Days and Nights in the Forest
Araṇyēr Din Rātri
Satyajit Ray (1970)
Four men drive away from big city lives to spend time together in a locale and culture far removed from what they know. That’s the starting point for John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), which James Dickey adapted from his novel of the same name, published in 1970 – when Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest was also released. Adapted by Ray from a 1968 novel by Sunil Ganguli, this black-and-white film opens with four male friends on the road from Kolkata, heading for the Palamu forests in Jharkand state. There, as in Deliverance, the excursion turns into something very different from what the tourists had in mind. In most other respects, Ray’s film could hardly be less like Boorman’s. There are none of Deliverance’s horrors, yet Days and Nights in the Forest develops into a story that’s troubling and painful, though full of humour, too.
The Deliverance quartet are primed for adventure, of a positive kind – whitewater canoeing down the Cahulawassee River in Georgia, before the river valley is dammed and the area’s natural beauty destroyed. The Days and Nights men are less ambitious, but they’ve read about Palamu customs and women. Each of the four is single although Hari (Samit Bhanja) has recently been in a relationship that ended when his girlfriend dumped him, dealing a big blow to his pride. Hari’s touchiness about this leads to angry words between him and Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh) on the road journey; Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), the car owner and driver, and Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), in the back seat reading snippets from a guidebook, are less excitable. All the men are educated but they earn a living in very different ways. Ashim has some kind of management role, Sanjoy a white-collar job at a jute mill. Hari is a professional cricketer. Shekhar is currently unemployed. What the foursome do have in common – and it’s soon evident – is a sense of entitlement.
They stop to ask a youth whose vest is full of holes, where they can find a forest bungalow to stay. The youth, Lakha (Dibyendu Chatterjee), joins them in the car to direct them to a bungalow but the caretaker there (Khairatilal Tahori) protests that he’ll lose his job if he lets the friends stay without an advance reservation. Shekhar informs him that they are ‘VIPs’; Ashim produces cash to clinch the argument, though the caretaker takes it reluctantly. Once they’re inside the bungalow, Ashim orders refreshments – tea, then dinner. The caretaker’s wife, who usually cooks, is ill, but no matter. Lakha will get shopping in; the caretaker will prepare their evening meal; money talks again. That’s not the only striking aspect of what gets said in Days and Nights in the Forest. The dialogue is mostly Bengali, but the main characters’ occasional use of English is revealing. It reflects the class and educational differences between these urbanites and the rustic locals. It’s sometimes a means whereby one educated character makes a point, ironically or for emphasis, to another. The English dialogue also serves as an implicit expression of British imperialism’s enduring cultural legacy in the attitudes of India’s relatively privileged.
The four friends are in their thirties or thereabouts, but don’t seem exact contemporaries. (The age difference between Rabi Ghosh, the eldest of the four actors, and Samit Bhanja, the youngest, was thirteen years.) It’s not clear therefore if they’re meant to have known each other since school days but Tom Milne, in his admiring Sight and Sound (Winter 1971/2) review of Days and Nights in the Forest, amusingly likens each of them to a school type:
‘Asim [sic] as the head prefect, brilliant and self-assured, and Sanjoy as the quiet boy who admires but does not aspire to emulate him; Hari as the handsome sporting hero, who chums up with the scatterbrained Sekhar [sic] because he is too dull-witted to be irritated like everyone else by the latter’s shrill, ingratiating eagerness to be popular …’
That ‘chums up’ oversimplifies (see above) but conveys well enough how things are once the men settle in at the bungalow, where Hari and Shekhar share one bedroom and Ashim and Sanjoy another. Milne is also right that his classification ‘suggests that Asim [sic] is the only one of the four with sufficient strength of character, as well as the intellectual capacity, to profit from their time out’. Whether or not Ashim eventually does so is one of the film’s most interesting ambiguities.
The men are sexual chauvinists in different ways. Once three young women arrive on the scene – strikingly elegant Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), her sister-in-law Jaya (Kaberi Bose) and Duli (Simi Garewal), a tribal dancer and good time girl – they continue to illuminate the male characters, and to give the story comic ironic force, as well as romantic complication. When, on the first night of their stay, the men go out for drinks and Shekhar points out Duli to Hari, ‘Miss India’ (as Shekhar calls her) is as inebriated as they are. Next morning, Shekhar is also the first to catch sight of Aparna and Jaya, strolling in the forest beyond the bungalow: not much later, all four men stand at a discreet distance to spy on this pair playing badminton. Hari, already more interested in Duli, wanders off, but the other three are preparing to introduce themselves to Aparna and Jaya when an elderly man, very well turned out, approaches. The badminton court is in the grounds of his holiday home, and he invites the tourists in.
This old gentleman is Sadasiv Tripathi (Pahari Sanyal). The little boy who also now appears is his grandson, Tublu (uncredited on IMDb) – child of the widowed Jaya and Tripathi’s late son. As the Tripathis and their visitors exchange small talk, seated on the verandah of the house, Hari tentatively rejoins the group, brightening up at Tublu’s excitement that he’s in the presence of a real sportsman. Ashim is immediately interested in Aparna, Tripathi’s daughter, who sits, in her white trousers and sunglasses, conspicuously apart from the others, reading a book. While Sanjay, Shekhar and Hari join Jaya for badminton doubles, Ashim asks to see inside a small house beyond the main one. Aparna takes him on a tour of what is now her personal hideaway. Ashim glances at a shelf of books (Arthur Miller plays, an Agatha Christie, The Survival of God in the Scientific Age[1]) and flicks through Aparna’s record collection (traditional Indian music, Rubber Soul, Mozart). The small house’s balcony prompts Ashim to quote Romeo and Juliet to Aparna; he then says he’d like to touch her. She offers him instead a tin of sweets and he takes one. Before they leave Tripathi’s home, the men are sociably invited back there by Jaya, for breakfast the following morning.
Ashim is keen to see the highly educated Aparna and her family as kindred spirits yet there’s a persistent tension between the civilised Tripathi household and Ashim’s own tendency to throw his weight around – never mind that he does so more suavely than Shekhar – in dealing with the less advantaged locals. Aparna is immediately disturbed to learn that the group ignored the rules to stay at the bungalow. Returning there from Tripathi’s place, they’re met by a forest ranger who, through a stammer, tells them they risk eviction if the forest manager turns up, and that the caretaker will certainly lose his job for letting them take up residence. Immediately after this encounter, Duli and two of her friends turn up at the bungalow, and Shekhar hires them as cleaners. Their employment is very short-lived: the moment the harassed caretaker catches sight of the women, he yells at them to leave. (They’re ‘very bad women’, he insists, despite Shekhar’s protests.) Within minutes, de facto houseboy Lakha is gone from the bungalow, too. Hari can’t find his wallet, accuses Lakha of theft, and gets violent with him. Lakha tearfully demands the payment he’s due, which Ashim gives him, and exits the bungalow.
Who’s watching who changes. In the morning Ashim, Shekhar and Sanjoy were spying on Aparna and Jaya’s badminton game; the same afternoon, this male trio are bathing outside the bungalow when a car pulls up, containing the two women and Tublu. Jaya explains that someone left a wallet on the badminton court, and hands it over. Shekhar’s grinning efforts to be nonchalant in his state of undress are very funny; Aparna’s deliberate head movement to avert her gaze increases Ashim’s acute embarrassment. That night, the four friends get drunk again, and are making a noisy spectacle of themselves on the forest road when car headlights appear in the darkness. Not even realising that this is Aparna and Jaya’s car again, the men do the twist and bawl about their VIP status, Ashim loudest of all. Hungover next morning, they miss their breakfast appointment but find a large tiffin container, with a note from Jaya, by the bungalow’s front door. They feel compelled to apologise and make their way to Tripathi’s house to find the old man chanting Hindu prayers (another instance of a character unaware they’re being observed). Shortly after returning to the bungalow, they’re confronted by the forest manager, who tells them to leave within the next two hours. On cue, Aparna appears with Jaya to explain that the bungalow party are friends of hers from Kolkata. That’s all she needs to say to rescue their holiday. The forest manager switches instantly from belligerence to deference and goes on his way.
By this point, Days and Nights in the Forest is blooming into rich social comedy. The high point in this vein follows in a party game in the forest, suggested by Jaya, in which she, Aparna and all four men take part. The rules, which Aparna explains, are as follows. The first player thinks of a famous person’s name; the person on one side of the first player repeats that name and adds a second; the next person repeats the first two names and adds a third name, and so on. As soon as a player fails to recite all the names in the right order, they’re out of the game. It’s hard to convey how improbably exciting, as well as absorbing, this memory game proves to be – how brilliantly it illustrates the personalities of the six individuals seated on the ground. Aparna is the most accomplished player, Ashim the most obviously competitive. When she and he are the only two left in the game, she claims she can’t remember the names and concedes. Yet in letting him win, she confirms that she has the upper hand, and Ashim knows it.
That earlier bathing incident, from which Hari is absent, hints at the other three men’s feelings about women. Cheeky joker Shekhar is simply scared of the opposite sex: the closest he gets to female company is on the other side of the net from Jaya in the badminton doubles, where there’s safety in male numbers. Sanjoy’s physical timidity will prove more hurtful. When the car approaches the bathers, he hides on the ground, staying there unseen throughout Shekhar and Ashim’s interaction with the car’s occupants. Once they’re eliminated from the memory game, Sanjoy and Jaya, sitting next to each other, chat. He then brings a pillow for her, from inside the bungalow, checking himself in the mirror before he returns. When the party next head to a fairground, Sanjoy and Jaya again pair up. Afterwards, they walk back together; she invites him in for coffee and he eagerly accepts. But coffee and conversation are all that Sanjoy wants. When Jaya tries to seduce him, he’s struck dumb and rooted to the spot. She, humiliated and distressed, leaves the room, while Sanjoy makes his escape.
It’s during the visit to the fair that Satyajit Ray, for almost the first time in the film, uses cross-cutting to tell the story. The sequences there are the prelude to three romantic climaxes and the start of a last episode involving an unseen watcher. Ray moves to and from among the characters, punctuating transitions with shots of tribal dancers at the fairground. Like Sanjoy and Jaya, Ashim and Aparna are a couple at the fair, but Hari changes partners. After a fairground ride with Shekhar, Hari catches sight of Duli and drags her off to the forest, where he has sex with her. The unseen watcher is Lakha, now relatively dressed up in a shirt – Hari, who insulted him at the bungalow, is in his sights. Lakha first spots Hari at the fairground, then follows him and Duli into the forest, and watches them from behind a tree. When he gets up from the ground after sex, Hari leaves that troublesome wallet on the forest floor. Duli picks it up, stands teasing him until he snatches it back. Once they go their separate ways, Lakha approaches Hari from behind, uses a tree branch to knock him out and, in a moment of poetic justice, makes off with his wallet.
What eventually happens between Ashim and Aparna, though predominantly conversational, is altogether more complex. They’re candid with each other as never before. She admits that, from their first meeting, she liked the idea of ruffling the feathers of his self-assurance. He’s ruefully exasperated about his loss of dignity in her presence – especially when he now finds out that Aparna also witnessed (and, she says, enjoyed) Ashim’s drunken antics on the road that night. She is still concerned by his thoughtless rule-breaking in taking over the bungalow; he replies that she’s fortunate in not needing to work for a living – that a temporary break from obeying office rules is part of what makes a holiday. He hardly allays her concerns, though. They approach the bungalow in a different direction from usual and see the shack where the caretaker’s wife lies sick. Aparna asks if Ashim knew the woman was ill when he decided to overrule the caretaker’s concerns about staying at the bungalow. ‘Somewhat’, he admits.
Jaya’s abortive bid for intimacy with Sanjoy is most poignant as she tells of her husband’s suicide, the loneliness of widowhood, and not knowing why her husband took his own life. Aparna also confides in Ashim about the trauma of her brother’s suicide, and of their mother’s death in a house fire. As she tells him this, Aparna has her back to Ashim, but Ray’s camera is on the faces of them both. Ashim’s face, uneasy rather than compassionate, signals that the legacy of Aparna’s unhappy family history is an emotional burden he may struggle to help her bear. She intuits this, suggesting that he’s never experienced a comparable personal crisis. He says nothing in response and Aparna doesn’t need him to. She already knows the answer, and so does the film’s audience. Ashim is capable of melancholy but only of a shallow kind (as when, in his cups, he tells Sanjoy, who envies his friend’s professional standing, that ‘the higher one rises, the more scope there is to fall’). Whether he’s cut out for unselfish sympathy is more doubtful. His and Aparna’s candour in this climactic conversation extends to expressing their feelings for each other. The following morning, the two women, like the tourists, will be heading back to Kolkata. It’s getting dark as Aparna and Ashim prepare to part company. She needs the flame from his cigarette lighter to see to write down her Kolkata phone number. Her doing so offers the prospect of a future between them yet the prospect feels fragile. Aparna writes the number on the only paper she has available, a five-rupee note.
Although the characters aren’t dramatically transformed, circumstances bring out new sides to them. Shekhar at the fair is like a kid among the grown-ups, pleading to borrow cash from Ashim and promising to pay it back with interest, though Ashim knows that his friend will gamble and lose. When he can’t find Hari, Shekhar calls his name like a child who’s got separated from an elder brother. (Actual children are thin on the fairground; Tublu has been taken by his grandfather that same day to see a circus.) Yet Shekhar also, when he bumps into the injured Hari in the forest, helps him back to the bungalow and gives him first aid. Jaya is friendly, a bit ditsy, humorously self-mocking until her liking for Sanjoy takes her into more risky territory and exposes her underlying misery. In an all-round strong cast, Kaveri Bose and Rabi Ghosh are standouts in the supporting roles, but there’s no doubt which characters emerge as the film’s main two. Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore are fine partners with highly complementary styles. Chatterjee, hero of Ray’s The World of Apu (1959), is a superb naturalistic actor, ideally equipped to interpret ambivalent Ashim – a man who’s rarely likeable but, thanks to the man playing him, never less than fascinating. Sharmila Tagore’s beautiful poise expresses Aparna’s alert self-control and understanding of others’ social and romantic expectations of her. Aparna moves differently according to whether she’s wearing Western or traditional Indian clothes.
These characterisations and Satyajit Ray’s direction of the actors are good enough to make you feel Tom Milne’s comparison of Ray’s films with Chekhov plays isn’t unjustified. The only scene that jars is an early flashback to the break-up of Hari’s affair with the woman (Aparna Sen) who jilts him. Ray may have felt he needed to dramatise Hari’s aggressive volatility in a relationship that meant a bit more to him than having sex with Duli will mean, yet the sequence lands heavily. (The only other flashback – in Ashim’s mind, to the ennui of a Kolkata cocktail party – is wordless, brief and effective.) The finale to Days and Nights in the Forest sees the travellers leaving the bungalow to set out on their journey home: Ashim wearing the leader-of-the-pack dark polo shirt he wore when they arrived; Sanjoy back to his amiably reserved usual self; Hari in a good mood, despite his bandaged head and limp; Shekhar, excited by Jaya’s final gift of hard-boiled eggs for the journey. Ashim calmly assures the caretaker there’ll be no repercussions to his letting them stay in the bungalow. (Ashim can give this glib assurance having urged Aparna to get her father to use his influence: she said the matter would be seen to.) In the film’s closing shot, the caretaker closes the gates to the bungalow as the travellers’ car disappears into the distance.
It’s suddenly all over, which left this viewer in two minds: I was elated by Ray’s wonderful storytelling, frustrated that I couldn’t know what happened to his characters once they vanished from the screen. BFI was screening a recently restored version of Days and Nights in the Forest – a restoration carried out under the auspices of Martin Scorsese’s film foundation, also supported by Wes Anderson. I don’t tend to have kind words to say about Anderson films these days. It’s good on this occasion to express thanks to him, as well as to Scorsese, for helping to give Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece a new lease of life in cinemas.
23 April 2026
[1] The best-known or, at least, best-selling work of Alan Isaacs, published in the mid-1960s.