Why Bengalis are afraid of Satyajit Ray

Culture isn't a copyright. When people say,"That's our culture,"they simply mean they have been doing certain things that way. Others can do the same things differently. Culture, which includes artistic production and consumption, is therefore nobody's private property, intellectual, or, in some cases, even material. Of late, Bengalis have been losing sweat over a particular cultural question. The choice of controversial filmmaker-actor Q (Quashiq Mukherjee) to portray cine-maestro Satyajit Ray in an upcoming film on the making of Pather Panchali has jangled a number of nerves that make Bongs who they are.

Artistic morality

Their sensibility, their artistic morality, their culture, among a retinue of other, slightly intangible, items that can't be measured automatically. Degrees of aantlaami (a peculiar kind of self-defeating intellectual narcissism, perhaps comparable to the French or German variety) determine the unbearable Bongness of being, oscillating between Rabindrasangeet and Satyajit Ray, when not rankled by whereabouts of Netaji or glued to the TV screen airing Mamata Banerjee's latest rally.

The question of Q playing Ray has thrown many a Bong off their comfort zone. How can a filmmaker of uncertain cinematic pedigree and downright "offensive" oeuvre be allowed to portray Ray?

For a community that prides itself for being immersed in culture, there's a certain stifling rigidity to what Bengalis, at least a large majority of them, particularly the teeming middle class consumers, perceive as culture. While artistic production centred in Kolkata still happens to be one of the most avant-garde and experimental in India, somehow that doesn't push the ossified boundaries of what is collectively imagined as Bengali culture, which still needs to hark back to a Tagore or Ray. Of course, reinterpreting those two pillars of Bengali art is a cottage industry in itself, as writers, musicians, dramatists and filmmakers fall back on the genius of Ray and Tagore, exploring their own journeys vis-à-vis the auteurs.

But the adaptations and appropriations - such as Bengali bands and films often rerecording Rabindrasangeet with electronic, techno jazz and rock music as background score, or a revered filmmaker such as the late Rituporno Ghosh, emphasising and magnifying the latent sexual elements in Tagore's novels and short stories - get mixed reactions. The response is less about the merit of the new work of art itself. Rather, the trepidation, in fact a full-fledged collective anxiety, stems from the fact that the adaptation is different from the original. And what constitutes the "original", what are its limits and horizons, just how far can it be stretched to be still considered Tagorean, is a turf war.

Idolatory

Similar idolatry over Satyajit Ray - the man, the artiste, the icon - constitutes another major chunk of the aggressive vocation that is Bengaliness.

Of course, such uncritical obsession, which is less the result of actually engaging with the myriad layers of Ray's formidable corpus-literary, filmic, as well as his sketches and music-but rather, of accepting Ray's cultural value blindly, as heirloom, a matter of inheritance, identity. Like language, somehow the inherited nature of Tagore's and Ray's cultural presence has made them somewhat uncontestable, unchallengeable divine beings, casting a long shadow on contemporary Bengaliness.

Coming back to the question posed at the beginning of this column - why are Bengalis up in arms over Q playing Ray - a quick glance at Q's filmography would provide the obvious answer. Q has used explicit sexual imagery in his films. Though not the eminently forgettable Biish, but the brilliant documentary Love in India, and the icing on the cake, Gandu - have brought in sex, sexuality and the body (male, female and those in between) matter-of-factly. Sexual intercourse, still a taboo in not just commercial Indian cinema but also Hollywood and other national mainstream filmmaking, gets a casual, frank makeover in Q's films, coming through both as statements intended to shock and as an attempt to break down the putrefying middle class morality of art consumers, particularly the Bengalis.

Bong sensibility

That Q is the man to portray Ray in a new film showing the making of Pather Panchali, Ray's first film (based on Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's novel) that ran into financial troubles and was ultimately made with a hefty government grant, since then becoming a cornerstone of cinematic achievement, is indeed something that has hit the rawest nerve of the so-called genteel Bong sensibility. By deifying Tagore and Ray, Bengalis have incarcerated the two artists in a prison-house of infantilism. Any deviation from set norms of reading Tagore and Ray is considered a blasphemy. The set norms, though not exactly codified, however, can be traced in the numerous renditions and performances of Tagore's songs and dance dramas, as well as through a neo-classical reading of Ray's filmography dealing with motifs and imageries, rather than engaging with the deep cultural questions posed by the honorary Oscar-winning filmmaker.

William Shakespeare, whose works have been subjected to the beautiful anarchy of intertextuality, cultural reconstructions (such as the first black or gay actor portraying say a Hamlet or a Macbeth) over four centuries, has been saved from the terrifying prospect of aesthetic mummification precisely because he has been resurrected as a global figure, far from the circumstances of his parochial 16th century English origin. We have Othello in Chinese and King Lear in Swahili. In India, we have had Vishal Bhardwaj's Shakespeare trilogy in Maqbool, Omkara and Haider.

Had African, Asian and Latin American writers and filmmakers not taken Shakespeare and given his Renaissance dramaturgy a tug and a pull crossing centuries and geographies, the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon would have been faintly remembered merely as an English playwright.

Q's pockmarked face might make us see Ray in a new light. Or not. But we shouldn't stop him from playing Ray. Our gods must not be so vulnerable.