Book review: A producer decodes a master director

This is an extraordinary book on many counts. For one, it isn’t known if any other producer has ever written a tome detailing the making of a single film primarily on the basis of unpublished correspondence with the director. That the film in question is Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977), the only Hindi feature that Satyajit Ray ever helmed, and that the account comes from a man who had more than just a ringside view of the production, makes this effort an invaluable addition to Indian cinema literature.

My Adventures with Satyajit Ray: The Making of Shatranj Ke Khilari, authored by Suresh Jindal, takes us not only into the fascinating world of an exceptional filmmaker who crafted some of the greatest cinematic masterpieces to ever come out of this country, but also facilitates a deep dive into the mind of an extraordinary creative powerhouse.

Ray’s early films altered the global perception of India’s cinema landscape in the second half of the 20th century like no other body of work ever did. For Jindal, the association with one of the most distinctive works of the master’s career at a point when he was at the height of his prowess — “Satyajit Ray seems to be able to achieve more and more with less and less,” Tim Radford wrote of Shatranj Ke Khilari in the Guardian — was no less life-changing. This book, which has an introduction by Ray’s biographer Andrew Robinson wherein the above critical observation is cited, establishes just that.

Of course, My Adventures with Satyajit Ray would not have been possible without “the prolific amount of correspondence he (Ray) generated in spite of his incredibly busy schedule”. Jindal writes: “No sooner had we agreed to work together than his letters began arriving; letters which, as it turns out, document the history of how Shatranj Ke Khilari was made.” The fact that he was in possession of an insight into how Ray worked, Jindal writes make him feel “duty-bound to create an engaging account of the making of this film and share it with the world”.

This book, however, is more than just about a film in the making. On one level, it helps us gain an understanding of the methods of a master. On another, it is a good old story of a dream come true for a New Delhi-based engineering graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who, riding on the success of Rajnigandha (1974) and still a few months shy of 33, dared to approach the towering Ray, a worldwide icon, with a proposal for a film “in Hindi, or in English, or if not, then in Bengali” and saw his “overreach” attain fruition.

The three years between Jindal’s first meeting with Ray in the latter’s “famous study” at his Bishop Lefroy Road, Calcutta residence in September 1974 and the release of Shatranj Ke Khilari in September 1977 weren’t easy. The project faced many ups and downs, some manageable, others demanding a huge amount of tact, patience and courage.

Among the latter was a showdown over perceived mistreatment of Ray’s crew by the production side that nearly led to Jindal pulling out of the film. Through the rough and the smooth, Jindal’s admiration for the filmmaker never waned or wavered. The blow-by-blow account of his experience of being friends with Ray — the bond lasted until the day the director died and the letters kept flowing all the way till the end — makes for a wonderful read.

My Adventures with Satyajit Ray is the kind of book that can be read in one go. Apart from being slim, it is remarkably lucid and candid. Legendary French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, who has contributed the foreword, writes of the experience of perusing the book: “It’s like walking into an adventure novel, where you penetrate another jungle full of delusions and dangers, but with the best possible guides…” As Carriere points out, one doesn’t have to be a cineaste to enjoy My Adventures with Satyajit Ray.  

Some of the aspects of Ray’s personality and approach to filmmaking that Jindal writes about — his fastidious pre-production research, his unwavering commitment to his crew, and his appetite for non-stop work, et al — are too well-known to be of any surprise. The book is at its best when the writer picks out the not-so-well-known nuggets about the man and his work from his carefully preserved trove of memories and letters.

Jindal throws light on Ray’s personal traits — his undemanding food habits, his embarrassment at receiving any special treatment on account of who he was, his insistence on reaching an airport well ahead of the departure time and his view of “relaxation as an avoidable foe”, among others add crucial pieces to the portrait Jindal draws for his readers.

Jindal had been exposed to Ray’s films, and those of other masters of world cinema, during his student days in the US, but it was a talk that the filmmaker delivered to FTII Pune students that strengthened the producer’s belief that Ray might be “ready to make a film for a larger audience than his past films had been able to attract”. Ray advised the students not to have contempt for the audience because “a filmmaker who blames the audience for not liking his films is akin to a cook blaming the diner for not liking a badly cooked fish”.

If films were indeed fish, there wasn’t ever one that Ray did not cook well. Suresh Jindal, for whom Ray “will always be a guru and a bodhisattva”, has written a book worthy of the subject in every respect.

Saibal Chatterjee is a National Award-winning film critic and writer based in New Delhi