Nuances

Sometimes we sense a small detail, intuit its significance, even come close to discovering its deep meaning, but then, our mind chasing after other, more compelling, significations, we ignore it, and miss a truer understanding of the whole. As I walk away from my last piece, chuckling with self-satisfaction, Andrew Robinson taps me on the shoulder.

It abounds in specific references: to Lakshmi, to the different saris worn by Ananga, and to the blowing of conches at nightfall, as well as to patterns of behaviour like the old Brahmin’s expectation of food and Gangacharan’s willingness to oblige him…. (Andrew Robinson, BFI Notes)

The old man doesn’t think Gangacharan is a saint. He expects our chap to have food and feed him because both belong to the same caste. This expectation to kill them both. The caste system commits suicide because it can only live off dead ideas.

Robinson. Satyajit Ray. Me. We all agree on the meaning of a key scene, its significance within the film. I demur when these eminent critics extrapolate to wider social themes.

On top of being overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster…Ray also felt a certain lack of sympathy with the world from which the victims came, with their caste mentality, that lead both to the emotional blackmail of city-dwellers and to their fatalistic attitudes… [H]e also believed that the old, irrational system of values that had helped to create it must pass. At heart he was a revolutionary; it was vital to him that Gangacharan should, of his own volition, begin to reject caste, despite the terrible crisis required to bring this about, than that the status quo should be maintained in all its benighted sterility. Gangacharan’s decision to cremate the girl’s corpse was, to Ray, ‘a big step forward, an enormously progressive gesture.’… [an]d is a much less bleak film than Deliverance.

The audience is left with Gangacharan making the decision to cremate the untouchable’s corpse. But he doesn’t actually do it. Pushed into an act that repels his whole being. It is to see two ways of life, two cosmologies, coming into conflict with no easy way to reconcile them. A zero sum game where one side loses when the other wins. But life is not as simple as a game. A moral instinct, its urge to break with the rules of caste, so rejecting an entire tradition, bangs up against the human being created by that tradition, the restrictions it places on the spontaneous expression of moral feelings. Such tension impossible to handle unless a hero. Thus Gangacharan’s indecision, surely the true meaning, the essence, of this film. Gangacharan is too weak to be free. Stuck in doubt, paralysed by worry, he is will-less; unable to act from his own liberty. Changing circumstances act on him. A freestanding individual turned into an object by forces outside his power. These my feelings, as I get up from my seat, and saunter down the aisle.

Progress is invariably good…revolutionaries known for their insight, their sensitivity.… Ray has too much curiosity about people to adopt the crude, inhuman simplicities of a radical, so antipathetic to art, which is fed by the senses and the texture of things. Ray, like all great artists, is at heart an anarchist, which also means a conservative, tied to the local and the quotidian; so opposed to the authoritarian and bureaucrat (characters typical of the progressive) and their obsession with the abstract, giving them power over individuals. Ray’s oeuvre an exploration of the tensions between the old and the new; and which in showing the evils of caste also highlight the riches lost. Then there’s the crassness of much of what’s new. A machine-war famine…hardly an advertisement for the modern world. So there you are! Ray is no Bolshevik. A true revolutionary never to take a backward glance at what they throw into history’s dustbin.