DATED 25TH JULY 2019
- As we approach the one hundred and
fiftieth birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, it is necessary to re-define
and reiterate the far-sightedness and comprehensiveness of his work on our own
terms. If the Nobel Prize carried his words beyond Indian shores as early as
the second decade of the twentieth century, the cinema as a visual medium
popularised in the later decades, was instrumental to a large extent in
exposing him at various international forums. In this essay, I will attempt an
exposition through the meeting point of the two men—India’s first Nobel
laureate Rabindranath Tagore and her only life-time Oscar winner, Satyajit Ray.
Andrew Robinson, writing of the link between the two says, ‘Tagore and Ray are
indissolubly bound. If non-Bengalis know Tagore at all today, it is mainly by
virtue of Ray’s interpretations of him on film.
- The question to be raised in this
essay is how do these two geniuses Tagore and Ray, complement (or confront?)
each other in the exploration of the status of women in the upper class society
of Bengal? The changing status of women, a product of the social reform
movements of the nineteenth century, must be viewed against the emergence of
the monotheistic Brahmo Samaj, its protest against Hindu polytheism, orthodoxy
and the concomitant social evils like the caste system, the victimisation of
women in a patriarchy through the practices of sati (immolation of a
widow on the husband’s funeral pyre), child marriage and kulin polygyny.
- I have deliberately posed the question
of confrontation because the intertextuality of fiction and film, of
translating the written word onto the cinema screen, is at best problematic.
Robert Stam, in an introductory essay on The Theory and Practice of
Adaptation, says, ‘The conventional language of adaptation criticism has
often been profoundly moralistic, rich in terms that imply that cinema has
somehow done a disservice to literature.Stam goes on to say that
one of the sources of hostility to adaptation is iconophobia, the fear of
exposing the subtle symbolism of the written word to the more explicit
iconography employed by the cinematographer. While this essay will delve into
the possible ramifications of this fear in the context of the two, its primary
connotation emerges in the cinema’s handling of the works of a literary figure
who is Bengal’s most revered icon, who, even today enjoys bardic status, even
when the maker of that adaptation is no less a figure than Satyajit Ray. It is
further problematic because the subject under consideration here is Tagore’s
analysis of the emergence of the New Woman (nabeena), battling the
confines of prescribed space within the andar mahal/antahpur (inner domain)
of the home in a patriarchal society in a pre-colonial context. How does Ray,
paying his centennial tribute to Tagore in the 1960’s and thereafter, present
this to a more permissive post-colonial generation for whom the stained glass
windows of the andar mahal of Victorian mansions had long since
collapsed. Talking of just such a dilemma of depicting Charulata’s
barely-controlled extra-marital passion for her brother-in-law Amal in Tagore’s
short story Nastanirh, on which Ray made a film he called Charulata,
Andrew Robinson comments, ‘Like so much that Tagore did, Nastanirh attracted
adverse criticism from Bengalis at the time. The story gave the foundations of
family life a shake, which many people resented. He (Ray) found people still
sensitive to the issue sixty years later, ‘A lot of people seemed to think it
was a very risky subject because of the illicit relationship. I never had any
such doubts at all. I made the film and it was proved that I was right, because
it was very widely accepted.The contentious issue of repressed
sexuality of the new woman vis à vis the old, will be examined in this essay
with particular reference to two of Tagore’s works, his novel, Ghare Baire
(The Home and the World) and his short story Nastanirh (The Destroyed
Nest) both of which were made into powerful movies by Ray.
- Any discussion on the changing status
of women must be viewed as earlier noted in this essay, against the
socio-religious background of the Brahmo Samaj and the resultant reform
movement of the Bengal Renaissance. With the spread of Western education and
the availability of Western texts, the bi-lingual upper-class élite in Bengali
society was deeply influenced by Western philosophy and the histories of social
revolution and religious reform in Europe. Raja Rammohan Roy (credited with
being instrumental in the abolition of sati) and Dwarkanath Tagore
(Tagore’s grandfather), established the monotheistic Brahmo Samaj.The
Samaj was at the forefront of the social reform movements of the time. It was
more egalitarian in worship than the Hindu religious order, allowed free mixing
of the sexes in the prayer meetings, called for female education, widow
re-marriage and the advancement of the age of marriage for girls. It benefitted
not only the members of the Samaj, but brought about the winds of change
through the Bengal Renaissance of which humanists like Tagore, the novelist
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee,educationist Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar
and the religious leader Swami Vivekananda, were at the forefront. Incidentally,
Satyajit Ray was also a member of the Samaj. However, this socio-religious
movement of the Samaj, also caused a deep divide within Bengali society between
those committed to reform and those entrenched in Hindu orthodoxy—a divide
nowhere more evident than in the plight of the occupants of the andar mahal
and that of their more liberated counterparts. Partha Chatterjee calls it the
spiritual/material dichotomy.
- The andar mahal
was a sacrosanct domain within which upper class women were contained and
confined by a patriarchal society, unseen by men beyond the immediate family
and to which even husbands had access only at night. The nineteenth century
re-invented this domain as a sort of sanctum sanctorum of Indian spirituality
and heritage in what Partha Chatterjee calls the last frontier of uncolonised
space where no encroachments by the coloniser could be permitted by Indian men
who were themselves exposed to Western culture and education and adhering to
the Western value system in public life. The victim of this male desire for
preservation of tradition was the woman, stereotyped as chaste wife (pativrata
stree), willing womb or repressed widow. The ideals of womanhood in
orthodox Hindu society were re-enforced by allusions to mythical and epical references
to female chastity, thus introducing a religious dimension to the worship
(Tagore uses the word bhakti at the beginning of Ghare Baire) and
care of the husband. The emergence of the New Woman towards the end of the
nineteenth century, educated, liberated, dressed differently from her more
traditional counterparts and exposed to the ‘provocations’ of
‘literacy and literature’, yet confined to the andar mahal, precipitated
a serious clash of personalities. It is this clash that Tagore exteriorises through
the study of repressed female sexuality and Ray through a series of symbols
signifying the dramatic turmoil within women like Charu in Charulata and
Bimola in Ghare Baire. These are portraits of lonely, sensitive,
dissatisfied women locked away in ornate affluence in enormous Victorian
mansions. These women are counterpoised in both Tagore and Ray against their
more traditional counterparts (pracheena). Instances of the latter are
seen in Manda (Charu’s brother’s wife, and one of a large retinue of dependants
thriving on her husband’s largesse) and Bimola’s widowed sister-in-law, also
dependant on the generosity of Nikhilesh, Bimola’s zamindar
husband in Ghare Baire. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, in a serious critique
of the dichotomy between the progressive woman and the orthodox in his essay Pracheena
and Nabeena, decries the loss of a traditional value system, which included
chastity, respect for and care of the husband, disciplined domestic labour and
philanthropy as a religious observance. The nabeena he says, with her
insufficient learning, has lost the values and the dharma of her
traditional counterpart and not benefited from the values to be inculcated from
modern education. Laziness and excessive leisure is at the root of all domestic
ills.
Both Charu and
Bimola fail the first requirement of patriarchal stereotyping, they are
empty-wombed. Though they do not suffer the social stigma attached to the same
owing to pride of position, their childlessness certainly generates the sexual
crisis which later brings about their downfall and which motherhood might well
have averted. The question whether they remain childless due to their husbands’
treatment of them as if they are fragile commodities to be handled with care
and reverence, remains unanswered. Their husbands are kind, gentle,
affectionate and without any addiction to the typical upper-class vices of wine
and women. Women like Charu and Bimola (as also Monimalika in Tagore’s Monihara,
filmed by Ray as part of his trilogy on Tagore’s women characters), apparently
have everything; large Victorian mansions scattered with expensive European
bric-a-brac, (among them gilded, ornamental mirrors, whose significance will be
discussed later in the essay) a retinue of servants, leisure, privacy and
encouragement to pursue their literary hobbies far from the prying eyes of the
large number of dependants who were an inevitable part of such households.
These were privileges unknown to many of their less fortunate peers.
In Monihara, the husband showers jewellery sets upon his avaricious wife
Monimalika (the name literally means a string of gems) in an effort to buy her
love. Ironically the same jewels lead to her death, when she elopes with her
cousin dressed from head to foot in her jewellery, in an effort to safeguard
them from the husband she has never loved and grossly misunderstood. Both
Nikhilesh and Bhupati are seen as Renaissance men who have inculcated reformist
values with varying degrees of success. But while Tagore’s novella Nastanirh,
was written as a critique of men who called themselves reformers but were
unsuccessful in implementing those reforms within their own homes, Nikhilesh in
Ghare Baire, conducts a daring social experiment of exposing his wife
before his friend and pays the penalty.The ideal of a more
progressive marriage based on companionship which challenged female
stereotyping, made impossible demands on these women in transition as Nikhilesh
ultimately realises, ‘In moulding the sahadharmini (a wife who shares
her husband’s vision), we corrupt the wife.
- Yet these women continue to be
dissatisfied and unfulfilled. Their peers who still remained confined within
the category of the pracheena might have been overwhelmed with such
bounty and devoted themselves to their service-unto-death vow to their lord and
master. The attitude of willing self sacrifice which the pativrata
traditionally practiced is described both by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in his
essay and Tagore at the beginning of Ghare Baire, as leading to a
submergence of the ego, which was its own spiritual reward. In the novel, which
follows the structure of a diary, Bimola in an introspective flashback, talks
of the dangers of negotiating the chasm between the pracheena and the nabeena.
She is initially eager to practice the rituals of service demanded of a pativrata,
much to the distress of her educated husband who prides himself on his
liberated views. She is unable to handle the freedom of choice her husband so
generously grants her. At the end of the novel, Bimola returns to the bhakti
and worship which is part of the dharma of the pativrata, but at
this point she has to earn the right to offer that worship which she has lost
in the intervening period. Tagore’s novel focuses on both these aspects of her
character because it begins with a flashback. In the film however, Ray shows a
Bimola (enacted by Swatilekha Chatterjee) who grows increasingly arrogant and
narcissistic taking her husband’s affection and generosity as her birthright.
The scene of the changing of jackets before the mirror is a prelude to that.
The reconciliation with her husband at the end in the film is executed through
a passionate kiss rather than any offer of bhakti. Charu (refreshingly
portrayed by Madhobi Mukherjee, Ray’s most sensitive actress) on the other
hand, remains unaware of the growing demands of her blossoming body and the
consequent restlessness as she flits bored and impatient from one inane task to
the other, with time hanging heavy on her hands and no one to make demands on
her. With the nabeena’s periphery still in transition, these generous,
considerate husbands, by not being ‘demanding,’ left unsatisfied the feminine
desire ‘to give’ in a marital relationship. This desire was rooted in the
traditional ‘dharma’ of womanhood with near-religious fervour. Tagore,
analysing this chasm between the old and the new, says in Monihara,
‘Traditionally, women like raw (sour) mangoes, hot chillies and stern husbands.The implication is that if a man does not make demands on his
wife, he is considered to be weak, lacking in masculinity and does not command
respect from his wife.
- Into such a scenario enters the third of the love triangle. The arrival of Charu’s young brother-in-law (played by the brilliant actor and matinee idol, Soumitra Chatterjee) is heralded by a storm in Ray’s film, in which shutters bang, the birdcage swings violently and the room is in turmoil. In the film Ghare Baire, the demagogue Sandip (also played by Soumitra Chatterjee) arrives on the shoulders of his saffron-clad followers with shouts of ‘Vande Mataram‘ rending the air against the background of the swadeshi movement triggered off by Lord Curzon’s attempts to partition Bengal in 1905–06. Bimola watches along with other womenfolk from behind the purdah of a bamboo curtain and at one point, mesmerised by his rousing speech, she unconsciously parts the curtain and their eyes meet. Bimola’s diary records her introspective comments in the novel: ‘Was I the bride of the palace? At that moment I was the sole representative of Bengal’s womanhood—and he, the manhood/icon of the bravery of Bengal.The enhancement of her own image to identify with the Motherland/Mother Goddess concept is part of her growing narcissism which leads to her downfall.
- Another aspect of repressed female
sexuality which finds expression in Ghare Baire is that of young
childless widows. Forced into a life of severe abstinence and prayer, widows
were often deprived of their rights to their property and abandoned in dire
poverty in the holy city of Varanasi. Deepa Mehta gives powerful expression to
their plight and their enforced prostitution in her Oscar-nominated film Water.
The question of inheritance and financial support from Nikhilesh to the widows
of his elder brothers and Bimola’s resentment towards his generosity towards
them haunts Ghare Baire as well. Ray uses colour contrasts to give
powerful expression to a widow’s life. The pallor of Bimola’s sister-in-law,
the stark whiteness of her unadorned widow’s weeds are initially contrasted
with the rich colours of the ornate interiors of the mansion, the extravagant
toiletry of Bimola’s dressing table. Ray’s camera includes in a single frame
the rather dark and plain Bimola changing her expensive and colorful velvet
jackets one after another before the dressing table mirror and the reflection
of the beautiful sister-in-law in the cruel, irrevocable whiteness of her saree
and chemise. The sister-in-law makes an overt comment on Nikhilesh’s obsessive
love for his wife. She calls it an addiction and contrasts it to her own
marriage which remained unconsummated due to her husband’s sexual indulgence
with courtesans as was customary for the zamindars of the time. However,
the same sister-in-law has her lips reddened by the betel juice forbidden to
her, a sign of her inability to accept in totality the sexual abstinence and
denial that widowhood forcibly imposes upon her.[She repeatedly
contrasts herself with the eldest sister-in-law committed to obligatory
ritualistic worship (she worships Nandagopal, a child image of Lord Krishna,
which may be interpreted as a childless widow’s wish fulfillment through
religious observances dedicated to a child god). She sings snatches of lyrics
suggestive of extra-marital love. She listens to lewd songs from folk theatre
being emitted rather shrilly by a cranked up gramophone and gossips with her
maids rather than restrict herself to the life of prayers and elaborate
ritualism. Her relationship with her younger brother-in-law Nikhilesh carries
sweet memories of an intimacy built up since the day she entered the gilded
prison of the zamindar’s mansion as a child bride of nine, but it is a
relationship of which Bimola is instinctively jealous. Nikhilesh, at the end of
the novel realises how this unfortunate woman, deprived by fate of husband and
child, had nurtured this one relationship with all the stored up nectar of her
heart. It brings him great solace amidst the domestic storm that ruins his
life. It is one which could teeter dangerously on the sexual given the
proximity of age and the shared experience of growing up together in an andar
mahal environment which was certainly hostile for a child bride where the
only sympathetic ear was that of the husband’s younger brother.
- Female sexuality and extra-marital relationships were, and continue to be a sensitive issue in Bengali films despite portrayals in later films, including Ray’s own in a film like Pikoo. Perhaps these issues become more sensitive to the audience given the period under consideration in the two films and the crossing and re-crossing of the peripheries of the andar mahal and its significant social connotations, as earlier discussed in the essay. In my opinion, the development of the theme is more convincing in the texts, particularly in Ghare Baire. This brings us back to the question of ‘confrontation’ raised in the introduction. Virginia Woolf raised the bogey of a novel’s complexly nuanced idea of love in the pages of a novel being reduced to a kiss on the screen.Is the kiss really clumsily executed without adequate build-up in Ray? In Ghare Baire he has indeed used subtly suggestive devices like the strains of a Tagore song (Rabindrasangeet), recurring motifs and the device of analepsis and prolepsis to match Tagore’s use of the diary method of introspection (in the same novel) to develop the effect of sexual repression on a woman and the ensuing confusion, frustration, despair and overwhelming sense of guilt on those traversing the dangerous periphery between the inner and outer chambers. Of Charulata, Supriya Chaudhuri in her essay, ‘Space, Interiority and Affect in Charulata and Ghare Baire,’ talks of the structure of strict parallels in Nastanirh which Ray does not attempt to reproduce, just as there is no parallel in the novella for the densely allusive literary conversation between Amal and Charu in Ray’s film turning on Bankim’s distinction between the traditional and contemporary woman, the prachina and the nabina which builds up a secret kinship leading up to Charu’s sexual attraction for her young brother-in-law. If the response of the Western audience was not unanimously favourable, we have to remember the many contentious issues that Ray had to wrestle with in his adaptation of these texts.
Shreya 