Seeing Mahanagar for the first time
So, last weekend, I placed my ongoing education in Hindi cinema to one side and we watched another film by Satyajit Ray: Mahanagar, otherwise known in English as 'The Big City'. Actually, that's probably the one real weakness of a film which is otherwise a masterpiece. Madhabi Mukherjee gives a luminous performance as the housewife who goes out to work as a salesgirl in defiance of her conservative in-laws in the Calcutta of the early 60s. It was Ray's first film to be set entirely in the contemporary city in which he was born and grew up, and whilst there is some attempt to film the streets of the city, including a masterful final shot in which husband and wife disappear into the crowded street - a quintessential image of modernity, balanced between anxiety and hopefulness - it's mostly a film defined by its interiors, where presumably it was much easier to film.
Everything I know about Ray's career suggests that he was always, or mostly always, working with relatively limited financial means, which might have hindered his ability to film more exteriors. Or perhaps it was down to the simple inconvenience of filming amid the bustling city (which could be the result of either technological or financial considerations). The film only really suffers in this respect in that we don't get much of a sense of what Arati is like as a salesgirl. We're certainly told that after only a few months she's excellent at her job, but we never actually see any evidence of that after a couple of scenes on her first day. No matter, the film is still a masterpiece as far as I'm concerned.
In fact, the more films I see by Satyajit Ray - and I admit, I've still only seen a handful - the more I find to like about his work. For me, he was clearly a master, one of those filmmakers whose work you don't just admire, but also find you love, even feel some sort of personal connection to - not that I imagine I can really articulate just what that is exactly, especially in this case! I'm not simply bowing to critical consensus which acclaims him as a master of world cinema - Ray's work means something to me which is more than just the intrinsic quality of the films of a great filmmaker.
Becoming more familiar with Ray's work
Now, given that his work emerged from a cultural context which is far removed from my own, I'm sure that there are nuances which I'm missing out on. But since I've seen the wonderful Indian film critic Jai Arjun Singh make much the same argument on the basis that he's not Bengali, what hope do I have? One advantage I have though is that although her family background is Punjabi, my wife was born in Calcutta, and speaks Bengali. So, as she also does with the Hindi films we watch, she can correct the subtitles when they aren't quite accurate, and explicate details of the context I would otherwise either miss or even completely misinterpret. A point I'll come back to below.
As I slowly start to see more of his films - I've also read a collection of his stories - there's something else I'm also starting to realise: that, for all his success with Western film critics and cineastes, his work has often been misunderstood or, worse even, patronised. From the very beginning of his career as a filmmaker, his work appears to have suffered from these sorts of preconceptions. In a really good piece about Ray for the African magazine Cityscapes, Arjun Singh points out:
In a perceptive 1962 essay about a later Ray film Devi (The Goddess), the American critic Pauline Kael noted that some early Western reviewers had mistakenly believed Ray was a “primitive” artist and that Apu’s progress over the three films in some way represented the director’s own journey from rural to city life. Indeed, the critic Dwight Macdonald wrote of Apur Sansar that while Ray handled village life well enough, he was “not up to” telling the story of a young writer in a city, which is “a more complex theme” – the implication being that rural stories were somehow truer both to Ray’s own life experience and to the Indian condition in general.
('Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray')
Ironically, this actually resonates with the famous criticism - quoted in a review by Salman Rushdie, included in his Imaginary Homelands collection - from the actress Nargis Dutt, after she became an MP, that films like Pather Panchali appealed to Western critics and viewers because it represented India as characterised chiefly by it's rural poverty: 'That is the image that they have of our country and a film that confirms that image seems to them authentic. ...What I want is that if Mr. Ray presents Indian poverty abroad he should also show "Modern India".'
Now, obviously, no filmmaker should be free from criticism, but this strikes me as a rather ludicrous judgement. Perhaps it's an easy judgement to mock, since do we really think that the judgements of politicians on art can really be trusted? Even if, in this instance, they were previously a famous actress? In fairness, The Apu Trilogy with which he established his reputation, is probably still his best known work. But in the 25 years between Ray's first film and early 1980, when the interview from which the Nargis quotations are taken took place, plenty of Ray's films were set in and concerned with modern India: Mahanagar is only one example. At the beginning of 1980, his recent films at that point included the magisterial Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players) which, while it was hardly modern - set in 1856 - does feature aristocrats for all of it's significant Indian characters. Later the same year he released Hirak Rajar Deshe (The Kingdom of Diamonds), his second children's fantasy about the lovable duo Goopy and Bagha. More than any other major filmmaker with whose work I'm familiar, the subject matter of Ray's films seems to have been enormously varied in both time and social scale. Admittedly, the Goopy and Bagha films don't appear to have traveled much outside of India, perhaps because they didn't easily fit into Western critics' views of Ray as the great humanist neorealist. If so, then more fool the critics of yesteryear.
More engaged, but arguably more problematic, is the judgment of David Thomson found in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. I remember when I showed my wife his piece on Ray from the fourth edition of the book, she was rather cross at how much she felt he appeared to misunderstand Ray. Having seen a little more of his work now, I'm beginning to see why.
A close-reading of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film entry
I can't have seen more than Shatranj Ke Khiladi, and perhaps Pather Panchali, when I first read Thompson's entry. Even at the time, I remember being rather put out by it, if only because I already knew that Ray was 'one of the greats of world cinema'. I was also then still inclined to take the judgments of the critical consensus for what constitutes the 'canon' of great works rather more for granted than I would now. This goes both ways: I was reading bits of David Thomson's book when I found it in a bookshop because I knew this was supposed to be a great book on film. I got the fourth edition for a Christmas present shortly after it was published, and probably did use it as something of guide for what I needed to watch (and I've still probably only seen perhaps a fraction of all the films I wanted to see back then), and what films I should admire.
And Thomson is a good guide to American cinema especially - both classic and more recent - as well as French cinema, and the post-war flowering of European art and Japanese cinema. Now of course, I can admire Thomson's work without necessarily agreeing with all of his critical judgements. To be fair, in "Have You Seen?", his more recent book of a thousand films you really should see, Thomson is rather more generous to Ray in his descriptions of the films he includes. In his piece on Charulata, he suggests that, 'The Western viewer may be inclined to think of Chekhov (or Renoir), but I'm sure that we need a better knowledge of Tagore to see where it all comes from.' I'm bothered by that 'we', if only because I do have some knowledge of Tagore's work. He won the Nobel Prize in 1907 for goodness' sake! His work is surely not that obscure, with enough available in English translation if you want to familiarise yourself with him.
But still, I think that's broadly a fair judgement. Ray appears to have based the majority of his films on prior literary works, and Tagore was a writer whose work he returned to throughout his career. So a familiarity with Tagore's writing is certainly going to help, but more broadly, his suggestion underlines the simple difference of cultural context. There, at least, Thomson is open to the problem. He's acknowledging the distance between himself and the culture in which Ray lived and made his films. In his earlier piece, partly perhaps as a result of attempting to summarise the work of a whole career in just over half a dozen paragraphs, he makes much more sweeping judgements.
He begins with a comparison with Truffaut, since both are 'thought of as disciples of Renoir, and directors with unusual tenderness for their own characters', and yet Truffaut apparently walked out of Pather Panchali, 'wearied of so much precise care'. It's this phrase 'precise care' which gets to the heart of Thomson's issues with Ray's work. As a critic, for all that he is probably one of the best that there is on the inherent limitations of film compared with the depth of insight and technique available to literature, Thomson is still opposed to any film with a form which suggests that films are 'versions of theatre or literature'. He's impatient with moralising and earnest middlebrow films, and suspicious of directors - especially 'arthouse' filmmakers - who appear to demonstrate too much of what we might term 'good taste'.
Thomson certainly doesn't dismiss cinematic beauty, but he has a clear dislike of directors who display too much precise control of the cinematic image. As he argues specifically about Ray,
... the warmth of his literary conception is as undeniable as a remorselessly tasteful sense of composition. The camera is all too easily the tool of pictorialism and Ray had inbred reluctance to broach that persistent calm. ...His own interest in music and painting adds to the feeling that sheer good taste is eliminating flavour.
Now, one doesn't have to agree with Thomson's argument about Ray's handling of the cinematic image. But it's still a perfectly reasonable criticism for him to make. He makes broadly the same argument about such different filmmakers as Tarkovsky ('The perfection has something monstrous about it... For this viewer, there is something tyrannical about it that spurs irreverent thoughts of resistance.'), James Ivory ('...decent, diffident, tasteful... The loveliness of Merchant-Ivory gives me the creeps'), and Krzystof Kieslowski ('Those films seem to think they're perfect, and I want to scream.') All of whom have directed films I personally have loved; perhaps my taste in films is rather more middlebrow than I would like to admit!
Still, however much one might wish to disagree with Thomson here - or perhaps you think he's right in his judgement - it's a critique which is attentive to the films themselves, rather than a misrepresentation of Ray or the context in which his films were made. And not just a misrepresentation of Ray, but also Truffaut. Thomson's description of the French director's walk out of Pather Panchali appears to be rather disingenuous when compared with the description of the same incident provided by Gilbert Adair in his book Flickers: Truffaut actually walked out because he, '...[didn't] want to see a film about Indian peasants'. He was bored not with the form, but with the subject of the Ray's film. I can even almost sympathise with him there, since I rather imagine that peasant life is often rather boring; that's surely part of the reason why middle and upper class intellectuals (from Tolstoy to John Berger) have wanted to idealise it. Obviously though, I don't agree with the rather racist manner in which he appears to have expressed the sentiment, suggesting that it's specifically Indian peasant life which is unworthy of his (Western) consideration.
But that is the central issue I think I'm circling around in this post: the gap between the Western viewer - whether that's an eminent critic, or an ordinary viewer, or just me - and the Indian filmmaker, in this case, Ray. Of course, any work, whether literature, or film, or any art really, is going to contain elements which are particular to the culture from which it originates - an element of difference which is only going to become more apparent the more removed it is from the viewer's own context. I'm really only stating a truism here. That's surely part of the attraction of such work, but it also then becomes incumbent on you as a viewer to work a little harder to comprehend the unfamiliar context. Of course, one can avoid this by appealing to the universal elements of a work, which is how I understand most of the earliest Western admirers of Ray's films wanted to interpret them. As Robin Wood apparently put it, 'Ray's films usually deal with human fundamentals that undercut all cultural distinctions.'
Thomson then, is perhaps to be applauded for not giving in to the prevailing Western tendency to universalise Ray's work when attempting to interpret it. In his opening paragraph, he warns that the appreciation of Ray's work in the West, and specifically the idea that he was 'a director worthy of A Passage to India...relies on an essentially patronising British view of India'. Only of course, to then go on and be equally condescending to him throughout his own piece. Presumably Thomson thought he was producing a fair minded piece, but it feels rather like a neat rhetorical trick: covering your tracks by criticising others for what you're about to do yourself.
Context is introduced through a series of rhetorical questions:
But what is an Indian film? Was Ray the West's notion of the worthy Indian artist? How did he relate to the vast, seething, naive but censorious cinema for the Indian masses? How far did Ray seem to be working in one of the most agonised and contradictory countries in the world?
Which are all fair questions to ask, even if the last does rest on a rather stereotyped image of India as 'agonised and contradictory'. Yet Thomson never displays any real knowledge of or interest in Indian cinema which was made for the 'masses'. In all 960-odd pages of his Biographical Dictionary, Ray is the only Indian figure to appear, apart from the actor Sabu, whose career was in any case almost entirely in American and European films. The context of Thomson's book includes none of the Indian cinema against which he is explicitly comparing Ray's films here.
And when he does address popular Hindi cinema elsewhere, you almost wish Thomson hadn't bothered. In "Have You Seen?" he picks out Khuda Gawah (God is My Witness), seemingly more or less at random, hardly bothering to describe it beyond noting that it stars the 'vacuously pretty' Amitabh Bachchan (quite possibly the oddest way to describe the 'Big B' that I've come across), and instead using it as the peg on which to hang his broader thoughts and opinions about Indian cinema. He makes at least one half decent point, linking the melodrama of so much of Bollywood's output with the 'great melodramas of Stroheim, Borzage, Murnau, Stahl, Sirk and so on'. But he still displays his lack of knowledge when he suggests that the label 'Bollywood' includes '...not just condescension but the recognition of a kind of unduly sweetened melodrama with censorship, of profusion and excess with an odious daintiness of ultimate moral character, that seems painful and constricted compared with our own great tradition of melodrama.' Because of course, the great American directors never had to cope with censorship, or were ever guilty of 'excess'. In any case, isn't 'excess' part of the attraction of melodrama?
Fair enough, one can't be knowledgable about everything. But then if you want to make an explicit comparison with popular Indian cinema (i.e. Bollywood), then you need to give some sense that you know something about what you're referring to. It's certainly not enough to write something as vague as, 'In the eighties, he was hindered by poor health, and left exposed by the variety of Indian cinema', when just about every commentator on Hindi cinema will tell you that the eighties were probably the lowest point in the quality of Bollywood's output (and I know my wife would also include a fair chunk of the output of the nineties in that dismissal). It's not the director whose limitations are exposed here, it's the critic's.
Thomson's other major complaint about Ray's work is that 'while there is genuine and very moving pain in his work there was not a great sense of India's turmoil'. He praises a film of the early seventies, Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), for precisely this: 'For the first time, Ray made a connection between the individual and the national plight.' In contrast, the subsequent Shatranj Ke Khiladi represented a 'step backwards - into the safer, academic prettiness of the past', with 'color, and the starry participation of Saeed Jaffrey and Richard Attenborough.' It's this that explains Thomson's repeated comparison with Chekhov, who 'wrote country-house plays in the years before the Revolution. But Chekhov seems to feel external breezes, while Ray's world too often closed in on itself.' Perhaps we can call it the 'Salman Rushdie syndrome', the expectation that an Indian artist, whether in prose or in film, should address themselves to the national situation. For sure, that's an important subject, for a filmmaker of any country, but it's also true that no artist should be confined to any particular vision. In any case, I don't know if this argument really holds up if you consider the films.
I've yet to see Ashani Sanket, so am currently unable to say if Thomson's is a fair judgement on the film's achievements, but I do think he misrepresents Shatranj Ke Khiladi. To start with, there's also the 'starry participation' of actors from the popular Hindi cinema. Sanjeev Kumar and Amjad Khan (Gabbar Singh from Sholay plays the King of Awadh!), and the most famous actor of all, Amitabh Bachchan, provides the voiceover at the film's opening. More importantly, I see nothing 'cozy' about a story set in in India in 1856. The sense of irony which contrasts two chess obsessed noblemen with the annexation of Awadh by the British East India company is doubly so when one considers not just what is presented on the screen but the also the significance of the date. All of these characters, even the British, are standing on a precipice in the light of what was to occur in the following year. 'External breezes' of the hurricane lurking just off stage are surely present for any knowledgable viewer.
I've already noted that Mahanagar is a little 'closed in', with most of the action taking place in a series of interiors, but it it hardly 'closed' to history. Arati's Anglo-Indian colleague Vicky, and the prejudice she faces from their boss, represents the legacy of the British Raj in a manner which in the telling is marvellously understated. Really, how could a story about a wife going out to work in order to supplement the family's income in the face of opposition from the more traditionally minded members of the family not be representative of a wider social changes affecting the country in which it is set? It's not even a circumstance which is unique to India. The changing roles of women are found in every country as it makes the transition to modernity. And this is clearly an issue with which the film grapples. The opening credits appear over a shot of that symbol of modernity, represented by a trolley pole of a moving tram sparking as it runs along an overhead cable. Equally, with the final shot of Arati and her husband disappearing into the crowded streets of Calcutta - surely one of the finest endings to any film - we're left balanced between a paradoxical mixture of hopefulness and trepidation which is surely quintessentially modern.
*
The really frustrating thing about Thomson's piece is that there's the kernel of a decent critique to be made here, if only it weren't beyond him. Ray was himself condescending towards commercial Indian and genre cinema, concerned with positioning his own work in opposition as a superior kind of cinema. He was rooted in a classical literary culture. And he wasn't representative of the whole of India, because what filmmaker is? Sadly, Thomson just isn't able to make the critique he clearly wants to make. For that, you need to turn to someone like Arjun Singh, whose piece not only acknowledges the ways in which Ray wasn't the 'quintessential Indian filmmaker' of Western critics' imagining, but is also able to explore the ways in which Ray's work contradicts his own expressed aesthetic preferences.
Of course, even when Western critics do take Ray at his own word, they're still liable to get things wrong.
With friends like these...
Early on in Mahanagar, following her decision to look for a job, there's a brief scene in which Arati signs the printed letter of application which her husband has written for her. She checks the spelling of their name with him, is their name spelt with a 'j' or a 'z'? Whilst watching this, my wife pointed out to me that this alludes to the fact that there is no 'z' sound in Bengali. She's asking her husband about it because she's spelling her name in English script.
Ah, thought I - in fact, I mentioned it to her at the time - to a Western viewer like me, that would just look like she was uneducated. Her husband has to write her letter of application, because she's basically uneducated; she can't even writer her own name. In fact, as is made clear at several points in the dialogue, her education had reached the end of her first year in college. Presumably she left university at the point at which she got married. But we'd see this emblematic scene, and draw the wrong conclusion.
Sure enough the esteemed film critic Philip French only went and proved me right! In a piece written just a couple of years ago, on the occasion of the film's re-release, he describes Arati as 'uneducated'. French knew Ray - he even helped Ray with the casting of Richard Attenborough in Shatranj Ke Khiladi - and his review is filled with his admiration for the filmmaker. So it feels rather mean to knock his writing like this - like I say, I'm sure I would make the same mistake without my wife's help. But it does display a lack of attention, as also when he summarises the story, '...But the household desperately needs more money to keep going, so, patronisingly and ever in charge, Subrata finds an advertisement for a sales job that might suit Arati, writes the application letter and sends her off for an interview.' Actually, the desire to find a job first comes from Arati, in the face of the household's economic difficulties. It's somewhat to his credit as an indulgent husband who professes to be a 'conservative', that Subrata doesn't stop her, but instead encourages Arati in her quest for work outside the household.
As much as Madhabi Mukherjee clearly deserves all the plaudits that have surely come her way for her performance, and as much as Arati is clearly the character at the centre of the film, there is also something enormously affecting about Anil Chatterjee's Subrata, who goes through just as many changes as does his wife over the course of the movie. He's decent enough, not only to encourage her in her desire for work, but also stands up to his parents' evident disapproval. He's not quite as conservative in his character as he wants to believe. It's only after she gets her job and starts to become successful, that he panics about what they have set in motion. He desperately tries to find a second job in order that Arati can resign from the job which is beginning to give her a real sense of satisfaction, only to collapse into near despair once he loses his own job with the collapse of the bank for which he works. What's really nice about Ray's slow pace is that we also get a proper sense of how much Subrata loves his wife throughout the film, despite the values he professes to believe in at it's beginning. Really, this is a young man who, initially at least, really doesn't know himself very well, protected by the contours and assumptions of the society in which he lives. By the finish, he's come to not only rediscover the love he obviously feels for his wife, but also discovers a new sense of respect for her which is genuinely moving.
Different contexts
French finishes his piece with a description of what must be a treasured photo: an image of Ray and Akira Kurosawa, deep in talk in front of the Taj Mahal. It's a resonant image of two great filmmakers of 'world cinema'.
I noted in an earlier post that I first encountered Ray's films in the context of a course I took as an undergraduate on post-war world cinema. He was the only Indian on the list, just as Kurosawa was the only Japanese filmmaker on the list, which gave us a series of representative films and their directors from most of the important moments of international post-war cinema as generally defined by the critical consensus. My recollection is that the lecturer was actually really good at placing each film and it's maker in their historical contexts, but I think the presence of Ray on the list was mostly down to his presence on the international film scene, and his links with neorealism as defined by the famous story of his inspiration to make his first film after his viewing of De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (there's surely grounds for thinking that film must rank as one of the most influential in the entire history of cinema - predictably, David Thomson has his issues with it, of course!)
If I studied Ray now, there's part of me that would really like to see him placed on a course devoted to Indian cinema more generally. I'd love to see Pather Panchali on a course alongside other significant Indian films from the 50s. Things like Mother India, Pyaasa, Devdas, Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi. You'd need more, but could finish it with Mughal-e-Azam (1960), and Kabuliwala (1961), pushing just into the beginning of the 60s. Produced by Bimal Roy (who like Ray, was also also influenced by Bicycle Thieves) and also adapted from Tagore, Kabuliwala would also work as a really interesting comparison with Ray's own dedication to Tagore's work.
I'm not trying to claim that this is the only way to understand his work. I don't want the context of a work to ever be used as a way of walling something off, as if to suggest that you'll never understand Pather Panchali without detailed knowledge of Bengali peasant life. However, I do think critics should take more care, when making pronouncements on a filmmaker who is working in a context with which they are unfamiliar. One of the problems with 'world cinema' as a concept is that it risks (or risked?) flattening out the local contexts which produced the films in question. One of the tasks of criticism is surely to reverse that flattening. In any case, knowledge of the context can only enrich our understanding of art. Which is about as prescriptive as I'm prepared to be at this point.
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