The art of writing letters calls for a grace that’s in short supply

We often lament that letter-writing is a lost art, but one day there might be a book of email exchanges like the love letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

In 1965, two filmmakers embarked on a war of words via the letters to the editor page of The Statesman, a Kolkata newspaper. They were Satyajit Ray, whose birth centenary falls this weekend, and Mrinal Sen. It started when Ray made some remarks about Sen’s film Akash Kusum. Soon it escalated into a back and forth between the two with references to Charlie Chaplin, Aesop, Jean-Luc Godard, and the common crow, which went on for almost a month till the newspaper decided to end it. In his book Mrinal Sen: Sixty Years in Search of Cinema, Dipankar Mukhopadhyay writes that Ray told Sen it was a pity it had ended because he could have written many more letters. Sen retorted that while he didn’t have Ray’s support base, “Rest assured, I would have replied to all your letters.” While it sounds like a cerebral Oxford-Cambridge debate, there was an uncomfortable personal undertone that led many to wonder why a filmmaker of Ray’s stature even felt the need to attack Sen publicly. But the letters, with references to everyone from Cervantes to Shakespeare (and there was no Google then), remain a masterclass in the epistolary art.