LIGHTNING STRIKES THE BANYAN TREE
The two final films Satyajit Ray made were his most direct addresses to his audience. He cut all the bells and whistles and gave us his most urgent concerns, and his learnings from a long and uncommon journey as a story-teller. It is terribly unfortunate that these are also bitter films and probably reflect a sense of dejection towards how the world had progressed, or regressed, during his lifetime.
While these are not his best realised films (on most days I consider Sakha Prosakha to be his weakest work) yet watching them should be a humbling experience because we are the closest to him we have ever been. And whatever flaws there are in the film, primarily the weak performances, they also serve to show us, by contrast, what a high-performing director he was for most of his life.
Who Inherits The Earth
The doyen of Ananda Nagar, Ananda Mohan (after whom the town was renamed), is a man who has amassed great wealth and reputation during his lifetime. On his seventieth birthday he suffers a heart attack during a felicitation ceremony, bringing his three sons and their families to his bedside (the fourth son is an invalid and already lives with him).
He has believed all his life that they have taken after him in their approach to work, propped by two maxims – “Work is worship” and “Honesty is the best policy”. He is proud that the all three of them have successful careers and have inherited his ethics. Proshanto, the invalid, was the most promising among them but was left mentally disabled by an accident.
But, while his tangible property can be divided four ways equally and left to his sons, is it correct to assume that his values have also been equally distributed the same way? After all, the working sons lead their own separate lives and hardly visit him so he has no way to know anything about them except based on their behaviour when they visit.
They aren’t bad, ungrateful children, not at all, but they aren’t innocent either. The eldest son (Probodh), and the third son (Probir), both indulge in the accumulation of unaccounted wealth – one by cheating on taxes, and the other by gambling on races. They know of these qualities in each other, which the father is oblivious of. They are both convinced that the times when their father achieved success without relying on any form of corruption are like a hoary past compared to their times. Now it is more shameful in their times to appear poor and lagging behind, than it is to be corrupt.
So what does this say about values? Can they only be practiced depending on the times? After all, during Ananda Mohan’s days it wasn’t a bad thing to be just like everyone else and live a humble life. There was no rat race, no need to match the consumption of others, none of it. If one thinks about it, even the two sons are trying to be just like everyone else, it’s just that the definition of what everyone is like has changed. Values aren’t set by individuals, but by societies, they imply.
Ray, who was himself the same age as the character Ananda Mohan, probably had a different path to success than any filmmaker of the time of this film, or even our time. My own experience has shown me how little good work means nowadays and how much is dependent on your carefully constructed image. If I follow the values of Ray’s time, and unfortunately I do, I will never achieve even a modicum of success. Instead, if I were to bet on horses or throw lavish parties on tax-free money, I may have a much better chance of organising my own success.
So what of us, our being, is left behind when we die? Probably nothing. But then again there are many people in the film who are positively influenced by Ananda Mohan, such as the young doctor who treats him, or the townspeople who daily benefit from his public works, like schools, hospitals, and parks. Maybe the legacy we leave behind is indirect insofar as we may never come to know how we have touched someone’s life. Large or small acts of charity, generosity, love, these may disperse like pollen in the air and create a legacy that we will never know.
When Ananda Mohan comes to know of his sons’ compromised careers, that too through the mouth of his grandson, he is devastated. Even though he is clearly out-of-touch with reality, we cannot question that his desires were noble. To suddenly go from the pride of having such principled offspring, to hearing your darling grandchild talk about black money is quite a blow.
But this is also the time when his love for his second son, Proshanto, is reawakened. Although he missed out on an illustrious career owing to his accident, perhaps he has also been spared the vicissitudes of the working life that his brothers had to face. Although he is not a kajer manush (working man, or man of utility) like his brothers, he has proved that he is the only one who has held on to his original values. That is not to say that what happened to him was not a tragedy but some kind of disguised blessing, yet it also affirms that not all utility comes from employment. Being devoted and uncompromising are probably greater achievements in this world, especially when life has been especially hard.
Personal Is Political
Although the second son is the only one who stays with the father and is his true companion in old age, it is the youngest who has actually fought the good fight against corruption. Protap resigned from his job when he found out about the malpractices rampant there. He cannot reconcile to this reality and would rather give it all up to pursue his reawakened dream – to be an actor on stage. Not only is it something he is good at and wants to do, but it is also a move to a community of like-minded moralistic people, at least to a greater extent.
Protap is also a stand-in for another of Ray’s disappointments in life – to see the undignified decline and fall of the workers’ movement around the world. Referring to the fall of communism across Europe in 1989, Protap confesses he doesn’t know what to make of the world anymore. All the promise of younger days has been betrayed and all hope has come crashing down. He looked up to seniors at work, just as he looked up to the leaders of the movement, and both have let him down.
To see your heroes fall before your eyes is a decisive episode in anybody’s life. Where once stood giants are now broken statues that don’t just practice corruption, but may even mock and abuse your inability to fall in line with it. Protap’s desire to abandon his line entirely and not look for any alternate employment comes from our need to walk away from what hurts us deeply. To continue would have been possible only with blinkers or lies.
As a filmmaker, Ray was always trying to use his films to inform his audience. While he was a master of his craft and never polemical, he did use his films as carriers of values. Almost all of his films tried to offer hope even in the bleakest of stories. Yet, between his first release (1955) and his last (1991) he would have seen things get much worse overall than better. The unemployment depicted in his 1970s films continued in the 1990s and in our present times. Poverty in the villages remains pitiful. Education has become hollow and only placement-oriented. People are not more charitable, not more aware, not more upstanding. No matter how much we try, one just cannot find a way in which Ray could have seen the world around him and felt satisfied he had done anything to improve it.
Protap could do nothing to expose the corruption in his company, he can’t even do anything to change his brothers. The contemptuous silence he maintains towards his brothers was also how he treated his work. The problems are too big, people are not interested in change, and he alone can do nothing. Self-preservation is the only answer. Find an oasis, a bubble, of like-minded people and try and contain your entire life within that.
The Cremation Fire Of Vanity
Finally, we come to what the film is most directly addressing – aging. The two oldest characters in the film, 70-year-old Ananda Mohan and 93-year-old Abhay Charan, his father, are both either bed-ridden or restricted to one room. While Ananda Mohan will recover and regain his freedom, his father is too old and weak and senile to be allowed any such privilege. He can no longer do anything for himself, requiring a round-the-clock helper to feed him, clothe him, and so on. He is in, what Shakespeare called, his second childhood.
And like a child he is able to have moments of pure enjoyment, like when he has visitors. His face lights up when he sees anyone new, and there may even be signs of recognition. That’s why it’s especially disappointing to see that even when the house is full of new faces he is not allowed to mix with them. Of course, this is mostly for his own good because neither physical nor mental exertion is good at his age. Yet one cannot but feel horrible for the kind of life that one gets reduced to in extreme old age. To be happy becomes a health risk. And yet, what is the point of prolonging life, if one isn’t allowed to really live?
And while he desperately wants to be with the others, some of the others have no time for him. Their reasons range from simple discomfort in how to react to the senile man, to actively avoiding his manifestations of age and decay. It’s not surprising that in a society that doesn’t know how to make adjustments for our seniors, we cannot make many other adjustments either. There’s probably a direct link between being uncaring and being corrupt – neither characteristic can stand the slightest discomfort. Is having a long life a blessing in such a world?
Ananda Mohan, by the end of the film, has realised he is more helpless than he thought. His mind may be sharp, his body may have strength, but his ability to influence the world has diminished to the point of near zero. Where he once was a stalwart and a highly influential man in his community, he has suddenly been faced with redundance. He goes so far as to be prideful of the blood his children have gotten from him, believing somehow he has passed on his ethics. He believes only in being a kajer manush, little disguising his contempt for those who don’t work like he did.
After all this if he cannot impact his four sons (or what he knows of them) what else can he expect? It is ironic that just before his heart attack a biography was launched on Ananda Mohan’s life, because everything about his life and all his beliefs are flipped on their heads in just a week after that.
The image of Ananda Mohan on his bed, weak and hooked up to medical machines, is eerily similar to the last glimpse of Ray the world would ever see. As he accepted his Oscar Award for Lifetime Achievement from his hospital bed, his deep baritone interrupted frequently by his breathing, he talked of how the films he admired entertained but also taught. There was no one better at that kind of cinema than Ray himself.
Looking at the ethos of this film, and wondering whether we have been good students, that is a question best left unanswered.