RAY’S reel women

Women in Satyajit Ray’s films defy stereotyping. In conventional narrative films, forms are complicit in producing women as subordinate, but the creative imagination of Ray has used these forms to present positive, dynamic and alternative representations of the fair sex, writes Shoma A. Chatterji

WOMEN in the films of Satyajit Ray (May 2, 1921 — April 23, 1992) depict a society where they are silenced, and where their experience and particular insights are undermined or dismissed. Yet, they differ in their historical contexts, their social backdrops, their positioning within the family and their financial status. They represent the marginalisation of women, sometimes in subtle ways such as Charu in Charulata. Sometimes, the expression of their undermined status comes across strongly and openly such as that of Dayamoyee in Devi. Most of his women characters have been treated quite differently. Arati of Mahanagar does not resemble Charu of Charulata though both characters were performed by the same actress — Madhabi Mukherjee. There is no resonance of the former’s characterisation in the latter film.

Interestingly, Ray does not project his male characters as negative or hollow to show his women as strong and powerful. Not one man in his entire oeuvre of films is a perpetrator of oppression or humiliation of women. Ray structures the script to give almost equal democratic space to male and female characters in a cinematic sense and also in a narrative sense.

Ray’s Pather Panchali has given Indian cinema the housewife Sarbajaya, who comes alive on screen, adding flesh and blood to the literary character created by Bibhuti Bhusan Bandopadhyay. Sarbajaya, Apu’s mother, a semi-literate, na`EFve, rustic and poor woman, grows through Pather Panchali and Aparajito from a young mother to middle-aged woman, from the epicentre of her family to a woman reduced to a picture of grief by poverty and the loss of a child.

Sarbajaya is a complete character. She gives free rein to her emotions, yet can pull herself in when she needs to. She throws pitiful balls of soggy rice at the doddering old Indir Thakrun, a distant cousin of her husband. Sarbajaya is disgusted with her because the old woman steals food when hungry. She drags her daughter Durga by the hair when she discovers that Durga has stolen beads from a neighbour. This violence is a projection of anger towards her own self. She knows that it is poverty that made Durga steal and she holds herself partly responsible for it.

Her mobile face registers palpable expressions of pain, anger, disgust, grief, joy — understated yet stressed. Despite the poverty, Sarbajaya has a quiet dignity and believes in the value of honesty. The anger and bitterness are directed at the poverty she is trapped within and can do nothing about.

Other than the little Apu, who revels in being the pampered and the naughty one in the family, (his mother makes paayesh – rice pudding, for him alone on his birthday), the cinematic space in Pather Panchali is monopolised by Sarbajaya. In Pather Panchali, Sarbajaya emerges as a woman whose strength of mind is stronger than her husband Harihar’s. She takes charge of her family after Harihar leaves. At times, she strains under the pressure, but break she does not, even after Durga dies.

This innate courage is carried over more intensely in Aparajito, when, in illness and in pain, finding it impossible to cope with the reality of the grown Apu deciding to go away, she dies waiting for him. The pathos of her lonely death is expressed through an eerie silence punctured by the soft humming of crickets and the darkness of a growing night dotted with glow-worms. Sarbajaya’s life is wasted away waiting for a son who loves his mother very much, but loves his freedom more.

Mahanagar was based on a short story by Narendranath Mitra. The original story placed the husband Subrata at the centre. Ray shifted the emphasis to the wife, Arati. This change marked the beginning of the middle-class working wife in a Bengali family in Kolkata. Mahanagar can be read as Ray’s personal statement on the changing values of the traditional, middle-class Bengali family of Calcutta, a microcosm of changes in urban, social values. Mahanagar is a strong, positive and realistic statement on the socio-economic changes in urban Bengali life through the metamorphosis of Arati. Arati is both the sign and the signified of this socio-economic revolution.

Arati joins the teeming millions of white-collared workers. She shares the financial burden of an extended family. Her retired schoolteacher father-in-law is unprepared for this culture shock. He prefers charity in the name of guru dakshina from ex-students to living off his daughter-in-law’s earnings. Arati’s mother-in-law is reasonable. She has no compunctions about serving a joint lunch to both son and daughter-in-law before they set out for their respective offices, though she secretly wipes off a tear with the end of her sari. Vicky Redwood, Arati’s Anglo-Indian colleague teaches her to use lipstick. She uses it only when she steps out of the home and wipes it off when she comes back. When her husband finds out and is sarcastic, she throws the stick of lipstick out of the window with one small twist of her wrist. It is an expression of silent anger against her husband.

Three shots show the slow change in Arati from a stay-at-home housewife to a working woman: (a) when she gets her first pay packet, handed over in cash, she shows her money first to herself, in the bathroom mirror, her nostrils flared in excitement and in the pride of achievement; (b) she then shows it to her husband; (c) then, in a crude gesture of grandiose generosity, she offers some to her father-in-law, who needs a new pair of spectacles.

Arati proves that a woman has vast resources of inner strength she may not be aware of. She draws upon these resources when the time is right, when she discovers that patriarchy, which defines a society dominated by men, has failed to solve emerging socio-economic problems that have a bearing on the family, on the economy and on the culture.

A single shot in Devi, based on a story by Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Dayamoyee’s aborted rebellion against the goddess-image bestowed on her against her will, comes across lucidly. Her father-in-law Kalikinkar Roy, (the feudal landlord, a fanatic devotee of Goddess Kali,) bends to touch her feet the morning after he dreams that Dayamoyee is a human personification of the Goddess. Dayamoyee turns to the wall, scratching her nails down its length, curling her toes inwards. The expression on her face, seen partially in profile, registers an uncanny blend of anguish, self-pity, pain, grief and shock.

Afterwards, Dayamoyee slips into the role of the Goddess that is thrust on her, much to the displeasure of Umaprasad, her husband. Harisundari, her elder sister-in-law, marks a counterpoint to Dayamoyee. Harisundari is not taken in by this hocus-pocus in the name of religion her father-in-law indulges in. She is a silent witness of her young sister-in-law’s victimisation. But she, too, is an unwilling and vulnerable victim of her father-in-law’s blind faith. But her pragmatism is as ill-fated as is the fantasy-woven world of Dayamoyee. Harisundari loses her child to her father-in-law’s feudal dictatorship who forces her sick child to get cured by Dayamoyee’s blessings instead of consulting a doctor. Dayamoyee loses not only her sanity, but also her life.

When Umaprasad tries to rescue his wife by taking her away with him to the city to liberate her from this enforced imprisonment, Dayamoyee is torn between her growing conviction in her ‘goddess-like’ powers and her human-ness. "What if I am really a Devi?" she asks Umaprasad. They talk in whispers on the banks of the river. Tall blades of grass sway in the moonlight, reflecting their disturbed mental state though their bodies are still. Dayamoyee spots the skeletal idol of the Goddess Durga, half-immersed in water, and again questions her status as the goddess-incarnate. She goes back, turning away from the vast night landscape, silhouetted in the dark, full of an air of foreboding. The escape boat is seen in long shot, shimmering in the distance. For her, the boat is of no use. For her, death is the only point of exit.

None of Ray’s women on celluloid can be reduced to cliché. Whether it is the jewellery-obsessed, neurotic and barren Monika in Monihara (Teen Kanya), or the proud little Ratan in Postmaster, who silently ignores a rupee’s tip the postmaster offers her, or, Charu in Charulata, who keeps gazing at the handsome Amal through her lorgnette, her only company in her lonely world, or the girl-bride Aparna in Apur Sansar, who scribbles on her husband’s cigarette packet a small message to reduce his smoking, they defy stereotyping.

For Ray, it is a question of cinematic representations of women contributing to, and constructing our understanding of what a woman is. It is a question of a re-thinking and re-conditioning of what we have been used to in mainstream cinema. He has proved that though conventional narrative film forms are complicit in producing women as subordinate, it is for the creative imagination of a director to use these forms to present positive, dynamic and alternative representations of women.

He has structured Monika, Ratan, Charu, Sarbajoya, Arati, Dayamoyee out of dominant modes of representation. He has structured any corrective re-ordering of women characters. He has not tried any avant garde strategies. He has altered the language of cinema to suit his creative ends. In so doing, he has created his unique film language for, and of women. He has not compromised on aesthetics to make his statements on women. He has used aesthetics to alter modes of female representation.