did my friend Harisadhan Das Gupta, who was to direct the film. Since my contribution ended with the writing, it didn’t affect my job in any way.

  But the producer went on to have second thoughts on the screenplay, and suggested some changes. In my youthful pride, I put my foot down. I was certainly not going to let a compromise sully my maiden contribution to the cinema. This led to a deadlock, and ended up in the project falling through. I felt like a pricked balloon at the time, but I can say now, after 35 years, that I consider it the greatest good fortune that the film was never made. Reading the screenplay now, I can see how pitifully superficial and Hollywoodish it was.

  At any rate, I found my mind turning back to Pather Panchali, which had by then taken a more concrete shape. I pondered on it, and on the implications of giving up my job. I felt it would be fun to be an independent artist, working to satisfy a creative urge rather than satisfy the needs of a client. Even at best, advertising art is a functional art, its sole aim being to sell a product. Of course, there is a commodity aspect to films too: the filmmaker works for a sponsor who expects to get his money back, and with a profit. But if—and this was a big if—inspite of a sponsor, it was possible to make a film in total freedom, then the choice for me would be simple.

  Two things happened around this time to ease the way towards a resolution.r />
  The first was the encounter with a director of world stature. Jean Renoir had come to Calcutta to scout locations and interview actors for a film he would be making in Bengal. Renoir was a French director who had emigrated to Hollywood just before Hitler’s army invaded France. I knew his American films, but not his French ones. His films had a poetry and a humanism one rarely found in American films.

  As it turned out, the man himself was very much like his films. He was genial, warm hearted, and ready with advice to a young aspirant. On two occasions, I was lucky enough to be with him while he was out looking for locations. He reacted with gasps of surprise and delight at details which eventually found their way into his film, capturing the Bengal countryside as it had never been captured before. As Renoir told me: ‘You don’t have to have too many elements in a film, but whatever you do, they must be the right elements, the expressive elements.’ Simple-sounding advice, which nevertheless touched on one of the fundamentals of art, which is economy of expression.