Satyajit Ray and the Art of the Political Film

In an interview he gave to the Cineaste magazine in 1982, Satyajit Ray was asked by the interviewer to respond to a point often made about his work: that Ray, in his films, had stayed away from major political statements.

Ray’s reply was  uncharacteristically combative:

I have made political statements more clearly than anyone else, including Mrinal Sen. In ‘The Middleman’ I included a long conversation in which a Congressite discusses the tasks ahead. He talks nonsense, he tells lies, but his very presence is significant.

If any other director had made that film, that scene would not have been allowed. But there are definitely restrictions on what a director can say. You know that certain statements and portrayals will never get past the censors. So why make them?

If we leave aside, for now, the somewhat gratuitous jab at Mrinal Sen – whose name had not figured up to that point in the interview even once – we are essentially looking at three statements here:

One, that ‘The Middleman’ makes an unequivocally political statement about contemporary Indian society.

Two, no film could have done more in terms of political messaging in the given circumstances.

And three, since the film-maker knows for sure that he can go only so far, and no farther, in making a political statement, there is no point wasting one’s energies trying to be more forthright.

‘The Middleman’ (‘Jana Aranya’, 1975) is a film about individual and societal corruption in 1970s Kolkata and its canvas comes as close to being bleak and despairing as Ray’s sensibility could countenance. In it a middle class youth embraces the life of an ‘order-supplier’, or a broker and arranger of sundry goods and services, after his efforts to land a decent job get him nowhere.

Inevitably, he finds himself in an amoral world where the only thing that matters is the cash that changes hands after a successful transaction is closed. Eventually, he is obliged to procure a prostitute for an influential client, and it is this ‘transaction’ that proves to be his first big break.

His family, including an old-fashioned father who has lived his whole life by the gentleman’s code and a trusting sister-in-law who believes her brother-in-law is patently incapable of any ‘immorality’, rejoices at this success. No questions are asked.

In course of his ‘descent’ into the dark recesses of a thoroughly corrupt society, the protagonist makes the acquaintance of someone who is presumably a Congressman – a clearly influential man who is as cynical as he is voluble.

As a finished product, ‘The Middleman’ is nowhere near Ray’s best work.

The characterisation is not particularly nuanced or layered, and there is a certain simplemindedness about how the plot unfolds, which is very un-Raylike. The film shoot had been completed before Indira Gandhi clamped her Emergency, though the release happened only in early 1976.

The fact that ‘Jana Aranya’ went on to bag the top official honours at the state – also ruled by a Congress government then – as well as the national level may well be a reflection of Ray’s unquestioned status as the country’s most important film-maker. But what it also suggests is that its political message was perhaps not as disagreeable to the political establishment as Ray himself had imagined. 

I will argue that the main reason why ‘Jana Aranya’ remains an unsatisfactory film is that ‘messaging’ per se – making or proving a specific, essentially a cerebral,  point – was not Satyajit Ray’s metier.

Also read: Today, We Need Satyajit Ray’s Vision of Politics More Than Ever

In her perceptive article on Ray’s vision of politics, Monobina Gupta also notes how, despite being “among Ray’s most directly political films,” ‘Ganashatru’ (‘An Enemy of the People’, 1989) is not one of his best.

She does not examine the film to find out why this is so, but had she done that, I believe she would have realised that ‘Ganashatru’ failed as an artistic project precisely because it was trying to be a ‘political’ film of some kind; that in his anxiety to construct a credible narrative around the pernicious nexus between religious faith and political or economic power, Ray sacrificed his greatest artistic strengths – his subtlety of touch, his penchant for avoiding the binaries of black and white, and his abhorrence of the stereotyping of characters.

What I am suggesting here is that temperamentally and by intellectual orientation, Satyajit Ray was not the ideal creator of political cinema. I will presently try and elaborate on why I am inclined to think so.

But, before that, let us look at a somewhat different, indeed more fundamental, question: is a film like ‘Ganashatru’ or ‘Jana Aranya’ a political film in the first place?

In the sense in which ‘Z’, ‘Aakrosh’, ‘October’ and ‘Dr Strangelove’ are political films, clearly neither of the two Ray films is a political film, for Ray’s concern is not primarily with a political system and its impact on human lives but with what is loosely described as ‘the human condition’, a slice of the life of an individual (or a group of individuals) caught in a specific space-time matrix in such a manner that requires accepted value systems  to be quizzed and articulated afresh.

The focus, for Ray, willy-nilly stays on the individual, and the ‘system’ or the milieu only serves to throw that individual’s emotions, thoughts and sensitivities – and their mutual contradictions and tensions– into sharper relief. This is true of both ‘Ganashatru’ and ‘Jana Aranya’, and even of ‘Ghare Baire’, the film that, without a doubt foregrounds most clearly some of the most important political questions of the era it represents.

In a film like ‘Aakrosh’ or ‘Z’, on the other hand, the individual is not even remotely a free agent any more.

The system casts its ominous shadow on his footsteps, every inch of his way, unremittingly, so that the audience ends up pondering the system rather than individual destiny.

In ‘Aakrosh’ the system feeding into the grinding poverty and naked sexual exploitation of the dispossessed minority does not show up except in its shadowy, but terrifying, silhouette, but that view is quite as oppressive as a full-frontal exposure to the truly hideous. The films through which Satyajit Ray seeks to deliver a political message, on the other hand, suffer from an ambivalence of tone that takes something away from their artistic integrity.

Though possessed of a formidable intellect, Satyajit Ray was less successful as a filmmaker of ideas than as a chronicler and interpreter of men’s lives. His penultimate film ‘Shakha Proshakha’ (‘The Branches of the Tree’ – 1990) is premised on an unlikely eventuality – that of a highly successful businessman in late-20th-century India suffering a fatal heart attack upon learning that his own sons might not have been strangers to corruption.

Its underlying theme of corruption and moral degeneracy links it up with ‘The Middleman’, but the treatment is even less convincing here. And ‘Agantuk’ (‘The Stranger’ – 1991) packs in so much of philosophical musings on right and wrong and the meanings and the costs of human progress that it gives you the distinct impression that Ray had visualised it as his swansong, his parting message to the world. 

In the process, he relinquishes the most potent weapons in his  arsenal– a marvellous economy of expression, an uncanny feel for telling detail, and a sparkling sense of humour.

In these films Ray had ventured out of his home stretch, his zone of comfort. To know what that zone consisted of, we can do no better than turn to his own words, written in 1980:

(M)y main preoccupation as a film-maker… has been to find out ways of investing a story with organic cohesion, and filling it with detailed and truthful observation of human behaviour and relationships in a given milieu and a given set of events , avoiding stereotypes and stock situations, and sustain interest visually, aurally, and emotionally by a judicious use of the human and technical resources at one’s disposal.

Here is the essence of Satyajit Ray’s art at its best.

The cinema, for him, is primarily about exploring human relationships and the dynamics of the mutual interplay and tensions between these relationships; in other words, its value lies in its being a credible and sensitive human document, not in its capacity to prove a point, let alone finding solutions to humankind’s problems. 

Indeed, his most powerful – and successful– social commentaries – ‘Devi’ (‘The Goddess’ – 1960) and ‘Sadgati’ (‘Deliverance’- 1981) – work because they confine themselves to telling powerful stories with great sensitivity, and do not essay social or political statements.

‘Devi’ takes a scorching look at religious fanaticism run amok within the boundaries of an upper-class Hindu home. The toll this fanaticism exacts is a young couple’s lives laid waste, no more – and yet the story resonates far more powerfully than any high-pitched critique of religious dogmatism and bigotry, however well-crafted, could have hoped to do. 

Indeed, ‘Devi’ is a more affectingly political film than ‘Ganashatru’, and an exquisitely beautiful work of art at that. ‘Sadgati’ is a devastating – one might almost say savage – indictment of the caste-system, arguably its most scalding indictment on celluloid yet. But the charge-sheet is delivered here through purely visual statements, and through them alone.

Both these films pack so much power in their storylines that the overwhelming sense is that of a tightly coiled spring about to uncoil with a snap. (It is possible – indeed likely – that if these films were to be made today, they would have had serious run-ins with censors.)

And yet, neither ‘Devi’ nor ‘Sadgati’ aspired to be counted as political cinema.

There is a body of criticism, and its echoes are heard in Gupta’s article as well, that seeks to see Ray’s work in light refracted through the prism of Nehruvian ideas of progress.

I don’t think this is a valid way of looking at Ray. He was, of course, a liberal humanist, much as Nehru was, also a product of the East-West synthesis, again like Nehru. But his art charted its own path of development, and there sociological or political thinking had no more than a rudimentary role to play.

Ray did not seek to extrapolate human behaviour from political thinking, for he did not need to. Rabindranath Tagore was a more potent influence.

But Gupta is surely right when she reminds us how the Left in Bengal – or rather elements sympathetic to the Left – persisted in faulting and harrying Ray in the 1960s-1970s for what they believed was his lack of commitment to social progress.

In fact, it is probable that Ray’s extreme sensitiveness on questions around his political orientation – revealed dramatically in the interview we started this piece with – was a function of such tasteless attacks.

Be that as it may, we need to keep one thing in mind regarding those films of his that Ray himself thought of as political: just as Marx once noted that no historical era managed to make a proper self-appraisal, great artists are also not necessarily the best judges of their own work.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.