In his film Hirak Rajar Deshe (translation: The Kingdom of Diamonds) (1980), Satyajit Ray explores the connection between madness and language through curious formalistic and narrative choices. The film is the second instalment of the film series Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969) exploring the adventures of Goopy and Bagha who were banished from their village of origin for their ‘madness.’ In this film, they encounter a king who is brainwashing his subjects to obey his authoritarian regime by repeating ‘mantras’ (words) written by the court poet to the effect of surrendering their intellectual autonomy to him with the help of a machine created by his court scientist. When the brainwashed subjects are reintroduced to society, their speech is indecipherable. They barely possess the ability to form coherent sentences, instead only repeating the learned mantra. 

Investigating madness and its connection to language in Madness, Language, Literature (2023), Michel Foucault, explains that historically the speech of the mad would only be interpreted as “noise”. Freud states that the speech of the madman can be immediately identified as “nonsensical, unreasonable, chimeric, stubborn” (76). Ray utilizes this aspect of stubborn, nonsensical and unreasonable speech of the madmen to illustrate the ‘madness’ of the conditions demanded within the totalitarian regime of the king. Freud, however, discovered that the speech of the mad could be viewed as codes that required interpretation, shifting the ‘noise’ of their speech from obscure to meaningful. Ray provides his audience the prospect of decoding the speech of the ‘mad’ in his film to ascertain its significance.

The Kingdom of Diamonds is written in rhyming couplets with the exception of the speech of specific characters or moments of dialogue. The two protagonists, Goopy and Bagha, who belong to humble backgrounds but are currently living a life of luxury, speak in rhymes exclusively in their introductory scene. This patterned speech immediately contrasts to that of the previous film of the series. After the musical number retelling their story of origin along with the opening credits, we find them in their private room where Bagha expresses still rhyming, “We have spent ten long years in fun and leisure, I don’t like it anymore” to which Goopy responds, “You are right, we must do something…”. Immediately, complacency, languor and idleness in one’s being is equated to their newly formed speech of rhymes. As Bagha declares, “… [T]his is not the time for leisure. Wasting time is painful”. Instantaneously, they decide to depart on a journey to unexplored spaces and their speech shifts, breaking the rhyme. The film thus confirms the distinction between the speech of the complacent, idle subject and the curious human traveler seeking transformation.

The following scene introduces Hirak, the king among his courtiers. In his kingdom every minister, poet, priest and subject speak in rhyming couplets. The entire kingdom is trapped in the conforming language of rhymes, including the inter-speeches of the characters. The scene continues to the introduction of the court scientist who has been granted seven lakh golden coins for his newest invention, the ‘brainwashing machine’. He explains, “This is a machine which makes ruling easy. With the help of this machine, the subjects who rebel against the king will have their brains washed which would make them the most obedient subject.” 

As the scientist departs, three subjects enter the court: a farmer who has failed to pay taxes, a miner who wishes to share his grievances and a singer, whom the soldiers have captured for insubordination. All three characters break the rhyme of the speech the king speaks to express their complaints. The singer is then asked to sing to the court:

The world is full of wonders…. 

Oh, my friend I don’t find any meaning in things….

The good person is living in a broken hut…

And the evil person is sitting on a throne

The one who harvests golden crops, don’t have food for themselves 

The workers of diamond mine don’t have a penny for themselves….

The song is poetic, yet it is not in the same meter as the simple nursery rhymes followed within the kingdom. Although a literary form, the rhymes of the king and his subjects signify a specific form of language, that is, of oppression. The poetry of the singer, on the other hand, is fluid, not based on the rhyming of words but in the expression of their meaning. 

 Foucault claims in Madness, Language, Literature that: 

For two or three centuries, literary speech and insane speech have been, for us, related in very specific ways [We cannot say that they are more closely connected because the deviance of the narrator, of the poet, of the prophet, the deviance of all those who use language uniquely has almost always and everywhere been placed under the auspices of madness.] (76-77)

It is this connection between madness and the arts that Ray is exploring in his filmic dialogues. There is an immediate categorization of the poet or prophet’s madness as prophetic. The singer is not only speaking against the injustice of the society’s condition but he is utilizing the art of music to express his ideas. Ray is playing with the idea of madness in his screenplay as the audience must question whom to correctly categorize as ‘mad’. Is it the people uttering grievances? Is it the musician speaking truth against the king in his court? Is it the people brainwashed who are unable to speak comprehensibly? Or is it the king ‘maddened’ by power?   

While the poet expresses through language, the rhymes of the machine are meant to be memorized by everyone, only to be mindlessly repeated, never contemplated. The farmer’s mantra ends with “even if we die, the king is God”, the miner’s mantra states “the offering of a miner is holy, the king is God,” and the teacher’s mantra concludes, “everyone sing praises of the [great] king of Hirak”. Ray utilizes literary speech but complicates it by presenting both sides of the socio-political position through a form of the trope. It is thus seemingly up to the viewer to comprehend the speech of the ‘mad’ according to their ideological positions.

Foucault categorizes the three means of connection between madness and literature as he states that there is no literature, “1) without the presentation of a character who, compared to the others, is mad”, “2) without the insertion of a language that can pass as the language of a mad person,” and “3) without the acknowledgment of a certain relation between the act of writing and the fact of being mad”. (76-77) Applying these categorizations into Ray’s film we can say, that the language of the rebels within the story is notably different from the rhymes of the subjugated subjects. The language of the ‘mad person’ of the film is distinct not only in the diegetic world but also in the non-diegetic world. The speech utilized by the subjugated is not the language of the audience. The speech of the insubordinate subjects, however, aligns with the audience’s, presenting a preferred subject position for the audience and revealing the ideological position of the film. As artist and author, Ray identifies with the so-called mad or rebel subject. 

            Foucault states, “[The] presence of the mad character in the midst of others, this presence of his insane speech in the midst of others- these have a very precise function, they are truth operators”. (78-79) The speech of Udayan, the rebel teacher, standing up to the king at his moment of capture is an expression of truth. Similarly, the lyrics of the folk singer is the truth of the kingdom. Aligning with Ray’s artistic expression in Hirak Rajar Deshe, Foucault states that “all the characters who surrounded [the mad subject] and compared to whom he was considered mad were, in reality, themselves blinded by a strange madness”. (79) Ray illustrates the truth of this relativity, aligning his audience with the ‘mad’ subjects in the film, directing them towards a society of peace and equality but one that depends on the freedom of expression.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel, Robert Bononno, Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, and Judith Revel. Madness, language, literature. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2023.