In Search of Mahanagar

CALCUTTA WAS TO Satyajit Ray what London was to Charles Dickens. In 1846, Dickens compared London to “a magic lantern”, a Victorian-era toy that projected paintings, prints, and photographs. He wrote in a letter, “A day in London sets me up and starts me.” When not in the city, Dickens felt that “the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern is immense!” Ray, similarly, once told an interviewer, “I love Calcutta. I have lived here all my life. The best of whatever is being done in the arts in India is being done here. There is great intellectual vitality […] From a filmmaker’s point of view, no city could be better.” The city, for Ray, was both home and muse, the light of his own magic lantern.

Ray died in 1992, nine years before ‘Calcutta’ became ‘Kolkata’. A film­maker, writer, and artist, Ray domi­nated Bengal’s artistic and aesthetic contribution in the latter half of the 20th century, and the 2000s raised him to a yet higher pedestal. In February, for instance, it was announced that the Hiland Park station on Kolkata Metro’s new Orange Line was going to be named after Ray. The station is expected to connect the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) to the rest of the city. The tiled Pather Panchali scenery one sees on its platform is an occasion for escape and recall.

From 1970 until his death in 1992, Ray lived at the intersection of Bishop Lefroy and Lee Road. When, in 2016, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had asked the Calcutta Municipal Corpora­tion to rename Lee Road ‘Satyajit Ray Dharani’ (dharani translates to ‘soil’ and, also, ‘earth’), Bishop Lefroy Road had been decorated with posters of Ray films, many of which he had designed himself. For some time, the street resembled an open-air gallery. To witness Ray’s genius as a graphic designer, one only needed to walk this lane. His posters for films like Devi (1960), Sonar Kella (1974) and Ganashatru (1989) felt contem­porary, strangely ahead of their time. Sadly, these look ragged today.

The tattered condition of some of Ray’s posters makes one think that the West Bengal government’s attempts to memorialise Ray have been somewhat half-hearted, but the worlds that Ray created often lurk behind Kolkata’s myriad realities, waiting to break in. The few posters on Bishop Lefroy Road that have survived the ravages of time and Cyclone Amphan, all serve as reminders of Ray’s craft. They force you to jog your mind and remember his iconic scenes and dialogues. Memory, like the city, is vulnerable to entropy, but Ray’s film output, one starts to think, is impervi­ous to forgetting and decay.

Even when made well, murals sometimes struggle under the weight of their impermanence. Like all good art, they strive toward timelessness, but the weather and prospect of a new paint job forever herald their erasure. In March last year, mayor Firhad Hakim and Ray’s son, Sandip, inaugurated a giant mural in Kolkata’s Charu Market area. A-Kill, a Chennai-based graffiti artist, had enshrined on a non-descript South Kolkata wall an image that several Kolkatans find familiar: Ray looking at the world through the lens of his film camera. Standing on the opposite pavement, taking in the specificities of the broad brushstrokes, one’s rapture is interrupted by the incoming rumble of a Ray totem: the tram.

ONCE A SIGNIFIER of Calcutta’s ubiquitous heritage, trams are a rare sight in today’s Kolkata. While many lament the disappearance of this cheap and sustainable mode of trans­port, the tram was in peril even in 1963, the year Ray released Mahanagar (The Big City). Newspapers at the time had also referred to the tram as “a relic of the British era”, an aberration that stood out like a sore thumb on the modern and motorised roads of the city. Ray, however, took a different view. In Mahanagar, we see that the tram is integral to the life of his working-class protagonist, Arati Mazumdar (Madhabi Mukherjee). The film’s opening credits, tellingly, play out against an image of a tram’s trolley pole moving along a cable.

For its tension, Mahanagar relies on the divides between gender and genera­tion. The house in Kalighat that Arati shares with her husband Subrata (Anil Chatterjee) and her in-laws is small and cramped. The radio in a neighbour’s house gives some of Ray’s scenes a background score. Several dialogues in the film allude to the family’s paucity. Arati’s decision to apply for the position of a door-to-door salesgirl is driven by both desire and need. Finally, it becomes the tram’s job to carry Arati from the anger and disapproval of her husband’s ageing parents to Mission Row, the heart of old Calcutta’s posh office area.

Faraday House, the office building where Arati worked, still stands. MN Dastur & Co was one of many businesses that were headquartered here when Mahanagar was shot, but with time, the company has taken over the entire com­plex. The cobbler and typist who hawk their services on the pavement outside this office wage an everyday battle against redundancy and time, but larger struggles seem as implicit in Kolkata’s fabric as they were in Ray’s Calcutta. For Arati and her female col­leagues, Faraday House was an oasis, a place that allowed them community, the ability to laugh together and gossip. It was here that Arati learnt how to wear lipstick and enjoy the benefits of a regular income. Women on Mission Row are even today a minority, but some of them walk in Arati’s footsteps. Sharing a cigarette outside Faraday House, an employee asks her male colleagues if salaries would come in before May 1.

The Calcutta we see from the office of Arati’s boss, Himangshu Mukerjee (Haradhan Bannerjee), is colonial and re­gal, but right at the end of the film when Arati puts in her papers and joins Subrata on the street below, the aerial view of the city only magnifies the pro­tagonist’s soft optimism. Having quit because of her employer’s parochialism, Arati assures her unemployed husband that in a city so big, one that afforded its residents so many disparate professions, they would, in the end, find work.

The worlds that Satyajit Ray created often lurk behind Kolkata’s myriad realities, waiting to break in. The few posters on Bishop Lefroy Road that have survived the ravages of time and Cyclone Amphan, all serve as reminders of Ray’s craft

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CALCUTTA ALSO BRIMS with opportunity in other Ray films. Not far from Faraday House, the Dal­housie offices of central Kolkata give way to the often-decrepit houses of the north. In Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956), the second film in Ray’s Apu tril­ogy, Apurba Kumar Roy, or Apu, heads to Patuatola Lane when he first arrives in Calcutta. Walking down the narrow street, it is still possible to stand in the exact spot where Ray had framed an adolescent and hopeful Apu, standing with his luggage and globe in hand. A yellow taxi now lends authenticity to the building Ray had chosen as a back­drop. Though political hoardings and graffiti mark the passage of time, they feel like encroachers.

Apu, in Aparajito, is a migrant from rural Bengal who comes to Kolkata in search of education and progress. He works nights in a press to pay his rent. In some ways, Patuatola Lane contin­ues to feel like a place where the barely sufficient come to make sure their ends meet. Accommodation here is available at Lotus Lodge and the University of Calcutta girl students’ hall at the mouth of the lane. Together, they reek of an old-world precariousness that defines the architecture of the buildings, and, one assumes, the lives of its inhabitants, too. The young men who collect and sell old newspapers on separate corners of this street all seem to display a tenacity that together matches Apu’s effort at survival.

In his essay, ‘Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta: Friend or Adversary’, Amitabha Bhattacharya writes, “Calcutta was a crucial factor in Apu’s development, from a priestly brahmin boy to a secular, sensitive and progressive human being. He was transcending a painful adoles­cence and also experiencing the pulls of contrary forces—between mother-home-root on the one hand and the calls of a liberating outside world on the other. Calcutta saves Apu.” Having come of age in Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959), Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) finds in Calcutta the will to triumph over loneliness and dire penury.

Neither in the colonial times in which Apur Sansar is set nor in the freshly postcolonial times in which the film was shot, was the divide between old North Calcutta and a newly developed South Kolkata as stark as it feels today

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Neither in the colonial times in which Apur Sansar is set nor in the freshly postcolonial times in which the film was shot, was the divide between old North Calcutta and a newly devel­oped South Kolkata as stark as it feels today. Calcutta, for Apu, feels like a composite. In Aparajito, for instance, he refuses the first cigarette he is offered on the grounds of Victoria Memorial, but in Apur Sansar, he smokes with abandon. The city instills in him faith in new heroes—“Dickens, Goethe, Dostoevsky”—and even when asked to marry Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), it is his urbanity that makes him first hesitate.

After Aparna’s prospective groom turns out to be unhinged, Apu steps in to save her from ignominy. The life they build in Calcutta is grounded in understanding and empathy. When Apu takes his pregnant wife to see a film in the theatre, he ditches the tram and hires a carriage. Seeing Aparna protest, Apu defends his indulgence by saying he only wanted to be alone with her. As Bhattacharya writes, “His basic rever­ence for life that Calcutta celebrates with such abandon, makes Apu retain his dignity. He draws his sustenance from the city—the spirit of one reinforcing the other. Only his wife’s death makes the city unbearable to him—that too for a while.” The film’s final scene sees Apu build bridges with his estranged son Kajal by promising to take him to an abundant Calcutta.

WITH TIME, THE city stopped being a cornucopia in Ray’s films. In his Calcutta trilogy—Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Seemabaddha (Company Limited, 1971) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman, 1975)—Ray seems more struck by the limits of his city. Hobbled by the needs of refugees who had crossed the border after the Bangladesh war, the city was failing in its fight against ineq­uity and Naxalism. Supriya Chaudhuri describes these three films as “driven” and “haunted”. In her essay, ‘In the City’, she says, “The films are painful, like memory-traces of a trauma. As we watch them, we re-inhabit a world we hoped was lost; the world of the urban unem­ployed, the job-seeker, the interviewee, the radical student, the vulnerable young woman, the defeated father, the cynical friend.”

The clubs that Seemabaddha’s affluent characters patronise—Calcutta Swimming Club and Royal Calcutta Turf Club—are exclusive spaces even today. Ray’s strident moralism also becomes apparent in an iconic Pratidwandi scene where the film’s protagonist, Siddhartha (Dhritiman Chatterjee) takes his girlfriend Keya (Jayashree Roy) to the top of Kolkata’s Tata Centre. The couple sees a political rally swell below. An all-paralysing discontent replaces the optimism of Mahanagar.

By 1991, the year in which Ray released his last film, Agantuk (The Stranger), Kolkata’s skyline had transformed substantially. In one scene, the filmmaker shot a man paragliding against the backdrop of skyscrapers that now competed with Tata Centre on the city’s Chowringhee stretch. Manomohan Mitra (Utpal Dutt), the film’s protago­nist who has returned to the city after an ab­sence of 35 years, is happy to hear that sweetshops like Bhim Nag and Ganguram are still in busi­ness, but his view of Calcutta is damning: people pulling rickshaws in a city of highrises is an incongruity we can’t wish away.

Ray undoubtedly uses Agantuk as a soapbox. Standing atop it, he demands that urban ethos comes to include the values of society and community we find in the world’s remote tribes. Because it often amounts to nothing more than gossip and backbiting, he dismisses the culture of adda in the city as “empty twaddle”. A year before his death, Ray seemed to suggest that city life has a habit of making frogs of us all. Calcutta, he reminded us, is sometimes nothing more than a well we must escape in our minds if we want to better its ethical and physical realities. The city that had saved several of his characters was, in the 1990s, in need of rescue itself. Today’s Kolkata is not very different. Travelling in it to find Ray’s imprint, we see his name often, but the city could also do by memorialising his concern.

Fact File

Pradosh Chandra Mitter, the detective who was at the centre of several Satyajit Ray stories, is known to his fans as ‘Feluda’. Much like 221B Baker Street, the London home of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Feluda’s fictional address, 21 Rajani Sen Road, is one that genera­tions of Calcuttans remember well. A prominent feature on Kolkata’s Feluda trail, this street is where the sleuth’s acolytes often begin their pilgrimage of spots that the detective had visited in Ray’s stories and his Feluda films.

Where to go: In Badshahi Angti, one of his most iconic Feluda stories, Ray makes mention of the Marble Palace, Raja Rajendra Mullick’s erstwhile home. Constructed with more than 80 different kinds of marble, the building earned renown in the city because of Mullick’s private zoo. In Kolkata’s Indian Museum, one can still find the 12 coins that emperor Jahangir had got minted in accordance with the zodiac. In Ray’s story, ‘Jahangirer Swarnamudra’, Feluda and his young sidekick, Topshe, solve the mystery of the missing twelfth coin. The South Park Street Cemetery and St John’s Church both help further the plot in ‘Gorosthaney Sabdhan’, a story Ray made spooky and uncanny.

What to eat: The Makaibari tea that Feluda loves to drink is available in many of the city’s tea shops, and Nizam’s mutton rolls he devours are still easy on the pocket. Like in ‘Baksho Rahasya’, the catechu-free meetha paan that Feluda orders can still be bought near the New Empire cinema hall. At Abar Bhaitak, a café in Kolkata’s Jodhpur Park, the art is inspired by Ray’s two Feluda films— Sonar Kella (1974) and Joy Baba Felunath (1979). The ‘Tinkorir Babu Hot Chocolate’ here is scrumptious.

How to read: While a translated omnibus of Ray’s Feluda stories can easily be found online, one must travel to Ananda, a little shop in Gariahat, to find a copy of Golapi Mukta Rahashya (The Mystery of the Pink Pearl), a pretty and inventive graphic-novel version of another classic Feluda yarn.

About The Author

Shreevatsa Nevatia

Shreevatsa Nevatia is the author of How to Travel Light: My Memories of Madness and Melancholia

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