Cash and Carry Away....

We cannot plan the future on the basis of the past. This the lesson the old Brahmins must learn; for British capitalism is based on different values to that of the old religions and the civilisation they spawned; a civilisation where morality and art, those fine-tuners of the soul, were its idols and gods. Satyajit Ray, Branches of the Tree. When thugs deface temples and galleries.

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Introduce a toxic substance and accidents occur. A lesson most leaders learn too late, intoxicated by their magical potions, our new synthetic miracles, with their promises of wealth and power. Drunk on the miraculous they don’t think of the hangover, have no concern about black eyes and bruises, your broken ribs. Casualties? Can’t see any chum…too drink-blind to notice.

We witness an invasion. No other word describes it, though it seems a typical familial reunion. But consider what carries them away…. As the children leave the grandfather catches sight of the enemy, and, such is its force for evil, our ninety-year old, who can longer speak, somehow articulates the danger: “mo-to-or”. What to us is an innocuous mode of transport is a weapon here.

To sophisticated Romantics, overly aware of the damage modernity brings in its wake, this is an easy scene to read: an aircraft carrier leaves behind a sea-storm of junks. That car has deep resonances for this man and his relatives.

The backfire agitates Ananda; not because an innocent to modern inventions, but because of Probodh, his son, wrecked by this most emblematic of modern transports, while studying in England. A car crash has left him brain-damaged; his mind now a kaleidoscope of shifting musical patterns – he has a talent for music, his one obsessive interest – out of which emerges the occasional coherent sentence. Mostly he is silent, communicating with gestures; he hits the plate with his index finger when he wants food; thumps any surface with the palm of his hand when a family argument upsets him. An odd conductor of a strange orchestra. In one scene he bangs the table, while his brothers and sisters-in-law look on in panic: they are not used to such histrionics. Prasahnto eventually calms him down, and a servant helps this tottering colossus – Probodh is tall and large – out of the room. It is a moment of pathos: a majestic ruin is being taken away. 

Probodh was the most brilliant of the brothers, and the only one who, after his studies, wanted to return to his father’s house, a rural backwater. Do I need to write that he carries the film’s metaphorical freight? The Tower of Pisa leans on a giant’s shoulder, and is manoeuvred out of town.  

His father, Ananda Mohan Majumdar, is a great man. Starting almost from the factory floor he became a full partner in the firm, and was responsible for its transformation into a profitable business. The profits he used to build schools and hospitals and other social services for the locals, who revere him. A guru. He has a reputation for hard work, intelligence and honesty; a reputation that happens to be true: he is a great man, wise and compassionate. Now he is old. Seventy when the film starts, he lives in the halo of his exemplary life. Yet something has been lost. With the exception of Probodh, none of his sons are with him. Too busy in Calcutta to come to his birthday they send him presents - a dhoti and a jumper - that seem more dutiful than thoughtful. The outside world goes on without him; and he is losing touch with its radical ways, where business eclipses family, and the scales of justice tip towards money not morality.

Though Ananda worries about his sons, he believes them imbued with his values; clothed in civility and honour, their riches to kowtow to probity and justice. Ananda measures his own life by the quality of his children. To have nurtured strong and healthy and moral sons is his wish. His two English mottoes – “worship work” and “honesty is the best policy” – helped make him a fortune, as well as improving the lives of the local people, but their central purpose was to protect and enhance the family and its reputation. All the signs show - surely there can be no doubt - that he has succeeded…Probodh’s misfortune was an accident, and Ananda, being a clever man, knows that these are always possible. Not the stray incident but the overall pattern is what the wise man must contemplate.

An artist looks at life differently: through the perspective of the particular they discover the general truth. It is the difference between two great men, Ananda Mohan Majumdar and his creator Satyajit Ray. 

Ananda loves his car-ruined son. But does he understand him? Talking to Probodh about this early life, he must believe that only Probodh’s language faculty has been wrecked, that his understanding remains. Possible (though we have our doubts). If so, this adds an extra layer of poignancy to the son’s condition: he’ll know that this idle existence goes against his father’s precepts, adding to the old man’s unhappiness. Saints impossible to live with, for they are models impossible to emulate.

Ananda’s worries about his other sons are of a different, more troubling kind. Rumours are circulating of mass corruption: “black money” is rife in modern India. Ananda hopes that his sons have not caught this commercial disease. But doubts nag nag nag away, for deep down he knows these boys lack his moral strength, are not strong enough to resist the pressures of their milieu. They follow the mass not lead it.

Like the majority of old men he is stuffed with illusions. Having lost contact with the contemporary scene, Ananda looks on from the promontory of his own past; a landscape carved out of a culture that predated him but which he enriched with his own gifts. His father an English teacher. His maxims are from England. Both suggest a man formed by a country that has left its own strange character on the sub-continent. Ananda Mohan Majumdar is a relic of colonialism, with all its complex effects; here melding some of the best in ancient Indian culture with the products of the English genius to create an enlightened businessman. In his own person he has achieved a happy balance. Alas, the commercial ethos is parasitic on older values, and tends, over time, to consume its host. Commerce, in the end, turns everything into a commodity. The reason why most cultures have looked down on shopkeepers and moneymakers, have kept them in their place. There is wisdom to such a view. When profit rules even fathers are treated as mere transactions. It is why only Probodh lives at home; and why, when their father is taken ill, his sons are keen to cut their visit short. Money calls!

What once was an amicable entente is turning into conflict, as distinct values discover their incompatibilities; and it is the older India, the classical culture of the Brahmin caste, that must suffer, as the family is forced to play second fiddle to the institution’s first violin. Monday to Friday, 9 to 6, followed by evening cocktails, those client chit-chats; such rituals now take precedence, loosening the emotional bonds to parents and siblings. The ironies hurt: Ananda Mohan Majumdar created this new world! Looking to improve the country, he didn’t follow his father into the teaching profession, but transformed a local firm into a modern company. He brought a new ship to this backwater, and then set his sons afloat on it. Now they’re on the high seas, heading towards Tokyo, London, New York.

His legacy is twisting out of shape. 

Ananda the conduit through which old India is fading away. He responsible for the decline of the old moral values, allowing the spread of “black money” through this best of families. At film’s start he is ignorant of his sons’s corruption, but the atmosphere surrounding their lives gnaws away at him; for Ananda is too clever to lose himself wholly to his faith. The old values have little hold on the young, this he sees, but he doesn't follow this thought to its logical terminus, for he cannot believe his children are corrupt. 

His father is ancient and senile; a symbol, if only Ananda could read it, of his culture’s dementia. 

The youngest and most sensitive son, Prasahnto, is wandering around the house alone. His grandfather pops out of a door. It’s the first time they’ve met on this visit (all the brothers have avoided the old man) and he’s shocked into incoherence. He stares at this familial relic, the face empty of intelligence. In his red jumper, this nonagenarian crazy, with his pale skin, white clothes and white hair, is almost an apparition. A ghost raises his shaking arm and extends a juddering finger, pointing it at Prasahnto’s heart. You recognise me? The servant runs in, apologises, and carries the grandfather away. Only a single generation separates them, but they are complete strangers.

Prasahnto is the sensitive son. Though he too has gone into business, he’s become disillusioned with the commercial life, unable to accept its crooked morality. His faith in the Modern is lost. An old friend, whom he believed incorruptible, is now a low-level crook and cynic – “if you want to stay in business give up your sentimental ideas”, he tells Prasahnto. Such cynicism creates a crisis, and Prasahnto resigns his job to take up his first love, acting; a vocation - the irony so sharp - he sacrificed for his father’s ideals. A momentous decision, surprising his brothers, who oppose it, for they think acting a stain on the family’s reputation. However, impressed by his tirade against commercial corruption and the vehement defence of their father’s values, they admire his courage, this determination to live for ideas for which they have no time.

The brothers know their father was a great man (and that Probodh, if not for his accident, may have been an even greater one). They cannot follow his path. Prasahnto has his father’s strength of will and his ethical outlook, but is not strong enough to maintain them in the business world, which has changed too much. In today’s India Mr Capitalism doesn’t want the old morals, for he can do nicely without them. Ananda Mohan Majumdar was indeed a hero, able to fuse the ancient with the modern to create a prosperous and a moral community. Exceptional, he was also helped by two cultures (English and Brahmin) that cultivated both moral ideals and the will to uphold them. That culture has gone; the great men of today cannot just adapt to the mores of the time but must fight against them if to uphold the beliefs of yesteryear. But as we know, Ananda’s young men are not fighters. Either they surrender to their environment – Protap, Probir – or they escape it: Prasahnto.

Their father is unaware of just how much moral capital has been lost. When he recovers from his stroke he is content; his family at home, their presence assuaging all doubt: how can such sons be corrupt? Yet Probir and Protap are desperate to return to Calcutta; while Probir can only think of his share of the inheritance. Family feeling is on the wane. Business rules these men’s lives; father just another profit or loss item on the balance sheet.

His grandson enlightens Ananda. Just before visit’s end the young boy runs into his room, and tells him about all the things he has learned. He talks about white money and black money and asks his grandfather where can he find the red and green money…. A revelation! His sons are crooks. A blow. He relapses, but recovers enough, a sad and defeated man, to see them off. Although we notice this subtle irony: Ananda is ignorant of the one son who has sacrificed wealth for the old moral values. The world not quite as bad as Ananda Mohan Majumdar believes. The old codes do live on, even though the society has suffered a total transformation. A decent culture to exist within the interstices of this new social space, in areas previously considered outcast and disreputable.

In modernity all values are inverted.

Encased inside music, which he plays late into the night, Probodh lives free of commerce. This irritates the older brothers; Probir; complaining to his wife, says he cannot understand why his brother likes such quaint music. Tapati corrects him: it is Bach. Probir’s reply is typically crass: he quotes a few biographical facts from The Reader’s Digest. The only truly comical moment in the film. Probir has no culture at all. A barbarian.

An odd outcome for Western progress.

Tapati is a beautiful and intelligent woman who has married a boor and a fool.  She is in love with Prasahnto, the one member of the family she talks to as a friend. Except for this relationship her life is empty; for she was conned by her passion into accepting an unsuitable husband, who crushes her spirit. Again, we have this idea of an oasis in a commercial desert…. In a wonderful scene, making palpable Tapati’s beauty and the quiet flux of her emotions and the play of her intelligence, she learns that Prasahnto has quit his job to join the theatre. A moment of shared thought and feeling; a holy communion. Also an elegy. He tells her of his love for a beautiful and clever woman, who, “yes, is on the same wavelength”. Prasahnto is moving away from this world of bad-money and sharp-practice, and Tapati is to be left alone.

Probir, wanting the respect of his son, is trying to be less boorish. Such small improvements the bait to trap the fish…Tapati condemned to live a lifetime of loneliness (Probir may stop sleeping with other women but he’ll never be a sophisticated companion). A few years of sexual ecstasy is to blame: passion doesn’t last, she says. And wealth? It is no satisfying substitute for love and the exercise of a rare mind. Only those who don’t have such qualities can find fulfilment in cash. Probir. Protap.

Money. It encourages the basest feelings. It feeds Probir’s bodily cravings for drink, women, gambling. Barbarian? No. Too kind. Beast.

The above scene, the most beautiful in the film, is a lament for a fallen India. Tapati, the repository what is marvellous in Indian culture (which includes Beethoven and Bach), is to be left to wither alone. For aestheticism will no longer be so intimate with daily life. Art, with its godly wonders, is to leave the office, depart from the home, so as to wander across its own territories. The once integrated life of religion, aesthetics, work and domesticity are separating out into their own spheres; making it harder for those, like Tapati, who need that integrated existence; a prerequisite for a cultivated education.

Walking around the room, musing on his family’s success, Ananda says that it’s due to his two favourite maxims. Probodh, sitting on a chair, quietly humming to himself, unexpectedly quotes them. Ananda is overjoyed. A sign of intelligence. This joy is short-lived. Probodh repeats them obsessively and loudly, shaking his head back and forth, and thumping the sides of the armchair; almost a parody…. Losing his composure Ananda shouts at his son. Probodh stops the performance, and his father, all remorse, apologises for his temper. A resonant scene, whose meaning is ominous but unclear.

Think about that inversion. This happens even to moral values; for the good, given changed circumstances, can easily turn into the bad. “Worship work”. What a plethora of values, attributes and qualities that portmanteau word “work” contains! from the regular hours of a pick-pocket to the concert performances of Ravi Shankar.

Perhaps Probodh is a genius.

At film's end Ananda is close only to Probodh; the most brilliant of sons, incapable of exercising his talents. Here is paradox! We explain it this way. When young Probodh was the naughty child, but also his father’s favourite. Why? Because such a child has the old man’s spirit – naughtiness can be a sign of vitality and independence. Those English mottoes directing that unruly spirit, by digging a channel and setting a goal at channel’s end. Ananda his own soul, who had the strength to interrogate convention and follow his own standards. This made him great, though such greatness required a special mix of talents, combining spirit with intelligence, insight to will and compassion. Yet, like many such spirited children, he retained much of the feeling he struck against. A rare and unstable mixture.

It is easy to overlook the obvious. To achieve true greatness requires the son to rebel against the father, providing it leads to the noble life. Do you see what Ananda cannot see? He had to cultivate a wise resistance in his sons, if he were to replicate his own moral behaviours. He was too great to do this, and so his error: he produced merely followers.

Strike out on one’s own, but keep the best of what bred you. 

The mistake was to think that his successful fusion of West and East would outlast him. Such a succession not only called for a different kind of father-son relationship, but would require the contingencies of time to stay the same; Christianity to still modulate British business. This balancing act couldn't last. Capitalism, once let out of Pandora’s Box, too strong to be contained by the moral values of older civilisations. History moves on. The felicitous merge of ancient and modern was but a temporary affair; unlikely to survive a generation. This the tragedy of Ananda’s life; fated to destroy the very thing he loved.

Probodh exists outside the world his father has created. Yet it’s he who upholds Ananda’s values, thus the last scene of filial solicitude.

Thoughts crowd my mind like an audience squeezing out of the cinema…. Did Ananda choose the wrong career? A better way to preserve the old values to continue along the Brahmin road of education? Or is this my bias? Knocked over the head by the Greeks, do I rate knowledge too highly? Questions bustle and push through the doors…. Or was he just unlucky? Without that accident this brilliant son to have led his own brilliant career, in whatever field chosen. Just an accident.

We hold onto his thought, which we may share with Satyajit Ray.

Yet we know that something has gone wrong. And being artists we have to put the question to modernity, each to come up with their own answer. Ray’s answer is ambiguous; for although nodding to art as a self-enclosed realm, he sees the loss to the rest of society; knows that art needs a cultivated lay audience, women like Tapati. Art for the artist’s sake leads to the madness of Probodh. 

But there must be a simple way! you cry.

I turn to Leopardi, and his ‘Leopard’: to stay the same everything must change. 

Yes! But how? How! 

Ray’s film suggests its own answer, though not an easy one to put into words.

You nudge me. Ask me to write it down.

In the modern world the spirit of art is precarious. All our efforts should go into preserving a quality so easily lost. But how do this? Well, we have the solution here, in the genius of our director.

Genius, you say, genius is the answer to our problem?

Of course, it always is. Yet I have something specific in mind. The spirit is contained within the film itself, which Ray was able to make because he had almost total control of the enterprise. Some means to be found to allow genius its liberty, not easy when the culture is colonised by the corporation and its collective ethos.

Independence then?

For those who know how to use it well. Ray a man who not only travels alone, but finds the beautiful and profound wherever he alights.

Ah man!

Review: Branches of the Tree