Kishore Singh, Business Standard, New Delhi August 1, 2009
A sneak-peek at photographer Nemai Ghosh’s collection of Satyajit Ray images bought recently by a Delhi-based archivist.
“I can’t invite you home,” photographer Nemai Ghosh is in a state of despair. “There are photographs everywhere, negatives on the tables, slides on the chairs, there is no space in the house.” The 75-year-old has not been well, but there’s a silver lining on at least one count: he recently sold his archive, a quarter century’s photographs of director Satyajit Ray, to Delhi-based art collector Ashish Anand. “At least the negatives will be saved,” he sighs from his home in Kolkata, “there is nobody else to look after them.”
Ghosh was a happenstance photographer, stumbling accidentally not only on to a medium that led him to abandon his chosen profession as an actor, but also led him to Ray and his creative craft of filmmaking, both of which he observed up close from the director’s space and eye. “Passion, love, respect, I gave him everything,” Nemai-da can’t control the tremor in his voice even 17 years after Satyajit Ray died. From 1967, when he literally stumbled into Ray’s camp, till 1992, when Ray died soon after he received the lifetime achievement Oscar in his bed in Calcutta, Ghosh went on to become Ray’s shadow. “It was like being in a trance for 25 years,” he recounts, “It’s like still being in a trance. I think of him all the time, I miss him all the time.”
Ray was shooting Goopy Gyane Bagha Byne at an outdoor location when a theatre friend cajoled him to come along to watch the shooting. Ghosh, who was learning photography as a hobby at the time, had carried his Canon 8Q L17 and “two cut-piece still films”, all of which he exhausted taking pictures of Ray at work. When he showed his efforts to his photographer brother, “he punched me in my belly and kissed me on my forehead”, Nemai-da recalls, “simultaneously”. With his brother’s blessings, Ghosh began his photographic career.
It was a career that began and some might say ended with Satyajit Ray — even though Ghosh has gone on to create an exciting body of work with portraits, Bengali theatre and, more recently, photographing artists at work in their studios. But in the years that he came to know Ray and lasting the rest of his lifetime, Ghosh was never far from him. He attended all his shoots, became his unofficial photographer, and was always at hand to do cameo shots of everyone from the director to his actors and his characters. “Satyajit Ray never told me whether the pictures were good or bad,” Nemai-da’s memories are still warm with his presence, “never”. Sometimes he would ask to see the pictures and might say ‘bomba!’ — fantastic! — and on a few occasions he would ask me for pictures to give to American magazines. He called me a biographer’s photographer.”
Part of that biographer’s material went into the making of the book Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema, written by Andrew Robinson and accompanied by Ray’s own drawings and 450 of Ghosh’s pictures. “For seven years I ran around for the making of the book, a classic, but no one helped me. Andrew Robinson spent £42,000 from his pocket on making it — he did not want to compromise on its quality.” To ensure that the book remained affordable in India, both Robinson and Ghosh offered to give up any royalties on copies of the book sold in the country.
That is when Ghosh realised that his photography archive needed rescuing. “I had offers from abroad, but I did not know those people or how they would preserve the negatives, or how other people would have access to the pictures. Besides, how would they identify the people, the actors, the cast?” It was then that Delhi Art Gallery’s Ashish Anand made him an offer, even though the negotiating took three years. “I trust him,” says Nemai-da, “I believe he will keep his promise.”
Back in Delhi, in the basement of the gallery in Hauz Khas Village, where a team of researchers is engaged in the documentation process of Indian art in general, and Ghosh’s Ray collection in particular, Somu Sahi is particularly excited. A filmmaker in the learning, Somu is part of archivist and documentation specialist Pramod Kumar KG’s team. Sorting through Ghosh’s 25-year-old archive has been an exhausting process. If the entertaining part has been watching Ray’s films from that period so that photographs of actors preparing for their shots, or stills from the films, can be properly documented, getting the sequence right, cross-referencing, identification and serialising them can sometimes take its toll.
When it arrived in Delhi, the archive consisted of 80,000 black and white negatives (and a few colour slides and negatives) packed in four trunks. “This is probably the largest photographic archive by any one photographer on one personality,” says an excited Anand, brimming with the possibilities it opens up professionally, since he has also bought the copyright for the negatives. That means that even the copyright for printed or published pictures, or those in important collections, now rests with him. “He was happy it was going into the right hands. I’ve told him we’ll do justice to his pictures as well as to all the people he has photographed,” Anand explains. Already, he’s planning “scores of exhibitions and publications over the next few years that we will take even to museums abroad”.
Anand asked the associate director of the Alkazi Foundation, Pramod Kumar KG, to head the documentation process and give the archive shape. “He has tremendous knowledge of photography,” as is evident from his last assignment — archiving the royal collection of the house of Mewar, an exhibition from which has recently been mounted within the Udaipur’s City Palace complex. Already, a little more than half the negatives have been scanned, and a quarter documented. In all, the collection has extensive pictures of 25 Ray films, including Agantuk, Sadgati, Jana Aranya, Ghare Baire, Aranyer Din Ratri, Sonar Kella, Hirak Rajar Deshe, Ashani Sanket, Ganashatru, Pratidwandi and, of course, the Apu triology, three documentaries (on Sikkim, the artist Benodebehari Mukherjee and on the Bharatanatyam dancer Bala Saraswati) and several shorts. “Certain movies are very well documented,” Anand says, among them the only film he did that was not in Bengali, Shatranj Ke Khilari with, for Ray, a star cast of Bollywood biggies. During different periods he worked with Sharmila Tagore, Simi Grewal (whom he cast impossibly as a tribal in Aranyer Din Ratri), Utpal Dutt and Soumitra Chatterjee, though he also worked with Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey.
Anand first chanced upon the collection in Kolkata when he was looking for pictures of Benodebehari Mukherjee, on whom he was doing a book for which he required photographs of the painter. Since Ghosh had photographed him while Ray was making a documentary on the artist, he had the pictures that Anand wanted. In a later book, Faces of Indian Art (Art Alive Gallery), Ghosh writes, “How could a visually impaired man ever paint? I remember asking myself till I actually saw him in his studio. It was an amazing experience for me although I must admit that I was not consciously aware of his art. Instead, I was occupied with my own work, that of taking photographs and recording those moments.”
“In 2006, I saw his archives,” says Anand, “and I told him I wanted to do a deal with him and give it proper shape.” That only happened earlier this year, and for an undisclosed sum. Not only do the 80,000 negatives record almost everything there is on Ray, but there are other photographs too – of the Kutch region before it was struck by the earthquake, of the Bastar region, portraits of Mother Teresa and theatre director Habib Tanvir as well as a large selection on Bengal theatre. “I worked with Utpal Dutt in theatre,” remembers Nemai-da, “that’s why my compositions are theatrical, and there’s in-action photography.”
“What’s amazing,” says Anand, “is that you discover several aspects of Ray’s filmmaking, there are rare shots of him at work, or when thinking, or planning his shots, preparing his actors, even trimming someone’s moustache, if required.” This extensive documentation was part of Ghosh’s life. “I went to his house at different hours without needing to make appointments,” writes Ghosh about Ray in Faces, “and as a result saw him involved in various kinds of activities related to filmmaking. He would at times be doing illustrations, at other times calligraphy and poster designing,” processes he photographed, “and all the time I would watch him silently.”
Interestingly, Ray had begun his career as a commercial artist with the British firm D J Keymer, where he was not entirely happy because the English employees in the advertising agency were better paid and treated than their Indian counterparts, but he accepted the offer to work at the company’s head office in London, in 1950. Earlier, he had met and assisted filmmaker Jean Renoir with locations when he came to India to shoot The River. In London now, he devoured films, watching 99 of them in three months, and was most profoundly influenced by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle.
From there to shooting Pather Panchali, the first of his Apu triology, was a short journey, even though the film itself was in the making for three long years. Ray was strapped for funds, refused to change storylines, and was laying the foundation of a way of making films that would define him for the rest of his life. It is the reason Ghosh’s photographs of the director at work are marvellous instances of Ray’s creativity – whether tracking shots from the back of an Ambassador dickey, or from within a bullock cart, or on a bicycle rickshaw in Calcutta’s crowded streets.
He is often cited as the edge of creative renaissance for his ability to combine writing to illustrating. He revived the family-owned Sandesh magazine, would draw meticulously the details for everything from the sets to the costumes to be used in his films, drew comic strips, created the popular sleuth Feluda, and there is even a debate that Steven Spielberg’s E.T. is nothing more than a science fiction character lifted off Satyajit Ray’s drawing board.
But it is not just the meagre resources and how he used creative ingenuity to surpass such obstacles that have impressed Somu Sahi in his basement studio as he sits with the numbered sheets and boxes of negatives. “The pictures show his style and philosophy of filmmaking,” he stresses. “He was able to make poetry out of chaos.” Among the aspects much discussed is his direction style of neo-realism. “But when he arranges his actors,” Somu points to images, “it is not European at all, but the Indian musical style. Clearly, his style was a synthesis of the two.”
Lauded around the world, he was also sometimes at the receiving end of stinging criticism, even in the West which was responsible, in large part, for the recognition that came his way. Not all critics liked his films, beginning with Pather Panchali, and they were often derided for being “slow”. Not unlike Slumdog Millionaire now, he was accused of glorifying India’s Third World status, and a strident Nargis Dutt, as Rajya Sabha MP, accused him of “exporting poverty” via the silver screen. But for friend Akira Kurosawa, his work was magical. “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon,” he said.
Interestingly, Nemai Ghosh, for all his closeness with Ray, never abused that friendship or camaraderie, so the photographs are never of his personal life but taken of the director while at work, even at repose, when giving interviews, or when attending film festivals. “A lot of his photographs are close to the master shots in Ray’s films, they’re like a visual storyboard of his movies,” explains Somu. “It is clear he knew the scenes very well because of the way he catches their essence in the pictures.”
Ghosh didn’t make too much money from his oeuvre. “I lived in a joint family,” he says, “everyone supported me.” Fortunately, he adds, neither films nor processing was then expensive. “But everybody cheated me, they would ask for photographs but not make payments, or pay very little.” Why didn’t he object? “Photography was my passion,” Nemai-da is hesitant, tentatively searching for words that will explain his madness, some might even say his recklessness, “and I respected him [Ray).”
In the basement, Somu says he spends the first half of the day looking at the new images that have been scanned, and the second half of the day putting them in order with descritions and, where, required, questions he’s saving for Nemai Ghosh, for when he will be need to spend time in Delhi going over the pictures, recalling the scenes, drawing out the episodes, identifying the key characters. “Nobody else can do it,” Nemai-da is humble but conscious of his responsibility. Already, the archive is beginning to take shape with a general chronology, and a rough log of the film catalogue that is emerging.
“It is the largest photographic archive in India,” says Anand proudly. While that may be arguable – so much in India still awaits discovery – it’s clear that with its rescue and archiving, a treasure has been saved that includes Ghosh’s photography, Ray’s filmmaking, a cast of India’s most brilliant actors, and a slice of Indian cinema. One can only wonder if Ghosh is already thinking of stage two: archiving his photographs from 1992 till the present.