ashokbhatia

“But behind your achievement, the achievement of another remains…”

Feluda (“The Elephant God”)

In my schoolboy days, I once declared in an essay that Satyajit Ray was my favourite writer. Decades of reading have done nothing to dislodge him from that position. I have wandered through considerable literary territory since then—from Tolstoy to Tagore, from Borges to Bankim—and yet I return, always, to the particular flavour of Ray’s Bengali prose. Some will say this merely confirms that I never truly outgrew the garden walls of children’s literature. Perhaps. But to reduce Ray to Feluda and Professor Shonku is rather like insisting that a master chef is only to be judged by his breakfast menu. His short stories are every bit as accomplished, every bit as precise. Even his novel Fatickchand—into which he poured what one suspects was a deliberate effort to deny the reader any cause for tears—leaves, in the final pages, a bruise upon the heart that no amount of re-reading quite soothes.

A true storyteller, it seems to me, tells his tales with equal fluency across every medium available to him. Ray’s cinematic grammar is as fascinating as his prose, and the charge that his sensibility is somehow “Western” has always struck me as less a criticism than an inadvertent compliment. It was, in fact, that very Western flair which drew me deeper into his work—and led me, eventually, to a discovery that illuminated yet another facet of his genius.

The Screenplay and the Secret Admirer

Today I wish to set aside Ray’s directorial masterpieces—the Apu Trilogy, Charulata, Jalsaghar—and speak instead of a film in which he served not as director but as screenwriter and music composer. That film is Baksa Badal (1970) -literally, “The Exchange of Suitcases”—directed by Nityananda Datta and based on a story by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. I have read the original story. I have seen the film. And I confess that the film, carrying Ray’s fingerprints on every scene, gave me a pleasure the source material alone could not.

The plot, briefly: Pratul, a psychiatrist, boards a train and encounters a young woman named Amiya. Upon arriving at his solitary quarters in a tea garden, he opens his suitcase to discover it belongs to a lady—silks, saris, and the unmistakable evidence of feminine proprietorship where his own belongings ought to be. The culprit is the oldest of railway comedies: the swapped suitcase. Fortunately, Amiya’s uncle’s address is tucked inside, and Pratul dispatches the bag to him in Kalimpong—the uncle being a botanist of the most magnificently unworldly variety. Amiya, meanwhile, has discovered the swap and is in pursuit of her property. What had been a simple exchange of luggage becomes, of course, something considerably more complicated—and considerably more enjoyable.

Now: what was in Amiya’s suitcase that makes this comic engine run? Not jewels. Not state secrets. Women’s clothing, homemade sweets, and—most dangerously of all—a personal diary, whose candid entries begin to sketch for Pratul a portrait of the woman he has never met. It is precisely this detail—the magnificently Wodehousean notion that a suitcase becomes a character reference—that lifts the film from pleasant entertainment into something approaching art.

Enter Plum

From an interview with Ray himself and later confirmed in Bijoya Ray’s memoir Amader Kotha (A commentary on Ray’s family life with his wife), came the revelation that explained so much: Ray’s favourite author was P.G. Wodehouse. Several veils lifted at once. The “smartness”—that unique  quality of elegant mischief I had always sensed in Ray’s work without being able to name it—had a source. As Wodehouse himself once wrote: “I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music.” Ray, I would argue, understood this instinctively, and in Baksa Badal he composed precisely such a comedy—Bengali in its bones, Wodehousean in its spirit.

The Cast of Characters, Translated

The changes Ray made in adapting Bibhutibhushan’s story into a screenplay are where the Wodehousean influence declares itself most openly.

Pratul is the linchpin. In the original story, he is an unremarkable fellow on a train. In Ray’s version, he remains a traveller, but a traveller of considerable resource and ingenuity. He does not merely return the suitcase; he arrives at the lady’s house in disguise—deploying the sort of elaborate subterfuge that Wodehouse heroes (and villains, and valets) often resort to.  To my mind, Pratul is much likely  akin to Psmith: that magnificently unflappable young man who, in Psmith in the City, Leave it to Psmith, and elsewhere, glides through many a catastrophe with a raised eyebrow and a well-turned sentence. Psmith is intelligent, fundamentally decent, and possesses what one can only describe as an almost supernatural capacity for crisis management—all qualities that Pratul’s character shares with him. There is also, in Pratul’s moments of quiet wit, more than a little of Jeeves: the man who sees further than everyone else in the room and arranges outcomes with the serene competence of a chess grandmaster.

Shovan is an invention entirely Ray’s own—he does not exist in Bibhutibhushan’s original. And what an invention it turns out to be! Played with a perfection that still disarms audiences today by Satindra Bhattacharyya, Shovan is positioned as the conventional “thorn in the hero’s side.” But Ray, being Ray, refuses the conventional treatment. Shovan is not a villain. He is something far funnier and far more human: a well-meaning, chronically disorganised, constitutionally forgetful innocent who creates havoc not through malice but through a congenital inability to manage his own affairs. He is, in every sense, like  Gussie Fink-Nottle—Bertie Wooster’s hapless friend, the newt-fancier, a man whose romantic difficulties and spectacular social mishaps provide the engine for some of Wodehouse’s finest passages. The film’s perfectly Wodehousean irony—and one suspects Ray savoured it—is that Shovan goes, entirely unwittingly, to his own romantic rival for what we might today call life coaching. Gussie himself could not have managed it better.

This matters enormously from a craft perspective. Traditional comic construction demands a powerful antagonist to make the hero shine. Ray understood, as Wodehouse understood, that a more sophisticated comedy arises when the “obstacle” is not wicked but simply hapless—when the hero must defeat not malevolence but  a dash of pumpkin-headed-ness. It is a far more charitable worldview and a far more entertaining one with absolute warmth.

The Uncle—absorbed in his botanical specimens with a serenity impervious to surrounding drama—is Lord Emsworth to the life. Emsworth, the ninth Earl of that ilk, was Wodehouse’s great monument to benign incompetence: a man so thoroughly enchanted by his prize pig, the Empress of Blandings, and his garden, that the turbulent comedy erupting around him might as well be occurring on another continent. Ray’s uncle achieves precisely the same effect: while a romantic catastrophe unfolds under his roof, he nurses his plants with the focused tranquillity of a man who has simply declined to notice that the world exists.

Amiya completes the quartet in the manner of Wodehouse’s Joan Valentine or, in her drier moments, Sally Nicholas: the woman who is the only person in the room capable of matching the hero’s intelligence, who wields a quiet, lethal humour, and who loves the hapless third party (Shovan, in this case) with the exasperated affection of an elder sister rather than the romantic devotion of a heroine. This is where Ray—faithful to his Plum—refuses sentimentality. She scolds Shovan as a mother might; she respects Pratul as an equal. The emotional geometry crafted by Ray is Wodehousean in its precision.

The Moustache Gambit and Other Plummy Pleasures

One cannot leave Baksa Badal without observing the running comedy of the moustache—a joke that begins when Pratul draws a moustache on a photograph of Amiya’s brother. This incident  elevates the narrative to a level where an entire architecture of double identity (one persona with the moustache; one without) gets unleashed upon the viewer. it gets sustained with the careful internal logic that all great farce requires. Ray introduced this particular brand of “moustache punning” to Indian cinema a full decade before Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s beloved Gol Maal (1979) made the device famous in Hindi film. Priority, one feels, should be acknowledged.

In Wodehouse’s world, physical disguise and mistaken identity are the load-bearing columns of the comic architecture. Much Obliged, Jeeves, The Mating Season, The Code of the Woosters,  Big Money—in story after story, the elaborate management of who thinks whom is who drives the plot forward. Ray understood this mechanism well  and deployed it with characteristic economy: never a beat wasted, never a joke pushed past its natural life.

There is also, finally, the matter of Sudden Resolution—what one might call the Wodehousean Restoration of Order. In Plum’s world, however catastrophic the muddle, the final pages deliver every character to their appropriate goal , no bitterness permitted, no score unsettled. It is, as Wodehouse himself put it, a world “two inches above the surface of the earth”—a place where unhappy endings are simply not allowed. Baksa Badal achieves this same smooth, frictionless landing. The suitcases are returned. The right people find one another. And the uncle, one imagines, is finally left free to potter about amongst his plants.

A (Belated) Birthday Tribute

I do not pretend to be worthy  enough of being able to judge a colossus. Satyajit Ray remains, as he has always been, my favourite—followed closely, in a different register, by Wodehouse. What Baksa Badal represents, to my mind, is something rarer than influence and more graceful than homage: it is the act of a supreme artist absorbing his deepest pleasure and returning it, transformed, in his own idiom. The Bengali soul of the film is never in doubt—the tea gardens, the Kalimpong hills, the particular social textures of middle-class Bengal—and yet, threaded invisibly through it, is the sunlit comic universe of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.

This, I believe, is the mark of  the greatest creators. They carry their loves inside their work like light inside a lantern—invisible from the outside until you hold the thing up to the flame and see, suddenly, the pattern within.

Wodehouse wrote that his ideal was to take “a handful of people and ring the changes on them.” Ray did precisely this in Baksa Badal—and rang them in Bengali, on a hillside, a stolen moustache, and made something wholly and unmistakably his own.

But behind your achievement, the achievement of another remains.

That is not diminishment. In Ray’s case, it is the highest compliment one can pay: that he was capacious enough to carry Wodehouse within him, and confident enough in his own genius to let the presence show—like a watermark, visible only when you know to look, and glorious when you do.

Belated happy birthday, “Manik-da” (as Ray is famously known as). The suitcases, it turns out, were never really swapped at all. Everything arrived exactly where it was meant to go.

“The object of the writer is to charm, to amuse, and to interest.” — P.G. Wodehouse

Baksa Badal (1970) did all three. And it did so because two giants, born on different continents and dishing out creative stuff in different time zones, turned out to share the same understanding of what comedy, at its finest, is actually for. (Ray was born on the 2nd of May, 1921 and left us on the 23rd of April, 1992. Plum was born on the 15th of October, 1881 and left us on the 14th of February, 1975.)

After all, humour is not merely a tool for propelling a narrative. It is the garnishing that creative geniuses deploy to make their offerings more palatable to their audience’s mental hunger, which is forever seeking an inner bliss which would transport them to a more equitable, fair, and just world.

Related Post