ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters, I have analysed what gave the post-war Bengal cinema its ‘Bengali’ spirit – essentially its key signifiers like ‘the good story’, UttamSuchitra and Bhanu the bangal. Yet, these were also the years which saw the rise of Satyajit Ray and the movement for an art cinema, and which also fundamentally influenced the overall making of a ‘Bengali’ cinema. This chapter traces the emergence of Satyajit Ray and historicizes the trends of his cinema, to make the case that Ray, who is best known as ‘the post-independence modernist’ artist, who brought Indian cinema to the international stage, was first and foremost a Bengali film-maker. By ‘Bengali’, I evidently mean here more than the language that Ray made his films in, though, in part, it was that too. Ray was ‘a Bengali film-maker’ by virtue of a larger history of the Bengali cinema, of which he was undeniably a part – most specifically, in respect of that sense of ‘Bengaliness’ which his cinema was able to produce, and which, in turn, was instrumental in shaping the imaginary of the Bengali film. This chapter, which primarily covers the years that comprise Ray’s early career as film-maker, makes the case that Ray, though becoming ensconced as the ‘Indian’ artist par excellence had a most singular resonance for the Bengali cinema and its audiences – one that has largely eluded Ray scholars. Ray’s films of this early phase are discernible by virtue of their elemental quality – that which embodied the primacy of emotion and sentiments as against the relative psychological complexity of much of his later work. Through their analysis, this chapter configures Ray’s cinema as part of that affective domain of the Bengali film which so significantly effected the Bengali sense of self. Through his signification of ‘Bengaliness’, and his linking of it with a vision for transcending the local and regional, Ray was able to create a Bengali public which came to imagine itself in terms of a discourse of the cinema. In Ray, the cultural project of the Bengali cinema, and a ‘Bengali-nation’, came full circle.
