Revisiting a Classic

Written by Surbhi Gupta | Published: December 11, 2017 12:00 am A still from Shatranj ke Khiladi

I didn’t realise it’s been forty years, that’s a long time. Shatranj Ke Khiladi has become a world classic,” says Suresh Jindal. The 75-year-old is the producer of the iconic 1977 film, Satyajit Ray’s only full-length Hindi feature.

Seated in his Sundar Nagar residence, Jindal fondly remembers the making of the film, and also its legendary director. “Ray is so great, some of it falls upon me,” he says, adding, “A Ray film was a Ray film, there was nobody else, he did everything himself, up to the poster design. There was no ambiguity in his visualisation. He worked so hard during the pre-production stage that when we began shooting, it was just about translating his vision.”

Jindal’s book My Adventures with Satyajit Ray: The Making of Shatranj Ke Khiladi (Rs 350, Harper Collins), that released recently, discusses this meticulous filmmaking process. He has documented the journey of the film, from his first meeting with Ray in September 1974, to the hurdles in the pre-production stage and the success of the film at festivals world over.

“The film almost didn’t get made,” Jindal tells us. It took about three years for it to hit the theatres from the day Jindal first met Ray in 1974, when the producer flew to Kolkata to meet Ray, following his instinct that the filmmaker was “ready” to make a Hindi film. He shares how the two belonged to opposite ends — while Ray was a celebrated 57-year-old filmmaker belonging to a distinguished family of Bengal that was highly accomplished, both academically and artistically, Jindal was an electronics engineer from The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Few months shy of 33, he came from a well-to-do, non-intellectual, conservative, Jain-Bania family from Punjab. Introduced to world cinema in the US, till then, Jindal had only produced one film, Basu Chatterjee’s Rajnigandha, that too at the behest of a friend who had requested him to invest money in the project. “I was very anxious that Ray would refuse,” says Jindal. But the filmmaker was welcoming. He had a story in mind but told Jindal it would cost a lot of money (Rs 35 lakh). “He was very considerate and a complete producer’s director — no tantrums, no wastage. He would worry more about your money than you,” recalls Jindal.

The two began filming a few months later on the adaptation of a short story by Munshi Premchand, with two parallel plots: the annexation of the state of Awadh, and the story of two noblemen obsessed with shatranj, an ancient form of chess. There were several hiccups, from delay in pre-production, to actor Sanjeev Kumar (who played Mirza Sajjad Ali) suffering from a heart attack and Amjad Khan’s (who played Nawab Wajid Ali Shah) near fatal accident. “They recovered and by then Ray’s script was also ready. The book has a letter where Ray says that he will give it (the script) another try, and if it doesn’t work out, we will drop the film,” says Jindal. After the film was complete, four distributors who had agreed to buy the film backed out and the movie had to wait for a year for a commercial release.

The book is laced with several such memories and also includes Ray’s sketches of characters, costumes and storyboards in the notebooks he called Kheror-Khata (these have now been digitised by the National Digital Library). The letters exchanged between Jindal and Ray, give an insight into the detailed planning that went into making the film. “I knew these letters were important. I also have the main costumes and the crown worn by the Nawab. I don’t know if UCLA would want them for their museum,” says Jindal. He recalls how patient Ray was. “On his first meeting with Richard Attenborough (who played General Outram), Ray told him that he can even read the telephone directory for him. He was very patient and compassionate, we called him Bodhisattva,” he says.

After the success of Shatranj ke Khiladi, Jindal produced only a handful movies, including Sai Paranjpye’s Katha and Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, after which he distanced himself from the industry. “I got introduced to Buddhism. I was also bored with the kind of movies that were being made,” he says. Cinema, he feels, has improved now — its technical quality and scripts. “Back in the day, I remember Elia Kazan (American filmmaker) saying that Hollywood used to be run by individuals, now accountants and lawyers have taken over. I couldn’t relate to it then. But now, for every one Ship of Theseus, there are almost 10,000 unsold films,” he says.

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