Reassessing 'Agantuk' - Satyajit Rays final statement as an artist

In the year 1991 Satyajit Ray made Agantuk (The Stranger), his last film before his death in April 1992.
Here, Ray made a unique attempt to convey his annoyance about the materialistic quest of modern
civilization through his characteristic storytelling style. The film depicts how the protagonist uncle
Manomohan Mitras sudden landing into a conventional milieu of hosts made a panicky effect on them and
exposed their priggish pride as a sham. The uncle was initially suspected as a fraud and later assumed to be
a person with an insular objective to fill his empty pockets. In fact the depiction in the film turns into a
near perfect surgical analysis of not only the benevolent protagonist but his mean-minded middle class
hosts. It uncovered a terrible status of the modern urban middle class acutely selfish and self centered,
extremely money driven, always worried about security and hypocrite to the core. When at the end, taking
account of his hosts hospitality, the altruistic uncle simply leaves the million dollar cheque of his inherited
money as a small message of little or no value for them, it falls like a slap on the face of the middle class
smugness. The only member of the host family who was totally unsuspicious about Manomohan from the
beginning was his grandnephew - the hosts little son. He was the first to convincingly declare that his
grandfather is not a fake but genuine. The child has not yet been infected by the synthetic worldview of his
parents and is yet to become a slave of conventional habits. His innocent and keen observations of his
grandfather were the only one which was without any prejudices.

In many ways Agantuk is an inciting film. Though there is a genuine doubt if at all the grungy middle class
can really think today in the way Ray wanted them to think. The basic theme is an intellectual soul
searching for a re-discovery of the lost human values. It bluntly focuses on the vices of the post-modern
world. The reckless immorality of the elite class, their greed for material possessions is harshly criticized. A
civilized person was defined as the person who can wipe out an entire population with lethal weapon by
just pressing a button but has awfully forgotten how to embrace an alien stranger! The contradictions of
high-rise and rickshaw pullers, NASA and NESHA (drug addiction), technology and organized religion, the
phenomenal decay of principles and values, the deep rooted systemic corruption and the death of curiosity
are among some of the dark hidden corners of civilization that Ray has scornfully declared in Agantuk as
symbols of civilization. How can the tangibility of a person's identity be proved through a passport in a
fraudulent world? Who is civilized and who is savage? Class, caste and religion, values and prejudices,
politics and power really have no place in the concrete humanity and morality that Ray has articulated
throughout the film. Through his quest and vast experience of life Manomohan has recognized the
brotherhood of Man which is beyond any country, language, cast or religion and free of any form of identity
crisis. Rays own beliefs become clear when he speaks through Manomohan that, I do not believe anything
that divides Man religion does it, and organized religion does it certainly. For the same reason I do not
believe in caste According to him, caste and religion in the present form is only spreading hate and
dividing Man. Technological achievements may well become counter-productive to provoke blatant greed.
Modern civilization boasts on the achievements of science but forgets that it was the Neolithic age when
Man had already made most of the indispensable inventions crucial for his survival.

Agantuk has two discern layers. The upper layer of the film deals with the problems of the urban middle
class morals. This layer is relatively easy to recognize while viewing the film. In this layer Ray is mercilessly
probing the harmful effects of money, the artificiality of values, the idiocy of war, the emptiness of an
acquisitive worldview and the absurdity of identity. But there is also another deeper and subtle layer that
exists side by side with the upper layer which apparently looks abstract. It deals with a much wider gamut of
pertinent issues. This layer is inciting the viewer to position him/her in front of the history of human race to
re-discover the natural Man in relation to his social state.

Honestly speaking, the anthropological aspects of the film were not Rays own. He had often spoken about
how Agantuk was inspired by the thinking of the French anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss. In his works
Lvi-Strauss had firmly stressed that the mind and intelligence of the primitive savage people were certainly
not inferior to civilized people. The universe of the primitives and of the civilized is different due to the
approach in which primitive and civilized people conceptualized their world. The savage mind according to
Lvi-Strauss is equally logical in the same sense and the same fashion as the civilized minds and therefore
no negative value could be attributed to it.

In his memoir Tristes Tropiques, Lvi-Strauss had revealed that in every part of the world and in every
forms of society, whether savage or civilize, human beings has always followed its own styles and methods
of thinking and has structured unlimited social systems for themselves. Every society is a product of the
inescapable norms of these systems. The systems originate from the human thought process and then are
applied in real life practices. The application of systems to reach the objectives of life might differ in time
and space according to the cultural values of a specific society. This diversity is caused mainly by the
different thought processes and its conclusion which evokes from the diverse reality of a particular time.
The physical world is approached and conceptualized by the savage thought process in a supremely
concrete way where the point of view originates from the sensible qualities of the savage mind. On the other
end, civilized humans apply a supremely abstract method in their thought process which is derived from the
formal properties of their civilized minds.

Whenever the strangeness of the primitive world is unintelligible to the people of the civilized world, the
reality of the primitive people is viewed by them as ridiculous and disgusting. Frustrated by the inability to
comprehend the culture and values remote from them, the primitive reality becomes insignificant, a
vanished reality. This ignorance then becomes an excuse for the modern mechanistic civilization to
gradually trap, overcome and finally destroy the radically different society of the primitives. As Lvi-Strauss
has pointed out, human societies or individual human beings never create absolutely but choose certain
combinations from a repertory of ideas which it should be possible to reconstitute. The values and social
norms of the primitives are therefore important. To understand another system one needs to be tolerant,
reflective and curious. Sadly, the mechanistic civilization by and large has lost these qualities.

Lvi-Strauss has asserted that, Certain social groups must be adjudged superior to ourselves, if the
comparison rests upon their success in reaching objectives comparable to our own The phenomenal
evolution of human beings from anthropoid apes to modern man is the greatest evidence of this success.
Certain civilizations of the past knew quite well how best to solve the same problems which the modern
civilized society is still struggling to solve today. If one can diversify the field of investigation into different
societies it will eventually become plain that no human society is fundamentally good: but neither is any of
them fundamentally bad; all offer their members certain advantages Cannibalism is considered to be the
most horrible, disgusting and uncivilized of all savage practices. But according to Lvi-Strauss, no
society is proof, morally speaking, against the demands of hunger. In times of starvation men will eat
literally anything, as we lately saw in the Nazi extermination camps. By looking from outside one could be
easily tempted to distinguish two opposing types of society. But once one had lived as they live, and eaten
as they eat, one well knew what hunger could be, and how the satisfaction of that hunger brought not
merely repletion, but happiness itself. Every form of society thus has its own impurity within itself that
finds outlet in elements of injustice, cruelty, and insensitivity. Societies which seem to be brutal may turn
out, to be reasonably humane and benevolent when examined from another point of view. By nature, no
society is perfect. Claiming one form of society as superior in its relation to all the others is thus a shameful
stupidity. In Agantuk, the representation of the Bison of Altamira convincingly explains this point.

In a most bizarre way, the honest provocation generated by Ray in the film has stirred his detractors. He is
criticized as an armchair liberal functioning as a simple humanist who is placing his hopes and
disillusionment on some grass-root cultural activity and on the innocence of children. Is he not
oversimplifying social reality by viewing it as an individual vs. society conflict? Is he not an old fashioned,
anti-progressive artist under a humanist cloak trying to spread pessimism? Do not forget that Ray was
accused by similar criticism for romanticizing Indias poverty for foreign consumption in his seminal
work Pather Panchali. These are stupid arguments essentially stimulated to achieve solace from envious
intellectual melancholy of the present time and its flatulence from indigested modernity.

Ray did not profess for the primitive form of society which many of his critics thought he did. He has simply
chosen a middle path where Shakespeare, Tagore, Marx and Freud can equally contribute along with the
experience and values of primitive ancestors. While he has harshly criticized the war mentality of the
civilized world, similarly he has disapproved the tribal custom of polygamy. His intention was to raise
relevant issues from a certain perspective which can stir his audience to look differently. As a genuine artist,
Ray did not intend to show the solution but tried to guide the audience to find one. Agantuk assists to shift
the focus of the civilized world towards re-evaluating its root.

Similarly, Ray has definitely not spoken about any individual vs. society conflict in the film. He got the
fundamental idea from Lvi-Strauss to put up incisive interrogations on society and culture as a whole. Is it
possible to take an unbiased view of customs and ways of life distant from ones own? Is it possible to doubt
the rightness or naturalness of the customs of the civilized society instead of taking it for granted? Is it
possible to find a middle way between the primitive and modern values? How to find elements from other
societies and make use of them that will help the civilized world to reform its own customs? How to gather
experiences from a remote culture and get enriched by them? Is it possible to unravel what in the present
nature of Man is original, and what is artificial? Is it possible to re-discover the natural Man in his relation
to the social state he belongs to? Even if we believe, how do we prove that other societies may not be better
than our own?

The level of depth inscribed in the oeuvre of Satyajit Rays films is unique. In the age of the banality
of Slumdog Millionaire and the hoopla surrounding an overcooked myth of Bollywoods theory of culture, it
is worth talking about Ray and his phenomenal artistic mastery.