Suresh Jindal - My Adventures With Satyajit Ray: The Making of Shatranj Ke Khilari

My Adventures with
Satyajit Ray

THE MAKING OF SHATRANJ KE KHILARI

Suresh Jindal

With an Introduction by
Andrew Robinson

Dedicated to my late parents,
who taught me to revere creativity and creators

Contents

Impossible Not to Open the Door

I heard about Satyajit Ray for the first time from Luis Buuel. He had seen Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955) at Cannes and told me: You must see this film, and see it several times [he did insist]. The director is a great one.

I saw Pather Panchali, and I saw it several times, following Buuels instructions. Then I watched Rays other films, one by one, and loved all of them. Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958) is among my all-time favourites. I have seen it six or seven times (and Ill see it again and again).

I was lucky enough to meet Satyajit in Calcutta in 1982. I was travelling through India with Peter Brook, looking for any help, any indication or suggestion that could come to our rescue, for we were working on our stage adaptation of The Mahabharata.

I gave up, because I couldnt imagine Kirk Douglas playing Arjuna, Ray said with a smile.

We met again several times in Calcutta in the following years. I remember sitting next to him during the screening of one of his last films, Shakha Proshakha (Branches of the Tree, 1990). As always, I felt his strong presence. When I watched his unforgettable last declaration the day he received the Academys Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement on television in Paris, tears welled up in my eyes. I knew I would never see him again. A great artist, and a great man, was leaving us. And he was aware of it.

When it comes to Suresh, its strange, but I dont remember when I first met him; I just know that we are friends. We met several times in India, maybe thirty years ago, but also in Paris andstrangely enoughin Mexico. We had long conversations, and together we even cautiously explored the jungle near Palenque in the Maya country. Suresh kept pretending that his light Indian sandals were the best possible shoes for walking in an unexplored forest, which, to this day, I doubt.

One day he sent me the manuscript of this book, containing the letters exchanged between Satyajit Ray and himself regarding the movie he had produced, Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), which is set in Lucknow in the nineteenth century, precisely in 1856. And I was seduced at once, because I had never read anything like it before: the story of the making of a film, step by step, from beginning to end. The relations between a film director and a producer are usually secretive. They can sometimes be treacherous, even violent. And they remain a mystery to the crew and, consequently, to the audience.

While reading Sureshs book (and looking at the pictures and documents it contains), we discover whats generally hidden. Its like walking into an adventure novel, where you penetrate another jungle full of delusions and dangers, but with the best possible guides. I guess even if we dont belong to the world of cinema (and we dont need to in order to enjoy this book), we partake of the desires, the worries, the hesitations, the difficulties and also the joys these two men faced along the way in making a great film.

A legend (Suresh regards Ray as a magnificent human specimen, a towering personality) is coming to visit us, to share his dreams with us, as if we were part of his team; I would even say, as part of his family.

And its impossible not to open the door and let him in.

JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIRE

Suresh, every film is like an adventure!Satyajit Ray
(while researching Shatranj Ke Khilari in Lucknow)

S hatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players), completed in 1977, was the first adult film about the British Raj in India. Today, after Gandhi, Heat and Dust, The Jewel in the Crown, A Passage to India, Lagaan and many other films, Satyajit Rays film remains by far the most sophisticated portrayal of this particular clash of cultures. No other directorBritish, Indian or otherwiseis likely to better it. As V.S. Naipaul remarked, It is like a Shakespeare scene. Only 300 words are spoken but goodness!terrific things happen.

Ray had known Premchands short story Shatranj Ke Khilari for more than thirty years before he attempted to make a screenplay out of it, after meeting the young producer Suresh Jindal in 1974. Although it had first appeared in print in Hindi in the mid-1920s, Ray read it in English translation in the early 1940s as an art student at Rabindranath Tagores university in Bengal and was immediately drawn to it for several reasons.

Lucknow, the setting of the story, is one of the most resonant cities in India. Satyajit took holidays there in the late 1920s and 1930s from the age of about eight, staying at first in the house of an uncle, later with other relatives. The uncle, a barrister called Atulprasad Sen, was the most famous Bengali composer of songs after Tagore. His house hummed with music of every kind, and his guests displayed polished manners to match; they included the greatest north Indian classical musician of modern times, Ustad Allauddin Khan (the father of Ali Akbar Khan and the guru of Ravi Shankar). The young Ray listened to him playing the piano and violin, and took in the atmosphere of courtly refinement that was so characteristic of Lucknow. He was also taken to see all the sights that had made Lucknow known as the Paris of the East and the Babylon of India a century before: the great mosque Bara Imambara with its notorious Bhulbhulaiya Maze, the Dilkusha Garden and the remains of the palaces of the Kings of Awadh (Oudh). Nearby he saw the shell of the British Residency, with the marks of cannonballs still visible on its walls and a marble plaque commemorating the spot where Sir Henry Lawrence had fallen during the Indian Mutiny/Uprising of 1857. Even today these places have a peculiar elegiac aura. The brief allusions to the city and that period in its history in Premchands story conjured up a host of images and sensations in the twenty-year-old Rays mind.

By then he was also keenly interested in chess. Over the next ten years or so this became an addictionthe main bond (along with Western classical music) between him and his first English friend, Norman Clare, an RAF serviceman with time on his hands in Calcutta in 1944-46. After this friend was demobbed, Ray found himself without a partner and took to playing solitaire chess. Over the next few years he became engrossed in it and bought books on chess, which he would soon decide to sell to raise money to shoot the pilot footage for his first film, Pather Panchali. His passion for chess disappeared only with the onset of a greater passion: film-making.

That came around 1951, after his return to Calcutta from his first visit to Britain. Nearly a quarter of a century passed before Ray tackled the story he had admired as a student. His reluctance was principally due to his doubts about writing a screenplay and working with actors in a languageUrdu, the court language of Lucknow (which is very similar to Hindi, the language of Premchands story)that was not his own. So rich, subtle and lifelike is Rays usual film dialogueas Naipaul appreciated from just the portions of