As Aranyer Din Ratri premieres at Cannes, Ray’s cinema returns to global spotlight, evoking his timeless humanism and ability to see the extraordinary in the everyday
Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), the restored black-and-white classic by Satyajit Ray (May 2, 1921-April 23, 1992) is being showcased at the ongoing Cannes Film Festival, hailed as the ‘Mecca of the finest cinema’ in the world.
While we will never know how Ray would have responded to the restoration, what we do know is that just weeks before his death, at the 64th Academy Awards on March 30, 1992, actress Audrey Hepburn had announced the ‘Honorary Award’ for lifetime achievement in cinema for the auteur: “To Satyajit Ray, in recognition of his rare mastery of the art of motion pictures, and of his profound humanitarian outlook, which has had an indelible influence on filmmakers and audiences throughout the world.”
Ray, then ailing, and admitted to a hospital in Kolkata, was categorical in his short speech: “Well, it’s an extraordinary experience for me to be here tonight to receive this magnificent award; certainly, the best achievement of my movie-making career… Well, there you are. I have learned everything I’ve learned about the craft of cinema from the making of American films. I’ve been watching American films very carefully over the years and I loved them for what they entertain, and then later loved them for what they taught. So, I express my gratitude to the American cinema, to the motion picture association who have given me this award and who have made me feel so proud. Thank you very, very much.”
Aranyer Din Ratri: Shot in tribal hinterland
Aranyer Din Ratri (1970), shot in the poverty-stricken tribal hinterland and forests of Palamau (now a Tiger reserve in Jharkhand), was nominated for the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 20th Berlin International Film Festival.
Starring the elegant and graceful Sharmila Tagore, the versatile actor Soumitra Chatterjee, and — surprisingly — Simi Garewal, known for being fair, westernised, urbane, demure and delicate, portraying a dark-skinned, forthright tribal girl who enjoys her local drink (mahua), the film is based on a novel by eminent Bengali writer Sunil Gangopadhyay. Sharmila Tagore and Simi Garewal are attending the film festival, where the restored film is set to premiere on Monday (May 19).
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The choice of Simi was surprising because no one could ever imagine her as a young Adivasi girl, especially after her sublime, very modern looks in Dev Anand’s Teen Deviyan (Three Goddesses, 1965), and the role of an Anglo-Indian teacher in Raj Kapoor’s magnum opus, Mera Naam Joker (1970).
Ray spotted her at a screening of the film, followed by the dinner hosted by Raj Kapoor in his house in Bombay (now Mumbai), before its release. Non-conformist, as the filmmaker was, he immediately decided to cast her as a dark tribal girl, though it would take hours to put the black paint on her face and body, and then get it off.
Aranyer Din Ratri (1970), shot in the poverty-stricken tribal hinterland and forests of Palamau (now in Jharkhand), was nominated for the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 20th Berlin International Film Festival.
The film, at once, exposes the hypocrisy and contradictions of the middle class and the ‘bourgeois’ trappings of a city-bred, male society, who carry their sexism, prejudices, fake superiorities, frustrations and inadequacies into a remote forest of Adivasis, where the simple folks live in synthesis with their oral traditions and ecology, and where women are free, beautiful and spontaneous, detached from the suffocating baggage and morality of traditional, well-to-do Bengali households.
‘Ray makes us re-evaluate the commonplace’
The film, when released, was much appreciated by the Western media. British film critic Tom Milne wrote: “Ray gradually distils a magical world of absolute stasis: a shimmering summer’s day, a tranquil forest clearing, the two women strolling in a shady avenue, wistful yearnings as love and the need for love echo plangently… Beautifully shot and acted, it’s probably Ray’s masterpiece.”
The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wrote, “Satyajit Ray’s films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness in me than the work of any other director... No artist has done more than Ray to make us reevaluate the commonplace.”
However, the Village Voice critic, William Paul, took a different view: “Days and Nights seems anachronistically the ideal art-house film of the 1950s: vaguely humanistic without any feeling for the complexities of human life, pretentious, short on plot but striving to be long on character, stylistically awkward as a sign of sincere emotions, and all of it held together by a title that is more poetic than anything in the movie itself.” (Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, The Biography of a Master Film-Maker by Andrew Robinson, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
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While Ray is famous because of his earlier films, the ‘Apu Trilogy’ — Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955), Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959) — penned by great novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, and Devi (1960) and Charulata (1964), politically and socially relevant films followed soon after, in the 1970s, including what are called the ‘Calcutta trilogy’: Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Seemabaddha (Company Limited, 1971) and Jana Aranya (Human Forest, 1976).
Mahanagar (The Big City) and women’s liberation
Pratidwandi, also penned by Sunil Gangopadhyay, is located in the turbulent backdrop of mass unemployment and corruption, the failed aspirations and idealism of the freedom movement, the beginning of the Naxalite movement in Bengal, and the peak of the Vietnam war which led to huge protests in the US against ‘American imperialism’. Siddhartha, looking for a job, is asked by a heavyweight interview board, as to what he considers to be the biggest human achievement of the 20th century. He says, the “plain human courage shown by the people of Vietnam”.
He is then cynically asked whether he, therefore, does not consider the landing on the moon as the singularly great achievement by humankind? He replies with absolute confidence that with scientific advancement, this was well-nigh inevitable. However, a tiny, poor country of peasants, ravaged earlier by the French for decades, who achieved an impossible victory, after a protracted guerrilla war of 20 years, amid massacres and brutality, against the mightiest military and industrial country in the world — the USA — that is what should be considered as the single greatest achievement by humankind in the 20th century.
Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963) was perhaps the first ‘women’s lib’ film made in India.
Among other films, Ray’s Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963) was perhaps the first ‘women’s lib’ film made in India. The great actress Madhabi Mukherjee, Ray’s muse, as Arati, the female protagonist and working woman, breaks all the clichéd taboos entrenched in a middle-class Bengali family in what was then Calcutta, with a weak and jobless husband unable to handle her slow, stoic, and steady realisation of self-identity, strength and freedom.
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The scene in a washroom, where an Anglo-Indian woman colleague gifts the lonely wife a red lipstick, and when she wears it on with a subtle, sly, half-smile, is undoubtedly a glorious moment of both revelation and resurrection for a woman of that era, otherwise eternally condemned to be a mother and wife, trapped in the domesticity of the orthodox male narrative. No wonder, Ray showcased this shot as the extremely popular poster of the film.
Mainstream, not parallel
The Adventures of Feluda, the famous detective series, his science fiction stories, his screenplays, scripts, meticulously etched sketches for the next day’s shoot, notes and observations, his fabulously entertaining musicals and spoofs such as Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969) and Hirak Rajar Deshe (1980), and even his indoor films when he was ailing, in the aftermath of Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World, 1984) — set in the backdrop of the freedom movement — will all be remembered in film history as the incredible contribution of a genius.
On his working table, in his room, with a big window and a tree outside, Ray worked extremely hard — relentlessly — understood, absorbed, grasped, imagined, plotted and conceived a reality, which was the work of a master. Along with his team of gifted and talented editors, musicians, lyricists, cinematographers, and actors, often with actors new and unfamiliar, as in Pather Panchali, Ray made films which were never part of the parallel cinema — they were as mainstream as any other box-office movie. Predictably, his films almost always had a packed house.
The 2K digitally restored version of Ray’s 1966 film Nayak (The Hero) re-released in select Indian cinemas on February 21 this year. Shot on a moving train, it stars Mahanayak (Superstar) Uttam Kumar playing a popular film star and Sharmila Tagore as a sharp and sensitive journalist, it returned in theatres after 59 years to mark Uttam Kumar’s pre-centenary year. Nayak drew wonderful responses, and so will Aranyer Din Raatri — and not just at Cannes.
At the end of the day, what makes Ray’s cinema so unforgettable isn’t just his masterful storytelling or his eye for detail — it’s the way he opened up whole new worlds, where everyday moments carry deep truths, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and where his compassion for human nature and society shines through every frame, showcasing that his films aren’t just stories, but reflections of life itself, timeless and endlessly alive.
