Photo: Nemai Ghosh

“Have you seen Bobby and have you seen Ashani Sanket?” begins Dileep Chitre the writer, critic, filmmaker, painter and the pseudonymous ‘D’ of the Quest in his essay, “What Has Dimple Got That Satyajit Hasn’t?”

The Quest was a notable Indian magazine of letters that was in publication through the 1950s to 1975 when it became a casualty of the Emergency. When active it published poems, stories and essays by names such as Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Keki Daruwala, Adil Jussawalla and Agha Shahid Ali, and had Nissim Ezekeil at its helm. And it had the notorious D who wrote on topics as varied as Rajesh Khanna, pornography, Shivaji in his playfully acerbic tone. If in an essay in praise of Rajesh Khanna he calls him “one of the top selling consumer products in India today”, in the same Dilip Kumar is described as “he moved and spoke, from the start [of his movies], as if he was his own pall-bearer.” The late Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray in an essay on Shivaji is blatantly called “the Fuhrer”.

So in 1973 when Ray’s Ashani Sanket came out and failed to impress his usually loyal audience, how could D be kept silent?

He commits the “blasphemy” of comparing Raj Kapoor’s Bobby with Ray and admits so as much:

…I want to discuss, in the same breath, the success of Dimple Kapadia and the failure of Satyajit Ray. Miss Kapadia, who is now the wife of superstar Rajesh Khanna, has swept movie audiences throughout the country. Mr Ray has flopped miserably in convincing even his art film audience that his cinematic imagination is somewhat better than the genius of the Films Division itself. Bobby — wherein Miss Kapadia stars — is a film made by that veteran showman, Raj Kapoor. It is a spectacular commercial success and it was meant to be. Ashani Sanket is an ungainly artistic flop and such as was certainly not intended by Mr Ray.

But this does not mean that the columnist was a fan of either Bobby or Mr Kapoor. Bobby serves only as a simile, against which Ashani Sanket must collide and perish, for.

Bobby is an unashamedly escapist adolescent love story designed to capture the imagination of sexually unstable and mentally deficient Hindi movie-goers of all ages. Miss Kapadia’s legs are the chief attraction; Mr Rishi Kapoor, her lover, has the subsidiary role of looking unduly energetic, forlorn, passionate and crazy in turns. Since both these kid stars look charming and since the audience’s own urge to make love is satisfied merely by watching films and humming erotic tunes in the bathroom or singing sad songs in the kitchen, the pair becomes an instant rage.

If Satyajit Ray is an overrated filmmaker, which we will read about later, Raj Kapoor in D’s words “has the knack of imposing his limitation on his audience”. He points out Bobby’s stereotyping of the Goan Catholic lifestyle, which is pretty much in vogue still:

…they wear suits, drink continually, dance occasionally and wear golden crosses. They also speak bad Hindi.

D returns to Ray and his movie that had just failed and prods us to look at the Ray audience which is very different from Kapoor’s.

There are the snobs, the Bengali cultural chauvinists, the art people, the middle and high-brow. They are awed by Ray’s reputation and by the fact that the film has bagged an international award.

Then he turns towards the familiar criticism of Ray’s depiction of poverty as something scenic and beautiful, as seen in many of his iconic movies.

But Ray’s famine is beautiful, decorative and colourful. He visualises moral degradation in terms of a woman selling her body for some rice and apparently enjoying it. A few dying and hungry humans, some stray shots of failed crops and tabletop montages of newspaper headlines about the rice price indices are the only attempt by Ray to depict the ravages of the famine.

D asks his readers if we can’t draw parallels between “Ray’s saccharinous famine” and “Raj Kapoor’s chocolate-box love story”, given that “their moral and aesthetic import is on the same level of mediocrity”. But he acknowledges that Raj Kapoor at least entertains.

The columnist goes against the tide that considered Ray to be at par with the Kurosawa and Fellinis of the world and in the process accepts his fondness for Ghatak. Remember that usually the Ghatak lovers and the Ray lovers weren’t the same people — and here lovers must be emphasised to mark their passion.

Incidentally, I have always felt that Ray is a grossly overrated film-maker. He is certainly not in the class of Kurosawa, Buñuel, Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Polanski, Godard, Bresson, Resnais and half a dozen or more other top film-makers of the world. The much unluckier Ritwick Ghatak is the only Indian film-maker who has so far touched the heights that these great directors have touched in their best work. It has been said that Ray is a master of the cinematic technique; I have always felt that his camera is non-functional and his sound-track and visuals are too dominated by the quasi-literary concepts.

Ray, who the columnist considers to an overindulgent film-maker who lives off repeating his own patches of success and hoping to invent a masterpiece in this process, is seen as a romantic with exotic ideas of the decay, caught in a time warp.

Ray’s best work has dealt with the pre-modern, traditional and urban Bengal. Even there he shows a romantic nostalgia for a decaying environment and values. He cannot be free, he cannot move forward. He made an effort to face his own times in Pratidwandwi and failed. In Ashani Sanket he fails even more convincingly.

According to D, Ray who is stuck with Tagorean sensibilities trapped in a world of the yore, problem was that he wanted to cover more than he could.