Days and Nights in the Forest: Into the Woods

Essays—

Sep 29, 2026

There’s an unforgettable image in Louis Malle’s 1969 documentary Calcutta: From a remote high angle, we see a battle between police and protesters unfold on the streets of the eponymous city (now known as Kolkata). Hundreds of bodies clash and collide like pebbles, the sounds of bullets and bombs punctuate the cacophony of the mob, and gray clouds of tear gas blur the horizon. Shot in 1968, the scene captures a city at the peak of crisis; the 1962 war with China, famines and food shortages, the war in Vietnam, and the brewing conflict in East Pakistan—which would soon claw its independence from West Pakistan to become Bangladesh—had wrecked the economy, filled the streets with angry demonstrators, and sparked brutal state repression.

Then there was the 1967 Maoist uprising in the village of Naxalbari, in northern West Bengal. Led by tribal Santal peasants and Communist leaders, it was soon spreading throughout the countryside, tearing apart a left already beleaguered by the Sino-Soviet split. By 1969, the movement had spilled over into the city: in April of that year, the architects of the Naxalbari revolt announced the formation of a new, revolutionary party—the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)—in Calcutta. Students dropped out of universities and joined the armed struggle in droves.

For many of those tumultuous months, Satyajit Ray was not in Calcutta. The situation was not conducive to making films, he had said in a letter to critic and biographer Marie Seton in 1967, before setting out to the forts of Rajasthan and the snowy valleys of Himachal Pradesh to make a musical fantasy for children, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969). In the early and middle months of 1969, he was in Palamu, a wooded tribal region more than three hundred miles to the west of Calcutta, in what was then the Indian state of Bihar. Ironically, Ray was there shooting Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), a film about four bachelors who also leave the roil of the city for the respite of the countryside. The sole, stray glimpse in the film of the events of the day is a copy of the Calcutta newspaper the Statesman, whose headline—“Another Sino-Soviet Border Clash Reported”—is fuzzily visible as one of the men sets it on fire and declares, “All connection with civilization is over.”

Ray’s absence from the melee angered viewers and critics. His influence was already tremendous—so much so that he had managed to persuade Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to release Utpal Dutt, who had been imprisoned for his Marxist publications, so the actor could work on the Merchant Ivory film The Guru (1969). Yet Ray’s films, commentators argued, were apolitical. While colleagues like Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak were responding to the moment with angsty Brechtian polemics, he was making movies about fantastical kingdoms and the holidays of bourgeois youth in picturesque locations. Ray didn’t necessarily refute the charge but insisted that he was not interested in ideology as much as in individual motivations. “A person with a definite political line is often psychologically less interesting,” he once said in an interview. “Revolutionaries don’t think for themselves all the time.”

By 1970, he had conceded that his cinema had to confront the times. After Days and Nights in the Forest, he embarked on his Calcutta trilogy, starting with the bristling, burning The Adversary (1970)—a film he described to Seton as “basically though not blatantly pro-revolution—because I feel nothing else can set the country up on its feet.” The protagonist, one among the hundreds of unemployed youths trying to find a job, remains somewhat ambivalent and disaffected; he is angry but unsure until the very end of what to do with his mounting rage. But his brother sets off to join the Naxals, and the young militant’s clear-cut conviction throws our hero’s aimless drift into relief.

The Calcutta trilogy is often considered Ray’s decisive political turn. But I’ve always found Days and Nights in the Forest to be the real key to his evolution as a director—a film whose structuring absences reveal an artist grappling with the inadequacy of his mode for the moment.

Ray’s cinema had sprouted from the literary word. Of the nearly twenty films he had made by 1970, only two were based on original screenplays (1962’s Kanchenjunga and 1966’s The Hero); the rest were adapted from either short stories or novels. For him, reality was filtered through the lens of the modernist novel, which centered the individual as the subject of history; literature was his conduit to the inner truths of everyday people, rendered distinct and psychologically complex, unlike the broad archetypes of commercial cinema. He was a particular devotee of modern Bengali literature, and his films are less indebted to neorealism—a label that chased him throughout his career and beyond—than to a kind of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary realism. “The true basis of the film style of Pather Panchali is not neorealist cinema or any other school of cinema or even any individual work of cinema, but the novel of Bibhutibhusan [Banerjee] itself,” Ray wrote.

Days and Nights in the Forest continues that tradition—it is adapted from a
novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay, who also wrote the book that inspired The Adversary—but it also questions it, evincing metatextual traces of self-doubt. In Gangopadhyay’s semi-autobiographical text, four city-bred youths get on a train to the countryside without a destination in mind and get off arbitrarily in the town of Dhalbhumgarh on the recommendation of a fellow passenger. In the film, these men—Ashim, Shekhar, Sanjoy, Hari—are headed by car to a premeditated destination, Palamu, inspired by a famous travelogue from the 1880s by Sanjib Chandra Chattopadhyay. In the opening scenes, Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee) is reading excerpts from the text’s exoticist descriptions of the area’s natural beauty, including that of its Indigenous Santal women. “They are all as black as ebony and in the bloom of youth,” reads out Sanjoy, exciting his car-mates. “Their groins are scantily covered with a small piece of fabric.” The rest of the film will slowly strip our protagonists of the illusions that texts such as these, filtered through the paternalistic voyeurism of the urban intellectual, have conjured for them.

Much of the film concerns the men’s nasty lording of bourgeois privilege over the poor tribal workers of Palamu. They find a forest bungalow and decide to set up camp there; when the caretaker protests, insisting that a reservation is required to stay in the house, Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee) hands him some cash and Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh) bullies him into submission, muttering, “Thank God for corruption.” They hire a local youth, Lakha, as an errand boy, before Hari (Samit Bhanja) wrongly accuses him of stealing a wallet and kicks him out. At the village bar, they soak up the local mahua and marvel at the Santal women who, too, partake in alcohol. One of them, Duli (the fair-skinned Simi Garewal in unfortunate brownface), catches Hari’s eye, and later he will demean and seduce her. The men’s performance of superiority is punctured only by their encounter with two refined young women from Calcutta, Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) and her widowed sister-in-law, Jaya (Kaberi Bose), who are also holidaying in Palamu.

Masculine fragility is one of Ray’s enduring themes; his male characters tend to be insecure, indecisive, even pathetic. Both Amal and Bhupati in Charulata (1964) are oblivious in their own ways, blinkered by their self-important preoccupations. In The Hero, Uttam Kumar’s Arindam Mukherjee drowns his regrets and the loneliness of fame in drink. In Kanchenjunga, the industrialist patriarch is so intent on imposing his choices on his daughter that he fails to see not only her true self but also the mountain peak for which he has traveled all this way when it emerges from the clouds. Each of these characters is frustrated by a woman whose self-possession assaults his pride. And yet Ray’s men are almost never entirely irredeemable. One of my favorite moments in his filmography comes when the husband in The Big City (1963), who has grown resentful of his wife’s success at work while he endures unemployment, tells her that by standing up to her boss to defend a mistreated colleague, she has shown more courage than he ever could have.

Days and Nights in the Forest, however, gives us no such reprieve from the small-mindedness of its men. The film is biting in its critique: in a memorable scene, Aparna tells Ashim that when she first saw him, she thought, “It would be nice to crush this gentleman’s confidence a little.” Soumitra Chatterjee reportedly disliked the characters of the movie, though he admired Ray’s style; he preferred Gangopadhyay’s characters, who he believed still retained some vestiges of idealism. The men of Days and Nights in the Forest are lost causes.

The tension at the heart of the film is that all of this moral ugliness unfolds with splendid visual grace. I already knew Days and Nights in the Forest was an exquisite film when, years ago, I first saw a grimy, pixelated version on YouTube; the restoration, with its deep shadows and sharp, sun-scorched silhouettes, is breathtaking. The beauty, as always with Ray, is less a function of what’s in front of the camera—although the svelte Tagore, with her dimpled smile and kohl-lined eyes, and Soumitra Chatterjee, tall and elegant, are beauty epitomized—than of how the camera perceives its subjects. Like so many of his films, Days and Nights in the Forest frames a distinct point of view right from the beginning: the artful calligraphy of the opening credits perforates a black screen, the letters becoming narrow windows through which we see the forest pass by in a blur.

Pauline Kael described the film as “overwhelmingly, sometimes unbearably beautiful.” Like most of Ray’s work, it emanates something larger than the sum of its parts: a transcendent sense of harmony that feels deeply satisfying and intuitive. Each shot is perfectly choreographed yet unshowy, and sharpens the characters’ personalities. The camera looks at the suave, sophisticated Ashim, a rising star at a corporate job, from a low angle, framing his towering figure against a bright, hot sky. It peeks at the diminutive Shekhar, the jester of the group, from behind a car, so that his head seems to emerge comically from the hood. It attends to how the wind ruffles the bookish Sanjoy’s floppy hair and how sweat glistens on cricket star Hari’s handsome, arrogant face. Ray’s gaze endows people and places with a radiance that pleases and soothes, like a new-yet-familiar tune. How bad could someone or something be if looked at with such rapture?

This contradiction between appearances and intentions—between surface and depth—is a central tension of Days and Nights in the Forest, and it plays out in the film’s iconic “memory game” sequence. The four men and two women go around adding names to a list that each of them must recite again from the start; whoever slips up and misses a name loses. The invocation of memory, and the game’s structure of spontaneity, implies an unearthing of sorts, something summoned from the subconscious. But the references thrown about—Marx, Mao, Shakespeare, Cleopatra, Tagore—are rarefied and pretentious. The game is about perception rather than remembering, about gazes rather than words. Sanjoy begins to pick up on Jaya’s flirtations and rushes inside to fetch her a pillow, pausing to check his hair in the mirror. Ashim and Aparna last the longest, trading names like Cupid’s arrows, until Aparna concedes the game to Ashim, recognizing that what’s at stake here isn’t memory but desire.

Indeed, the game completes a shift that begins earlier, the moment Aparna and Jaya appear: rather than a story about men encountering nature, it becomes that well-worn tale of men encountering desirable women. Our heroes proclaim that they’ve come to Palamu to give in to the therapeutic pleasures of primitivity, but the flimsiest of their commitments to bare their inner, uncultivated selves—not to shave during their stay in Palamu—goes out the window once the ladies enter the picture. Yet Sanjoy can’t even muster lust, the basest of base impulses, when Jaya offers herself to him, decked in glowing tribal jewelry; he is paralyzed by fear. What they truly desire is desire itself, a force powerful enough to pierce through their alienation and draw them into the present. It doesn’t come.

Ray has employed tragedy before—in The Apu Trilogy, in Devi (1960), in The Music Room (1958). Driving back to the city in Ashim’s handsome car, the characters of Days and Nights in the Forest in some ways resemble the feudal aristocrat of The Music Room, clinging to a world that is rapidly receding into the past. But there is no tragedy at the conclusion of Days and Nights in the Forest; only unease, a sense of irresolution. Aparna chastises Ashim for his naive indifference to the suffering of others, including that of the caretaker he and his mates have pushed around while the man’s wife fights a grave illness. But when Aparna goes with him to the caretaker’s house, she only looks through the window and says she’ll talk to her father to have the matter “settled.” She may be worldlier than Ashim, and more experienced in loss and pain, but she is no less passive an observer of a burning world.

Hari, meanwhile, is beaten up by Lakha in a sweet moment of revenge, but his comeuppance—an individual act of violence—also feels feeble, particularly given the then-ongoing uprising of a whole people against their bourgeois overlords. The characters remain unchanged, save for a bandaged head and hangdog looks; a holiday in the village is no match for the stubborn existential accoutrements of class. One has the feeling that they, and we, have only encountered negative space—only the blinding light of day and the suffocating dark of night. Fittingly, a year later, Ray began The Adversary with a photonegative image of a funeral, the human figures glowing in the gray, X-ray-like screen. Dark gives way to light, and light to dark: now, the moment of change has arrived.

Days and Nights in the Forest: Into the Woods

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