A Difficult Trip

The primitive is not a place, it is a state of mind alive in the city as well as the countryside; if one is open enough to explore it; has the strength to risk the terrors, is flexible enough to enjoy one's own excitements. In Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest, four young men test out this truth. Two are mediocre students. Asim is a virtuoso. Sanjoy fails his exam. It is what happens when we go into the wilds: it is not a country you must confront but yourself, a territory which for some is best left unknown.

The film ends. Someone speaks: “Such a wonderful storyteller; so gentle.” He is an old Indian, who sits in front of me. So true! Although such softness can mislead. During much of its length the film feels inconsequential – four city men on a short holiday in rural Bengal - until we are thrust into a climax of extraordinary power, which Ray resolves simply and quietly: an individual’s tragedy is absorbed into the group, so dispersing its effects, as together the friends drive home. The shape of the film close to the psychology of these individuals; each affected by this remote place, but who go back to the city with their characters more or less intact. Sekhar with empty pockets; Hari with a head injury; Sanjoy suffused with failure; Asim full of the possibility of a new sort of life.

The film begins with Sanjoy reading from a very old travel book about the wild customs of their destination, where women drink alcohol and walk around bare-chested. The promise of the savage, they have come to experience; although, being pampered urbanites, they also expect the place to be as civilised as Calcutta, with bungalows to stay in and people to wait upon them. These chaps are tourists. Here for a holiday. It is not really supposed to be an adventure, except in their fantasies.

Looking for the alien; which this place can produce, albeit not in the form Sanjoy’s antique information suggests. The differences between the places significant enough to change them a little, for stimulated by their preconceptions, they act more freely than at when home. They go to a local bar and get drunk. Then do what they call the ‘tribal twist’ on the ‘main road’, where they are caught in the headlights of a passing car; amusing the women inside. 

The changes are self-conscious, they are willed, these friends their own audience. It is why, when Sekhar forgets his shaver, and Sanjoy refuses to lend his own, Sekhar suggests they stop shaving for the rest of the holiday: ‘we will be hippies’. To play the role of the primitive, even though the locals do not have beards. A cartoon version of the wild, and a small revolt against the bourgeois life they have temporarily vacated. 

Watch out!…tiny tiny footsteps Mr Schloss. 

Days and Nights in the Forest has a thousand and one nuances; for like all great artists, Ray clothes his abstractions in an array of dazzling colours. These city men, though broadly similar in outlook - all believe a caricature of the countryside - are very different personalities. It is Sekhar’s idea not to shave; yet his view of the primitive is more superficial than Sanjoy’s, who needs it to feed his imagination of an alternative existence. Sekhar, impervious to influence, is a man who remains untouched by his location, its charms but decorative; this trip a non-stick moment in time, mere entertainment. Such opacity a source of humour to the others; not just because there is something comic about his inability to adjust to his surroundings, but that absurd idea to imitate Western sophisticates, so out of key with the local culture, is made ridiculous by their residence in a modern bungalow. In contrast, Asim, unhappy with his successful professional life, and Sanjoy, feeling the squeeze of his bourgeois background, are both looking for an experience to take them out of themselves. Asim wants a rest from the rinsed out round of work and parties. Sanjoy needs its promise of escape (if only a few days, but then who knows what might happen?). Of course this village isn’t going to turn them wild; for it dances to the same rhythms of modernity as the rest of India. Nevertheless, its separation from the city offers just enough difference, it provides a space, where they can generate their own primaeval meanings, create an idea of the self that, even though self-conscious and artificial, is free from routine. They ‘let it all hang out’ by drinking too much at the local bar. Some light relief. A little break. Am-dram.

Hari is not in good shape. He too is escaping Calcutta. Dumped by his girlfriend because he is uncivilised - he made the mistake of sending her an illiterate love letter - Hari is down, and is carried along by the others, until he sees an attractive local girl drinking in the bar, with whom he falls in love. Hari doesn’t need to travel to find the exotic. He is a natural ‘wild man’; a cricketer who, living through his reflexes, isn’t bound by the social constraints of a Sanjoy or Asim. Free in Calcutta as in the forest; he slips into his girlfriend’s bedroom in the big city, sleeps with Duli here. He inhabits a scene, and becomes part of it. It is why he mistakenly (and wildly) accuses a local man of theft. A social chameleon even though he never changes. Hit over the head by this man, Hari goes home like he came: with a head injury (the first was mental, this physical). Yet it is he who has got closest to the locals.

Sekhar doesn't change for different reasons and with different effects. Free of the social constraints of Asim and Sanjoy, Sekhar is ebullient where they are reserved; while his obsession with gambling unglosses his respectability. There is wildness inside him. However, unlike Hari, whose sensuousness makes him adaptable, Sekhar is emotionally and mentally constipated; he is unable to let himself go. Unskilful with women, he won’t get drunk with his friends. Such self-consciousness, in making him too self-contained, prevents Sekhar absorbing new experiences, so insulating him against change. Reason its own radiation suit. The same person before and after the holiday, even though - it is the first time - he loses all his money gambling; a sign he hasn’t understood the villagers.

Sekhar starts shaving again. Why? Because he sees two attractive ladies walking outside the compound. The irony is sharp. Jaya and Aparna are from the city; it is their cultivation which attracts these men.

Jaya is a widow; who lives with her sister and father-in-law. They are staying in the family’s holiday retreat. The old man is wise and talented, and during a visit sings a long and beautiful song, to the admiration and applause of the friends. Jaya is young, attractive and easy going; her freedom and joviality surprising our chaps, who attribute it to the times: no holds barred! It is the impact of the Sixties, especially on middle class women, who, going out into the world, are more lively and independent than the men. So modern! Think of Aparna’s slacks. The party girls back in Calcutta. Very quickly Jaya becomes friendly with Sanjoy.

Aparna is beautiful and enigmatic. She spends a lot of time on her own, reads English poetry and listens to western music (from Mozart to the Beatles). Charming and reserved, she wears western clothes, but does not the share the morality of the Calcutta party girls; for Aparna belongs to an older, to an aesthetic, an aristocratic, past. A true original, she mixes the old with the new; her modern dress and thoughts rooted in a tradition she cannot (and does not want) to discard. She strikes up a friendship with Asim, which is complex and difficult to define.

Jaya likes to play games. When they first meet Jaya and Aparna are playing badminton. Later, all play the memory game, in which Aparna is a master (she has total recall). This time, however, she loses to Asim, much to her sister-in-law’s surprise and consternation. It reveals Aparna’s feelings.  

Afterwards, she tells Asim that she lost on purpose. ‘I can still remember all the names, can you?’ Asim admits he can’t. She tells him that she didn’t want to offend him by winning – ‘I’d have upset you, wouldn’t I?’ -; then qualifies this, saying she now wants to unsettle him, to trouble his self-confidence; for Asim is too sure of himself. It is a paradox, but a finely drawn one: she allows him to win but undermines the authenticity of that victory which is no longer a victory at all. It is to deepen the mystery that is herself, which intrigues and disturbs Asim; for Aparna is a ‘situation’ he cannot grasp and thus control. Yet she comes from the city! And the books she reads – the metaphysical poets – and the records she listens to – The Beatles’ Rubber Soul - are products of a modern India. Aparna is the spirit that Asim sought in the forest, but which does not exist there; this place too poor and uncultured to create such uncanny minds. He came to find the wildness of the body and has found an exotic intellect. Aparna’s a sensibility of the few; whose origin is in her father’s culture and her own tragedy, making her reflective, inward, distant. We could argue that Aparna represents a high caste fusion of old and new. I think it is more complex than this; her infallible memory suggests the pre-eminence of tradition…it is the memory of the past that shapes her character and interests. Although, like any intelligent representative of a high culture, she keeps it alive through absorbing the vital and the foreign, which subtly changes but does not destroy that cultural history. Aparna wears slacks; she mostly wears saris. This young woman is Indian culture; a hardly fathomable beast, because it is alive, therefore profound, ever changing.

In a wonderfully drawn scene we see them close in emotionally, and yet…they remain at a distance; Aparna giving Asim her Calcutta number, which is an invitation to call; although she insists there will be no parties. We believe the friendship will deepen into a relationship. Why? Because Asim has changed. Slightly hesitant, a little unsure, curious and bedazzled by depths he cannot swim, Aparna has opened him up to a realm of sympathetic feeling previously denied his egotistic self. The technocrat is being forced to think like a poet, such thoughts spilling out into the world around him. Through Aparna he sees his disregard of the compound’s caretaker, who he bribed to rent the bungalow, and whom he continually asked to serve them, despite his wife’s illness. Aparna says that she will ensure the caretaker will not lose his job, and she makes Asim (but quietly oh so quietly!) confront the sickness of the woman he has ignored. Both are present when she dies. Asim admits he didn’t want to know the truth.

The truth! It is what the forest elicits from its inhabitants. Aparna is enigmatic because she lives inside herself, intimate with her own traumatic memories – her mother dying in a fire, the recent suicide of a brother. Tragedy is like blood in the veins, it runs constantly through her feelings and thoughts; yet she is open to life, has fallen in love with Asim. When she tells him her history, that as a child she saw her mother die, he is greatly troubled, but not scared away; for being in love he can face the revelation, and live with its consequences - Aparna to always be slightly out of reach. Asim is changing. Becoming stronger; he can now live with uncertainty. For life, Aparna is showing him, cannot be controlled, we can only adapt to it. This holiday a rite of passage out of the adolescent self, but conducted by the most sophisticated person in the locality! There is no simple, clear-cut divide between city and the forest; Aparna complicating those simple ideas of an urban middle class which gives them such an illusory strength. Asim won that memory game only because of a fiction; which Aparna exposes, then supplies him with the strength to live with his defeat.

Sanjoy is weak. After a happy afternoon at the funfair, Sanjoy and Jaya to go back to her house. They have become close, the scene is intimate, and Jaya asks him in for a coffee. After serving him, she disappears for a long time, her own drink getting cold. Sanjoy calls out. Jaya returns, dressed in black, ornamented with jewellery, she is extremely attractive and seductive and undulates over to Sanjoy, who to control his emotions looks to the floor. Eyes alive with electricity, he will not look up at Jaya. She puts his hand on her chest, pouts, and raises up her closed lips willing him to kiss them. It is an extraordinary scene, and two hundred people in the audience are straining their necks: ‘Go on! Go on!’ He can’t. Jaya falls back to the doorjamb, and says that it is terrible being a widow – ‘you are always living with ghosts’. She collapses on her bed, wrecking her body with sobs. Sanjoy leaves the house, hardly able so say hello to Aparna and Asim, as he walks away.

Sanjoy, for all his imaginary hopes, is unable to escape the middle class. He cannot let go. A widowed woman too big a taboo to break. Suffocatingly conventional, he dreams but does not act. It is a truth he must face. He has entered the forest, he has been offered its delights, but is too fragile to accept them. A crucifying revelation: I am a typical bourgeois too frightened of breaking the rules. A scaredy-cat, who knows it. Poor sod. But Ray is gentle with him, calmly and quietly driving our man back to safety.

Review: Days and Nights in the Forest