The Great Speeches of Modern India

by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

  Also, words have a function that goes well beyond the information they directly convey; much is communicated by the sound of the language and special choice of words to convey a sense, or to create a particular effect. As Ray has noted, ‘in a sound film, words are expected to perform not only a narrative but a plastic function’, and ‘much will be missed unless one knows the language, and knows it well’.

  Indeed, even the narrative may get inescapably transformed because of language barriers—the difficulty of conveying the nuances through translations (not to mention gestures or body movements). I was reminded of Ray’s remark the other day, when I saw Teen Kanya again, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they are currently having a festival of Satyajit Ray’s films. When Paglee—in the sparkling form of Aparna Sen (then Dasgupta)—decides to write, at last, a letter to her spurned husband, she conveys her new sense of adult intimacy by addressing him in the familiar form ‘tumi’ (as he had requested), rather than the formal ‘apni’. This could not, of course, be caught in the English subtitle. So the translation had to show her as signing the letter as ‘your wife’ (to convey something similar in adult intimacy). But the Bengali form in which she signs as ‘Paglee’ but addresses him as ‘tumi’ is infinitely more subtle.

  Such difficulties and barriers cannot be escaped. Ray did not want to aim his movies at a foreign audience, and the Ray fan abroad who rushes to see his films knows that she is, in a sense, eavesdropping. I believe this relationship of the creator and the eavesdropper is by now very well established among the millions of Ray fans across the world. There is no expectation that his films are anything other than that of an Indian—and a Bengali—director made for a local audience, and the attempt to see what is going on is a decision to engage in a self consciously ‘receptive’ activity.

  In this sense, Ray has triumphed and triumphed in his ‘own terms’ and this vindication, despite all the barriers, tells us something about possible communicability across cultural boundaries. It may be hard, but it can be done, and the eagerness with which viewers with much experience of the finest Western cinema flock to see Ray’s films (despite the occasional obscurities of a presentation tailored to an entirely different audience) indicates what is possible when there is a willingness to go beyond the bounds of one’s own culture.

  Satyajit Ray makes an important distinction on what is or is not sensible in trying to speak across a cultural divide, especially between the West and India. In 1958 (two years after Pather Panchali won the special award in Cannes, and one year after the Grand Prix at Venice for Aparajito), he wrote the following:

  ‘There is no reason why we should not cash in on the foreigners’ curiosity about the Orient. But this must not mean pandering to their love of the false-exotic. A great many notions about our country and our people have to be dispelled, even though it may be easier and—from a film point of view—more paying to sustain the existing myths than to demolish them’ (‘Problems of a Bengali Film Maker,’ 1958, included in Our Films, Their Films, 1993).

  Ray was not, of course, unique in following this approach. There have been several other great directors from this country, who have essentially followed the same route as Ray. As an old resident of Calcutta, I am of course proud of the fact that some particularly distinguished ones have come—like Ray—from this very city (I think of course of Mrinal Sen, and also Ritwik Ghatak, Aparna Sen, and others).

  But what Ray calls pandering to the ‘love of the false-exotic’ has clearly tempted many other directors. Many of them have achieved great success abroad, often in West Asia and Africa, and Mumbai has been a big influence on the cinematographic world in many countries. It is not obvious whether the imaginary scenes of archaic splendour shown in such ‘entertainment movies’ should be seen as misdescriptions of India in which they are allegedly set, or as excellent portrayal of some non-existent ‘neverneverland’ (not to be confused with any real country).

  As Ray notes in another context, quite a few of these traditional Indian films, which attract large audiences, ‘do away wholly with [the] bothersome aspect of social identification’ and ‘present a synthetic, non-existent society, and one can speak of credibility only within the norms of this make believe world’ (‘Our Films, Their Films’). Ray suggests that this feature ‘accounts for their countrywide acceptance’.

  This is so, but this make belief feature also contributes greatly to the appeal of these films to some foreign audiences, which is ready to go on seeing lavish entertainment placed in an imagined land. This is, of course, a story of success in an easily understandable sense, since acceptance abroad brings with it both reputation and revenue (and in contemporary India, when the supreme value seems to be ‘export promotion’, who can doubt the quality of this achievement?).

  In fact, the exploitation of the biases and vulnerabilities of the foreign audience need not be concerned specifically with ‘the love of the false-exotic’. Exploitation can take other forms—not necessarily false, nor especially exotic. There is, for example, nothing false about Indian poverty, nor about the fact—remarkable to others—that we have learned to live normal lives taking no notice of the misery and poverty around us. The graphic portrayal of extreme misery and people’s heartlessness towards the downtrodden can itself be exploitatively utilized, especially when supplemented by a goodly supply of vicious villains.

  At quite a sophisticated level, such exploitation can be seen even in that wonderfully successful film by Meera Nair, Salaam Bombay. That film has received much acclaim, mostly with justice, since it is very powerfully constructed and deeply moving. And yet it mercilessly exploits not only the viewer’s raw sympathy, but also his interest in identifying ‘the villain of the piece’ who could be blamed for all this.

  Since Salaam Bombay is full of villains and also of people totally lacking in sympathy and any sense of justice, the causes of the misery and suffering portrayed in the film begin to look easily understandable even to distant foreigners. (This feature of reliance on villains is relatively less present in Meera Nair’s next film, Mississippi Masala, which raises some interesting and deep issues about identity and intermixing, in this case, involving ex-Ugandans of Indian origin encountering African Americans in the United States).

  The underlying philosophy takes them straight to the rhetorical question: given the lack of humanity of people around the victims, what else can you expect? The exploitative form draws at once (i) on the knowledge—common in the West—that India has much poverty and suffering, and (ii) on the comfort—for which there is some demand—of seeing the faces of the ‘baddies’ who are causing all this trouble (as in, say, American gangster movies). At a more mundane level, The City of Joy does the same with Calcutta, with clearly identified villains who have to be confronted.

  In contrast, even when Ray’s films deal with problems that are just as intense (such as the coming of the Bengal famine in Ashani Sanket), the comfort of the ready explanation through the prominent presence of marauding villains is sharply avoided. Indeed, villains are remarkably rare—almost absent—in Satyajit Ray’s films. When terrible things happen, there may be no one clearly responsible for the evil happening. Even when someone ‘is’ clearly responsible, as Dayamoyee’s father in law most definitely is for her predicament, and ultimately death, in the film Devi, he too is a victim and by no means devoid of humane features.

  If Salaam Bombay and The City of Joy are, ultimately, in the ‘cops and robbers’ tradition (except that there are no ‘good cops’ in ‘Salaam Bombay’), the Ray films which portray tragedies and sufferings have neither cops nor robbers. One result of this abstinence is that Ray manages to convey something of the complexity of social situations that make such tragedies hard to avoid, rather than seeking easy explanations in the greed, cupidity and cruelty of some very ‘bad’ people. In eschewing easy communicability of films in which nasty people cause nasty events, Ray provides visions that are both complex and valuable.

  While Satyajit Ray insi
sts on retaining the real cultural features of the society that he portrays, his view of India—indeed even of Bengal—is full of recognition of a complex reality, with immense heterogeneity at every level. It is not the picture of a stylized East meeting a formulaic West, which has been the stock in trade of so many recent cultural writings critical of Westernization and modernity. Indeed, Ray points out that the people who ‘inhabit’ his films, are both complicated and extremely heterogeneous:

  ‘Take a single province: Bengal. Or, better still, take the city of Calcutta where I live and work. Accents here vary between one neighbourhood and another. Every educated Bengali peppers his native speech with a sprinkling of English words and phrases. Dress is not standardized. Although women generally prefer the sari, men wear clothes which reflect the style of the thirteenth century or conform to the directives of the latest “Esquire”. The contrast between the rich and the poor is proverbial. Teenagers do the twist and drink Coke, while the devout Brahmin takes a dip in the Ganges and chants his “mantras” to the rising sun’ (Our Films, Their Films).

  One important thing to note immediately here is that the native culture which Ray emphasizes is not some pure vision of a tradition bound society, but the heterogenous lives and commitments of contemporary India. The one who does the ‘twist’ is as much there as is the one who chants his ‘mantras’ after dipping in the Ganges.

  The recognition of this heterogeneity makes it immediately clear why Satyajit Ray’s focus on local culture cannot be readily seen as an ‘anti-modern’ move. ‘Our culture’ can draw on ‘their culture’ as well, as can ‘their culture’ draw on ‘ours’. The acknowledgement of and emphasis on the culture of the people who inhabit Ray’s films is in no way a denial of the legitimacy of seeking interest in things originating elsewhere. Indeed, Ray recollects with evident joy the time when Calcutta was full of Western—including American—troops in the winter of 1942.

  ‘Calcutta now being a base of operations of the war, Chowringhee was choc-a-bloc with GIs. The pavement book stalls displayed wafer-thin editions of “Life” and “Time”, and the jam-packed cinema showed the very latest films from Hollywood. While I sat at my office desk…, my mind buzzed with the thoughts of the films I had been seeing. I never ceased to regret that while I had stood in the scorching summer sun in the wilds of Santiniketan sketching “simul” and “palash” in full bloom, “Citizen Kane” had come and gone, playing for just three days in the newest and biggest cinema in Calcutta.’ (Our Films, Their Films, p.s.).

  This was the continuation of an interest in things from elsewhere that had begun a lot earlier, but which in wartime Calcutta found much greater real opportunity than ever before.

  Ray’s interest in Western classical music goes back to his youth, but his interest in films preceded this commitment to music.

  ‘I became a film fan while still at school. I avidly read “Picturegoer” and “Photoplay”, neglected my studies and gorged myself on Hollywood gossip purveyed by Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Deanna Durbin became a favourite not only because of her looks and her obvious gifts as an actress, but because of her lovely soprano voice. Also firm favourites were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, all of whose films I saw several times just to learn the Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern tunes by heart’ (My Years with Apu: A Memoir).

  Ray’s willingness to enjoy and learn from things happening elsewhere—within India or abroad—is plentifully clear in how he chose to live and what he chose to do. When Ray describes what he learned as a student at Santiniketan, the elements from home and abroad are well mixed together: on the one hand, things about India’s ‘artistic and musical heritage’ (he got involved in Indian classical music, aside from being trained to paint in traditional Indian ways), ‘and’ on the other, ‘fareastern calligraphy’ (and particularly the use of ‘minimum brush strokes applied with maximum discipline’).

  When his teacher, Professor Nandalal Bose, a great artist and the leading light of the Bengal school, taught Ray how to draw a tree (‘Not from the top downwards. A tree grows up, not down. The strokes must be from the base upwards…’), Bose was being at once critical of some Western conventions, while introducing Ray to the styles and traditions in two other countries abroad, China and Japan.

  Ray does not hesitate to indicate how strongly his Pather Panchali—the profound movie that immediately made him a frontranking filmmaker in the world—was directly influenced by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. He notes that not only had he seen Bicycle Thieves within three days of arriving in London, but also the following: ‘I knew immediately that if I ever made “Pather Panchali”—and the idea had been at the back of my mind for some time—I would make it in the same way, using natural locations and unknown actors’ (Our Films, Their Films).

  Despite this influence, Pather Panchali is a quintessentially Indian film, both in subject matter and in the style of presentation, and yet a major inspiration for the exact organization for the film came directly from an Italian film. The Italian influence did not make Pather Panchali anything other than an Indian film—it simply helped it to become a ‘great Indian film’.

  The growing tendency that we increasingly find in contemporary India to champion the need for an indigenous culture that has ‘resisted’ external influences and borrowings lacks credibility as well as cogency. It has become quite common to cite the foreign origin of an idea or a tradition as an argument against its use, and this has been linked up with an anti-modernist priority.

  But Indian culture, as it has evolved, has always been prepared to absorb material and ideas from elsewhere. Satyajit Ray’s heterodoxy is not, in any sense, out of line with our tradition.

  Even in matters of day to day living, the fact that the chilli, a basic ingredient of traditional Indian cooking, was brought to India by the Portuguese from the ‘new world’, does not make current Indian cooking, which does not repudiate the chilli, any less Indian, chilli has now become an ‘Indian’ spice.

  Cultural influences are, of course, a two-way process, and India has borrowed from abroad, just as we have also given the world outside the benefits of our cooking tradition. For example, while tandoori came from West Asia to India, it is from India that tandoori has become a staple British diet. It may be a bit premature to use an expression I heard in London last summer: ‘It is as English as daffodils or chicken tikka masala.’ But with the acceptance and common use of that cooking form (if that continues to grow as it has been doing at rates no one could have predicted), there would be nothing startling to use an expression of this kind at an appropriate time in the future.

  The mixture of traditions that underlie the major intellectual developments in the world militates strongly against taking a ‘national’ (or a ‘regional’ or a ‘local community based’) view of these developments. The role of mixed heritage in a subject like mathematics is, of course, well known. The interlinkage between Indian, Arabic and European mathematics has been particularly significant in the development of what is now called Western mathematics. The connections are beautifully illustrated by the origin of the term ‘sine’ common in Western trigonometry. That modern term—sine—came to India straight through the British, and yet its genesis there is a remarkable Indian component. Aryabhata had discussed the concept of ‘sine’ in the fifth century, and he called it ‘jya ardha’ (half chord). From there the term moved on in an interesting migratory way, as Howard Eves describes:

  ‘Aryabhata called it “ardhya jya” (half chord) and “jya ardha” (chord half ), and then abbreviated the term by simply using “jya” (chord). From “jya” the Arabs phonetically derived “jiba”, which, following Arabic practice of omitting vowels, was written as “jb”. Now “jiba”, aside from its technical significance, is a meaningless word in Arabic. Later writers who came across “jb” as an abbreviation for the meaningless word “jiba” substituted “jaib” instead, which contains the same letters, and is a good Arabic word meaning “cove” or “bay”. Still lat
er, Gherardo of Cremona (ca. 1150), when he made his translations from the Arabic, replaced the Arabic “jaib” by its Latin equivalent, “sinus” (meaning a cove or a bay), from whence came our present word sine’ (Howard Eves, An Introduction to the History of Mathematics, New York: Saunders College Publishing House, 6th edition, 1990).

  Given the cultural and intellectual interconnections, the question what is ‘Western’ and what is ‘Eastern’ (or ‘Indian’) is often hard to decide, and the issue can be discussed only in more dialectical terms. The diagnosis of a thought as ‘purely Western’ or ‘purely Indian’ can be very illusory. The origin of ideas is not the kind of thing to which ‘purity’ happens easily.

  This issue has some practical importance right now given the political developments of the last decade, including the increase in the strength of political parties focussing on Indian—and particularly Hindu—heritage. There is an important aspect of anti-modernism, which tends to question—explicitly or by implication—the emphasis to be placed on what is called ‘Western science’. If and when the challenges from traditional conservatism grow, this can become quite a threat to scientific education in India, affecting what young Indians are encouraged to learn and how much emphasis is put on science in the general curriculum. This approach is, however, based on a deluded reading of cultural differences.

  First, so called ‘Western science’ is not the special possession of Europe and America. Certainly, since the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, most of the scientific progress has actually occurred in the West. But these scientific developments drew substantially on earlier work in mathematics and science done by the Arabs, the Chinese, the Indians, and others. The term ‘Western science’ is misleading in this respect, and quite misguided in its tendency to establish a distance between non-Western people and the pursuit of mathematics and science.