SATYAJIT RAY, A RAY OF LIGHT AN EYE FOR THE DARKER SIDE OF LIFE (AS HE ENTERS HIS CENTENARY NEAR )

Ali Peter John

He will always be remembered as one of the towering figures of the last hundred years. He is one of the leading filmmakers of India who took Indian cinema to the world and topped his illustrious career as the first Indian filmmaker to be presented with the Oscar which received on his sick bed . He was also a filmmaker who attracted the most stringent attacks from his critics who charged him with peddling the poverty of India to make a name for himself and to make money....

Mrs.Nargis Dutt was only the second film personality to be nominated to the Rajya Sabha because of her being a very close friend of the then Prime, Mrs.Indira Gandhi, she did not make a major contribution to Parliament like most of the other film personalities who followed her in Parliament, whether it was the Rajya Sabha or the Lok Sabha .Mrs.Dutt however made headlines when she made a strident speech against satyajit Ray and spoke about how he sold the poverty of India in the International"market".Her daring speech got her into a spot of serious trouble when some of the leading filmmakers of India which included her friend and my guru,K.A.Abbas who not only criticized her for running down a leading filmmaker like Ray but also asked her to apologize which she refused to do, but she never spoke in the Rajya Sabha again. She was soon diagnosed with cancer and died on May 3,1981. But that attack on Ray is still remembered by many....

Tinnu Anand was the son of the well-known Hindi film writer Inder Raj Anand, one of the highest paid writers of the sixties and seventies and who was also a very close friend of Abbas and Ray .Tinnu was an actor who was also one of the assistants of Abbas who was making "Saat Hindustani "and had decided to cast Tinnu as one of the seven Indians in the film. It was also the time when Abbas and Inder Raj Anand had written letters to their friends, Michaelangelo Antonioni and Ray asking them to take on Tinnu as an assistant. Tinnu was all set to leave for Goa to start shooting for "Saat Hindustani", when he received a letter from Ray asking him to come to Calcutta and join him as his assistant. Tinnu was in a fix and didn't know what to do . He was asked by his father to meet Abbas and tell him what had happened .Tinnu like many others was very scared of Abbas, but he faced him and showed the letter from Ray and told Abbas that he would not be able to do his film as he was keen to join Ray .

Abbas lost his temper and told Tinnu that he would not let him go unless he brought him a suitable replacement. A tense Tinnu brought out a photograph from his pocket of a young man which was given to him by his girlfriend Shiela in Delhi who had told him that the young man in the photograph wanted to act in films. Abbas who was still angry asked Tinnu to call the young man from wherever he was. That young man came from Calcutta within two days and on the fourth day ,Abbas signed him to play the role Tinnu was to play. That young man was Amitabh Bachchan .Tinnu Anand joined Satyajit Ray as his thirteenth assistant and worked with him for two years and came back to Bombay to make films like "Duniya Meri Jeb Mein ", " Ye Ishq Nahi Aasaan"and "Kalia ", "Shahenshah", Maine Aazad Hoon "and"Major Saab ",all of them with Amitabh Bachchan.
He was also a very good actor. He seemed to have forgotten all that he had learnt about film making from Ray ....

Amitabh Bachchan was fascinated by Ray's personality ,his voice and his knowledge of music. He had a few meetings with Ray and if I remember, he had even done the voiceover for one of Ray's films, I think it was for "Shatranj Ke Khiladi ".There was even talk about Ray planning to make a film with Amitabh, but ...

It was after the grand success of" Sholay"that Ray thought of making his first Hindi film ,"Shatranj Ke Khiladi "and had a casting sensation when he brought together Sanjeev Kumar, Amjad Khan and Shabana Azmi. Amjad had met with a very serious accident while shooting with Amitabh Bachchan in Goa for a film called "The Great Gambler "and was in hospital for more than six months and couldn't think of shooting for any film. But Ray was so keen to work with Amjad that he decided to wait till Amjad was out of hospital and fit to work. The film also marked the debut of the writer Javed Siddiqui, who was a journalist jailed for his writings during the Emergency and had taken to working as an assistant to Abrar Alvi who was the writer of Guru Dutt in most of his films which included classics like "Pyaasa",Kaagaz ke Phool" and "Chaudhvin Ka Chand".Ray failed to make the same impact that he made with his Bengali films.....

He may have made it very big on an International level and critics and other filmmakers may have praised him, but he couldn't reach audiences in India which were "drunk" on masala Hindi films .I remember the evening when his film" Sadgati" was being shown on Doordarshan and I had decided to do some kind of a study among audiences in Bombay. I walked around in several suburbs and saw that people had put off their TV sets or were watching some other programme or shows....

When I wrote about what I had observed, I was branded "anti-Ray" and "a journalist biased against the greatest filmmaker of India ".Were they right in calling me names when I was only trying to place the truth before them ?How the people and critics and even the Government at the Centre and West Bengal and the other states and the country reacts during Ray's centenary celebrations to come will provide the answer.