Charulata

I’ve been fortunate to see more Satyajit Ray films in Toronto in the last six years than I could in more than a decade when I was in India. In India I saw most of Ray’s oeuvre on TV. Here in Toronto I’ve seen all the films on the big screen – either at Ray or Tagore festivals. It makes a world of difference to see these films on the big screen.

This summer TIFF Bell Lightbox has organized a comprehensive festival of Ray’s films from July 3 to August 17. The Sun and the Moon – The Films of Satyajit Ray will screen all of Ray’s important classics.

Surprisingly, the screenings have been well-attended. In fact, had it not been for the generosity of my friend Mariellen Ward, a friend of India and an intrepid travel blogger, who gave me a free ticket, I wouldn’t have been able to attend Kathleen O’Donnell’s lecture on and the subsequent screening of Charulata (The Lonely Wife – 1964).  

Kathleen O’Donnell is a professor at the University of Toronto teaching Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray. Ray turned Tagore’s Nastanirh – the broken nest – into Charulata.

Kathleen O’Donnell’s introduction to Ray delineated all the important facets of the filmmaker, including Tagore’s influence, the basic grounding in the ideas of the Bengali renaissance, the confluence of western and oriental thought as exemplified by the Brahmo Samaj,  his career as a commercial artist, his interest in calligraphy and the creation of the Ray Roman font, Ray’s abiding debt to the French filmmaker Jean Renoir, and his almost-maniacal attention to details to all aspects of film making – from directing to script, music, set-design, costumes, cinematography and editing. Unfortunately, as she was warming up to the subject, it was time for the screening.

Charulata is one of Ray’s best.  It is a period film (1879) – depicting the height of the Bengali renaissance, when the issues that had been raised nearly a century ago in public fora were now being hotly debated in homes. Of special significance was the role of women in the family and the society. The film depicts the cloistered lives of women in feudal households, with nothing much to do except knit, make paan, play cards, and supervise the household help; the few who could read and occasionally wrote.

Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee) is one such housewife, and falls in love with her husband’s cousin Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee).  The woolly-headed husband Bhupati (Sailen Mukherjee) runs his own newspaper, and is forever obsessed with British political happenings and English thought, and how these would affect Indians.  He doesn’t have time for Charu, or for the books she reads. Amal, on the other hand, is young and has all the time to feed Charu’s fantasies. She falls in love with him, but he is not willing to betray his brother and beats a hasty retreat. When Bhupati discovers Charu’s love for Amal, he is shattered and attempts to leave, but returns to what is now a broken nest.

In The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, film critic and Ray’s contemporary Chidananda Das Gupta (1921-2011) says, “The secret of their identification with an otherwise uncomfortable theme lay in the state of innocence of the characters caught in the web of forces greater than themselves. Their lack of conscious knowledge of what is happening inside them gives them a certain nobility; it is in their awakening that their tragedy lies. Amal, the younger man, is the first to realize the truth; for Charu it is an imperceptible movement from the unconscious to the conscious; for the husband, it is a sudden, stark, unbelievable revelation of truth. All three wake up, as it were, into the twentieth century, the age of self-consciousness. The rhythm of the unfolding is so gentle, impeccable and true that there is no sense of shock even for the conservative Indian, although Ray’s film was as daring for the wider audience as Tagore’s story had been in its day.”

Incidentally, it is believed that Tagore’s story may have been based on the relationship between Rabindranath and Kadambaridevi, the wife of Rabindranath’s elder brother Jyotirindranath. Kadambaridevi committed suicide soon after Rabindranath’s marriage. Rabindranath and Kadambaridevi wrote and read poetry together.

I also saw Mahanagar the next day. But I’ll write about that some other time. The post has become too long. 

Premchand & Manto

I was at a meeting earlier this week, where one of the topics discussed was the several languages of the South Asia. Hindi and Urdu are the main (and official) languages of India and Pakistan.

Shorn of the excesses of linguistic Puritanism and zeal on part of the establishments in India and Pakistan to distinguish the languages (and force officialese on the people), there really isn’t any substantial difference between the two. The word Hindustani captures the true essence of how hundreds of millions of people speak Hindi and Urdu language in large swathes of South Asia.

Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) and Sadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) wrote in Hindustani. Manto used the Urdu script. Premchand alternated between Hindi and Urdu. I don’t know whether they ever met. I would imagine they must have met considering they were contemporaries and both wrote in Urdu. Both were tremendously influenced – their works indicate this in ample measures – by humanism. Both were overtly political but used literature to voice their views.
Not for them the empty rhetoric of form versus content or the argument of whether art should be for art sake or should art be a catalyst for socio-political change. They were firmly believed in using art as means to highlight the ills in the society they lived in. Both were briefly involved with the Hindi film industry as writers.

It’s perhaps my misfortune that I’ve read both only in English translations. I can’t read Urdu, and though I can read Hindi, I prefer to read fiction in English; I guess that’s because of habit and nothing else. I have read Premchand’s Godaan and a few short stories by Manto’s – Toba Tek Singh, Thanda Gohst (Cold Meat), among others.

Manto immigrated to Pakistan after the Partition of the subcontinent, and died soon thereafter. But before his premature death – triggered I think by the acute depression caused because he had to leave Bombay – created masterpieces of prose form.

Toba Tek Singh is one of them. I’m no literary expert, but I can’t think of too many parallels in world literature that can match Toba Tek Singh’s stark brutality. It evocatively depicts the lunacy of the Partition of the subcontinent through the experiences of the lunatic Toba Tek Singh.

This is how the story ends: “After fifteen years on his feet, he was lying face down on the ground. India was on one side, behind a barbed wire fence. Pakistan was on the other side, behind another fence. Toba Tek Singh lay in the middle, on a piece of land that had no name.” (Translated from Urdu by Richard McGill Murphy, available at the Words without Borders website: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=toba

Premchand is said to have brought realism to Indian literature. Godaan’s simplicity hides the inherently unjust nature of the traditional Indian society. For a scholarly exposition on the novel, please take a look at the Literature section of Indianetzone website. The URL is: http://society.indianetzone.com/literature/1/godan.htm. The anonymous author of this piece emphasizes the new introduction to the book by Vasudha Dalmia.

Dalmia’s introduction to Godaan states: “Premchand presented in his fiction an understanding of the social reality decades before academic scholarship could “squarely face it”. She suggests the use of some essays from the volume of Subaltern Studies published in the early eighties for a greater comprehension of Godaan through political and social history of Awadh.”

Premchand’s international fame is also because the foremost Indian film-maker Satyajit Ray turned two of Premchand’s works – Sadgati and Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players) – into memorable movies. Also, several short stories of Premchand (most memorable of these was, undoubtedly Kafan) have been turned into television films by Doordarshan. Also, while researching about Premchand on the internet, I discovered an absolutely amazing blog called Munshi Premchand’s Stories.

Manto's sketch from: http://www.urdustudies.com/auinfo/auphotos/Manto.jpg

Premchand's sketch from: http://munshi-premchand.blogspot.com/2006/03/blog-post_114178765150842259.html