IndiaStar book review: Satyajit Ray
by Surabhi Banerjee

IndiaStar--A Literary-Art Magazine

--Book Review--

Satyajit Ray: Beyond the Frame

by Surabhi Banerjee
(NewDelhi: Allied Publishers, 1996)
220 pages $20

Reviewed by C.J. Wallia

In 1978, when Satyajit Ray released his new film Shatranj ke Khilari
(The Chess Players) at the Berlin Film Festival, its organzing committee
ranked him as one of the three all-time best directors. However, despite
Ray's universally acclaimed "Apu Trilogy"and his 1992 Oscar for lifetime
achievement, only a few books in English discuss his work as an auteur.
Andrew Robinson's Satyajit Ray, The Inner Eye (published by the University
of California Press, 1989) remains the best known, but it lacks his last two
films-- both major statements. A new book, Satyajit Ray: Beyond the Frame
by Ms. Surabhi Banerjee, complements existing Ray studies. Surabhi Banerjee,
a noted literay critic, heads Calcutta University's English department.

In the first part, "The Growth of a Polyphonic Artist," Banerjee describes the
Brahmo background of Satyajit Ray's father, Sukumar Ray, a famous writer of
children's stories, and his grandfather, Upendrakishore Ray, writer and pioneering
printer. The progressive outlook of the Brahmo religion strongly influenced
Satyajit Ray's work, for example, Devi, in which he said he "denounced religious
fanaticism." Throughout the book, the author skillfully draws on Ray's comments
on his own work as reported in numerous published interviews and from his book,
Our FilmsTheir Films.

The second part, "The Magic Lantern, " appraises Ray's 31 feature films
and five documentaries. Surabhi Banerjee regards Pather Panchali as
his most representative film. In The Apu Trilogy, she writes, Ray invoked
"what may be called the rhetoric of literary cinema. And it is by virtue of
this rhetoric, complex in meaning and economical in expression, striving
towards a precise expression of the finer shades of feeling and thought, that
the trilogy finds its response among all classes and conditions of men and
thus scales the heights to become a universal classic." Surabhi Banerjee also
regards The Postmaster, based on a Tagore short story, as "a high exemplar
of humanist cinema" -- a judgment I wholly concur with. She approves of
Ray's changing the ending of the Tagore story because it was,
in Ray's view, "too sentimental."

Surabhi Banerjee devotes the chapter "Sociological Perspective" to reviewing
a series of Ray films that portray the socio-economic situation of the impoverished
urban middle-class. This portrayal, Surabhi Banerjee writes, first emerges in
Mahanagar (1963) and assumes fuller expression in several films he made in the
seventies: Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), Pratidwandi
(The Adversary), Seemabaddha (The Company Limited) and Jana Aranya
(The Middleman). In the last phase of his film-making, Ray's perspective assumes
socio-political dimensions in Ganashatru (Enemy of the People), Shakha Proshakha
(The Branches of a Tree), and Agantuk (The Stranger). The last two films excoriate
the inhumanity of contemporary materialistic society worldwide.


The third part "Word Pictures" evaluates Ray's literary career, which began in 1961
when he revived his family's magazine Sandesh. In his story "The Astronaut's Diary,"
Ray introduced Professor Shonku,"the protagonist of his science-fiction stories and
novellas. Surabhi Banerjee convincingly argues that in both his science fiction and
detective stories --the Feluda series-- Ray's themes remain focused on human values.
The appendix includes a chapter entitled "Schemes Unrealized" describing the plagiarizing
of Ray's 1967 script "The Alien" by Columbia Pictures and its re-emergence as Steven
Spielberg's E.T. (Ray wrote in detail about this: "ET would not have been possible without
my script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies.")


Two of his other unrealized schemes were making a film of the epic Mahabharata and
E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India.

Despite its shortcomings of poor copyediting, mediocre production (the frontispiece
photograph of Ray is printed upside down) and the absence of an index,
I found this brilliant book engrossing.