Satyajit Ray’s Nayak (1966) tells the story of Arindam Mukherjee, a matinee idol. The film, starring Uttam Kumar as Arindam and Sharmila Tagore as a journalist, is set on a 24-hour train journey from Kolkata to Delhi where Arindam is receiving a national award. Written by Ray, while the film explores the psyche of a superstar, the other characters are interesting as well. Bengaluru-based author and translator Bhaskar Chattopadhyay has done a fascinating novelisation of the film Nayak The Hero (Harper Collins).
“It has been a long-standing belief of mine that a good portion of the essence of Satyajit Ray’s films are lost on non-Bangla speaking audiences because of poor subtitling,” begins Bhaskar.
“Although Ray used to be extremely economical in his dialogues, much of what is said on screen is hardly conveyed by the subtitles,” Bhaskar continues. “Which is why, I have always felt the need to do a proper translation of the stories behind these films. This is also why I wrote 14: Stories That Inspired Satyajit Ray . Nayak was no different. But in this case, I didn’t have a story to translate, because it is one of Ray’s original scripts. It was then that the idea of a novelisation struck me.”
Bhaskar says he chose Nayak because “It is a fascinating story, perhaps the greatest portrayal of an anti-hero in Indian cinema. A beautifully-crafted study of a human mind, a deep analysis of the true meaning of happiness, and a warning about the price of success.
To me, Nayak is more than a film. It is a reminder that at the end of every dream, there is a mirror waiting to tell you what it cost you to get there, and to show you what you have become.”
The best part of the novelisation, Bhaskar says, “was the opportunity to work with a powerful story. I watched the film several times before I started writing, and every time I watched it, I discovered something new. An expression here, a gesture there, a seemingly inconsequential item hanging from the wall of the compartment that told me so much more about its owner, or a trailing piece of dialogue that I had earlier missed but that now seemed so significant. I discovered the movie in a new light during the novelisation.”
Commenting that too much of research, or a reading of what others thought of the movie, would have been detrimental to the process, Bhaskar says, he wanted to “work with my interpretation of the film. That was important to me, and I stuck to this belief till the end. The only research that I did was to hunt down the original script of Nayak , and I read it carefully to understand two things – what was Ray thinking when he wrote the script? And what parts of the script did not make it to the film and why? Once I had those answers, I was ready to begin.”
Bhaskar says he did not consciously divide the chapters into scenes. “If readers find it that way now, it must have happened without my giving any thought to it. The medium of literature is quite different from that of film. In literature, there is an unconscious need to maintain a certain uniform length of chapters, which is not there in film. If I were to force one over the other, it would have been a rather messy affair.”
One of the fascinating things in the novel is Bhaskar’s use of colour. “Since the movie is in black and white, I had to take a call on colours. That comes from two things – general knowledge (for instance, the BOAC airline bag), and the visual crystallisation of imagination. You look at a frame, not just on the screen, but in your mind as well. And you ask yourself, what exactly am I seeing here? What is the frame not telling me? Is there more? And then you go with the answers.”
Admitting to adding to the world of Nayak, Bhaskar says, “I have taken the essence of the film and told the story in my own words. As much as possible, I have tried to remain true to the dialogues, but I had to expand the world, write about each character’s convictions, their motivations, their back stories, their feelings; you can’t call out feelings on screen, you can only interpret them. When one is writing a script, one usually has all these things running in one’s head. They don’t appear on paper, because a script is a visual reference. All I have done is turned the process on its head and expanded it, taking it to its logical conclusion – my version of it.”
The back of the book carries Sharmila Tagore’s comment. “ Nayak is a very important film in my career as an actor. This novelisation of its brilliant original screenplay, is a testimony to Satyajit Ray’s enduring genius as a storyteller.” Bhaskar says, “I am truly grateful for her comments. I admired her work in the film, and in many ways, I think the film would not have been possible without her.”
While writing, Bhaskar was not bogged down by detail. “Ray’s script looks so simple, so ordinary, even. Forget about excesses, there’s hardly any embellishment at all, scarcely any detail. Just a simple description of who is doing what and saying what to whom. The entire film was in his head. He did not like giving too many instructions to his actors, and that shows in the script as well. It was quite a bit of work to take the script to the level of a novel, where details are important, because it is no longer a visual reference.”
Bhaskar says he followed the chronology of the story as “Had I gone by the order of the scenes, it would have made for a rather unimpressive reading experience.”
