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All grownups were once children – although few of them remember it.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery,
The Little Prince
Just close your eyes and think of Apu and Durga running through the kaash fields in Pather Panchali to see the train; a slightly grown-up Apu in Aparajito giving an oil massage to his mother’s employer; the little Kajol asking his father “Tumi ki bondhu?” (Are you a friend?) in Apur Sansar; the proud little orphan girl Ratan who refuses the one-rupee tip from her master in Postmaster; the exquisitely beautiful and tomboyish Mrinmoyee in Samapti playing truant on her nuptial night; the child and teenage protagonists in his Feluda series of mystery films; the innocent little boy who asks his mother how to use white for a flower in a painting about his garden in Pikoo; the naïve grandson who asks his ailing grandfather what ‘du numberi money’ means in Shakha Proshakha; and last, but never the least, the little docile boy of Agantuk who is the only member of the family to place complete faith in the stranger who has arrived from nowhere.
These are children created and nurtured by Ray through the magic of his imagination, his aesthetics and his humane sensibilities. They are children who transcend the synthetic boundaries of celluloid and the framed confines of the screen to step into our hearts and remain there forever.
And who can ever forget the silent, Black-and-White short film Two, which pits a rich boy and a poor urchin, around the same age, against each other, simply with their toys and their music which suggests not just their differences but also their power, or the lack of it.
The rich boy lives in a flat built on a certain height and from its window, he looks down on a street kid, showing off his toys. The urchin does likewise and controls with the reel in his hand, a kite flying in the sky. The rich boy flaunts his toy trumpet which is very loud while the street urchin brings out his flute to show off.
The fact that ‘power’ through affluence sows the seeds of power in that little rich boy’s mind who is not aware that unlike the urchin, he is too caged up in his room and does not have the freedom to chase the kite in the sky. The rich kid gets his slingshot to attack the kite. Unable to aim properly, he then gets his toy air-rifle and successfully shoots down the kite and taunts the poor street kid with a sense of cruel satisfaction.
The urchin returns to his hut with tears and a torn kite and gives up on trying to make friends with the rich kid. Ray achieves this purely through a screen where the two boys can almost be ‘heard’ through the explosive silence that surrounds them and through the difference in the sounds they make with their ‘toys’.
There are two other very famous and commercially successful films targeted both at adults and children Ray made. One of them was Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne he made to fulfil his son’s desire that he make films for children. The other was its sequel called Heerok Rajar Deshe. While the magic, the fun and the comic element made both films very entertaining for children, both films were strong political comments.
While GGBB was a sharp political comment on the state of war, hunger, cruelty and its opposite – peace, food, kindness through the two twin kings and their subjects, Heerok Rajar Deshe was a sharp critique on a totalitarian leader who was against education of any kind and the only one to rebel was a young school teacher. The Ghost Dance with its specially recorded music and song alongside its picturisation through shadow play in GGBB can lend itself even to a Ph.D, research study.
The late Utpalendu Chakraborty made an interesting 77-minute documentary entitled Child Artistes and Satyajit Ray. Produced by Satarupa Sanyal, the film was Censor-certified in 1997 but was never released. This writer had the good fortune of having watched its only screening at Gorky Sadan, Calcutta, under the auspices of The Eisenstein Cine Club, Calcutta, a few years ago.
This is the only film in India that explores the mastery of Satyajit Ray over children not only in terms of presenting them as characters within a film, but also through stories written specifically with the child-reader and child-viewer in mind. He had the rare ability of handling them in a way that made them appear as if they had been picked out of real life. From Pather Panchali to Agantuk, Ray tackled children as children.
Yet, he took them out of their urban, educated, modern backdrop to place them in a rural setting as and when the script demanded. And not once did they appear out of place. Nor did they once behave or speak like adults do.
Ray, for instance, could have easily extended the story of Pikoo made for French TV, into a full-length feature film. It had the elements of drama, conflict, and the scope for propounding Ray’s own ideological stance, perhaps in greater detail. A lesser director would have easily fallen into the trap.
But Ray did not need this. He had his craftsmanship, his artistic creativity, his aesthetic vision and his ideology completely within his command, for every film that he chose to make. In so doing, he honed and perfected the skill and the mastery of deciding the footage of his film without compromising on any of these things.
Pikoo is not a film for children but it helps adults to look at their world through the eyes of Pikoo. Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and Hirak Rajar Deshe were films targeted at a universal audience. Children enjoyed these films for the fantasy, the music, the fairy-tale element and the magic while adults could read in them, thinly veiled attacks against the politics of totalitarianism and suppression of individual freedom. Plus, a message against war when the ‘soldiers’ and animals are too weak to fight because they have been kept hungry.
This understanding of the child’s mindset, this ability to look at the world through the eyes of the child, was within Ray’s genes. His grandfather Upendrakishore Roychoudhury and his father Sukumar Roy were gifted creators of literature for children. Their works are still regarded as milestones in the history of children’s literature in Bengali.
Ray was practically sucked into the world of the child when he began to illustrate books like Pagla Dashu, Abol Tabol, Haw-Jaw-Baw-Raw-Law-the famous book of nonsense rhymes authored by his father. Later, the involvement deepened with the revival of the then-extinct children’s magazine Sandesh, founded, edited and published by grandfather Upendrakishore. Ray edited and illustrated the revived Sandesh jointly with Leela Majumdar and Shakti Chattopadhyay, his lifelong poet friend, till his death.
Ray’s contribution to children’s literature is comprised of 21 novels and 11 short story compilations, most of them translated in many languages across the world. The two incredible and immortal characters Ray has gifted his child-readers with are – Feluda and Professor Shanku. Feluda later turned into a celluloid character that has now cut across the barrier of time and creation with Bombaiyer Bombete directed by Ray’s son Sandip.
The high point of Gautam Ghose’s documentary on the great master simply titled Ray (2001), is the intrigue it triggers off by shedding light again and again on a sentence Ray often marked his beautiful scripts with. “I don’t know.” These three words occur time and again, sometimes in the margin, at other times, right into the script, or below a dialogue, raising questions about a sense of uncertainty that seems to have dogged Ray along his journey towards greatness.
The film closes with a translation of the poem Tagore wrote in seven-year-old Ray’s autograph book left with the poet by Ray’s mother the day before. While handing the book back to the little boy, Tagore had said that though he was too little to understand the words now, he would, when he grew up. “I have travelled around the world to see the rivers and the mountains,” wrote Tagore, “and I have spent a lot of money. I have gone to great lengths. I have seen everything. But I forgot to see just outside my house, a dewdrop on a blade of grass.” These lines marked much of Ray’s philosophy in his later life and work.
