The documentary Ray planned to make
WHEN you come across a book on iconic director Satyajit Ray, it is quite natural to expect it to be either about the filmmaker or about his works in various art form --- movies, writings, drawings and music etc. But Satyajit Ray's Ravi Shankar: An Unfilmed Visual Script is not about a completed compendium of his works but is about a documentary film Ray had planned to make, prepared its visual script (storyboard) and even titled it “A Sitar Recital by Ravi Shankar”but could not shoot it. Why? No one knows, not even his family members, including film-maker-son Sandip Ray.
“This is the story of a film that did not happen”, goes the apt and very first sentence of the book's introduction, “Unheard Melodies”, written by eminent film and music critic Sankarlal Bhattacharjee, who was associated with Ray for a long time.
Film lovers know through Ray's films, like the epoch-making Pather Panchali, Aparajito, Apur Sansar and Paras Pathar, that masterpieces are born when the director and the sitar maestro, the two greatest names in their respective fields, collaborate on a project.
Sandip Ray's highly informative preface to the book, Sankarlal Bhattacharjee's erudite and detailed analysis of the storyboard of Ray's planned documentary on Ravi Shankar and excerpts of old interviews of Ray and Ravi Shankar, reproduced in the book under review, reveal to the new generation of film and music lovers the deep admiration and respect the two geniuses had for each other, their close friendship and subtle hints of differences between them.
The book also informs readers how the music of Pather Panchali happened in just one day before Ravi Shankar left on a foreign tour and how the sitar maestro was “inspired” by the rushes of the film he saw in Bhavani cinema hall in Kolkata and what are the instruments used in the music of the film. It also recounts how Ray used the tar shehnai to telling effect in one of the key sequences of the film when Sarbajaya breaks down after Durga's death and after Harihar hands over to his wife a sari meant for Durga.
Ray says in his My Years with Apu: A Memoir (reproduced in the book under review) that he was happy with the way things had worked out for the sequence except Sarbajaya's “grief-stricken outburst. It didn't sound right. Then I saw it without sound and found that visually it was perfect and therefore decided to substitute the lamentation with a high controlled instrument like the tar shehnai, which would be suggestive of grief”. The tar shehnai for the scene was played by one of its best exponents D M Tagore, says Ray.
Another interesting anecdote Ray mentions in his memoir (the same is told to readers by Ray's wife Bijoya in her book Manik and I: My Life with Satyajit Ray) speaks volumes of the director's ability to bring out the hidden talent of a person. Time constraints prevented Ravi Shankar from composing the music of “one of the more important scenes” of Pather Panchali when the sweetmeat seller goes around the village selling his sweets. Ray found rhythm in the walking of the seller and wanted music for it and the music was given by, of all people, his cameraman Subrata Mitra who the director says “was also an excellent sitar player”.
Ray had known Ravi Shankar much before the latter composed the background music for Pather Panchali and the sitar maestro had read Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's novel much before he saw the film. Ravi Shankar's association with composing music for films began before Pather Panchali when he had done it for Khwaja Ahmad Abbas' Dharti Ke Lal and Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar.
There is no certainty when Ray had prepared the 32-page storyboard, the centre-piece of Satyajit Ray's Ravi Shankar: An Unfilmed Visual Script, and why he did not translate it into a film. According to Sandip Ray, Marie Seton, Ray's biographer, says the storyboard was made in 1951, four years before Pather Panchali but “there are film scholars who argue against this date”. However, according to the son, “it may not be unreasonable to say that the storyboard was made before the time of Aparajito” (1956) and Sandip's argument is that his father “left drawing blocks and used red notebooks for the first time to write the screenplay for his second feature film.”
But did Ray altogether discard storyboarding after Pather Panchali? As the documentary filmmaker and journalist Nasreen Munni Kabir notes in her book, Conversations with Waheeda Rehman, the actress, who is in Ray's 1962 film Abhijan, tells her interviewer that the director's “storyboarding was extremely helpful”.
Ray's storyboard on the planned documentary on Ravi Shankar, containing more than 100 sketches and technical instructions on camera movements and other things, has been carefully preserved in the archives of the Society for Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives, of which Sandip Ray is member-secretary. As the junior Ray tells us, “this is the first time a whole storyboard comprising sketches by my father is going to appear in book form.”
The Society for Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives and HarperCollins must be congratulated for giving us such an important book. One cannot resist the temptation, though, of making a suggestion that perhaps could be debated wildly: should Sankarlal Bhattacharjee's analysis of the storyboard of A Sitar Recital By Ravi Shankar have preceded the sketches or followed them? It is like asking: should you read a review first and then go to watch a film or vice versa?
Pallab Bhattacharya is a senior Indian journalist based in New Delhi
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