Satyajit
Ray was a legendary filmmaker who not just influenced directors and actors in
India, but artistes across the world. On Ray’s 27th death anniversary,
Sahapedia looks at the Bengali filmmaker’s relationship with two influential
women Indira Gandhi and Marie Seton who recognised and supported his genius. As
India sought to rebuild itself post Independence, its filmmakers found
patronage from a rather unusual and enthusiastic quarter—film connoisseurs and
cinephiles such as Jawahar Lal Nehru and Indira Gandhi—who helped them reach
the global arena. The iconic Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who placed India
on the global film map firmly with his landmark debut movie Pather Panchali
(1955), was a product of such patronage. Ray’s early supporters were two
influential women—Indira Gandhi,
the
first female prime minister of India, and Marie Seton, a family friend of the
Nehrus and a British film consultant, who had been invited to India in the
1950s to assist the government with the making and promotion of films after
penning a biography of the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. Unbeknownst to
many, Gandhi had a keen interest in promoting Indian arts, especially films. In
1952, she brought one of her family friends, Indo-French director Jahangir
Bhownagary to India to launch the International Film Festival of India (IFFI)
under the Films Division. It’s now in its 67th year. Gandhi was in search of
talented Indian filmmakers when she came across Ray. Indira Gandhi was excited
about the release of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali in 1955 and its
compassionate portrayal of countryside poverty in India. Marie Seton too was
all praises for the film.
Having
seen it during her multi-city lecture series across India, Seton identified
Ray’s film as the neo-realist advent in India and gave a good report to Gandhi
and her father, the then prime minister Jawahar Lal Nehru. Those days Nehru not
only had the last word in politics but in the arenas of art and science as
well. As many critics began to denounce Ray’s debut film for selling Indian
poverty abroad, it was Nehru who declared that ‘if a filmmaker shows poverty
with such empathy, I am all for it’. Gandhi and Seton’s relationship with Ray
did not end with Pather Panchali. Soon, after Seton heard of the Ray film in
August 1955,
she
went to Kolkata to revive the Calcutta Film Society. The film society had been
established in 1947 but had stopped activities as its founders were busy making
their debut films in the early 1950s. Seton went around Calcutta and wrote the
first English biography of Ray, Portrait of a Director – Satyajit Ray in 1971.
It was because of Ray that she remained a lifelong Indo-phile and was awarded
the Padma Bhushan—the third highest civilian award in India in 1984. “After her
first visit, Marie Seton developed such an attraction for India, she virtually
became a citizen of this country,” Prof. Satish Bahadur of the Film and
Television Institute of India (FTII) wrote in his centenary tribute to Seton in
The Hindu in 2010.
