Satyajit Ray, an ancestral home in Bangladesh and many stories of blurred border

Indian Express

16-07-2025

It was February 21, 1972. Dhaka's Paltan Maidan, which had witnessed historic rallies a year ago during the war of liberation, was all set to mark the first Shaheed Dibosh (martyrs' day) of independent Bangladesh – an event to commemorate those who had lost their lives in 1952 to get Bengali recognised as the official language of undivided Pakistan. But the chief guest was not someone from the newly formed nation. It was Satyajit Ray, the auteur from across the border, whose films had established him as a global cultural icon. In his brief speech, delivered after Shyamal Mitra's opening song, Ray made two things clear: His love for the Bangla language and his desire to visit his ancestral home in Bangladesh.
Ray wasn't born in Bangladesh. He only visited the country on a few occasions. But the memory of the rising sun over the Padma, seen from his uncle's house at Wari, Rankin Street in Dhaka, was etched in his memory. He wanted to visit the ancestral home as well, but as he said, 'That hope kept receding, particularly after the Partition.'
As Ray's ancestral home is being demolished in Bangladesh, his family's presence on the other side of the Padma is obliterated forever. But culturally, the Ray-trio – Satyajit Ray, his father Sukumar Ray and his grandfather Upendrakishore Roychowdhury – remains as relevant to the Bengali language as they were during the first Shaheed Dibosh of independent Bangladesh.
Demolition of Ray's house, citing risk, or the mob-led vandalism of Tagore's ancestral house, defeats the foundational values of Bangladesh. The birth of the country was a response to the failure of the religion-based two-nation theory. It was a victory of the ethno-linguistic spirit over religious dogmatism, showing that for a multicultural nation, religious identity couldn't be the only binding factor.
Ray's films and writings upheld that spirit. While in films like Devi (1960), Ray questioned religious dogma, the rhymic dialogue of Heerak Rajar Deshe (1980) was one of the finest experiments in the history of Bengali language films. In Ray's words, 'I got many requests from many places to leave Bangla and make films in other languages in other countries. But I have rejected those offers over and over again. I know that the language that runs in my blood is the Bangla language. I know that if I leave this language and try to do something in any other, then I will have no ground under my feet, I will not find any base as an artist; I will lose all my spirit and energy.' (taken from his Shaheed Dibosh speech). His Feluda series and Professor Shanku are still considered 'must-read' literature for Bengali children across the border.
In his book Our Films, Their Films, Ray outlined the problems of Bengali filmmakers – their difficulty in getting rid of a mix of devotional and mythological scripts that shrouded its exploratory potential. His own films addressed the gap. His Calcutta trilogy illustrated the post-Partition burden of urban Bengal; the Apu trilogy scripted a new chapter in film realism. Ray's portrayal of Bengali culture and everyday life influenced many Bangladeshi filmmakers like Tareque Masuda and Muhammad Quayum.
Ray, however, returned to the Padma – though this time on the India side. During the recce for his film Jalsaghar (1989), he reached Nimtita on the bank of the Padma – a few kilometres away from Bangladesh — to find the perfect palace with a 'music room'. Here, he encountered a story — of resilience and rootedness. When he found that the river had gobbled up a sizable chunk of Ganendra Narayan Chowdhury's estate, he asked Chowdhury, 'Why do you still stay here?'. He responded, 'We'd sooner go down with the house than desert it.' Ray's ancestral house represented that sort of indelible ethno-spatial roots. Whether he was there or not was not relevant. It was the tie that mattered, the shared bond of a land and a language. That's why every year — even this year– many Bangladeshi gathered at the house on his birth anniversary. In 2020, a campaign was also initiated by the Federation of Film Societies of India (FFSI) to restore Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak's ancestral homes in Bangladesh. Now, the Indian government has offered help in restoring Ray's ancestral home. It remains to be seen if Bangladesh accepts the offer. But each demolition strikes at the roots of memory, uprooting histories, in favour of a monolithic narrative that celebrates borders, not their blurring.
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