Sunday, January 19, 2003		Books

Narrow shot of a big man
M. L. Raina

The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity
by Darius Cooper. Cambridge University Press, New York. Pages xii+260. $22.95

YEARS ago when I taught a course on fiction and film at an American university, I was often hauled up for ignoring what Ray’s western critics called his "sentimentality and nostalgia." At that time there were no Andrew Robinson and Darius Cooper commentaries to guide me. My principal objective was to assert Ray’s superiority over all other Indian filmmakers and to express renewed faith in the vanishing genre of art cinema in India and the Third World.

I was convinced then, as I am convinced now, that Satyajit Ray is our greatest contemporary filmmaker and that one need not be apologetic about art cinema. Largely silent on the latter, Darius Cooper’s commentary on the major films parallels my own understanding of Ray’s work formed over a decade and a half of repeated viewings. Cooper helps me in placing Ray within the Bengali middle-class culture while emphasising his universal significance.

At a time when even well-meaning academics are seduced by the crass infantilism of films like Lagaan (its breathless American reception stands the much-maligned Orientalist posturing on its head), Darius Cooper’s book redirects us into the riches of Ray’s difficult but intensely lyrical creations whose signature is the total absence of complacency.

One could talk of the musical motif that recurs at crucial points in Pather Panchali and deepens the emotional tone of the particular frame. Or of the frequent table thumping of Proshanto in the late film Shakha Prashakha that nullifies the pomposity of Ashoke and Probir. One could show the juxtaposing of Calcutta City and the dark forest in Days and Nights in the Forest or the ever-visible presence of the Kanchenchuga peak in the film of that name. All these Cooper analyses with patient care, revealing an intricacy in Ray’s work not amenable to the superficial treatment of popular cinema.

Strongly grounded in the Indian tradition, Ray mastered the cinematic art of the West and adapted it to his own purposes. The long shots in Devi, the crowd scenes in Pratidwandi and the blending of the comic and the serious in the Apu films indicate his sense of the malleability of the medium. Darius Cooper very attentively studies these details to bring out their relevance in the total structure of the work. He questions pseudo-feminist and other reductive readings by making clear the independence of Ray’s women and the timidity of his men. He credits the auteur with full grasp of colonialism in the Chess Players.

These chapters are focused on both the sociological and psychological nature of the characters (such as the women’s sexuality) and enlarge our view of the director as a conscious and morally (as opposed to ideologically) committed artist. Cooper goes into the characters’ complexities by closely reading central episodes in selected films. In no other director’s work do we find such variety of people and such wide-angle grasp of social and psychological character traits. Mrinal Sen and Govind Nihalani are hortative, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan (except in Mukham Mukham) grows more subjective. Only Ray, in my opinion, is deep enough to record the fluctuating rhythms of human action in his characters.

If Ray’s moral commitment enables him to cut across narrow ideological blinkers, as Cooper believes, his muted lyricism makes for visual concentration, admitting no laid-back hedonistic response. Like a tight symbolist poem, Ray’s films reveal as much as they conceal, putting the viewer’s perception to a stem test. Ray shares this quality with all great filmmakers, particularly Renoir, Hitchcok and Kurusawa, as anyone familiar with them would attest. Using the Rasa theory to read Ray’s films does not pronouncedly bring this out, much as Cooper labours to make us believe so.

Cooper’s signal failure in this book is to take out the Rasa theory from its Indian closet and slot Ray into it. What Cooper wants to prove by his recourse to Indian aesthetics is evident to any close reader of the films, especially if they, like Cooper, are familiar with the New Critical methods of analysis. Ray’s openness to Western culture and his appreciation of fellow directors would make it impossible to tie him down to any particular aesthetical doctrine.

Besides, Cooper’s knowledge of Indian aesthetics is suspect since he cites no first-hand evidence in support of his statements. Like a standard American thesis, this book makes do with secondary sources of dubious kinds, Nirad Chaudhari on Hinduism, for one. Enough to mar a decidedly perceptive study!