Latest news with #SatyajitRay
The Hindu
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Hindu
Kolkata's youth, on Bengali ashmita
'As a non-binary person, I find the most freedom in expressing myself through Bangla. It doesn't confine me to gendered pronouns: I can simply be a 'tui' or 'tumi' to those I love. My Bengali identity thrives in Satyajit Ray's films, in the comfort of aloo-sheddho bhaat, and in the Durga Pujo essays I wrote every year in school, guided by my grandfather's handwritten notes.' — Zoya Khan, filmmaker, 27 'Political movements, intelligence, culture: Bengalis have always been at the forefront of these things.' — Pratyasha Pal, a post-graduate student of History, 23 'Bengali identity is the Bengali language, Durga Pujas, and football. The way we express ourselves in Bengali, our mother tongue, is crucial to expressing our true emotions.' — Guddu Adhikari, hospital intern, 21 'We have a lot to be proud of, as Bengalis, like our literature and our freedom fighters.' — Soumit Choudhury, journalism student, 19 'To me, anyone who speaks Bangla is Bengali. There isn't a divide if you are Hindu or Muslim or where your place of origin is. As a student of Bengali literature, I am very attached to our great writers: Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.' — Riya Nayak, Bengali literature student, 19 'Bangla is our mother tongue, and to me, that is the most important aspect of being Bengali.' — Aniket Pal, voice actor and blood bank staff member, 25 'Bengali identity is everyone who speaks in Bengali, be it in West Bengal, Tripura, or Bangladesh. It is our mother tongue, and that is where our identity lies; it is a shared identity.' — Abhinab Das, student of philosophy, 20 'If there is anything called Bengali ashmita, then it is a reaction to what is happening in our country right now. Before, this identity was more cultural; now it is a matter of ego as well.' — Rushati Saha, illustrator and graphic designer, 25 'For me, my Bengali identity is associated with Durga Pujas, football, and staying in Kolkata. I was raised in Lucknow, so my exploration of the conventional Bengali culture has been limited.' — Pritam Sarkar, studying Comparative Literature, 20 'Bengal's culture and heritage are great, but the current rate of unemployment and lack of opportunities in West Bengal make me wonder if I have enough to be proud of.' — Shinjini Guha, MBA student, 21 'My favourite part of being Bengali is being in love and expressing love in Bangla. This is the sweetest language in the world.' — Swarnali Adhikari, medical student, 24
Mint
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
'Sholay' at 50: Making sense of Ramesh Sippy's classic
Is it possible for the most iconic and mythologised film in your life—the one that is most thoroughly familiar—to also feel like a jigsaw puzzle that took a long time to put together? Sholay is widely acknowledged as the most polished and fully realised Hindi film of its era, the most flawless technically, the one with the best action scenes and sound design, the fewest loose ends or awkward cutting. The sort of mainstream film that even Satyajit Ray could (grudgingly?) admire. But however complete it may be, I still think of it as a series of moments that are so embedded in one's consciousness (and so easily accessed from the mind's old filing cabinet) that it almost doesn't matter which order those fragments come in—there are any number of entry points. It's a bit like knowing key sections of a legendary epic—say, the Mahabharat—rather than every last detail, and still feeling like you know it in its entirety. Like any other super-fan, I have my personal Sholay history, and it includes this confession: though the film is central to my pop-cultural journey, looming forever on the horizon like those boulders against the sun in Gabbar's domain, there have been many gaps in my viewing. Of course, I have watched it in the conventional way from beginning to end, at least five or six times (as opposed to the dozens or hundreds claimed by other devotees)—and yet it always feels like I came to it piecemeal through a melange of things heard and read, narratives constructed, back-stories related in magazines and books… and finally, prints with scenes missing in them. Here's how this can happen. ***** You're six or seven, and going for a rare family outing to a hall, to see a film that's less than a decade old but already fixed in legend. Someone dawdles, you reach 10 minutes after the show has begun, walking into a noisy action sequence involving a train, bad guys on horses, and three leading men whom you recognise. It's exciting but you're overwhelmed, and lost about who is doing what: why is one of the 'heroes" in police uniform while the other two look roguish, though they all appear to be fighting on the same side? Then, in the very next scene, Sanjeev Kumar—the cop on the train, energetic and youthful—is older, tired, speaking slowly. The concept of the flashback and flashforward, the idea that these images can jump rudely from one period to another, is not something you have fully assimilated. A few moments later the other heroes, Dharmendra and Bachchan (your childhood crushes), are goofing around on a bike, singing, clowning about in jail. It's a night show, you may be drifting off now and again. The spectre of Gabbar Singh arrives: first his name, spoken fearfully many times, and later the man himself. But even amidst the terror of his first appearance, with the minatory music and the belt being dragged along the rocks, you feel confusion: you think he resembles one of the dacoits on horseback—curly-haired, green shirt—from that train scene, and wonder if there's a link you missed. A mid-film flashback where Sanjeev Kumar is young again. Through blurry eyes you register the shifts: black moustache to grey moustache, hands to no hands, police uniform to sombre shawl. Later, a fragmented viewing at someone's house will leave you with more confusion about the two major flashbacks and more questions about the sequence of events. Which is to say that there was a time in my childhood when the plot of Sholay was as much of a maze as a convoluted David Lynch or Christopher Nolan film might be. Navigating the labyrinth was complicated by the fact that for a while it was done simultaneously along two mediums: listening to the famous double audio-cassette of the film's dialogue, and watching a videotape that was much cherished. The audio-cassette was unnerving: you had to identify characters by their voices; it didn't feature entire songs, playing only the first couple of bars of each familiar tune, before returning to the prose scenes. Some excitement lay in the details—I was tickled to bits by the line 'Thakur ne hijron ki fauj banayi hai (Thakur has assembled an army of eunuchs)", not having expected to hear a word like that in a film—but on balance I preferred to watch Sholay, not hear it. The videotape, one of my favourite childhood possessions, came for some reason from faraway Lagos, brought by a visiting uncle who had been assured that the thing I wanted most in the world was my own Sholay cassette. I was 10 now, we had just got a video player at home, and I must have worn it out over days with this tape. The train flashback now made sense to me, as did the overall chronology (though there was still some disorientation in, for instance, seeing Gabbar's henchman Kaalia alive and gloating in a flashback after he had been bumped off in that sadistic roulette scene). At last I was getting to watch the complete film, from start to finish. Or so I thought. There were abrupt cuts here and there—it took some time to realise that chunks had been snipped to fit the VHS's 180 minutes. Sleuthing, carefully matching the video footage with the audio on my dialogue-cassette, I realised that the scenes involving Soorma Bhopali (Jagdeep) and the Hitler-like jailer (Asrani) had been excised. That makes some sense if you have to cut 15 minutes: those sequences are fun and show off the skills of two fine character actors, but they are dispensable to the main narrative, and they greatly delay Veeru and Jai's arrival in Ramgarh. Even so, I feel cheated that it took me years, maybe decades, to realise that the beloved Keshto Mukherjee had a small role in Sholay (in the jailer scene). Things were also complicated by the fact that Sholay's characters were continuing with their lives in other forms and media. Gabbar Singh was selling glucose biscuits in ads long after he had been vanquished (or killed, in the ending that was shot but not released). In the late 1980s came a film called Soorma Bhopali with Jagdeep, featuring Dharmendra and Bachchan in cameos unrelated to their Sholay roles; after that, Ramgarh ke Sholay, which seemed cheap and B-grade-ish, being filled with star-impersonators, but which still had the real Amjad Khan (looking much paunchier, as if Gabbar had taken his role as biscuit mascot too seriously). ***** Between all this, Sholay did perform the epiphanic functions that a landmark film is expected to. For instance, I can never forget the tense scene where the villagers turn hostile towards their mercenary protectors, because this was the moment when the idea first entered my nascently movie-obsessed head that a camera movement is a deliberate, engineered thing that builds meaning: when the line 'Kab tak jeeyoge tum, aur kab tak jeeyenge hum, agar yeh dono iss gaon mein rahe?" ('How long will we stay alive if these two remain in the village?") is accompanied by a camera swish that places Veeru and Jai at the centre of the frame, precisely on the words 'yeh dono". I learnt about the mysteries of personality too, and how a creative work can bring catharsis or draw out aspects of yourself that you hadn't fully processed yet. As a painfully shy and quiet child with a taste for sardonic humour, there was every reason for me to relate to Bachchan's Jai; instead I was always more drawn to and even felt a kinship with the boisterous Veeru. But that Nigerian tape was also responsible for the biggest of my Sholay gaps—one I was unaware of until well in my 30s. That's how old I was when I watched Sholay's great opening-credits sequence for the very first time. While that might not be a big deal for most Hindi films of the period, in Sholay the craft and attention to detail begins right here—in the scene where the manservant Ramlal leads a policeman on horseback from the railway station to the Thakur's haveli. My tape had the credits only until the names of the six principal actors; there was a sudden cut after the title 'And Introducing Amjad Khan". This is a major bone I have to pick with the anonymous tape-editor sitting, in my mind's eye, in some squalid little Lagos bootleggers' shop. Because, watching the full sequence on DVD decades later, I saw how it sets the stage, giving us a detailed view of Ramgarh and its surroundings, long before the narrative actually takes us there. The superb R.D. Burman background score changes from a guitar-dominated tune as the riders move through a barren, American Western-like setting to a more Indian sound, with mridangam and taar shehnai, as they pass through the village. The symbolic nature of Sholay's mise-en-scene is made obvious, with the contrast between swathes of rough landscape (where the dacoits, creatures of the wild, perch like vultures) and the village, where people live together in an ordered community—a setting that will soon welcome two rootless men who will learn about taking on responsibility and integrating into a larger world. When I screened and discussed the sequence in classes I taught, the discussions were perceptive, intense and wide-ranging—even when they involved students who had never actually watched the film (yes, there are now many such movie buffs). But the possibility of being surprised by a detail here, or a fresh re-watch, still exists, for them as well as for old fans like me, who thought there was nothing more to learn. Jai Arjun Singh is a writer and critic.
Deccan Herald
26-07-2025
- Politics
- Deccan Herald
Censors and their ridiculous cuts
In 2010, the Indian government undid one of their more contentious decisions. They 'unbanned' the Satyajit Ray documentary, Sikkim. This film, commissioned in 1971 by the Chogyal (king) of Sikkim and then cast aside since he was not happy with its final cut (too much reality … err… poverty!) had been banned in 1975 by the Indian government in the light of Sikkim's controversial accession to India that year. Over the years, the film had vanished from public view and only in 2010 was it screened in Kolkata to a rapturous response. By then, the context had changed, and it was deemed 'safe'. .As far as films were concerned, 1975 (the year of the infamous Emergency) was annus horribilis. That year also witnessed the government come down on Aandhi, directed by Gulzar. The lead character's look and the plot were deemed much too close to Indira Gandhi and her life. And then there was the case of Kissa Kursi Ka (KKK), submitted to the Censor Board in 1975, blacklisted (without due process) owing to its spoofing of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi and their flunkies like Dhirendra Brahmachari and Rukhsana Sultana. Its prints were then secreted away and burnt on the express instructions of V C Shukla, the then I&B minister. This, despite the fact that the movie was directed by Amrit Nahata, who was a Congress MP. The movie was subsequently reshot and released in was common to all of these films was their politics. Sikkim made the larger Indian state uncomfortable. Aandhi and KKK made political leaders calling the shots in the government uncomfortable. That state of affairs continues. .'Superman' can't save Hollywood from superhero one were to list the films that have found themselves in the crosshairs of the Censor Board in recent times, the same terms and conditions apply. Panjab '95 and Santosh question the role of the state and its enforcement wing, the police. L2: Empuraan with its depiction of the 2002 Gujarat riots was skating close to the brings us to the case of 'Janaki V v/s State of Kerala'..State as 'sanskari'.Janaki V v/s State of Kerala is about sexual assault. And that its eponymous victim-character bore the name of the goddess who was the epitome of Indian womanhood was what waylaid the film for a while. Why even a kissing scene from 'Superman' had the censor authorities' knickers in a twist and was cut. .This cultural dimension to censorship wasn't always a thing. British-era censorship rules came down mostly on politics. Gandhi, the freedom movement, revolution — it was these that were on their proscribed list. .But it didn't always work. For all their attempts to curb political messaging, the British were daft enough to pass the song 'Door hato, ye duniyawaalon' in the 1943 movie, 'Kismet'. Since it was World War II, they read it as a warning to the Germans and Japanese to stay away from India. All of India knew that the song was aimed at our then-rulers. And it is they who were being asked to leave. .As for the 'sanskari' angle, movies of the 1920s and 30s were decidedly more uninhibited. Kissing was common with movies featuring both many, many kisses (1932's 'Zarina' — 42!) and long, long ones (1933's 'Karma' — allegedly four minutes). But somewhere along the line, the powers that be deemed it necessary to 'save' the Indian public from overtly sensual displays and began to come down hard on what they deemed was 'vulgar' and against 'family values'. These categories, fuzzy as they were, gave the censor authorities a lot of leeway and power. We were then ushered into the era of negotiation as filmmakers and pen-pushers argued, often maddeningly, about art and the 'national interest' and struck deals. The public, who were both to be fed these films and 'protected', were mute spectators. .Is all hope lost? .Are we, the public, then condemned to be patronised and hoodwinked eternally? Are we going to be 'protected' from risqué content because of our 'tender' sensitivities on the one hand and denied political content and ushered into a state of blind obedience, on the other? .Well… yes! If we continue to be so thin-skinned and demand 'bans' on all and sundry on the basis of the dodgy 'hurt sentiments' argument, this is how things are likely to be. In fact, it will probably get worse. A scenario where someone calls for a ban on the cooking or eating of non-vegetarian food on screen is not unimaginable. Equally, another might want to have a say in the 'naming' of characters. Villains cannot bear 'good' names may be the it is time we healed ourselves. Committing to free expression and a willingness to tolerate contrary opinions (political, artistic, whatever) is de rigueur for good citizenship. That is the need of the hour. The state must be held accountable for livelihoods, health and education rather than focusing on censorship..(The author is a well-known writer and editor)
India Today
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
Satyajit Ray through Nemai Ghosh's lens
Light and Shadow: Satyajit Ray through Nemai Ghosh's Lens is now on view at Kolkata's Alipore Museum, presented by DAG in collaboration with the museum. The exhibition offers a rare and intimate look at the life and work of Satyajit Ray, one of India's greatest filmmakers, as captured over 25 years by photographer Nemai Ghosh. It remains on display until September 13.
News18
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
This Actor Was Once Called 'Flop Master General', Later Delivered 29 Hits With Top Heroine
When we talk about Bengali cinema, the first name that comes to mind is Uttam Kumar. Known as the 'Mahanayak' long before Amitabh Bachchan, Uttam Kumar left a lasting mark not just on Bengali films but on Indian cinema as a whole. However, his journey to stardom was far from easy. (News18 Hindi) Uttam Kumar's real name was Arun Kumar Chatterjee. He was born on September 3, 1926, in the Ahiritola area of Kolkata. After completing his education, he briefly worked at the Kolkata Port Trust, but his passion for theatre soon drew him to the world of acting. (News18 Hindi) He made his film debut in 1948 with Drishtidan, which failed at the box office. Unfortunately, it was just the beginning of a rough patch, with six more films flopping consecutively. The failures were so significant that people mockingly labelled him the 'Flop Master General'. (News18 Hindi) But Uttam Kumar didn't give up. In 1952, he bounced back with Basu Paribar, a film that became a box office hit and changed his fortunes. From that point on, there was no looking back. In 1966, his performance in Satyajit Ray's Nayak, where he portrayed a superstar battling inner turmoil, took his career to new heights. The character of 'Arindam Mukherjee' mirrored Uttam's own life in many ways. Satyajit Ray himself praised his acting, calling him a true superstar. (News18 Hindi) His on-screen pairing with Suchitra Sen was legendary in Bengali cinema. The two worked together in 30 films, including Sharey Chuattar, Saptapadi, Amar Prem, and Harano Sur. Remarkably, 29 of these were box office hits. Uttam Kumar once admitted in an interview that he might not have become the star he was without Suchitra Sen by his side. (News18 Hindi) After conquering Bengali cinema, he also ventured into Hindi films. His most acclaimed Hindi film was Amanush (1975), directed by Shakti Samanta, which was released in both Hindi and Bengali. He also starred in films like Anand Ashram, Chhoti Si Mulakat, and Dooriyan. (News18 Hindi) Uttam Kumar was recognised with several prestigious awards for his acting. In 1967, he won the National Film Award for Best Actor for his roles in Antony Firingee and Chiriyakhana. In 2009, the Indian Postal Department honoured him with a commemorative postage stamp. Kolkata also renamed a metro station as 'Mahanayak Uttam Kumar Metro Station' in his memory. (News18 Hindi) Tragically, while shooting for the film Ogo Bodhu Shundori, he experienced chest pain on July 23, 1980, and drove himself to the hospital. Despite medical efforts, he passed away the next day, on July 24, 1980, at the age of 53. (News18 Hindi) Uttam Kumar's life is a testament to resilience, talent, and the enduring power of cinema. From being written off early in his career to becoming a cultural icon, his journey continues to inspire generations. (News18 Hindi)
