here are two « mysteries » in Rohinton Mistry’s 2002 novel Family Matters.

One concerns the character of Nariman Vakeel, the 79 year old Professor suffering from Parkinson and osteoporosis, who lives with his two adult unmarried step-children, Jal and Coomy, in their large family house. His wife died some years ago, in circumstances that connect directly to the drama which starts when, because he’s a burden to his two step-children, he is sent away to live in his daughter Roxana’s minuscule flat. There he lies all day long on the sofa, unable to move because of a plastered ankle. He has to be continually looked after, especially in the most unsettling bodily functions. But what is the meaning of this character? Is he a modern King Lear? What does he teach us?

And then there’s Yezad’s conversion to the Zoroastrian religion. Yezad Chenoy is Roxana’s husband; he works as salesman for a Mumbai sports shop, and together with Roxana, they have two boys, aged 13 and 10, Murad and Jehangir. Their little flat was bought for them by Nariman when Roxana got married, and they have started living a typical middle-class, hard-working life. Yezad’s position is vulnerable to economic variations, but he’s based his life on rational principles and careful management, and so far, it has worked. How and why does he evolve towards this mystical and soon intolerant conversion?

These 500 pages of small type contain Mistry’s precise, powerful and enchanting prose. Mistry’s creative powers, already prominent in A fine balance, lifts you above all calculated, escapist fiction to a world of psychological and emotional beauty which I have rarely seen. So Paul Elie (VillageVoice.com), who believes Family Matters is nothing more than melodrama, just has it all wrong, when he writes: “Family Matters is vexingly mediocre - thoughtful, great-souled, generous toward characters and readers alike, but badly in need of a little artistry.”

Family matters might be sometimes lengthy, but is never boring. In this novel, one is bound to say that there are absolutely no concessions to any of the conventional ingredients of fiction. No sex, no facile suspense, no satisfying coincidences. There is nothing but the unfolding of family life and emotions, the description of moral choices and their consequences. Nothing but the logical interplay of interests and affections. Where there is love, it’s like oil, the social machinery runs smoothly. Where hate reigns, it grinds to a halt, and snaps under the subsequent pressure buildup. Is this over-optimistic? Is there a missing dose of negativity? No, this is how it works in real life, as a rule, even if in some cases love fails and vested interests are too strong to budge.

At regular intervals, we follow Nariman’s previous life (it is told as in a dream, and is the only love-story of the book): we discover that “forty years before, as an eligible, secularly inclined young intellectual in newly independent India, he had wanted to marry Lucy, a Goan Christian. Reluctantly, and with tragic consequences, Nariman succumbed to family pressure and took instead a Parsi widow (with two children) to wife.” (John Sutherland, in the NY Times). What are these consequences, and what do they mean? Well, Lucy never stopped loving him, and became half crazy with his decision to conform to family wishes (which “mattered” more than Nariman’s feelings). She hounded him, took up premises close to where he had started living with his new wife Yasmin and their children (Chateau Felicity, a hypocritical name where Nariman still lives at the beginning of the novel), and inveigled herself in his life in spite of all reasoning. Nariman, who has never stopped loving her, is forced to see her, talk to her, much to the displeasure of his Parsi wife. One day, Lucy climbs on the roof of their block of flats, and trying to bring her back by sheer force (whereas in previous cases, Nariman had used soft words), Yasmin falls off the ridge with her.

The two stepchildren are marvels of characterization. Coomy, especially, the righteous and cantankerous spinster who pretends she’s altruistic and concerned, but who has let hate eat her up, and tragically has a hole instead of a heart. The scene where, at Nariman’s birthday, she is forced by her stepfather to bring out the bone china instead of the everyday plates and dishes is a piece of anthology. She secretly blames Nariman for having killed her mother, with his unruly love of that Goan woman. Let’s say she’s her deceased mother’s avenger. And so even if she cannot say it, her whole life is full of hatred and self-righteousness (as a compensation), and she’s on the lookout for the first opportunity to get rid of the detested free-thinker, who represents a crossover form of civilised culture very much at risk in today’s India. Coomy on the other hand represents intransigence and sectarianism. And the soft-willed brother Jal represents opportunistic powerlessness, because even though he’s friendly, he cannot resist his sister’s fury and rage, and objectively sides with her.

The broken ankle is the needed opportunity. At first, Nariman is taken care of at Chateau Felicity, but being bedridden, he’s now an invalid, and Coomy’s hatred spawns a Machiavellian scheme: she pretends they don’t have the money any more to look after him, that the doctor told her this and that, and one day she arrives at Yezad’s flat with Nariman in an ambulance. He is to stay only a few days. But after the period is over, she deliberately damages Nariman’s ceiling (in fact she obliges Jal to do it) and informs Roxana and Yezad that the “accident” in his ceiling makes his room impossible to have him back. This wilful hammering has a symbolical meaning: it stands for a generation’s disregard for the higher values of mercy, forbearance and integration. The deliberate destruction of Gandhian values, in fact, which India’s independence had elevated for the world to see. This ceiling of values is shattered in order to enable separatism, and the refusal of transgenerational education.

As a professor of English, Nariman Vakeel stands for the universality of culture, for the freedom of spirit against the narrow-mindedness of casteism and bigotry. And as grandfather he stands for the necessity of community and togetherness. And some of his “step” children (are today’s Indians still Ghandi’s children? asks Mistry) have all but refused his humanist and spiritual legacy. The fate of prophets is never an enviable one. And so when the iron girder (meant to repair the ceiling) falls on Coomy, it’s a logical punishment for her behaviour, but most of all it’s the author’s condemnation of the social and historical attitude based on the Coomy’s principles. 

The detailed account of Nariman’s ordeal is so psychologically true, so morally compelling that I often read on with a kind of unease, the novel’s accusing eye on my own life’s compromises. Indeed who hasn’t, like Coomy, or worse perhaps, like Jal (because Jal lets violence take place, and does not act) sold at least some of their ideals and values, in order to live in more comfortable selfishness? Here the book’s narrative precision and, yes Mr. Elie, the all-knowing narrator’s interventionism serves a moral purpose intended at exposing our delicate and untold personal settlements with society and this makes Mistry a moralist of the best sort.

Let’s turn to Yezad now. Like Nariman, he used to be a staunch believer in secularism; he used to look down upon any religious belief as irrational and anti-modern. He used to indulge in the pleasures of ordinary life, laughing with his boys, enjoying his wife’s loveliness when he came back from work. But this finely balanced life is altered when Nariman, whom he respects and enjoys when he goes to visit his in-laws, is obliged to stay home, permanently, it seems. There’s the ever-present financial aspect, of course, and then the bedpan and bottle one. The genial father becomes a rigid purist when it comes to hygiene and cleanliness. He won’t allow “his” sons (possessiveness as the source of social chaos, cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau) to touch Nariman’s instruments, and lets the old man in agony if Roxana is away. The bad smells and change of habits bring out the bad aspects in him. And this unbalancing of ordinarily virtuous life (virtuous because it was balanced – virtue is often that, a precarious balancing of humanity and animality) reverberates on the innocence of his boys: because joy and happiness are no longer the rule at home, because a poison of greed and hatred has been inoculated somewhere up the line, Jehangir lets himself trapped in a bribe-taking scheme at school (he helps classmates to cheat on their lessons), so he can bring money home to pay for grandpa’s medicines.

This wouldn’t be much of a crime, seen from a certain perspective, but Rohinton Mistry dramatises these little events so we can understand their moral importance as open doors for greater disasters. You start cheating and then you lie about your cheating, and the cheating becomes trivialised, the lying becomes trivialised, and so on. Yezad also abandons some of his principles, and goes to see a fortune-teller neighbour, who takes bets on numbers she’s seen in her dreams, and because it has worked once on a little sum, he’s tempted to do it again on a large one. It fails, of course, because the whole betting organisation is raided by police, and Yezad loses all the family’s money. The drama is less the financial distress he brings to his wife and children than the misery he inflicts on them and himself as well. Because of this incident, the joys of honesty and simple life are eaten up by worries and silent guilt, and this elementary moral lesson is always important to remember, I think.

There are forces which are present to repair and soothe: first and foremost Roxana’s dogged resistance to adversity. She looks after her children, after her husband, after her father, forgetting herself in the process: she’s the real saint of the story. Then there’s Daisy, the violinist next door, who comes and play for Nariman, and to whom he asks to come and play for him when he will die. She promises him she will, perhaps out of politeness. That scene is perhaps the only moment of real melodrama: realizing his grandfather is dying, Jehangir runs through town to fetch her, and finds her at a rehearsal and reminds her of her promise. She had forgotten, but she respects the promise, and goes back home to dress in grand style before meeting the agonizing professor and his family, and playing at his deathbed.

There’s also Vilas, the letter reader and writer, whom Yezad befriends on his way to work. For me he represents Mistry himself, trying to make sense out the chaos of human stories and listening to each person’s perspective. When the news he has to read to his clients is too harsh, he doesn’t ask for money. That’s his contribution to the alleviation of the general sorrow of the world.

What’s interesting is that some of this good-doing works: Yezad one day accepts to look after his father in-law’s bedpan, and Roxana realises that she’s been the instrument of something greater than her patience and selflessness. It’s after Yezad has decided to take up his religious practices which will eventually lead him to half-bigotry. But before that, they have undoubtedly lifted him up above petty trouble and put him put in the right way. Hence the gesture towards the old man. Yezad has found in his Parsi identity a new sense of accomplishment, just like Nariman had found accomplishment in the stoic acceptance and abandonment of his personal initiative. The old religion roots him in his position as son to his own father, and so father himself. But in the epilogue, which takes place 5 years later, Mistry shows him to have gone too far, and become bigoted and intolerant, as intolerant in fact as Nariman’s parents had been when they had refused that he marry the Goan Christian woman. Yezad’s son, Murad, is in love with a non-Parsi, and the confrontation is acutely described. Yezad is dangerously on the verge of sectarian intransigence, the fun-loving dad is now a frightening bigot who won’t let anyone step close to him when he’s doing his holy rites. The peaceful solace that he had managed to find in his religion has turned into a family war that Roxana looks upon helplessly.

I wonder if this change occurs because he has won. He’s won the struggle against the selfish forces in the family, but this victory becomes a failure. So doesn’t Yezad behave the way he does in the end because Coomy is dead, because Jal has invited them to come and live at Chateau Felicity, and finally they all live in the comfort they deserved? Could it be the balance has tilted too much on the positive side this time? Is Mistry telling us that all passion for religion rankles and becomes intolerant? Because on the other hand, we could say that true religiosity contains a sanctification process, a disconnection from worldly concerns which can seem intolerant to those that don’t share its radicalism.

Yet my appreciation of the novel focuses on Nariman’s example, his delicate and moving passing away into the silence of Parkinson’s disease, his friendly and refined humour, his dedicated sense of duty and finally his light-hearted stoicism. I’d say Yezad is left at an intermediary stage, the stage when one realises the importance and seriousness of religious commitment, but hasn’t yet acknowledged the vanity of all clinging to one’s achievements. Yezad is religious by atonement, not out of love and this condemns his radicalism (not his faith!). Let’s then take the positive view that he might evolve, that experience will bring him the wisdom to realize his excess. Because what will save Yezad is that for him, “family matters”, he has Roxana, and after his sons have finished rebelling against him (as they must), they and their wives and children will be around him, and he’ll remember Nariman’s towering example. At one stage, Yezad does a brave thing: he tears up all the documents that he had kept in the loose hope of emigrating to Canada one day. He decides to stay in his country, and belong:

He sat upon the bed, and shook out the large envelope. The letters, forms, photocopies, news clippings fluttered out in a heap. He began ripping them up.

The sound of tearing brought Roxana to the backroom. “What are you doing?”, she asked, horrified.

“Getting rid of garbage”.

For a second she thought of rescuing the documents. Then she understood, Yezad was right, it was not worth keeping.

She joined him on the bed, cross-legged, and began tearing. It felt good. They looked up from the pile, smiling, and their eyes met.

When everything had been shredded into a mound of paper petals, he reached over it to pull her closer to him. He put his arms around her, cradling her head on his chest.” (p. 255)

Paying guest by Subodh Mukherji (1957) is not completely worth its two and a half hours of watching: it’s just another 2^nd class romantic comedy with elements of drama and thriller. It incorporates all the elements of a standard family show: good-looking actors, suspense, slapstick, disguises, family interest and whodunit courtroom mystery in the end (1). Dev Anand and Nutan lead the dance, and the charm of their acting succeeds sometimes to offset the repetitiveness of the timeworn recipes, which one might have thought were more reserved for Punch & Judy children audiences than for cinema-goers. But, after all! Comedy is eternal, is it not?

The reason I’m bothering to write is a thought about Nutan. It again struck me while watching this movie (it must now be the 8^th  or 9^th film with her that I watch) that she plays with what I would call her “soul”, which is something actors of today would forbid themselves from doing, I think. Because the art they are involved in is a technique, and they are judged on their ability to impersonate a character more than anything else. Some do it, but nobody asks them to use that spiritually oriented aspect of their person. Perhaps because this soul is what others would call intimacy, or privacy, and everybody knows you have a right to keep your privacy to yourself. With Nutan, the soul is just there, on the surface. With her, I feel there is nothing to hide. It isn’t that she doesn’t have a private inner world, but her public self mirrors the inner one perfectly. She is innocent, as it were, of any social compromise, by which I mean a kind of self-consciousness and a defence of intimacy, because when you are involved socially, you wear a mask, you tend to hide to the public certain aspects of who you are down deep. And naturally this defence of intimacy is of paramount importance in the dramatic arts.

Nutan strikes me as Purity. Watching her I thought: now here’s purity, here’s an actress (because she certainly isn’t the only one, but her persona carries it particularly well) who’s managed somehow to join innocence and experience, to remain innocent and wise at the same time. Her face cannot be hiding anything than what we see and what it shows the world: radiant goodness and intelligence. I never see any self-indulgence. She is benevolence, righteousness, generosity. And as a result, happiness (and its sign: a certain restraint) reigns on that face and in her gestures. This restraint can be felt in the way she lowers her eyes, the way she’s totally present in the emotions she displays, and will never give way to violence. She never imposes her simplicity and clarity to others, because her nature is one of respect of otherness, and love of creation and life.  

There is a moment in the film (above) when she has to express the confrontation of innocence and violence: it the moment when she made to believe she has killed her brother-in law. The expression she manages to make at that moment, which lasts such a long time, and strikes as so full of stupor and horror, for me is a classic: it shows her range of acting of course but at the same time testifies to the potential within her to feel the distance between purity and evil. I believe it is because she herself possesses a sort of saintliness that she feels and can convey so well the atrocious fall of sin and evil which is inherent in murder.

I hope I’m not just blinded by her beauty, and naively building up a discourse based on my appreciation of her good looks.) In Nutan (and I’ve said this before elsewhere), we have a miracle: a fusion of beauty and goodliness, a blending of charm and purity which I have very seldom seen on the screen. You see it in life, of course; many young women are favoured enough by nature and nurture to benefit from this double gift. But on the screen? Audrey Hepburn, perhaps? The cinema is such a temptation for vanity and mimetic attractiveness to wreak their havoc. So many actors are busy with themselves. There might have been a golden age of innocence then, when the cinema was free of the futility and the materialism which fills it today, but even so, she is an exception. Nutan owns the first two ingredients: beauty and honesty; and a third: wisdom, and even a fourth: happiness, as the crowning gift coming from the first three.

Just compare her with Dev Anand, her partner in Paying Guest: well, precisely, he’s only the guest. She’s the hostess, the permanent value, the dependable worth. Dev is really fine, in terms of acting. Yet you notice the ham in him sometimes, he doesn’t let you quite forget that he’s good and appreciated as good. He plays the There’s a Dev Anand that we want him to be, the lovable, eminently marriageable sophisticated young man (or something like that). Perhaps I’m blinded (you tell me) but I feel nothing of the kind with Nutan. On the contrary, there’s a subtle mix of strong presence and bashfulness in her that shows she’s aware of the risk of using her attractiveness for her own personal promotion, but she’s as far as can be from using it to manipulate the spectator, for example. This is something I’ve discussed about Aishwarya Rai already. Nutan knows she’s beautiful, and must know that beauty is both a powerful element of self-promotion and a potential enemy of a clear distinction between good and bad (it’s easier to be a little mean or superior if you’re a stunner, and you can get away with it by manipulating your critics). Yet I have never yet seen her follow that very ordinary path, on which one goes along indulging in trivial foibles and at the same time supposing them acceptable on the basis that everybody does the same.

There is one song which I found particularly moving: Chand phir Nikala:

(1) The psychological unlikelihood weighs most heavily when Shanti’s (Nutan) old school pal (Shubha Khote), who believes in money in marriage (whereas Shanti defends love), tries to woo Ramesh (Anand), Shanti’s hubbie… and the film pretends she succeeds!

("Make way for Queen Victoria!")

Shatranj ke Khilari (1977, The chess players) shows how close Satyajit Ray has come to Shakespearian inspiration. In this story of two gentlemen of Lucknow we have the dilemma of the good king, made powerless by a power stronger than his own; we have the Realpolitik of History and Conquest magnified to the dimension of lyrical drama, we have - on the backdrop of a nostalgic XIXth century society of servants and breathtaking outdoor scenery - the subplot of loud-spoken and often clownish compeers who bring their conventional comic relief. The two stories intertwine superbly, and create a rich pattern of symbolical and psychological truth which deserves the greatest praise. I think only Satyajit Ray could pull this off, in Indian cinema.

There have been a number of “chess films” and books, too – Ray’s film is in fact based on a story by Munshi Premchand – notably Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle, and the game’s inspirational symmetrical structure contains a sort of magnetism which is easily used visually and dramatically. But Satyajit Ray isn’t a victim of that influence; the game’s charm, or its curse, doesn’t interest him: he plays with its evocative tradition of confrontation and isolated pair of opponents, and is as much interested in the players as in the game. Chess is only an image for the main subject of the film, the conflict of power opposing the various protagonists. It is thus possible to decide that the main characters are the title-bearers, i.e., the two noblemen with their quirkiness and their aloofness from outside events, or the king, his prime minister and General Outram, the British Resident in Lucknow (Richard Attenborough). Depending on whether you think the first are Ray’s target, you have the perspective according to which the film criticises the moral futility of the gentility, its indifference to the real world. Or your point of view would be a more political and historical one, and you would say that the film dissects the weakness of Indian resistance to British imperialism.

("Forget the game, tonight")

I have decided to choose the second one, for several reasons. I realize that the film isn’t called “The powerless king”, or “How Britain ate the last cherry on the Indian cake”. But I’ll explain this later. First there is Satyajit Ray’s choice of language. Shatranj ki khilari is his only film in urdu. We know that otherwise he writes and directs his film in Bengali. Choosing urdu means that he is placing himself in the centre of the political and historical chessboard, where the roots of modern India are to be found. How did England become a colonial Empire? What were its moves to achieve that aim? Everything started in Bengal, around Calcutta. But things really became serious when the imperialist power began conquering the subcontinent in a pincers-like movement, South towards Madras and North towards Delhi, thus preparing for the moment when the two claws would meet in Bombay, as you can see on this double map of India.

  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/61/India1837to1857.jpg

The encircling is done in 1857, one year after the annexation of the kingdom of Awadh (or Oudh) which occurred in 1856. And 1857 is the year of the famous Indian Rebellion, which marks the end of any Indian claim to supremacy. The Sepoy mutiny takes place in Lucknow, and if Ray chooses to film the event of the dethronement of the king of Awadh in 1856, it is in natural reference to the events of a year later. The strategic moves which would enable Britain (through its commercial cover-up, the East Indian Company) to rule all of India as from 1857, were prepared by the careful planning of the 1856 coup.

So making the characters speak Urdu emphasizes for Ray the centrality of Awadh as an essential square on the political and military chessboard. Just as Lucknow was the centre for refinement and culture at the time (and Urdu its linguistic medium), Awadh was the central and remaining link in Britain’s conquest of the Northern states. It had to be subjugated, and even if the move provoked the Sepoy rebellion of 1857 (which showed the importance of the tactical decision), the British had already gained too much power for a divided and multiple resistance to come back to the old Mughal Empire. The Government of India Act, voted in Parliament in 1858, instituted the new era of the British Raj which would last until 1947.

                                            (A slice of Oudh, your Excellency?)

So “the chess players” are really Lord Dalhousie and General Outram on the one hand, and king Walid and his ministers on the other. The trouble is that the Indians play in their “Indian” way whereas the English have adopted a “faster” variation of the game. On the English chessboard the Queen has all the power (that’s Queen Victoria of course), whereas the Indian version has only a “minister”. The soldier pawns move at double speed too: two squares instead of one! Finally, the rule of promotion of the pawn into a queen, once it reaches the eighth square is a clear reference to the “conquer and rule” policy. These details of the chess game, explained in the film by the delightful character of Nandlal Sahab, only serve to underline the British expansionist superiority that India could do nothing against at the time. The film also carefully presents General Outram’s conflict of duties, forced as he was to implement the Governor’s decision to annex Oudh, and this gives us a fine psychological insight into the understanding of the broader historical picture.

                                            ("Do they find our game too slow?")

As a result, the two noblemen Mir (Saeed Jaffrey) and Mirza (Sanjeev Kumar) engrossed in their “stupid” game (as Khurshid, Mirza’s wife – a fiery Shabana Azmi -, says) serve as an comical illustration of the tragic History that engulfs them. They play chess, but mainly they play, while others are involved in the serious job of designing the future of their country above their heads. They are children who do not understand what is happening in the adult’s world. Their “order” is based on the simple rules established by their ancestors long ago, and they have not learned to observe the changing times. And the catastrophe is that the king Wajid Ali Shah (Amjad Khan) is one of these children too! He is shown as a pensive introvert who realises he’s not up to the task of governing, but cannot change that. His character is beautiful and poignant at the same time.

When he is asked to give his order for an army and artillery to be summoned to retaliate the Company’s advances, we see him heave a sigh, as if he was going to cry, look away ahead of him – a view of the palace rooftops appears for a moment in the sunset - and, to the dismay of his ministers, he starts a song about his beloved Lucknow that he doesn’t know how he will be able to leave: “You can take away my crown, but you cannot take away my dignity…” We know that King Walid is known to be a revivalist of the classical arts: “He is hailed as one of the most prodigious promoters of Thumri (A form of classical music) and Kathak (A popular form of classical dance from northern India). In this paradoxical character, Amjad portrays the masculinity of a King and effeminacy of a man dedicated to dance, poetry and music, with equal conviction. Music of the movie is also a plus. In most of the scenes, one can listen to melodious thumris or other compositions of Indian classical music being played in the background.” (Kandarp Mehta from IMdB)

This reviewer has an axe to grind, by the way. He criticises Ray for not being faithful to Premchand’s story. Here is his main criticism: “the biggest alteration has been made in the climax of the story and this destroys the very patriotic essence of the story. In the original story, both the characters, Mirza and Mir, end up killing each other. Munshi Premchand very categorically mentions twice that they did not lack 'personal valor' but didn't want to use qualities of courage and bravery for their nation. Munshi Premchand was a patriotic writer. He wanted to show that prosperity made the Indian elite lazy, myopic and lackadaisical, and fated India with foreign rule. On the other hand, Ray kept them alive, and actually portrays them as impotent people, who accept their cowardice as a fact of life. New York Times Review of the movie (DT: May 17, 1978) wrote Ray Satirizes Indian Nobility: Civilized Impotency. This is definitely not how Munshi meant it to be. In order to have a greater universal appeal, and fetch more awards, Ray killed the very patriotic soul of the story.”

("What would happen if war broke out?")

I’m not sure that there is such a difference, notwithstanding the “personal valor” which Premchand might have wanted to bestow on the two noblemen, reduced to “impotency” by Satyajit Ray. Did making them kill each other show their valour more than having them fight, and after having reconciled, start to play once again? I wouldn’t say they are cowards; they are simply ignorant of reality. They are never faced with a decision which could have, if taken, saved the fate of India. Ray points out on the contrary that it is too late, that India in 1856 was doomed. 1857 was at hand, and even if a battle (and its uncertainties) had to be won by the British, in retrospect, this date marked only one thing: India’s subjection. On the other hand, Ray also shows that the culture which Mir and Mirza stand for, and which the King promoted, was exquisite and elaborate, and this isn’t downplayed by the film. Certainly he is saying that today’s culture might gain from revisiting the sources which King Walid revived. Globalization represents a threat which can be fought against. And if some believe that, like the fate of the Indian empire in the movie, Indian culture is equally doomed to be eaten up by the global trends, they may be right, but that history has still to be written.

One last remark, concerning the cinematographic pleasure experienced in Shatranj ke Khilari: the game metaphor is an apt one for any movie, where actors move on the board as directed by the master; but the depth and intelligence of the game also receives added brilliancy from the contrast of scenes, inside and outside, the close-ups and the wide-angle shots, the rich and colourful evocations of a luxury where time seemed to have stopped. In short, the film is a song, a swan-song maybe, filled with tedium perhaps, but the song whose variegated accents – now grave, now joyful, ominous or ludicrous, mingle to recreate a world of refinement and beauty, eternal in its fleetingness.

For other reviews, do not miss upperstall.com who puts the movie in a perhaps more decadent perspective than the one upheld here. But his commentaries of some of the scenes are a real pleasure.  On satyajitray.org there is the remark that the film was made during the “Emergency” period of Indian Politics, and he suggestion that Indira Gandhi acted in a similar way to that of Mir and Mirza. At culturecartel.com John Nesbit holds the view that the film suffers from “excessive narration and overly staged acting”, so it’s interesting to read their point of view in the perspective of Ray’s “wonderful canon”.

Sagina (1974), a hindi remake of the bengali Sagina Mahato, shot by the same director (Tapan Sinha) four years before, is a reflexion on work exploitation, oppression and revolution. The story is set in the “tea gardens” of North-East India, in the forties, and centres around the charismatic figure of a local worker, Sagina Mahato (Dilip Kumar), who is the acknowledged leader of the exploited bunch of mountain villagers toiling away for the benefit of the British. As expected, the capitalistic manager is a ruthless heartless racist, whereas Sagina, who has the guts to confront the boss, manages to make him understand that the coolies are human and cannot be simply beaten and used like cattle.

Sagina’s fiery character is doubled by that of Lalita (Saira Banu), a mountain Bengal tigress ready to slit whoever approaches her, and whose faithfulness to Sagina is one of the movie’s great wonders. Because Saira Banu isn’t a the movie’s pretty face: that title is reserved to Vishaka, the socialist secretary we shall speak about in a minute, played by beauty Aparna Sen. But to have cast Saira Banu as Sagina’s companion (we don’t know if they’re married, but it can be supposed) shows a sure flair. The movie’s realism and authenticity certainly gains from it.

To say the truth, it also gains from Dilip Kumar’s personality. The “king of tragedy” cuts a fine role as a cunning country labourer, alternatively as peculiar and unsexy as possible, and then just as hilarious and witty. He manages his pathos with consummate art, knows when to play the fool to avoid hero-worship, and when to stop for the spectator to grasp the tragedy of the cause. His antics with Lalita are really what befriends him to us: together they’re a great couple, full of temper and pride, and these are based not on a selfish desire to ensnare the other into a private relationship, but their love builds the community, and testifies to its lively spirit. For instance in the scene where a young Indian girl has been raped by a white employee from the company, who gets caught and Sagina declares revenge, at the window Lalita watches him go, and, as she holds the frightened girl in her arms, she breathes in the fantastic breath of victory and confidence in the man who is such a naturally fearless leader.

Things start deteriorating nevertheless when revolutionaries from the city (nearby Calcutta) start becoming interested in the particular worker resistance that has coalesced around Sagina. Such a feat cannot remain unexploited: the communist party who probably is also trying to federate some reaction against the colonial power, comes to the company in the form of Amal, who ventures to put some socialist ideas about rules and legality in Sagina’s mind. Act legal, become a recognised party: that is Amal’s creed. But Sagina, even if he tries to do his best, remains a political yokel, and when a crisis comes, will follow nothing but his instinct. The workers he leads remain unruled and wild, as the Bengal tiger who leads them.

This prompts a second step, and Amal’s party superiors arrive, together with the apparatchika, the party secretary, Vishaka, who incidentally is the daughter of the Calcutta-based owner of the whole industry of which our little mountain unit if only a regional branch. Vishaka is the archetype of the idealist, and we see her father ponder the fact that she has preferred the communist party to her own family. But according to her, it’s because her parents have been absent from her life, the father working, the mother partying. So in a way, she’s the embodiment of criticism against a certain form of Indian colonial profiteering, where the rich upper classes took advantage of what the British needed, a superior-minded class of collaborationists who would help them maintain their stronghold on the dominion.

The tragic irony of the following scenes is that the communist party boss, Aniruddha, is going to team up with the capitalistic British manager against the untameable Sagina. They jointly organise his election as “welfare officer”, an honour which in effect sends him away to the city where he will be out of the way for the party to set up its own rule with the supposedly prepared workers. Strike is soon declared against the company owners, and the workers, headless, obey their new masters. What happens next is the normal consequence: when Sagina comes back to the village, having understood he’s been trapped into leaving, his departure is thrown into his face as a betrayal: nobody wants to see him any more. The workers are starving and nobody is helping them; the commies are as ruthless as the company manager! Sagina, their chief, their tiger, is back too late: they have lost trust in him. He can go back where he comes from, his former fellowmen are blinded by grief and oppression. Only Lalita, who at first escapes him too (she has not completely groundless reasons to believe her lion has succumbed to the cool charm of the fair apparatchika!), finally falls in his arms and sides by him, explaining everything to him. He then tries to speak to the assembly of workers, but they boo him and, rushing to wards him, trample him mercilessly.

The last step is Sagina’s arrest at night. The communists have staged an emergency trial in the forest in order to trap him and continue their totalitarian application of their revolutionary theory. All the inhabitants are summoned in the woods, and the revolutionary leader hopes to stage a swift and efficient condemnation. Doesn’t everybody hate Sagina now? Doesn’t every single former friend look upon him as a damned traitor, who has sided with the oppressor? Well, the trial begins and the protagonists start remembering… And this is where the film’s structure comes in, because in fact it opens with the trial, and the flashbacks, which tell all the story, are individual recollections of each of the main actors of the drama: we relive the beginning of Sagina’s epic through their eyes, so to speak, and this all forms the complete story which comes to an end in the woods that night.

And in fact, slowly, one by one, they refuse to play Aniruddha’s hunting game: at first they’re struck by the scene, but recovering their senses, they realize that Sagina has also been trapped, as they have been trapped. He hasn’t betrayed them, nor is he all-powerful, he’s just one of them. Darker forces had tried to hypnotize all of them into believing Sagina was a double-dealer. Now even Amal loyally recognizes that Sagina cannot be the monster Aniruddha portrays and, cornered, tries to judge all on his own, declaring him guilty and that he should be killed straight away. He has a gun, and is going to execute his crazy justice, but Amal intervenes, and takes the shot. Aniruddha tries to escape, is caught by a vengeful Sagina, who throws away the gun: his hands are enough. But then another executioner enters the scene and ends the madman’s life.  

What is very original in this movie is its complex treatment of the forces of good and evil, when an overwhelming number of movies simplify the opposition to a pitifully weak antagonism. Okay, the communist leader is a caricature. But he’s the only one. All the actors in the drama have virtues and merits, alongside with shortcomings and prejudices. Sagina for example isn’t the hero whom everybody loves at first sight. If you identify with him, it is because you understand precisely that he’s limited and ridiculous, and that this is his nature.  And this works also for his attitude concerning political action. This attitude has nothing you can tie it down to. It isn’t revolutionary; it isn’t theoretical, it isn’t even political. He fights with his instinct, his courage and his magnanimity. When he senses his community is wronged, he displays a formidable flair for the right words to say to the right person, the right thing to do and when to do it, and this opportunism is his strength. His keen sense of justice and human dignity works miracles among the people he knows, and of course his enemies understand that, who send him away in order to cut him away from his zone of influence.

Sagina therefore demonstrates the limits of political science, which is commonly based on the opposition of binary systems: rightists vs. leftists, conservatives vs. revolutionaries, capitalism vs. communism, etc. Both the company bosses, who ruthlessly exploit the workers, and the communist revolutionaries, who come to the Tea Gardens to organise their revolt, are formatted by these antagonistic pairs of opposites. Both believe in imposing their rigid frame of understanding to human labour, and both fail because they don’t understand the human factor, which is made of need, hope and self-respect. Workers are human beings who suffer when exploited (that’s the communist perspective), but also recognize the company as their “mother” (that’s the patriarchal industrialist’s model, which communists will deride as oppressive). Sagina Mahato represents a political force that theorists cannot place in their rigid grid; his freedom represents a third type of interpretation, more complex, more human too. At one moment, the communist leader tells him that orders oblige him to do something. But says Sagina, I don’t obey orders. If you request, on the other hand, it’s another matter. His political practice bases itself on confidence and respect.

Of course, you might say that such a political attitude is limited in scope and efficiency. If you want to make things move on a greater scale, that of a country, for example, or that of nations, you have to revert to party discipline and follow orders. Outside the community where he is known and appreciated, what is Sagina’s stance worth? Well, perhaps this isn’t true: Gandhi has shown the world that the dualist politics based on the violence of conflicting interests might not always be the rule; alternating right and left parties are not necessarily the only way to practice politics. A great deal of strength is surely needed to go beyond commonly accepted practices, but they aren’t necessarily doomed. The trouble is that people come to public affairs with these structures in their minds: which party shall I join, which party will give me the best chances to fulfil my interests? Even idealists opt for one side, and believe that if you want to win elections, you have to control a party. Saginas are rare today. But the film’s lesson is that they can and must exist, that politics shouldn’t be left to politicians only. We know it, but how do we act in order to make this change?

One other theme in the movie, which is connected to the preceding one, is the questioning of rules as the media through which human relations must be established. Amal tells Sagina to act legally, and the latter tells him to “forget the rules”!  (top photo)It isn’t enough to say that rules are made for men and not men for the rules; some rules can be changed, some rules are bad, but the concept of rules itself must also sometimes be questioned. The law guarantees that people will live in peace, normally. But sometimes is creates war, because the law has become the expression of the oppressive power of the rich and the great. They uphold the law as a means to continue their rule and protect their interests. So the law must regularly be re-evaluated by another law, that of “humanity” (whatever that is – it depends partly on which human community is concerned), the law which is inside all of us, and serves as the ultimate standard. Sagina represents also that final recourse, a fragile one, as the movie shows, because it can be manipulated (hence the need for education – Sagina is illiterate), but an indispensable stay against the perversion of the law.