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National Seminar

on

FICTION INTO FILM:

Satyajit Ray’s Interpretation of Tagore and Premchand

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, in collaboration with the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi

23 - 25 November 2006

A Report

            A three day National Seminar on ‘Fiction into Film: Satyajit Ray’s Interpretation of Tagore and Premchand’ was organized by the UGC Special Assistance Programme, Department of English and Modern European Languages, and A. K. J. Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, in collaboration with the Sahitya Akademi from the 23^rd to the  25^th of  November, 2006.

            The inaugural session began with A. Krishna Murthy, Secretary, Sahitya Akademi, welcoming the participants to the seminar. He briefly talked about the contested relationship between fiction and film, authors and directors, words and images. This was followed by the seminar director, M. Asaduddin introducing the objective of the seminar, wherein he showed that though literature and cinema are two distinct media, the reliance of both on the narrative makes the two very similar.

            Thereafter, the keynote address was delivered by the eminent film and theatre critic Samik Bandyopadhyay, who laid down the historical setting of Ray’s works. He discussed the influence, on Ray’s work, of European music, Hollywood, Italian neo-realist cinema, and Ray’s education at Santiniketan. He further stated that for Ray, literary texts became an entry into the world of films and his early films were all adaptations of established literary texts. Bandyopadhyay, who interviewed Satyajit Ray several times, narrated one such experience, where Ray, commenting on the relationship between fiction and films, avowed that any act of adaptation is an act of implied criticism.

            This brilliant exposition was followed by the formal release of the M. Asaduddin edited Penguin Book of Classic Urdu Stories, by the well known poet Keki N Daruwalla who congratulated the editor for his careful and considered selection. Thereafter, the presidential remarks were made by the Vice Chancellor, Mushirul Hasan, who welcomed the delegates and hoped that the discussions would be valuable to all. The session ended with a vote of thanks proposed by Anisur Rahman.

            The first session of the seminar, chaired by Meenakshi Mukherjee, had presentations by Harish Narang and Jasbir Jain. Harish Narang, in his paper ‘Kiski Sheh Kiski Maat: Politics of Portraying History: Ray versus Premchand’, traced, with reference to Shatranj Ke Khilari, the difficult process of translation of a literary text into the verbal-visual medium. In a close examination of the depiction of Awadh and its politics in the two parallel texts of Premchand and Ray, he studied the changes and their significance to the discourses of feudalism and colonialism.

            This was followed by Jasbir Jain’s paper on ‘Critiquing Colonialism through Cinematic Frames: Shatranj Ke Khilari and Ghare Baire’. Her discussion, interspersed with screening of select clips from the two films, while looking at the difference between text and image, argued that both films—Ghaire Baire, enmeshed in the Swadeshi movement, and  Shatranj ke Khilari set up in mid-nineteenth century Awadh—go on to comment on and critique colonialism, albeit differently.

            The post lunch session of the day was chaired by Jasbir Jain and comprised three papers. The first paper by Tutun Mukherjee on ‘Tagore’s Women Protagonists through Ray’s Camera: Re-presenting the Shifting Concepts of History, Culture and Identity’ discussed Ray’s women protagonists as depicting different aspects of womanhood—from the young Ratan in ‘Postmaster’, the rebellious Mrinmoyee in ‘Samapti’, and the obsessive and haunting Monimalika in ‘Monihara’, the three short films that comprise Ray’s Teen Kanya, to Bimala in Ghare Baire. She looked at the portraiture of women in Tagore’s narratives in terms of their transformation from pracheena to naveena and its problematization by Ray while configuring the ‘new woman’ of the post-Independence decades.

            Next, Shohini Ghosh in her paper on ‘Tagore’s Disobedient Women in the Cinema of Satyajit Ray’ discussed the detours that a filmmaker necessarily takes while adapting a literary text, arguing for the validity of the autonomy and self-sufficiency of such an enterprise. In a close analysis of Tagore’s original text Nashta Nir and Ray’s adaptation of the same, Charulata, Shohini Ghosh painstakingly traced the disobedience and insubordination of Charu in her familial and marital space.

            This paper was followed by Brinda Bose’s, titled ‘From Nashta Nir to Charulata: Ray’s Creation of an Audio-Visual “Aura” for Tagore’s Fiction’, which studied Charulata, as a deeply self-reflexive film, which uses the camera to mimic different significative modes. Brinda Bose also noted, especially in relation to Charulata, that Ray makes one conscious of one’s role as a spectator, and the dynamics of the camera plays with the erotics of one’s gaze. The session was followed by animated discussion by the participants with the theme of intertextuality as the point of departure.

             The second day of the seminar began with the first plenary address delivered by Meenakshi Mukherjee and chaired by Samik Bandyopadhyay. Her brilliant paper titled ‘His Films, Their Stories’ looked at Satyajit Ray’s film adaptations of short stories by Tagore (Teen Kanya and Charulata) and Premchand (Shatranj ke Khiladi and Sadgati) to trace his changing relationship with the original literary texts, whereby, while in the early stages of his career, he felt the need to justify these departures, later he stopped offering any explanation.

            The plenary was followed by the third session, chaired by Harish Trivedi, with three presentations. The first by Surbhi Goel on ‘Rewriting Shatranj ke Khiladi in Cinematic Language: Examination of Ray’s Technique’ looked at the adaptation of Shatranj ke Khiladi by Ray and concluded that Ray goes beyond history, in changing the ending of the story, in his characterization of Kallo as the narrator, as also in the depiction of the mood of the city of Awadh.

            Next, Vishnupriya Sengupta, in her paper ‘The Enigma of “Departure”: A Reinterpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nashta Nir and Satyajit Ray’s Charulata’, examined how, in spite of apparent differences in the titles of the two texts, in the treatment of the two versions, and a divergence in endings, the film version is actually an extension and expansion of Tagore’s work.

            Thereafter, there was a joint presentation by Priyadarshini Bhattacharya and Sadiqur Rahman on ‘Word to Image: Ray’s Interpretation of Premchand’ where they argued that deviations in Rays’ Sadgati and Shatranj Ke Khiladi from Premchand’s texts have to be read as his own ideological positioning and preoccupation rather than as an innocent difference between the two mediums.

            Supriya Choudhury chaired the fourth session, where the first presentation was by Sanjoy Mukhopadhyay on ‘The Defiant Translator: Word-Image Liaison in Satyajit Ray’s Films’. He stated that though Ray did not deploy any subversive strategy while creating images from the written word, he nevertheless, as an auteur had his independent approach and interpretation. For instance, in Charulata, Ray, interweaving the historical and the personal, went on to study a woman’s loneliness and desperation in the figure of Charu, while in Shatranj Ke Khilari, in a departure from Premchand, Ray brought his own personal reading of history and historical figures to bear on the filmic version.

            This paper was followed by a joint presentation by Jayita Sengupta and Shreya Bhattacharjee on ‘Text to Film: Tagore, Premchand and Ray’s Canvas’, which discussed the process of transcreation from text to film in Shatranj Ke Khilari and Ghare Baire. They also went on to discuss the cultural confrontation between the two worlds, to show how in Ray’s cinema the personal is always mapped on to the political. They further argued that while in Shatranj Ke Khilari there is a redeeming vision of sustained friendship, in Ghare Baire, that possibility is severely problematised.

            The third and the last paper in this session by A. A. Khan, titled ‘The Complexity of Translation between the Viewer and the Film: Satyajit Ray’s Interpretation of Tagore and Premchand’, looked at a number of techniques—especially of compression and telescoping—that Ray uses to translate the descriptive passages from text to film.

            The second day ended on a very special note with students of the Department of English and Modern European Languages putting up a stage performance of a dramatic rendition of the Premchand short story “Nirvasan” by students of English Department (directed by Ameena  K Ansari), followed by a dinner hosted by the Vice Chancellor, in which the delegates and other guests were seen animatedly discussing Ray, Tagore and Premchand over sumptuous dishes, lending an informal warmth to the academic worth of the seminar.

            The third and final day of the seminar began with the second plenary address by Supriya Chaudhuri which was chaired by Tutun Mukherjee. Her immensely insightful paper titled ‘Space, Interiority and Affect in Charulata and Ghare Baire’ studied how in Tagore’s representation of personal and affective life, narrow spaces of private and domestic life are repeatedly contrasted with the openness of a viewed or imagined natural setting. She argued that Ray’s cinema makes use of this aspect of Tagore’s representational technique, never seeking a simple translation of Tagore’s metaphors into visual forms, but substituting them with a range of cinematic frames within which interiority, affect and self-image receive distinct treatment, as is particularly notable in Charulata.

            This paper was followed by Anuradha Ghosh’s ‘Some Aspects of Inter-Semiotic Translation: A Study of Satyajit Ray’s Rabindranath’ which showed how the category of “inter-semiotic translation”, or an adaptation involving two different mediums rooted in the same cultural context, have both points of conjunction and disjunction. Her paper explored aspects of Ray’s “translations” in Charulata and Teen Kanya, to show that every act of translation is finally an act in interpretation.

            The sixth and the last session chaired by Sanjoy Mukhopadhyay had two presentations. The first by Asha K Choudhury, titled ‘“Thak”/Freeze - Negotiating Narrative Positions in Adaptation: The Female in Tagore’s The Broken Nest and Ray’s Charulata’, interrogated Mulveyan notions of the controlling gaze in cinema in relation to Ray’s Charulata in terms of the male operative gaze and Charu’s assumed subject position. She argued that Tagore’s novella Nashta Nir or The Broken Nest, in spite of working at different levels of omniscient narrator positions, ends on a decisively ‘feminist’ note of rejection, which in Ray, it gets translated into the ambiguous frozen shot in the film.

            This paper was followed by Vijaya Singh’s presentation on ‘Page to Screen: A Brief History and Framework for Film Adaptations’, which through a study of the history and theories of film adaptation, proposed by critics such as Seymore Chatman, David Bordwell,  Dudley Andrew and Brian McFarlane, argued that the interface between literature and cinema is not merely one of transferring the word to the screen but an act of cultural negotiation which reflects social perceptions. This, according to her, is especially evident in Satyajit Ray’s adaptations of Tagore and Premchand.

            The sessions over, the valedictory address, chaired by Alok Bhalla, was delivered by the poet Keki N. Daruwalla who went on to sum up his observations on the proceedings of the seminar and felt that the issue of fidelity between word and image was not passé and, of all the masters of cinema, it is best evidenced in the cinema of Ray. Thereafter, the seminar director, M. Asaduddin thanked the participants and those who assisted in organizing the seminar, thereby drawing to a close the three days of discussions, debates and deliberations around Ray, Premchand and Tagore.

Faculty of Humanities and Languages