মহারাজা তোমারে সেলাম : A tribute on the 25th year of passing away

I seem to have an uncanny habit of remembering dates and this has been a part of my growing up and life in general .
Hence  important dates are hardly missed although I cannot claim which one is important and which one is not as opinions might vary , but certain dates are so imprinted in memory that unless you are suffering from dementia you may not forget them ever.

23rd April is one such date ... As such if you see there is nothing special about it , no world war was declared , the world was not brought down by a ghastly dengue or malaria parasite , definitely no one broke world record in something , apparently no earth shaking news .

Yet and yet it was a day when 1/4 th or 1/3 rd of my life was taken away . I havent seen Tagore going away , Bengal's ever green hero Uttam Kumar went away in 1980 when I was too young to realise the magnitude of loss  but this day the  quantum of the loss was so inevitably sharp that with it went away a lot of my childhood and the burden still lingers even after 25 years.

Yes - you are right .. Its been 25 years RAY left us .. On this very dark day in 1992 , 5.15 pm Satyajit Ray left this world for a journey into another world plunging  a billion of his blind fans and critics into a state of shock and  disbelief which still to this day is irrevocable . He had received the LIFE TIME OSCAR a few days before in his death bed and we all were hoping that he will make one final comeback but that did not happen..

This encomium is not about Ray and his life & work - we all know what monumental work he had done in his 37 years as film maker and writer and the MAGNUM OPUS that his life is all about .

I am writing this purely because every year am choked with emotion as I think about this man and the  the burden that he single handedly carried as a film maker . Like Sachin Tendulkar , he had the burden of the entire nation as India struggled to move ahead from a state of nascency to adulthood in main stream cinema . Guru Dutta, Bimal Roy, KL Sehgal , Mrinal Sen ,  Shyam Benegal and Adoor Gopalakrishnan ( at a later stage ) were all there just like India had Laxman , Dravid , Ganguly and Sehwag and these by no means were ordinary names but it was the sheer greatness of Ray much like Tendulkar that had to carry the nation every time when India was discussed in a big way at the Cannes, Berlin, London , Toronto, Venice  and finally at the Oscars.

The life and works of Satyajit Ray is well known to all of us , I need not emphasize the same again.  From an advertising professional in D. J. Keymer to making a film on Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's well known classic ( Pather Panchali - The song of the Road) which had to be funded by the then CM of West Bengal Dr . Bidhan Chandra Ray due to paucity of funds to a historic release of the same in 1955 catapulting him instantly into international stardom all are well documented in anals of world cinema .


What I am trying to look at after a quarter of a century of his passing away is his impact on our lives and the extent of his magnitude as a film maker which has been analysed , dissected many a times by experts all over the world.

Ray inherited a legacy - a huge legacy like TAGORE which helped him to think  and work the way he did .  Being born into one of the two pioneer bengali families of the renaissance era and arguably one of the greatest as well -  the roy choudhury's of Garpar - his grand father Upendrakishore Roy Choudhury , a leader of Brahmo Samaj and a man of many parts and his hugely talented father Sukumar Ray nipped in the bud what many think was the foundation of this amazing talent that Satyajit Ray was.

I am inclined to think like many others that had Sukumar Ray lived a normal life like others he would have surpassed Tagore in his exploits as Bengal's greatest intellectual icon. The founder of nonsense rhyme Sukumar Ray's untimely death at the age of 36 in 1923 robbed Bengal and India of a great man whose talents we get a glimpse in his out of the world creation " abol tabol."

Ray from his childhood was overtly interested  in Fine Arts - going to Shantiniketan at the expense of his mother Suprabha's insistence is one such example.

His art and sketches in his creation of his iconic SLEUTH series - feluda and his sci-fi series Prof Shanku is a testimony to the fact of his parallel talent in sketching.

His family was classy as was the other great one from Bengal - Jorasanko Thakurbari but they were exactly not what you call the rich zamindars from Bengal. They had values and principles imbibed in what we call the middle class.

It is this very middle class behaviour and the intellectual bent of mind that prompted Ray to experiment with a classic novel - Pather Panchali ( Song of the Road) where Apu a small boy of a rural village matures .

The novel which has since become iconic and a masterpiece  deals primarily with the growing up of a village lad Apu as he goes through the various phases of life where he handles joy and sadness ( in the form of death ) together as a part of maturing from childhood to adoloscence.

Together with its two parts - Aparajito and Apur Sansar where he introduced his iconic actor Saumitra Chattopadhyay who were to be his thespian for the next 13 movies , Ray launched a new wave of new realistic cinema in which he showcased the common man and his struggle in his daily life .

His treatment of common man and his daily life has been the signature of most of his films from 1955-1983   till  he fell ill and his productivity and quality of films were severely hit in the remaining 9 years of his life .


Kanchenjungha - his first colour film in 1962 which depicts an upper middle class family's visit to Darjeeling  & Charulata in 1964 based on an adaptation by Tagore's Nastanirh ( the tale of a lonely zamindar wife and her growing feelings for her brother in law ) are the two notable exceptions in his work during this period where the treatment of his work was not middle class families .

Often referred to as Ray's Mozartian Masterpiece, Charulata remains one of his best works ever .

Amongst his works between 1965-1982 , Nayak in 1966 where he for the first time cast Bengali Cinema's ever green hero Uttam Kumar deserves mention . Uttam was then at the height of his success as an actor in WB and India and Ray had to use all his powers to convince him to play this role of a screen star travelling by train and meeting a female sympathetic journalist. The film dwells on the inner conflict of a ragingly succesful matinee idol and many see this as a biography of Uttam's own life .

Its been 25 years he is gone , but what he has left behind is nigh impossible to replicate . The legacy has been so rich ... His work is full of humanism, deceptive simplicity, and underlying complexity . Contemporary bengali life , its people and problems have always been the backbone of his simply told tales which has weaved a magic and cast a spell on us over the years ... In Pratidwandi in 1970 , Ray first used a new elliptical narrative style viz. scenes in negative and dream sequences. All these were done to highlight the pathos and agony of the middle class which formed the backbone of Ray's story .

At the silver jubilee of his passing away , we look at the facets of his creation and realise that all his movies mainly sing the song of LIFE and human beings .. He nurtured human relations and its complexities and the humanism that was the backbone of his movies made him an unique man in the world of parallel cinema.

His going away only at 71 in 1992 , has been a huge huge loss to the world of cinema but what he has given to us has been so rich that we still bask in its glory . Households are still glued to TV sets when Sonar Kella or Apur Sansar is aired . The name RAY spells magic ..



Maharaja tomare selam !!!!