The Inner Eye

 Benode Behari Mukhopadhyay - Satyajit Ray- The Inner Eye

 

        It was a winter night. The last train just passed the small station of a small town. A young passenger of around twenty was looking for a rickshaw outside the station building. His name is Aditya. He has come to his uncle’s house in his winter vacation. At the outside of the station building it is totally dark. Probably the town is under severe power cut. It’s a no-moon night even the stars are not visible as there is a thin film of dark cloud above the head. After waiting for sometime for a rickshaw the young man decides to go on
walking. His uncle’s house is only half kilometer from the station and it is now just 11’o clock. Several times he has visited this place earlier. He starts walking. It’s very difficult to walk in such darkness. He is frequently stumbling and saves him from being fallen. Suddenly he bounces with an object and fall down on the road. He gets frightened. With a groaning sound he discovers that he has bounced against a man. With the help of each other both raise back again. Aditya expresses sorrow for the accident. The man says in a soft low voice, “Where will you go?” Aditya tells him his uncle’s address. “It will fall in my route”, the man says,” Hold my hand and follow me.” Aditya follows the man. He feels by the sound that in the other hand of the man there is a walking stick. The man is walking very slowly but smoothly. An uncanny feeling grows within the mind of Aditya. How can a man walk so smoothly in such darkness? He is sweating in winter. About half an hour they have walked. The man stops at a place and tells Aditya “We are in front of your uncle’s house.” Aditya identifies the place by the thin light of kerosene lantern coming through an open window. He has reached safely. “Do you have extra eyes to look into the darkness”, Aditya adds the question while expressing his gratitude to the man. “No, I’m blind”, the man replied.

Benode Behari Mukhopadhyay

      Once I wrote the above story for my little son for his story telling curriculum. The idea is not mine; I took it from an English poem which I had read long ago and forgot the name of the poet. For the title I simply copied that of a documentary film made by the great Indian film-maker Satyajit Ray, “The Inner Eye”. Ray made this documentary on Benode Behari Mukhopadhyay (7 February 1904 - 11 November 1980), an eminent Indian painter. Benode Behari was a teacher of Satyajit Ray in the Art School at Shantiniketan (Kalabhavan, Visva Bharati University, West Bengal, India). He painted several murals on the walls of different buildings of Kalabhavan, Shantiniketan, besides his other works. (In my short stay at Shantiniketan as a student I also saw those murals.) He was awarded ‘Padma Vibhushan’ (The second highest civil award in India, the first one is “Bharat Ratna’) in 1974. But these facts do not justify the title of the documentary. Due to a medical mishap Benode Behari lost his sight at the age of 54 years. That should have been the end of his artist life. But that did not happen. Blindness could not stop Benode Behari’s creativity; there was a mere change in the medium of creation. He started creating wax sculpture with the touch of his fingers.

"Blindness is a new feeling, a new experience, a new state of being".
- Binode Bihari Mukherjee.