That Flash of Genius

Translated by S.K. Ray Chaudhuri

HarperCollins India

Pages: 107

Rs 199

Tangled up this May were the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore and the 90th of Satyajit Ray. If one subscribes to the fundamentalism that the Bengal Renaissance ended not with Tagore’s death in 1941 but Ray’s in 1992,then Ray was its last embodiment. Not because the original efflorescence lingered for an extra half-century,but because Ray worked in and perfected a medium whose potential was far from being realised,in India,by the “official” end-date of 1941. The anniversary was fit for the publication of Nemai Ghosh’s Manik-da: Memories of Satyajit Ray,for the first time in an English edition,the original Bengali having appeared in 2000,and the prompt French translation a year later.

Ghosh,an accidental arrival in the realm of photography in the late 1960s,was Ray’s Boswell with a camera,the resemblance noted by the maestro himself. Till Ray’s last days,Ghosh shadowed him everywhere,beginning as an amateur stills photographer of his sets and shoots,soon finding anytime access to Ray at “work and play”. Ghosh was an actor in the theatre who had to make the painful choice between his first love and his newfound obsession soon after meeting Ray,picking what he believed was his destiny.

Manik-da is an autobiography. It is the anecdotal story of how one man’s life changed by the contact with,and the presence in it of,a towering 6 feet 2 inch figure. In recounting that tale of art,skill and livelihood,an intimate close-up of Ray emerges — the best actor on his own sets and off,an instinctive spotter of talent (how else would a chance entrant with an ordinary camera chanced upon by a friend in a taxi,who had never before held one in his hand,ever get his opportunity?),a firm believer in doing-it-oneself and a disciplined perfectionist.

Nobody knew Ray better. Ghosh has 90,000-plus photographs of Ray — having worked always in black-and-white and natural light to preserve the dramatic tension and precision of his stills — spanning a long relationship in which only a few words were exchanged between the two. This book,rather unevenly translated,and accompanied by a foreword by Sharmila Tagore,offers 50-odd previously unpublished of those photographs. His subject fascinated Ghosh: “the magnetic presence of the filmmaker as auteur. My lens captured various poses of that intense,self-contained man…” The reader’s dilemma is whether to read the photos as complementary to the text,or the text as an accompaniment to the photographs,which Ray used to say were shot exactly the way he himself would have taken them. Here’s the scale-tipper: the author in Ghosh resides in his camera.