The Road to Delhi, Et Al. : Author Spent 7 Years on It to Study Film Maker Ray

SAN DIEGO —  Bombay, Calcutta and Poona weren’t on the itinerary when University of San Diego Professor Ben Nyce set out to research a book on Indian film maker Satyajit Ray. When you’re working on a shoestring budget, you don’t book passage to India.

“I think when you take all my expenses and add them up,” Nyce said, laughing, “I’ll come out about a thousand or two short.”

Nyce had no delusions about his seven-year effort to write a book-length study of the films of Ray, the most prolific and most respected director in India. He figured the potential for an audience was small. But, to get the story he set out to get, he had to travel by planes, trains and automobiles--even on foot--to such far-off places as Paris, London, Delhi, Bombay and Poona.

The writing of “Satyajit Ray: A Study of His Films” began with the same film that Ray used to launch his own career: “Pather Panchali” (“Song of the Little Road”).

In a sense, Nyce recalled, the journey began in New Jersey.

“The Garden Theater in Princeton was really my fifth classroom,” said Nyce, a lifelong film buff who earned his undergraduate degree in English literature at Princeton University. “I would try to avoid homework by retreating to the land of fantasy. It was the great early era of the art-house film, so I saw Cocteau, Lubitch, Lang, Renoir.”

Unsure about what to do after leaving Princeton, Nyce moved to California and got a job summarizing pulp fiction as a Hollywood script reader. Later, he enrolled at Claremont College and began work on his doctoral degree in English.

It was there in 1957 that Nyce first saw “Pather Panchali,” regarded by many as the most important film ever made by an Indian.

“What really fixed me on Ray was an evening in the old Unicorn Theater in La Jolla,” Nyce said. “They did a retrospective and showed the Apu Trilogy (of which ‘Pather Panchali’ was the first installment). I was just bowled over by the wonderful richness of those films. By 1981, I had seen about a dozen of his films and said to myself, ‘Why don’t you make a serious effort to write a book?’ ”

Nyce, 56, gathered some short articles he had written about Ray’s films and sent them to the director in Calcutta.

“He wrote back and told me he liked the pieces and gave me the names of people who were doing work on him already.”

Nyce contacted the other researchers and discovered that his was the only project being done for the West, in English.

The study became Nyce’s own Mt. Everest, and it was no easy climb. Of Ray’s 32 films, only 16 are distributed in the United States. At the very least, the professor realized he would have to go to London to visit the English-language distributor of Ray’s films.

Nyce had no publisher lined up, and the $6,000 worth of stipends he received from USD and the Indo-American Friendship Society would hardly cover the costs of an intercontinental film search that would last for years. So the professor dug into his own pockets to cover the shortfall and headed east by way of London.

From there he went to the Cinematheque Francais in Paris, where he saw a few more of Ray’s films. Then, after sorting things out back in San Diego, he realized that the bulk of his travel was still ahead.

“I decided that I had to go to India to see about a dozen films that just could not be seen any other place,” Nyce said.

He arrived in India at a bad time. There was widespread social unrest over the Sikh nationalists’ assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, and Ray, then 64, was recovering from open-heart surgery. The situation was compounded by Nyce’s own insecurities about interviewing the famed director.

Nyce said he had researched Indian culture, but was intimidated by Ray’s knowledge about the West.

“I felt my questions were bound to be inadequate and that I would betray my ignorance of the (Indian) culture and language,” he said. “My chief trepidation in writing the book was that I didn’t know the language.”

Ray reassured him during their first meeting and they plunged on, but the American professor was never completely at ease during the interviews.

“He’s a very formal person,” Nyce said. “His films suggest a kind of down-to-earthness and warmth that I did not find (characteristic of) him. He’s very tall and speaks with great precision and elegance. There was always a real sense of distance between us.”

Nyce said Ray, who has been described by the New York Review of Books as “the last Bengali Renaissance man,” is a “Type A personality.”

“He’s very active and likes to be at work all the time. When he’s not shooting, he’s editing a children’s magazine or writing stories or drawing.”

After his first set of discussions with Ray in Calcutta, Nyce set off throughout India to track down the films he had yet to see.

“I literally chased his films around India. Ray made arrangements for me to see some films he thought I would never see any other place. I chased the rest around Bombay, Delhi and, most of all, Poona, where the national cinema archives are located.”

Nyce spent 10 weeks roaming India during the summer of 1985, wading through monsoon rains and sitting in dark viewing rooms. By the end of the summer, he had seen all but two of Ray’s films.

One of the unseen works is a 1967 feature titled “Chiriakhana” (“The Zoo”). Ray stubbornly refused to let Nyce see it, would not help him find it, and discouraged him from contacting the film’s distributor. There had been a fight between Ray and the distributor, but Nyce came to believe that the director didn’t want him to see “Chiriakhana” for the most obvious reason: It was a clinker.

The other unviewed film is a documentary commissioned by the ruler of Sikkim, a northeast Indian principality that became the country’s 22nd state in 1975. The only copy of the film now resides with the wife of the former ruler, an American socialite living in New York.

Nyce said he received a great deal of help in his search for Ray’s films, notably from Chidananda Das Gupta, India’s best-known film critic and a longtime associate of Ray. Through him, Nyce was able to interview Soumitra Chatterjee, one of Ray’s stock actors from the early years, and Shamila Tagore, probably the biggest female film star in India.

Nyce said he tried to see as much of India as he could during his travels there, but found the work all-consuming. He spent most of his days in an editing room and his evenings writing. Still, he managed to spend time discussing movies with students in Poona, and came away impressed with the average Indian’s knowledge of films, particularly the films of Satyajit Ray.

“The guy could have been a street sweeper,” Nyce said, “but he still knows Ray’s work. Calcutta is very culturally alive--at all levels--and cinema is a very potent art medium in India.”

After returning to San Diego, Nyce polished more chapters and forwarded some, including those critical of some films, to Ray. As the book neared completion last December, he returned to India to interview Ray for one more week.

Now that the book is out, Nyce is waiting for reviews and making appearances on his own behalf. He will speak at a book-signing session at The Book Works in Del Mar tonight at 7:30 and will show video excerpts from some of Ray’s films.

Nyce said he is glad his Ray odyssey has ended and that the book (published by Praeger Publishers) is finally out.

“This was one of the more difficult books about a film maker one could write, because I had to chase his films around India,” Nyce said. “So many of his films are really museum pieces and will never come over here and (be shown) in the West, except in a retrospective.”

But, if Nyce is finished with Ray and exotic location research, he isn’t finished with film books. He said his next work will be on the films of an American director, probably Martin Scorsese.

He hopes to limit his travel to Los Angeles and maybe New York. Maybe, he said, he’ll even make some money on it.