The Flawed Nayaks of Satyajit Ray

Satyajit  Ray, the multi-hyphenate Bengali auteur considered one of the most influential Indian filmmakers of all time, was never interested in the perfect hero. Spanning over four decades from the mid-1950s until his death in 1992, his oeuvre — largely made up of striking adaptations of short stories and novels — consists of 40 films that continue to act as cinematic blueprint. Over the years, the filmmaker’s outings have been thoroughly dissected and championed for its feminist undertones — the women in Ray’s films always seemed to have their agency intact, less interested in domestic subversience and more committed to upending social structures.

But an accurate reading of the several strong female characters that dot Ray’s cinema is impossible without also taking into consideration the various heroes that occupied the Ray universe. That is to say, the filmmaker adopted a female gaze in some of his most successful outings — a common thread running through his films is the idea that women are psychologically stronger than men. It’s perhaps why male heroes are absent in Ray’s films; instead the leading men in his films were all portraits of flawed, troubled masculinity. So even when his storylines prodded at the inner desires and hidden lives of women who represented the moral conscience of his films, the men erred. They constantly struggled with insecurities and appeared burdened down by their own moral transgressions.

Much of the filmmaker’s vision of male characters in his movie stemmed from his own cinematic belief of creating realistic characters — in both his short stories, stacked to the brim with lonely men, and his cinematic offerings. “The natural character of an actor was important to Ray, not only in the case of the non-professional but professionals as well. He must, in real life, reflect some of the basic qualities sought in the character to be portrayed. Acting against the grain of the actor’s nature is unacceptable in Ray’s scheme of things,” prolific film critic and historian Chidananda Dasgupta noted in The Cinema of Satyajit Ray.

That’s not to say that Ray’s leading men weren’t charming. In fact, they provided the lexicon for charm. The actors who essayed most of his male characters — Soumitra Chatterjee , Dhritiman Chatterjee , Uttam Kumar — became synonymous with the idea of the proverbial Bengali bhadralok. Ray’s men were intellectual and contemplative but never quite infallible.

In Nayak (1966) for instance, Ray cast the late Uttam Kumar — the reigning superstar of Bengali cinema at the time — as Arindam Mukherjee, a superstar who rose from humble beginnings. Even though Kumar literally played a hero, Nayak never saw him as the knight in shining armour, reducing him instead to an everyman. Ray employed the actor’s cachet to create an image of the insecure artist, delivering arguably one of the most powerful indictments of stardom.

Despite their intellectual pursuits, Ray’s men never suffered from a superiority complex — they were sensitive, melancholic, and prone to misfortunes. There’s no better example than Soumitra Chatterjee’s incomparable turn as Apu in Apur Sansar (1959), the third installment of Ray’s famed The Apu Trilogy. In the trilogy, Apu, a young writer who loses his wife at childbirth, is consumed by pathos. It’s only when Apu is reunited with his son that his face goes back to resembling joy. Apur Sansar was Chatterjee’s first Ray film — the actor went on to collaborate with the filmmaker in 14 films over the course of their exemplary careers — and Chatterjee delivered a performance so attuned to the pain and poetry of living that it became difficult to distinguish the reel from the real.

Even Ray’s urban heroes — Soumitra Chatterjee in Charulata (1964) and Dhritiman Chatterjee in Pratidwandi (1970) — represented a side of the quintessential Bengali youth that strayed from convention. Both characters played young talented, educated Bengali men who found themselves lost when confronted with crucial decisions. For a large part of these two films, the camera would catch both these men alone, simply living life instead of performing them for the camera. In fact, it is in humanizing their weaknesses that Ray managed to redefine the idea of a hero. After all, what is more heroic than confronting your own demons?

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on  Twitter .

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