Gitanjali Chandrasekhran (MUMBAI MIRROR; May 4, 2014)

As the alaap begins, the dark screen lights up slowly to reveal a man playing the sitar, deep in concentration. Over the next several frames, the camera ‘trucks’ forward in on the maestro on stage, before slowly panning away to dissolve into an evening landscape.

 This is how filmmaker Satyajit Ray visualised a documentary that he had planned on late Ravi Shankar, the man who composed music for The Apu Trilogy.

 Titled simply, A Sitar Recital by Ravi Shankar, the film never got made, but that it was Ray’s preoccupation is evident from the hundred odd sketches Ray doodled in the form of a storyboard.

 They, and the Ray-Shankar relationship, are now presented in a book by Ray’s son, filmmaker and writer Sandip Ray in Satyajit Ray’s Ravi Shankar: An Unfilmed Script, published by HarperCollins.

 Speaking from Kolkata where he was readying for the book launch, 60-year-old Sandip said it took him six months to put the book together. “Besides the entire storyboard, which was made in a drawing book with pen and ink, the book contains articles and interviews on both, my father and Raviji, discussing their close association with each other,” he says, adding, “Fortunately, it’s ready just in time for his (Ray’s) 93rd birthday.”

 What sets this particular storyboard apart from those preserved in Satyajit Ray Archives in Kolkata, believes Sandip, is their detailing. “This one is very elaborate and has precise notes on when he wants to track forward or back. The stage of the raag and the moods he wants to portray have all been noted down in the 32-page drawing book.”

 The stage for the documentary is a hypothetical concert at which Shankar plays. However, there is still some debate on which raag Ray intended be captured. In his essay, Unheard Melodies — The Sitar and the Camera, that finds place in the book, Shankar’s official biographer Sankarlal Bhattacharjee says: The two hints that we can possibly derive…posit a quandary — the frame suggesting an evening landscape proposes a different time of day from the ones portraying a Rajasthani miniature built around the morning Ragini Todi… With no raga identified we are hard-pressed to gauge whether the image travels with the melodic content or simply reflects the speed generated on the strings.

 The storyboard, which Sandip says his father rediscovered some time in the 1970s, poses many such mysteries. Primarily, why it never reached the filming stage. Sandip offers an explanation, “My father must have made the storyboard during the 1950s when Raviji was composing music for him. After Pather Panchali became a critically acclaimed hit, Shankar was wandering around the world. Both he and father got so busy, there was never any time. My father was excited to see the book when he discovered it. But he put it aside, saying ‘forget it’.”

 While not many knew about the film, Shankar did. In an interview to Bhattacharjee, he is quoted saying, “Satyajit-babu wanted to use my curly shock of hair as a pattern to launch out from, into the leaves of trees and floating clouds. He also wanted to see the melodies of the sitar as curled lines rising upwards into the air.”

 While much has been speculated over the fallout between Ray and Shankar — the two never worked together after The Apu Trilogy — the book attempts to dispel it as a myth. “They remained close. Each time Raviji came to Kolkata, he called on us and they would sit and chat. In the later years, they would constantly inquire after each other’s health,” says Sandip.

 And while A Sitar Recital… remains an unfinished tribute to Shankar, the maestro dedicated an entire album to the filmmaker, titled Farewell My Friend, after his death in 1992. The album, says Bhattacharjee in his essay, was a “superb rendering of the Raga Rajya Kalyan, followed by variations on the theme of Pather Panchali.”