Opinion | No, Satyajit Ray Is Not Your 'Renaissance Man'

Ask any scholar of world cinema, and you will know how widely and globally recognised Satyajit Ray's cinematic genius is. However, his career in India—living and posthumous—is a complex matter. It reveals a lot about Indian society and the structures that constitute its state apparatuses. Like many other stalwarts of his time and later, Ray's artistic legacy has been assimilated, tempered, and, often, even censored beyond recognition by the very institutions that appear to celebrate him.

Ray, who was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1992 - a month before his demise - had the distinction of seeing his documentary film Sikkim (1971) being banned by the government. A clear look into Ray's life and works reveals that the same political, cultural, and ideological frameworks that he often deconstructed in his cinema have contributed a great deal to the mythmaking surrounding his posthumous existence. And even though much of that mythology seems laudatory, one can't be sure whether Ray would have approved.

'A Bureaucratic Invention'

Ray's status as a harbinger of what was described in his last months as an ‘Indian Renaissance' wasn't entirely uncontested. Mercifully so! In 1992, a few months after Ray's demise, Utpal Dutt delivered a seminar commemorating his colleague's craftsmanship and ethical commitments. Among other things, Dutt mounted a scathing critique of the invisible nexus a few opportunistic elements of the Indian state and the cultural imperialism of the ‘West'. As Dutt reminded us, despite Ray's global acclaim, his film Teen Kanya (1961), adapted from Rabindranath Tagore's short stories, was distilled down to Two Daughters for state television. An audience mature enough was deemed unfit to understand the emotional or intellectual maturity the original film demanded.

A still from Teen Kanya (1961)

Besides, Dutt was particularly troubled by the idea of Ray being a ‘Renaissance' man. He dismissed it as a bureaucratic invention lacking historical sincerity. Far from finding flaws in Ray's work and legacy, Dutt saw the title as compensation for the negligence doled out to his colleague during his lifetime.  Though not a historian himself, Dutt's analysis was impeccable. He contrasted the so-called ‘renaissance' with the more historically sanguine ‘Bengal Renaissance'. The latter, unlike its purported ‘national' counterpart, arose in the early 19th century out of palpable social, political, cultural, and ethical obligations - especially within and in opposition to a British regime. Transplanting that label onto Ray's posthumous specter was not just misleading, according to Dutt, but also politically manipulative as it sought to retrospectively reclaim Ray after the West had already validated his contributions through an honorary Oscar. 

In other words, some of India's state apparatuses were happy to ignore Ray until Hollywood - which itself was exposed to Ray's oeuvre only superficially - made it impossible for audiences back home to look the other way. The posthumous glorification his image underwent was, by no means, unique. It symptomised a larger institutional malaise in selectively supporting intellectuals, artists, scholars, and creative geniuses.

The People Who Didn't Care For Ray

Recently, India's political leaders made headlines by debating what constituted the concept of a ‘state'. It was eventually concluded - somewhat churlishly and belatedly - that ‘state' comprises not only the ruling establishment but also the opposition. More significantly, as teachers of sociology and civic sciences will inform us, it also comprises various governmental and nongovernmental institutions that directly or indirectly collaborate in the nation state's functioning. In that comprehensive sense, even ‘We, the People' constitute the nation-state of India, that is Bharat. This clarification is important in Ray's context because a bulk of the apathy and misinterpretations directed towards him did not come from state actors but social structures.

This was done in the guise of a seemingly sophisticated but actually lazy objection. Some listless critics suggested that Ray's cinema looked apolitical. Accordingly, it was driven by humanist concerns, not social or ideological acuity. It took his demise for that premise to be challenged.

As Chandak Sengoopta argues, Ray's films were ideologically layered and underpinned by anticolonial Bengali liberalism. Ray was not detached from the national discourse. Films like Jalsaghar (1958), Charulata (1964), and Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977) were not just period dramas meant to nostalgically depict teakwood, boudoirs, artefacts, musical instruments, and knickknacks from nineteenth-century Calcutta and Lucknow. They confronted repressed questions of gendered private and public spaces and how old-fashioned coloniality affected postcolonial national subjects, whether male, female, anglicised, indigenised, libertarian, free-marketeer, or statist.

A still from Jalsaghar (1958)

For example, one is not likely to find a direct feminist denunciation of patriarchal structures in Ray's critical oeuvre. But, as Devapriya Sanyal rightly adds, Ray's cinema was far more nuanced, in that it made men the bearers of the burden of being ‘national subjects' without leaving female characters out as irrelevant; he made them witnesses to the success or failure of their male counterparts, enfranchising them as the barometers of societal change. Simultaneously, as eloquently explained by Bishnupriya Ghosh, Ray's “preoccupation with rural history, folk-cultures and religions of India” only goes to underscore “his interest in articulating the non-western aspects of Indian culture”.

Unlike filmmakers committed to political activism, Ray did not rely on straightforward political staging to convey his ideology. Instead, he explored complex ideological interplays at locations where they truly manifest - the intimate lives of characters. 

Ray's Nehruvian Beliefs

Ray was seen, erroneously of course, as being in alignment with Nehruvian developmental policies. That naturally led disengaged critics to think that someone of Ray's lineage—with Brahmo ideals and familial privilege—could only be too content with the fact of India's independence and an elite class's control over the nation's social and cultural capital. Brinda Bose, for instance, has in passing somewhat reaffirmed that Ray's early cinema ‘strongly endorsed Jawaharlal Nehru's vision of nation-building, which Ray greatly admired then'. Ray's ‘idealism', bordering on the ‘romantic' in Aparajito, The Unvanquished (1956) or Mahanagar (1963), has appealed to Bose as being related to history without any ‘violent ruptures but only lessons from the past and present'. Suman Ghosh has, however, emphatically argued that Ray instead stood ‘in defiance of the state'.

A still from Aparajito, The Unvanquished (1956)

It is indeed true, as Jyotika Virdi cautions, that Ray's contemporary and rival from Bengal, Ritwik Ghatak, was ‘a superb filmmaker in his own right, from whom Satyajit Ray, many believe, undeservingly 'stole the spotlight'. Nonetheless, as Ravi Vasudevan might elaborate, though Ray's cinema may have seemed unopposed to the immediate meaning of Nehruvian nation building, it never aligned with the state's construction of a coherent national identity. Themes of displacement, social dichotomy, and incomplete or fragmented modernities continued to punctuate his filmmaking. Perhaps, what disturbed Ray the most was India's middle-class nationalist imagination. This disturbance probably became most acute in films like Sadgati (1981) and Ganashatru (1989), which were highly critical of social injustice, class inequities, and caste-based oppression.

It might seem here that the objective of this article has been to lament the lack of credit given to Ray during his life. It may also appear that, in doing so, the piece highlights the tension between market forces and artistic expressions. These, however, are just some weary costumes that this piece has worn to try to convey a subtler moral imperative. Dutt was of the view that if Ray's film Devi [or perhaps his adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1882) in Ganashatru] had truly seeped into the Indian psyche, the religious fanaticism of the 1980s and 1990s would have perhaps unfolded differently.

The Myth Of An 'Apolitical' Ray

In other words, artists like Ray may not be the good-old realists that socialist regimes warranted, but poets in whom, as T.S. Eliot described in Tradition and the Individual Talent, the persona “who suffers and the mind which creates” are distinct entities; such a poet or artist creates not by reproducing one's own experience but by digesting and transmuting “the passions which are its material”. In those transmutations lay Ray's challenge to the dominant ideologies and power structures that, after they had ignored him in his prime, sought to claim his legacy as their own.

Ray was not apolitical. Ironically, in fact, morphing his stature as 20th-century India's ‘Renaissance Man' was a depoliticisation of his life - or lives like his, whose artistic genius has been used to mask India's social contradictions.  The reader cannot be blamed for thinking that this article was written in disapproval of Ray's delayed recognition by certain factors of the Indian state. But, it was not. Rather, it was written in recognition of the fact that posthumous or highly belated recognitions from the state and society often seek to camouflage uncomfortable truths - truths that these very awardees spoke, before they were to speak no more.

[Arup K. Chatterjee is the author of 'The Great Indian Railways' (2017, 2019), 'Indians in London' (2021), and 'Adam's Bridge' (2024)]

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author