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My Years With Satyajit Ray's Cinema

By Rutuja Deshmukh Wakankar

03 May, 2016
Countercurrents.org

Sometimes I wonder if Fydoor Dostoevsky had met Satyajit Ray, what could have happened on the celluloid is simply unimaginable. Simply for the reason that their creations were reverberating with humanism, universality, and of deceptive simplicity with deep underlying complexity.

Today I feel like reminiscing his uncontrollable presence in my formative years of under-grad and post grad.

Years ago, as a college going student in Pune, I got to associate myself with National Films Archive of India which had periodic screenings of great films from India and abroad. This place definitely left the aficionados craving for more . The film festivals became the rage of those years. The classics from masters enthralled the young and the old alike. And many like me got an opportunity to see some of the best films ever made.

It is said that when we have very high expectations, we are likely to feel let down eventually, but Ray enthralls you and leaves an imprint of his frames on your heart. The first of the Appu trilogy had made Ray an overnight celebrity; obviously I was waiting to see it and reached almost an hour before the show at Film and Televison Insititute of India (where they were screening the film at their Wisdom Tree film festival).

Years later, I feel the same excitement when I think of that small hall in FTII that evening where I met Appu, Durga and his life through the lens of Ray. I had heard many times over of the sheer beauty of those shots where Appu and Durga wade through the grass to see the train running past their village. What is it that makes this one scene so special and memorable is something that I can’t grasp yet – probably the first interaction of Appu and Durga with the “modern” world or the sheer curiosity of human mind reflected with beautiful human emotions, my interpretations go on till today. And it is, perhaps, the beauty of it, that the scene is etched in one’s memory forever. But after watching the film, the scene that etches my heart is when it is Appu’s first day at school and Durga is eager to wake him. And one skips a heartbeat where Appu looks through the torn patch of his quilt at his sister.

After this tormented journey of self through the film, I decided to watch Shatranj ke Khiladi – Ray’s symbolism of two local aristocrats of Lucknow, who remain oblivious to their real lives which are in a mess and follow their passions; similar to the rulers of Awadh of eighteenth century who became virtually impotent in guarding their kingdoms from the British rule.

When one talks of Satyajit Ray, one is not talking of a person – Ray was a phenomenon, an institution, and a rare one at that.

One of his contemporaries, the legendary Japanese filmmaker, Akiro Kurosawa, had once said: “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon”!

I am happy that I managed to see the sun and moon in a different light and shadow through Ray’s cinema.

Rutuja Deshmukh Wakankar is a former journalist with Indian Express. She has taught Cinema Studies at Allahabad University. She is an avid photographer and held exhibitions of her work in Pune. She is also a qualified Advanced Open Water SCUBA Diver.





 



 

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