“It’s a very, very complex mixed kind of thing, the entire British heritage in India”, Satyajit Ray told me after a pregnant pause when I interviewed him at length for a biography in the 1980s. “I’m thankful for the fact that at least I’m familiar with both cultures and it gives me a very much stronger footing as a film-maker, but I’m also aware of all the dirty things that were being done. I really don’t know how I feel about it.”
The opportunity to probe some of these deep equivocations in himself drew Ray to tackle a film—The Chess Players (Shatranj ke Khilari)—that differs in certain important respects from all his other 30 or more feature films, beginning with the Apu Trilogy of the 1950s. For a start, The Chess Players was easily Ray’s most expensive film, employing stars of the Bombay cinema (notably Amjad Khan, Shabana Azmi and Amitabh Bachchan as a narrator) and even of western cinema (Richard Attenborough), large Mughal-style sets and exotic location shooting (Lucknow and Rajasthan). In addition, it was Ray’s first and only feature to venture into a language—Urdu—other than Bengali. It was also his only film in which Islamic culture played a major role. Most important of all, the film was a historical drama—set during the East India Company’s annexation of Oudh in 1856, the year before the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny—which dealt directly with the Raj. Although the influence of the British is felt in most of Ray’s films in subtle ways, and he made several films set in the 19th century, The Chess Players is the only one where the Raj and its officials occupy centre stage.
Given its world premiere at the London Film Festival in 1977, The Chess Players was the first adult film about the Raj. Today, after Gandhi, Heat and Dust, The Jewel in the Crown, A Passage to India and many other Raj-related films, Ray’s film remains by far the most sophisticated portrayal of this particular clash of cultures. As the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul remarked of the film, “It is like a Shakespeare scene. Only 300 words are spoken but goodness!—terrific things happen.”
Ray's first film in a language other than Bengali - here English, Urdu and Hindi - is a gently humorous, acutely observed satire of colonialism and self absorption. Using the powerful symbolism of the chess games of two nobles to make an acute commentary on Anglo-Indian relations in Victorian times, Ray notes that no matter who may win or lose, board and pieces stay exactly the same.
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The Chess Players
