In 1930, when Rabindranath Tagore saw Sergei Eisenstein's newly made film Battleship Potemkin in Moscow, he was powerfully moved. As tsarist troops were shown massacring the people during the 1905 revolution, Tagore's face was tense. According to his Russian interpreter Pera Atasheva, future wife of Eisenstein, the poet clenched and unclenched his hands with excitement.
Tagore never really became involved with filmmaking in India. However, he was keenly interested in the visual arts, including the cinema, from the 1920s onwards. One can see why from a comment he made in Creative Unity (1922), while trying to define the aims of his new university: 'A large part of man cannot find its expression in the mere language of words. It must therefore seek for its other languages – lines and colours, sounds and movements.'
Tagore's own paintings use such a language of line and colour, radically free of artistic traditions from the Subcontinent. That is why they affected Satyajit Ray as a young art student studying at Tagore's Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan. Half a century later, Ray wrote in The Art of Rabindranath Tagore: 'It is important to stress that Tagore was uninfluenced by any painter, eastern or western. His work does not stem from any tradition but is truly original. Whether one likes it or not, one has to admit its uniqueness.'
Ray's interest in filming Tagore works began early. In 1947, he wrote a screenplay for The Home and the World (Ghare Baire), to be directed by a friend, but the project fell through. In 1960, he directed The Goddess (Devi), based on a theme Tagore had gifted to another Bengali writer. Then, in 1961, Tagore's birth centenary, Ray tackled Tagore directly. (Tagore himself had died two decades earlier, in 1941.) He made a one-hour documentary film on Tagore and, simultaneously, a trilogy, Three Daughters (Teen Kanya), adapted from three of Tagore's short stories. Three years later, 1964 saw Ray's first feature film based on Tagore, Charulata. Finally, in 1984, he directed The Home and the World.
In addition, most of Ray's other films contain snatches or passages of Tagore in word and song and also other references to him. There can be few great artists who have as close an affinity. Let us look briefly at Charulata and one of the Three Daughters trilogy, The Postmaster. They are considered to be among Ray's best works, besides being among his personal favourites.
The foolish human heart
In Tagore's brief, late-Victorian story, 'Postmaster', a respectable young man from Calcutta is forced to accept an ill-paid job in the back of beyond. 'Coming from such a metropolis, he was like a fish out of water,' begins Tagore. The locals are definitely 'not fit company for a gentleman. Not that our son of Calcutta had the knack of mingling with strangers. In an unfamiliar place he became either arrogant or ill at ease.' Like most educated Bengalis of his age and time, the postmaster writes poetry. Having little official work, he produces a poem or two. These poems 'expressed sentiments about days passed happily in contemplation of new leaves trembling on the trees and clouds in the sky – but God knows, if overnight some genie from an Arabian tale had stripped the trees of leaves and branches, built a paved road and blotted out the clouds and sky with rows of tall buildings, this half-dead gentleman would have sprung to life.'
The postmaster comes to depend on his servant, a wispy orphan girl with 'no real prospect of marrying', named Ratan. Tagore sketches their relationship in one deft paragraph:
While the postmaster rested in the evening, smoke coiled upwards from the village cowsheds, crickets chirped in the bushes, and from a village farther off came the beating of drums and cymbals and the unearthly high-pitched songs of intoxicated Bauls. Then, sitting alone in the darkness, if he saw a tree shiver, even this poet's heart beat a little faster. He would light a feeble lamp in a corner of the room and cry 'Ratan!' Ratan, waiting outside the door, would be expecting his call but would not come at the first summons. She would say, 'What is it, Dada Babu? What do you want?'
Ray took Tagore's hints about the postmaster's timidity and insularity, and elaborated upon them to create a poignant visual poetry, deploying a few carefully selected expressive details. Partly out of sympathy for Ratan but mainly to fill the endless hours in the village, the postmaster teaches the girl the basics of reading and writing Bengali. Ratan learns most eagerly. Time passes. Then the postmaster catches malaria and becomes delirious. Ratan nurses him and soon comes to see the postmaster as the father she never knew. Immediately after he recovers, however, he decides to apply for a transfer from the village on health grounds. When his request is refused by the authorities, he resigns.
'The new postmaster arrived,' Tagore writes, continuing:
The former postmaster, on the point of leaving, explained the responsibilities of the job. Then he called out for Ratan. 'Ratan, I've never been able to give you anything,' he said. 'Now that I am going I want to give you this. It will keep you for some time.' He drew his entire month's salary from his pocket, keeping only travelling expenses. Then Ratan fell to the ground, clasped his feet and pleaded, 'Dada Babu, I beg you, I beg you, you don't have to give me anything. I beg you, no one should trouble about me.' She ran away.
The ending of Ray's film is completely faithful to this charged little duet between male insensitivity and female hurt affection. But Ray's approach differs greatly. Gone is Ratan's falling at the postmaster's feet, which would have been rather melodramatic. All we see is her lugging a large pail from the well for the new postmaster, passing mutely by the former postmaster as he makes his way down the village path towards the boat – to the accompaniment of some trembling plucked instruments.
In Ray's telling, Ratan has been crying, but she is too proud and wounded to accept the coin that the postmaster is ready to offer her; she does not look at him or even stop until she has gone well beyond him, when she needs to relieve the weight of the pail on her arm. She disappears and, a few moments later, the postmaster overhears her familiar voice say, 'I have brought your water, sir.' But she is calling, of course, not to him but to his replacement. Emotion overwhelms him then, as he gazes at the useless rupee in his hand. Replacing it in his pocket he very slowly walks away, his figure gradually receding, forever leaving behind Ratan and his brief village existence.
Tagore finishes with a somewhat Victorian moral, though delicately expressed. Ratan tearfully wanders round and round the post-office shed, with perhaps a faint hope that her Dada Babu might return. 'Alas for the foolish human heart!' Tagore writes. 'It cannot avoid making such blunders. Logic is slow to penetrate it. It distrusts proofs, however absolute, clutches at false consolations, until they sever all its arteries and suck its life-blood. Only then, finally, does the mind become aware of its errors; but the heart continues eagerly to fall into further nets of entanglement.'
With Ray, there is no speech by the postmaster, virtually no response from Ratan, and definitely no propounding of morals. Everything is left unsaid – symbolised by the rejected rupee. It is as if words are simply inadequate to express Ratan's sense of hurt – and, in a deeper sense, the pathos of the human condition. Even the hard-bitten New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was moved to write of The Postmaster: 'It says almost all that can be managed about the loneliness of the human heart.'
Freeze frame
Charulata, also known as The Lonely Wife, is also about loneliness, but this time of the rich. Set in Calcutta at the height of the Bengal Renaissance, the film's story is an archetypal love triangle: between the childless Charu, her husband Bhupati and her young brother-in-law Amal. The original novella, The Broken Nest (1901), was based on a real-life triangle: between Tagore's sister-in-law, his elder brother and himself. The wealthy Bhupati is wrapped up in his work as the proprietor and editor of an English-language newspaper, and fails to notice when his child-wife Charu grows into a young woman.
'The newspaper editor failed to react to this momentous piece of news,' Tagore writes.
His overriding concern was that the Government of India's border policy of gradual expansion might break all bounds and precipitate chaos. In this affluent household Charulata had nothing to do. Like a flower with no hope of fruition she came into bloom, quite superfluous, and somehow whiled away the useless, endless hours. She lacked for nothing. In such a situation a young wife, if given the chance, fusses too much over her husband, violates domestic border policy and steps from being timely to untimely, from proper to improper. Charulata had no such opportunity. The barrier of paper guarding her husband seemed well-nigh impenetrable.
This passage comes near the beginning. Ray's challenge was how to express Tagore's metaphors and his bantering tone as soon as the film started. His solution is an extended opening sequence – some seven and a half minutes long – containing hardly a dozen spoken words and none of them between husband and wife. In Ray's own words, 'Except for one line of dialogue … the scene says what it has to say in terms that speak to the eye and the ear.' Charu merely wanders from room to room, picking up a book here, playing a note on the piano there, catching glimpses of the intriguing outside world through half-closed shutters with the help of eye-glasses, a lorgnette.
Finally, from his adjacent office, Bhupati appears, fetches a book and slowly returns, nose buried, failing to notice his wife right beside him. As he disappears down some steps, Charu playfully watches him through the lorgnette and then suddenly, frustrated by the game, lets it drop from her eyes. As her arm falls, Ray's camera abruptly pulls back from a close-up of Charu watching her husband to a long shot of her standing alone, framed by wealth – the lonely wife of the film's title. Ray's use of the lorgnette, which brings Bhupati and his book physically closer while simultaneously emphasising his mental distance from Charu, is a masterly cinematic realisation of Tagore's line, 'The barrier of paper guarding her husband seemed well-nigh impenetrable.'
Let it be
Yet, not all of the most affecting scenes in Ray films are wordless. Well into Charulata comes an evening scene that turns largely on words and their nuances. This is thoroughly in tune with Charu and Amal's love of word play, literature and the life of books as spelt out by Tagore. By this point, Charu is now deeply in love with Amal. She also fears he is going to leave her, knowing that he has realised that their relationship has trespassed onto dangerous ground. Instinctively, their conversation becomes a light-hearted game with dark undercurrents, in which each of them must start as many words as possible with the letter 'b' – words such as Bristol (where Rammohan Roy died), barrister, Bengal, Byron, Bankim (a reference to Bankim Chandra Chatterji, the Bengali writer), i (Bengali for sister-in-law), even bilat (meaning abroad). Amal has an offer to go to England in order to train as a barrister, but only if he first agrees to a marriage – biye in Bengali – arranged by Bhupati with a wealthy bride in neighbouring Burdwan. Beneath all this banter lurks the b-word that dare not speak its name: for Bhupati, the third member of the triangle, is utterly unaware of what is happening behind his back.
At the end of the scene, Charu bites her tongue as she is about to call herself behaya, meaning brazen, in other words shameless. Her eyes meet Amal's and it is obvious that the game – and perhaps their intimacy? – must end. That night, Amal packs and leaves the house without saying goodbye. Charu understands why he has gone, but in Tagore's novella Bhupati still has no inkling. This incomprehension struck Ray as not being credible psychology. He therefore created a scene in which Bhupati discovers Charu's true feelings by accidentally witnessing the latter's monsoon of emotion on reading a letter from Amal.
There was no possibility of a happy ending here, but neither could it be high tragedy. For Tagore's ending is ambiguous. Bhupati is about to accept a job as a newspaper editor in far-off South India. Charu suddenly seizes his hand and requests, 'Take me with you.' For a moment he studies her face. Then his hand goes slack and drops hers. Bhupati moves away to the veranda and reflects, 'How long could I bear embracing someone whose heart was dead? I cannot face the rest of my life like that.' He goes to Charu in the bedroom and says, 'No, I cannot do that.' He sees the blood drain from her face. She clenches the edge of the bed. At once Bhupati urges, 'Come, Charu, come with me.' 'No,' she replies. 'Thak.' Let it be.
In the film, Bhupati leaves the house in mental turmoil, but eventually, after nightfall and after much anguished reflection, he returns. He meets Charu on the threshold and, with extreme hesitation, accedes to her gentle request to enter: 'Esho', come in. She extends her hand, but, just before their hands can touch, the image freezes. The film finishes with a brief 'photograph album' of still images: the hands about to touch; the individual shadowed faces of Charu and Bhupati; the face of their manservant bringing a glowing lamp; Charu and Bhupati together in mid-shot, hands poised to meet; finally a long shot down the veranda of these three people with the title of Tagore's story in ornate Bengali script superimposed on the screen – Nashtanirh – The Broken Nest.
Ray said that the freeze shot at the end of François Truffaut's film The Four Hundred Blows (1959) gave him the 'courage' to use such a freeze in Charulata. But of course there was more to it than mere imitation. Here is Ray's attempted explanation (in an interview with this writer in the 1980s). It should, I suggest, recall Tagore's earlier remark: 'A large part of man cannot find its expression in the mere language of words'. Ray said:
Rabindranath's ending was a kind of very abrupt, logical conclusion, and I wanted a visual equivalent of 'thak'; instead of the word, an image, which would suggest that the two people are about to be reconciled and then are prevented from doing so. I couldn't end with a word because I have a feeling that the really crucial moments in a film should be wordless. It's very difficult to express what was precisely meant to be achieved with that series of still shots, but it was something that told me instinctively that it would be the right conclusion for the film. I can't explain beyond that.'
~ Andrew Robinson has recently published The Apu Trilogy: Satyajit Ray and the making of an epic. He is based in London.