Fugitive pieces, Moonlight Sonata & Pather Panchali

15 years ago I first heard Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata…..the slow adagio sostuneto is an all time romantic tune on earth…yet I did not like it for its romanticism…but its brooding sadness….a slow ache of un explained nostalgia that it always evoked….The bars stayed with me. I never knew why….recently after I saw ‘Fugitive Pieces’ (2007, directed by Jeremy Podeswa based on a eponymous novel by Canadian writer Anne Micheals) in IIT Bombay film club, a movie about Jacob Beer a holocaust survivor trying to coming to terms with his own loss I rediscovered the haunting melody of Beethoven….I realized why they say Beethoven is a timeless classic. Jacob’s sister used to play piano and Jacob remembers moonlight sonata from his past when they were a happy family of four until the Nazis hounded them in Poland, killed his parents in front of his own eyes and abducted his sister. Jacob survived miraculously with the kind help of a Greek archeologist. But the trauma that incident left behind is difficult to hide. He grows up in Canada, becomes a successful teacher and writer but never away from his past. He is consumed with the obsession of finding holocaust stories and writing them…..his wife Alexi deserts him once she gets to know from his diary how the shameless vitality of her is a distraction for Jacob’s endless pursuit of the past. In these moments and others when Jacob’s sister comes back in his dreams and memories I could identify with Jacob’s sense of loss. Though my history of difficulties are far more different and culturally irrelevant to Jacob’s yet the universal sense of loss evoked in me that unexplained nostalgia for my lost possessions, time , opportunities and losing on life as a whole. These feelings of loss occur in every society. When Jacob remembers her sister and moonlight sonata comes in the backdrop, I identify him with young Apu remembering his dead sister Durga from Ray classic Pather Panchali…..you got to see it to know my feelings…..

Two anecdotes on Ray

 

These are two anecdotes on Satyajit Ray.

Professor Subodh Chandra Sengupta was a famous professor of English literature of Calcutta’s hallowed institution , the Presidency College. From his autobiography “Te hi no dibasa gota” in Bangla I got this gem. One evening, in the early 1950’s Professor Sengupta was taking a walk in Maidan, Calcutta’s lungs. He met his “Lomba chatro” ( meaning ‘Tall student’ in Bangla ). The ‘Tall student’ said that after learning art from Nandalal Bose of Santiniketan, he was working as an illustrator in D.J.Keimer & Co, an ad agency. Professor Sengupta was visibly upset because he knew his ‘Tall student’ was excellent in English and got highest marks in English in Calcuuta University Intermediate in Science exam. His professedly instinct was that this ‘Tall student’ would have made more contribution to field of English education if joined a college or university. He particularly harbored a secret wish to tutor this ‘Tall student’ to that goal. But alas! This would not happen, because this favourite ‘Tall student’ of his has joined an advertisement firm, which in his opinion was simple waste of a talent. He was a very well-respected professor of English that time and he thought he sampled enough students in life so that his predictions will never prove wrong.

Within a year or two Prof Sengupta was amused and delighted to find himself wrong in at least one of his predictions about the future of his students. In 1956 this ‘Tall student’ of his made a movie called ‘Pather Panchali’ . Shall I have to tell the name of the ‘Tall student’ to cine buffs?

The second story is also about Ray. Not a story…a true event. All of us know by know that Ray had a great eye for details. The dresses, the furnitures of period pieces, the make-up of characters were pursued to the minutest detail making his movies almost flawless with regard to details. Be it Charulata or Ghare Baire or Nayak, the details never missed his eyes. The movie goers used to be baffled too like my grandfather. Dr.Murari Mohan Mukherji, a pioneer in Plastic Surgery in India happened to be my maternal grandfather. I heard this from him. Even in his heydays he used to catch up movies in Calcutta cinema halls during night shows. Most of the times family would accompany him and you have to remember those days there were no mobiles. Being a busy and responsible surgeon he would give the phone number of the cinema hall to the hospital so that in emergency the hospital can call the hall manager. Many a times movie goers in Basusree or Purna or Bijolee or Metro would be annoyed to see a sudden message flashing on silver screen (between the reels) calling a Dr. Murari Mukherji to go to SSKM Hospital since his patient was serious.

Anyway let me not deviate from Ray. Once my grandfather went to see ‘Ashani Sonket’ made by Ray. “Ashani Sonket” or “The distant thunder”, starring Soumitra Chatterji was made after the eponymous novel by Bibhuti Bushan Bandyopadhyay written on the backdrop of Bengal famine during World War II. Ashani Sonket had a character caller ‘Pora Jodu’ (meaning the burnt faced ‘Jodu’….this villainous character raped a young lady in the film by luring her with promise of food in the time of famine). The burnt and scarred face of ‘Pora Jodu’ attracted my grandfather’s attention. Unlike others he was not despising the man. Rather, being a plastic surgeon he thought of doing a cosmetic surgery on this man. After coming back from the hall, he called Soumitra Chatterjee ( he had acquaintances in Tollygunge film industry and few of the heroes and heroines of that time went under his scalpel ). He inquired about the address and status of this ‘Pora Jodu’ with Soumitra Chaterjee and expressed his wish to rectify the scarred face of ‘Pora Jodu’ by surgery. Soumitra Chatterjee started to laugh and cleared my grandpa’s confusion by saying “ Daktar babu, that was not burns you saw; this is  the Ray effect. This character ‘Pora Jodu’ is a result of make-up. Manikda has great eye for details and told his make-up man to make his scarred face a realistic one. Don’t worry; he doesn’t need your surgical intervention.” Knowing this my grandfather was relieved.

These are the two anecdotes I share about Ray. If you want more I have another in store.

Note: This blog written by me was published first in Passionforcinema.com in August,2009.

Amita Malik-The grand old lady of Indian film & media journalism

‘The grand old lady of Indian film & media journalism’, Amita Malik passed away in February, 2009. She was truly the first of her kind in India. Even, I remember Mr.Prannoy Roy decorating her with this epithet when she was invited to comment on future of Indian media journalism in a memorable programme on NDTV three years back. From my Kolkata days, I remember her wonderful film criticism in the revered newspaper, The Statesman. Long before Namrata Joshi, Khalid Mohammed, Anil Grover, Nikhat Kazmi came in the picture, Amita was the one who wrote about movies prolifically. I remember a flowing and flawless article by her on filmmaker Goutam Ghosh’s documentary The Silk Route in The Statesman. Her opinion mattered for Indian filmmakers. Bijoya Ray, widow of the great Satyajit Ray reminisces fondly in her autobiography ‘Amader Kotha’ about the TV interview of Ray and Marlon Brando during infancy of Doordarshan in the early seventies. She commanded much respect from filmmakers, as evident from my interaction with Harisadhan Dasgupta, the first documentary filmmaker of India. Panchthupi, a documentary by Harisadhan for Burmah Shell was shot in a village in Murshidabad district of Bengal where he likened the homecoming of a rural married lady with the events of Durga Puja, a very Bengali tradition. Seeing Panchthupi, Amita Malik, was ecstatic and went on to praise to the extent of comparing it to Pather Panchali in The Statesman. I found Harisadhan glowing whenever he used to refer to Panchthupi’s review by Amita Malik. With her demise, a generation and genre is gone.

Note: This blog written by me was first published in Passionforcinema.com in April,2009.

More anecdotes on Ray

I feel encouraged by reader’s comments to recollect and write more anecdotes on Satyajit Ray.

I still remember Satyajit Ray’s Oscar acceptance speech of 1992 Academy Awards. My generation will; forever!!!  I was studying in Class XI . Satyajit Ray was very ill then. He was admitted to Belle Vue Clinic in Calcutta. The Academy members came to Calcutta to give away the Oscar.  Dilip Basu, a professor of UCLA was instrumental in getting them to Calcutta. Inside the hospital room Ray received the Oscar from his wife Bijoya Ray’s hands (I refer to ‘Amader Kotha’- an autobiography published in Bangla by Ananda Publishers, for this information). After receiving the Oscar in the reclining hospital bed Ray gave a memorable speech recorded by the Academy cameraman. That speech of 4.5 minutes was shown in the Oscars ceremony in March 1992 after a brief montage (of Ray classics) and introduction by none other than Audrey Hepburn. There was a standing ovation after Ray’s recorded speech. The speech not only moved the audience present there, but also Billy Wilder, a very famous Hollywood filmmaker of Double Indemnity and Sunset boulevard fame. Ray in his speech said that he learnt a lot from Hollywood and directors like Billy Wlider, John Ford, Hitchcock influenced him a lot. He said that being deeply touched by Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard he wrote to Billy Wilder in appreciation in the late 1940’s. But Billy Wilder never replied. Ray wrote to Deanna Durbin too at the same time. She never replied also. Well! The speech ended with a thunderous applause and standing ovation in Dorothy Chandler auditorium. Surely the Americans liked the fondness and appreciations of all things Hollywood by a person from distant shores. But the story does not end here. Few days after this Oscar acceptance speech, Ray household got an Air mail from USA. The sender was Billy Wilder. He apologized profusely for not replying to Ray much, much earlier and wished him good luck and speedy recovery. This news published in Calcutta dailies like Ananda Bazaar Patrika and The Telegraph gave us a real thrill.

Another one I remember about Ray. Once while showing Mahanagar in some European film festival a film critic noticed that the movie ends with the camera panning to the open sky of Calcutta and focus on a streetlight having two bulbs- one was alight, another not. In this very moment the couples (Anil Chatterji as husband and Madhavi Mukherji, the wife) who have lost jobs are hopeful that they will get job soon and this city will never forego them. The critic showered praises on Ray for showing the half-lit streetlight to display the contradicting emotions of hope and hopelessness, anxiety and apprehension of the jobless couple. Ray simply said that he never wanted to mean anything by that last shot. The Calcutta streetlights, many of the time, due to lackadaisical nature of municipal maintenance used to have one bulb functional and another fused to give that half-lit appearance. It was mere coincidence that he got one when he panned the camera. Needless to say audience was amused.

Ray is still watched and admired in America. It has to be remembered that it was due to Merchant-Ivory Productions’ active effort that classics like Pather Panchali were digitally re-mastered and restored. Very recently I found (from an article in Outlook) that David Packard of the Hewlett-Packard (HP) fame is an ardent admirer of the master. He arranged a special show of Ray movies in Pasadena , California as an “antidote of pessimism” shown in  ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. Long live Ray.

Note: This blog written by me first appeared in Passionforcinema.com in August,2009

Remembering Harisadhan Dasgupta – a forgotten filmmaker

       

Hospitals are not the best of places to meet interesting people and forge friendly bonds with a person four times your age. Yet it was in a hospital room that I met Harisadhan Dasgupta – the doyen of documentary filmmaking in India. He is much in news these days due to  reasons other than his filmmaking career-his wife Sonali’s affair with Rossellini and a recent book “Under her spell” by Dileep Padgaonkar in 2008, the ex-editor in chief of times of India.

 Anyway, let us go back to summer of 1993. I was badly injured in a motorcycle accident and admitted in Woodburn block of SSKM Hospital, Kolkata. I shared the room with Harisadhan, whom I later started calling Hari dadu ( Dadu means Grandpa in Bengali to the uninitiated ). He was in his late sixties, quite infirm and desolate with loneliness and despair. I was eighteen and injured bad enough to be bedridden and operated into with no hope of recovery in six months. But the plight of illness did not stop me to get connected to him. Being a budding film buff with firm belief that European movies were far better than Hollywood counterparts though Hollywood could not be denied because of its worldwide presence, in no time, we were chatting on movies, music and what not. Suddenly he asked me the name of Eugene O’Neal’s daughter married to Chaplin. As I said “Oona”, Hari dadu exclaimed “Now I have no doubt about your love for films.” And who knew those animated discussions would soon turn into a friendship- quite unusual between two men with half a century age gap. Yet we were friends discussing anything and everything under the sun. I used to talk about my friends, family, ambition, career, music, books…..and he used to listen to them intently and advise me on my career plans.

He used to tell about his past life, his movies, his celebrity acquaintances and his American experiences. His father,Dr.Biraj Mohon Dasgupta, was a renowned protozologist-the second Indian to become a director of School of Tropical Medicine, Calcutta. They had a sprawling mansion at Southern Avenue in Calcutta. His father wanted him to be a physicist and sent him to England during the Second World War to for higher studies. But his creative urge propelled him to University of Southern California where he learned filmmaking. He assisted Irving Pitchell in one of his films. In late forties and fifties, after returning to Calcutta, he started making documentary films like Tata Steel, Konark, A day in the life of a cigarette ( for ITC). And he was started to be called as “Hari S” by his friends as a result of his penchant for everything American.

Because of his skills, he was Jean Renoir’s natural choice in Calcutta to assist him in directing The River just after independence of India. And his documentary film Tata Steel was a classic with script by Satyajit Ray, camerawork by Claude Renoir and music by none other than Pandit Ravishankar. He was a founder of Calcutta film society movement. He used to earn well by making documentaries since most of them were financed by profit making business houses. At that time he had developed a rift with Satyajit ray regarding making a movie out of Rabindra Nath Tagore’s novel - Ghare Baire. He paid Rs.20000, a princely sum those days on account of royalty to Visva Bharati. But the movie did not happen since no decent producer could be found in Calcutta. But the loss of money on his side caused a permanent rift between them which nobody bridged in future life. Even Satyajit Ray wrote about this in ‘My days with Apu’, a Penguin book. Anyway, in his long and eventful career, he made many documentaries for Films Division and private organizations and two popular feature films in Bangla- Eki onge eto roop ( Too many faces of eve, starred by Soumitro Chatterjee & Madhavi Mukherjee) and Kamal lata ( starred by Uttam Kumar & Suchitra Sen). Eki onge Eto Roop got a prize in Edinburgh film festival.

One night he was quite depressed. I inquired. He asked me “Can I tell you something adult ?”. Upon my affirmation, he started telling me his traumatic married life, how his wife Sonali eloped with the world famous Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini with his one year old son to Rome leaving behind his elder son Raja. That was an international scandal and for his honor I refrain from divulging any details as it may hurt many still alive.

The scar this incident left was hard to be hidden. Though he raised his son Raja with his family’s help, and led a ‘clean’ life without getting any more scandal and media attention, sometimes his reflections on himself showed the deep despair he harboured within. But he was courageous enough to continue making films even after this debacle. In fact his memorable documentaries like Panchthupi (for Burmah Shell), Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Baba Alauddin Khan were made after this scandal. Panchthupi was shot in a village in Murshidabad district of Bengal where he likened the homecoming of a rural married lady with the events of Durga Puja, a very Bengali tradition. Seeing Panchthupi, Amita Malik, noted film critic of The Statesman was ecstatic and went on to praise to the extent of comparing it to Pather Panchali. But sometimes I felt he was a pioneer who never read the sign of time. In the Naxal movement ridden turbulent 70’s when Satyajit Ray was making socially relevant Pratidwandi or Mrinal Sen, Kolkata 71, he was contented with a romantic Uttam-Suchitra starrer Kamal Lata, the last episode of the Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanto series of novels.

Tragedy and sorrow never left Harisadhan. He lost his younger brother Bulu Dasgupta, a talented cameraman during shooting of Panchthupi by lightning strike while taking a shot of thunderstorm in an open field. “Keno chokher jole bhijie dile na sukno dhulo joto (o lord , why did not I soak the dust of your path by my tears?)” was his favorite Tagore song that always consoled him. I remember him singing this song tearfully quite often. Due to Sonali’s departure and ensuing scandal, his brother Bulu’s death, he used to think of filmmaking having an ominous influence on him in later part of his life and tried to keep his son Raja away from films. But as luck would have it, Raja Dasgupta went on to become an independent filmmaker and his grandson, Birsa has also joined filmmaking bearing the legacy of his grandfather. When Raja Dasgupta made his first documentary on the Santhal leader Birsa Munda during his college days, he told me, he was secretly happy though he expressed disapproval publicly. How could he say no when he himself devoted his life to movies? And many of the noted filmmakers like Gautam Ghosh, Buddhadev Dasgupta, K.Bikram Singh were helped by him in their budding years. He helped Bangladeshi filmmaker Zahir Raihan a lot during Muktijuddho in 1971. I remember Goutam Ghosh fondly, coming to meet him almost everyday.

My stay was going to end as I was operated on and released. But my association with Hari dadu continued through letters, which I have kept as fond remembrance. Then he was released from hospital. He visited our house at Bhabanipore once. He gave me a long list of ‘must watch’ movies which I still cherish. He was in high sprits then and was planning for a movie again. He wrote a script of a feature film which he showed me once, but a rank bohemian that he was, he did not stay back in Kolkata. He went to Santiniketan. We exchanged letters but slowly his reply trickled off. I became engaged with my college life, movies and friends. One day in September, 1996, all the leading dailies of Kolkata reported his death in an obscure village near Santiniketan, Bengal. His silent departure reminded me of a sentence “We carved not a line and we raised not a stone but we left him alone with his glory”; from an old poem “The burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna”.

Note: This blog written by me first appeared in Passionforcinema.com in May,2009

Meghe Dhaka Tara, a Nobel laureate and Me

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This is about my correspondence with Professor Roald Hoffman, a Nobel laureate regarding Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara. Roald Hoffman got Nobel in chemistry in 1981 for Woodward-Hoffman rules in organic spectroscopy. Apart from his expertise in academics he writes plays and poetry. He visited Calcutta in 1999 to deliver a lecture in Indian Association for Cultivation of Science. After his lecture he watched Meghe Dhaka Tara in Jadavpur University film club. I did not attend his lecture. I came to know all these from Anandabazar Patrika, a Bengali daily. I got a little inquisitive not because of a foreigner’s interest in Ghatak’s films but because of his appreciation of this melancholic movie in view of his troubled past. His father was killed by the Nazis in Poland and he fled to USA with his mother from a concentration camp at the tender age of eleven. Later on he had a peaceful life and an illustrious career (He got a Nobel). But I always had this question. Why did this man like and praise Meghe Dhaka Tara, a sad movie on the sadder events of sacrifice and exploitation of a Bengali refugee girl (Nita, portrayed brilliantly by Supriya Chaudhuri) in the aftermath of partition? Did his history of difficulties under the Nazis made him become touched by the sufferings of a Bengali girl in a movie whose backdrop is culturally much different from his?

I did not know. And I forgot this news item for a while. Why shouldn’t I?  I come from a family of Calcutta who never faced any pain of displacement after partition of India in 1947. Our ancestors were residents of Calcutta over the past century. So as a high school student when I watched this movie I was not impressed. I loathed the melancholy of suffering of Nita, the female protagonist who took charge of a refugee Bengali family almost single-handedly and sacrificed her whole life. She died of TB at the end when everyone of that helpless family got to their feet with her help.

But with a downturn of our family fortune and neglect we lost our prime ancestral property in Calcutta. Financial conditions went down gradually. We were forced to settle down in a suburb of Calcutta, away from the usual dazzle of city life that we enjoyed for long. I had to take charge of everything. My shoulders became heavy with duty. I could not even look after my career properly. The restructuring of my family came with my sacrifice. And with this loss and displacement from own piece of land I understood the greatness of Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara. When you don’t lose, you don’t suffer and if you don’t suffer you never identify yourself with the sufferings of others.

I left Calcutta to break away from the melancholy. I could not look after my career earlier. My peers got much ahead of me. Even my younger cousins and juniors went ahead and overtook me. After 2 jobs- one as a lecturer in a college and another in R&D of a biotech company I came back to Ph.D. in IIT Bombay which I wanted to do much, much earlier. I joined PhD at an age of 32 ! I am optimistic; things have changed and I am fighting back. After a successful PhD  I relocated to Hyderabad to join an IT company. Then I joined St Xavier's College Mumbai and did well for myself. I understood one fact : There is no point in glorifying suffering.

But now whenever I see this film I am touched with Nita’s sorrow. I understand how much pain she must have gone through. And I identify with her character more than before. I consider Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara as one of the greatest films ever made. I sob uncontrollably when I see Nita and her brother singing that Tagore song “Je rate mor duar guli bhanglo jhor e (The night my doors were broken by storm)”.

I shared these feelings on Meghe Dhaka Tara with Prof Hoffman through email. These days with internet and email you can do things which were unthinkable and impossible a decade ago. I know it is a bit strange to write a letter to an unknown person, that also to a Nobel laureate. I was hesitant to write initially, but then I felt if I do not share my feeling and get to know about his opinion on this film I would be unhappy.

And to my surprise he replied! He wrote …………..

Subject: Re: a letter on Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara
From:    "Roald Hoffmann" ......
Date:    Tue, May 19, 2009 5:45 am
To:      biswaprasun@iitb.ac.in

Hello, Biswa,
        It is remarkable that you remember that visit. Debashis Mukherjee introduced me to Ritwik Gathak's films, and I have viewed them since with pleasure. For a long time it was impossible to get them shown publicly in the US because of some complicated family struggle on the rights. But now DVDs are available; I have a ste of 5 or 6.
        You are right that among Western cinematophiles he was overshadowed by Satyajit
Ray, and I think unjustly so. Fashion makes these things happen, it's unfair. I have always liked the blend of social justice and depth of personal feeling that characterizes his films.  And you have undergone a great degree of personal suffering, that has allowed you to come in contact with the emotions Gathak so beautifully has his actors express.
        My own history of difficulties was in my childhood, and the cultural setting very
different. But emotions of loss are universal. I don't think it is because of his expression of suffering that I liked and like Gathak; I can't really say why...
        I have been editing an English translation of selected poems of Joy Goswami. It
does not differ from what came out in Calcutta as "Part Autobiography", but I have written a different introduction, and I think gotten the translators to improve their work. Getting it published here, my goal, is very difficult.
        I wish you well in your PhD studies, it has been a long road for you.
Cordially yours,
Roald

This letter is my treasured possession. Not everyday you get a letter from a Nobel laureate. Though it is quite personal and I shared a little bit of my life-story with the film-lover blog readers, I thought of doing this just to let you know how powerful the language of a movie can be so as to cut across the barriers of language or society.

Thank you readers.

Note: This blog written by me first came out in Passionforcinema.com in April,2010.