Refractions and Reflections

Yesterday was Satyajit Ray's birth anniversary. Perhaps that is why I thought it wouldn't be entirely out of place to turn into a blog-post a few thoughts that occurred to me while watching Jalsaghar. On another day, may be I'd have held my peace.

To begin with, let me confess that Jalsaghar is one of my favourite Ray films. For me, it is perhaps his only grand tragedy. Is Biswambhar Roy an admirable figure? May be not. But the film is a requiem for an entire economic and social order. We are likely to hold that order in contempt anyway, but one can hardly help marvelling (even if suspiciously), at that kind of a lifestyle. And his fall is a great one. Like Lear, Biswambhar Ray too has to cut down on his train of knights, as it were. Ultimately he is left with two trusty servants. Yet, unlike Lear, he has his own land, and whatever is left of his inheritance. The world around him has changed and he has been caught napping. I keep recalling some of the notes that Lampedusa strikes in The Leopard. In Ray's oeuvre I can't think of another quite like it. Shatranj ke khiladi is about another significant change-over in history, but even though it is similar to Jalsaghar in some of its concerns, it comes across on the whole as somewhat comical. Debi isn't quite tragedy, even though it is tragic.

It is also ironic that two of Ray's films that are most musical, Jalsaghar and Kanchenjunga (I'm thinking of Suman Ghosh's essay here, "Ray's Musical Narratives: Studying the Screenplay of Kanchenjungha") feature Chhabi Biswas, a rather unmusical man, as characters who are gradually losing their grip on things. Let me digress further from the point and offer a passage from Bishoy chalachchitra many of us would be familiar with:

But when I was introduced to him [Biswas] during casting, I realised that even though he was the ideal candidate in all respects, there were a couple of reasons for doubt. Firstly, he had ridden a horse. And secondly, he was quite indifferent to music. "Are you familiar with the scales?" [Ray asks.] "Most doubtful." "The ragas?" "Not remotely."

Satyajit Ray and Chhabi Biswas stayed during the shoot at two ends of the rajbari, where the film was shot. There are several touching anecdotes that Ray shares, including one where a band was playing in preparation for the next day's shoot.

Suddenly I hear a tremendous roar at the other end of the veranda. "Mr Roy!" Chhabi-babu's voice resonated. I came out hurriedly and saw him standing in a lungi, clenching the railings of the veranda, looking down and shaking his head in disgust and dismay. He caught sight of me in the darkness and pointing to the band asked scornfully, "What is going on?"

Chhabi Biswas was deeply disappointed with the performance. They had neither rhythm, nor any spirit. He turned to Ray and asked, "Why don't you conduct?" (Let me add here that Ray masterfully transcribes it in Bangla as "হোয়াই ডোন্‌চিউ কন্ডাক্ট?", his fine ear replicating the "ch" sound that many belonging to an earlier generation, and some of our own, use in such cases - or indeed the "j" in a word like "education" or "immediate".) When Ray declined,

...he leaned over the railings in a most precarious manner, and raising his hands over his head, started conducting. Over the sounds of the band, the foxes, and the crickets, his voice boomed - "One-two-three, One-two-three."

The discovery of the palace itself, as Andrew Robinson writes, is an interesting story. A serendipitous find, the palace at Nimtita belonged to someone who was quite the opposite of Biswambhar Roy. The owner's uncle, one Upendra Narayan Chowdhury was closer in spirit to the protagonist of the story. It was he who had built the jalsaghar. Upon their return, when Tarasankar heard of the house, he is said to have confessed that Upendra Narayan was the very person on whom he had based his failing zamindar. What I found particularly compelling is the fact that it was the music-room, the jalsaghar, that Ray found insufficient in dimensions. Bangshi Chandragupta, it seems, had to create a set for the room that lies at the heart of the narrative.

A few days back a friend of mine, Shinjini Chattopadhyay, presented a paper at a one-day seminar we had at Jadavpur University in collaboration with l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, on the objects in some of banik households of Calcutta. She spoke of the clocks and mirrors, among other things. I thought immediately of the mirrors inside the Marble Palace on Muktaram Babu Street. These Belgian mirrors rise nearly as high as the hall itself, and are remarkable because even at the edges there is no observable distortion of the reflected image.

The music room, even in the Marble Palace, has the mirror at one end (or are there facing mirrors?). The staging area is now marked by an uneven surface. The eager guide explains hastily that the richly crafted mats used to be spread on that part of the room, where the dances and the musical performances would take place. Never having the good fortune of watching one of these jalsa-s in full swing, I had never really thought about the dynamics or configuration of the room. When I started watching Jalsaghar it struck me as odd that the mirror should be behind the performance space. It dawned on me only gradually that this made perfect sense.

It was held for a long time (and I believe the view still persists) that the Lord's Room in the Shakespearean stage, or at least in some of the theatres, was somewhere above and behind the stage. The idea, if this is true, was to be seen, as it was to see. The mirrors in the music room do not seem to reflect in any profitable way images of the performance. What they do reflect, however, is an image of the consumer of the performance: the patrons and the guests. As such, for a member of the audience, it is also necessary to get the body-language right. If you fall asleep, not only do you run the risk of insulting a performer, you get caught in view of your fellow audience members. Picking one's nose or acting fidgety is harmful for one's reputation. Stretching the argument, one can perhaps see the mirrors even serving the purpose of projecting on to the same surface, on to the world of the artist, the image of the patron - (as Anushka too thought) in a manner similar to the reflecting glass windows that as Frederic Jameson notes, projects our images as window-shoppers on to the world of the consumable product. It is consumption of consumption. Perhaps even conspicuous.

The film both begins and ends with the image of a chandelier. In the title sequence it is bright. Not very bright, but at least dimly lit. In the closing sequence it has been extinguished. The moment when the last candle burns out forms one of the climactic moments in the film. The feudal hubris of these houses depends on illusions of multiplication. The mirror duplicates. In the case of the facing mirrors in the Marble Palace, they can theoretically produce infinite images of the objects in the room. The crystal prisms of the chandelier refract and multiply the light of the candles. One of the other objects Shinjini wrote about in her paper was the clock. There is the element of time in Jalsaghar. The burning out of the candle is itself symbolic of the passage and indeed the end of a specific kind of time, and although clocks aren't altogether absent from the mise en scène, Ray doesn't focus on any in particular. Last night while watching the film again it suddenly struck me that both in the opening and in the closing sequences, the chandelier gently swings sideways (caused in part by the same winds that sunk the vessel his wife and son were on?). The chandelier is a pendulum, a time-keeper.