Satyajit Ray and Suresh Jindal, the director and producer respectively of Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977), were at Harvard University promoting the film, when Jindal ran into a young Indian woman who begged Jindal to allow her to meet Ray at a dinner, a university don was hosting for Ray and a few other distinguished guests. The event was invite only, so Jindal had to say no – much to his regret, for the woman was rather pretty. But he was surprised when she showed up anyway, having miraculously scrounged an invitation.
He was quite pleased at the prospect of spending the evening in her company but was annoyed, and more than a little amused, when the woman simply ignored him all evening and instead sat at the long feet of her hero, the six-foot-five Ray, as he reclined in an armchair smoking a pipe and discoursing on cinema. Many years later, Jindal ran into the woman again and asked her if she remembered that evening. “Why, yes,” Mira Nair replied. “In fact, it was that night I knew beyond all doubt I wanted to be a filmmaker.”
I chose to begin this article with the above anecdote because I believe that although Ray’s cinematic and literary achievements are well known, comparatively little has been written or spoken about the lives of the people he touched, in his almost fifty-year-long career. One such person was, of course, Suresh Jindal, the author of My Adventures With Satyajit Ray: The Making of Shatranj Ke Khilari, himself a luminary who built his reputation by producing ‘offbeat, non-mainstream films’ such as Rajnigandha (1974) and commercial epics such as Gandhi (1982) and the titular Ray film.
Jindal was only thirty-two when he approached Ray about making a Hindi film. He was certain Ray would refuse because the latter’s aversion to setting a film in a community he didn’t know, and making it in a language he couldn’t speak, was legendary. However, Ray had been considering tackling an epic for some time. Because this would have required a large budget, he would be forced to make it in Hindi. In Jindal, a young renegade who – unlike the titans who ruled Bombay’s film industry at the time – firmly believed that a director needed full creative control to do his or her job, Ray found the ideal collaborator. Jindal’s book is a rare gem because although Ray’s eventful career has been well documented in two official biographies – a personal biography written by his wife, countless essays (many by Ray himself), and full-length documentaries – almost no media exists that has been produced by people Ray worked closely with. A few have merged in recent years, but what makes Jindal’s work unique is that it contains letters Ray and Jindal exchanged during the making of the film.
Ray is often called the last true man of letters. Although this is true in a metaphorical context – Ray was a polymath who wrote dozens of essays and ran a children’s magazine (Sandesh) to which he contributed short stories and poems as well as the popular Feluda detective stories, also wrote his own screenplays and wrote and composed his own music – it is true in a literal sense, as the pages of My Adventures… attest. Ray and Jindal corresponded throughout filming, and the image of Ray that emerges through the letters is a more colourful one than even his biographies have managed to convey. This is a Ray who was all those things he was claimed and depicted to be – viscerally talented, intelligent, and perhaps a little aloof – but also one who was often angry and impatient and bogged down in technical and financial details; in other words, this is a Ray who is a lot more human.
It would be impossible to discuss all the interesting insights I obtained into Ray’s psyche and work process in this article, so I’ll mention the one that stuck the most firmly in my memory. While shooting in Rajasthan, Jindal had put up the non-Bengali crew in a four-star hotel and the Bengali crew (except Ray and a few other senior unit members) in a three-star hotel at the latter’s own request. Everything seemed fine until Jindal and some of the crew-members indulged in a drunken night of revelry that culminated with the different ethnicities in the room joshing each other about their stereotypes. Jindal, as a Punjabi, took his lumps, but he gave also gave back as good as he got to the Bengalis. This incident caused the Bengali crewmembers to complain to Ray that Jindal was ethnophobic, with the implication that that this is why he had put up the Bengali crew in a three-star hotel. Ray promptly summoned Jindal to his suite and excoriated him (although without using profanities). This shocked me because in all of Ray’s interviews and biographies, his reserve has repeatedly stood out. Jindal was so shocked that he didn’t inform Ray it had been the crew’s decision to stay at a different hotel. Instead, he left the suite and immediately took the next flight home, ostensibly abandoning the film. Although Ray managed to coax him back, it took a long time for their relationship to regain its previous warmth.
Many other Rays emerge from this book: Ray the technician who was concerned about shooting being postponed because a certain types of lens hadn’t arrived from abroad, Ray the accountant who hesitated to ask Jindal for more money to reshoot a scene, Ray the father figure whom the crew approached all the time with their problems, and so on. However, none of these images seem disparate; instead, they come together to create a cohesive picture of a man who was, in many ways, just like anyone else. He was someone who was singularly focused when working, but he was also someone who enjoyed tea from a roadside stall and joked around with his crew. Jindal’s book humanises Ray and consequently makes him a little more accessible to those in awe of his prodigious talent. For that reason alone, it is worth picking up.