Our Culture, Their Culture:
Indian-ness in Satyajit Ray and Rabindranath Tagore
explored through their works Charulata and Nashtanir

by Kaustuv Sen

(Editor's intro: Kaustuv Sen is a
columnist for the Harvard Crimson.)

 

"Although you have roots here in Bengal, in India--
you are at the same time part of a large plan, a universal
pattern. This uniqueness and this universality and the
coexistence of the two, is what I mainly try to convey
through my films."     Satyajit Ray

"Languages are jealous sovereigns, and passports are
rarely allowed for travelers to cross their strictly guarded
boundaries."   Rabindranath Tagore

A film that, when pressed, Satyajit Ray would choose as his best ever and the controversial, highly personal Tagore novella upon which it is based are the focus of this article. Ray believed that the 1964 Berlin Prize-winning Charulata was the film in which he had made the least mistakes, and the turn-of-the-century Nashtanir (The Broken Nest) is a barely disguised autobiographical and intimate account of the triangular affections between Tagore, his elder brother Jatirindranath and Jatirindranath's wife, Kadambari Devi. The importance of this relationship to the poet can be gauged by a confession Tagore made in the waning years of his life to the painter Nandalal Bose, that it was Kadambari's eyes that formed the basis of his many haunting female portraits, a mainstay of the very unconventional painting that Tagore started at the age of seventy.

The two artistes require little introduction. Giants in their respective fields of literature and filmmaking, both men enjoyed widespread international recognition in their lifetimes, Tagore receiving only the third ever Nobel prize for literature in 1913, and Ray a lifetime achievement Oscar besides a number of firsts at the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals. What Tagore did for Bengali letters in his poetry and stories-redefining the parameters of Bengali prose and creating a new literary language as he went along -Ray did for Indian cinema, starting with his first film Pather Panchali in 1955. Though separated by more than half a century, Tagore and Ray are bound together by the common thread of an intellectual and spiritual resurgence in India often commonly termed the Bengal Renaissance.

Of Ray's 25-odd films, all but two of them were based on existing scripts. Ray maintained that in the evaluation of such films, it is not beneficial to compare the filmed version with the original novel at every step "because cinema and literature are two separate art forms, because while doing the screenplay of any story some changes are inevitable." In particular, he wrote a scathing reply, never published, to a critic who had denigrated his departures from the original in Charulata, fuming that such a comparison was wholly unproductive. However, the critic's particular agenda aside, these changes do form the basis of the interpretive act by a director, especially a total filmmaker like Ray who would write the adaptive screenplay, conceptualize, cast, direct and edit the film and even photograph sequences behind the primary camera himself. As such, both Ray's loyalty to and deviations from Tagore's work serve to reveal nuances and differences in the thinking of the two men, not least with respect to their conceptions of a social and national identity for Bengal.
The main features of the plot on which both agree are fairly straightforward. The narrative tells of a middle-aged brown sahib Bengali landowner, Bhupati Majumdar, his wife Charulata, much younger than him, lonely but sensitive and literary, and the carefree college-going Amal, Bhupati's younger cousin-brother who takes up residence in their household. Bhupati is a worshipper of European rationality, is constantly engrossed in the editing and publishing of a political journal in English which stridently proclaims his belief that the salvation of India is tied to a victory of the Liberals in the British Parliamentary elections. Lost in this faraway world of political intrigue, he is a poor companion for the poetic, somewhat whimsical Charu, and misses her development from a child-wife into a young woman.

Amal, on the other hand, is footloose and fancy-free and has literary ambitions of his own. The traditional Bengali relationship of intimate affection laced with a little license between a woman and her debar (husband's younger brother) develops here on a footing of shared artistic dreams. There are some especially poignant moments in the household garden where Charu and Amal, through alliterative wordplays and rhetorical foibles, exhort each other to literary efforts. Amal, however, goes on to publish some of these writings in Sharoruha, a contemporary journal. In time, he gains a following which bestows upon him typically farfetched epithets such as "the Ruskin of Bengal" . Charu is strangely upset at Amal's popularity, and feels violated at the intrusion of anonymous readers into their intimate literary circle of two.

The dénouement of the story comes with Amal's hesitant consciousness of there being more to Charu's emotions towards him than mere sisterly affection. Simultaneously, Charu's brother, Umapada, who has been working as Bhupati's business manager, betrays Bhupati's trust and absconds with all their money, leaving Bhupati laden with debt and broken-spirited. Amal, not wanting the further betrayal of Bhupati that must come if he continues to live in close proximity to Charu, departs suddenly. At this point, Ray and Tagore diverge significantly even on the basic plot. The common elements that remain are Bhupati's gargantuan delayed realization of the relationship between Amal and Charu, and the handling of the aftermath.

Besides this backbone of plot and emotion, there is much else that Ray's film owes to Tagore. For example, the musical score of the movie, composed entirely by Ray himself, comes back repeatedly to the motifs of two popular Tagore songs, momo chittye and phule phule. Both are evocative of the restless yearning of a free spirit aroused by the resonant beat in another, and Ray has Charu sing them at key junctures of progress in her relationship with Amal. One especially memorable instance is the famous swing scene, where Charu on the swing is observing an oblivious Amal through her lorgnettes, while Ray's innovative jump-cuts frame her swaying body and the barely perceptible ripples on her face suggest that she can no longer deny the ebb and flow of her feelings for her thakurpo (another word for debar). As Amal looks up, she starts humming phule phule.

Another theme that binds Ray to Tagore is the constant evocation of Bankim Chandra Chatterji as a motif in the film. Bankim is the father of the Bengali literary Renaissance, and the Gurudev's own Guru. In Rabindrananth's own words, "Bankimchandra lifted the dead weight of ponderous forms from our language. . . and a great promise and a vision of beauty she revealed to us when she awoke in the fullness of her grace." The first to recognize Tagore's prodigious talent, Bankim, much older than Tagore, was long dead by the time Ray was born. A return to Bankim, for Ray, can only happen via the bridge of Tagore, signifying a stepping back into a well-loved classical world. The movie opens with Bankim, when Charu picks up an old classic of the writer's Kapalakundala humming "Bankim, bankim", a popular tune. Bankim returns when Charu and Amal are having their first exchanges about literature. His imperviousness to Bankim signals Bhupati's obtuseness about emotion. And finally, Bankim rises again in the last tender alliterative scene between Amal and Charu, as they discuss Amal's departure, "first Burdhwan, then biye (marriage), then Britain, then barrister, then back to Bengal, Black Native, bap bap bole (tail between my legs). . . and Bankim, Babu Bankim Chandra, and his novel Bisabriksa." Ray's Bankim motif is all the more significant when we realize that Tagore's novel makes scant mention of it.

A third significant similarity is in the portrayal of Charulata. For Tagore, the woman has always represented the higher spiritual consciousness that is peculiarly Indian, aspiring to Unity and Eternity. The male, on the other hand, more often than not possesses a dissonant, pragmatic European quality . In Nashtanir, Tagore makes this dichotomy explicit in the simple, lyrical Bengali prose of Charu contrasted with the half-understood English political preachings of Bhupati. Charu is clearly the heroine of the piece, and both Bhupati and Amal are lacking in comparison. Ray's conception of the story also pivots around a strong Charulata. It seems he shares some of Tagore's views on women, "A woman's beauty also lies in her patience and endurance in a world where men are generally more vulnerable and in need of guidance." Though his specific interpretation of Charu's character differs subtly from Tagore's, Ray and actress Madhabi Mukherjee capture the essence of a strong, introspective but simple and playful female lead in a manner that would have made Tagore proud.
It is unnecessary to belabor the point any further. Ray's debts to Tagore are so great and so numerous that Chidananda Das Gupta, perhaps Ray's most perspicacious Indian critic, went so far as to claim that Ray was so trapped in the Tagore mythos that he felt most comfortable in Tagorian space and was unable to deal with the issues of his own age . Ray himself cedes that "[Tagore's] influence was inescapable. . . we as students felt that Tagore was there all the time, hovering behind us or over our heads."

In the relatively small court of Bengali Renaissance literature, Tagore reigned like a colossus. And Ray's entire family were among his most prominent courtiers. Both Upendrakishore and Sukumar, Ray's grandfather and father, were well known litterateurs, and both counted Tagore as their closest friend and mentor. The adulation was mutual--Tagore even tried to emulate Sukumar's brilliant nonsense verse, but gave up in admiration. Additionally, the Rays were active members of the Brahmo Samaj, the religious sect long headed by the Tagore family. Ray was thus consciously brought up in a classical Rabindric mould, his education capped by a brief but profoundly influential stint at Santiniketan, Tagore's open air university . His overarching philosophy of filmmaking, as perhaps of life, owed a great deal to the Santiniketan school of thought. His films show a remarkable focus on minute details and a taut, calm concentration such that the slightest emotional ripples are accentuated, as well as a constant striving towards an organic unity. In these aspects, he followed the dictates of his two great Indian teachers, both of whom he commemorated in documentaries : his art teacher Binode Behari Mukherjee who taught him the principles of "minimum brush strokes applied with maximum discipline" and "calm without, fire within"; and, of course, Tagore whose inscription to the young Ray on a book jacket forever remained with the latter :

I've travelled all around the world to see the rivers and the mountains, and I've spent a lot of money. I have gone to great lengths, I have seen everything, but I forgot to see just outside my house a dewdrop on a little blade of grass, a dewdrop which reflects in its convexity the whole universe around you .

However, Dasgupta goes much too far in claiming that Ray never emerged from the Kabiguru's shadow. Ray did all his work in a post-independence India seeking its place in a rapidly shrinking global village. Tagore's world, though receiving the initial impetus towards creative awakening through contact with post-Enlightenment western thought courtesy the British, was essentially a world of Sanskrit and Vedic classicism. His father Debendranath did not want the young `Rabi' to mix with Europeans. Thus, in spite of living in the British Raj, at seventeen Rabi had never met a Briton and his command over English was halting. His attempts to read Tennyson, and later Dante and Goethe in English translation, all ended in abject failure. He never really "got" any of these writers at this early stage in his life, he letter confessed. In a letter of 1921 to Edward Thompson from New York, he bemoans, "You know I began to pay court to your language when I was fifty. It was pretty late for me ever to hope to win her heart."

Tagore's fundamental muses were all drawn from the Sanskrit pantheon. The nonpareil Kalidasa and Jayadeva's Vaishnava poetry were his constant childhood companions. In his poem "Passing Time in the Rain", he compares western poetry unfavourably to Kalidasa's Meghdoot, which originally invoked his monsoon muse:

I flick through some bidesi verses
But find in none of them traces
Of the shade of this monsoon rain-
No sound of this dark pattering,
No deep, indolent yearning,
No self-immersing pain !

He never quite managed to overcome this uneasiness with seamlessly embracing the West. In mid-life he burnt all the papers of his grandfather, Prince Dwarkanath Tagore, presumably because Dwarkanath was too Westernized and perceived by his grandson to be an English yaysayer. This remarkable man, Bengal's richest and greatest entrepreneurial captain, suave Indian diplomat abroad, a connoisseur of fine literature, art and theater at home, a magnanimous philanthropist and the founder of the Tagore household as Rabi knew it, thus finds no mention at all in Rabindranath's autobiography, My Reminisces. Later in his life, Tagore wrote in a letter to his niece, Indira Devi, pondering about death and reincarnation : "My greatest fear is of being born in Europe-because in Europe there is never any chance to bare one's soul so loftily. I'd probably have to slave away in some factory or bank or parliament." Though forever open to learning from Western traditions, he held them to be different and irreconcilable from those of his homeland. His perceived differences are encapsulated in this paragraph about music:

The daytime world is like European music-consonant and dissonant bits and pieces are combined to produce an overall harmony. And the night-time world is like our Indian music-a pure, poignant, solemn, unmixed raga. . . they are opposed to each other. . .we Indians live in the kingdom of the Night-we are attuned to eternity and unity. Our melodies are lonely and single; Eruope's music is social and communal.

Ray, on the other hand, when asked to name his primary musical influences would trot out Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and even Monteverdi. In his youth, he had the largest collection of Western classical music in Calcutta, and probably in India. From early in his life, watching the jatras (or popular dramas) of rural Bengal, he learnt a healthy respect for mixing various forms of music. This culminated in the score for one of his best loved children's musicals, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, where he has songs in the Rabindric, Carnatic, Classical Indian and Mozartian traditions as well as several unique melodies of an indeterminate pedigree. In an interview late in his life, he claimed that though he looked down on Indian music when young and later grew violently fond of it to the detriment of his passion for Western classical, lately he had come to realize that all music is really one. His conclusions were in stark contrast to the inherent East-West tension of Tagore.

Similarly in filmmaking, which he considered an essentially Western art form, Ray's influences ranged from Renoir, Donskoi, Chekov, Flaherty, John Ford, Capra to the likes of Godard, Truffaut and Kurosawa . Weaned on a heady diet of American, French and Italian classics, he was moved to quit advertising and take up filmmaking as a profession after seeing the neo-realist Vittorio de Sica's Ladri di Biciclette in London in 1950. More broadly, Rabindric influences through his family notwithstanding, Ray's entire formal education was carried out in English, first at the Ballygunge Government High School, and then at the British Empire's premier educational institution outside Britain, the Presidency College. As Ray put it in a mid-life interview, "I had a Western education, I studied English, and only over the last ten years, I have found myself more and more going back to the history of my country, my people, my past, my culture. . ."

This seamless blending of Western and Eastern influences were to become the hallmark of Ray's cinema. His chosen medium perhaps lent itself more easily to integration than Tagore's, gestures and physical settings translating more smoothly than words, though essential cultural differences remained. This integration was necessary to reflect and define the psyche of a post-colonial nation, as Ray counterbalanced Rabindric bonds with his Western sensibilities to fully grapple with the realities of urban life in 1960s Calcutta, most famously in his `Calcutta trilogy' culminating in Jana Aranya (the Middle Man) in 1975. The film so closely mirrored the angst of post-modern, anonymous existence familiar to post World War II Europeans that it evoked a critique in the British daily New Statesman titled "India catches up with the rest of us" . While few will deny that Ray made films primarily for a Bengali audience, his technology, in the form of the Arriflex motion camera, and the methods dictated by it, were Western. Ray explains that cinema is an art bound by time. And all films have a musical structure. While the structure of Western music is defined by a diversity of interweaving subjects cued precisely with the unfolding of time, Indian music is atemporal. Characterized by a single predetermined mood and tonality, full of improvisation, a single idea can take well over an hour to exposit. It was, thus, impossible for Ray to make films resonant of the Indian ragas. He drew most of his inspiration for the fine balancing of emotions and themes, particularly consciously in Charulata, from Mozart. Aside from overarching structure, his themes and photographic techniques can be variously ascribed to European stalwarts-the grotesque dismembered masks that appear to Charu in her dreamlike flashback are straight out of Fellini, the jump shots that Ray experiments with for the first time in the same scene are borrowed from Godard, and the freeze frame ending to the film is admittedly reminiscent of Truffaut's first work, Les Quatre Centrs Coup.

Along with methodology, it is almost inevitable that Ray's interpretation, even of a quintessentially period piece like Charulata entirely defined by Tagore's rules and sensibilities, will diverge from the original, perhaps most significantly along this dimension of national identity. As can be expected, Ray emerges with a more cosmopolitan and reconciliatory prescription. A closer examination of two aspects of the works will suffice to illustrate this point. The first of these is the characterization of the three central players. As already noted, Tagore made Charu his quintessential spirit of Indian timelessness and unity. Her simple, unaffected Bengali prose and rural themes brings to mind his own mane hala sukh ati sahaj saral (I felt that Happines is very easy) when talking of the uncomplicated beauty he had found in villages of riverine Bengal. Bhupati, on the other hand, is blemished European rationality. He cannot quite understand the higher tuggings of his own soul, far less the emotional needs of others. And finally Amal is the careless and ornate representative of dead Indian tradition. His writing style is flowery and rhetorical, and his character is, likewise, often demanding and churlish, as in his repeated demands for additional trivial gifts.

In the end, only Charu's character remains constant. Tagore widens the cracks in each of the male characters until they are broken and collapse. Bhupati's obsession with dry reason leaves him blind to the machinations of those around him-he is left materially bereft by Umapada's desertion and emotionally bereft by his discovery of Charu's infidelity (in thought if not in deed). At some point, he stumbles towards bringing himself closer to ideal of simple India. Bhupati Majumdar, who understood so little about literature that he would berate even Bankim, begins to write painstaking prose in a private notebook, and finally looks for Charu's approbation for his naive efforts. Similarly, for Amal, with the knowledge of the true relationship between Charu and him comes the gravity of understanding about deficiencies in his character. He, too, has to depart from his ways, in this case physically, as he leaves for England to become a barrister, finally giving in to Bhupati's altar of reason. What emerges from these ruins is the patient, eternal gravity of Charu's unspoken spirit, the emotional showpiece of the novella.

Ray's sympathies are aligned differently, if only ever so subtly. Bhupati is essentially the same character as in Tagore, representing Western reason, perhaps even slightly more accentuated. It is Amal, however-- a more transparent, innocent and likeable character in the film than in Tagore-- and not Charu, who symbolizes the old poetic, emotional India. Amal, with his Sanskritic prose, is himself what he calls Manda, Umapada's wife, in the film--Prachina, or of the ancient, classical mould. And Charu, once again the creator's exemplar for his audience, is now Nabina, a mixture of the old and the new, of the oriental and the occidental. She is endowed as much with an incisive, rational bent of mind as with poetry and playfulness. Less naive than in Tagore, her rational faculties are highlighted by Ray to great effect in an introductory scene in which she is playing cards with Manda. In a simple game of flash, Manda, the traditional woman, shows obtuseness and childlike excitement, not grasping the governing element of random chance in the game. Charu, on the other hand, is knowing and indifferent to the ups and downs of the game, since she knows it is dictated purely by luck and not by human agency. Later in the film, she suggests an alliance of equals to Bhupati, offering to edit the cultural and literary half of a journal if he would oversee the political and scientific parts.

And in the end, Ray does not make either Bhupati or Amal move towards a middle ground. Bhupati never takes up literary pursuits, but is enthused only by the suggestion of starting another newspaper. Amal, though he does depart, never goes to England nor gives up his carefree ways of yore. He cavorts off to a friend in Madras, and writes occasional, abrupt letters. It is only in the character of Charulata that the two antagonistic forces are harmoniously reconciled, and that East and West meet.
The second, and related, indicator of these interpretive differences lies in the endings of the two works. Tagore's novella ends in a duple rejection. Bhupati, saddened, defeated unable to bear the thought of living with a wife whose affections lie elsewhere, chooses to abscond from the house for an editorial position in South India. In a poignant ending, the last few words husband and wife exchange are:

Charu : "Take me with you. Don't go and leave me here."
Bhupati : "No, Charu, I can't do that."
All the color drained from her face and left it white and dry, like a piece of paper. With clenched hands, she held onto the bed.
Immediately, Bhupati said, "come, Charu, come with me."
"No," Charu said, "thak." (let it be).

The rueful single Bengali word, thak, on which the novel ends embodies the ultimate incompatibility of the simple India and the rationally constructed Europe in Tagore's mind. There is much sympathy and tenderness between them, much history, but ultimately, each rejects the other. Each must go its own way, the two paths irreconcilable.

Ray's ending, a masterpiece in filmmaking history, hints at the possibility that the new India will be able to live with Western reason. As a debilitated Bhupati comes shuffling into a dark house, Charu extends an invitation to him to come back, twice. A servant lights a lamp and holds it aloft. Bhupati approaches Charu, and they stretch their hands towards one another, their fingers approaching closer and closer. Just before they are about to touch, Ray freezes the frame. Ray then ends the movie in a brilliant series of five still shots: a closeup of Charu's face, somber but untroubled. A similar shot of Bhupati's face, grieving and anxious. A shot of the servant holding up the lamp. A mid-level shot of Charu and Bhupati standing with their hands stretched towards each other, illuminated by the lamp. A zoom out, and a final long shot of the same scene from the end of the verandah as the credits begin to roll.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and the nuanced suggestions of film as evocative as this cannot fully be captured in words. Yet, we must try, and here is a relatively straightforward interpretation of at least one aspect of this ending. Charu, who has been quite composed through the hurricane of revelations breaking over Bhupati, extends the invitation of reconciliation. The Nabina sees no dichotomy between her love of Amal, the ancient, and her devotion to Bhupati, the rational. Bhupati, as in Tagore, is destroyed by her infidelity and presumably cherishes little hope for the future. Yet, he extends his own hand in return. They never quite touch, but the seeds of the desire for rapprochement are born, and expressed, and the film ends. Germane to Ray's time, in which India is just setting up a post-independence identity where she must parlay on her own terms with the Euro-American powers, the ending is uncertain. There will always be inherent tensions and vast differences between the new India and the West, but equally definitely there is always the possibility of reconciliation and harmonic coexistence. Charulata's story, as with India's history, must remain incomplete, ending in suspended animation.