The Cinema of Ray: A Humanistic Rendition of Childhood

Abstract

Any discourse on childhood entails a quintessentially humanist consideration of life and experience, a retrospective glance at what was, with a pang lurking from behind all sensibilities as to how things have come to be now – a memory of innocence, now endangered due to various complex processes of circumstances and relationships that have eventually influenced life and have been influenced by it. Yet, the condition of childhood continues to be a vulnerable point in time when a child needs care and attention to grow up to be a worthy man of the future. In this paper I would talk about the representation of childhood through the moving images – the cinema – a medium that may be said to have brought childhood to us in a way that we, more often than not, are able to reach out to the ‘good old days’ and, in the process, cherish the bygone reality. The film has emerged to be an efficacious medium not only of representation but of communication as well between the filmmaker and the audience, much in the manner of that between a writer of literature and his/her reader though not in an entirely identical sense. When the images appeal to our visual sense, we are ‘made able’ to recognize and relate to the eventualities appearing before us in a way that we begin to relive the once-lived experiences that nostalgically constitute a part of our life. A cinematic representation of the child impels the viewer to visualize the pastwhen he/she, as a child, was perhaps a different human being altogether – different from his/her grown-up, conscious, mature, and even complex and gendered self. A question that may arise here is that, do children always require to be considered only as ‘children’? Do they always need to be thought of as ‘vulnerable’ and, hence, necessarily ‘gullible’, epithets that are almost unexceptionally associated with the condition of being a child? These questions have most certainly urged me to explore the representations of the child in the cinema of a man who used the medium to lend an indelible expression to the human cause, thereby championing it through his works – the artist of a magnitudinal height, Satyajit Ray. A very interesting feature that characterizes Ray’s portrayal of the child in films is that he significantly restrains himself from ‘patronizing’ children in any way or considering them as having ‘limited intelligence’. He did not believe in offering them ‘kids’ stuff’ since that is not always what they desire to see and have. A child’s intelligence needs to be respected and Ray offered him with situations that required some bit of critical and analytical thinking, along with making ethical judgements, even on his (the child’s) part. He did not dish out to the young materials that are conventionally made use of to be, in their turn, blindly and uncritically taken for the sake of ‘childish’ pleasure. The essence of education and a healthy development of the mind is what his films are imbued with thereby implicitly, yet palpably, rejecting the convention of conceiving children as being mere ‘sponges’ who could easily be moulded and silenced with superficial elements of commercial entertainment designed for them. In this study, I would consider three of Ray’s feature films –Sonar Kella (‘The Golden Fortress’, 1974), Joy Baba Felunath (‘The Elephant God’, 1979) and ‘Phatikchand’ (1983) along with two short films entitled ‘Two’, that he made in the year 1964 as a part of a trilogy of short films from India that were commissioned by the US Public Television, and ‘Pikoor Diary’ (‘Pikoo’s Diary’, 1980) – in an attempt to show how the master filmmaker took up the theme of childhood,without taking advantage of the child’s ‘supposed’ immaturity but rather, with a recognition of his (the child’s) needs and potentialities and respect for his innocence that needs to be nurtured and not exploited.