In Bengali cinema, the goddess may be greater than a marker of the festive season. What issues is what her presence does to these round her. Does Durga change into a witness to transgression, a counterpoint to human cruelty, a super {that a} girl is requested to embody, or a mirror reflecting a family’s contradictions? In movies comparable to Satyajit Ray’s Devi, Aparna Sen’s Parama and Rituparno Ghosh’s Utsab and Antarmahal, the goddess’s picture turns into a part of the drama. By framing, gentle, sound and the digital camera’s gaze, she shapes the characters’ lives with out ever talking.
Sharmila Tagore in Satyajit Ray’s Devi ( 1960)
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To look intently at Durga in Bengali cinema is to look past the spectacle of Puja and ask how an unmoving picture alters the that means of the whole lot unfolding earlier than it.
A goddess and the ladies who resemble her
In Aparna Sen’s Parama (1985), the goddess seems earlier than the story has correctly begun. Cinematographer Ashok Mehta’s digital camera approaches Durga’s face by a viewfinder, then slowly pulls again to disclose the idol. Quickly after, we encounter Rakhee Gulzar as Parama, a center aged girl whose home life is unsettled by an affair.
The visible affiliation is suggestive. The goddess’s face consists and assured; Parama’s, framed by a red-bordered sari and vermilion bindi, carries an identical presence. As cinematographer Supratim Bhol observes within the Bengal Movie Archive’s essay Idol Watch, the opening establishes a visible relationship between the goddess and a lady who will insist on her proper to want, independence and a life past home expectation. Although the Puja recedes, its imagery lingers as a manner of taking a look at Parama.
A poster of Aparna Sen’s Parama Parama ( 1985)
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The comparability isn’t that Parama is divine, however that the movie locations the 2 faces in dialog. The goddess, conventionally invoked as a determine of female energy, turns into a counterpoint to the restrictions imposed on an odd girl. Does her picture liberate Parama from judgement, or sharpen the contradiction between the ability celebrated within the goddess and the liberty denied to ladies? The movie leaves the stress unresolved.
The idol on the centre of a divided household
In Rituparno Ghosh’s Utsab (2000), Durga turns into the nonetheless centre round which a household’s fractures emerge. An prolonged household gathers for its ancestral Puja, however beneath the celebration lie resentments, strained marriages, monetary anxieties and the prospect of promoting the ancestral residence.
Rituparna Sengupta in Ritiparno Ghosh’s Utsab (2000)
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Bhol factors to the distinction in cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay’s visible language: wide-angle compositions set up the completeness of the idol, whereas tighter photographs of members of the family make them seem like separate islands throughout the similar residence. The goddess embodies togetherness; the individuals gathered round her battle to maintain it.
Ghosh additionally complicates the way in which cinema appears to be like on the pageant. Pleasure, a younger member of the family, data the celebrations on a camcorder. His footage turns into a movie throughout the movie, drawing consideration to the acquainted visible vocabulary of Durga Puja — crimson and white saris, rituals and thoroughly composed pictures of Bengali id. The digital camera watches the watchers. What seems harmonious in a picture might conceal a distinct emotional actuality.
Prof. Sanjoy Mukhopadhyay, former dean of the Division of Movie Research at Jadavpur College, locations this relationship between the goddess and the social world throughout the wider historical past of Bengali cinema. “For filmmakers comparable to Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, Puja was not merely a non secular event however a cultural house the place completely different courses and communities might mingle.In Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), the village’s social world is formed by such encounters, with wealthy and poor coming collectively earlier than the goddess’s picture. In Ghatak’s cinema, the goddess assumes a extra mythic and political resonance. Prof. Sanjoy factors to the climactic tribal dance in Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, whose imagery evokes collective consciousness amid political upheaval, connecting particular person lives with agrarian revolution, social battle and belonging,” say Sanjoy.
A nonetheless from Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955)
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The goddess additionally affords ladies a determine by whom to think about energy. In Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane, Prof Sanjoy recollects, Sreela Majumdar’s character stands earlier than a Durga mandap and identifies with the omnipotent Mom. Girls might resonate with the goddess’s energy, he suggests, whereas privileged males stay preoccupied with the social pleasures surrounding the pageant.
This contradiction runs by Ray’s Devi, Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara and Ghosh’s Utsab. In Devi, a younger girl is pressured to consider she is an incarnation of the goddess. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Nita sustains her household at the price of her personal aspirations.
“Each ladies are made to carry out the function of the good mom. One has to take care of the whole household; the opposite is made to consider she is the goddess. In Devi, the younger girl makes an attempt to flee into the mustard fields. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Nita cries, ‘Dada, ami banchte chai’ (‘Brother, I wish to stay’), because the digital camera closes in on her. It’s then that the viewer realises she has died, revealing the human price of the sacrifice demanded of her. Hindu patriarchy all the time locations ladies both as a goddess or as a sufferer,” says Prof. Sanjoy. “For a girl, going through each could be very troublesome,” notes the professor.
A nonetheless from Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960)
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When devotion turns into a jail
In Ray’s Devi (1960), the connection between the human and the divine turns into disturbing. The movie opens with the face of a clay goddess taking form by the act of idol-making. Bells, fireworks and the sounds of Puja animate the world round it.
Doyamoyee, performed by Sharmila Tagore, is said an incarnation of the Mom Goddess by her father-in-law. The family begins to worship her, trapping the younger girl inside an id imposed by different individuals’s religion.
Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore in Satyajit Ray’s Devi ( 1960)
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Ray’s digital camera and Subrata Mitra’s cinematography make this transformation unsettling. Lamplight falls throughout faces as shadows collect within the corners of rooms. Doyamoyee is repeatedly framed throughout the structure of worship, her dwelling physique visually related to the sacred picture. Her confinement turns into seen earlier than she will articulate it.
The goddess’s picture turns into a method by which patriarchal authority is exercised. The tragedy lies within the hole between the ability attributed to the divine female and the helplessness of the lady made to embody it. The place Parama permits the goddess’s picture to counsel a lady’s proper to self-determination, Devi exhibits how the demand {that a} girl change into divine can erase her humanity.
The violence behind the attractive picture
Rituparno Ghosh’s Antarmahal (2005) turns the scrutiny in the direction of the family that commissions the goddess. Set in colonial Bengal, the movie follows a zamindar obsessive about producing an extravagant Durga idol and securing a male inheritor. His want to switch the goddess’s face with that of Queen Victoria transforms the picture into an instrument of standing and colonial aspiration.
In a hanging visible gesture, the face of Jashomati, performed by Soha Ali Khan, consists to resemble the idol. As Bhol notes, the close-up makes a human face echo a sacred one. However that is no uncomplicated elevation of womanhood. The zamindar’s obsession with the goddess’s look coexists along with his makes an attempt to manage the ladies in his family. The idol turns into an extension of his self-importance, whereas the ladies bear the price of his ambitions. The picture that signifies female energy is appropriated by a system that denies ladies company.
What stays exterior the body
The goddess needn’t dominate a movie’s composition to form its emotional world. In Ray’s Pleasure Baba Felunath (1979), the strategy of Puja is established by idol-making, however the digital camera initially directs consideration to Mahishasura, then the attacking lion and the face of the kid Ruku. The pageant gathers dramatic pressure by these surrounding particulars earlier than the central thriller unfolds.
Sound can set up an identical presence. In Devi, bells, chants and ritual noises do greater than create non secular ambiance: they change into a part of the equipment by which Doyamoyee’s deification gathers pressure. The world round her grows louder at the same time as her skill to talk for herself diminishes.
A nonetheless from Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955)
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Durga’s presence can inhabit the house between a ritual and a quarrel, public celebration and personal sorrow. She could also be worshipped because the destroyer of evil, the daughter returning residence, or the embodiment of female energy. Cinema complicates these meanings: generally her picture affords a language for resistance; generally it exposes the violence hid beneath devotion.
The goddess doesn’t must intervene within the story. Her stillness permits us to see the individuals round her otherwise. Within the house between her unblinking gaze and their stressed lives, Bengali cinema turns the digital camera in the direction of us, and the viewers takes a leap inwards.
