Book review: Bengali sentimentality running riot

Book: Manik-Da: Memories Of Satyajit Ray
Author: Nemai Ghosh
Translated by SK Ray Chaudhuri
Harper Collins
107 pages
Rs 199

“Bengalis are a sentimental people.” That’s how the Bengali publisher’s note — prefacing the author’s note which itself prefaces the foreword to the actual text of Manik-da: Memories Of Satyajit Ray by Nemai Ghosh — begins.

These are prescient words, because when you’ve flipped through its 100-odd pages you’ll find that the book is an exercise in reminiscence made extremely dull by good old Bengali sentiment.
Bengali sentimentalism is quite unique.

Under the CPI (M)’s 34-year reign, the chest-beating, pontificating, parochial Bengali bhadralok/mohila was starved of men and women of achievement— heroes if you will — to chest-beat, pontificate or be parochial about. So they chase ghosts — trying
desperately to breathe life into fast-fading shadows.

There are three ‘ghosts’ who rule the roost in Bengal.

Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray and Sourav Ganguly (whose cricketing achievements are rattling about in chains and white sheets even as I write this). The achievements of these men are not in question. The cloying and institutionalised fawning over their achievements is. And it’s this never-ending obsession that allows books like Manik-da to be commissioned and eventually published.

Ghosh is a Bengali cultural icon in his own right. He is best known for his photographs of the master director. But the primary identity that Ghosh establishes for himself in this book is not that of a photographer, friend or observer of Satyajit Ray, but a wide-eyed, awestruck fanboy.

Take this, for instance: “I was to take photographs of Manik-da’s shooting that (sic) too on his order! It was as if the stars were in my reach! That was the first time I felt I was doing a job which was part of his work.” Or this — when Ghosh was in the employ of another famous director and got a call from Ray — “He also knew I would leave his job if he did not release me, irrespective of the loss I might suffer. My fascination for Manik-da was like that — unbridled, unreasonable.” The adulation, the worship, is palpable.

Most of the book is Ghosh’s musings about how Ray plucked him out of obscurity, transformed him from a budding actor into a professional photographer, and finally his personal rapport with the great man. It could’ve been fodder for some interesting insights into a fiercely private personality. However, so besotted is Ghosh with Ray that his anecdotes (clearly personal and meaningful to him) come off as quite banal and uninteresting.

The text is only half of the story. There are 50 ‘never-before-seen’ photographs accompanying the text. And they are wonderful. Naturally lit, exquisitely framed, the candid moments of Ray at work bear the hallmark of Ghosh’s true calling — that of a photographer. Half a glance at any of Ghosh’s photographs gives the reader more insight into Ray than 50 pages of his text. His total immersion into the cult of Ray’s personality may have robbed him of the distance required to be an astute and critical observer.

However, this almost fanatical devotion to Ray, the man, works wonderfully to his advantage as a photographer. The nuances that Ghosh is able to bring out through the lens of his camera, far exceeds anything he’s able to put in to words.

This would’ve been a great collection of photos. But as book of memories of the iconic Bengali director, it adds nothing of great value to the sea of analysis and musings that already exists.