It's been a summer of classics for me. A series of events made me peer beyond the here-and-new into the phenomenon of enduring works of art.
In May, Satyajit Ray’s 1970 classic, Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in the presence of actors Sharmila Tagore and Simi Garewal after the film had gone through a six-year-long restoration process.
A month later, an uncut, restored version of Sholay was unveiled at the Rediscovered Cinema festival in Bologna at a memorable setting—an al-fresco screening at dusk on the city’s central piazza, with a full crowd watching the classic on the 50th anniversary of its release.
A few days earlier, on the 50th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule, Hazaron Khwaishein Aisi (A Thousand Wishes Like This) became the buzz. Interestingly, Sudhir Mishra’s 2003 film, like Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 film and Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957)—whose restored version was commercially re-released this April and showcased at Cannes later—had initially opened to tepid audiences, but became all-time classics with word-of-mouth promotion.
But then, this is not just about movies. Be it movies, music or books, the phenomenon of classics begs questions on their enduring mystique, without any answer that involves mathematical certainty. However, with the wisdom of hindsight, I dare say there are several explanations that are equally fascinating.
The most obvious one is that some creative works have a timeless appeal based on human emotions that cut across generations. The cry for justice, the longing for love, childhood innocence, character flaws, and awesome heroism are identifiable across cultures. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is not about fishing, as a casual reading might show, but about endurance and the human spirit.
A favourite anecdote is about screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who is said to have remarked that he wrote the script for a stage adaptation of the Mahabharata by Peter Brook in Paris because “when you see a character, you can say, There goes Shakuni”.
There are also storytelling styles that appeal with their innovation, timing or context. Think of the Salvador Dali or Vincent van Gogh paintings that come with stories about their creators, which built an aura with the contexts.
The cliché of struggling artists can bring attention back on their works. Teesri Kasam, the Basu Bhattacharya movie released in 1966, was a box office failure, but its songs live on along with the story about how its producer and renowned lyricist Shailendra died a broken man.
I also believe classics help new generations understand their parents, ancestors or nations in a way that earns them the timeless tag. You can travel in time with classics, especially ones that are written or scripted as tales of the times. Cross-genre versions, send-ups or parodies can also be a path back to an old work. My own interest in Beethoven was kindled by a disco version of his ‘Fifth Symphony’ in the 1977 hit Saturday Night Fever, and I went on to listen to the sublime original and other works by the composer. One learnt later that the raucous opening guitar riff of rock group Deep Purple’s 1972 classic ‘Smoke on the water’ was little more than a slightly modified reverse of Beethoven’s Fifth.
Classics also serve conduits between literature and history. This March, I listened to a captivating lecture on E M Forster’s A Passage to India on the 100th anniversary of the publication of the novel set in the waning days of the British raj. For one, the book set in the 1920s reveals much about the subsoil that Hindutva grew on. The characters reflect the social realities of those times that shaped both the Gandhian approach to independence and Veer Savarkar’s cultural orientations. Novels, after all, can capture the zeitgeist in a manner a droll history textbook cannot.
Shakespeare’s Bollywood versions and easy-on-the-tongue adaptations of his plays in various languages show how some classics live on because of ‘modernisation’. We should place remastered, coloured versions of old black-and-white movies and maybe e-book or PDF versions of old books in the same league.
In music, the internet is buzzing with new adaptations of the old, including Count Basie and Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly me to the Moon’, partly because of a 2024 romcom with the same title. Ilaiyaraaja has given his own interpretation of some Bach compositions.
The access to digitally stored, easily replicable content and the ability to reshape them with new technologies including artificial intelligence may, counter-intuitively, take us into a new era in which the old is easily reborn. That would be a reverse swing to the future, like H G Wells’ The Time Machine trapped in a Christopher Nolan movie.
What can be said with a measure of certainty is that classics have a way of taking us into our own selves—individual and collective—in ways that blend nostalgia with creativity.
Madhavan Narayanan| Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(On X @madversity)