Some artists are parochial. They serve a local market. Some parochial artists may be said to have universal appeal. Anyone at all can enjoy them. What of a parochial product, which the locals don't greatly care for, but which is exported as exotic or artsy-fartsy or as embodying some virtuous ideology? Might it not represent something universal? Certainly. But only in the sense that the Japanese Tea Ceremony is universal, not to mention watching paint dry.
Satyajit Ray's work was parochial. Unlike his Uncle, Nitin Bose, who invented play-back singing, moved to Bombay and made some blockbusters, Ray stuck with being an artsy-fartsy Bengali whose films were devoid of nice song & dance numbers. But, this also meant they might appeal to elite Western audiences who considered 'musicals' to be frothy and escapist. The Soviet Union however preferred melodramas with lots of romantic songs and folk dances and fight scenes. Nargis and Raj Kapoor were big stars behind the Iron Curtain. Thus their films could be said to have universal appeal save for sophisticated Western audiences.
Marie Seton, the biographer of Eisenstein, was brought by Nehru to Delhi to help with the Government's 'Films division'. She befriended the handsome and cultured Satyajit Ray and got Nehru to champion him (which is how his first film got to Venice despite opposition from the State and Central Government). Previously, in 'January 1952, Nehru had stressed the need for more State interventions in the field of films. He had said-‘Film has become a powerful influence in people’s lives. It can educate them rightly or wrongly… I mean that they should introduce artistic and aesthetical values in life and encourage the appreciation of beauty in all its aspects. I hope that films which are just sensational or melodramatic or such as make capital out of crime, will not be encouraged. If our film industry keeps this ideal before it, it will encourage good taste and help pave its own way in the building of a new India…' Since Ray's films were boring but artsy, Ray was the 'sarkari' director par excellence. Well, he would have been if he hadn't been utterly shit. Nehru, again on Seton's advise, had brought in an actual Italian- not a Bengali bloke who liked 'Bicycle Thieves'- to film 'India- Matri Bhumi'. Ray could not compete with Rossellini as an auteur but he was certainly more boring than any Italian or Frenchman and thus a true acolyte of Tagore.
Sadly for Marie Seton & Rossellini & co, Mehboob Khan re-made 'Aurat' as 'Mother India' in 1957. It was a big hit and became the defining 'Nehruvian' film of the decade. What's more the Communist countries were prepared to pay hard cash for entertaining movies which were melodramatic and sensational and made 'capital out of crime'. Thus Nargis, whose social origins were perhaps not very exalted, could, at a later point, tell the Indian Government to stop subsidizing bougie Ray & his miserabilist bullshit.
One other thing. Ray's 'Kanchenjunga' came out in May 1962. The Chinese invaded in October. Nehru suddenly needed a film-maker, familiar with the relevant terrain, who could stir up patriotic sentiment. Could Ray do something in this regard? No. Don't be silly. 'Kanchenjunga' explained why the Indians didn't want to defend the Himalayas. It wasn't that the Himalayas weren't beautiful or sacred to the Hindus. It's just that Nehru's Indians were lazy, cowardly and utterly shit.
Amartya Sen, who may have crossed paths with Ray at Shantinketan (where the latter studied Art after taking a degree in Economics) has a chapter in his 'Argumentative Indian shithead' titled 'Satyajit Ray and the art of Universalism: Our Culture, Their Culture'.
Rossellini's art may have been universal. Nehru thought it worthwhile to pay him to make movies in India of the sort he had made in Italy and Germany. Incidentally, an Iranian diplomat wrote part of the script of 'Matr-bhumi'. What of Ray? Did he make films in Italy or China? Nope. He was parochial. However, because of competition in the local market, Ray needed either Government subsidies or else the equivalent of an 'affirmative action' rent arising on niche foreign markets where his competitors were artificially excluded. Ray was smart enough to neither become wholly dependent on the Government nor the tiny foreign market. Sadly, he wasn't smart enough to make films with mass appeal.
Sen, like Ray, has made a career by pretending to be Indian to foreigners and pretending to know Western Liberal culture to Indians. He writes-
The work of Satyajit Ray presents a remarkably insightful understanding of the relations between cultures,
In India, the relationship between cultures was crude. The rulers had culture. The ruled were merely human cattle. I suppose one might say that Ray belonged to the first generation of Bengalis for whom Hindu, Islamic and European cultures jostled with each other to establish dominance. Pakistan went down the Islamic route. India was Hindu with a small topsoil of secular stupidity and boring virtue signaling.
Ray was not interested in war or partition or anything dramatic in nature. He did make a film about the famine where everybody starves to death in between saying boring and stupid shit. He never made a film about partition. He had no insight or understanding of the clash between Hindu and Muslim culture which led to so much bloodshed in Bengal. What of the relation between English and Indian culture? Once again, we draw a blank. David Lean's 'Passage' might be said to address that issue. Ray's 'Chess-players', though starring Richard Attenborough, was boring shite about how Muslim Nawabs are boring shitheads.
and his ideas remain pertinent to the great cultural debates in the contemporary world, not least in India.
He had no ideas, that was the trouble.
I would like to pursue these ideas. In Ray’s films and in his writings, we find explorations of at least three general themes on cultures and their interrelations: the importance of distinctions between different local cultures and their respective individualities;
why is that important? Is it because it could lead to ethnic cleansing? Ray saw that happen with his own eyes. He didn't write about it or make films about it. There is no big clash of cultures in his films. There are some dudes from Calcutta who meet a Santhal girl or something of that sort but the thing misfires.
the necessity of understanding the heterogeneous character of each local culture (even the culture of a common, not to mention a region or a country);
Sen's people understood that heterogeneous character well enough to run the fuck away from East Bengal and its Muslim majority
and the great need for intercultural communication,
film-makers need to make interesting films if they wish to communicate with audiences from other cultures.
attended by a recognition of the barriers that make intercultural communication a hard task.
The British had no trouble overcoming 'cultural barriers' so as to rule Bengal. They could also make good enough films about 'cultural barriers' between themselves and the Indians- e.g. Attenborough's 'Gandhi' and Lean's 'Passage' and various interminable BBC serials about the Raj.
However, the Brits did not confine themselves to the urban chattering classes. Korda had made 'elephant boy' Sabu a star in Hollywood. Renoir mightn't have been able to do much with Rumer Godden's 'the River' but 'Black Narcissus' was a big hit. I personally quite liked 'Nine hours to Rama' where Godse was played by Horst Buchholz and Robert Morley played a Congress Minister. I suppose we should mention Merchant and Ivory and Jhabwala- especially their 'Heat and Dust'- all of whom show that film can easily be as universal as you like provided it doesn't aim to be as boring as shit.
A deep respect for distinctiveness is combined, in Ray’s vision, with a recognition of internal diversity and an appreciation of the need for genuine communication.
Sen says 'Ray shows women as wearing Sari and men as wearing dhoti'. This is clear proof the man was a freakin' genius.
Impetuous cosmopolitans have something to learn from his focus on distinctiveness, but it is the growing army of communitarian and cultural “separatists” — increasingly more fashionable in India and elsewhere, that most needs to take note of the persistence of heterogeneity at the local level and the creative role of intercultural and intercommunal communication and learning.
Why didn't Raj make a movie about the Bangladesh war? He says it was because he preferred refugees to 'politics'. In other words, he wanted to be a boring virtue signaling cunt.
In emphasizing the need to honor the individuality of each culture, Ray saw no reason for closing the doors to the outside world. Indeed, opening doors was an important priority of Ray’s work.
You could replace 'Ray' with 'Tagore' or, indeed, 'Sen', himself.
In this respect, Ray’s attitude contrasts sharply with the increasing tendency to see Indian culture (or cultures) in highly conservative terms, to preserve it (or them) from the “pollution” of Western ideas and thought.
Indian movies, like American movies, have never been conservative. They eagerly imitate or appropriate anything from anywhere if that will boost box-office receipts. Ray was unusual in that he wanted to make boring shit in the way he had previously made boring shit. But then his was a niche market predicated on some supposed genius he had.
He was always willing to enjoy and to learn from ideas, art forms, and styles of life from anywhere, in India or abroad.
He wasn't even willing to learn from his Uncle, who invented play-back singing.
Ray appreciated the importance of heterogeneity within local communities.
This is like appreciating the importance of the cosmopolitanism of small, smelly Turd World villages.
This perception contrasts sharply with the tendency of many communitarians, religious and secular, who are willing to break up the nation into communities and then stop dead there: “thus far and no further.”
Why shouldn't there be ethnic cleansing and partition in every hut or hovel?
The great filmmaker’s eagerness to seek the larger unit — to talk to the whole world — went well with his enthusiasm for understanding the smallest of the small — the individuality, ultimately, of each person.
This is where Ray failed. He couldn't create any interesting characters. His 'Feluda' is a fool. If Ray really had any universal, as opposed to virtue signaling, quality, his detective films and his films for kids would have been remade- at least in India. But they were boring shite.
From such a vision, I believe, we have much to learn right now. There can be little doubt about the importance that Ray attached to the distinctiveness of cultures.
If cultures aren't distinctive they may end up getting Gay with each other. Ray was very stern about such things. He would tell Classical culture to kindly take its dick out of the arsehole of Modern culture.
He also discussed the problems that these divisions create in the possibility of communication across cultural boundaries.
e.g. Americans not being able to understand what Japanese actors are saying in Japanese films.
In Our Films, Their Films, he noted the important fact that films acquire “colour from all manner of indigenous factors such as habits of speech and behaviour, deep- seated social practices, past traditions, present influences and so on.”
Yet Korda could make money out of films about an elephant boy in Mysore who, a little later, is a Prince on the North West Frontier. What Ray was noticing was nonsense.
He went on to ask: “How much of this can a foreigner — with no more than a cursory knowledge of the factors involved — feel and respond to?”
Enough to make money from movies that aint as boring as shit.
He observed also that “there are certain basic similarities in human behaviour all over the world” (such as “expressions of joy and sorrow, love and hate, anger, surprise and fear”), but “even they can exhibit minute local variations which can only puzzle and perturb — and consequently warp the judgment of — the uninitiated foreigner.”
Ray was wrong. The inscrutable Chinese and the histrionic Hispanics all responded in exactly the same way to the great silent film starts. During the Thirties, import restrictions played a role in market segmentation by language for 'the Talkies'. But 'genre' movies- e.g. Samurai movies, creature features, or sword & sandals epics- showed that audiences responded to the same things in the same ways in very different countries. As a human document, Ray's first film, like Nanook of the North, had some value. Oddly Ravi Shankar's music turned out to have some appeal everywhere though it appealed to few in India itself. With Ray, even this wasn't true. He peaked with his first and went down hill thereafter.
The presence of such cultural differences raises many interesting problems.
By 'interesting' Sen means 'boring and stupid'.
The possibility of communication is only one of them.
The Brits had no problem ruling Bengal. This is because they understood that by learning a language you solve all fucking problems associated with the possibility of communication.
There is also the more basic issue of the individuality of each culture.
No there isn't. Either a culture exists or it doesn't. Individuals have individuality. Cultures don't. It doesn't matter if Jain culture is indistinguishable from Hindu culture to most people. There is absolutely no need for Jains to put on some special type of dress in order to appear different.
How might this individuality be respected and valued, even as the world grows steadily smaller and more uniform?
There is no reason or need to respect or value individuality or culture or anything else. Now it is true that some people may say 'the Government should ensure that such and such indigenous tribe or ancient dialect does not perish'. But that has to do with protecting autochthonous people from settlers or mining corporations etc.
We live in a time in which many things are increasingly common, and the possibility that something important is being lost in this process of integration has aroused understandable concern.
amongst virtue signaling cretins. The rest of us don't care. Cinema is either entertaining or it makes a loss. Unlike penis puppetry, cinema can't discover a cure for cancer.
The individuality of cultures is a big subject now,
No. 'Clash of civilizations' had become a thing. Nobody was saying that Canadians were completely unlike human beings.
and the tendency towards the homogenization of cultures, particularly in some uniformly Western mode, or in the deceptive form of “modernity,”
how is modernity deceptive? Sen doesn't know. He is just repeating shit at third hand. In India, the 'jadidi' or 'modernist' tradition was associated with reform-minded religious poets and writers. Thus Bedil was championed by 'jadidi' intellectuals in Afghanistan and Central Asia while in India there was direct participation by Urdu poets and artists in Socialist and anti-Imperialist movements. Nehru was part and parcel of that intellectual culture just as much as Azad and Hasrat Mohani. Peshawar produced a lot of great actors and directors who were part of the PWA movement and who made it big in Bollywood. Sahir, a Communist who fled Pakistan, became very rich penning songs for the Hindi movies. Tagore and Ray and Sen were considered bourgeois fossils.
has been sharply challenged. Anxieties of this kind have been expressed in different forms in recent cultural studies, which flourish today in Western literary and intellectual circles.
Shitty ones populated by Bengalis- maybe.
There is an irony, perhaps, in the fact that so much of the critique of “Western modernity” has come straight from the West to the Third World;
England was modern in the sense that it used newer technology. It ruled India, which was backwards in many respects. Since England is to the West of India, Indians would naturally speak of 'Western modernity' more particularly if they are qualifying as barristers or Actuaries, etc.
but these questions are being plentifully asked in contemporary India as well. Engaging arguments in this direction have been presented by, among others, Partha Chatterjee, in The Nation and Its Fragments (1993) and elsewhere, and in the literary, sociological and anthropological writings of such diverse and forceful authors as Ashis Nandy, Homi K. Bhaba and Veena Das, to name a few.
They were worthless shitheads just as Ray was a boring fool
These approaches share, to varying extents, a well-articulated “antimodernism,” rejecting, in particular, “Western” forms of modernization, which Chatterjee contrasts with the preferred form of what he calls “our modernism.”
which was and is technologically less advanced in many fields.
Sometimes the defiance of Western cultural modes is expressed in India through enunciations of the unique importance of Indian culture and the traditions of its communities.
In every country, there are people who want to preserve traditions unique to themselves.
At the broader level of “Asia” rather than India, the separateness of “Asian values,” and their distinction from Western norms, has often been asserted, particularly in east Asia, from Singapore and Malaysia to China and Japan.
But this has nothing to do with cinema. Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea could earn good money exporting movies and TV series to the West. 'Asian values' had to do with a different type of polity and legal structure. As Singapore's law minister says, the fact that Singapore has had only 4 Prime Ministers since its Independence, whereas the Tory Party has had 4 Prime Ministers since the Brexit referendum, is also the reason Singapore is now much richer than the UK. Sen, cretin that he is, thinks 'Asian values' has to do with wearing kimono or dhoti.
The invoking of Asian values has sometimes occurred in rather dubious political circumstances. It has been used to justify authoritarianism (and harsh penalties for alleged transgressions) in some east Asian countries. In 1993, at the Vienna conference on human rights, the foreign minister of Singapore, along with the Chinese Foreign Minister, cited the differences between Asian and European traditions and argued that “universal recognition of the ideal of human rights can be harmful if universalism is used to deny or mask the reality of diversity.”
They were saying they wouldn't sign trade agreements which had human rights clauses or shite of that sort. They have prevailed.
The championing of “Asian values” has typically come from governmental spokesmen and not from individuals opposed to the established regimes. Still, the general issue is important enough to deserve our attention; and so, in examining the implications of cultural diversity, I must also take up this question.
Sen contributed nothing to this debate. It simply is a fact that 'human rights' are meaningless if incentive compatible remedies aren't available. Greatly curtailing the freedom of a large class of people may lead to rapid economic development such that, with hindsight, they would consider the sacrifice worthwhile.
Even though he emphasized the difficulties of intercultural communication, Ray did not take cross-cultural comprehension to be impossible.
He spoke English. It is fucking obvious that he could do 'cross-cultural comprehension' because he had no difficulty working in London.
He saw the difficulties as challenges to be surmounted rather than as strict boundaries that could not be breached.
Which is why there are so many scenes of Argentines dancing the Tango and Chinese people doing Kung Fu in his films.
He did not propound a thesis of “incommunicability” across cultural boundaries; he argued instead that we need to recognize the difficulties that may arise. And on the larger subject of preserving traditions against foreign influence, Ray was not a cultural conservative. He did not give systematic priority to inherited practices.
He gave priority to boring shite.
I find no evidence in Ray’s films or in his writings that the fear of being too influenced by outsiders disturbed his equilibrium as an “Indian” artist.
If you are making boring films, why bother to steal stuff from interesting films made by foreigners?
He wanted to take full note of the importance of a particular cultural background without denying what there is to learn from elsewhere.
He didn't have to learn how to be boring. It just came to him naturally.
There is much wisdom, I think, in this “critical openness,” including the prizing of a dynamic, adaptable world over a world that is constantly “policing” external influences and fearing “invasion” of ideas from elsewhere.
Sen is a Professor. His job is 'policing' ideas. In the above he is saying one type of thinking is very wicked and evil. Ray was just as bigoted. What neither understood is that it is the outcome of the receipt of ideas or the result of actual invasions or insurrections which matters. Ray might have been able to make watchable movies if he had followed the example of his Uncle and what other directors were getting up to in Bombay and Madras. If he wanted to make a detective film, he could have studied Hitchcock. If the wanted to make a musical fantasy for kids, he could have watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. His films needn't have been utterly shit. To be fair, Ray was something of a one-man band. Hitchcock's movies would have sucked if he'd composed the music and the dialogue and also taken on the role of the icy blonde.
The difficulties of understanding each other across the boundaries of culture are undoubtedly great.
Not for film-makers.
This applies to the cinema, but also to other art forms, especially literature.
Not if you are bilingual or just have access to a good enough translation
The inability of most foreigners, even of other Indians, to grasp the beauty of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry
which is boring shit. On the other hand, because the guy was the head of a Hindu sect he could convey a particular Hindu sentiment well enough.
(a failure that we Bengalis find so exasperating) is a good illustration of this problem. Indeed, the thought that these non-appreciating others are being willfully contrary and obdurate (rather than being thwarted by the barriers of languages and translations) is a frequently aired suspicion.
We suspect that people who went to Shantiniketan are going to pretend Tagore wasn't a boring cunt because they gain a reputational benefit thereby.
The problem is perhaps less extreme in films, so far as film is less dependent on language. People can be informed by gestures and actions. Still, our day-to-day experiences generate certain patterns of reaction and non-reaction that can be mystifying for foreign viewers who have not had those experiences.
Not really. Samurai films and Hong Kong 'chop-socky' were popular precisely because of the bizarre body language and facial tics associated with the genre.
The gestures — and the non-gestures — that are quite standard, and are “perfectly ordinary,” in India may appear altogether remarkable when they are seen by others.
Fuck off! If you want Indian, get Peter Sellers. Actual Indians are too boring. On the other hand, you could pass of IS Jowhar as an Arab.
Also words have a function that goes well beyond the information that they directly convey.
No. Words convey information even if their meaning is not known. Sen thinks semantic information is the only sort. He is as stupid as shit.
Much is communicated by the sound of the language, and a special choice of words conveys a particular meaning or creates a particular effect.
to cretins. Others understand that sonorous boring shit is just boring shit.
As Ray observed, “in a sound film, words are expected to perform not only a narrative but a plastic function,” and “much will be missed unless one knows the language, and knows it well.”
Ray was wrong. Lots of the films he liked were in languages he didn't know.
Even the narrative may be inescapably transformed by language barriers, owing to nuances that are missed in translations.
More plausibly, Sen may be a fucking cretin.
I was reminded of Ray’s remark the other day when I saw Tin Kanya again, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a recent festival of Ray’s films (in their wonderful reissues by Merchant-Ivory). When the obdurate Paglee at last decides to write a letter to her spurned husband, she conveys her new sense of intimacy by addressing him with the familiar form tumi rather than the formal apni.
So what? We get that the 'tom boy' has calmed down. This is like 'taming of the shrew'. Fuck is wrong with Sen.
This could not be caught in the English subtitle.
Why the fuck is the cunt looking at the subtitle?
The translation had to show her sign the letter as “your wife,” to convey this new sense of intimacy; but the Bengali original form in which she signs as “Paglee” but addresses him as tumi, is infinitely more subtle.
It is meaningless. What matters is that she looks happy and is not fisting herself.
Such difficulties cannot be altogether escaped. Ray did not design his movies for a foreign audience, and the Ray fans abroad who rush to see his films know that they are, in a sense, eavesdropping.
Nobody 'rushed' to see his boring shit.
This relationship between the artist and the eavesdropper is by now very well established among the millions of Ray’s admirers around the world.
He had few admirers which is why his films never had nationwide releases or ran for very long. However, they were heavily promoted by the Indian Government through their missions abroad.
There is no expectation that his films are anything other than those of an Indian director — and a Bengali director — made for a local audience, and the attempt to see what is going on in these films is a decision to engage in a self-consciously “receptive” activity.
He was known as a maker of art films. Since they featured no nudity, you assumed it was about spirituality and the duty to be nice to starving darkies in shithole countries. Economic theory explains why there will always be some boring and shitty movies which however there is a reputational benefit in having claimed to have watched.
In this sense, Ray has triumphed and on his own terms.
Because Govt. of India promoted the cunt.
This vindication of his belief that he will be understood, barriers notwithstanding, tells us about the possibility of understanding across cultural boundaries. It may be hard, but it can be done; and the eagerness with which viewers with rich experience of Western cinema flock to see Ray’s films (despite the occasional obscurities of a presentation tailored to an entirely different audience) indicates what may be accomplished when there is a willingness to go beyond the bounds of one’s own culture.
There simply is no such 'eagerness'. True, some kids may think Kurosawa or Scorsese were sincere in their praise of Ray. But the only sincere type of praise in cinema is imitation.
Satyajit Ray makes an important distinction between what is or is not sensible when one tries to speak across a cultural divide, especially across the divide between the West and India. In 1958, two years after Pather Panchali won the Special Award in Cannes, and one year after he won the Grand Prix at Venice for Aparajito, Ray wrote the following, in an essay called Problems of a Bengali Film Maker: “There is no reason why we should not cash in on the foreigners’ curiosity about the Orient. But this must not mean pandering to their love of the false-exotic.
or the love of stuff which isn't as boring as shit. Aim always to be more boring than Tagore.
A great many notions about our country and our people have to be dispelled, even though it may be easier and — from a film point of view — more paying to sustain tile existing myths than to demolish them.”
Even Ray put beautiful actresses into his films. This did create a myth that Indian women might be comely.
Ray was not alone, of course, in pursuing such an approach. There have been several other eminent directors from India who have essentially followed the same route as Ray.
No. Ray was alone because the Government could not afford to subsidize a whole bunch of morons.
As an old resident of Calcutta, I am proud of the fact that some of the particularly distinguished ones have come — like Ray — from this very city. (I think of Mrinal Sen, Rhtwik Ghatak, Aparna Sen and others.)
Sen and Ghatak are from East Bengal.
But what Ray calls pandering to the “love of the false-exotic” has clearly tempted many other directors.
A Hollywood movie set in India- e.g. Octopussy or Temple of Doom- should feature snake-charmers and elephants and maharajas.
Many Indian films that can fairly be called “entertainment movies” have achieved great success abroad,
only if they achieved even greater success in India.
including in the Middle East and Africa, and Bombay has been a big influence on the cinematic world in many countries.
Not really. Other countries, including India, re-make South Korean movies like 'Old Boy'. Nobody remakes Indian or Iranian or Nigerian films.
It is not obvious whether the imaginary scenes of archaic splendor shown in such “entertainment movies” should be seen as mis-descriptions of the India in which they are allegedly set or as an excellent portrayal of some non-existent “never-never land” that is not to be confused with any real country.
This stupid cunt thinks everything he sees in films like 'Robin Hood' or 'Ten Commandments' is historically accurate.
As Ray notes in another context, quite a few of these traditional Indian films, which attract large audiences, “do away wholly with the bothersome aspect of social identification” and “present a synthetic, nonexistent society, and one can speak of credibility only within the norms of this make-believe world.”
Ray presents a boring and stupid world. Apparently kids bought his detective stories and so he didn't starve.
Ray suggests that this feature “accounts for their countrywide acceptance.” This is true; but this quality of make-believe also contributes greatly to the appeal of these films to some foreign audiences, which are happy to see lavish entertainment in an imagined land.
I think Indian music and the ugliness of most Indian men was a drawback. On the other hand, apparently Rajnikanth is big in Japan.
This is an easily understandable “success” story: acceptance abroad brings both reputation and revenue.
No. In 1946, a Chetan Anand film based on a story by Maxim Gorki won a prize at Cannes. Anand didn't bother to release it in India because it was miserabilist shit.
In contemporary India, where “export promotion” is becoming a supreme value, who can deny such an achievement?
Does Sen mean the 'NRI movie'? But they weren't art-movies.
In fact, the exploitation of the biases and the vulnerabilities of the foreign audience need not be concerned specifically with the “love of the false-exotic.”
Indians weren't exporting exotic films. The Government did promote shite by Ray because they wanted their begging bowl refilled. Anyway, Indira had attended Shantiniketan and Ray was gentlemanly enough.
Exploitation can take other forms — not necessarily false, nor especially exotic. There is nothing false about Indian poverty nor about the fact — remarkable to others — that Indians have learned to live normal lives in the midst of this poverty, taking little notice of the surrounding misery.
Because it isn't misery- to them.
The graphic portrayal of extreme wretchedness, and of heartlessness towards the downtrodden, can itself be exploited, especially when supplemented by a goodly supply of vicious villains. At a sophisticated level, such exploitation can be seen even in Salaam Bombay!, the wonderfully successful film by Meera Nair.
Woody Allen & Bette Midler watch the movie in a mall and rush to the food court to stuff themselves. Nothing like a bit of Poverty porn to put you in the mood for a porterhouse.
Nair’s film is powerfully constructed and deeply moving; and yet it mercilessly exploits not only the viewer’s sympathy and sentimentality, but also her interest in identifying “the villain of the piece” who might be blamed for all this suffering. Since Salaam Bombay! is full of villains, and of people totally lacking in sympathy and any sense of justice, the causes of the suffering portrayed in the film begin to look easily comprehensible even to distant foreigners.
The film isn't as boring as fuck. Nair is Punjabi, not Bengali. Sad.
Given the lack of humanity around these Indian victims, what else can you expect? Nair’s kind of exploitation draws simultaneously on the common knowledge that India has much suffering and on the common comfort — for which there is a demanding seeing the faces of the “baddies” who are causing all this trouble, as in, say, American gangster movies. (This easy reliance on villains is less present in Nair’s subsequent film, Mississippi Masala, which raises some important and interesting issues of identity involving ex-Ugandans of Indian origin in the United States.)
It has Denzel. That's enough.
At a more mundane level, City of Joy
which has Patrick Swayze.
does the same with Calcutta, with clearly identified villains who have to be confronted. By contrast, even when Ray’s films
which have ugly actors. If he had put in a couple of good songs and kept the camera on Sharmila, he would have found a market.
deal with problems that are just as intense (such as the coming of the Bengal famine in Ashani Sanket),
it is based on a Bibhuti story but is shit. Ray and Sen knew what caused the famine. It was also what caused the 1974 Bangladesh famine. Hiding the truth, showed they were 'Secular Socialists'.
the comfort of a ready explanation through the presence of villains is avoided.
Those who stole the famine relief money weren't villains.
In Ray’s films, villains are remarkably rare, almost absent.
Villains are interesting. Ray worked hard to be very very boring.
When terrible things happen, there may be nobody clearly responsible.
But if someone is, you have an interesting story.
And even when someone is clearly responsible, as Dayamoyee’s father-in-law most definitely is responsible for her predicament, and ultimately for her suicide, in Devi, he, too, is a victim, and by no means devoid of humane features.
The silly woman should just have got her father-in-law to transfer the property to her and then fuck off to Benares. Brahmo propaganda is as stupid as any other sort of propaganda but twice as boring.
If Salaam Bombay! and City of Joy ultimately belong in the “cops and robbers” tradition (except that there are no “good cops” in Salaam Bombay!), the Ray films which portray tragedies have neither cops nor robbers. Ray chooses to convey something of the complexity of social situations that makes such tragedies hard to avoid, rather than to supply easy explanations in the greed, the cupidity and the cruelty of “bad” people.
He conveys his own stupidity.
While Satyajit Ray insists on retaining the real cultural features of the society that he portrays, his view of India — even his view of Bengal — recognizes a complex reality, with immense heterogeneity at every level.
His films aren't complex. They are stupid.
It is not the picture of a stylized East meeting a stereotypical West,
because the fucker wasn't making 'Passage to India'. He made stupid shit about stupid Bengalis who met other stupid Bengalis.
which has been the stock-in-trade of so many recent writings critical of “Westernization” and “modernity.” Ray emphasized that the people who “inhabit” his films are complicated and extremely diverse.
They are boring and stupid.
Sen quotes Ray
'Take a single province: Bengal. Or, better still, take the city of Calcutta where I live and work. Accents here vary between one neighbourhood and another. Every educated Bengali peppers his native speech with a sprinkling of English words and phrases. Dress is not standardized. Although women generally prefer the sari, men wear clothes, which reflect the style of the thirteenth century or conform to the directives of the latest Esquire. The contrast between the rich and the poor is proverbial. Teenagers do the twist and drink Coke, while the devout Brahmin takes a dip in the Ganges and chants his mantras to the rising sun.'
Ray forgets that there some intrinsically interesting people in Calcutta- e.g. a gangster who was also a devout Brahmins, and police detectives who did the twist and drank coke while wearing Sari. What would be cool, is if there were an arranged marriage between them.
It is important to note that the native culture which Ray stresses is not some pure vision of a tradition-bound society, but the heterogeneous lives and commitments of contemporary India.
Ray does not depict Islam as being part and parcel of 'native culture'. On the other hand, he does show women, but not men, as wearing Saris. It is very important to note this.
The Indian who does the twist is as much there as the one who chants his mantras by the Ganges.
There were orthodox Brahmin film actors who danced the twist. Actors tend to be superstitious.
The recognition of this heterogeneity makes it immediately clear why Ray’s focus on local culture cannot be readily seen as an “anti-modern” move.
It can't be seen as modern. Ray was boring and old fashioned.
“Our culture” can draw on “their culture” and “their culture” can draw on our culture.”
Nobody needed Ray's permission. He made shitty films. Nargis told him to go fuck himself. Bengalis of his own class might stick up for him but they can't point to any thing worthwhile in his oeuvre.
The emphasis on the culture of the people who inhabit Ray’s films is in no way a denial of the legitimacy of the interest in things originating elsewhere.
It is a denial of the notion that Ray could stop being a boring shithead for even a second.
Indeed, Ray recollects with evident joy the time when Calcutta was full of Western (including American) troops, in the winter of 1942: #Calcutta now being a base of operations of the war, Chowringhee was chock-a- block with GIs. The pavement book stalls displayed wafer-thin editions of Life and Time, and the jam-packed cinema showed the very latest films from Hollywood. While I sat at my office desk … my mind buzzed with the thoughts of the films I had been seeing. I never ceased to regret that while I had stood in the scorching summer sun in the wilds of Santiniketan sketching simul and palash in full bloom, Citizen Kane had come and gone, playing for just three days in the newest and biggest cinema in Calcutta.# This interest in things from elsewhere had begun a lot earlier. Ray’s engagement with Western classical music goes back to his youth, and his fascination with films preceded his involvement with music.
Ray liked movies. Everybody did. That's why the Cinema was a profitable industry. Sen is saying 'despite being Bengali, Ray was heterogeneous. Seriously, he wasn't constantly shoving things up his bum.'
In his posthumously published book, My Years with Apu: A Memoir Ray recollects: “I became a film fan while still at school. I avidly read Picturegoer and Photoplay, neglected my studies and gorged myself on Hollywood gossip purveyed by Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.
Okay. Maybe he wasn't really 'heterogenous'. Boys don't 'gorge on gossip'. Suddenly, hanging out with GIs doesn't sound quite so innocent.
Deanna Derbin became a favourite not only because of her looks and her obvious gifts as an actress, but because of her lovely soprano voice. Also firm favourites were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, all of whose films I saw several times just to learn the Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern tunes by heart.” Ray’s willingness to enjoy and to learn from things happening elsewhere in India or abroad is plentifully clear in how he chose to live and what he chose to do.
Why were his films so boring and stupid? Did Deanna Derbin or Ginger Rogers shit on the screen?
(In addition to Ray’s own autobiographical accounts in Our Films, Their Films and My Years with Apu: A Memoir his involvements in ideas and arts from elsewhere are discussed in some detail in Andrew Robinson’s Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, which appeared in 1989.)
'The Inner Eye' was the title of a short film Ray had made on a famous blind painter at Shantiniketan. Robinson, perhaps, was suggesting that Ray was a film-maker who like Benode Behari, had lost the ability to appreciate his own type of art in 1956 or thereabouts.
When Ray describes what he learned as a student at Santiniketan, where he studied fine arts at Tagore’s distinguished center of education, the elements from home and abroad are well mixed together.
There was no art at Shantiniketan. After Okakura met Tagore, some started to filter in from Calcutta and Japan etc. But if people won't pay for art, it isn't art. It is ugly shit.
He learned a great deal about India’s “artistic and musical heritage” (he got involved in Indian classical music, aside from being trained to paint in traditional Indian ways)
an Indian learned some Indian music. That shows India has universalism.
and “far-eastern calligraphy” (particularly the use of “minimum brush strokes applied with maximum discipline”).
Japanese calligraphy. Since the Japs planned to take Bengal from the Brits, it makes sense for them to get the Bengalis to learn calligraphy.
When his teacher, Nandalal Bose, a great artist and the leading light of the Bengal school, taught Ray to draw a tree
Ray had a degree in Economics from Presidency. Then his Mummy decided he needed to learn how to draw a tree.
(“Not from the top downwards. A tree grows up, not down. The strokes must be from the base upwards…”), Bose was being critical of some Western conventions and introduced Ray to the styles and the traditions of China and Japan. (They got the tree right, Bose had decided.)
Ray was taught to draw Japanese tree. He was not taught to draw upside down tree because that is the tree Lord Krishna mentions in the Gita. Ray was secular boy.
Ray does not hesitate to indicate how strongly Pather Panchali — the profound film that immediately made him a film maker of international distinction — was influenced by Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief.
But De Sica's film is dramatic. Ray's is boring shite. Okay Ravi Shankar's music is good and the cinematographer was very good.
He saw Bicycle Thief within three days of arriving in London for a brief stay, and noted: “I knew immediately that if I ever made Pather Panchali — and the idea had been at the back of my mind for some time — I would make it in the same way, using natural locations and unknown actors.”
Rossellini was more important. 'Rome- Open City' & 'Germany- year zero' are harrowing. But his 'India-MatrBhumi' wasn't much watched. Still, it has elephants and is not boring shite.
Despite this influence, Pather Panchali, of course, is a quintessentially Indian film,
boring Indian film
in subject matter and in style, and yet a major inspiration came from an Italian film.
No. The idea of not having sets or actors came to Ray from Italian films shot just after the war. But Italians aren't boring as shit. Buddhijivis are.
The Italian influence did not make Pather Panchali anything other than an Indian film; it simply helped to make it a great Indian film.
Only liked by Marie Seton who got Nehru to push the shitty thing abroad.
The growing tendency in contemporary India to champion the need for an indigenous culture that has “resisted” external influences and borrowings lacks credibility as well as cogency.
If it lacks credibility that means no one believes there is any such 'growing tendency'. Sen is saying that he is getting at is false and insane.
It has become quite common to cite the foreign origin of an idea or a tradition as an argument against its use, and this has been linked to an antimodernist priority.
Where has it become common? In Indian cinema? Fuck off! Nobody was saying you can't have a kung-fu type fight followed by a disco number.
Thus, even a social analyst as acute as Partha Chatterjee
Sen thinks film producers care about that professors of useless shite
finds it impossible to dismiss Benedict Anderon’s thesis linking nationalism and its “imagined communities” by referring to the Western origin of that “modular” form.
Sen means the reverse. Partha dismisses Anderson's stupid shite by shitting copiously.
“I have a central objection to Anderson’s argument. If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?”
Sodomy?
Anderson’s concept of “the nation as an imagined community” may or may not have much to commend it
definitely sodomy. Partha fucks Anderson in the ass. Does Sen provide a reach-around? I imagine so. Academic communities are like that only.
(I think that it does); but the fear that its Western origin would leave us without a model that is our “own” is a rather peculiar concern.
Sen forgets that Indonesia and India were both colonized by Western nations. It might be worth having one's own definition of nation just in case it once again becomes profitable to colonize these two countries.
The crucial concept here is oikeiosis which is based on uncorrelated asymmetries. If you belong to a particular family or community by reason of biology, it is worthwhile having an emic understanding of it. Behaving like a fucking Martian anthropologist will get you laughed at if it doesn't invite physical attacks. Nehru may have imagined India to be Secular rather than Hindu. But this meant China could attack it because if Indians aren't Hindu why the fuck would they bother to defend territory? Moreover, if China stamps out Buddhism in Tibet, obviously, the secular Indians would want the Chinese to move further south and suppress Hinduism. Indeed, there were Bengalis who said 'China's chairman is our chairman'. Ray said he admired their courage (they were killing policemen) though they showed little after the police started slaughtering them.
Indian culture, as it has evolved, has always been prepared to absorb materials and ideas from elsewhere.
Sen means the country got invaded a lot. But it didn't absorb shit. England was the leading naval power. India didn't absorb any fucking interest, let alone skill, in maritime matters.
Satyajit Ray’s heterodoxy is not out of line with our tradition.
He was stupid, boring and bigoted just like Sen, Tagore etc.
Even in matters of day-to-day living: the fact that the chili, a basic ingredient of traditional Indian cooking, was brought to India by the Portuguese from the “New World” does not make Indian cooking any less Indian.
Ingredients don't alter the nature of a cuisine. It is the method of preparation which matters.
Indeed, chili has now become an “Indian” spice.
India grows some chilis. They are referred to as domestically produced ingredients. But Indian cuisine can be prepared with types of chili not grown in India.
Of course, cultural influences are a two way process: India may have acquired the chili from abroad, but we have also given the world the benefits of our culinary traditions.
A culinary tradition is independent of ingredients used. Indian restaurants were set up abroad either by immigrants or local entrepreneurs. Those restaurants may use local ingredients. A dish originally from India may morph into something very different- e.g. Japanese 'curry'.
While tandoori came from the Middle East to India, it is in its Indian form that tandoori has become a staple British diet. In London last summer I heard something described as being “as English as daffodils or chicken tikka masala.”
Back then, there were more Indian takeaways. This was a 'supply side' fad.
The mixture of traditions that underlie the major intellectual developments in the world dictates strongly against taking a “national” (or “regional” or “local” or “community-based”) view of these developments.
They are irrelevant. Ray was promoted by the Indian government, not that of China. He was 'national' so long as Nehru or Indira was in charge. But Nehru had brought in Rossellini and Seton to improve the Government's 'Films Division'. Had Ray started making films in Hollywood, we could say he was 'cosmopolitan' or 'universal' rather than parochial.
The role of mixed heritage in a subject such as mathematics, for example, is well-known.
It is irrelevant. There is no fucking mixed heritage now.
The interlinkage between Indian, Arabic and European mathematics has been particularly significant in the development of what is now called Western mathematics.
It didn't matter in the slightest.
These connections are beautifully illustrated by the origin of the term “sine” in Western trigonometry.
But those connections are irrelevant to learning mathematics or advancing its frontiers.
That modern term came to India through the British, and yet in its genesis there is a remarkable Indian component. Aryabhata, an Indian mathematician and astronomer who lived in the fifth and early sixth centuries, discussed the concept of “sine,” and called it Jyanardha, or “half-chord,” in Sanskrit. From there the term migrated in an interesting way, as Howard Eves describes in An Introduction to the History of Mathematics: “Aryabhata called it ardha-jya (“half-chord”) and jya-ardha (“chord-half”), and then abbreviated the term by simply using jya (“chord”). From jya the Arabs phonetically derived jiba, which, following Arabic practice of omitting vowels, was written as jb. Now jiba, aside from its technical significance, is a meaningless word in Arabic. Later writers who came across jb as an abbreviation for the meaningless word Jiba substituted Jaib instead, which contains the same letters, and is a good Arabic word meaning “cove” or “bay.” Still later, Gherardo of Cremona (ca. 1150), when he made his translations from the Arabic, replaced the Arabian jaib by its Latin equivalent, sinus [meaning a cove or a bay], from whence came our present word sine. ” Given the and intellectual interconnections, the question of what is “Western” and what is “Eastern” (or Indian) is often hard to decide, and the issue can be discussed only in dialectical terms. The characterization of an idea as “purely Western” or “purely Indian” can be very illusory. The origin of ideas is not the kind of thing to which “purity” happens easily.
However, as Sen himself admits, nobody in India practices 'Indian' mathematics. Only Western mathematics is used. Nowadays, almost all papers are written in English.
This issue has some practical importance now, given the political developments of the last decade, including the increase in the strength of political parties focusing on the Indian — particularly the Hindu — heritage.
Sen thought the BJP would insist that Indians write math papers in Sanskrit. He was wrong.
There is an important aspect of anti-modernism, which tends to question, explicitly or implicitly, the emphasis to be placed on what is called “Western science.” If the challenges from traditional conservatism grow, this can become quite a threat to scientific education in India, affecting what young Indians are encouraged to learn, and how much emphasis is put on science in the general curriculum.
If the challenge from the nationalists hadn't grown, nutters like Sen would have insisted that all Indian universities, not just Nalanda, should give diplomatic immunity to Naxalites or ISIS terrorists.
The reasoning behind this “anti-foreign” attitude is flawed in several ways. First,
it objects to being conquered and enslaved.
so-called “Western science” is not the special possession of Europe and America.
Nor is Eastern wisdom. You can buy both but investing in the former is vital. The latter is shite.
It is true that, since the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment, most scientific progress has occurred in the West; but these scientific developments drew substantially on earlier work in mathematics and science done by the Arabs, the Chinese, the Indians, and others. The term “Western science” is misleading in this respect, and misguided in its tendency to establish a distance between non-Western people and the pursuit of mathematics and science
Similarly the term 'Europe' is misleading because it establishes a distance between people who don't live in Europe and those who do. The plain fact is, if you are genuinely 'pursuing' mathematics and science, you don't give a fuck where it comes from. Still, it is true that if you relabel 'Chemistry' as 'Girlie-twirly fun-fun', more girls will take it up. That's what happened to Mrs. Thatcher. Later she stopped being an industrial character because training to be a barrister had been relabeled 'Vagina maintenance for posh bints'. Similarly, she only became Prime Minister after Number 10 Downing Street was redesignated as a powder room.
Second, irrespective of the location of the discoveries and the inventions, the methods of reasoning used in science and mathematics give them some independence of local geography and cultural history. To be sure, there are important issues of local knowledge, and of the varying perspectives regarding what is or is not important; but there is still much of substance that is shared in methods of argument, demonstration, and the scrutiny of evidence. The term “Western science” is misleading in this respect, too.
Which is why this nutter keeps using that term.
Third, our decisions about the future need not be parasitic on the past we have experienced. Even if there were no Asian or Indian component in the evolution of contemporary mathematics and science — this is not the case, but even if it were the case — their importance in the contemporary India need not be deeply undermined for that reason.
If there is no indigenous component in the evolution of a discipline of vital importance, then the thing must be imported wholesale. If this is not done, the thing will only be important in the sense of representing a deficiency which endangers the country.
Rabindranath Tagore nicely illustrated the tyranny of being bound to the past in his amusing but profoundly serious short story Kartar Bhoot (“The Ghost of the Leader”), in which the wishes of the respected but dead leader make the lives of others impossibly constrained.
Tagore is Sen and Ray's Kartar Bhoot. He was boring and stupid. They were boring and stupid. But he was pro-Hindu. They were anti-Hindu. This is because they were sucking up to a different dynasty.
There is a similar issue, to which I referred earlier, about the role of “modernity” in contemporary India.
Ray wasn't modern. He was as boring as shit.
The recent attacks on modernity (especially on a “modernity” that is seen as coming to India from the West) draw greatly on the literature of “post-modernism” and on similar approaches that have been quite influential in Western literary and cultural circles, and in India, too.
Post-modernism was about rejecting grand narratives which were as boring as shit. You could 'mix & match' provided you were entertaining. Sadly, post-colonial studies wasn't entertaining. It was stupid and boring sit.
There is something interesting in this dual role of the West, the colonial metropolis supplying ideas to post-colonial intellectuals to attack the influence of the colonial metropolis; but there is no contradiction here.
Stupidity involves no contradiction. Ray and Sen gathered up a lot of international accolades not because they were any good but because they were Indian and showed that India is a shithole.
Which brings us back to Satyajit Ray. His delicate portrayal of very different types that make us what we are cannot be matched.
Sen is lying. Bengalis do that to boost fellow Bengalis- provided those Bengalis are as boring as shit.
Reflecting on what to include in his films,
after excluding anything interesting
he posed the problem beautifully:
'What should you put in your films? What can you leave out? Would you leave the city behind and go to the village where cows graze in the endless fields and the shepherd plays the flute? You can make a film here that would be pure and fresh and have the delicate rhythm of a boatman’s song. Or would you rather go back in time — way back to the Epics, where the gods and demons took sides in the great battle where brother killed brother and Lord Krishna revivified a desolate prince with the words of the Gita? One could do exciting things here, using the great mimetic tradition of Kathakali, as the Japanese use their Noh and Kabuki. Or would you rather stay where you are, right in the present, in the heart of this monstrous, teeming, bewildering city, and try to orchestrate its dizzying contrasts of sight and sound and milieu?'
We get it. Ray was a blathershite.
The celebration of these differences — the “dizzying contrasts” — is far from what can be found in labored generalizations about the unique and fragile purity of “our culture,” and in the vigorous pleas to keep “our culture”, “our modernity”, immune from “their culture”, “their modernity.”
Sen is only praising Ray because he is a fellow boring shithead of a Shantiniketan alumni who rose under the Dynasty.
In our heterogeneity, and in our openness, lies our pride, not our disgrace. Satyajit Ray taught us this, and the lesson is profoundly important for India. And for Asia, and for the world.
Sen and Ray thought India's pride lay in getting fucked in the ass by the Chinese. Watch Kanchenjunga and you can see why Asia and the world might have rejoiced when the Reds poured into Assam. Hopefully, Sen will live long enough to watch Mamta turn West Bengal into a no-go zone for Hindus. Then his cup of joy will overflow.
