The Chess Players

The Chess Players

The Chess Players

The Chess Players

India's submission to the 50th Academy Awards - and Satyajit Ray's first Hindi movie - uses chess as an allegory for the British occupation of India. A pair of men play shatranj (an ancient version of the game), having little interest for the world outside. Some of the most effective scenes show the British general (played by Richard Attenborough) discussing the impending annexation of Awadh with his aide; these scenes make perfectly clear the British attitude towards the colonized peoples. In other scenes, we get to see all sorts of things representing Hindustani culture. I've only seen one other Satyajit Ray movie ("The World of Apu", and that was a long time ago), so I can't really compaure "Shatranj Ke Khilari" with everything else. But I can say that it's one impressive piece of work. Not the ultimate masterpiece, but I recommend it. Chess plays as important a role as it does in Stanley Kubrick's movies (it's worth noting that the game got created as an analysis of medieval Europe, with the expendable pawns getting sent out first, while the monarchs and their cohorts stay safely behind). I need to start watching more of Ray's movies.

"The principle victims of British policies are Unpeople - those whose lives are deemed worthless and expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain. They are the modern equivalent of the 'savages' of colonial days, who could be mown down by British guns in virtual secrecy, or else in circumstances where the perpetrators were hailed as the upholders of civilisation." - Mark Curtis Like many of director Satyajit Ray's later films, "The Chess Players" takes places in a series of confined locations, in which men barter, scheme and plot. Along with "The Home and the World", it's also one of the few Satyajit Ray films to deal overtly with British Imperialism. Fittingly, "The Chess Players" opens alongside a chessboard. Disembodied hands reach out and manoeuvre the board's pieces, a motif which will extend throughout Ray's picture; in "The Chess Players", everyone's a puppet on a string. We're then given a brief history lesson, Ray using cartoons, paintings and narration to touch upon the life and customs of 19th century India, and the events which will lead to the annexation of the Indian State of Oudh by the notorious British East India Company. The film then watches as British Imperialists, led by General Outram (Richard Attenborough), scheme to remove Muslim ruler Wajid Ali Shah from Oudh's capital of Lucknow. They want him out and their own puppets in. Unsurprisingly, the British view Wajid Ali Shah as a savage, hedonistic and salacious. Ray subverts these prejudices; Ali Shah is also an artist, poet, and more importantly, is one of the few Indians in power to resist the Company's attempts at expansion. Other monarchs and noblemen - noblemen who should share Ali Shah's class interests – remain oblivious to the Empire's scheming. They sit in their private cocoons, disinterested. At its best "The Chess Players" details how the apathy and disunity of India's ruling classes allowed a comparatively small number of British officials and soldiers to conquer regions without opposition. Like Ray's later film, "The Home and the World", "The Chess Players" also presents a fairly nuanced view of "progress". In Ray's hands, feudalism and monarchy are as brutal, stupid and reactionary as European Imperialism, but each of these conflicting "systems" are nevertheless "beneficial" in the sense that they supplant, destroy or mitigate the excesses of the other. Ray would himself hint at this in interviews: "Easy targets don't interest me very much. I was portraying two negative forces, feudalism and colonialism, and condemning both." "The Chess Players" was based on a Munshi Premchand short story of the same name. It was Ray's first and only feature to be shot in a language other than his native Bengal. It remains one of the more sophisticated films about the divide and conquer tactics used by the British in India, but lacks the visual splendour oft associated with the genre ("A Passage to India", "Gandhi", "North West Frontier", "Khartoum" etc). 8/10 - See Pontecorvo's "Burn!".

Ray has not spared any effort in mocking the lucknavi shan-o-shauqat in this movie. The upper class, both the royalty and the newly-rich, have slipped into celebrating art and culture at the expense of everything else. There is widespread loss of manhood - unsatisfied wife, cheating wife, accepting defeat without any protest. Luxury has enfeebled the mind and the chess players choose the pretentious way of displaying their intellect at chess rather than solving their real life problems. Performances by all the characters are impeccable. Shabana has been underutilized. Ray has done a great job at recreating that period of history. The pace of the movie is slow, but I guess that is in synch with the lifestyle of those days.

Previous reviews have puzzlingly stated that this is one of the first films to break away from the commercial traditions of Bollywood. In fact, it belongs to a different tradition altogether - art cinema reflecting social themes - which has been going on since at least the early 1950s in India (where it was initially strongly influenced by Italian neo-realism) in the work of Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak. All three were, perhaps significantly, Bengalis, and partook of the rich intellectual traditions of that region, most widely associated with the great poet and national figure Rabindranath Tagore. The Chess Players is a delight from beginning to end. Taking its cue from the origins of chess as a war-strategy training game, Ray builds two narrative strands in parallel: in the mid-1850s, a pair of idle aristocrats become obsessed by chess and play it all day long, oblivious to the collapse of their domestic relationships that it causes; and in the larger world outside, the scheming and strategy of the chess-board is played out in the real-life scheming of the East India Company as it attempts to manoeuvre the Nawab of Oudh from his throne and bring the state within British jurisdiction. The two plotlines are beautifully brought together at the end when, after hearing that Company troops have moved in and the Nawab has abdicated, the chess-playing friends change their board layout to the Western manner, which involves the king and queen changing their starting positions: "Move over, king. Make way for en] Victoria!" There are fine performances all round: from Amjad Khan as the Nawab, whose infinitely delicate sensibilities lead to infinite puzzlement at the connivings of the less fastidious, to Richard Attenborough as the Company representative in Oudh whose job it is to unseat him, who manages to convey a genuine belief that the state needs to be better run, with an underlying realization that he has no right to do what he is doing. Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey, as the chess players Mirza and Mir, both have extremely expressive faces that can switch from blustering bonhomie to pained hurt, or from deadpan seriousness to quizzical amusement, in a heartbeat. Jaffrey's talent for comedy will come as no surprise to viewers of his English-language films, and he provides the film's finest comic moment when he walks into his bedroom to find his wife trying to hide her lover (his nephew) under the bed - a moment straight out of a Feydeau farce. Two moments of great artistic beauty stand out for me. First, when the Nawab, overwhelmed by the political situation while in conference with his ministers, seeks solace in a haunting, graceful song he had composed in a happier time (actually composed by Ray - perhaps the director showing us his self-identification with the character). Second, in a scene where Mir is left on his own at the chessboard while Mirza goes off to "see what the trouble is" with his wife, the camera follows Mir as he gets up and goes out into the hallway to see where his friend has got to. The camera then stays still as he retraces his steps, and in the vertical slice of light caused by a gap between two curtains that separate the hallway and the chess room, we see framed the precise point on the chessboard where Mir's hand slowly and surreptitiously comes into view as he sneakily moves one of the pieces. A virtuoso piece of camerawork and compositional framing that, like the film as a whole, never fails to enchant.

India's submission to the 50th Academy Awards - and Satyajit Ray's first Hindi movie - uses chess as an allegory for the British occupation of India. A pair of men play shatranj (an ancient version of the game), having little interest for the world outside. Some of the most effective scenes show the British general (played by Richard Attenborough) discussing the impending annexation of Awadh with his aide; these scenes make perfectly clear the British attitude towards the colonized peoples. In other scenes, we get to see all sorts of things representing Hindustani culture. I've only seen one other Satyajit Ray movie ("The World of Apu", and that was a long time ago), so I can't really compaure "Shatranj Ke Khilari" with everything else. But I can say that it's one impressive piece of work. Not the ultimate masterpiece, but I recommend it. Chess plays as important a role as it does in Stanley Kubrick's movies (it's worth noting that the game got created as an analysis of medieval Europe, with the expendable pawns getting sent out first, while the monarchs and their cohorts stay safely behind). I need to start watching more of Ray's movies.

'The Chess Players' is the only film of Ray which ventures deep into a different culture - the one of the Muslim kingdom of Oudh, and is spoken in the Urdu language. Filmed on location in Lucknow it describes the end of the last Muslim fief in India in 1856, going deep into the social and cultural causes of the fall of the kingdom. It is a work of great psychological and cinematographic beauty, also the most expensive film ever made by Ray. The famous Indian writer V.S. Naipul was quoted comparing this film with a Shakespeare play, and the comparison is not exaggerated. There are two apparently distinct threads in the film. One is the historical story of the deposing of the last king of Oudh, Wajid Ali Shah (played by Amjad Khan). He is described in the film as a fascinating mix of corruption and sensitivity, of debauchery and resignation. Ray had ambivalent feelings to this character, which is on one side a symbol of the decay of remains of the Mogul empire, but on the other side has an internal dignity and continues a tradition and a way of life which is misjudged and completely mis-understood by his enemies. The opposing camp of the British is represented by general Outram (Richard Attenborough), the archetype of the colonial conqueror, misjudging and downplaying the culture of his opponents. The dialogs between the two are fascinating. They use a translator, and the translation is rigorously accurate. Yet, the true meaning gets often lost in translation. The dialog between cultures needs to take place much above the dictionary. The second thread is the one of the chess players. Two friends, belonging to the aristocracy of the kingdom spend all their time, days and nights playing chess. They play it the old way, they are proud that the game invented in India (and not in Persia!) spread all over the world, and although they hear that the British had changed some rules they ignore the changes. By love for the game they ignore everything around - their affairs, their wives, the dangers that threaten their kingdom and mode of life. Chess becomes the central obsession of their lives and the central obsession of the film, a symbol of the tradition and refinement of their civilization, but also of the obsession and refuse to face the reality that leads to its loss. While spending time in fighting each others king, they fail to protect the real king and his kingdom. Sanjeev Kumar as Mirza Sajjad Ali and Saeed Jaffrey as Mir Roshan Ali are perfect in the two roles. The cinematography of Ray is beautiful and refined as is the world that it describes. Many of the scenes are beautiful compositions, and when music and dance mix as in many Indian films it fits perfectly in the story and the ambiance of the court. The story of the takeover of the last Muslim kingdom of India by the British, with the passive complicity of the local nobility too busy to live its life of luxury and enjoy its preferred pleasures is forever cast in the images of this wonderful film.

The Chess Players is a curious film by the famed Indian director Satyajit Ray. Half in Hindi and half in English which is curious in itself. The story is about the take over of the Kingdom of Oudh, capital Lucknow, by the British. It shows the complete deceit of the British in their takeover of the Indian Sub Continent using underhand methods based in their emasculation of the Indian rulers. The Nawab of Oudh is a cultured Muslim ruler in the tradition of The Moghuls. The qualities admired by the culture of the time were not militaristic and patriarchal but cultural and aesthetic. The Nawab often sang songs to his people and danced for them or read poetry and wrote it of course. This was considered by the British to show signs of effeminacy and not good government. I fact the subjects of the Nawab who were for the most part Hindus, loved their Ruler for precisely these qualities and even though he was of a different faith, lived happily in a cultural paradise. The British represented by Richard Attenborough show a total lack of understanding of this culture and in a cynical move annex the kingdom and send the Nawab into exile.There was interestingly enough, no attempt at resistance but a bland acceptance of the will of God. Strangely sad and haunting film from one of India's greatest directors since Independence. Trivia. Lucknow was the city that Cliff Richard was born in and lived as a child before Independence.