My Adventures with Satyajit Ray

136 Pages·2017·1.39 MB·English

by  Suresh Jindal

My Adventures with
Satyajit Ray
THE MAKING OF SHATRANJ KE KHILARI
Suresh Jindal
With an Introduction by
Andrew Robinson
Dedicated to my late parents,
who taught me to revere creativity and creators
Contents
Foreword by Jean-Claude Carrière
Introduction by Andrew Robinson
1. The Meeting
2. Satyajit Ray: A Brief Biography
3. Shatranj Ke Khilari: The Beginnings
4. Research and Scheduling
5. Casting
6. Final Preparations
7. Filming
8. Post-production
9. The Release and After
10. Looking Back
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Book
About the Author
Copyright
Foreword
Impossible Not to Open the Door
I
heard about Satyajit Ray for the first time from Luis Buñuel. He had seen Pather
Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955) at Cannes and told me: ‘You must see this film,
and see it several times [he did insist]. The director is a great one.’
I saw Pather Panchali, and I saw it several times, following Buñuel’s instructions.
Then I watched Ray’s other films, one by one, and loved all of them. Jalsaghar (The
Music Room, 1958) is among my all-time favourites. I have seen it six or seven times
(and I’ll see it again and again).
I was lucky enough to meet Satyajit in Calcutta in 1982. I was travelling through
India with Peter Brook, looking for any help, any indication or suggestion that could
come to our rescue, for we were working on our stage adaptation of The Mahabharata.
Satyajit was nice enough to receive us in his office several times and give us priceless
advice. He even told us that for a long time he had himself dreamed of making a film
based on the great Indian epic. But the project would have been expensive and would
have to be shot in English, preferably with American actors.1 ‘I gave up, because I
couldn’t imagine Kirk Douglas playing Arjuna,’ Ray said with a smile.
We met again several times in Calcutta in the following years. I remember sitting
next to him during the screening of one of his last films, Shakha Proshakha (Branches of
the Tree, 1990). As always, I felt his strong presence. When I watched his unforgettable
last declaration the day he received the Academy’s Honorary Award for Lifetime
Achievement on television in Paris, tears welled up in my eyes. I knew I would never
see him again. A great artist, and a great man, was leaving us. And he was aware of it.
When it comes to Suresh, it’s strange, but I don’t remember when I first met him; I
just know that we are friends. We met several times in India, maybe thirty years ago,
but also in Paris and—strangely enough—in Mexico. We had long conversations, and
together we even cautiously explored the jungle near Palenque in the Maya country.
Suresh kept pretending that his light Indian sandals were the best possible shoes for
walking in an unexplored forest, which, to this day, I doubt.
One day he sent me the manuscript of this book, containing the letters exchanged
between Satyajit Ray and himself regarding the movie he had produced, Shatranj Ke
Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), which is set in Lucknow in the nineteenth century,
precisely in 1856. And I was seduced at once, because I had never read anything like it
before: the story of the making of a film, step by step, from beginning to end. The
relations between a film director and a producer are usually secretive. They can
sometimes be treacherous, even violent. And they remain a mystery to the crew and,
consequently, to the audience.
While reading Suresh’s book (and looking at the pictures and documents it
contains), we discover what’s generally hidden. It’s like walking into an adventure
novel, where you penetrate another jungle full of delusions and dangers, but with the
best possible guides. I guess even if we don’t belong to the world of cinema (and we
don’t need to in order to enjoy this book), we partake of the desires, the worries, the
hesitations, the difficulties and also the joys these two men faced along the way in
making a great film.
A legend (Suresh regards Ray as ‘a magnificent human specimen’, a ‘towering
personality’) is coming to visit us, to share his dreams with us, as if we were part of his
team; I would even say, as part of his family.
And it’s impossible not to open the door and let him in.
JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIÈRE
Introduction
‘Suresh, every film is like an adventure!’1—Satyajit Ray
(while researching Shatranj Ke Khilari in Lucknow)
S
hatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players), completed in 1977, was the first adult film
about the British Raj in India. Today, after Gandhi, Heat and Dust, The Jewel in the
Crown, A Passage to India, Lagaan and many other films, Satyajit Ray’s film remains by
far the most sophisticated portrayal of this particular clash of cultures. No other
director—British, Indian or otherwise—is likely to better it. As V.S. Naipaul remarked,
‘It is like a Shakespeare scene. Only 300 words are spoken but goodness!—terrific
things happen.’2
Ray had known Premchand’s short story ‘Shatranj Ke Khilari’ for more than thirty
years before he attempted to make a screenplay out of it, after meeting the young
producer Suresh Jindal in 1974. Although it had first appeared in print in Hindi in the
mid-1920s, Ray read it in English translation in the early 1940s as an art student at
Rabindranath Tagore’s university in Bengal and was immediately drawn to it for several
reasons.
Lucknow, the setting of the story, is one of the most resonant cities in India. Satyajit
took holidays there in the late 1920s and 1930s from the age of about eight, staying at
first in the house of an uncle, later with other relatives. The uncle, a barrister called
Atulprasad Sen, was the most famous Bengali composer of songs after Tagore. His
house hummed with music of every kind, and his guests displayed polished manners to
match; they included the greatest north Indian classical musician of modern times,
Ustad Allauddin Khan (the father of Ali Akbar Khan and the guru of Ravi Shankar).
The young Ray listened to him playing the piano and violin, and took in the
atmosphere of courtly refinement that was so characteristic of Lucknow. He was also
taken to see all the sights that had made Lucknow known as the ‘Paris of the East’ and
the ‘Babylon of India’ a century before: the great mosque Bara Imambara with its
notorious Bhulbhulaiya Maze, the Dilkusha Garden and the remains of the palaces of
the Kings of Awadh (Oudh). Nearby he saw the shell of the British Residency, with the
marks of cannonballs still visible on its walls and a marble plaque commemorating the
spot where Sir Henry Lawrence had fallen during the Indian Mutiny/Uprising of 1857.
Even today these places have a peculiar elegiac aura. The brief allusions to the city and
that period in its history in Premchand’s story conjured up a host of images and
sensations in the twenty-year-old Ray’s mind.
By then he was also keenly interested in chess. Over the next ten years or so this
became an addiction—the main bond (along with Western classical music) between
him and his first English friend, Norman Clare, an RAF serviceman with time on his
hands in Calcutta in 1944-46. After this friend was demobbed, Ray found himself
without a partner and took to playing solitaire chess. Over the next few years he
became engrossed in it and bought books on chess, which he would soon decide to sell
to raise money to shoot the pilot footage for his first film, Pather Panchali. His passion
for chess disappeared only with the onset of a greater passion: film-making.
That came around 1951, after his return to Calcutta from his first visit to Britain.
Nearly a quarter of a century passed before Ray tackled the story he had admired as a
student. His reluctance was principally due to his doubts about writing a screenplay
and working with actors in a language—Urdu, the court language of Lucknow (which
is very similar to Hindi, the language of Premchand’s story)—that was not his own. So
rich, subtle and lifelike is Ray’s usual film dialogue—as Naipaul appreciated from just
the portions of The Chess Players in English—so nuanced his direction of actors that he
feared to work in a language other than Bengali or perhaps English. It was his affection
for the story, his discovery of able Urdu collaborators and his awareness of a pool of
talented Urdu-speaking actors in Bombay (rather than his usual Calcutta) which
eventually gave him confidence. For the first time—excepting his science-fiction
project, The Alien, and his documentaries—Ray wrote a screenplay in English, which
was subsequently translated into Urdu. During production, he spoke English to his
producer Jindal, the actors and his Urdu collaborators. Although his Hindi was
serviceable, Ray characteristically avoided speaking in Hindi. ‘He doesn’t like to do