Monday 27 January 2014

ചിലപ്പോഴൊക്കെ നമുക്ക് കരയാനും തോന്നില്ലേ?



പഥേര്‍ പാഞ്ചാലി കാണാന്‍ ഭാഗ്യമുണ്ടായവര്‍ ഈ സീന്‍ ഓര്‍ക്കുന്നുണ്ടാവുമല്ലോ? കാശുപ്പൂക്കളുടെ ഇടയില്‍ നിന്ന് ചേച്ചിയും അനുജനും തീവണ്ടിയെ കാണുന്ന കാഴ്ച. ആ സീന്‍ ചിത്രീകരിച്ചതിനു പുറകിലുണ്ടായ സംഭവങ്ങള്‍ സത്യജിത് റേയുടെ വാക്കുകളില്‍:
It was an episode in the screenplay where the two children of the story, brother and sister, stray away from their village and chance upon a field of kash flowers. The two have had a quarrel, and here in this enchanted setting they are reconciled and their long journey is rewarded by their first sight of a railway train. I chose to begin with this scene because on paper it seemed both effective and simple. I considered this important, because the whole idea behind launching the production with only 8000 rupees in the bank was to produce quickly and cheaply a reasonable length of rough cut which we hoped would establish our bonafides, the lack of which had so far stood in the way of our getting a financier.
At the end of the first day’s shooting we had eight shots. The children behaved naturally, which was a bit of luck because I had not tested them. As for myself, I remember feeling a bit strung up in the beginning: but as work progressed my nerves relaxed and in the end I even felt a kind of elation. However, the scene was only half finished, and on the following Sunday we were back on the same location. But was it the same location? It was hard to believe it. What was on the previous occasion a sea of fluffy whiteness was now a mere expanse of uninspiring brownish grass. We knew kash was a seasonal flower, but surely they were not that short lived? A local peasant provided the explanation. The flowers, he said, were food to the cattle. The cows and buffaloes had come to graze the day before and had literally chewed up the scenery.
This was a big setback. We knew of no other kash field that would provide the long shots that I needed. This meant staging the location in a different setting, and the very thought was heart-breaking. Who would have known then that we would be back on the identical location exactly two years later and indulge in the luxury of reshooting the entire scene with the same cast and the same unit but with the money provided by the Government of West Bengal.
('A Long Time on the Little Road', Our Films, Their Films, p30, 31)
പഥേര്‍ പാഞ്ചാലിയുടെ വിവര്‍ത്തനം ഞാന്‍ വായിച്ചിരുന്നു. ഒരു നോവല്‍ സിനിമയാകുമ്പോള്‍ ഉണ്ടാകുന്ന ആ രാസ പരിണാമങ്ങളില്ലേ? ഒരു ചുഴിയില്‍ നോക്കി നില്‍ക്കുന്ന രസമുണ്ട് ആ മാറ്റങ്ങള്‍ വീക്ഷിക്കുമ്പോള്‍. പാമ്പ് എന്ന ചെറു നോവല്‍ പദ്മരാജന്‍ രതിനിര്‍വേദം ആക്കിയപ്പോള്‍, ഉദകപ്പോള രൂപാന്തരം സംഭവിച്ചു തൂവാനത്തുമ്പികള്‍ ആയപ്പോള്‍, ആലിസ് വോക്കറുടെ കളര്‍ പര്‍പ്പിള്‍ സ്പീല്‍ബര്‍ഗ് അഭ്രത്തിലേക്ക് മാറ്റി എഴുതിയപ്പോള്‍, ഹെന്‍‌റിഷാരിയറുടെ പാപ്പിയോണ്‍ ചലച്ചിത്ര രൂപം പൂണ്ടു മുന്നില്‍ വന്നു നിന്നപ്പോള്‍ - ത്രില്ലടിപ്പിച്ച എത്രയോ നിമിഷങ്ങള്‍!! എങ്കിലും പഥേര്‍ പാഞ്ചാലി കാണുമ്പോഴൊക്കെ എന്‍റെ മനസ്സില്‍ ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നത് കഥ എഴുതിയ ബിഭൂതി ഭൂഷന്‍ ബന്ദോപാധ്യായ ആയിരുന്നു. എന്ത് തരം മനുഷ്യന്‍ ആയിരുന്നു അയാള്‍? ആ ചോദ്യത്തിന് ഉത്തരം റേയുടെ എഴുത്തുകളില്‍ കണ്ടെത്താന്‍ കഴിഞ്ഞില്ലെങ്കിലും ഇക്കഴിഞ്ഞ ദിവസം നീരദ്‌ സി ചൌധുരിയുടെ Thy Hand, Great Anarch വായിക്കുമ്പോള്‍ ദാ കിടക്കുന്നു ബിഭൂതിയെപ്പറ്റി ഒരു അദ്ധ്യായം! - Stumbling on a Friend: Bibhuti Banerji

നീരദ്‌ ചൌധുരി
1914 - 1916 കാലയളവില്‍ രണ്ടു പേരും റിപ്പണ്‍ കോളജില്‍ ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നു. അല്പകാലം കഴിഞ്ഞു ബിഭൂതി അധ്യാപക വേഷത്തില്‍ കല്‍ക്കത്തയില്‍ കഴിയുമ്പോള്‍ ഇരുവരും വീണ്ടും കണ്ടുമുട്ടി. ഒരേ കെട്ടിടത്തില്‍ താമസം, ബിഭൂതിക്ക് നഗരത്തില്‍നിന്ന് ഇരുപതു മൈലകലെ സ്കൂളില്‍ ജോലി. ദിവസവും ട്രെയിനില്‍ യാത്ര. പതിയെപ്പതിയെ നീരദ്‌ ഈ മനുഷ്യന്‍റെ ജീവിത കഥ പഠിച്ചെടുത്തു.
"What he told me was afterwards embodied by him in his novel Aparajita (Undefeated). The story has also been filmed in two parts by Ray, and those who have seen the films will understand what Bibhuti Babu went through..... Although by caste he belonged to one of the highest clans of Bengali Brahmins, socially his family was of the humblest rank of the Bengali gentry. His father was a Kathak or expositor of Hindu mythology, and these men stood very low in the priestly hierarchy. This man was poor, and in addition a Bohemian given to wandering. But he was also a character, and wrote verse besides keeping a diary, which has survived to be used by Bibhuti Babu's biographer. I learned all this piecemeal, for he was extremely unwilling to speak about his father and family antecedents.............

I acquired a great respect for his mind, which had a wide range of interests. But I certainly did not expect a young Bengali of his class and education to show interest in astrophysics and human palaentology, which he did. He would talk to me of E.P. Hubble, the astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory, and his theories, although he had never been a student either of mathematics or physics. I had heard about Jeans and Eddington, and had also read a little by or about them. I had Einstein's book on Relativity as well. But I had not heard of Hubble. Bibhuti Babhu also showed me Sir Arthur Keith's Antiquity of Man, which inspite of his want of means he had bought. At that time I had only a smattering of human palaentology and prehistory, but he created such an absorbing interest in them in me that I soon went far beyond him, and not only read Boule's Les Hommes Fossiles and other standard works, but also bought the massive monographs on paleolithic art by Piette, Caraihac, Breuil and others, ordering them from Paris. What I did immediately was to make Bibhuti Babu buy Burckit's Prehistory, when it was published in 1923, of course to read it myself. ......................
ബിഭൂതി ഭൂഷന്‍ ബന്ദോപാധ്യായ
He had to give up his studies when he was in the MA class for want of means, and was now a teacher in a village school about twenty miles south of Calcutta, to which he went every day by train. He had married while still at college, and had lost his young wife in the great influenza epidemic of 1918, after only a year of married life. The memories of his wife kept him from marrying again for twenty-three years. I always noticed a packet of papers in his breast pocket, and an embroidered hand-made fan by his pillow. He never referred to them, nor did I ask. But I could easily guess that the packet contained few letters his wife had written to him, and that the fan was made by her...................................

On another occasion, when he was over forty, a very mischievous writer friend of mine played him a cruel practical joke, and he came to complain about it to me in furious anger. He said that the wicked man had promised to show him an Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) prostitute if he would go and wait in Wellington Square at nine in the evening. He had gone and sat in the cold on that November night for two hours and neither the friend nor the prostitute had come. 'Could you imagine anything more treacherous?' Bibhuti Babhu asked me..............
Soon I began to receive the proofs for correction. But before I had done with them I received a grievous piece of news. My friend Bibhuti Babu was dead. He died on 1 November 1950, of what appeared to be a heart attack............Yet his death was not the sole tragedy for the family. In that little town he had been living with his younger brother whom I had met as a boy and who was now a doctor practicing in the same town. He too had married. A week after the death of Bibhuti Babu, the dead body of this brother was found lying near the spot where his elder brother had been cremated. He had committed suicide by taking poison. Nobody knew why. The brothers left two young widows. It would seem that a curse lay on the family. Bibhuti Babu's father and mother had died in great distress; his young first wife had untimely death in 1918; his sister was taken by a crocodile.
ഇത് വായിച്ചപ്പോള്‍ എനിക്ക് കരയാന്‍ തോന്നി. പഥേര്‍ പാഞ്ചാലി കണ്ടപ്പോള്‍ ഉണ്ടായ ആ വിഷാദമുണ്ടല്ലോ, അത് തന്നെയാണ് ഈ അധ്യായം വായിച്ചപ്പോഴും ഉണ്ടായത്.

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