Shatranj Ke Khiladi was well-received in the West, but in India itself there was grumbling that Ray had destroyed the patriotic essence of Premchand's story. Although this may be contested, Shyam Benegal's Junoon (1978) may have been intended as an antidote to Ray's film – it has an English girl falling in love with a leader of the 1857 Mutiny. Ray, as already indicated, was particular that history should be respected and there are no indications that the ‘nationalist’ spirit even existed in 1857 – although the Mutiny has been officially renamed the First War of Indian Independence. Ray had been critical of the Congress Party in his Calcutta Trilogy; this was a much more bitter pill to swallow for the regime than the radical cinema of the 1970s, which often employed the same rhetoric as Mrs Gandhi – railing against the West, the colonial mindset and feudalism and being pro-worker and pro-peasant. Mrs Gandhi had aligned with the Communists in the 1970s and had brought left-wingers into her government, among them intellectuals like Mohan Kumaramangalam, who became Minister for Steel and Mines and Ashok Mitra, who was Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India. Ray was considered ‘conservative’ in relation to radical filmmakers like Mrinal Sen, but the radical polemic of these latter filmmakers was actually more aligned with political power. Ray, it can be surmised, found himself marginalised with Mrs Gandhi at the helm when he became critical of her party/government, and the films dealt with in this chapter examine the effect of the cultural marginalisation of the filmmaker on his films. Ray had made Pather Panchali in 1955 and had been internationally renowned for decades, but he received the Dada Saheb Phalke Award, the highest recognition for a film personality, only in 1985 after Mrs Gandhi's death – when much less important people associated with films had been honoured earlier. The films dealt with here were made in a five-year period at the turn of the decade.

A strategy employed in the course of this book is to examine Bollywood in the same period to which Ray's films dealt with in this chapter pertain, and Bollywood has always been deeply sensitive to the political currents at any time. In the timespan covered by the films in this chapter, Mrs Gandhi lost power (1977) after having imposed a very unpopular ‘Emergency’ during which press freedom was curtailed.

A case was made in the Introduction for Satyajit Ray as a national filmmaker, and the epithet ‘national’ would include his portrayal of India before it became a nation, i.e. its time under British colonisation. All three of the films discussed in this chapter are connected by the common thread in their portrayals of the decline of feudalism as a force and decaying tradition. They are all based in nineteenth-century India and as such offer us glimpses of key moments of Indian history that contribute to our sense of a nation with a historical trajectory. These films also document the struggle between tradition and modernity as the advent of the British in the country brought in its wake many new developments, the end of numerous kingdoms, the zamindari system as social organisation and the strengthening of colonialism alongside the burgeoning of the Bengal cultural Renaissance. The three films have been studied chronologically (in historical terms) so as to be able to afford a sense of the changes Ray saw as wrought in Indian society in the nineteenth century under the impact of colonial modernity.

The Incursions of Colonialism: Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977)

Of the three films dealt with in this chapter, Satyajit Ray's Shatranj Ke Khiladi is historically placed at the earliest moment and can be used as a template to understand all three as representing, on the one hand, the clash between tradition and colonial modernity and on the other, that between two different civilisations. It presents to us, in effect, with more than the coloniser-versus-colonised theme in which colonisation is simply the betrayal of faith. In Premchand's story the political events happen offstage, as it were, and it can be seen as a critique of the self-absorbed aristocracy doing little when their land is usurped by the colonisers but getting into a murderous rage over a chess game. In Ray's film, General Outram and Nawab Wajid Ali Shah – representing the two opposing sides – are fleshed out and the film emerges as the clash of ideas bred by two different and even opposing civilisations – with neither Outram nor Wajid Ali Shah painted in absolute terms, although the British are the victors. The Nawab is a patron of music and the fine arts, by nature a poet and a connoisseur of beauty.

The two aspects of Satyajit Ray's films covered in this book pertain to his position as a filmmaker vis-à-vis the nation and his portrayal of male characters as national subjects. Masculinity is a key notion with regard to which the British, and those they colonised, had entirely different civilisational perspectives, and with the stabilising of British control over India there was a grading of masculinities in the colonial space. By the late nineteenth century, the politics of colonial masculinity was organised along a descending scale: senior British officials associated with the administration and military establishment, and elite non officials, those not directly related to the colonial administration, occupied positions at the top of the scale. Other groups and classes that made up colonial society supposedly shared some, though not all, of the attributes associated with the figure of the ‘manly Englishman’. In this colonial ordering of masculinity, the politically self-conscious Indian intellectuals occupied a different place; they represented an ‘unnatural’ or perverted form of masculinity. Hence this group of Indians, the most typical representatives of which at the time were the middle-class Bengali Hindus, became the quintessential referents designated as ‘effeminate babus’. A thread in this book has been how colonial masculinity, in the context of the changes in the imperial social formation in the late nineteenth century, produced and furthered such categories.

The portrayal of the English in Shatranj Ke Khiladi, who are pitched against the Indians, is a particularly significant one in this context through the characters of General Outram and Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. While Premchand, from whose short story Ray adapted his film, holds the Nawab culpable on this account, Ray, aware of the complexities of colonisation, and himself being the product of a postcolonial society, takes a different stance. Wajid Ali Shah's is an androgynous presence, but only due to the civilisational contrasts between British and Indian societies noted by Ashis Nandy. To reiterate whatever has been said already, bisexuality in India has been taken to be an indicator of saintliness and spiritual accomplishment, which is also associated with singing and dancing. The person close to godliness is expected to show a little less concern for the worldly division between the sexes and more ability to transcend the barriers imposed by his own sexual selfhood. He subscribes to values that are unfettered by society's prevalent sexual identities.

In the previous chapter the focus was on the incursion of colonial modernity into Indian society and the advent of the modern Indian. This incursion gave rise to a socio-cultural movement in the nineteenth century, generally called the Bengal Renaissance, and consequently to a spiritual sense of a ‘nation’ and helped prompt the struggle for freedom, culminating in Independence, alongside the painful events of the partition. This chapter deals with the genesis of the nationalist struggle, which to my mind, began with the East-West interaction, creating a special breed of Indian men who would later take up the mantle of the freedom struggle. The two films dealt with here – Charulata and Ghare Baire – deal with these aspects and are linked by protagonists who are subjects of the British empire; the films depict important moments in the narrative of Indian history as it unfolded. Gender is an important part of the significance of these films, since both of them are about women/wives who are torn between loyalty to their husbands and extra-marital relationships. Needless to add, the extra-marital relations featured have socio-political ramifications.

In today's political India, nationalism has come to occupy a central position in the discourse around India's past. This is ironic since in the nineteenth century, Indians did not yet have a sense of what ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ or nation or even nationalism meant. And yet in the span of less than 100 years, nationalism has come to mean so much. It has come to mean what Benedict Anderson acknowledged as ‘profound emotional legacy’. However, even before discussing nationalism, a definition of the nation needs to be repeated and Anderson describes it as ‘an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’.

Non-Western nationalisms, according to Anderson, were entirely applications of Western models of nationhood, national identity and nationalist agitation. Before Anderson, however, Bruce McCully had asserted that nineteenth-century Indian nationalism was an ‘exotic growth implanted by foreign hands and influence’ and the great Indian nationalist figures of the time had invented little or nothing in the way of ideology.

Satyajit Ray: Bengali, Indian or International?

This book is about Satyajit Ray's cinema with a focus on his male characters, but the first issue to be resolved – before all others are taken up – is where he belongs as a filmmaker. The question concerns whether he was Bengali, and primarily attached to local Bengal culture since he often described himself as ‘Bengali’ rather than Indian; ‘Indian’ since he was one of independent India's most prestigious cultural exports; or ‘international’ because of his acceptance as auteur at the international level, unmatched by any other Indian filmmaker. This is an issue of importance not only because it has been debated, but because his cultural location as a director would also influence our reading of his films. At the international level, films from unfamiliar cultures bear the burden of representing more than the story elements, including character and the immediate milieu, while representations of dominant groups are seen as indicative of diversity. It has been suggested that Ray unconsciously ‘represented’ a unique place – Nishchindipur – when he used the music associated with the village in Pather Panchali to accompany a different village in its sequel, Aparajito. It is, of course, simplistic to read the use of the same music in this way, as implying congruity between the two spaces, but we may still say that whenever a space is photographed, it can in a sense ‘represent’ an abstraction as well – a village dwelling representing the village dwelling. In India itself early photographic portraits, it has been noted, were painted over to reintroduce decorative elements that preceded photography, to turn the individual into an archetype like a landowner or a matriarch rather than merely an ordinary individual, and even spaces in this sense could become abstractions. Since the village Nishchindipur is not of great interest in the film, perhaps even Indians are justified in regarding it as an ‘Indian village’ despite characteristics specific to Bengal, even though cultural theorists may frown upon this. Popular cinema in India has consistently represented villages as national abstractions, for instance Ramgarh in Sholay.

This chapter, like the previous one, deals with the decades of the 1960s and 70s through the aspirations and failures of the male characters in Kanchenjunga, Mahanagar, Pratidwandi and Jana Aranya. Success in the previous chapter was only for the few because of the limited opportunities in the decades, leading them to appear self-satisfied; thwarted aspiration was the rule. A characteristic of the films examined in this chapter is that the women are more successful, although the discourse would need interpretation – since it is not a straightforward representation of a prevalent state of affairs.

Hindi cinema recorded the milieu in the 1970s through the ‘Angry Young Man’, the figure made popular by Amitabh Bachchan. The failure of the state to provide solutions at the time was undeniable and several different kinds of crises erupted while Indira Gandhi was in office, but her era also propagated self-reliance as Nehru's had done. The agricultural sector did well later in her regime due to the Green Revolution of the previous decade and there were also populist measures, with party cadres as conduits. But overall, few of the benefits were reaped by the salaried classes. Employment was only in public sector financial institutions like banks and insurance; manufacturing sector employment levels were low.

Unemployment and inflation were high in the 1960s and 70s, and with the death of Nehru in 1964 realpolitik took over. When Indira Gandhi took charge in the mid-1960s India was at its most vulnerable, both economically and politically. The wars of 1962 and 1965, two successive monsoon failures of 1965 and 1966, a fall in agricultural output by 20 per cent and food stocks so low as to threaten famine-like conditions had placed India in an unenviable situation, unprecedented after 1947.

Indira Gandhi was quick to realise that India would not be able to maintain a sovereign independent stance vis-a-vis the advanced countries if her economy remained weak and depended on those countries for food. She pushed the ‘Green Revolution’ strategy vigorously and it yielded results. But while the economic conditions improved on account of these measures, there was dissatisfaction among the middle-classes since the economic boom – in which it could fruitfully participate – was to come only decades later. We could say that Ray's films examined in this chapter represent the flip side to those in the previous one, in that they deal with disaffection.

The films covered in this chapter are the very last that Satyajit Ray made before he passed away in 1992 and they differ on many counts from the ones which he made earlier in his career. The last few years of his life saw Ray being given the highest accolades in cinema and in India as a citizen – the Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement and the Bharat Ratna. In 1987 he was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French President Mitterrand, who himself travelled to Calcutta to confer the award on Ray as he was too unwell to travel outside the country. Ray's health was precarious and had already started breaking down before he began filming Ghare Baire in 1984. However, as he told his biographers, it was the thought of making more films that kept him alive and hopeful.

As noted in the previous chapter, Ray had found himself on the wrong side of the Indira Gandhi administration, which prevented him from being recognised for what he truly was – the ‘gold standard’ in cinema that India had to offer to the world – and acknowledged through the Honorary Oscar before getting the Bharat Ratna in India. Ray, as a Bengali, knew that Tagore suffered the same fate – recognition outside India before he was accepted by his compatriots. In 1913 Tagore had won the Nobel Prize in Literature – the first Asian and the only Indian to have won in this category. He received his knighthood only later in 1915 after winning the Nobel Prize, although he repudiated the knighthood in 1919 in protest against the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar.

His health having broken down in 1984, Ray was now restricted to his bed, but thoughts of filming kept him going. When the doctors sensed an improvement in his health, they allowed him to shoot, but movement was restricted and so location shooting was limited and mostly relegated to the studio. The last three films are thus more verbose, relying more on the spoken word than on the moving image, always a hallmark of a Satyajit Ray film, but they are also more polemical.

The period of rest was perhaps a period of introspection for Ray, but one cannot say that he was at the height of his powers when he recovered enough to make films.

By the time we come to the 1960s and 1970s, the newly emergent class is an indigenous segment that may be seen as an offshoot of the class under observation in the last chapter – the anglicised postcolonial bourgeoisie. The era was, however, different from the previous one, with more disaffection. While the early 1960s, dominated by the Sino-Indian War and alarming food shortages – when the Green Revolution was initiated with massive investment in agriculture – was politically ‘stable’, the last years saw the rise of Maoism. This was a radical period around the world and culminated in 1968 in Paris, even being described as a ‘World Revolution’ by political thinkers. Maoism in the late 1960s was associated with a village in North Bengal called Naxalbari, and for this reason has been called ‘Naxalism’ ever since. It was only in the early 1970s when Naxalism was finally suppressed through the concerted efforts of the then Bengal government – the United Front – but it keeps reappearing in one form or another. It is therefore impossible to deal with the Bengali cinema of the period without invoking Naxalism.

A strategy used in this book is to invoke the popular Hindi cinema of the period to which Ray's films in the chapter pertain, and that is not because the two kinds of cinema are similar. It is rather because the two are different responses to the same socio-political reality which needs to be understood first. Looking at that reality from the perspectives of the two cinemas may be helpful. It is interesting to note that the decades under examination here produced Hindi films that were held to be ‘escapist’. Foreign location and hill stations were the norm after the Sino-Indian War, read as an escape from the Nehruvian nationalism of the 1950s, but the trend continued after 1965 when India had fared better in a war against Pakistan. The years immediately after the military disaster against China were dominated by food shortages, but the Green Revolution, with massive investment in agriculture, also mitigated conditions. Whereas farmers were indebted and poor in the earlier cinema (Ganga Jumna, 1961), the progressive farmer is the motif in Upkaar (1967), in which the war of 1965 is also invoked and agrarian want is less of an issue.

Satyajit Ray shot to fame with his debut film Pather Panchali, the first part of The Apu Trilogy. Pather Panchali traces the birth and growth of Apu until he is six years old. Aparajito and Apur Sansar deal with his adolescent years and Apu attaining manhood respectively. One can read The Apu Trilogy as a bildungsroman since that genre concerns itself with the individual discovering himself.

The birth of the bildungsroman as a genre is dated to the publication of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Goethe in 1785–1796 or sometimes to Christoph Martin Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon of 1769. Although it originated in Germany it later spread to the rest of the world. As a genre it focusses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood, in which character transformation or development is important. One however observes that bildungsroman novels usually focus on a male protagonist, as is the case with Ray's trilogy. One can attribute this male-centeredness of the bildungsroman to it being a genre dealing with individual self-discovery while woman protagonists learn to conform to gender givens, rather than discover themselves as individuals. Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice – which are about strong women – are, as instances, about women adjusting to patriarchal societies, either successfully or unsuccessfully, as the case may be. While in everyday life women have entered the public sphere and their voices can be heard in politics and the media, in gender conceptualisation they are still confined to the realm of the personal and the private, as Ljiljana Ina Gjurgain notes.

In Apu's context, the fact that he is male becomes particularly relevant as his growth alongside the emergent nation partly informs the allegorical essence of the Trilogy. Apu's growth from childhood to manhood encapsulates in a way the conflicts, the paradoxes and histories of a nation in the making, although Ray is careful to allow it to be our reading through scrupulously realist storytelling. In the Trilogy – which is based on autobiographical novels by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay – Apu grows up to become a writer, and it would be pertinent at this point to examine how the writer as creative artist was represented in popular cinema at around the same time. Evidently the creative artist had significance in the popular culture of the time to be thus represented.

Ray's cinema, as noted before, offers a consistent and perceptive critique of the nation and the citizenry it created. His ‘locatedness’ – in inhabiting the imaginative as well as geographical terrain of the nation – is clearsighted. To either take a position as a critic of the nation – as many leftwing filmmakers did – or embrace it patriotically as many popular films did after 1947 was not an option to him; what was possible and necessary however was to lay claim to it even as it was being spoken for by sectarian economic and cultural interests, not to forget political ones at the time of Independence. Without taking these paths, Ray instead laid claim to Indian history, seeing it unfolding under the first prime minister of India, Pandit Nehru, and then his later successor Indira Gandhi. One recalls here what Edward Said proposed about the role of the intellectual: ‘With regard to the consensus on group or national identity it is the intellectual's task to show how the group is not a natural or god-given entity but is a constructed, manufactured, even in some cases invented object with a history of struggle and conquest behind it, that it is sometimes important to represent.’

Postcolonial ‘masculinities’ have been studied by Mrinalini Sinha, Rosalind O’Hanlon, Sikata Banerjee and Sanjay Srivasatava, but these studies have mostly been studied in conjunction with violence, religiosity et cetera, the most blatant manifestations. In dealing with the Indian male, Ray was not concerned with ‘Indian masculinity’ per se as much as the Indian subject actively interacting with the nation, being created by it and directing its future. In patriarchal societies national subjecthood is usually exemplified by the male citizen. If the male subject's masculinity is problematic, it could be interpreted as a critique of emergent India – which is how I propose to read Ray's films set after 1947.

From the Colonial to the Postcolonial

India and Pakistan became two sovereign states on 14–15 August 1947, which marked the formal transfer of power from the British imperial government to the newly formed governments of India and Pakistan. This moment in Indian history is specially marked by Nehru's historic speech ‘Tryst with destiny’. While there were celebrations on the streets, there were also riots.