Nemai Ghosh is a low-profile person. He was content shadowing his idol, hero, friend, philosopher and guide, Satyajit Ray. He never seeks vantage position in the front row of life. Way back in 1991, a photobiography on Satyajit Ray was published under the title – Satyajit Ray at 70. It documented a collection of black and white photographs of the great master of celluloid taken by his personal photographer for more than 25 years.
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 Ghosh that will enter into posterity is his work for 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. After Ray passed away, Ghosh ventured to discover new worlds to capture them for posterity through the magic lens of his camera and this resulted in coffee table books of archival value that are still coming out one after another.
Encounter with the camera
Basically from group theatre, Ghosh chanced upon photography purely through a strange twist of fate. “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 an assistant cameraman in films, offered to teach me the ropes. Actor Robi Ghosh from theatre took me to a shooting of a Ray film. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
Many moods of Ray
The photographs of Ghosh 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-fingeand- thumb lenses at an actor, caught inside a room in a vest 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.
Talking about how he was so singularly focussed on Ray for so long, Ghosh says, “I was in a trance, such was the power of his persona. I was mesmerised by this towering persona, his ability to get sucked into his work so much that he forgot that I was always there, photographing him every minute in time. I did a lot of work to span theatre also during that time as I am originally from theatre. But that was like an off-shoot which became a subject later on. The eye of my camera and my own eyes behind the lens was focussed on Manik-da.” In January 2013, in a tribute to 100 years of Indian Cinema, The Delhi Art Gallery had organised an exhibition entitled ‘Nemai Ghosh – Satyajit Ray and Beyond’ launched by another famous Ray cinematographer Soumendu Roy who says, “what I could not achieve with my big camera, Nemai has done with his little camera!”
Documenting master artists
Delhi Art Gallery has digitised Ghosh’s work of more than one lakh negatives, and presented around 170 archival prints at the Harrington Street Art Centre in Kolkata. Delhi Art Gallery brought out a superbly printed coffee table book of Ghosh’s photographs of Ray caught candidly in a myriad of moods – reading, writing, concentrating, pensive, working, looking through the lens on location, pointing a finger to direct action and so on. Pramod Kumar K.G. curator of the exhibition said, “Ghosh’s photographs of Ray at home and on the sets suggest a rare intimacy; with the poignancy of these images of the master at work, during and in many cases, enacting roles.”
His photographs on Ray are exhibited at the permanent gallery of St Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and at Nord Pas-de-Calais, France. He has documented the making of films such as Jukti Takko Gappo by Ritwik Ghatak, Interview, Calcutta 71 and Ek Adhuri Kahani by Mrinal Sen, Paar by Gautam Ghosh and Ijjodu by M S Sathyu. Ghosh photographed great masters Jamini Roy, Ram Kinker Baij and Benode Behari Mukherjee over the years 1969 and 1970. He went back to his interest in documenting master artists from 2002, photographing more than 30 major Indian painters and sculptors at work, resulting in a massive suite of photographs of the best minds in contemporary Indian art at work.
Beyond Ray
Moving beyond Ray, he has photographed the land and the people of Kutch in Gujarat (1995–97), Bastar in Chhattisgarh (1998–99), Bonda Hills in Orissa (2007), the Apatani tribals in Ziro in Arunachal Pradesh (2010). “You cannot even begin to imagine what a long struggle it was to capture the lives and habitats of these adivasis of India living in remote places inaccessible by any form of public and private transport, involving miles and hours of trekking on foot in terrible climatic conditions and all this when I was not exactly young,” reminisces Ghosh who celebrated his 80th birthday this May.
“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.” One of his sons, Satyaki Ghosh, is currently one of the best-known names as a brilliant photographer in B & W of performing artistes, cinema, and fashion.
“Today, the word ‘camera’ is an integral part of my name. Wherever a group of people discuss me, the word ‘photograph’ comes up almost naturally. 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 along with one of the greatest filmmakers the world has ever produced.
Nemai’s Kolkata
Right now, Nemai-da is anxiously waiting for his latest coffee table book published under the Harper-Collins India imprint called ‘Nemai Ghosh’s Kolkata’. It is a brilliant aesthetic and creative tribute to the city. The images reproduced in B & W are complemented with text and captions by culture historian and journalist Shankarlal Bhattacharya and Ghosh’s own quotes. “I hear a lot about this city. Some call it a city of poverty and despair. Some find it to be one of politics and rallies. And there are many who believe in its deep root in art and culture. Whatever be the case, I find life here, and love. What draws me to Kolkata is the human element and its spontaneous expression. Every moment of the city distils a narrative of epic possibilities and I, as a flaneur, have framed all of that. From the alleys to the highways, my lens has been doing its job. It is not a comprehensive, definitive compendium of Kolkata. Neither is it meant to be one. It is my Kolkata, the way I have seen it evolve through time,” says Ghosh, who was bestowed with the Padma Shri in 2010 among numerous national and international awards.
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Shoma Chatterji
The writer is a freelance journalist, film scholar and author, who has won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema.[/column]