From Ray To Decay

Satyajit Ray influenced mainstream Bengali cinema like no one else did, and he drew inspiration from Bengali literature for his works. Seven decades after his Pather Panchali, Bengali cinema seems to be lost. A parallel decline in Bengali literature could be key to this free fall

- Rabi Banerjee

In the early 1980s, Satyajit Ray was speaking at a memorial event for a renowned novelist at Kolkata’s Academy of Fine Arts. During his speech, he said that contemporary novels were not fit enough to be converted into films as they

lacked proper narration. “Many writers seem more inclined to use their minds rather than their eyes and ears,” he commented. “There is a marked tendency to avoid concrete observation. The writers are either incapable of or disinclined to visualise beyond certain points. This itself need not be held against a novel, but in a film writer, this tendency can only lead to a film that shows a lot but says very little.”

Ray added that there was a lack of adventure; everyone played safe. This led to “stagnation” in the literary world, he said.

Reading his comments in the newspaper the next day, Buddhadeb Guha, one of the popular novelists of the time, reacted sharply: “It is not the responsibility of writers to fulfill the needs of film directors.”

In his response, Ray brought up the way Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, in his novel Pather Panchali, described the style of how an old woman wears a sari. “He did not think of the film while doing that.... Today, such descriptions are missing from the literary world of Bengal,” he wrote in a letter to Guha.

Ray was echoing the thoughts of his friend, the writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri. His books, especially Atmaghati Bangali (Suicidal Bengali), spoke of the decay in Bengal, which had arguably formed the cultural and spiritual backbone of India in the 19th and 20th centuries.