NARRATIVE DISJUNCTION IN THE CINEMA OF SATYAJIT RAY

The film begins with a bang, as it were, with the pretitle sequence dramatically merging into the titles4. This beginning seems an introduction of sorts with the four principal characters quite different in their attitudes and proclivities. The story moves along in episodes and the women characters, Duli, Aparna and Jaya also present a range of varying attitude. If Duli, the tribal girl, is a subaltern with a feisty temperament, Aparna is more of an upper middle class woman of an intellectual disposition; while Jaya is of the same milieu as Aparna but less cerebral. Among the men, Hari is a sportsman, slowly recovering from being jilted in love. Ashim is a confident soul who needs to have his smugness shaken, somehow, by the enigmatic Aparna while Sanjoy is a curious mix of Bangla Culture(ibid) and middle class morality. Shekhar seems the ubiquitous buffoon, the court jester, as it were, but his inner self, albeit unashamedly thick shinned, is genuine in its gregarious quality. If the first half uses key episodes to convey the ‘Calcutta chromosome’6 in an alien environment, the second half is pointed in its eschewing of the traditional narrative idiom. Here too, motifs and signifiers abound like the famous ‘sand flowing out of the hand’ shot that serves as a metaphor for time. The ‘memory game’ itself is a remarkable narrative construct; it is like an analytical microscope weeding out elements of milieu and Zeitgeist from mere names. The characters are unmasked and decoded while the narrative becomes distinctly discursive.

If the track involving Hari, Duli, Shekhar and Hari’s nemesis is an episodic roller-coaster ride of love, lust, revenge and awakening, the syntagma involving Jaya and Sanjoy is exceedingly subtle in its playing out Sanjoy’s hesitant withdrawal in the face of Jaya’s explicit overtures. The dialogue between Aparna and Ashim is the most ambiguous and intriguing of all the interactions as the vulnerability in the one seeks to unmask the guardedness of the other. The private and the personal shakes hands with the outwardly and the superficial.

As in many of Ray’s texts, ‘Aranyer Din Ratri’ ends in a bitter-sweet zone with no victories and no defeats; nothing is achieved but all is not lost. In this delicate tapestry of eroticism and soul searching introspection, the city slickers return to the city. It is this lack of a traditional climax, this steering clear of catharsis that makes Ray’s texts uniquely disjunctive in their narrativity.

In ‘Nayak’ (The hero – 1966) it is a journey – a kind of spiritual sojourn, apposite to a dream (and fraught with dreams) that is most arresting.

The structure is reminiscent of Bergman’s masterpiece, ’Wild Strawberries’ (1957) wherein the journey of Dr. Isak Borg played adroitly by the spontaneous Viktor Sjostrom, is symbolic of his achievements and insecurities as a doctor. And yet, there is something uniquely Indian about the Ray text. While the structure effectively de-centres the narrative in favour of several strands of psychological and philosophical exploration, the array of supporting characters create a magnificent tapestry of moods and morals. The journey is, in a sense, a framing device that encapsulates various streams of episodic narrativity. The principal text is, therefore, constantly interrupted by flashbacks, dreams and the conscious recounting of incidents from the past. This dynamic depiction of time serves as a signifier that seeks to scratch below the surface of the matinee idol, gently probing into his areas of insecurity. Coming from a lower middle class background, the protagonist, Arindam, is a product of the collective consciousness of the Bengali but also is a rebel of sorts in his career choices. Opting for cinema while eschewing the call of the theatre, he goes against the wishes of his mentor, Shankar Da. He is also an exception as he does not totally conform to the traditional definition of an actor, he is a thinker and gently appreciative of Aditi (the pseudo journalist) and her faintly supercilious appraisal of so called “superstars’.

The flashbacks reveal that Arindam, for a time, did have his feet firmly on the ground. His friends were his theatre comrades as also his man Friday not to mention his kindred soul, the trade unionist whom he had to betray. If one were to compare with Dr. Isak Borg,