Sharmila Tagore: Satyajit Ray's films deal with the follies of humans

For Sharmila Tagore, Satyajit Ray’s cinema is all about lasting power. Something known, acknowledged and celebrated, time and again, and underscored once more at the recent screening of the restored version of his 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) at the Cannes Film Festival in its Cannes Classics segment. “Ray and his creations have lived on. They still speak to the viewers and feel contemporary,” says Tagore, two days after the screening, on her return to India from a very rushed trip to the French Riviera.

Tagore had presented the film along with her co-actor Simi Garewal in the presence of the renowned American filmmaker Wes Anderson, among others. Anderson participated in and has supported the film’s 4K restoration by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at L’Immagine Ritrovata, together with Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation, Janus Films and Criterion Collection. It was financed by the Golden Globe Foundation and made from the original camera negative and sound preserved by Purnima Dutta, and the magnetic track stored in the BFI National Archive.

Tagore feels that the sense of contemporaneity holds especially true for Aranyer Din Ratri and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959), the film with which made her acting debut. The other three films she worked with Ray were Devi (Goddess, 1960), Nayak (The Hero, 1966) and Seemabaddha (Company Limited, 1971). “Apur Sansar’s romance is eternal. It still excites and thrills in its simplicity and touches a chord,” she says.

Describing Aranyer Din Ratri as the story of a playful encounter between four young men and three young women, the Cannes writeup on the film called it free-spirited and radiant in its appeal. Based on Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novel of the same name, Ray turns it into a portrait of the bourgeoisie Indian youth of the times and a peep into the class, gender and urban-rural dynamics, differences and divides.

Tagore calls the four male protagonists of Aranyer Din Ratri, “victims of cultural imperialism”. “The four boys [Asim played by Soumitra Chatterjee, Subhendu Chatterjee as Sanjoy, Samit Bhanja as Hari and Rabi Ghosh as Sekhar] go for a vacation [to Palamu] to get away from it all… They are too caught up. Without the trope of Western cinema, they can’t appreciate nature. They don’t have the words to explain it. They are out of place in nature, amid the grace of the local santhal tribal people,” says Tagore.

A nonchalance that could also hold true for youngsters today, inhabiting a world that is all about instant gratification, selfie culture and compulsion to constantly click photographs. “In the process, they lose out on looking and absorbing a place. They need to spend time drinking it all in. Perhaps write a diary to make memories. But with the telephone in hand, it has become all about the instant. They don’t go to the depths, they are short of time,” she says.

Posited against the arrogance, callousness and entitlement of the Aranyer men are three women who hold a mirror up to them—the elegant, intelligent and self-possessed Aparna, played by Tagore, the feral tribal Duli (Simi Garewal) and the daring Jaya (Kaberi Bose), Aparna’s widowed sister-in-law.

Tagore points to a “complex” aspect in Aranyer Din Ratri, the way it deals with the issue of corruption—the fact that the guys offer bribes to the caretaker to get a place to stay in the forest rest house but are blind to the fact that it’s to do as much with his lack of scruples as their own encouragement and facilitation of corruption. “Ray deals with such fundamental quirks and follies of human beings,” says Tagore, adding, “The hero in Nayak is treated like God, is mobbed and is under pressure. But there’s a human being beneath it all. In Devi, the father-in-law deifies his unlettered daughter-in-law. A victim of his dreams, she loses her mind, feels alienated.”

Aranyer Din Ratri was shot in Chhipadohar village in Palamu district in Jharkhand (then Bihar) in April and May. “It was very hot. Trees were all leafless and had a skeletal look in the film. We would shoot for three hours from 5.30 am to about 9 am and then 3 pm to 6 pm, till the light would be good,” recalls Tagore. “Rest of the time we chatted, bonded and sang and danced with the Santhals, especially on full moon nights. The boys tried the local drink mohua once and swore never to have it again. It left them with such a bad hangover,” she says.

The boys stayed in a tin shed and it was so hot that Rabi Ghosh would call himself Robi Pora or Burnt Robi. She remembers her co-actor Simi Garewal and her sister staying in a bungalow in the next village while she had a tiny 10x8 room of the caretaker to live in. There was an air cooler for her which served well in the dry heat.

Aranyer Din Ratri is Ray’s eighth film to have been presented at Cannes. Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), the first of his Apu trilogy, has played at Cannes thrice. It marked his debut in Cannes, was in the In Competition section and won the Best Human Document Award at the 1956 edition of Cannes. It was part of its Special Screenings programme in 1992 and a restored print featured in the Cannes Classics segment in 2005. Just three years back, in 2022, Pratidwandi (The Adversary) was shown in the same Cannes Classics segment, as was Charulata in 2013.

After Pather Panchali, three more Ray films competed in the In Competition section—Parash Patthar (Philosopher’s Stone) in 1958, Devi (Goddess) in 1962 and Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) in 1984. His Ganashatru (Public Enemy) was in the Special Screenings section in 1989.

While appreciative of the packed theatre and the standing ovation for the film in Cannes, Tagore wasn’t surprised by the thumping response to Aranyer Din Ratri at Cannes. “It’s a film-savvy group that goes to the festival. They are not the kind of people who’d judge a film or get bored by it. They come prepared for what they are watching. They’d have often read up on it,” she says.

Tagore recalls having been to the festival long back with Manikda—as she and many others call Ray—and then in 2009 as a member of the jury. She found it getting more crowded this year. Apart from showcasing the best of world cinema, what strikes her about the festival is the buying and selling of films at the market and the red carpet and how it is used for the promotion of brands and by some people for themselves. Cannes is dynamic and thriving as compared to the relatively quiet Venice.

What amuses her no end is the obsession with the look for the red carpet—who are you wearing, as everyone asks about the designer costumes. She wanted to wear a white Bengali dhakai with a shell necklace and dark glasses, in tune with her character Aparna in Aranyer Din Ratri. “It was shot down by my granddaughter and daughters for being too simple and also because they felt nobody would be able to make the connection with the film,” she says. However, she was certain about wearing a sari and chose a green silk one instead. “But everyone kept telling me that I should have worn a prominent necklace. That my neck looked bare. I had worn a little chain but it wasn’t visible,” she says.

She is very happy with the restoration, recalling how she couldn’t hear anything at a screening of Devi at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi. “It looked so dull, the dhaak and dhol sounded dull. These films are bound to start deteriorating because they’ve all been filmed on celluloid not digitally,” she says.

Aranyer Din Ratri itself is 55 years old. It was shot in the same year as her mainstream outing with the then-superstar Rajesh Khanna in Shakti Samanta’s Aradhana.

Wes Anderson has often quoted Ray’s cinema as a major influence, Aranyer Din Ratri being one of his favourites. He dedicated his 2007 comedy-drama, The Darjeeling Limited, to the maestro and used music from Ray’s films for it. In an interview, he had said, “Ray is one of my favourites. His films feel like novels to me. He draws you very close to his characters, and his stories are almost always about people going through a major internal transition. My favourites are the Calcutta trilogy of The Adversary (1970; Pratidwandi), Company Limited (1971; Seemabaddha), and The Middleman (1976; Jana Aranya), which are very adventurous and inventive stylistically, and Days and Nights in the Forest (1970; Aranyer Din Ratri), which completely captured my attention when I was a teenager, with soulful troublemakers as heroes. I think Charulata (1964; The Lonely Wife) is one of his most beautiful films, and also the Apu films.”