“Blood,” thunders Biswambhar Roy. “The blood in my veins”
Poor Anantu, his manservant, stares at him in bewilderment. Is it merely the potency of the Hennessy wine or is it the hour when the epigram – “It takes ten to build a fortune and one to ruin it”- finally takes truth? Ray answers for us – the chandeliers and the lamps slowly kill their wicks. The mood of a storm builds in clear skies. The frenzied zamindar mounts his horse and races across the lands that are no longer his. As head hits the sand, he utters “blood” as his own sputters around him.
Though Nargis Dutt’s infamous comment that Ray rode to fame by “exporting poverty” came three decades later, it’s even more farcical considering Jalsaghar released well before her comment. Jalsaghar captures an immense grandiosity – in music, in production design, in its characters’ robes – but underscores the pungency of such wealth. Despite all that he possesses, Biswambhar’s mind is parochial, puerile, and at worst, petty in its considerations. He walks through his music room that is evidently decaying, he holds his airs and graces to swat his visitors, and amidst others, he stands before the mirror tucking his paunch lest he falls short of the standards set by his ancestors who now adorn the walls. It wasn’t that Ray despised the state of richness. If anything, he defined it in a way that was far from being material. Ray’s richness resides in a cottage where the rare lark chirp is cherished, not a mansion where the sitar is strung to foul extents. After all, this was a man who said “I’m certainly not as rich as Bombay actors, by no means, but I can live comfortably. That’s all I need. I can buy the books and records I want.”
Ray’s films all gravitate towards materially poorer subjects, with few rare exceptions such as Jalsaghar and Nayak. Perhaps, he feels that it is only when we live closer to our natural state of existence, the state in which many thousands lived and continue to live, do we possess a broader appreciation for our own sensibilities. It is not to say that Ray romanticized poverty or the poor. In all his films, his characters are relatively poor to others. It isn’t a rigidly defined state. They are unsaturated by the excesses of wealth but are dimensionally richer in humaneness. Ray’s objective in making Jalsaghar, I believe, was to showcase how when one is bathed in wealth, the relationship between our sensibilities and the phenomena that stimulate them becomes cloyingly transactional.
Biswambhar constantly strains his wealth to stage events in his music room, but there’s always an uneasiness underpinning his appreciation. You can see him constantly appraising the air of the room. Then, is this affinity for music truly appreciation? Or is it prestige? It only accentuates man’s ability to make a vice out of anything. Biswambhar transacts this seeming appreciation of music for an extended lease of respect for himself and his lineage. As the film takes on a theatrical tone, Ray’s suggestion is more overt – in trying to subjugate a sensation, man subordinates himself to it. Temperate throughout his own life, he knows that only in relative poverty and asceticism does novelty bless the receiver.
Jalsaghar can lay a strong claim for being amongst Ray’s finest films from a craft perspective. With such bone-chillingly beautiful music, he has still managed to isolate the grotesqueness of the music room. In the initial scene where we are introduced to the music room, we see Begum Akhtar deliver Bhar Bhar Ayi Mori Ankhiyan with her pain-struck Ghazali voice. She’s sat on one side of the room, the men on the other. The carpets’ are of a slightly different shade and Ray trucks from behind the pillars, almost invasively, from right to left. Moving alongside the pace of the music, we see the men who tap their cigarettes and watch her with an unwavering gaze. Reaching the other end of the room, Ray’s blocking of the scene shines – the spatial separation between the singer and the men is concretely established. He cuts at the end of this take to show Mahim, the upstart neighbour, feigning appreciation. Her celestial voice is uninterrupted, yet the transactional pretence of these men in appreciating the music is established without souring dialogue. There are many other instances within Jalsaghar that are milestones of maturity in Ray’s road as a director but I chose to highlight this for its effortlessness.
Speaking about the music itself, Ray found himself away from his frequent collaborator. With Ustad Vilayat Khan, the maestro who composed for Jalsaghar, disagreements were rife. This was unsurprising given that Ray has had disagreements with all his musicians until he decided to compose on his own. Sometimes, fastidiousness can be an obstacle. In Ray’s case, both in his early and late-career, despite all disagreements, he still managed to extract the tonal pith of the film from his composers. For Pather Panchali, he hummed it out to Shankar. Half-armed with knowledge of music and half-versed in the musical language, his composers felt that he was bleeding into their territories. As a director, you sometimes feel the obsessive necessity to dictate every element of your film, but Ray never let his frustrations manifest as criticisms of his composers. He felt that despite their merits, language was failing him in his attempts to communicate what he wanted from them. But mellow and without acrimony, it personified his approach to life and his films – he never tainted anyone for being the reason for certain shortcomings.
When we see Ray alongside his contemporaries, more particularly his Eastern ones, I feel he resonates more with Ozu than Kurosawa. He doesn’t agree – Ozu is more eastern in his mind. But when I see Jalsaghar, I see a film that’s halfway between Ozu and Kurosawa but remains uniquely Ray in its ethos. The conclusion of the film is didactic, yet unspoken. The construct of the film is laconic, yet piercing. But there’s always a Ray touch here or there – the reminiscing flute and Khoka’s fascination with the zamindari life in a sequence that is briskly stitched together. Though Ray chalks up his success (and Kurosawa’s) to their accessibility to the Western palate, the sustained success of his work is because there’s a sliver of Indian-ness in it that not many have been able to replicate on screen since he shelved the director’s hat.
For the week to come, I’d like to turn to Devi and Charulata. Amongst the few films that Ray did direct with women at its centre, the latter has been his personal favourite. As for Jalsaghar, it will continue to stand tall and towering – a reminder that transacting one satisfactory vice for another can only reward torment, not sweetness.
