Reading Satyajit Ray

Hailed as one of the finest filmmakers from India, Satyajit Ray’s films like Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Shatranj Ke Khiladi have ensured that his is an everlasting legacy in the pantheon of Indian cinema. In a bid to celebrate his 90th birth anniversary, a new collection of his scripts titled Satyajit Ray: Original English Film Scripts has been distributed by the publishing house, Orient Blackswan. This collection is edited and introduced by Ray’s son, Sandip Ray, and Aditi Nath Sarkar, erstwhile director of the Satyajit Ray Society. Sarkar is also a documentary filmmaker, apart from being an associate professor at DA-IICT, Gandhinagar.

“Ray originally published the Bengali versions of most of his film scripts pretty regularly in a Calcutta literary quarterly called Ekshan. He believed that the cinema-going public should have these available for reading, and believed that a film-viewing culture had to be thus created; a film-going public had to be educated. Ray promoted that cause all his life quite apart from his filmmaking, by starting one of the first film societies in India. Hence, the publication of these film scripts is really part of a larger set of cultural activities, which seek to propagate Ray’s agenda,” says Sarkar.

In 1992, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,the Satyajit Ray Society and funding agencies such as the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the India Foundation of the Arts, and other organisations came together to try preserving and restoring Ray’s heritage. Part of this archiving effort has been preserving Ray’s paper archives, for he left extensive ‘Notebooks’ of each of his productions. These have draft storylines, scenarios, draft dialogue, character outlines, musical annotations, story-boards, detailed pictures of costumes, shot breakdowns etc — in short, the entire visual and aural creative process of one of India’s foremost artistes, in detail. There are full musical annotations both in staff notation and in sargam, or all the musical treatments and background music for most of his films.

“Our volume is part of a planned attempt at archiving and sharing this material. The dominant idea here is of a distributed archive,” explains Sarkar. “Most of the material has been scanned (at low-res to avoid illegal publication) and preserved on high quality DVDs. These may easily be duplicated and shared with other appropriate archives. Secondly, just as with this current volume, material from these archives may be gradually printed and published in book form.”

The most technologically advanced initiative so far has been to start placing this material gradually in a searchable, retrievable format online. This is currently being worked on as a collaborative project between the ICSIT (Institute of Cybernetics Systems and Information Technology, Kolkata) and SNLTR (Society for Natural Language Technology Research, Kolkata) and DA-IICT in Gandhinagar. The object would be to start with placing one searchable version of one Ray notebook online.

The Gandhinagar team comprises professors Prasenjit Majumdar and Aditi Nath Sarkar, assisted by their students Prabhat Shukla and  Saumya Gupta, and Ahmedabad-based musicians such as Nirav Mashruwala. The team has been working on this project for the past few months, with the plan to have a usable version of at least the first Ray notebook online by Ray’s birth anniversary on May 2.