HL: A Ray of poeticity – Mahanayak x Ray

Rediscovering the auteur’s take on the psyche of a film star in Nayak(1960)

On 3rd September, 2026, the Film Heritage Foundation celebrated 100 years of the ‘Mahanayak’ Uttam Kumar by screening Satyajit Ray’s Nayak(1966) at Regal Cinema in Mumbai. I was fortunate to be one among the packed audience that got to see the unfolding of Ray’s highly revered masterpiece with the Bengali titan as it’s protagonist on the big screen. 

In Nayak(1966) directed by Satyajit Ray, Uttam Kumar plays a high profile film star ‘Arindam Mukherjee’ who journeys from his home to Delhi on an overnight train to attend an awards function of which he is a recipient. The film chronicles detailed encounters with his past, his unsettling ephemeral dreams and his co-passengers who come from various walks of life: a nervous yet power-hungry advertising professional along with his wife who aspires to be an actress, a family of three where the daughter is sick and the father is a senior businessman appearing to have a taste for the ways of the West, an old cynical film critic, an ever smiling train attendant, a curious fleeting girl child and the graceful independent journalist ‘Ms. Aditi Sengupta’ (played by Sharmila Tagore) along with her parents.

The minimalist opening title credit sequence with a tensely dramatic monophonic melody composed by Ray holds a metaphor of it’s own. The credits overlay a series of thick striped lines which disintegrate into chequered lines with the every accent of each crash cymbal shot. One crash sound and a chunk of the line vanishes: an audio-visual motif for a fast changing world where success can hit you, a career can make you or break you at unpredictable moments. As the chequered lines disintegrate with a final crash sound, Arindam Mukherjee’s head is eventually unveiled as he combs his hair neatly. The camera pans down his shoulder to his hands as he folds the cords of his electric shaver and places it in the box, while loosely emphasizing his shiny watch. While wearing a white formal full sleeved shirt, his assistant enters and begins a conversation. The voice of ‘the hero’ is introduced first as he responds to his assistant’s inquisitions. He fastens a tie over his shirt and then sits, to eventually tie the lace of his squeaky clean vintage two-tone spectator shoes, all-the-while the camera still depriving us of the Nayak’s face throughout the introductory conversation. Eventually as the costume completes itself, Arindam’s face is unveiled through a vulnerable yet charismatic look of confident questioning. This shot breakdown is an exemplar of a stylistic introduction of a protagonist who commands attention without obvious exhibition or ‘aura farming’ in today’s vocabulary. 

As with auteurs who educate us about their literary or non-literary sources through their films, we shuffle through Ray’s library of collected wisdom of the Western and Eastern culture through dialogue-based or action-based breadcrumbs in his characters. In one instance, the senior businessman in Arindam’s train cabin says, ‘After all there is nothing that beats American Movies’, while praising the evolution of Japanese cinema and bringing up the 1960s Hollywood crisis. The same character is seen shuffling through a Perry Mason novel and later asking for ‘coke’ when the puzzled waiter deciphers that it is ‘coca-cola’ through the advertising professional’s help. With a nervously proud laugh, the advertising professional proudly claims that his name ‘Pritish’ rhymes with the word ‘British’, showing Ray’s flair for satire and humour with an undercurrent anti-colonial stance. The old, cynical film critic despises the so called non-intellectualism of the film world and strongly calls for a ‘deep moral sense’ that is missing in those that work in the film world. As Arindam absorbs these comments with a loose aloofness, we empathize with his callous smile. Through these skilfully curated interactions in the beginning quarter of the film, Ray starts to build an exterior persona of the ‘hero’ Arindam Mukherjee while keeping us carefully protected from the interior ‘human’ Arindam Mukherjee. 

In one of the many striking dream sequences in the film, Arindam finds himself walking through a desert of dunes made up of notes of money, joyous in its tone at first, but slowly turning dark with a rapture of ceremonial noise and skeletal hands popping out of the ground with ringing telephones in them. Ray plants the first first clue of Arindam’s past, his theatre mentor Shankardada, in this dream through a sonic cue. The chaotic pandal noise becomes a crucial motif for Arindam’s memory of Shankardada’s sudden death during the lifting of a deity palanquin during Durga Puja. It is eventually revealed that Shankardada is a very orthodox theatre person who dislikes Arindam’s choice to move into the filmmaking world, repeatedly warning him, ‘film actor is a puppet!’.

While having tea in the restaurant car of the train, Arindam has a chance encounter with Ms. Aditi Sengupta (played by Sharmila Tagore) who seeks his autograph as a favour for another person. Wearing thick black glasses, with an eye of judgement and subtle sternness of someone who despises glamour’s side effects, she introduces herself as a headstrong woman running an independent magazine called ‘Adhunik’, which only publishes articles written by women writers. While she is curious to know Arindam, she wilfully rejects any occasion of being enamoured by his presence and Arindam finds this as a fresh breeze amidst a sea of journalists he has come across, hungry for either scandal or gossip. Eventually Arindam begins to peel layers of his ‘tucked away’ past through Ms. Sengupta’s dignified and charming curiosity. She gradually feels his hurt heart in two stages. Firstly, during his recollection of the fading veteran actor Mukunda Lahiri (played by Bireswar Sen) who shows up at his home, speaking about a stagnation in his career, begging Arindam for a meagre side-role of a doorman in his next film out of desperation. Secondly, when she witnesses a hopelessly inebriated Arindam on the train, having downed a bottle of whisky to numb himself to sleep and called upon her to talk to him. Arindam confides in her as he starts to feel a sense of freedom in unburdening himself from the troubles of the past, taking a pause from being ‘a hero in the eyes of the public’ constantly. As Arindam surrenders himself to an alcohol induced sleep, Aditi copes with a sleepless euphoric excitement of having entered a man’s soul and developed a sort of intoxicating fondness for his intense confidence of being able to share his world’s hard earned truth. She realizes how she wants to nurse his wounds while also revealing a few of the scars to him. The more she wants to navigate into the interiors of the Nayak’s soul, the more she is afraid of it’s consequences.

Ray’s fondness for practical lighting, which makes use of natural light sources and choreographed shadows, reminded me of the Kirk Douglas’s partially lit face in many of the frames of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus(1960). In the scene where Mukunda arrives unannounced at Arindam’s house and asks for some whisky, he delivers one the most powerful lines in the film while looking down dejected with a half lit face, ‘It’s not for me. It’s for my soul’. Ray’s detailing in terms of sound design for the interior train sequences is worth studying. In moments of character introspection, he emphasizes the ‘trrrr’ clinking noises of glasses vibrating next to each other along with the rumble of the railway. When a drunk Arindam stares at the stroboscopic diverging and converging train tracks in the night air, the diegetic sound of the train chug turns into a rhythmically unsettling background score underlining the angst of his existential revelation. What I personally liked was Ray’s treatment of Uttam Kumar’s character as an actor who is deeply ambitious yet firmly grounded, kind, loving and devoid of the ‘creative stereotype’ of rudeness. Towards the end of the journey, the little girl who is sick in his train cabin seems to have healed through his loving presence and the young journalist bids goodbye to Arindam, deeply rooting for his health and success. Ms Aditi Sengupta is a character that encapsulates Ray’s progressive and deeply empathetic feminist outlook faithfully. Arindam and Aditi acknowledge their ephemeral bonding, and uphold it’s truth by choosing to walk their own paths. Nayak(1966) educates us on the truth of the undoings of a viciously ambitious pull towards success, an artist’s desire for human validation, and the answers that dreams seek to find. 

Harnessed with Uttam Kumar’s and Sharmila Tagore’s outstanding performances, the sharp, witty and grounded writing of Satyajit Ray, the film reassures us of a distilled poeticity of form and prose, trickling down from years of gathered intellectual wisdom. The tactfully orchestrated shot breakdowns, cinematic frames flavoured with practical lighting and the brisk editing grammar throughout the length of the film, shows how Ray imbibed passionately from the world of global arts and reinterpreted the techniques that inspired him in his own narratives.