Theater of Cruelty (32 page)

This was the source of some ambivalence. Since they were colonial middlemen their interests lay with the British Empire, which their political ideals would ultimately lead them to oppose. Their sons and grandsons, frustrated by the lack of political power on the one hand and the inertia of Indian traditions on the other, often turned to Marxist radicalism. The reformist zeal of the
bhadralok
left a legacy in Bengal of Marxist government and occasional terrorism. The cultural sophistication, the fruit of the Bengali renaissance, gave us thousands
of garrulous coffee-shop philosophers, millions of poets, and the occasional genius, such as Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray.

Tagore’s grandfather, Dwarkanath, was a typical example of the pioneering
bhadralok
. He started off as the chief native officer of the East India Company’s opium and salt department, but in true
bhadralok
style later owned several English-language newspapers. A British friend described him as “a Hindoo with an enlarged mind and a truly British spirit.” He might have said the same about Satyajit Ray’s grandfather, Upendrakisore Ray, an accomplished musician of Western classical music, graphic artist, composer of songs, and writer of children’s stories. Upendrakisore launched a children’s monthly magazine called
Gandesh
, which Satyajit revived in 1961 and in which most of the short stories in
The Unicorn Expedition
first appeared.
³
Few renaissance men maintain the same level of excellence in everything they put their hands to. Although Ray’s stories, written for teenagers, never quite scale the heights of his films, they are suffused with the same spirit.

His characters reflect the gentle patrician humanism, so typically
bhadralok
and so typical of Ray’s work. There is Shonku, the scientist-inventor, whom Ray calls “a mild-mannered version of Professor Challenger,” one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s creations. Professor Shonku travels around the world showing off his strange inventions—a computer the size of a football that knows the answers to a million questions, or Corvus, the crow genius. Like Ray, Shonku is cosmopolitan, at home in most capital cities, thirsty for new knowledge, but at the same time very Indian in his fascination with the metaphysical. His adventures take him to Zen gardens in Kyoto and Tibetan monasteries where he learns how to fly off to an imaginary
land filled with unicorns. The Shonku stories, in the manner of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, humanize science. The author’s attitude, his humanism, and his faith in science remind one of a more self-confident age in the West, when people still believed in progress, an age before Auschwitz and the invention of the atom bomb. Indians (and most Asians, for that matter) often like to make the neat distinction between scientific Western civilization and spiritual Eastern civilization. Professor Shonku, again a bit like his creator, quite successfully manages to straddle both.

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:

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, appears 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.