Mud Slide

We watch a civilisation perish; a beautiful city slip into the sea. An elegy for the caste system, its civilised people, those delicate sensibilities, their sublime ideas. What happens to an elite when the talents that make them indispensable lose their worth? Can a morality that grew up around those skills survive? Is convention a sufficient preservative when these characters are forced to compete with everyone else on equal terms? Satyajit Ray’s The Middleman, when values go topsy-turvy, and the best mutate into the worst.

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Mass literacy destroys the livelihood of the Brahmin caste. With wholesale competition there’s no guarantee they’ll get the high-level jobs. Cheating students, incompetent examiners, foolishly small handwriting (that over-refinement of the Banerjees), or simply chance - the examiner loses his spectacles and cannot see Somnath’s small print - all prevent a talented Brahmin from acquiring the exam marks necessary for entry into the public institutions; India’s new temples. Seven marks short of an honours degree and a pension plan. To pass is not enough. For sure, it puts him in the 40% eligible for Bengal’s better-paid jobs. But in a country of young men and widespread literacy, this figure translates into big numbers: a company advertises 10 vacancies and 100,000 apply. Kicked out of the ruling class.

Education levels out the old hierarchies, removing many previous privileges. Not even intelligence enough to secure a good job. The tombola of birth replaced by the lottery of the social system, where all castes must play the lucky dip. Somnath is eighteen months unemployed. 

One day he slips on a banana skin.

A lucky accident; for the banana belongs to Bisuda, a self-made businessman who has risen from nothing. They talk, and Bisuda, after interesting Somnath in the business, offers him what he calls “a launching pad” to start his own company. Somnath accepts, after discussing it with his father, who reluctantly agrees: “we must change with the changing times”. Interestingly, Mr Banerjee distinguishes between business and owning a shop, the latter a respectable occupation. What’s wrong with men like Bisuda? Well, in Bengal they are given another name: middleman. They don’t make or sell anything, only profit from the work of others. 

A greybeard quoting Aristotle whispers about the evil of interest.

Should we take the old Greeks at their word? I ask. Surely it’s the idea of a social parasite; someone living off others. Something for nothing. A wastrel. A criminal.

Greybeard mutters about monsters created from dead things…. 

I shake my head. Businessmen are the mirror image of the Brahmins. Only those so close us to pollute us so. Keep the walls high! and we’ll not see a parody of ourselves. 

Greybeard gives me the evil eye, and stumbles away.

In Bengali the middleman has another name: dayal: pimp. Bisuda thinks it a joke. Somnath laughs too; attracted by the irony, that clever veneer. Poor sod. As with many smart chaps Somnath, dazzled by the surface brilliance, fails to absorb a word’s true meaning. And he is apt to repeat such mistakes. Thus his ready acceptance that it’s ok to fake companies to rise the price of goods. Just words. A phrase and a few seconds is all it takes for Somnath to lose the moral purity his family has acquired over generations.

A lucky accident? Yes, for the termites, eating away at the moral foundations.

Somnath is seduced by this new life. Interesting in itself, he meets fascinating characters; while his natural curiosity and ebullience produces quick success. His caste status helps; the aura it gives to a disreputable occupation charms his business colleagues, who are keen to help: Bisuda offers him a rent free desk for three months; Adok, his bookkeeper, connects him to the executives of Calcutta’s top companies. With a talent for the work, Somnath overlooks the small immoralities essential to this trade, such as tax fiddling. Can’t complain that our clothes are dirty if we walk in roads full of mud.

An independent man. No longer relying on Kamala’s gifts, now Somnath buys his sister-in-law presents. And with money he feels he can visit Sukumar at home. His old friend hasn’t changed, although he’s finding family life difficult; the poverty, an overbearing father, then Kauna, the beautiful but flirtatious sister, are heavy loads for even this strong mind to hold. Nevertheless, he has hopes that an MP friend will get him a taxi license. It is why he refuses Somnath’s offer of a job (a comment on his friend’s occupation).

Success seems certain. For sure Somnath makes mistakes, but, as his father says, “you will always do well in all things”. This son has the talents to thrive. Also a talent for looking the other way, as Somnath learns that the business world is uncaring and corrupt. Once “launched” Bisuda is indifferent to his fate. While all lie and take kickbacks. Our man accepts these realities, but still hasn’t absorbed their full import; for Somnath naively assumes he is immune from such infections; inoculated by a superior moral code.

As if words alone protect us.

Outside Brahmin society Brahmin ideas lose their efficacy. Without the reinforcement of daily routines - that ‘thick’ social existence where ideas are embodied in action - they thin out to mere words; to be brushed aside like cobwebs. Once detached from habit ideas are little more than decoration. Beautiful wrapping paper around an ugly present.

Can Somnath survive? Adok has doubts, “when the going gets tough, and it will get tough, are you to stand straight or bend?” Again the deep meaning of these words isn’t sounded; for they are fathoms away from Somnath’s sense of his self. Even now, he believes himself a tourist in Commerce-Land. Lucky man. Intellectuals think of moral concepts as gods in Plato’s heaven; the mind - that free controller of human action - able to call on them at will to guide their lives. Such Platonic forms a conceptual puppet-master to pull us out of some horrible play. A fantasy. Intellectuals, by putting ideas first, fool themselves they are incorruptible, that the idea by itself to save them; as if belief alone is moral purity. It is not so. Moral ideas are embedded in social practice, and live or die with those practices. Remove the moral corset of habit and the immoral fat spills out. Intellectuals to survive their illusions only if isolated from life’s realities. Strapped up tight in the straight-jacket of their study.

There are the usual misunderstandings. For Somnath moral codes are tough as steel, never to break even under the most severe pressure. He doesn’t notice they bend under the slightest touch. Intellectuals are especially naive; believing what’s read in books lasts a lifetime. Do they heck! Ideas change as soon as they leave the page. Out on the town in their glad rags! Moral codes twist around our daily activities, the people we meet, the actions we perform, the conceptual detritus we pick up along the way; until ideas lose their original function, that coercive force, and are worn merely as badges, of status, of virtue; or they are cast aside, yesterday’s fashion. Ideas alone to keep you on the moral line…no! Too weak; too easily broken by our deeds, the presence of others, those demands of survival and success. No one walks down the high street in a radiation suit.

Somnath overlooks the reason for his family’s moral austerity: social isolation. A Brahmin is protected by caste distance, keeping him safe from the vices of others. But this is changing. The Brahmins are leaving their temple towers to mix with others, whose characteristics they partly acquire; this lifestyle fluid and promiscuous. Only strong characters can stick to the old standards. Alas, Somnath is an ordinary man with an ordinary man’s weaknesses; and without the prophylactic of physical segregation, he succumbs to the pressures of his new milieu. How else live? How get on? At first such questions cause moral ideas to split from action, and we disguise our compromises with the illusion that belief itself keeps us moral; that ideas alone wipe away sin. How long can this be done? In associating with disreputable types Somnath adapts to their milieu, increasing the pressure on his illusion-machine. Every day he must exercise the mental muscles to keep up that moral fairy tale. One day he’ll run out of strength.

Morals are not God-given. Weaved into the fabric of a society, we wear them like a clean but faded cardigan. Moral codes retain their efficacy only through commensurable social action. Then each job has its own forms of moral judgement. Profits require a flexible morality, that moulds itself around the new shapes money creates. Middlemen live and think in a different way from Brahmins. For businessmen this is a social benefit. In epochs when aristocrats, warriors and priests rule such activities are outcast or outlawed. More complicated in developing societies, when the ancient values still dominate a culture whose economic and political relations are changing (values move slower than practices). However, we don’t need a palmist to read India’s future: the old beliefs to fade away. Think of 19th century Britain, when industrialism was justified by a novel metaphysics, which said the useful is the good. Christ reborn in a factory. Utilitarianism a way-station to the future. When commerce conquers the social field, and businessmen are more confident of their own value, the need for such abstract justifications vanishes: today only profs read Jeremy Bentham. Profit its own moral worth. The best people those who can convert anything into cash. 

You got a problem with that mate?

I was raising a doubt, asking a question, thinking about this sacred cow.

What are you, a dinosaur? We’re helping people right.

India has a long way to go. But it’s getting there….

The middleman is coming into social prominence, turning the old hierarchy on its head; as ideas become fluid and money defines worth; businessmen not Brahmins calling the shots. Not just things that sell. Anyone can be bought! Somnath still unaware of this awful truth. Wrapped in the moral blankets of his Brahmin upbringing he has a child’s innocence about his moral safety. Principles alone to keep him healthy. As if the holy scriptures were a modern vaccine. The assumption is that morals are permanent attributes, insulated from all influences; a Platonic reality untouchable by human hands. Such ideas, perfectly adapted to a religious society, which quarantines thought and its guardians within an autonomous sphere, cannot survive a commercial environment where castes mingle and all things, through money’s alchemical powers, are transformed into their opposites. We lose our distinctiveness. Satyajit Ray helps us grasp this point when he shows Somnath lost amongst the crowd; his immersion into the mass that is modernity. In an anonymous world the middlemen rule; they to define what is good and what is bad. 

Our man’s tragedy is that it takes him too long to learn this truth. In the tug-of-war between new practices and old values, this Brahmin is torn apart by a crisis he cannot control. But Somnath is no Greek hero, confronting his existential choice and going down in glorious defeat. No, too weak to fight, he slowly succumbs to his unfamiliar surroundings until he finds himself a ruined man.

One day you are on this side of the river, with its temples and ancient palaces; the next, you’re on the other shore, amongst the bazaars and brothels; a woman’s hand taking you by the wrist.…

The film starts magnificently; in a classroom on a sun-filled day. Large words scatter the walls, while young men sit at desks, writing their exam papers. Many are cheating. One man puts a note into a cigarette packet and throws it to Somnath, who immediately passes it on (our man doesn’t need to cheat). The invigilator turns angrily around and asks what is happening. Suddenly the men are laughing…the screen freezes; and through a series of still shots the credits scroll across these happy faces. The optimism and playfulness of youth.

The film ends in the dark. A darkness punctuated by garish light; of candles, of lights; of an electronic sign that tells its own terrible tale: room occupied. After a long and complicated night of business Somnath returns home alone. These last days he’s been withdrawn and depressed. More so now. As he enters the front door he hangs his head like a guilty schoolboy, too weak to hold up the shame it carries. His father sits in his usual place, imprisoned in the shadows of a fretwork wall. Mr Banerjee asks if he won the contract. Yes, says Somnath. His father is pleased! His pleasure captured in a few stills; reminding us of that first classroom scene. After his elder son told him that businessmen take bribes, Mr Banerjee has been worrying about Somnath. No more! Success must mean he is clean. To us it seems an odd mistake, to link corruption with failure; but this is an old man who still lives inside a world where the good and the best share the same moral qualities. There are benefits; safely ignorant of Somnath’s tragedy, his caste’s pollution, he can lose himself to illusions. Of course he sees the signs - Bhombol has become a clever bourgeois; that break up of a friend’s family; his own distance from his sons - but Mr Banerjee cannot grasp their true meaning, overladen, as they are, with the dust of inertia, the sclerosis of his old ideas. Staying at home, he can’t read the graffiti on the walls: Brahmins are on the way out. Nobody to wear these clothes any more.

As Kamala watches Somnath she reads the runes of defeat in that broken demeanour, his dejection. Although unaware of the details she knows that her brother-in-law has done something shameful. One evening he had confided that he was unhappy with the job; and that Bengalis have another word for middleman. Shorn of all irony, ‘pimp’ is at last seen in its most ghastly light. A candle flame flares up, when a lighter is put into it. A garish label on a gaudy tin. Kamala looks at Somnath turn into his bedroom, and walk into a black hole. The End. A brilliant day closes in the worst of nights. This Brahmin has fallen.

What happened? To secure a big deal Somnath has employed Natabar Mitter, a middleman who trades on people’s emotions; his gift an ability to divine and exploit a person's weaknesses. He discovers that an executive, married to a rich woman to whom he is not sexually attracted (she has polio), finds consolation in soft porn. Somnath also knows this. While a passenger in Goenka’s car the glove department fell open spilling out pin-ups. Somnath’s instinct is to keep this secret. Yet such scenes are Mitter’s trade; he chides Somnath that he didn’t mention it. A moral gulf separates them. Somnath, brought up to idealise women, is repulsed by their sexualisation. Mitter believes all things can be sold. He suggests they buy a woman for Goenka, who will then award him the contract. Our man’s instinct is to refuse. Mitter works on him; you are a child, a weakling; you have no strength to make the difficult decisions. But business isn’t just words. Mitter adds the crushing weight of fact: refuse and I’ll demand my commission now.

Bankruptcy or moral shame, when already halfway down that mud slide.… 

Those chaste bedfellows, innocence and prudery, are bad for business. To a Natabar Mitter upholding Brahmin standards is a failing. Somnath, though he implicitly agrees - he has surrendered so many - still cannot see the end to which this path leads…he is losing the resources to protect himself against moral outrage. For once remove the foundations, it won’t be long before the walls fall down. Does he think he can hold them up with his own hands? Bah! Having committed himself to business, to stop now requires more than ordinary courage; it needs a superhuman will. 

Our man is no hero. 

Natabar takes him on a Cook’s tour of Calcutta nightlife. First up Mrs Ganguli, a housewife who sells herself to pay for her husband’s alcoholism. It’s bad timing…as they agree the transaction a drunken spouse returns home, and faced with the reality of his wife’s trade tells the men to leave. What follows is a moment of Satyajit Ray genius: pulling back the curtain we find Mrs Ganguli rapidly covering herself in a moment of panic and embarrassment, but also of beauty; while the husband looks on hopeless and helpless; a portent for Somnath. Shame awaits the weak. 

Mrs Ganguli’s exposure echoes that of an earlier scene, when Sukumar saw a group of men looking at his sister as she undresses. Kauna playing to an audience. Sukumar is livid. Shutting the window blinds, he slaps his sister, telling her that poverty is no excuse for lasciviousness, and she must never do that again. 

In these two scenes we see the scale of moral value in its entirety. Mrs Ganguli is ashamed of her profession; her husband too weak to forbid it. Sukumar, in contrast, is a strong character who acts on his beliefs. While Kauna follows a completely different moral code, one which worships sex and celebrates seduction; and where desire overwhelms all obstacles. Somnath is somewhere in the middle; believing in ideas that have a declining effect on his actions; albeit the longer a middleman the less constraint these ideas will command, until having none at all, he’ll enter an alien territory, a moral wasteland.

Our man slides on down….

The next house is a ‘respectable’ brothel. Here Somnath’s learns more about this strange profession: one ‘daughter has been mislead by an admirer into taking a foreign holiday where she must work for free; the other is down the hall servicing a Japanese client. The men wait to see the quality of the merchandise; but the madam says their man must come here. Natabar decides this place is not for Goenka.

Next is a pimp who handles street prostitutes. The first two Natabar dismisses as impossible; we assume because raddled with sexual corruption. But the man tempts them, by saying a new girl’s just started, who only works after 10 o’clock; to deceive her family. The woman is Kauna. 

This revelation hits like a heart attack. Such is the shock, I start a new paragraph….

Somnath changes his mind. Kauna is stronger and forces him to continue – “you will lose the contract, won’t you?” He agrees, and takes her to Goenka’s hotel room. No illusions left. Somnath is a pimp. He hands Kauna the money (too much, but the only way to assuage his guilt), rings the bell, and hands her over to his client. The door closes; the electric sign pings on: Do Not Disturb. Left alone in an empty corridor our man waits for Kauna to finish her business. 

Somnath has slid to the bottom of the slope.

The slide into ignominy is so slow as to seem invisible; Somnath’s decision to acquiesce to Kauna’s plea thus feels inevitable; a reflex of nature. By the time of their meeting his ideals are so badly compromised that he has no reason to refuse what has become simple common sense: how can he lose the deal? Moral termites have consumed his moral principles. And now, when he needs them, nothing is left. What’s a silly scruple to making big money?

Blame the banana skin. The easy way out for those who refuse to accept that such a charming man can be humiliated so. I remember the young master in Joseph Losey’s The Servant. A terrible mistake!…straight to the medicine cabinet, I pour out the Valium. 

Calm, I return to my desk; my muse whispering into my ear. Face the facts Schloss, Somnath is an agent of fate, a victim of Progress. In modern India only the gods and the impotent glue themselves to the old beliefs. A Natabar Mitter believes such characters fools, destined to drown under a tidal wave of rupees. Easy for us to think them heroes; standing in Time’s road trying to stop the traffic of Time; though we query the cost…surely it’d be better to compromise, to slow down not stop these vehicles. Yet on reflection we agree with Natabar: only fools to put Mr Time in the deep freeze. Always it’s a question of adaptation; always to ask ourselves how far do I go…there are other ways of making money, you do not have to sell a friend’s sister for sex. Think of Somnath’s brother; he, surely, is the future. The Brahmins won’t die out; they’ll mutate into something modern; the grandchildren of the Banerjees no longer to read the Gita but the company’s accounts; or they’ll walk down the catwalks of Paris and New York. The old ideas wearing away, to be replaced by those more in keeping with new forms of status and power.

Somnath is caught between two epochs. Stuck on a train half-way through his journey, he has to decide whether to get off in this place of bandits and brothels, or stay on and hope it reaches its destination.

A depressing trip? No. As with any collapsing civilisation, we witness that last flush of beauty as it vanishes into oblivion. An ornate temple, overgrown with dust and decay, but aflame with colour, its girls juggling hips and breasts on columns and porticos, subsides slowly into the Ganges; whose water sparkles like jewels. We gasp in admiration as a brilliant world sinks down in front of our rapt eyes.

Review: The Middleman