Ray through the lens of Nemai Ghosh
Way back in 1991, a photobiography on Satyajit Ray was published under the title Satyajit Ray at 70. It documented a collection of B & W photographs of the great master of celluloid taken by his photographer of 25 years, Nemai Ghosh. The book was published by Eiffel Editions of Belgium that went on to institute a travelling exhibition of these photographs with a world premiere on June 20, 1991. Ray is no more. But Ghosh, now perhaps in his late sixties, is very much around and active. In fact, he has transcended the frame of his camera to enter into the world of words: he has written a book about his feelings and experiences in Bengali which was released at the Calcutta Book Fair early this year. The book, simply called Manik-da(Manik is Ray’s now-famous nickname) a slim volume of 96 pages, bound in paperback, has the pages equally divided between textual matter and reprints of B & W photographs of Ray taken by Ghosh himself. Priced at a hefty Rs 225, the book evolves into a collector’s item for people interested in cinema per se and in Ray in particular.

Ghosh has in his personal collection, more than one lakh photographs of Satyajit Ray including working stills from his films since Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, during the shooting of which his association with Ray first began. This by itself is an astounding amount of work put in by a single man by any standards and speaks volumes for his hard work and dedication. Another work of note by Ghosh peretains to the Bengali theatre which has recently come out in the form of a book recording the history of Bengali Group Theatre for the past 25 years through photographs. “The three things that have seen me through my struggles to establish myself are tenacity of purpose, discipline and hard work. I learnt discipline from Utpal Dutt when I trained under him as part of his Little Theatre Group. The same applied to Ray,” says Nimai. One of his sons, Satyaki Ghosh, is now a brilliant photographer, in B & W, of performing artistes, cinema, fashion and so on.

“Today, the word ‘camera’ has become an integral part of my name. This means that wherever a group of people discuss me, the word ‘photograph’ comes up almost naturally. But the most interesting part of my story is that to be a photographer was never a part of my life-plan.” These are the opening lines of the book Manik-da. Simply written, the author-photographer traces how his passion for the theatre,developed since boyhood, and his interest in lighting, which is an integral part of theatre, slowly but surely took him on a long and exciting journey alongwith one of the greatest filmmakers the world has ever produced. “But my ability to catch the exact mood, the precise moment, the particular posture, the body-movement, the facial expression are all rooted back to my theatre training”, writes Ghosh. He goes on to say that his early training in theatre, linked later to his closeness to Ray, blocked him to any kind of compromise in his career as a photographer. The biggest surprise he offers his readers is the dramatic manner in which he ‘bought’ his first still camera. “One evening, as I waited to go to the rehearsals for a play and munched peanuts, a friend of mine said someone had forgotten his camera in a cab. He picked it up and was already offered Rs 600 for it from another friend. I don’t know what prompted me to buy the camera off him. ‘You already owe me Rs 240. If you give the camera to me, I shall write off the loan. He left the camera with me. I turned it around and looked into it, examining it closely. But I could hardly understand how it worked. At this point, a friend of mine who was assistant cameraman in films, offered to teach me the ropes.” And so the narrative goes on, unfolding one incident after another, taking us smoothy from Ghosh’s fumbling with his first camera to a reflective look at his own life after the demise of his hero and idol, Satyajit Ray.

The photographs present Ray in his many moods— at work, in thought, pensive, joyful, probing the frame through outstretched palms joined at the thumbs, talking to a sadhu near the ghats at Varanasi, bending over a chessboard on location, in profile holding his fingers to his chin, ‘looking through’ his rounded-finger-and-thumb lenses at an actor, caught inside a room in banyan and trousers with a book in his hand, looking through the lens of his still camera, and many more. You name a particular expression you wish to see Ray in, and it is there, captured for posterity through the gifted lens of Ghosh’s historic camera. Ghosh has deliberately kept away from a chronological ordering of the photographs. This invests the book with an element of continuous surprise.

His motivation for photography is the thought— what is viewed by the natural eye should also be capable of being grasped through the lens of the camera. His ultimate aspiration is to be able to photograph completely in the dark, totally without light.
Shoma A Chatterji