Goddess in a trap

Illustration/Uday Mohite

It is fascinating how our relationship with the same film can evolve with time and life experience. I've long been an admirer of Satyajit Ray's films. I revisited many of his films, including Devi (The Goddess, 1960), when I curated the retrospective "Satyajit Ray, His Contemporaries and Legacy" for the Toronto International Film Festival's TIFF Cinematheque in 2022. It struck me forcefully then, that the film was about how patriarchy and religion can be a fatal combination, swiftly causing the downfall of reason. It is uncanny how Ray seems to have anticipated in 1960 the triumph of patriarchy and religion today, with the national crescendo accompanying the inauguration of the Ayodhya Ram Mandir on January 22, perfectly timed just before the general elections.

But on reviewing the film again recently, I was equally powerfully struck by the foot massage scene. I'd been invited to lecture on Satyajit Ray's Devi at the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (German Film Institute & Film Museum, DFF), Frankfurt, on January 18, as part of the series Ein Auge fur Die Welt: Die Filme von Satyajit Ray (An Eye for the World: The Cinema of Satyajit Ray), a landmark, 10-month lecture and film series curated by Vinzenz Hediger, Ritika Kaushik and Daniel Fairfax. And they screened a gorgeous 35mm print from the Academy Film Archive, of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, AMPAS. My lecture, titled "Devi: Goddess in a Trap", had a sub-title, "Me Too via Religion".

Devi, Ray's sixth feature, is an aching tour de force that was warmly received in the Cannes Film Festival's Competition. Its core debate, faith vs reason, is based on Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee's story, prompted by Rabindranath Tagore. After rural teenage newlyweds Umaprasad Chowdhury (Soumitra Chatterjee) and Doyamoyee (Sharmila Tagore, just 14 years old) are separated, as Umaprasad goes away to University in Calcutta, Doyamoyee dutifully cares for her feudal father-in-law Kalikinkar (Chhabi Biswas). Soon, he dreams that Doyamoyee is an incarnation of the Mother Goddess Devi, instals her in a shrine at home and worships her. Doyamoyee is terrified of being a goddess, but a father-son showdown melts after she ‘revives' a devotee's dying child. Her inability to cure another sick child results in a grand tragedy. Ray shows how, by placing a woman on a pedestal, you can strip her of all agency. He also daringly addresses a variation of the Oedipus complex, where the father-in-law, by imposing divinity on his beautiful daughter-in-law, in a sense, "obtains" her for himself.

In the crucial foot massage scene, Kalikinkar leans back on a chair, as the docile Doyamoyee sits at his feet, massaging them. When I get a pedicure in a Bombay salon - often done by a man, who places my foot on a towel on his knees - I always keep my knees closed together, and busy myself with my phone or a magazine, so that the energy exchange between strangers, forced into an intimacy of touch, is kept neutral. Ray explicitly invests his foot massage scene and what follows, with Oedipal undertones; and in hindsight, also the ‘MeToo' exploitation of a woman who is innocent, dependent and vulnerable.

Notice the mise-en-scene: their high-low position, emphasising his power and control; his wide-open knees; the leopard print rug on his chair, hinting at an animal of prey; his insinuating himself into her affections, while putting down his own son, her husband, as unable to value her worth as he does. He unilaterally decides that she's an incarnation of Devi, has her parked in a shrine, a public spectacle for devotees; he even moves her to another room when she is unconscious, without her knowledge or permission, all the better to control her. All these shocking transgressions deliver her almost entirely in his personal control. But because he keeps harping on religion, the connection to ‘divinity' appears to render all his transgressions unimpeachable, with tragic consequences for the entire family.

Another key scene is when the educated Umaprasad, outraged by the religious charade, persuades Doyamoyee to "elope" with him to Calcutta, but she refuses as she has doubts: What if I am the goddess, and cured that sick boy? The film underlines how formal rational education can be a bulwark against the ‘misuse' of religious faith and superstition in controlling others. But education is no guarantee of reason, of course. Ray's Devi, made in 1960, is terrifyingly prescient of India in 2024.

Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival, National Award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist.
Reach her at meenakshi.shedde@mid-day.com