My Adventures with Satyajit Ray: The Making of Shatranj Ke Khilari

157 Pages·2018·2.06 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 anything unless
he’s really good at it,’ Shama Zaidi, his chief collaborator in the writing of the
screenplay, remarked.
Her role in the film began early on, about two years before Ray completed the
first draft of the screenplay in June 1976. Ray’s art director Bansi Chandragupta
introduced Zaidi to Ray in 1974. He was just beginning to get to grips with his
research for the film—which makes it one of the longest pre-production periods of
any Ray film (during which he made another film, Jana Aranya [The Middle Man]).
It is not hard to see why: not only had Ray taken on the re-creation of an entire
culture that was not his own, he was also having to confront his own ambivalence
towards the British Raj and, in particular, the contradictions of King Wajid Ali Shah,
one of the most bizarre monarchs in a land of eccentric rulers.
Since Ray has regularly been condemned for failing to make his own attitude to
the Indian and British sides clear in Shatranj Ke Khilari—notably in a long attack on
the film for accepting the British view of Wajid Ali Shah as being ‘effete and
effeminate’,3 published in the Illustrated Weekly of India, to which Ray responded at
length—it is worth detailing the principal sources he consulted in his research in
India and, later, in the India Office Library in London. Some of them pop up in his
wonderfully detailed and revealing letters to Suresh Jindal that form the spine of My
Adventures with Satyajit Ray, a compellingly readable, honest and touching memoir
of a great artist in the throes of creation. ‘Ray was a tireless and outstanding
researcher,’4 notes Jindal. ‘Just accompanying him to his meetings with scholars,
academicians, experts and specialists in music, art, architecture and military history
was an amazing experience and taught me a great deal.’
Ray listed his sources in his reply to the attack as follows, adding his own
comments on their significance, which are reproduced here along with my own
remarks in square brackets: